Israel Ascendant: From the Shadow of Oslo to the Doctrine of Preemption

Once again, the Jewish state stands alone in the eye of the storm. Once again, it stands unafraid. And like all such moments in Jewish history, it comes not in comfort but in crisis.

But today, Israel stands not at the precipice of survival but at the edge of opportunity. This is not a desperate act of self-defense. It is a moment of transformation—from anxious legitimacy to unassailable sovereignty—a moment when Israel stops asking for permission and starts enforcing outcomes.

Iran is exposed. Its proxies are disoriented. While the ballistic missile arsenal aimed at Israeli civilians retains the power to inflict lethal damage, its launching capacity is being methodically reduced to debris. The nuclear program—hidden behind deep concrete and unrepentant ambition—is vulnerable. And Iran’s military, banking, energy, and infrastructure function only because Israel has thus far allowed it to.

Victory will not take years. It will take days—weeks at most. And it will be achieved with or without the United States.

We are now witnessing a silly debate over whether the US should authorize a B-2 bomber strike on Fordow. It is a debate fueled by bureaucrats, embittered ex-officials, and self-styled realists who have grown comfortable with Western impotence. Make no mistake: Israel will destroy Iran’s nuclear and missile capabilities, with or without the bunker busters.

Natanz Nuclear Facility in Iran

There are alternatives. Israel has used them before. Cutting power to Fordow’s centrifuges—as seen at Natanz—can cause catastrophic mechanical failure. Cyberattacks, airstrikes, and precision commando operations can achieve what diplomacy never will.

The total cost to rebuild this war machine exceeds $30 billion. It would take 5 to 7 years to rebuild the enrichment and bomb-making facilities. And that assumes Iran survives the internal unrest unleashed by a military defeat.

Not since the 16^th century has such a small nation achieved a victory so sudden and decisive that it transformed the world and shaped civilization for centuries to come. In 1588, the Spanish Armada—vast, imperial, cloaked in divine certainty—set out to crush Protestant England. It failed. Not just militarily but cosmically. That defeat broke the Catholic monopoly on European power and opened the door to the rise of England and, later, the British Empire.

Israel’s crushing, solo victory over Iran’s nuclear and military complex is similarly wiping out the perception of inevitability that sustained Iran’s regime. Israel, small and hated and alone, is shown to be formidable.

Just as the Armada’s defeat recalibrated power toward Britain and its alliances, Israel’s victory has demonstrated that Israel is not a client state but a world power. Just as the Armada’s defeat redrew the map of Europeopean power, this victory can reset the trajectory of the Middle East toward realism, sovereignty, and modernity.

Whether the Middle East moves in that direction remains to be seen. Most immediately and most important, Israel is no longer beholden to the expectations and enlightened neutrality of the “rules-based order. In addition to destroying Iran’s evil infrastructure, Israel’s actions have freed itself from the tyranny of double standards.

The greatest threat to Israel has never been a single army or weapon. It is the erosion of seriousness in the West—a Europe paralyzed by demographics and ideology. An international elite seduced by a post-colonial narrative that brands Jewish nationalism as a historical crime.

The American people remain supportive of Israel, and a recent poll shows that 72 percent want the US to take out the regime. But sentiments are shifting. Israel, by its stunning success against Islamic tyranny, has shown that while it will always be in the market for military equipment and supplies, it does not need a protector or a patron.

By crushing Iran and its proxies, Israel has, in partnership with the Trump administration, shifted the balance of power around the world. Israel has shown once again that “in a world of terrorists, terrorist states and weapons of mass destruction, the option of preemption is especially necessary... Deterrence does not work against people who ache for heaven. Preemption is the only possible strategy.

To his credit, President Trump understands all of this. His support wasn’t sentimental. It was strategic. His Abraham Accords reshaped the region. His pressure campaign weakened Tehran.

Note also Trump’s increasing willingness to use the term “we” in discussing the war against Iran. At times, he means Israel and the US, and at other times, he means the US. That’s how it should be. Trump redefined the alliance. It was no longer an asymmetric dependency. It became a mutual partnership—a foundation of American power in a region otherwise threatened by Chinese expansion and Russian adventurism. Such a shift will occur regardless of whether the stealth bombers drop bunker busters on Fordow.

Israel’s enemies are not vanquished—they are merely unmasked. The threat from Tehran may recede, but new challengers will emerge. The Palestinian national movement, still intoxicated by its genocidal delusions, must be forcibly disabused of the fantasy that the Jewish state is a temporary inconvenience. Turkey and Egypt, each vying for regional hegemony, may seek—with Qatari patronage—to fill the void left by a humbled Iran.

Israel must meet these ambitions not with accommodation but with the same clarity, ferocity, and moral confidence that defined its campaign against Iran. Israel must at last rid itself of the final illusions of Oslo—the fantasy that peace will come not through deterrence, strength, and sovereignty but by national self-effacement. That if only Israel ceases to be Jewish in substance—retaining Hebrew, perhaps, but abandoning Jewish purpose—it will be embraced by its enemies. As Gadi Taub so acidly put it, the dream is to become Sweden in Hebrew.

But Zionism was never about becoming Sweden. It was about the Jews reclaiming the dignity of agency—the right to shape their own history rather than be its perennial victim. It was a movement born of fire and necessity, not of guilt. And yet, within Israel's own borders, there remain those who recoil from that power—post-Zionists who see Jewish sovereignty not as a triumph but as transgression, who view the Jewish state as an original sin to be expiated through surrender to Palestinian rule.

They would trade superpower partnership and military supremacy for the approval of European salons and Ivy League faculties. They believe that Jewish power is inherently dangerous because, in their moral inversion, Jewish self-determination is a form of colonialism, and Jewish survival a provocation.

And yet, here stands Israel—ascendant, defiant, enduring. That it has reached this height under the stewardship of Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s most polarizing statesman, only deepens the despair of the post-Zionists. A nation born out of the ashes now shapes the future of the Middle East. It is today a powerful defender of its permanence, a deadly adversary to those who threaten it, and a steadfast ally to all who still believe freedom is worth the fight.

Never in its 3,800-year journey—from Pharaoh to the Promised Land, to Persia to pogrom and to the Promised Land once more —has the Jewish people exercised such control over their fate. And yet, some Jews, in Tel Aviv and on American campuses alike, loathe this fact. It unsettles their worldview. They prefer Jews as moral witnesses, not actors. As victims, not victors.

But Israel is no longer a question. It is an answer. The only question that remains is who will govern it in the decades to come. That will determine not just what kind of Jewish state survives—but whether it survives.