The wording is familiar. The urgency is always absolute. The implication is unmistakable: Israel is not choosing war. It is forced into it.

For many, the claim is inherently contradictory. How can a state initiate war—and in Gaza’s case, sustain a genocide—while insisting that it is merely defending itself from annihilation? Yet within Israeli political discourse, and across much of Western media, this contradiction is rarely interrogated. It is normalized.

That normalization is not incidental. It is foundational.

Dimona is not an ordinary town. It lies adjacent to the Negev Nuclear Research Center, widely understood to be central to Israel’s nuclear weapons program.

Located deep in the Naqab desert, the facility has long been treated as one of Israel’s most sensitive strategic sites, associated with plutonium production and long-term weapons capability.

That context gives the strike its meaning. The Iranian attack on Dimona came hours after a renewed US-Israeli strike on Iran’s Natanz nuclear facility earlier the same day.

According to international and Iranian reports carried by Reuters, the Natanz enrichment complex in Isfahan province was targeted on the morning of March 21, with the International Atomic Energy Agency confirming damage but no radiation leak.

The sequence is not incidental. Natanz was struck in the morning; Dimona was hit later the same day. Even without an exact hour-by-hour timeline, the proximity establishes a clear operational logic: a nuclear facility in Iran is answered with a nuclear-adjacent site in Israel within hours.

READ: The Tolstoy guide to history that Trump and Netanyahu didn’t read

Since the beginning of the war on........

© Middle East Monitor