search
Yitzhak Santis

Israel Didn’t Start This War: Iran Did, Long Ago

Driven by a redemptionist theological drive to destroy Israel, Tehran long ago declared an existential war on the Jewish state. 

The claim that Israel started the war with Iran – pushed by NGOs, authoritarian regimes, keyboard jihadists, and the Western far Left – isn’t just false, it’s a deliberate distortion. The goal? To cast Israel as the aggressor and cover up Iran’s decades-long, religiously driven campaign to destroy the Jewish state.

Iran began this war decades ago, with its regional proxies, terrorism and a nuclear weapons program that has now reached a critical threshold. As the May 31, 2025, IAEA “Safeguards Report” warned:

The significantly increased production and accumulation of highly enriched uranium by Iran, the only non-nuclear-weapon State to produce such nuclear material, is of serious concern.

This is a red flag alert from the world’s nuclear watchdog. Iran’s nuclear intentions are military, aggressive, and aimed squarely at Israel and its allies. It confirms what Israel had long warned: Iran is actively pursuing nuclear weapons, enriching uranium far beyond civilian needs, obstructing inspections, and stalling diplomacy. Its nuclear program is designed to shield its terror network, threaten regional rivals, and embolden aggression behind a radioactive firewall.

What Westerners don’t get

Westerners often struggle to grasp the religious absolutism that drives Iran’s leaders. In liberal democracies, religion is largely private: separate from the state, tempered by centuries of reform, and challenged by secularism. For these reasons, Westerners have a hard time wrapping their heads around how, for the Islamic Republic, religion is all about political power. Religion is the state. It shapes policy, justifies violence, and sanctifies Israel’s destruction as a divine mission.

Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei has declared, “The fight against this wretched regime… is a public duty,” and foretold the “annihilation and destruction of the false and fake Zionist regime… through God’s power and assistance.”

These are not empty slogans. They reflect the regime’s conviction that eradicating Israel is a redemptive religious act to restore divine justice to the universe. This hostility is informed by an absolutist, non-negotiable theology.

This explains why Iran has spent decades building its “Axis of Resistance,” arming, training, and funding a network of Islamist terror proxies: Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad in Gaza, Shiite militias in Iraq and Syria, and the Houthis in Yemen. These groups were created not to defend Iran, but to encircle and wage war on Israel.

October 7: Iran’s War Breaks Cover

This is the context behind Hamas’s October 7 invasion and slaughter of over 1,200 Israelis and taking of hundreds of hostages of which 53 remain in Hamas’s wretched tunnels. In the days that followed Iran activated its other proxies to escalate the conflict.

Hezbollah, a branch of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corp (IRGC), launched daily rockets into northern Israel, forcing mass evacuations of northern Israeli towns. The Houthis targeted Israeli ships and Eilat with drones and missiles, widening the war’s scope to drain Israeli defenses. The Houthis also attacked neutral civilian cargo ships, forcing the rerouting of ships around Africa, disrupting global supply chains, delaying deliveries, and inflating costs.

In response, on April 1, 2024, Israel struck an Iranian military command center in Damascus, operating under diplomatic cover, where IRGC and Hezbollah commanders were coordinating attacks. Then, on April 13-14, Iran launched its first direct overt military attack on Israel of over 300 ballistic missiles, cruise missiles, and drones.

In October 2024, Iran launched another round of missile strikes on Israeli cities after Israel assassinated Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran where he had been coordinating global fundraising and strategy, reportedly using an IRGC-secured compound as his base of operations. Haniyeh publicly celebrated the Hamas attacks on October 7. His elimination was a proportionate act to disrupt ongoing threats, yet Iran responded with another massive and indiscriminate barrage.

From Buenos Aires to Baku: Exporting Terror, Targeting Jews

Iran’s war is not confined to the Middle East. In 1992, Hezbollah under Iranian direction bombed the Israeli Embassy in Buenos Aires, killing 29. In 1994, they struck again in Buenos Aires at the AMIA Jewish Community Center, killing 85, mostly Jews. Iranian-backed plots have since targeted Israeli or Jewish civilians in Bulgaria, Cyprus, Thailand, India, Georgia, and Azerbaijan.

So, claiming Israel started this war erases the chain of events that brought us here. It confuses response with provocation and defense with aggression. To grasp this moment, we must see the full picture: Iran’s redemptive absolutist theology, its long-war strategy, its proxy armies, its nuclear escalation, and its global terror footprint.

History will not ask who fired back. It will ask who fired first. And that answer, unambiguously, is Iran.

Related Topics
Related Posts