In the early morning hours of June 13, Israel launched an attack that had been prophesied in some form or another for nearly 20 years: a full-blown assault on Iran’s nuclear program and, in a move that shocked many observers, its entire military structure. The top brass of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, and of Iran’s Armed Forces as a whole, has been assassinated. Critical nuclear facilities at Natanz and Fordow were bombarded with the intent to destroy. On Friday, Iran retaliated with multiple rounds of ballistic missiles in the heart of Tel Aviv, targeting Israel’s Ministry of Defense and reportedly other military bases in the area.

Israel’s justification for its attack hinged again on the specter of the “preemptive strike.” It’s a mythos dating back to the fiction that Egypt was planning an imminent attack on Israeli forces in 1967, and thus Israel was justified in “preemptively” destroying Egypt’s military power and occupying the Sinai, the Golan, the West Bank, and Gaza.

Here, the stakes are treated as just as high. Videos from the Israeli military extoll that they are fighting for the West’s future and that they had “no other choice” but to act against an existential threat — not just against the State of Israel, but against every country within range of Iran’s vast missile arsenal.

Israel’s propaganda machine has been running full steam, lobbing claims about the amount of weapons-grade uranium Iran allegedly........

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