Sirens rang in Jerusalem as air defense systems shot down missiles over the city early yesterday morning. After Iran launched more than three hundred missiles and drones at Israel, here’s what we know today:
- The strikes caused only minor damage to one Israeli military base.
- Israel’s chief military spokesman said nearly 99 percent of the aerial threats were intercepted. The US said it helped shoot down dozens of drones and missiles.
- Leaders of the Group of Seven nations stated yesterday that they “unequivocally condemn in the strongest terms Iran’s direct and unprecedented attack against Israel.”
- Israel vowed to “exact a price,” but an Israeli war cabinet meeting ended last night without a decision on how Israel will respond.
- Iran’s top military officer said “there is no intention to continue” its offensive, but added that if Israel attacked Iran, “our next operation will be much bigger than this.”
While the attack itself was not devastating, the New York Times reports that it “opened a volatile new chapter in the long-running shadow war between Iran and Israel.”
Iran is about seventy-five times larger than the Jewish state; its population is nearly ten times larger. The two countries are more than a thousand miles apart. Israel has no intention of occupying Iranian land or subjugating its people.
Why, then, is Iran at war with Israel?
And why is this question so significant for America and the global future?
There was a time when Iran and Israel were not enemies but allies. When Israel declared its independence in 1948, Iran was one of the first Muslim countries to recognize the new state. However, when Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini ousted Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi in the 1979 Islamic revolution, he severed all diplomatic and commercial ties with Israel.
Khomeini’s goals from the inception of the revolution were to liberate Iranians from “the evils of Western imperialism” and to export his version of political Islam. Over the years, Iran built what it calls an “axis of resistance” that includes Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Syrian regime and Shia militias in Syria, Houthi rebels in Yemen, militias in Iraq, and Palestinian Islamic Jihad and Hamas in Gaza and the West Bank.
We are seeing a “priesthood” of this kind now in our own backyard, teaching the “evils of Western imperialism” to the youth of our own country. How long before this new secular religion, gets a dynamic and charismatic religious leader that tells them all they want to hear. I believe it will not be Christian, that’s so “colonial” sic. But it will be a religious leader that shakes off the “shackles” of Christianity and its outdated “sins.” There will be new sins, and they are already named and have all the same powers over life and new freedoms if you want to call them that. What you can eat, what you can wear, the kind of books you can read, the kind of music and entertainment that is “acceptable;” what kind of car or appliances. There is even a new “Leper” that is untouchable and “unclean.”
Across the years, Iran has waged war on Israel through these proxies. Now it has launched an unprecedented direct attack on Israel from Iran itself. One reason is that Iran is 90% Shia Muslim while the so-called Palestinians are almost 100% Sunnis. They were and are literally at each other’s throats for their entire history, but without the common cause of killing all Jews. Iran seems more than happy to sacrifice Sunnis for the cause.
Americans remember Ayatollah Khomeini because of the Iranian hostage crisis caused by another weak American government of the time, that ensued shortly after he came to power and are familiar with his successor, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, but most do not know the person who prepared the way for this revolution.
Ali Shariati was a Western-educated (only we teach things against our own way for life in the history of the world) intellectual who was inspired by Marxist anti-colonialist scholars (name me on single government that didn’t begin as a “colony/colonizer”). He divided the world into the oppressed (including Iran) and the oppressors (primarily the West) and framed a revolutionary ideology to oust the monarchy and “liberate” Iranians. He died before the 1979 revolution, but Khomeini capitalized on the popularity of his ideas.
From then to now, Iran’s leaders have sought to export this linkage of Marxist “liberation” with radicalized Islam. Since Israel and the US are the primary obstacles to this vision, Khomeini termed them the “little Satan” and the “great Satan,” respectively.
Add the eschatological conviction of Iran’s leaders that the Mahdi, their version of the Messiah, will appear to dominate the world for Islam only after the Muslim world destroys Israel, and you can see why Iran’s unprecedented escalation against Israel over the weekend is significant.
They are not only Politically aligned against us, but fanatic religious zealots living within a theocracy, that are committed to our destruction as a society. Not much there to work with as far as agreement.
“So we remain in darkness”
This conflict is not just military but spiritual. Iran’s leaders are being used by the evil one who “comes only to steal and kill and destroy” (John 10:10) as they strive to enact their deluded vision of the future through violent means. Jesus’ description fits them well:
This is the judgment: the light has come into the world, and people loved the darkness rather than the light because their works were evil. For everyone who does wicked things hates the light and does not come into the light, lest his works should be exposed. But whoever does what is true comes to the light, so that it may be clearly seen that his works have been carried out in God (John 3:19–21).
This temptation to choose self-dependent darkness over Spirit-dependent light is not limited to Iran. Henri Nouwen commented:
Jesus sees the evil in this world as a lack of trust in God’s love. He makes us see that we persistently fall back on ourselves, rely more on ourselves than on God, and are inclined more to love of self than to love of God. So we remain in darkness. If we walk in the light, then we are enabled to acknowledge that everything good, beautiful, and true comes from God and is offered to us in love.
Now it falls to you and me to “walk in the light” and to share it as urgently as we can:
According to Foreign Policy, the Institute for Science and International Security currently assesses Iran’s breakout time—the period necessary for Iran to assemble a nuclear weapon—at zero. This means that Iran has enough weapons-grade uranium to build a bomb within days and enough to assemble six weapons within thirty days.
Iran is already successfully weaponizing proxies to fight Israel on its behalf, encircling the besieged nation with terrorist groups Hezbollah in the north, Hamas in the west, Palestinian Islamic Jihad in the east, the Houthis in the south, and militias in Syria and Iraq in the northeast.
The irony that must not be lost, is that Iran, which is Shiite and Persian, is using Arabs, many of whom are Sunni, to do its bidding. As one commentator notes, “Attacking Iran’s proxies in the region has . . . been largely ineffective, given the regime’s indifference to Arabs martyring themselves for its cause.” They really don’t care about ethnic Arab Sunni Muslims. It would be like Methodists not caring about Baptist’s who martyr themselves for the faith and keep sending out the Baptist’s.
But Iran’s reach transcends the Middle East. Tehran is now aligned directly with Russia and China, delivering more than two thousand drones to aid Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine and exporting vast oil shipments to aid the Chinese government. It joined the Shanghai Cooperation Organization in July 2023, further solidifying its economic and defense alliance with the two.
Iran’s multipolar strategy is working.
A bipartisan letter sent earlier this year by over a dozen senators noted that, despite US sanctions, “Iran is now exporting on average more than 1.4 million barrels of crude oil per day,” two-thirds of it to China. The letter adds that because of illicit oil exports and pervasive sanctions evasion, Iran’s economy is growing by 4 percent annually and its foreign currency reserves increased by 45 percent from 2021 to 2023. The sanctions are a joke!
In the meantime, Hamas’s strategy of sacrificing Palestinian civilians to shelter its troops is working as well. As civilian casualties in Gaza have tragically but predictably climbed, support for Israel in the West has fallen. Americans’ support for Israel’s military actions has declined from 50 percent in November 2023 to only 36 percent today. Support for Israel among young evangelicals in the US has plummeted by more than 50 percent in just three years.
All this raises the pressing question: now that Iran has attacked Israel, how will Americans respond?