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Why Israel Had to Act

(Spiked-UK) Melanie Phillips interviewed by Brendan O'Neill - Judging by most Western commentary, you could be forgiven for forgetting that Iran started this war. That Hamas, an Iranian proxy, launched a bloody assault on Israel on 7 October 2023. And that Hizbullah and the Houthis, two other Iranian-backed groups, later joined in the violence. So why is Israel being framed as the aggressor? Phillips: "I'm not at all surprised that Israel attacked Iran....Israel had very credible intelligence that two things were happening which meant it was in existential peril. It had to act and it did. The first was that Iran was at the point of working out how to fit nuclear material onto its missiles. The second was that it had ramped up its ballistic missile production to produce 300 missiles per month. This was considered to be an immediate existential threat, which Israel had no choice but to confront." "This was a tremendous act of courage, because...Iran had thousands of extremely powerful missiles. They were much more powerful than the missiles that have been raining down on Israel from Hamas, Hizbullah and the Houthis...and could do much more harm." "What people don't want to understand is that 7 October 2023 was the opening salvo in an onslaught by Iran to exterminate Israel. Iran was largely working through its proxies in a seven-front war, involving Gaza, Lebanon, Iraq, Syria, Yemen and what is called the West Bank - all of them attacked Israel in various ways at the same time." "There is no negotiation with people who believe it is their God-given duty to wipe the Jews off the face of the Earth. Netanyahu waited until there was literally no alternative." "There is a sense of us all being in this together - a sense of absolute certainty that whatever horrors lie ahead, we are going to win this, and we are going to defeat evil, because we are fighting the good fight." "This highly traumatized, scapegoated nation is absolutely unbowed and undaunted. Its courage is absolutely off the scale. Its resilience is off the scale. Its optimism and its happiness are off the scale because it knows what it is. It loves what it is. It knows it wants to survive. It knows why it wants to survive." Melanie Phillips is a columnist for The Times-UK.
2025-06-23 00:00:00
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