Destroyed homes in the Israeli city of Rishon LeZion, central Israel, after a ballistic missile fired from Iran hit the area, June 14, 2025. (Oren Ziv)

It has been more than 46 years since I left Iran with my family at the age of nine. I have spent most of my life in Israel, where we built a family and raised our daughters — but Iran has never ceased to be my homeland. Since October 2023, I have seen countless images of men, women, and children standing beside the ruins of their homes, and their cries are etched in my mind. But when I see the images from Iran after the Israeli attacks and hear the cries in Persian, my mother tongue, the sense of collapse within me feels different. The thought that this destruction is being carried out by the country of which I hold citizenship is unbearable.

Over the years, the Israeli public has grown convinced that it can exist in this region while harboring deep contempt for its neighbors — engaging in murderous rampages against anyone, whenever and however it pleases, relying solely on brute force. For nearly 80 years, “total victory” has been just around the corner: just defeat the Palestinians, eliminate Hamas, crush Lebanon, destroy Iran’s nuclear capabilities — and paradise will be ours.

But for nearly 80 years, these so-called “victories” have proven Pyrrhic. Each one digs Israel into a deeper pit of isolation, threat, and hatred. The Nakba of 1948 created the refugee crisis that refuses to go away and laid the foundation for the apartheid regime. The 1967 victory gave rise to an occupation that continues to fuel Palestinian resistance. The war of October 2023 spiraled into a genocide that turned Israel into a global pariah.

The Israeli military — central to this entire process — has become a mindless weapon of mass destruction. It maintains its exalted status among a sedated public through flashy stunts: pagers exploding in men’s pockets at a Lebanese market, or a drone base planted in the heart of an enemy state. And under the command of a genocidal government, it digs itself deeper into wars it has no clue how to exit.

For so many years, under the spell of this supposedly all-powerful army, Israeli society convinced itself that it was bulletproof. Total worship of the military on the one hand, and arrogant disdain for regional neighbors on the other, bred the belief that we would never pay a price. Then came October 7, shattering — if only for a moment — the illusion of immunity. But rather than reckon with the significance of that moment, the public surrendered to a campaign of revenge. Because only through slaughter did the world make sense again: Israel kills, Palestinians die. Order restored.

Home Front Command forces at the scene where a ballistic missile fired from Iran hit and caused damage in Bat Yam, central Israel, June 15, 2025. (Chaim Goldberg/Flash90)

That’s why the images of bombed buildings in Ramat Gan, Rishon LeZion, Bat Yam, Tel Aviv and Tamra (an Arab city in the Galilee) were so jarring. They were hauntingly similar to the ones we’ve grown accustomed to seeing from Gaza: charred concrete skeletons, plumes of dust, streets buried in rubble and ash, children’s toys clutched by rescue workers. These images delivered a brief rupture in our collective delusion, that we are immune to everything. Civilian casualties on both sides — 13 Israelis and at least 128 Iranians — highlight the human cost of this new front, even if the scale remains a far cry from the devastation routinely inflicted on Gaza.

The army as doctrine

There was a time when some Jewish leaders in Israel understood that our existence in this region couldn’t be sustained by the illusion of total immunity. They may not have been free of a sense of superiority, but they grasped that basic truth. The late leftist lawmaker Yossi Sarid once recalled Yitzhak Rabin telling him: “A nation that flexes its muscles for fifty years — those muscles will eventually tire.” Rabin understood that living forever by the sword, contrary to Netanyahu’s horror-laced promise, is not a viable option.

Today, there are no more Jewish politicians of that ilk in Israel. When the Zionist left erupts in celebration over a reckless attack on Iran, it reveals a stubborn attachment to the fantasy that, no matter what we do, or how deeply we alienate ourselves from the region we live in, the army will always protect us.

Interception of an Iranian missile attack on Israel as seen from Jerusalem, June 15, 2025. (Chaim Goldberg/Flash90)

“A strong people, a determined army, and a resilient home front. That’s how we’ve always won, and that’s how we’ll win today too,” wrote Yair Golan, head of the Democrats Party — a merger of the Zionist left parties Meretz and Labor — in a post on X following Friday’s strike. His fellow party member, MK Naama Lazimi, chimed in to thank “the advanced intelligence systems and intelligence superiority. The IDF and all security systems. The heroic pilots and the Air Force. Israel’s defense systems.”

In this sense, the fantasy of immunity granted by the army runs even deeper in the Zionist left than on the right. The right’s answer to its security anxiety is annihilation and ethnic cleansing — that’s its endgame. But the center-left places its faith almost entirely in the army’s supposedly limitless capabilities. Without question, the Jewish center-left in Israel worships the military far more fervently than the right, which treats it merely as a tool to execute its vision of destruction and ethnic cleansing.

We Israelis must understand — we are not immune. A people whose entire existence depends solely on military might is destined to end up in the darkest corners of destruction, and ultimately, in defeat. If we haven’t learned this most basic lesson from the past two years, let alone the past eighty, then we are truly lost. Not because of Iran’s nuclear program or Palestinian resistance, but because of the blind, arrogant hubris that has taken hold of an entire nation.

Orly Noy