Israel’s overnight strikes on the Islamic Republic of Iran represent the initial salvo of what Jerusalem is calling Operation Rising Lion. In Genesis 49, Jacob tells his sons: ‘Judah is a lion’s cub/ from the prey, my son, you rise up/ He lies down and crouches like a lion/ like a lioness — who dares disturb him?’
Jerusalem is bracing itself for painful reprisals and has put its citizens on alert
Israel rose up after years of warning the world of Iran’s plot to acquire nuclear weapons. In a series of daring precision strikes, it has targeted key regime figures, ballistic missile supplies and the Natanz nuclear facility. Israeli intelligence reportedly learned that Tehran had produced enough enriched uranium to build 15 nuclear bombs and was approaching ‘the point of no return’. Israel is describing its actions as a ‘preemptive strike’, hinting that the possibility of an Iranian attack on Israel was growing.
Hossein Salami, head of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, is dead. Mohammad Bagheri, chief of staff of Iran’s armed forces, is also believed to have been killed. Among the other fatalities are key officials and scientists involved in the regime’s nuclear programme.
There are reports that Mossad agents embedded deep in Iran sabotaged the Islamic state’s military air defences. The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) characterised its air strikes as ‘the opening blow’ and stated that ‘at the end of the operation, there will be no nuclear threat’. Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu said: ‘We can’t leave these threats for the next generation, because if we don’t act now, there will not be another generation. If we don’t act now, we simply won’t be here.’
In a direct message to ordinary Iranians, he added that Israel harboured no enmity towards them but rather towards the fundamentalist dictatorship.
In retaliation, Iran has dispatched more than 100 drones to bomb Israel. Jerusalem is bracing itself for painful reprisals and has put its citizens on alert. Lieutenant General Eyal Zamir, the IDF’s chief of staff, has cautioned Israelis: ‘The expected cost will be different from what we are used to.’
This suggests the top brass and the security cabinet have factored in the potential for significant loss of Israeli lives or severe damage to hardware, infrastructure or networks, but calculated that a greater cost would have been incurred by inaction. There are no good options for Israel. Iran is sworn to the destruction of the Jewish state and nuclear weapons would allow the Ayatollah Khamenei to inflict devastating, existential destruction on Israel and her people. Whatever loss of life follows Rising Lion would be dwarfed by the mass extermination Iran could carry out with nuclear arms.
In addition to the military blowback, there will be diplomatic ramifications. This will include fallout from traditionally anti-Israel institutions such as the United Nations and censure from European nations increasingly concerned with managing internal cohesion and extremism problems and eager to be seen by some segments of their populations as distancing themselves from Israel.
Jerusalem will be interested primarily in the impact on relations with the United States. The Americans took no part in Rising Lion and president Donald Trump had been urging calm to allow a fresh nuclear deal with Iran to be struck. Mindful of how the Obama nuclear deal, cancelled during the first Trump administration, gave Tehran breathing space under the guise of hemming in its nuclear programme, Israel might well have assessed that Trump was on the brink of making the same mistake and acted before Tehran could lock in favourable terms for its uranium enrichment and warhead capabilities. Although the operation had been foreshadowed by the evacuation of senior American personnel from the region, Israel had previously been on the brink of taking out Tehran’s offensive nuclear capabilities only to be reined in by Washington DC.
Trump is instinctively pro-Israel, as is his Secretary of State Marco Rubio. But his second administration has witnessed an influx into the national security and foreign policy bureaucracies of isolationist ideologues hostile to Israel. These figures think of Israel as a malign ally that talks in pro-American terms but could drag the United States into further Middle Eastern conflict. This is, in part, because of American policymakers’ and voters’ affinity for the embattled nation, and also because of the implications of allowing another large-scale elimination of Jews less than a century on from the Shoah.
These sentiments are misplaced. Far from a drag on America First, an Israel that takes proactive measures against common enemies like Iran enhances American security while allowing Washington DC to maintain clean hands. A nuclear-armed Iran would overnight become caller of the shots in West Asia; Tehran would be able to inflict sizeable casualties on American and other Western citizens and assets in the region, as well as disrupting military, intelligence and trading operations. It would be able to hold the West to ransom for political, diplomatic and financial gain.
There are echoes in Rising Lion of Operation Opera, the 1981 mission that destroyed Osirak, Saddam Hussein’s nuclear reactor, and Operation Outside the Box, the 2007 bombing of Syria’s offensive nuclear programme at Al Kibar. The Osirak bombing was met by widespread international condemnation, denunciatory resolutions and diplomatic hysteria, but over time it became clear that Israel had done the world a favour in denying nuclear capabilities to a madman. Ironically, had Israel deferred to the world opinion and left Osirak alone, by the eve of the second Iraq War in 2003 Saddam almost certainly would have been able to hit British (and American) assets within 45 minutes.
Israel can expect the same indignant response from the international community now as it did then. But it can be safe in the knowledge that it has acted not only in its own interests but in the strategic, security and commercial interests of the Western nations lining up to condemn it. That is the way of it when you are one of the few remaining democracies that believes in destroying your enemies before they can destroy you. Other nations might think it proper to wait until the UN, the EU and the legal professoriate give them the green light to wanly defend themselves, by which point their cities are already smouldering and endless body bags being filled from the rubble. But Israel is not one of them.
‘Judah,’ Jacob tells his fourth son, ‘your brothers shall praise you/ Your hand shall be on the neck of your enemies’. Judah’s hand has struck his foes and those of his brothers but there will be little in the way of fraternal commendation. The lion’s cub has risen up, not for praise but for survival.
