Israel had no choice

For decades, the Islamic Republic of Iran has said, loudly and repeatedly, that it wants Israel wiped from the face of the earth. The world mostly nodded, filed the rhetoric away, and moved on. Israel could not afford to.

Today, Israel, alongside the United States, struck Iran's missile infrastructure, its military command centers, and the apparatus of a regime that has spent forty years building toward a single strategic goal: the annihilation of the Jewish state. 

The strikes are being called reckless, provocative, even criminal by voices in European capitals and on editorial boards that have never once had to live under the shadow of existential threat. Those voices are wrong, and history will judge them accordingly.

Let's be honest about what Israel has been living with. Iran is not a theoretical adversary. It is the world's leading state sponsor of terrorism, the patron of Hezbollah on Israel's northern border, the financier of Hamas, the supplier of drones to militias across the region, all of them pointed, without apology, at Israeli civilians. Iran's nuclear program was not being built to generate electricity. Everyone knew it. 

The polite fiction of diplomatic engagement allowed Tehran to buy time while its centrifuges spun and its missile arsenal grew.

No nation on earth would tolerate what Israel has tolerated. No country would watch a neighboring regime arm proxies to attack its cities, chant "Death to Israel" in its parliament, and race toward a nuclear weapon, and simply wait to see how it all turned out. 

The right to self-defense is not a privilege reserved for large nations with comfortable geographic buffers. It is a fundamental right, and Israel has exercised it.

Critics will point to the risks of escalation. Those risks are real. But the greater risk, the risk that was metastasizing slowly and quietly for years, was allowing Iran to complete the architecture of Israel's destruction on the installment plan. 

A nuclear-armed Iran is not a problem that diplomacy was solving. The Geneva talks, conducted while Iranian missiles rained down on Israeli towns, were a diplomatic theater that served one audience: the regime in Tehran, which used every negotiating pause to advance its program and buy time.

The Iranian people, who have been dying in the streets by the tens of thousands demanding freedom from this same regime, understand something that comfortable Western observers do not: the mullahs in Tehran are not reformable. They are not negotiating in good faith. They are playing for time and playing for keeps.

Israel is not. Israel is playing for survival.

A nation that has been told, again and again, that its enemies intend to destroy it has both the right and the obligation to act before that intention becomes capability. Israel acted. The risks are serious. The alternative, a nuclear Iran committed to Israel's elimination, was unsurvivable.

History will not fault Israel for choosing to live.