Operation Rising Lion: Israel's War On Iran

On June 13, Israel unleashed an unprovoked attack on Iran called Operation Rising Lion. The scale of the assault carried an echo on the lines of Amos in the Jewish Torah—the first five books of the Hebrew Bible—The lion has roared, who will not fear? Israel hit sites across the country, including the Natanz Nuclear Facility—located 150 km south-west of the religious city of Qom—and government buildings and civilian neighbourhoods in Tehran. Iran responded with missile and drone attacks that struck Tel Aviv, Israel’s capital. Israel has an ‘ambiguous’ nuclear weapons programme, with no public scrutiny, but it possesses about a 100 nuclear warheads in violation of international law.

Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu spoke in English to the Iranian people that they must overthrow their government and that the Israeli bombings were ‘clearing the path for you to achieve your freedom’. Disregarding Netanyahu’s strange speech, a cross-section of Iranians took to the streets and demanded that their government procure nuclear weapons to defend themselves against the madness of Israel’s assault.

As Israel continued to pummel Iran, the majlis—or the Iranian Parliament—prepared a bill for it to withdraw from the 1968 Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT), under whose rules Iran built a nuclear energy programme and pledged not to build a nuclear weapon. In 2003, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei published a fatwa (law) that forbids the use of nuclear weapons: “We consider the use of such weapons as haram (forbidden) and believe that it is everyone’s duty to make efforts to secure humanity against this great disaster.” Khamenei has been the Supreme Leader since 1989, but given the prevailing climate, he might reverse his fatwa. When the Israeli attacks claimed the lives of some Iranian nuclear scientists, Khamenei said that others would pick up their work. With its attack, Khamenei said, Israel has ‘sealed for itself a bitter and painful destiny’.

Experience suggests that possession of a nuclear weapon prevents a catastrophic attack and removal of the nuclear shield provides allowance for regime change. North Korea, for instance, has a nuclear deterrent, which prevents the US and its allies from fundamentally conducting a regime change war. Meanwhile, Libya’s government began to dismantle its nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons programmes in 2003, and then faced a war of aggression in 2011 that effectively destroyed the Libyan state. These two examples show that a country with nuclear weapons is far less likely to have its state destroyed than one without them. This is exactly the kind of comparison that is on the minds of the Iranian people, a proud population that values its sovereignty. And even if sections of Iranians have a problem with the Islamic Republic, they do not support US action to overthrow it. It is such people, including a woman in Tehran who did not wear a headscarf amidst the crowd, who told television reporters that she wanted her government to build an atom bomb as a shield.

The lion that roared from Tel Aviv might attain ends that are the reverse of its intentions: Iran might hastily build a nuclear weapon in the largely impenetrable Fordow Fuel Enrichment Plant and then create its own nuclear shield to prevent an escalation of this imposed conflict.

Early into the conflict, Israeli aircraft struck the country’s main television station, Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting (IRIB). Hit during a live broadcast, with the studio engulfed in smoke and debris, anchor Sahar Emami condemned the ‘aggression against the homeland’. The strike killed an IRIB editor Nima Rajabpoor and Masoumeh Azimi, who worked in the office. The IRIB studio is in Tehran’s District Three, whose one million residents had received a chilling warning from the Israeli military to evacuate just before the bombing. These evacuation orders echo the Israeli behaviour at the start of its genocide in Gaza, when it ordered people to move from highly congested areas minutes prior to the bombs. District Three is a tree-lined affluent area with the United Nations buildings, the National Library, and a diplomatic enclave. It is an unlikely place to warn and bomb. Shortly afterwards, Emami appeared on air, seemingly unfazed by the attack. Her return to the airwaves signalled defiance, which has been widely praised on Iranian social media networks.

A few hours later, mirroring the Israeli tactic, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps warned the residents of Tel Aviv’s Bnei Brak to evacuate and said that it would strike Israel’s Kan 11 news channel in Jerusalem’s Givat Shaul area (and then later channels 12 and 1). Missiles and drones from Iran struck the coastal neighbourhood of Bnei Brak. Israel’s air defence systems were shown to be fallible as Iranian weapons systems appeared to counter them effectively. On June 16, the Iranian military demonstrated its Shahed-107, a ‘suicide’ drone that can fly over 1,500 km in a dangerous drone swarm. While this war is not a Generation 4.5 conflict—as the air war between India and Pakistan recently—it nonetheless has begun to show that neither side has a decisive advantage in terms of offensive or defensive weapons. Unless the US enters the conflict directly and fires into Iranian cities from its bases in the Gulf and from its navy vessels, it is unlikely that there will be a clear winner in these days of fighting between the two West Asian countries.

In New York, Iran’s permanent representative to the United Nations, Amir-Saeid Iravani, sent a letter to the Secretary General stating that Israel had violated Article 2(4) of the Charter with its unprovoked attack, and that Iran has the right of self-defence under Article 51. Additionally, Iravani noted that Israel had attacked nuclear energy facilities—particularly at Natanz—that had been under the supervision of the International Atomic Energy Agency, which ‘marks a dangerous and unprecedented escalation that risks radioactive nuclear material and poses a significant threat to the region and to the world’. Around the same time, Iran’s Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Esmaeil Baqaei told the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk that he should not hide ‘behind distorted concepts’ and should condemn Israel’s violation of the UN Charter ‘clearly, without ambiguity, without justification’.

Iravani’s letter and Baqaei’s statement are interesting in the context of how the West responded to Russia’s violation of the UN Charter when Russian forces invaded Ukraine. At that time, the West went ballistic, sanctioning Russia, sending files to the International Criminal Court to arrest Russian leaders, and then arming Ukraine. No such sentiment has been expressed for Israel’s violation of the UN Charter with its unprovoked attack on Iran.

The licence for the Israeli attack does not come from the United Nations Charter, but from a long-standing agreement with the US that Israel must have a ‘qualitative military edge’ (QME) over all of its neighbouring states, including Iran. The US has armed Israel to the point that it has a QME over all others, including close US allies—such as the Gulf Arab states—who are only permitted a certain level of military equipment, a ceiling provided by Israel. That Israel has a QME and carte blanche from the US—as is visible in its genocide against the Palestinians—that have allowed Israel to routinely threaten military violence against Iran, which it sees as the main pro-Palestinian state in the region. Since 2009, the US has encouraged Israel’s open threats to attack Iran to put pressure on European states to further tighten sanctions against Iran. In other words, the West told its allies to apply harsh sanctions against Iran not because of an imminent Iranian threat of building nuclear weapons or of Iran striking Israel, but to prevent an Israeli attack on Iran. This reversal of meaning has now become utterly ordinary in Western circles (on June 15, Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission, bizarrely tweeted that Israel—which initiated this war of aggression—‘has the right to defend itself’ and that Iran, which has the right to defend itself, ‘is the main source of regional instability’).

During the fourth day of the missiles flying over Syria and Iraq, Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan spoke with Russia’s president Vladimir Putin. The readout of the conversation is interesting because Erdoğan tells Putin that Netanyahu’s ‘lawless attitude poses a clear threat to the international system’. It is true that Netanyahu has heeded none of the entreaties from the United Nations to cease the genocide of the Palestinians and has violated the sovereignty of both Lebanon and Syria during these past three years and has now begun this war against Iran. The spiral of violence, Erdoğan said, ‘has put the security of the entire region at risk’. Both Erdoğan and Putin called for an immediate end to the violence, worrying about it spilling over into other countries and becoming a regional, if not a world war.

A glance at the map of West Asia shows where life has become truly satanic: the hellish landscape of Gaza, bombed and bombed and bombed by US bombs—dropped by Israeli aircraft—and then the broken countryside of Syria, where mass graves of this or that side speak of the evil in sectarian conflict, where Israeli bombs replaced bloodstained hands with bloodstained hands; the missiles that fly across these lands, threatening to draw in others, the US—with the most powerful army in the world—and perhaps Russia and Turkey. The conversation between Putin and Erdoğan shows that there is no appetite for escalation, which seems to be an attitude mirrored in Washington. But Netanyahu continues regardless, threatening to drag the world into a calamity. No one seems to be able to stop him, and many people are averting their gaze. Violence is our new pandemic. Instead of a face mask, we have plastered bandages over our eyes.

Israel has a terrifying military doctrine called the ‘Samson Option’ (as American journalist Seymour M. Hersh described it in his 1991 book on Israel’s nuclear weapon policy). If Israel feels threatened, it will launch its nuclear weapons and take out its enemies. The term ‘Samson Option’ comes from the Biblical story of Samson and the Lion. As Samson goes to meet his future wife, a young lion ‘comes roaring toward him’ (as is written in the Tanakh—the entire Hebrew Bible). Samson, with the power of god in him, tears the lion apart with his bare hands ‘as he might have torn a young goat’. The current Israeli war on Iran is called the Lion’s Roar. Perhaps Netanyahu and his high officials have forgotten what Samson, their ultimate option, did to the lion. It tore it apart.

(Views expressed are personal)

Vijay Prashad is the director of Tricontinental: Institute For Social Research. His latest book is On Cuba: Reflections On 70 Years Of Revolution And Struggle, written with Noam Chomsky

This article is part of 해외카지노 Magazine's July 1, 2025 issue, 'Unprovoked', which explores India’s fragile borderlands and the human cost of conflict. It appeared in print as 'And Then, The Lion Was Torn Apart',