He We are living through what many hoped would be the final chapter in a long and dangerous story: the Iranian regime’s sustained campaign against the State of Israel. That hope now appears premature. Absent a genuine internal rupture within Iran, we are not witnessing an ending but a continuation. There are more chapters ahead. Real conflict is not a movie plot. It is messy, slow-moving, and often obscured by fog.

There is a tempting modern habit of imagining war scenarios as if it were an action film: a clear villain, a dramatic climax, and a decisive resolution. In that version of events, the Iranian threat appears, is confronted, and is defeated within a clean cinematic arc. But the real world does not cooperate with that fantasy. Conflict unfolds over years, and sometimes decades, shaped by uncertainty, unintended consequences, and the limits of human judgment. Neither Israel nor the Jewish people have ever lived in such a neat universe. We have lived in a world where danger develops gradually and resolution arrives, if it arrives at all, only after long endurance.

For the Jewish people, this pattern is not new – our history has never moved in straight lines. It advances in long, uneven arcs marked by vulnerability and resurgence, exile and return, danger and deliverance. Since we emerged as a people in the shadow of the Exodus roughly 3,500 years ago, we have lived within that rhythm. Egypt, Assyria, Babylon, Persia, and Rome each appeared, in their time, immovable. None were. That does not make the present moment less dangerous. It makes it more intelligible.

The Iranian regime, as the modern successor to the ancient Persian empire, has spent decades constructing a strategic architecture designed not merely to threaten Israel, but to encircle it. Hezbollah to the north retains a significant rocket arsenal – though substantially diminished by Israel’s ongoing campaign – sufficient to continue harassing northern Israel and to show that it is unlikely to be fully neutralized at this time. Hamas still governs much of Gaza and remains openly committed to Israel’s destruction. Shiite militias in Iraq and Syria extend Iranian reach westward, while the Houthis in Yemen project power into the Red Sea and global........

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