Many Iranians are waving Israeli and American flags and hoping for their victory over the Islamist regime of terror in Iran. Naturally, this warms our hearts, but there is another dimension. We are subjected to boundless hatred with no end in sight, and Jews therefore tend to value expressions of affection, appreciation and gratitude from outside more than others.
Of course, it is preferable to receive sympathy not out of pity for a victim, as in the Holocaust, but because of the courage of the Israel Defense Forces and the Mossad, the sophistication of intelligence, and the bravery of political leadership. It is better for us to be on the right side of history as a sovereign people that controls its own fate, meaning fighters and actors rather than passive victims. But this is not only a matter of emotion. It is also a moral issue, because not only are we hated, we are also widely condemned on moral grounds. Yet our war since October 2023 is a war to eradicate evil, and it is encouraging to see that many people, not only Iranians, recognize this.
The current campaign is intended to remove an existential genocidal threat. This threat is explicitly declared in words, but is also backed by actions in the form of a nuclear ballistic project for mass destruction. The threat has been demonstrated in horrifying fashion through countless acts of mass terrorism, such as the 1994 bombing of the Jewish community center in Buenos Aires, orchestrated by the current commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, as well as the October 7 massacre. What moral purpose could be greater than preventing genocide?
The hope, though not a certainty, that the American and Israeli campaign will help the Iranian nation free itself from the terror of a murderous regime that has brutalized Iran for nearly 50 years adds another moral dimension to the goals of the war. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is right to describe this war in terms of a moral struggle for liberation, similar to World War II.
In a certain sense, both wars are global civil wars over a moral principle that divides camps within countries. Adolf Hitler had supporters in the West and opponents within Germany. France and many other countries in Europe and around the world were divided in that civil war, and they are divided again now.
Jihadist Islam, whether Shiite or Sunni, is spreading across the world and threatening it as a whole. But American isolationists and European appeasers, as if they have learned nothing and forgotten nothing, have turned "regime change" into a term of abuse. Instead, the simple term "liberation" should be used: the liberation of Islamic countries from jihadists, beginning with the liberation of Iran, its neighbors and ultimately the entire world from the oppressive and murderous imperialism of the Shiite clerical regime.
Indeed, our attacks on their mechanisms of killing and repression are first and foremost intended to serve a vital Israeli interest. We will not be sufficiently freed from the Iranian threat if the regime survives the current American and Israeli campaign. But the fact that Israel is acting in pursuit of its own essential interests does not negate another fact: that the war being waged by Israel and the US is a distinctly moral one by any universal standard.
In truth, a state cannot be a moral state if it denies its own existential interests. That is why Europe's appeasing states suffer from both moral weakness and strategic folly. They fail to recognize their own existential interests just as they fail to distinguish between good and evil.
It is clear that Israel and the US would not be trying to help Iranians achieve freedom were it not for their own existential interests driving them. Consider, for example, that Israel under Netanyahu and the US under Barack Obama, followed by Donald Trump and Joe Biden, did not attempt to help Syrians free themselves from a regime of terror that killed its citizens in large numbers, including with chemical weapons of mass destruction, because no such existential interests pushed them to take that risk.
For the same reason, Israel did not come to Ukraine's aid. This is the nature of relations between nations. But this does not contradict the obvious fact that the success of the US and Israel in eliminating the Islamist regime in Iran would herald hope for a major moral victory.
