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Israel's Clash with Iran Is Nothing Like the Iraq War

(Spiked-UK) Brendan O'Neill - The debate about Israel/Iran is at risk of being derailed by disinformation. This is a crazed stab at "regime change," cry Israel's critics, and we all know what hellish things spring from "regime change." It is an "illegal war" and a "war of aggression," others insist. And the trump card: it's Iraq all over again. The moral evasion on display here is off the charts. To compare Israel's fight against its fanatical tormentors in Tehran with America and Britain's war in Iraq is to be willfully blind to both historical truth and moral principle. Iran has attacked Israel ceaselessly and ferociously. Its neo-fascist proxies in Hamas sent a 6,000-strong army into Israel in October 2023 where they raped and murdered hundreds. Its most important proxy - Hizbullah - followed up by firing 5,000 rockets into northern Israel, causing the evacuation of 60,000 people and the deaths of scores of civilians, including 12 Druze kids. Iran itself has directly fired ballistic missiles at Israel: 120 missiles in April 2024; 200 in October 2024. Anyone who laments Israel's strikes on Iran without mentioning what Iran has done to Israel has forfeited the right to be taken seriously on this topic. Iran does pose a strategic threat. It deploys its proxies to the imperial end of extending its theocratic writ across the region. And it unquestionably menaces Israel. Its missiles and its proxies' pogroms are testament to that. Iran's dream - openly - is to eradicate the Jewish state. Which other nation on Earth would be told to chill out in the face of such an extremist neighbor which in both word and deed had made plain its annihilationist aspirations? Israel's critics see themselves as being on the side of peace. Really? In railing against Israel for striking back against the regime that has visited extreme violence on its people, they are essentially instructing the Jewish state to live meekly alongside an existential hazard. They see the existential endangerment of the Jews of Israel as a small price to pay for their own peace of mind. That isn't "peace."
2025-06-19 00:00:00
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