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Notes -
Since I sort of semi promised a post about the previous war and then didn't really follow up on it I had hoped to at least provide one for the inevitable next one, but since Trump likes wars on weekends because of the stock markets and I do not use my phone/computer on Saturday you don't get anything too live, sorry. And frankly might know more than me since I'm only now catching up on the news.
The first war was a pretty big shock, we were woken up by an earthquake siren (Israel has been overdue a major earthquake for a few centuries now) which was followed by a text message clarifying that there was no earthquake, but we had attacked Iran.
This time around was, uh, well they evacuated the embassy Friday so it wasn't really a big surprise. On the other hand it's already been a month of will they won't they. We had a siren early morning, went down to the bomb shelters, came back up, went back down, came back up, went back down, came back up. "Iran trying to raise our average life expectancy by forcing us to do some cardio" was the joke (perhaps funnier for the people not doing eight flights of stairs each time...). At some point in the afternoon the early warning systems came up (I don't know why they weren't initially up) so we were able to have advance warning that a siren might be coming shortly instead of having to run immediately each time.
One of the things I realized trying to write a post about the previous war and am running into again with this one is that aside from the personal angle there's not so much of interest I can share because we just don't know anything. Like this would be a more valuable post if I had interesting geopolitical takeaways rather than just "wow I don't know what's going to happen guess we'll find out haha".
I still remember the Iranian protests in 2009 and how they came to nothing, and the many many protests between then and now, so it would be pretty incredible if finally 16 years later something actually changed.
(The timing is, uh, interesting from a Jewish perspective since we're celebrating a prior defeat of a person from Persia who tried to wipe out the Jews this Tuesday/Wednesday. In the moment it does mean the celebrations planned for tomorrow in the schools are all cancelled since everything is closed)
I wondered why the attack happened on a Sabbath, but it being the week of Purim makes sense. Per Google:
Trump’s team is doing a Pascal’s Wager that it’s worth supporting Israel religiously, as well as politically. This will make the anti-Zionists and antisemites “big mad” as the kids say. I do wonder if this strike counts under the original Persian decree of Xerxes that the Jews be allowed to defend themselves; in the Book of Esther, a decree written in the king’s name and sealed with the royal signet ring cannot be revoked.
As for the direction of the Middle East and Levant going forward, I want to see Iranian blood money dry up and see the region incentivized to peace by the siren song of capitalism.
The people in the middle east are not going to like Israel more after another Israeli war of aggression. Meanwhile the rest of the world gets a continued reminder of what a warmongering and alien state Israel is. More Americans supported Palestine than israel in a poll for the first time in the US. That number is going to take a big jump.
Citation requested.
I find it fascinating that all of your doomsaying predictions about Israel consistently fail to come to pass, and yet this doesn't prompt any reflection or reconsideration on your part. Since it began, you've been repeatedly assuring us (including as recently as yesterday) that Israel's war in Gaza has absolutely nothing to do with its stated aims of destroying Hamas or recovering the hostages, and is solely motivated by a desire to create a massive refugee crisis on Europe's doorstep. As a fellow European citizen, I can't help but notice that, two and a half years after the start of the war in Gaza, this refugee crisis you've been warning us about has conspicuously failed to materialise. Indeed, the number of asylum seekers claiming refuge in the EU actually fell between 2023 and 2024 (a trend which appears to have continued into 2025), and there doesn't appear to have been any spike in the proportion of those refugees who are Palestinian (who I assume would be included in the "Other" category). Sincerely – where are all these Palestinian (or Lebanese, Syrian or Persian) refugees arriving in Europe? Not only has there not been a massive spike in refugees arriving in Europe from these countries, the absolute number has declined since the start of the war in Gaza.
There are two possible explanations. Either Israel waged its war on Gaza in a deliberate attempt to engineer a refugee crisis on Europe's doorstep, but it didn't pan out as intended (in which case they aren't as competent as they present themselves; or, more to the point, as competent as you seem to think they are). Or engineering a refugee crisis on Europe's doorstep was never Israel's aim.
One might naïvely assume that, when a prediction you made about Israel didn't come true, this might prompt some reflection on your part, perhaps even an admission that you were mistaken in your apprehension of Israel's true motives. But no such admission is forthcoming. Your claims about Israel's sinister motives were conclusively proven false, but Israel remains exactly as nefarious and inscrutable in your eyes as ever. Your hatred of Israel appears wholly uncoupled from any specific action Israel takes. I wonder what Leon Festinger might have made of you.
The big refugee wave from Israel's warmongering was Syria. It was a disaster for Europe. Luckily Ben Gvir failed and we did not get a major exodus from Gaza. Fundamentally Israel got stuck in a forever war it can't win. They aren't really managing to expel large numbers of people or win. They are stuck in a permanent state of emergency. Israel today is like the French in Algeria 70 years ago. They can't really win, they kill a lot of people and they are burning political capital at a high rate.
Israel is not going to collapse any time soon. Untenable states can hang on for some time. With that said a country that small can't be stuck in a permanent state of emergency and function. Rhodesia, South Vietnam and French Algeria seemed stable and were stable for a long stretch of time even though they had no way of functioning in the long term. Hamas isn't seizing Tel Aviv next month and Iran isn't going to eliminate them with missiles. It is going to be a slow long grind.
The more wars and the more chaos we have in the middle east the harder it is to repatriate migrants and the higher the risk of migrant flows is. We need stable regimes in the middle east, not forever wars.
Well, I'm going to stop you right there. How exactly is a civil war between Assad and ISIS the fault of Israel?
All of the remaining commentary is interesting, sure – but can you concede the original point, that "a refugee crisis on Europe's doorstep" simply did not happen as a result of the most recent conflict in Gaza, and hence that it is profoundly unlikely that engineering such a crisis was Israel's intention while prosecuting said war?
Israel was pushing hard for sanctions and destablization in Syria. Israel backed jihadists in Syria, bombed Syria and were actively trying to undermine it.
Okay. So has your claim shifted from "Israel's primary goal in prosecuting their war in Gaza is to engineer a massive refugee crisis on Europe's doorstep" to "Israel has already engineered a massive refugee crisis on Europe's doorstep"?
Because I think the shelf life on the former claim has conclusively expired, and you should stop making it, because it's dumb.
Fundamentally Israel failed in Gaza. They couldn't ethnically cleanse it.
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Thank you.
I'm sure this has already occurred to you, but it's worth pointing out the difference between expressing greater sympathy for the Palestinians i.e. thinking they're probably having a worse time of it, and actively "supporting" them (to use functor's terminology) in their goal to eliminate every Jew in the ME.
Yeah I'd say personally I have more sympathy for the average Gaza resident than I do for the average Israeli and yet I also think the overarching war is just and largely blame Gaza for poking the proverbial tiger
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Agreed. I'm sure most people expressing support for Palestinians, if pressed to explain themselves, would say something like "I think it's bad when Palestinian women and children get killed by Israeli rockets". You would probably get a very different response if you asked people who they support more: the IDF or Hamas.
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The people in the middle east aren't going to like Israel more if they do nothing either, so that's something of a moot point. Iran is also not particularly popular with large sections of the middle east due to religious differences and the fact that Iran has been funding proxies and trying to destabilise the region to their advantage for decades now, to the detriment of Israeli/US interests as well.
You are nakedly a partisan on this issue and therefore probably emotionally obliged to try and spin this as both a massive blunder and an act of unprovoked evil from Israel, but what they are doing now is entirely logical from a military/geo-political perspective given the circumstances, Iran is probably Israels greatest long term enemy and they're on the ropes, they would be stupid not to attack now.
As a wise man once said, "If fighting is sure to result in victory, then you must fight".
How popular do you think dragging the middle east into a major war is? People hate Israel from the start, now their tourist business in Dubai is shut down because of Israel.
I would guess that the leadership of the UAE is pretty ecstatic about the relatively modest price they are paying as a result of two powerful nations attacking and damaging Iran.
People have this fantasy that without Israel, the Middle East would be all peace-love-dove. The reality is that the UAE correctly perceives Iran to be a significant threat.
Yeah the Shia/Sunni split is a huge catalyst and the local residents aren't particularly peaceful people at the best of times.
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Agreed, given that Iran has been relentlessly attacking Israel (through proxies) for many years now, it's difficult to see how anyone could reasonably see this as "another Israeli war of aggression." To be sure, many people will (unreasonably) see it that way, but those people already hate Israel and there's nothing Israel could do (short of disappearing) which would change their minds.
Will this activity make Israel less popular? For the same reason, I tend to doubt it. But even if it does, it's far more important for Israel to be feared than to be loved.
Sarcastically: if it's fair game for Iran to attack Israel through its proxy militia Hezbollah, then it's fair game for Israel to attack Iran with its proxy American forces.
I'm not sure what your point is here. Rather than using sarcasm, can you spell it out explicitly? TIA.
A bit of a joke: the sets of people that see American forces as a proxy for Israel and those that see action against Iran as justifiable are pretty close to disjoint.
For what it's worth, I would agree that this statement is probably correct. That being said, I doubt that even the most rabid-Israel haters would deny that Israel is participating directly in the attacks on Iran.
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Iran funding people who shoot at Israel is well within the normal rules. Iran did in fact start it with the shots at Israel, however, and they've been going tit-for-tat for months.
I'm not sure what your point is here. What rules are you talking about?
I'm not sure what your point is here either. Is it your position that there is some kind of equivalency between Iran's aggressive terrorist campaigns and Israel's self-defense?
In any event, you don't seem to dispute that Israel's recent activities can't be reasonably described as a "war of aggression."
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Hasn't everybody and their dog been propping up militias in the region for decades? I'm pretty sure I remember reading a headline about the US fighting the very insurgents they've been funding, for example.
One of my favorite snarky comments about US foreign policy in the Middle East during the early teens went like this:
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I think that was during the ISIS saga, and it was that the Army and Air Force backed different militias materially
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I would imagine that's true for some definition of "propping up" and "militia" and "everybody" But I doubt Israel has been doing what Iran has been doing, namely having an organization like Hezbollah, which is effectively controlled by Iran, to engage in terrorism against Israel.
But in any event, assuming for the sake of argument that, as you say, everyone and their dog has been propping up militias in the region for decades, the claim on the table is that the recent strike constitutes a "war of aggression" by Israel. To me, "war of aggression" means military activity which is substantially unprovoked against an enemy which poses no substantial threat. Pretty clearly this was NOT a war of aggression by Israel.
Ahem.
"Thus, amid this bid to impair Abbas, Hamas was upgraded from a mere terror group to an organization with which Israel held indirect negotiations via Egypt, and one that was allowed to receive infusions of cash from abroad."
I'm really not sure what your point is here. Surely you are not claiming that Israel controls Hamas and uses it to engage in terrorism as Iran has done with Hezbollah?
Maybe just spell out your point explicitly.
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The actual quote from Sun Tzu, is "If fighting is sure to result in victory, then you must fight, even though the ruler forbid it; if fighting will not result in victory, then you must not fight even at the ruler's bidding."
I was about 50/50 on where that link was going and I was not disappointed ;-)
Was the other 50% chance Sabaton?
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"If fighting is sure to result in victory, then you must fight"
And how do they know it's sure to result in victory?
The Israelis and Americans seem to operate in this Star Wars school of warfare where they just have to blow up the bad guy, the Death Star, the Emperor and that's it, war's over and they can go home.
That's not how it works. Israel has blown up all these Hamas leaders, they've bombed the hell out of Gaza... and yet Hamas is still running Gaza. Years of intense bombing and no regime change of the smallest, closest easiest possible target Israel could have. America bombed the Fordow nuclear facility, said they totally destroyed it... and that did nothing, 6 months later they come back and say Iran is about to acquire nuclear weapons, need a new deal, new disarmament... Bombing is not going to be effective this time either.
To win real victories you need to win a ground campaign that actually destroys and crushes the enemy force from the bottom up, secures the territory and directly installs a new administration. Bombing an enemy from the top down looks impressive, doesn't work. They just replace the Ayatollah or whoever else it is that gets blown up. Only very fragile states can be endangered by bombing alone and despite all the breathless media coverage of Iran, it's not a very fragile state. Unlike Venezuela, they know how to maintain their own oil infrastructure, they can make their own weapons. Even in Venezuela, there's been no fundamental change to the state, just a change of faces.
A ground campaign is not going to happen, Trump lacks the desire and the means. So this war isn't going to work out.
And bombing will impede hopes of regime change in that dissidents are going to be tarred as Israeli assets, the enemy within subverting the nation when the country is under attack.
I agree strongly with what you wrote. Bombing for regime change generally does not work.
Well, at this point, I think it would be fair to count the Shah and the people who are campaigning for his return as Israeli assets. One can always hope that Mossad knows what it is doing.
On the other hand, the interests of secular Iranians are not perfectly aligned with the interests of Nethanyahu. For Israel, anything which reduces the power of the Ayatollah regime is a win. The Shah taking over would be the best outcome, but they will also take a descent into civil war a la Syria. And even if it fails and the regime stays in control, it can hardly hate Israel more than it hates them now, so no reason not to throw the dice.
That makes sense.
However, Khameini's death means his fatwa against nuclear weapons no longer holds. If the IRGC take control, as militaries have been known to do in wartime, then we may see a much more militarized, nuclearized and aggressive Iran. They absolutely can and likely will hate Israel more than they hate them now! There are only so many regime-change attempts they can take before turning a latent nuclear program into a real nuclear program.
Agreed. I think for the Iranians, greenlighting the Hamas atrocities on Oct 7 was seen as a response for Trump killing Qasem Soleimani in Baghdad. Presumably, the killing of the Ayatollah will annoy them even more.
But from the perspective of Nethanyahu, Oct 7 has been a great success. He somehow managed to convince Israel that he was not to blame for supporting the rise of Hamas and found a lot of support for his policy of starving Gaza.
Still, it remains to be seen if he has bitten off more than he can chew this time.
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Yeah, after this latest attack, the Iranian government is going to REALLY hate Israel and REALLY try to develop nuclear weapons. [/sarcasm]
Edit: Oops, after reading a sarcastic comment from someone else, I had forgotten that you aren't supposed to use sarcasm here.
What I am trying to say is that the Iranian government's hatred of Israel and desire for nuclear weapons was pretty maximal before the latest attack, so I doubt that this will provoke the reaction you predict. At this point, the main thing for Israel (and the US) to do, to paraphrase the Untouchables, is the Chicago Way.
Well they did blow up a bunch of kids and the head of state on home soil whereas before Israel mostly just blew up nuclear scientists or proxies elsewhere... That could get anyone's blood up.
Things can always happen for the first time. Things can always get worse.
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I tend to agree with this, although it's worth noting that Israel almost certainly has agents on the ground in Iran.
That being said, I think the more important question is what is the downside for Israel in attacking? Iran's leadership and its supporters and allies already maximally hate Israel. So as another poster pointed out, why not roll the dice? If nothing else, it's a free chance to destroy a few more strategic targets in Iran. In fact, I would guess that Israel's leadership has already determined that regime change is pretty unlikely.
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“If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.”
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Especially since Iran is also retaliating in the UAE and other Gulf states that are aligned with the US. It's a naked attempt to get them to apply diplomatic pressure. These countries don't like Iran, but here in the US we don't have to worry about air raid sirens. A place like Dubai that has spent decades trying to reinvent itself as a hub of international commerce and banking is in a tight spot if it becomes a target.
As I mentioned elsewhere, I would guess the UAE's leadership is pretty happy about the modest price it is paying to see a major third-party attack against Iran.
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Leaning on other Gulf states like that works, until it doesn't: at some level of retaliation, they presumably will think it's easier to rip the band-aid off and support regime change.
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Alien? You mean, alien as in unlike the famously peaceable USA and other countries well-known for spending their prime doing absolutely no wars of aggression?
It bears repeating that in no world is Israel ever going to be more alien to "the rest of the world" than the Muslim countries, save for perhaps other Muslim countries. The fargroup-outgroup distinction is in full force, and Israel is, as always, not the so-alien-they're-not-really-thought-about fargroup.
Having been to both (as a rootless piece of Euroslop who spent close to a decade in the US), I would say Turkey felt much less alien than Israel, and the latter's pervasive militarised Manifest Destiny frontier society vibes had everything to do with this.
My experience is exactly the opposite (though I'm an red-blooded American, so "militarized Manifest Destiny frontier society" was the name of my childhood daycare. If anything, this attitude is the thing I find most endearing about Israel--it's very American). Replace the Hebrew with Spanish, and Tel Aviv might as well be Miami. I was shocked at how normal the modern-development areas of Israel were (Jerusalem is a completely different beast, though still not that alien. It's like somebody air-dropped a million Brooklyn hipsters into an ancient middle eastern city).
And while I love Turkey, and think Istanbul is one of the greatest cities in the world, it feels decidedly less familiar to me as a westerner. The ubiquitous street animals, while charming, give a distinctively foreign/third world vibe. The cult of Attaturk is bizarre in an authoritarian way I'm very unused to. And as you get further into the countryside and the culture gets more conservative, fewer and fewer people drink and the women become ever more covered up and socially isolated, increasing the cultural distance. Israel's got its own share of alien ultraconservative religious zealots, but they're less visible/prominent in my memory. To top it all off, there's a certain afterimage of European imperialism to much of the urban environment in Turkey, similar to places like Egypt, Cuba, and much of Africa. Everywhere you look, you see beautiful old buildings constructed by the British or the French or the Germans in richer times, surrounded by cheap, local concrete boxes. That vibe of decay and living off the fumes of past glory and foreign investment is almost entirely absent from Israel.
I should say that in Israel I have only been to Jerusalem and the West Bank, so I can't comment on the reportedly more "normal" state of, say, Tel Aviv. What left impressions were patrols of machine gun toting conscript girls (admittedly good fanservice) on every corner, random coffeeshops with walls dedicated to pictures of patrons who are currently serving in the military (and steep discounts to soldiers), checkpoints, body scanners, locked-down city quarters and the "countryside" being a patchwork of creepy culty settlements and Arab villages enclosed in Berlin wall lookalike concrete slabs, among many others.
On the other hand, in Turkey... yeah, the Atatürk cultism was a bit out there, and I should say I haven't ventured far outside the European part (including however places like Edirne, not just Istanbul), but you can see the same sorts of stray cat populations all over Greece. The fancy buildings are mostly Ottoman, if sometimes imitating European imperial idiom. I don't think not drinking is more alien than Jewish dietary laws, and to my German-influenced eyes most of the US was plenty weird about alcohol (arguably more so than Istanbul, where I had several bottles of Efes with local tweens in a well-trafficked public square without a problem).
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You didn't get a 'militarized manifest destiny frontier society' vibe in the US?
Not at all, see my parallel post for the sort of thing I'm talking about. The US just has normal messy imperial metropole vibes, not far from the convex hull of '00s Russia, England and France.
Which parts of the US? Because off the beaten path you can definitely find the hero-cultism of military service, ubiquitous open carry, highly visible cops, Trump cult of personality, American exceptionalism, etc.
I spent most of my time in deep-blue country, but saw what you described during trips to red areas and felt all that to be LARP. America is not actually fighting any existential wars with real imminent threats to those areas, and is not in the process of settling any hostile frontiers.
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Course not. We finished our conquest and settled in behind our comfy double moat so we could switch gears to becoming Leviathan II.
Unless someone finds an uninhabited island with guano deposits.
Would be funny if we started airdropping guano on islands to annex them in order to avoid having to go to Congress for it.
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