I first broached the subject publicly in a 2019 conversation with Bernard-Henri Lévy at New York’s 92nd Street Y. When we were asking whether “never again” was simply a slogan, I said that Israel and Iran could be headed toward the most catastrophic war in history.

My analysis of this trajectory met with resistance in Israel. No longer. Oct. 7 altered Israel’s disposition toward its enemy as surely as Germany’s invasion of Poland and Japan’s strike on Pearl Harbor changed Britain’s and America’s. Absent either regime change or Tehran taking an off-ramp, the Islamic Republic’s imperial journey will end as Japan’s and Germany’s did—in unadulterated devastation for its axis.

Nurtured by the savior-like figure of Cyrus the Great, Jews have broadly regarded Persian civilization as one of the world’s richest. It wasn’t lost on them that holding the current clique in power as the rightful heirs to the elevated culture that produced Hafez and Ferdowsi would be tantamount to considering the Nazis lawful descendants to Goethe and Beethoven. Still, until Oct. 7, Israel’s animosity toward Tehran wasn’t so much personal as business.

The sheer hatred exhibited by the clerical regime was thus one-sided. Among myriad Iranian threats of extinguishing the “Israeli tumor” vociferated over decades, one always stood out—the 2014 warning to Israelis from Hossein Salami, then deputy commander and now commander in chief of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps: “We will chase you from house to house, avenging every single drop of our martyrs’ blood in Palestine.” A year ago, Hamas carried out that threat in the kibbutzim of Kfar Aza and Be’eri.

Like those who dismissed “Mein Kampf” as mere bluster until it was too late, most Israelis were aware of this frenzied hostility but chose not to internalize its significance fully—a phenomenon best exemplified by a government recklessly pursuing divisive politics over national unity, despite knowingly facing an existential external threat.

As the Russian proverb goes, “better to be slapped with the truth than kissed with a lie.” The orgiastic paroxysm of hate and bloodthirstiness that unleashed hell on earth in southern Israel made Israelis comprehend that the Islamists meant their calls for extermination literally. Given hours to do as they pleased with Jewish innocents, Hamas’s terrorists exposed the savage ideology of the Muslim Brotherhood. They created vignettes of barbarism that can never be unseen: infants shot and kidnapped, children burned alive, women gang-raped and dismembered, families slaughtered en masse.

Rather than stay quiet, Hezbollah opened hostilities in solidarity with Hamas. The mullahs and their proxies understood that, as the most horrific assault on Jews since the Holocaust, Oct. 7 had seared the Israelis’ touchiest nerve. They seemed to derive pleasure from it, as demonstrated by the late President Ebrahim Raisi’s revolting remark last November: “We kiss the hands of Hamas for its resistance against Israel.”

At last Israelis woke up to the reality that Iran’s objective was what it had professed all along: encirclement followed by genocide. Overnight, a shadow war turned into mortal combat. While the Jews had faced the Third Reich naked, times have changed—and “never again” isn’t only a slogan.

What does that mean in practice? Simply put, Israel’s gruesome epiphany could ultimately lead to the obliteration of Iran. Bernard Lewis once quipped that for the Islamic Republic, mutual assured destruction is less a deterrent than an inducement. A notable if distressing validation of this viewpoint, the regime has displayed far greater institutional recklessness since Oct. 7 than perhaps ever before.

Eschewing the strategic patience and cost-benefit analyses for which it was duly renowned, Tehran’s unmooring from rationality was evinced by the launching of ballistic missiles against the forces of three nuclear-armed countries—the U.S. (in Iraq last November), Pakistan (in January) and Israel (in April and again last week). It was further exposed by the high-risk/no-reward proposition of allowing Hezbollah to continue striking northern Israel long after the area was evacuated and the militia’s attacks had no practical effect other than to provide the Israel Defense Forces with a justification to crush an avowed enemy.

If Iran is so reckless, how would it behave if it had nuclear weapons? At least until recently, the regime subscribed to former President Hashemi Rafsanjani’s dismissive maxim that “Israel is a one-bomb country”—in other words, that a nuclear exchange with the Zionists is winnable. This assessment was reinforced by Iran’s belief that the less eschatologically driven, more life-loving Jews wouldn’t go as far as to risk an “extinction level” counterattack. Flattering as that perception of Jewish values might be, it must be disabused as plainly as America’s quandaries were about eliminating the Soviet Union.

Is the ideological fetish of destroying Israel worth losing tens of millions of people—and the concomitant eradication of thousands of years of patrimony? Such is the question before Tehran. Having witnessed the daring and ruthless manner in which Israel executed in Lebanon the decapitation of Iran’s prize piece on the chessboard, not to mention the impressive long-range raids prosecuted on the Houthis in Yemen, Tehran should realize that the continued pursuit of nuclear weapons—successful or not—could be a death sentence for the regime and the Iranian nation.

Read more on original:

https://www.wsj.com/opinion/oct-7-and-the-iranian-nuclear-threat-mideast-israel-war-2ff532ce