Mick Hartley

A JC leader – Israel may have done the world an incalculable service – but do not expect many thank-yous:

The world may never fully grasp the magnitude of the debt it owes to Israel if it succeeds in neutralising Iran’s nuclear threat. That is the paradox of preemption: its very success conceals the scale of the danger it prevented. In taking decisive action against a regime armed with ballistic missiles capable of delivering nuclear warheads not only to Israel and the region but to Europe and, in time, the US, the Jewish state is shouldering a burden that should never have fallen on it alone.

It was, mind, specifically the "Zionist entity" that Iran pledged to destroy, as the central plank of its foreign policy. But the point stands. A nuclear Iran – a nuclear theocracy – could never be tolerated. 

But one thing must now be clear to every serious government in the West: Israel needs and deserves the full diplomatic and security backing of its allies, and most urgently from the UK. This is not a border skirmish. It is an existential war against a genocidal regime that seemed to have been perilously close to acquiring the means to act on its threats. This is not the time for the usual bromides about “de-escalation” after decades of Iranian escalation, terrorism, and nuclear brinkmanship.

Yet, regrettably, that was precisely the first instinct of Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer and Foreign Secretary David Lammy – issuing calls for restraint, as if diplomacy hadn’t already been exhaustively tried to curb Iran’s nuclear ambitions. By contrast, France’s Foreign Minister, while also expressing concern over escalation, at least acknowledged the danger posed by Iran’s nuclear programme and affirmed Israel’s right to self-defence. Still, these reflexive responses are nothing new.

This is not the first time that Israel has changed the course of history for the better – only to be met with rebuke. In 1981, Israeli jets destroyed Iraq’s Osirak nuclear reactor. At the time, even the Israel-friendly Reagan administration reacted with outrage. Two decades later, the US quietly acknowledged that a nuclear-armed Saddam Hussein would have been a global disaster.

In 2007, Israel conducted a covert strike on a secret Syrian nuclear facility. One hardly needs to imagine what danger a nuclear-armed Assad — or jihadi groups who might have seized such weapons during Syria’s civil war — would have posed to global security.

And now, once again, Israel may have done the world an incalculable service. Much of that world will, predictably, rush to condemn it. That is the fate of those who act before catastrophe strikes – especially when those who act are Israeli.

Stephen Daisley makes the same points in the Spectator:

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.

If this leads to the end of the theocracy in Tehran – a big if – the world will have even more reason to be grateful. Hezbollah gone, Hamas and the Houthis down but not yet out – and now the head of the hydra.