Sheltering in Jerusalem and Looking at the Iran War
There is a Hebrew word for “squeezed,” sachut, which also means “being played.” In Jerusalem, after more than a week of the war that the United States and Israel launched on Iran, that state of mind seems inescapable. In the German Colony neighborhood, where my family lives, the constant, low growl of fighter jets has become a kind of white noise. Schools are closed, as are restaurants that don’t have shelters, but banks and shopping centers are open at unpredictable hours. Day and night, smartphones deliver a tone, piercing enough to start dogs trembling, alerting us to incoming missiles or drones. There are fewer alerts now, but they come episodically. We then listen for a chorus of sirens, which means that a missile or drone is headed to our general area. The German Colony is in the city center, just a mile or so from the Al Aqsa Mosque, so not a likely target for Islamic forces. But if a missile is shot down overhead, large pieces of shrapnel will be falling.
When the sirens sound, we rush down to a dank shelter, once a water cistern, under our building. On the stairs, we might hear the deafening pops of the launch of intercepting missiles, followed by distant, staccato thuds—or, more ominously, sustained rumbles. About half of the roughly three hundred missiles fired at Israel by March 10th reportedly carried cluster bombs. In the shelter, neighbors banter or trade dark punch lines. After ten or fifteen minutes, we check our phones for an all-clear or reports of where warheads may have gotten through. Later, we listen to security pundits and military experts telling us which Iranian leaders or installations have been “eliminated.” But they offer no answers for the most important questions, and seem to think them academic to people running to shelters: What can be achieved by this war? How will we end it—and not soon have to refight it? Why was it even necessary?
Ostensibly, the primary reason for a preëmptive war is Iran’s nuclear program, which, President Donald Trump says, menaces the United States and Israel as well as their European and Middle Eastern allies. (Given Iran’s special animus for Israel, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu insists, the threat is existential.) Connected to that is Iran’s ballistic-missile program. But the two programs are distinct and have different valence for the two partners waging this war.
The Iranian regime’s supply of enriched uranium that is believed to have survived Israel’s twelve-day attack on its nuclear installations last June—which Trump ended by employing B-2s to target critical enrichment sites (declaring them “obliterated”)—might eventually be used to make bombs. But, on March 2nd, the director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Rafael Mariano Grossi, said, “We don’t see a structured program to manufacture nuclear weapons” in Iran. On March 11th, Amos Yadlin, the former head of military intelligence, acknowledged that Iran has had no active plan to “weaponize” enriched uranium since 2003. More important, there was another way to address the issue: a strict inspection regime, much like the one that Trump, at Netanyahu’s urging, walked away from in 2018. (There is also, critically, Israel’s second-strike capacity—nukes nested in cruise missiles and Dolphin-class submarines off the Mediterranean coast.) The day before the war began, the Omani Foreign Minister, Sayyid Badr bin Hamad Al Busaidi, who was mediating U.S.-Iranian talks, told CBS that a new nuclear deal was “within our reach.”
The missile program is another matter. Iran’s conventional warheads pose no imminent threat to the U.S., and their threat to U.S. bases and allies in the Gulf, which has become lethal since the start of this war, was only contingent before it. But, for Israel, their threat is tangible—and ongoing. Iran’s stockpiling of missiles portends wars of attrition, like the current one, in which each side tries to wear the other down. Thus, Israel—preëmptively or in response to attacks—aims to eliminate Iran’s missile launchers and vast production facilities; Iran aims to degrade Israel’s economic life and endanger international shipping. But neither side seems positioned to win a decisive victory.
Militarily, Iran appears to be at an obvious disadvantage. Its air defense was decimated in October, 2024—when Israel attacked after Iran fired missiles to retaliate against Israel’s aerial assassination of Hezbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, in Lebanon—and then again in June. As the Times correspondent Mark Mazzetti has noted, “Netanyahu began to see the costs of going to war with Iran as lower,” which helped to “sell the United States [on] getting involved.” The assassinations of the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and many top officials in this war’s opening days may have seemed to confirm an accelerating asymmetry
But Israel is at other disadvantages. Its high-tech economy depends on advanced global networks, which are seriously disrupted by wars. Israel’s attack on Iran in June shuttered Israel’s non-essential businesses; it froze trade, travel, and tourism for a month, forced the cancellation of conferences showcasing Israeli startups, and temporarily shut down the country’s natural-gas fields. Schools were closed, as they are today. The wars have hastened the departure of some of Israel’s most educated people for jobs in American, European, and Australian companies, universities, and hospitals. (During the past three years of Netanyahu’s government, beginning with his assault on the judiciary and continuing into the prolonged war in Gaza, some two hundred thousand Israelis have left the country.)
Moreover, with Iran, Israel must patrol the skies of a nation that has a population close to the size of Turkey’s and a landmass roughly the size of Alaska’s with about two hundred aircraft (the number that reportedly participated in the initial February attack on Iran) that need to fly to targets more than a thousand miles away and be refuelled in the air. Meanwhile, Israel’s home-front command must shoot down missiles and penetrating drones that cost as little as twenty thousand dollars each with intercepting missiles that typically cost four million dollars and take far longer to manufacture. Besides, much of Iran’s missile-production infrastructure is deep underground, where most Israeli and U.S. bombs cannot reach. So the highest priority of Israel’s Air Force is to destroy missile-launch facilities on the ground; on Monday, the I.D.F. claimed to have knocked out perhaps eighty per cent of them. But, over time, they can be rebuilt and installed in new sites.
Prior to the calamitous war following the attacks of October 7, 2023, Israel fought five wars with Hamas, between 2008 and 2021. Vexingly, the war with Iran is reproducing in macrocosm what those wars taught in microcosm. “Look how quickly” Iranian security forces in Tehran are “taking on characteristics that resemble the Gaza Strip,” Ohad Hemo, Channel Twelve’s Arab-affairs correspondent, said on March 3rd. “Revolutionary Guards and Basij”—the volunteer paramilitary civilian force under the Guards—“are evacuating their headquarters, leaving their bases, and looking for cover in mosques and schools.” And their firing of ballistic missiles across Israel recalls Hamas’s firing of rockets into Israeli border towns. Israel’s response to those earlier wars, periodically “mowing the lawn” (as I.D.F. commanders infamously put bombarding Gazan installations, tunnels, and command posts), seems mirrored in the Israeli Air Force’s Iran campaign, except that now it’s undertaking to mow a distant pasture. And although Netanyahu kept the post-October 7th war going far longer than even prominent voices in the security establishment believed necessary, resulting in thousands more civilian deaths and many more of Gaza’s buildings and infrastructure destroyed, Hamas is still in power, with little ability to attack Israel, for now—but enough to intimidate Gazans. There is a lesson here, too.
One might have concluded, given Israel’s predictable jeopardy, that a diplomatic initiative to prevent this war would have been tried long ago. In March, 2022, before Netanyahu regained power, then Israeli Foreign Minister Yair Lapid and the U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken hosted a summit in Israel with the Abraham Accord signatories Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, and Morocco, reportedly with Saudi blessing. The leaders explored, among other things, something along the lines of a Middle Eastern NATO, to contain Iran. But a process of this kind has always meant engaging the Palestine Authority and entertaining a pathway to a Palestinian state, and that has meant abandoning annexation of the West Bank—a prospect that is anathema to Israel’s religious extremists, who are now settling what they call Judea and Samaria, and with whom Netanyahu has been allied since he began his career.
The choice of war, however, requires a U.S. partnership of a different kind, because Israel cannot stand against Iran alone. Trump seems aligned for now, though it’s not clear that he’s signed up to get Israel out of the specific danger of wars of attrition. Facing mounting opposition at home, and increasingly pressured oil markets, it’s not clear that he’ll stick to anything other than what appeals to his capricious, self-aggrandizing impulses. In January, after all, Trump encouraged Iranian protesters to come out in force, posting that “help is on the way.” (The United Nations Special Rapporteur on Iran estimated that at least five thousand people were killed by Iranian security forces during the protests, and, according to medical sources she consulted, as many as twenty thousand.) A month later, his idea of help, apparently, is the extensive bombing of the country in which, according to Iran’s U.N. envoy, thirteen hundred civilians have been killed, along with a demand for “unconditional surrender.” Trump also called for the intervention of Kurdish forces from Iraq, then changed his mind.
Nevertheless, the selection of Mojtaba Khamenei to succeed his father as Supreme Leader suggests that, however questionable his ability to reëstablish a chain of command, the hard-liners in the regime are doubling down. Iran’s President, Masoud Pezeshkian, hinted that some countries have begun “mediation efforts” to end the war. That could be a chance for Trump to declare victory and leave. “This was just an excursion into something that had to be done,” he said in a press conference on Monday. “We’re getting very close to finishing that, too.” And this: “Our enemies see what price we exact for aggression against us, I’m sure they’ll draw the conclusion.”
Actually, that last statement was not from Trump on Monday but from Netanyahu in May, 2021, at the close of that war with Hamas—more than two years before October 7th. Trump may keep shifting objectives, but for Netanyahu the inexorable goal still seems to be regime change, much the way that “total victory” against Hamas has been. For the Prime Minister, existential war is on brand. “A few months ago, Netanyahu described Israel as a modern Sparta,” the Haaretz security correspondent Amos Harel wrote on Monday. “But to preserve its militarist identity, a Sparta requires permanent military friction.”
“Bibi postures as Churchill,” the veteran journalist Eliezer Yaari—a former combat pilot—told me. “Cigars in hand—blood, sweat, and tears until the imaginary ‘absolute victory.’ In Jerusalem, we have relative quiet since the war broke out. But I speak with my children in Tel Aviv, and with friends running to shelters five times a night. They don’t feel like Spartans. They feel the anxiety of enduring this for weeks and months on end.” ♦