Israel had a window of opportunity to attack Iran and it was right to use it

From a military perspective, there is little question that Israel was right to strike Iran’s nuclear facilities. It took advantage of a unique window of opportunity that stemmed from three primary factors.

The first was the degradation of Iran’s regional proxies. For years, when the issue of attacking Iran would come up around the cabinet table, one of the main arguments against it was the retaliation Israel would face from Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas in Gaza, and Iranian forces in Syria. That concern is no longer what it once was.

Bashar al-Assad’s regime in Syria has fallen and, due to Israeli airstrikes, has lost nearly all of its strategic military capabilities. Hezbollah, while still dangerous, is a shadow of its former self – its arsenal has been significantly degraded, and its freedom of movement within Lebanon is more constrained. As for Hamas, it may have succeeded in dragging the IDF into what feels like a never-ending war in Gaza, but its ability to strike inside Israel is almost non-existent. What remains are a few dozen Houthi missiles in Yemen and Iran’s own powerful arsenal of a few thousand long-range ballistic missiles.

We know that the Israeli strike against Iran also targeted missile launchers and storage sites, hopefully succeeding in limiting Tehran’s ability to retaliate. This makes the potential cost of such a strike lower than it would have been two or even three years ago.

The second factor was operational capability – whether Israel can actually pull off such a strike. This has long been one of the most difficult questions, involving a mix of logistical, technological, and strategic challenges: can the Israeli Air Force reach Iran, can it drop munitions on a wide range of targets, and can it penetrate heavily fortified underground facilities like Natanz and Fordow where the regime enriches uranium?

Until recently, this was mostly theoretical. But even before today, we knew more. In April and again in October last year, Israeli Air Force jets – including the advanced F-35I – flew more than 2,000 kilometers into Iranian airspace and struck a couple dozen targets, including Iran’s Russian-made S-300 surface-to-air missile systems. These systems had been considered the primary deterrent to an Israeli airstrike, and their destruction has now made Iran’s airspace wide open.

Penetrating fortified sites remains a challenge, but there is reason to believe Israel has the means. Over the past two years, the IDF has demonstrated advanced bunker-busting capabilities in Gaza’s tunnel network, and, more dramatically, in Beirut last September when it eliminated Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah in a heavily fortified underground command center – a facility many had assumed might be beyond the Israel Air Force’s reach.

The third factor was the change in Washington. While President Donald Trump said he preferred a diplomatic deal with Iran, negotiations have stalled. Trump initially expressed optimism about reaching an agreement, but just this week he sounded more skeptical, citing Iran’s continued insistence to enrich uranium on its own soil as the main sticking point.

We now know that Trump and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu were coordinated and that the comments coming out of Washington, that a deal might still be possible, were part of a planned ruse to put the Iranians to sleep.

The window of opportunity needed to be used since it was not going to remain open indefinitely. The more time passes, the more Iran will rebuild – its air defenses, its proxies, and its offensive capabilities. In Gaza, we already see signs of Hamas reconstituting its forces and replenishing its weapons stockpiles. In Lebanon, Israel struck multiple buildings in Beirut just last week where Hezbollah was reportedly producing explosive drones. Iran will do the same.

What happens next?

But here’s the harder question – the one no one really knows how to answer: What happens the day after a potential strike?

There is no doubt that Israel’s attack can and will cause serious damage to Iran’s nuclear program and set it back. But will it stop Tehran’s pursuit of a bomb? The likely answer is no. If anything, it could accelerate the regime’s drive to achieve a nuclear weapons capability, especially if it believes that military action will now be the default response and determine that the only real deterrent is an independent nuclear capability.

And unlike Iraq in 1981 or Syria in 2007 – both of which relied on foreign actors to build and run their nuclear programs – Iran has the technical expertise, data, and knowledge to rebuild on its own. It won’t need French or North Korean scientists: The know-how is indigenous.

Some argue that a strike could spark a popular uprising and that the oppressed Iranian people – suffering under decades of brutal ayatollah rule – might finally rise up and take to the streets. But the opposite could just as easily happen. The regime might use the attack to unify the population around the flag, bury its nuclear infrastructure even deeper where it will obtain the bomb and buy even longer political survival.

All of which underscores why the strike needed to be coordinated with the United States.

There is one final issue – arguably the most troubling – and that is the crisis of trust within Israel itself.

In today’s fractured political environment, with faith in the government at an all-time low, it is hard to imagine any operation of this magnitude being viewed purely through the lens of national security. Many Israelis would see it instead through the prism of politics and personal survival – particularly that of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

This is unfortunate. A mission like this, that touches on the very existence of the State of Israel and which could escalate into a larger regional war and trigger unprecedented attacks on Israeli cities, should ideally be undertaken when the public is united, when its government has broad legitimacy, and when the people believe their leaders are acting out of strategic necessity, and not personal preservation.

That is not the situation in Israel today.

Does that mean the attack shouldn’t have happened? No. Israel could not miss this window of opportunity – and if the intelligence was sound, the moment right, and the objectives clear, then there was room to decide that the mission needed to go ahead.

But for that to happen, Netanyahu will need to do something he has not done in a long time: rebuild public trust. And he needs to start doing that now.

The writer is a co-author of a forthcoming book, While Israel Slept, about the October 7 Hamas attacks, a senior fellow at The Jewish People Policy Institute (JPPI), and a former editor-in-chief of The Jerusalem Post.