Israel Bombed a Country That Can Finally Fight Back & They Are Learning a Lesson

Unlike Gaza's trapped civilians, Iran has missiles, allies, and the ability to retaliate, but don't forget, Gaza is still being starved

We are told, again and again, that Israel is defending itself. But the truth is harder to stomach. Israel is defending its right to act with impunity throughout the Middle East to maintain its supremacy. Israel's June 13 strikes on Iranian territory represent the latest example of how the nation has weaponized the language of self-defense to justify acts of aggression.

Israel’s first Iranian target, a child

The Israeli government immediately framed these attacks as "preemptive strikes," yet this terminology collapses under scrutiny of international law. Language cannot disguise illegality. Article 51 of the UN Charter permits force only in cases of actual self-defense when an armed attack occurs. Even the controversial doctrine of anticipatory self-defense requires threats that are "instant, overwhelming, and leaving no choice of means and no moment for deliberation." By Israel's own admission, these strikes were not responses to any immediate Iranian attack. No missile barrage, no ground incursion, no declaration of war preceded them. There is a difference between "anxiety" and legality, and Israel cannot continue to collapse the two every time it chooses to strike.

The strikes targeted military installations and apartment blocks deep in Iranian territory, reportedly killing senior Iranian officials including Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps commanders, along with civilians including children. At least 80 people have been killed in Iran and at least 10 in Israel as the confrontation enters its third day. This was preventive war, illegal aggression disguised as legitimate defense.

Israel's supposed justifications crumble under examination. Claims of addressing an "immediate, inevitable threat" of Iranian nuclear weapons lack evidence. The meticulously planned operation carried out over years contradicts any notion of emergency response. Even the IAEA report cited by Israel contained nothing new that wasn't already known to relevant parties. The surprise assault was powered by smuggled weapons, internal collaborators, and Mossad-run drone bases deep inside Iran, revealing the long-term preparation that makes a mockery of claims about "preventive" action.

The nature of Israel's campaign reveals its true purpose. Rather than targeting nuclear facilities exclusively, Israeli forces have bombed missile bases, gasfields, oil depots, and conducted systematic assassinations of senior Iranian officials. The killing of Ali Shamkhani, a former defense minister and close adviser to Iran's Supreme Leader who was reportedly leading talks with the United States, exposes Israel's intent to sabotage diplomacy itself. The strikes took place during U.S.-Iran nuclear negotiations, killing at least 78 people, including dozens of children, and injuring over 300.

This follows Israel's favored strategy of eliminating specific individuals hoping their deaths will unravel entire systems. It reflects a calculated plan to demonstrate Israeli might across all levels of Iranian official life, not a focused strike on nuclear capabilities. Netanyahu's call for the "proud people of Iran" to rise against their government while bombing them relentlessly reveals the same delusional thinking that assumes starving Palestinians in Gaza will somehow turn against Hamas. The assumption that Iranians would simply do Israel's bidding as it bombs them demonstrates a profound lack of understanding of Iranian politics and patriotism.

This is how Israel manufactures permission. It imposes a logic of perpetual exception onto itself, one in which its borders are elastic, its enemies ever-expanding, and its right to violence absolute. The Iran strikes fit within Israel's sustained pattern of extraterritorial violence across the region. In the past three years alone, Israel has bombed Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, and now Iran, each time under the pretense of defense, each time flattening civilian infrastructure, killing children, and then turning to the world with outstretched hands, insisting it is the aggrieved party.

The timing coincides with Israel's systematic destruction of Gaza. UN satellite analysis found that destruction in Rafah and Jabalya now exceeds that of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in both scope and systematic nature. A five-stage demolition campaign involving aerial bombing, bulldozing, remote-controlled explosives, and contractor-led efforts where payment is tied to the number of buildings razed has damaged or destroyed two-thirds of Gaza's buildings, 501 of 564 schools, and 80% of its roads. The death toll has reached over 55,000 according to Gaza's Health Ministry, with independent analyses suggesting the real toll could be well into the hundreds of thousands.

The infrastructure devastation is staggering. A large part of the electrical infrastructure has been demolished, along with water and sewage lines. The number of egg-laying hens has decreased by 99 percent, the number of cattle by 94 percent, and the quantity of fish being caught by 93 percent. The UN estimates it will take two decades to clear 50 million tons of rubble and debris scattered across the Strip.

Israeli officials have stated that the military operation in Gaza is now "secondary" to the one in Iran, revealing how the Iran strikes serve to shift global attention away from ongoing genocide. When Israel severed Gaza's last fiber optic cable on Wednesday, plunging 2.1 million people into communications blackout, it succeeded in directing the world's gaze elsewhere. Between that and the launch of a new regional war, Israel has succeeded in shifting the world's focus. When internet returned on Saturday, Gazans reported a sharp escalation in IDF attacks since the strikes on Iran.

The daily massacres continue. The IDF's systematic killing of starving Palestinians at U.S.-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation aid sites has pushed the death toll to at least 285, including 11 killed on a single morning. In addition to IDF shootings, gunmen from the Israel-backed Abu Shabab militia, an ISIS-tied gang known for looting and collaborating with Israel, opened fire near a GHF site in Rafah, killing six and wounding nearly 100 before fleeing into IDF-controlled zones. A Gaza resident called the GHF aid sites a spectacle of dehumanization, "like throwing meat into a cage of starving lions."

As nuclear analyst John Steinbach notes, this doctrine means Israel's nuclear arsenal is "aimed at the Americans, not to launch it at the Americans, but to say, 'If you don't want to help us in a critical situation we will require you to help us.'" During the 1973 war, Israel used nuclear blackmail to force Kissinger and Nixon to airlift massive amounts of military hardware to Israel. The Israeli Ambassador threatened that if massive aid didn't start immediately, Israel would "draw very serious conclusions."

Even Israeli security experts acknowledge these strikes cannot achieve their stated goals. Experts say Israel failed to destroy Iran's underground enrichment facilities, an aim it will need the U.S.'s bunker-busting firepower to achieve.

Yet military effectiveness was never the point. For Netanyahu, facing domestic unrest, corruption trials, and international isolation, the Iran escalation serves to recast him as a wartime savior while his coalition crumbles and Gaza war crimes mount. With his coalition crumbling, Gaza war crimes mounting, and his corruption trial looming, the Iran escalation lets him recast himself as a wartime savior. This desperate gambit stakes a claim for complete and absolute impunity for Israel and for Netanyahu himself, whether in The Hague or domestic courts.

The new front also serves Netanyahu's personal agenda perfectly. When observing the current sense of jubilation in public Israeli discourse, this may very well be his salvation. The long lines stretching from every open store demonstrate that Israelis have entered blank survival mode. Two ultra-Orthodox parties that had threatened to support opposition efforts to dissolve parliament over the military draft ultimately backed down, allowing Netanyahu to survive the no-confidence vote.

Israel has mastered narrative manipulation, presenting itself as eternally under siege while acting as regional aggressor. This victimhood is selective and theatrical. It centers fear while erasing context. When Hamas fires rockets, the world is shown a nation under siege. When Israel drops American-made bombs on hospitals and refugee camps, the world is told it is defending itself. When its neighbors resist, they are described as terrorists. When it kills their scientists and children, it is called deterrence.

This asymmetry is not incidental, it is the cornerstone of Israel's political project. Zionism depends on the notion that any challenge to its authority is existential, that any people with the capacity to resist must be rendered defenseless. And so, Palestinian existence becomes a threat. Iranian enrichment becomes a threat. Lebanese sovereignty becomes a threat. And the response is always the same: preemptive, punitive, and unaccountable.

Meanwhile, the violence expands beyond Iran. Hours after bombing Tehran, Israel locked down the entire West Bank, cutting off roads, closing checkpoints, and building walls around Palestinian towns. In overnight raids, Israeli forces detained at least 34 Palestinians across Hebron, Nablus, Tulkarm, and Bethlehem. Israel is now allowing settlers to register ownership over West Bank land once held by Palestinians, nullifying decades-old Jordanian and Palestinian deeds.

Israeli forces returned to Khallet al-Dabaa, a Masafer Yatta hamlet they had already destroyed 90 percent of in May, to demolish 12 newly rebuilt structures and displace dozens of residents again. The checkpoint regime forces pregnant Palestinian women to give birth on dirt roads out of fear of encountering soldiers and settlers.

It alone can claim existential peril while occupying, besieging, and bombing at will. It alone can kill across borders and call it peacekeeping. It alone can claim the mantle of victimhood while its weapons systems light up the skies of half the region. And perhaps more dangerous than the strikes themselves is Israel's unshakable role in global diplomacy as the one state whose aggression is never met with consequences.

The Trump Administration initially insisted Washington had no involvement and had warned Israel not to act while nuclear talks were ongoing. But President Trump later claimed he had known about the strike in advance and said the attack would help bring Iran back to the negotiating table now that "the hardliners are all DEAD." Israeli officials now claim that Trump was fully on board and actively participated in a coordinated deception campaign to mislead Iran, pretending to oppose the strike in public while privately approving it.

Trump claims he had issued a 60-day ultimatum to Iran, which expired the day of the strike, and praised the operation as "excellent," noting that Israel had used "great American equipment." Trump is trying to have it both ways: claiming the strike wasn't his call while bragging that it achieved all of America's goals. A UN conference on Palestinian statehood, co-chaired by France and Saudi Arabia, was postponed due to Israel's assault on Iran.

Even popular opinion within Israel reveals the depth of the supremacist project. Support for ending the Gaza war is growing in Israel, driven by fears for the remaining hostages, not concern for Palestinians. Sixty-seven percent of Jewish Israelis say Gaza's suffering should play little or no role in policy decisions. A new poll shows 64 percent of Israelis believe there's no need for more coverage of Gaza's humanitarian crisis, with the same number agreeing that "there are no innocent people in Gaza."

When 149 countries voted at the UN demanding Israeli compliance with international law, Netanyahu responded by bombing Tehran. The message could not be clearer: Israel does not respond to law. It responds to defiance with violence. It responds to condemnation with escalation.

This is not fear driving these actions but entitlement. Israel's current definition of "security" means it can kill whoever it wants for as long as it wants, wherever and whenever it wants, without paying any price. This "security regime" must expand continuously because it can never stop. Such a "security" is what has motivated Israel's actions from Gaza to Yemen to Lebanon and Syria, and now in Iran.

Israel is defending not itself but its right to maintain a regional order in which its supremacy is never questioned and its borders are wherever it decides they are. It is not fear that drives these actions. It is entitlement. Israel is a state that moves as if it were always under siege and always entitled to strike first, not in response to threat, but in response to the possibility of parity.

This is not just a military problem. It is a discursive one. For decades, Israel has mastered the art of narrative manipulation, presenting itself as the eternal target, even as it becomes the aggressor. This is how Israel manufactures permission. It imposes a logic of perpetual exception onto itself, demanding the world accept that its “anxiety” justifies everyone else's annihilation.

Until the international community is willing to stop rewarding that entitlement with silence, impunity, and weapons, the violence will continue. The region will burn. And Israel, cloaked in the language of self-defense, will remain what it has long become: a rogue state, posing as a victim, at the center of an unfolding catastrophe.

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