On Iran, the choice between was always between bad and worse

Israel’s attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities has been long in the making. The implacable and belligerent opposition by Islamists to a state of the Jews on fundamentalist grounds has made this attack an inevitability. Trump’s chaotic foreign policy and the shunning of the rule of law gave Netanyahu the space to fulfil his long-cherished dream.

What was less predictable was Trump’s decision to involve the US and to utilise B2 bombers to attack Iran’s nuclear facilities.

While it can be argued that Trump was deeply foolish to withdraw in 2018 from Obama’s hard-won agreement with the Ayatollahs to limit their striving for a nuclear weapon, it did not change their inability to ever settle for a compromise, an outlook fashioned by ideological absolutism and religious belief. It was this intransigence that was clearly a central factor in Trump’s decision to send in the B2s.

Iranian pragmatism only breaks out in attitudes towards its allies, Russia, China and North Korea. Ayatollah Khameini has therefore remained silent on the plight of the Muslim Uyghurs in Xi Jinping’s China.

The Israeli attack on Iran should be seen in the context of the attack on Hezbollah in Lebanon but unlike the attack on Gaza where the hostages have been sacrificed and tens of thousands of civilians killed. This tends to reflect the consensus in Israel. According to initial surveys, a majority of Israeli Jews support the attack on Tehran but continue to oppose the continuation of hostilities in Gaza. In one sense, the inclination of this far Right Israeli government to attack Iran was embedded in its psyche long ago. Facts were actually less important.

However, the common question uniting the situation In Iran and the situation in Gaza is “what is the end game?” The suspicion is that Netanyahu does not know and does not want one.

In his interview with Kan public broadcasting last week, Netanyahu set no time limit on Operation Rising Lion, argued that Israel made its own decisions outside of American views and compared the resilience of the Israeli public to that of the British during the Blitz – and thereby, unwittingly or not, compared himself to Churchill.

Many have asked the central question of whether Iran really has been moving towards an breakout scenario in order to manufacture nuclear weapons. Or whether this was yet another Netanyahu deflection. The probable answer lies in the interpretation of Tehran’s acceleration on the enrichment and storage of fissile material.

The isotope uranium 235 is needed to develop weapons-grade nuclear material. A normal sample of uranium is mainly uranium 238 and a mere 0.7% of it is uranium 235. Enrichment is therefore required by using centrifuges to attain 90% rich uranium 235 – and from there it is a short step to attaching such nuclear fissile material to the warhead of a Shahab 3 missile.

In December last year, the UK, France and Germany stated that Iran was stockpiling highly enriched uranium to “unprecedented levels” and that this lacked any credible justification for civilian use. In February 2025, the nuclear watchdog, the IAEA, reported that 133.8 kg uranium 235 had been enriched to 60%. On May 17, it stated that that this had increased to 408.6 kg.

On June 12, these three countries – joined by the US – proposed a motion at a meeting of the IAEA Board of Governors which stated that for the first time since September 2005, Iran was non-compliant in its nuclear obligations. The motion passed with Russia and China opposing. The following day, Operation Rising Lion commenced with Israel’s first attacks on Iran’s nuclear facilities.

The Israeli action clearly reflected the long-held suspicion that Iran had followed a two-track approach. An open one for the peaceful use of nuclear energy and a clandestine one to secure nuclear weapons. The possession of such weapons would thus cement the future of the regime despite its international unpopularity, fortify its regional influence and be a potential threat to the existence of Israel.

These suspicions have been fortified by the periodic discovery of undeclared nuclear facilities and Tehran’s repeated demands that the IAEA stop its investigations. Undeclared enrichment sites were publicised at Natanz and Arak (2002) and at Fordow (2009).

As far back as 1985, Ayatolleh Khomeini launched a secret enrichment program. This was followed two years later by the training of six Iranian scientists at the Pakistan Institute of Nuclear Science and Technology. The Amad Plan, formulated in the late 1990s, was to build five nuclear weapons by 2004.

The JCPOA (Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action) agreement, forged by Barack Obama in 2015, placed all manner of restrictions on Iran’s ability to develop nuclear weapons such as a ban on uranium enrichment at Fordow for 15 years. The US subsequently unfroze $4 billion in Iranian funds abroad.

Trump withdrew from the agreement in May 2018 and by January 2020, Tehran announced that any restrictions of enrichment were now null and void. This announcement followed the killing of Qassem Solemani, the head of the Quds force of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, by a US drone strike near Baghdad airport.

By November 2020, the reputed head of Teheran’s nuclear program, Mohsen Fakhizadeh, was also assassinated, allegedly in a Mossad operation. 2021 and 2022 subsequently saw the installation of more advanced centrifuges. By November 2023, there were 6,200 first generation centrifuges and 2,500 advanced ones at Natanz. Xi’s China further provided the technology to extract uranium from Iranian mines.  

Does all this mean that Tehran was going to strike Tel Aviv with nuclear weapons? No one really knows the answer but Iran’s detailed preparations during recent years meant that a possibility moved closer to becoming a probability.

Given the lessons of Jewish history, an Israeli pre-emptive strike therefore became more of a certainty. As in the attack on Egyptian forces on the eve of the Six Day War in 1967, no Israeli was waiting to find out what Ayatollah Khameini’s real intentions were. He has described Israel as “a cancerous growth” and predicted that it would not exist by 2040. In 2000 he told CNN that “no one will allow a bunch of thugs, lechers and outcasts from London, America and Moscow to rule over the Palestinians."

The world outlook of Iranian Islamism has always been in stark contrast to that of both Jewish and Palestinian nationalism, which was forged by the French Revolution, the European Enlightenment and anti-colonialism – and not by belief. The Islamists, too, have their “forever” war – against the existence of a Hebrew republic.

Shortly after his return to power in 2009, Netanyahu proposed an attack on nuclear facilities in Iran. At that time, leading figures in the Mossad and the Shin Bet strongly opposed the notion – and noted Israel’s dependency on America’s bunker-busting bombs. They were then supported by Benny Gantz, the newly appointed head of the IDF, who told Netanyahu that victory over the Iranians would not be a walkover.

Since then, Trump has replaced Obama and Ben-Gvir has replaced Gantz. Assad in Syria has been overthrown, Nasrallah and his minions in Hezbollah were buried in the rubble of their Beirut bunkers, and the Shia Crescent, stretching from Tehran to the Golan Heights, has been broken into pieces. Netanyahu therefore understood that this was the ideal time to attack.

In his speech at the White House after sending in the B2s, Trump did not mention regime change – unlike Netanyahu, for whom it appears to be a cardinal principle. It was only in the context of a threat of future action that Trump later aired the possibility of replacing the ayatollahs. Iranian nationalism, however, may prove to be a stronger force than disillusionment with the ayatollahs. It remains to be seen how Tehran reacts to this US action. The choice for the state of Israel, however, was never between good and bad but always between bad and worse.