Aftershocks

By Yonoson Rosenblum | June 24, 2025

Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu and President Donald Trump have secured their place in history

The baal teshuvah movement in Israel began in the wake of Israel's lightning victory in the Six Day War, as the Jews of Israel experienced a v'nahafoch hu moment.In the tense weeks leading up to the war, tens of thousands of graves were dug in Tel Aviv to prepare for the expected war dead. And the dread only increased in the days immediately before the war, when Prime Minister Levi Eshkol's attempt to calm the nation in a radio address did precisely the opposite, as his voice cracked and he was barely comprehensible.

Then came the preemptive strike, in which Israel destroyed the air forces of Egypt and Syria on the ground, in the opening moments of the war, and thus secured total air control.

Sunday morning, the Jews of Israel experienced the same awakening from a nightmare, one that has lasted 46 years, from the outset of the Islamic Revolution in Iran. For more than two decades, Israel has lived under the specter of a nuclear Iran, which has vowed to wipe it off the map. And for more than a decade, Israel has been surrounded by a "ring of fire" on seven fronts of groups pledged to the cause, at least one of which, Hezbollah, was armed with over 130,000 missiles, many of them precision guided, capable of reaching every part of Israel.

The offensive capabilities of that seven-front "ring of fire" have been almost totally degraded since Simchas Torah 5784. And as of this morning, the three principal nuclear facilities belonging to Iran have been reduced to rubble.

That too is a v'nahafoch hu moment. Haviv Rettig Gur, speaking in the wee hours of the morning from Jerusalem on a hastily convened Free Press podcast hosted by Bari Weiss, described his young children sleeping in shelters nearby, and expressed the hope that soon sleeping in shelters would be a thing of the past. (It should be noted that until 1967, Israeli children living on kibbutzim in the shadow of the Syrian-held Golan Heights slept underground.) The normally dour Rettig Gur later described himself as "dancing."

There are many who will fail to see Hashem's hand in our deliverance. Just last Thursday morning, an Iranian ballistic missile hit Soroka Hospital in Be'er Sheva. The night before, the ward that suffered the greatest damage had been evacuated and the patients all moved underground. On the news that morning, one commentator was quick to celebrate the miracle in that timing. But the other quickly dismissed any talk of miracles. "Proper preparation," she said, nothing more. Why that proper preparation awaited the very eve of the missile hit, she did not explain.

But many will see in the concatenation of events Hashem's protection of His people. May we be prepared to greet them with open arms and hearts.

IN THE MEANTIME, let us begin to sort out the long-range implications of the destruction of Fordow, buried 300 feet underground, Natanz, and Isfahan. (The whereabouts of the 400 kilograms or more of uranium enriched to near weapon-level remains unknown, and Iran claims to have removed it from Fordow. Hopefully, Israeli intelligence is as accurate with respect to its whereabouts as it has been about those of senior military leaders and nuclear scientists.)

Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu and President Donald Trump have both secured their place in history, and will be forever linked to one another. In his uncharacteristically brief address to the nation, Trump congratulated Bibi fulsomely: "We worked as a team, as perhaps no team has ever worked before."

The Knesset opposition has long been mocking Netanyahu for having ruined Israel's relationship with America. Netanyahu's only response was to hold up his fingers in the Israeli gesture for "Wait a minute." Now he has secured one of Israel's greatest diplomatic triumphs, by gaining Trump's support for ending the Iranian nuclear program.

Had Netanyahu not launched the Israel air attack on Iran, and had that attack not been so successful, there is little or no chance that Trump would have sent American B-2 bombers to strike Iran. Israel set the stage. On the Free Press podcast, Haviv Rettig Gur described an entirely new American security paradigm in which regional allies would do the heavy lifting, as Israel had done with Iran, and the United States would arrive to deliver the coup de grace, if needed.

Just a week ago, Churchill biographer Andrew Roberts urged Trump to rise to the moment and make the decision to destroy Fordow, just as Churchill made the decision in 1940 to bomb the Vichy French navy, with the loss of just under 1,300 French lives, rather than let that navy fall under Nazi control. President Trump rose to the moment.

Had he not done so, Michael Doran of the Hudson Institute said on the Free Press podcast, Israel would have had no choice but to try to take Fordow with commandos. Even if successful, such an operation would have likely involved the heavy loss of life, and Israel would have been forced to destroy much of Iran's economic infrastructure, which it has thus far avoided doing.

Under President Obama, we grew used to hearing that there was "no military solution" to whatever the threat was. But as Russian dissident (and probably the greatest chess player in history) Garry Kasparov points out, Obama, Ben Rhodes (who orchestrated the media echo chamber for the JCPOA), and their ilk always prefer to warn of what "might happen instead of confronting the brutal truth of what's actually happened or is happening."

In the latter category, Kasparov places the millions of Iranians who face imprisonment, torture, or death if they run afoul of the precepts of the Iranian Revolution. Or the hundreds of thousands of Syrians whose murder Iran was an accomplice to. Or the Ukrainian citizens who have found themselves on the receiving end of over 8,000 Iranian-made suicide drones. Or the scores of Argentine Jews blown up in a Buenos Aires Jewish community center in 1994 without even the thinnest of martial pretexts.

Trump and Netanyahu have demonstrated that there are some problems for which there may only be military solutions and for which victory, not the inevitable calls for de-escalation, is the goal. Last week, Trump surprised the Iranians, who have grown accustomed to dictating the parameters of negotiations to a succession of American presidents, by letting it be known he was not interested in discussing a ceasefire or anything less than a complete end to Iran's nuclear program.

A succession of American presidents promised that Iran would not be allowed to obtain a bomb, but only Trump did something about it. As one prominent Trump hater tweeted after the attack, "Never Again" takes precedence over "Never Trump."

The biggest loser of all this is the Islamic Revolution and its dream of destroying Israel and eventually the Great Satan, America, in the process spreading Islam worldwide. To achieve that goal, the mullahs have invested half a trillion dollars in a nuclear program that now lies in ruin.

Iran was the accomplice to the deaths of 600,000 Syrians and 250,000 Yemenis, many of them children who starved to death, in its efforts to build that ring of fire around Israel.

Also ready for internment at long last is the dream of Barack Obama of distancing the United States from Israel and installing Iran as a regional hegemon. That effort concluded in the JCPOA, which allowed Iran to continue with nuclear enrichment, left its ballistic missile program untouched, and provided the regime with billions of dollars in cash stacked on pallets, to be dispersed to Iran's regional terrorist allies. With its sunset provisions, the JCPOA virtually guaranteed that Iran would one day have a nuclear weapon.

More speculative, but still possible, is that the humbling of the Islamic Revolution will result in a revisiting of the jihadist ideology that drives Iran's desire, and that of its proxies, to wipe out Israel. It is often said that an ideology cannot be defeated. But that is not always true when that ideology is decisively defeated and demonstrated to lead only to disaster after disaster. Rettig Gur pointed out, for instance, that the ideology of pan-Arabism, which led Egypt and Syria at one point to merge into one nation, ended with the overwhelming Arab defeat in the Six Day War.

The commitment to destroying the Jewish state, not to mention Jews everywhere they are to be found, enshrined in the Hamas charter, has over and over again led the people of Gaza to disaster, and turned their enclave to rubble. Is it possible, now that Iran can no longer bail out Hamas and the regime is itself tottering on the brink, that those in thrall to jihadist ideology will finally wake up and acknowledge that Israel is here to stay and redirect their energies to building better lives for themselves?

As Einat Wilf recently argued, it is time to restore words like "victory" and "defeat" in place of ceasefires after ceasefires, which allow the Palestinians to avoid confronting defeat and thus changing course from their steadfast rejection of Israel's existence. "Ceasefire" sounds benign, "victory" and "defeat" cruel. But "doing good," as opposed to "feeling good," depends on the unconditional defeat of jihadism against Israel, for only with that defeat will the Palestinians ever be able to direct their energies to creating better lives for themselves, in tandem with Israel.

ONE LAST GROUP to have taken a blow last night was the "MAGA right," whose most prominent member is Tucker Carlson. Carlson has campaigned for the United States to sever its ties with Israel, and predicted that an American attack on Iran might result in World War III and the loss of thousands of American lives.

He will now have to live with those predictions. But again, he is repeating the fallacy described by Garry Kasparov, citing speculative future dangers against an existent dark reality. President Trump pointed out in his statement that Iran is currently the world's leading state sponsor of terrorism, and that it is responsible for close to a million deaths in Syria and Yemen.

Moreover, the Iranian general's elite force developed "explosively formed penetrators," or EFPs, that killed or wounded hundreds of US troops in Iraq, and its proxies have lots of American blood on their hands. Trump made clear that he remains committed to the promise he made at the outset of his first presidential campaign to never let Iran acquire nuclear weapons. Long the "bully of the Middle East," Iran now must choose whether it will give up its nuclear program in return for peace or not, he said.

If it opts to continue down the nuclear path, he warned, there are plenty of targets left, and future American attacks on Iran will be "far greater and easier." Those targets, he said, can be removed in a matter of moments.

In those remarks, the president made clear, as he said last week, that he, and he alone, will determine what "Make American Great Again," and what are America's interests.

Free Press columnist Eli Lake put it well when he said the Carlson crowd don't have a foreign policy so much as a reflexive anti-Semitism. Carlson's allies have pretty much come out of the woodwork on that. Daryl Cooper, dubbed by Carlson as America's greatest living popular historian for placing the onus of World War II on Churchill and not Hitler, called for America to "bomb Tel Aviv," after Israel's initial strike on Iran, and the increasingly loony Candace Owens accused Jews of "bloodlust."

The patron saint of Carlson and his followers is Patrick Buchanan, who accused Jewish neocons of sending boys with names like "McCallister, Murphy, Gonzales, and Leroy Brown" to their deaths in wars at the behest of "the Israel Defense Ministry and its amen corner in the United States."

But in point of fact, today it is Jewish boys risking their lives in defense of the entire West. In the words of German chancellor Frederick Merz, Israel is "doing the dirty work for all of us" in seeking to stop Iran from going nuclear.

Allister Heath, writing in the Telegraph, saluted Israel, "a tiny country the size of Wales, the population barely larger than London's," for "annihilating — from 1,000 miles away, in an unprecedented long-distance war — an oil-rich regional superpower that is nine times more populous and boasts a 75-times-larger land area, while waging a conflict on seven fronts."

And he described Israel's achievement in destroying the Iranian proxy system as "an even greater victory for Western civilization than the ending of al-Qaeda and Islamic State. The regime pioneered modern Islamism and state terrorism; it funded Hamas, Islamic Jihad, Hezbollah, Iraqi Shia militias, and the Houthis."

President Trump concluded his speech to the nation, "We love You, G-d," and both he and Prime Minister Netanyahu invoked G-d's blessings on both their nations. We should all do the same.