A Letter From An Israeli Shelter

On the horrors of the Iranian regime and the complexities of preemptive war.

Ballistic missiles fly above Israel during an Iranian attack. (Photo by author).

It is hard to avoid the feeling that we are entering a new era in the Middle East. To mark a week since hostilities began, we are publishing two personal essays—one today by our Executive Director, David Hamburger, who found himself in Israel shortly before the war broke out; another tomorrow by an anonymous Iranian writer with family in Tehran.

—The editors.

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Friday has now arrived in Jerusalem, marking a week since air raid sirens rang out across the country and broke the pre-dawn silence.

Having flown to Tel Aviv a few days prior to attend a family wedding, in the midst of on-again-off-again launches from Yemen, I assumed at first that I was experiencing an attack by the Iran-backed Houthi militia. Yet, with a sense of clarity that slowly gained on the 3am haze, I watched as the army chief of staff announced in a special television broadcast that Israel had launched a preemptive strike on Iran’s nuclear program.

My first thoughts ran to preparations for the Iranian counterattack that seemed imminent. I scouted out the concrete safe room in the apartment I’d found, though any sense of comfort gave way soon enough; a previous tenant had seemingly found the regulation reinforced steel door an unnecessary encumbrance and removed it. I briefly contemplated stopping the gaping doorway with a mattress but concluded it was pointless. Instead I began filling as many pots as I could find with water, anticipating that shortly a cyberattack or air raid might knock out the power and water supply for some time.

On venturing out several hours later, I was stunned to find the grocer downstairs open and doing a fair but unpanicked trade. Customers evaluated watermelons as if their ripeness still mattered when over a hundred Iranian suicide drones were making their way slowly to Israeli airspace. At tables laid out along the sidewalk, a handful of families sat drinking coffee unhurriedly. Perhaps I detected a touch of stress, but then again, perhaps I was projecting.

By midday, certainly, the initial shock had begun to wear off, replaced by a cautious optimism. Israeli news outlets reported that a wave of over one hundred drones had been intercepted. Perhaps it was over? As the afternoon passed, preparations for the traditional Friday night Sabbath dinner commingled with a steady stream of updates from the television: Israeli intelligence had built drone bases inside Iranian territory, leading nuclear researchers and military chiefs had been assassinated, the air force was striking military installations and nuclear sites across Iran.

The optimism was short-lived. Shortly after dinner, sirens rang out once again. Outside, on the way to the shelter, I saw a missile barrage overhead for the first time: a series of fiery arcs, oddly at home against a clear and star-dappled sky. In the days since, I’ve seen missiles a half dozen times, but each time the incongruity remains: a surreal celestial elegance paired with a rational knowledge that in seconds some will slam to earth, hitting a family home (as on Saturday) or a medical research lab (as on Sunday) or a hospital complex (as yesterday).

I have, thankfully, been far from any impacts. But even successful air-defense interceptions resound and cause the building to quiver. At ever-less predictable intervals—sometimes twice in the middle of the night, other times only once in bright daylight—phones spring to life with a jarring ring, followed by air raid sirens alerting of incoming missile fire. The low rumble of jets is a constant at all hours.

And so it has continued for the past week: a mix of the surreal and the tragic punctuated by moments of comic absurdity to remind you that, yes, this is war, but it is real life, too. At the communal shelter in which I sought refuge on the second evening of missile fire, Punjabi workers laid down blankets for the night next to a local youth group. Sleep deprivation is a shared national condition: a popular weekly satire show produced a montage of TV anchors flubbing lines from exhaustion and talk show panelists falling asleep on air. A friend of a friend suggested that I make the most of the airspace closure by downloading Tinder and heading south to the seaside resort of Eilat, where the only danger is the occasional Houthi missile or explosive drone—a danger which, she seemed to say with a dismissive swat of her hand, is hardly anything.

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Some critics, including my colleague Sam Kahn, have argued that Israel’s campaign is a mistake, a repudiation of the rules-based international order by one of its putative proponents, the act of a bellicose leader intent on his own political survival through increasing shows of force.

It is not hard to see why global observers, watching the past three years of Prime Minister Netanyahu’s bankrupt mismanagement and self-interest, might wonder how much he is driven by political expediency rather than Israel’s existential necessity. Yes, the timing of the attack could not have been more politically auspicious for Netanyahu, allowing him to end a rebellion by ultra-Orthodox members of his government over the draft—a rebellion that had threatened to bring Israel to early elections. Yes, the remarkable daring of the opening Israeli salvoes restored some of the luster to Netanyahu’s much-vaunted image as “Mr. Security,” heavily damaged after the October 7^th massacre. And yes, perhaps most disturbingly, the opening of a new front in Iran has conveniently turned attention away from the hostages, the strategic quagmire, and the humanitarian crisis in Gaza. To be told now that it is necessary to strike Iran by a prime minister whose actions for the past decade at least have contributed to this exigency—first by campaigning against a diplomatic effort to contain the nuclear program, then helping to sink the resulting agreement, all the while failing to take decisive action and alienating the United States, Israel’s most important partner and benefactor—has a bitter irony.

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Don’t Give Up So Quickly on the Liberal International Order

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But attempts to conflate Iran and Gaza, and appeals from afar for one more attempt at international cooperation and against realpolitik, overlook a much bigger picture. Even while it engaged in negotiations and promised it had no intent to weaponize its nuclear program, Iran was insisting it would not relinquish its enrichment capacity. The IAEA reported last week that Iran is the only non-nuclear-armed nation in the world to be enriching uranium at levels far beyond any civilian use, in violation of its obligations under the Nonproliferation Treaty. The German chancellor, Friedrich Merz, said that Israel was “doing the dirty work for all of us.” Emmanuel Macron, currently in no warm embrace with Netanyahu’s government, said, “Iran bears a heavy responsibility in the destabilization of the whole region,” and described the prospect of a nuclear-armed Iran as a threat to French security.

If there is one lesson for would-be defenders of the international liberal order to take from its failures since Russia’s invasion in 2022, it is that credible threats to that order, however far-fetched they seem to the rational mind, should be treated credibly. Since at least the bombing of a Buenos Aires Jewish community center in 1994, the Iranian regime has expanded its use of a global terror network to strike Jews, dissidents, and Israelis without distinction. It has abducted visitors as political bargaining chips. It has recruited assassins to kill human rights activists on U.S. soil. Its network of proxies, dedicated to eliminating Israel and sworn to enmity with the United States, is designed to surround the Jewish state and destroy it definitively (in 2017, a clock was mounted in Tehran to count down until Israel’s destruction). Only Hamas’ impatience in prematurely launching the October 7^th massacre, it seems, prevented a combined assault. Hezbollah’s stock of thousands of long-range missiles rained down on civilians and posed a near-existential danger to Israel—a threat defanged not by reliance on the unenforced UN resolution designed to check it, but rather by years of Israel’s intelligence agencies having taken the threat as seriously as it deserved. And, as if a timely reminder were needed, Iran’s use of its conventional arsenal in the past seven days alone—its intentional targeting of a hospital, civilian centers and infrastructure, its use of ballistic-borne cluster munitions over cities, its deployment of over 1,000 suicide drones of the type it exports to Russia to terrorize Ukrainian cities—underlines how terrifying the prospect that the country could have nuclear capability is.¹

Faced with such a regime and its insistent dedication to nuclear enrichment, the statement by Rafael Grossi, Director General of the IAEA, that the agency had found no “proof of a systematic effort to move into a nuclear weapon,” and the apparent conclusion of the U.S. intelligence community that Iran has not yet decided whether to combine its constituent components into building a nuclear weapon, offer all the reassurance of a neighbor who has threatened to set fire to one’s yard, arrayed all the necessary ingredients for a flamethrower in the garden, and now shouts across the fence that he hasn’t quite made up his mind.

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And yet, as days become weeks, Israel’s campaign runs the risk of being a victim of its own success.

Having begun with the clearly-defined goal of destroying Iranian nuclear capacity and the ballistic missile program that is now sending Israelis to shelters daily, signs of increasing ambition are now appearing. Perhaps bred by the hubris of early and overwhelming success, perhaps by more tactical considerations, Israel now seems to be contemplating regime change in Iran. On Monday an Israeli strike destroyed a major state television building in Tehran. On Wednesday Israel said it had targeted the headquarters of Iran’s repressive internal police force, responsible for much of the regime brutality during the “Woman, Life, Freedom” protests. Hacked television channels broadcast a message calling on the Iranian population to rise up against the government. On Thursday, the Israeli defense minister Israel Katz said the supreme leader of Iran, Ali Khamenei, could not be allowed to “continue to exist” and described him as a “modern Hitler.” Today, Katz went a step further, saying he had ordered the Israeli military to “destabilize” the Iranian regime.

Make no mistake: there are few regimes as depraved as the one in Tehran. Its demise at the hands of an Iranian popular democratic movement would come not a moment too soon.

But even if the regime would not be mourned, the growing enthusiasm for regime change from the outside carries its share of peril. For Israel, it risks extending the campaign into an open-ended engagement that lasts months rather than days. Without U.S. support to destroy fortified nuclear sites, regime change also risks becoming in Israeli eyes a next-best option for the durable elimination of the Iranian nuclear project. For the Iranian people, it risks further pain and the disintegration of order and basic services in a country of 90 million. And, even if successful, the uncertainty of who might follow, the scattering of weapons and know-how that would likely result, and the prospect of nonstate powers entering the vacuum are all-too-familiar risks.

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There are also broader reasons for caution. Deep popular animosity to Israel in much of the Arab world has only grown in the nearly two years since October 7^th. For the leaders of Arab states entering into closer ties with Israel, the promise of economic opportunity and a quiet security partnership against Iranian influence has so far outweighed the risk of domestic disapproval. But for how much longer? Having missed opportunity after opportunity to strengthen the Abraham Accords in favor of buttressing his political survival, Netanyahu now argues that defeating Iran will be the decisive blow that heralds a new Middle East. He may be right, and almost certainly a nuclear Iran would drive a destabilizing nuclear race in the region. But as long as Israel’s campaign in Gaza continues and the political liability of engaging with Israel grows, removing the centripetal force behind regional realignment without an exit plan is a gamble. So, too, is embarking on an open-ended campaign.

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In an hour or two, as I write this, the sun will set in Jerusalem, marking the beginning of the Jewish Sabbath. Like last week, I will sit down and share in the traditional greeting “Shabbat shalom”—may it be a sabbath of peace. Jews around the world will recite a prayer asking for the divine to spread over the world “the canopy of your peace.”

Whether it will be a sabbath of peace rests in the hands of young soldiers in Israel manning the air defenses tonight and with the leadership in Tehran (and Jerusalem). But for the sake of all those—Israelis and Iranians alike—who find themselves, by no choice of their own, spending tonight in shelters or in fear, let us hope the canopy holds.

David Hamburger is Executive Director of Persuasion.

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1. Despite the tragic civilian casualties of Israel’s air campaign, equations of Iran’s intentional targeting of civilian centers with Israel’s attacks on military and government targets in Iran widely miss the mark. According to Iranian authorities, which do not distinguish between civilians and combatants, Israeli strikes have killed over 200 Iranians since the start of the conflict. Israel reports having carried out over 1,100 strikes, and has sought to publish Persian-language warnings before carrying out strikes on targets in densely-populated areas.