I keep returning to a line from Amos Oz.

Fanatics do not wrestle. Only those who can hold complexity wrestle.

The sentence has been echoing in my mind as the war with Iran expands and new layers of the story surface.

My reaction to this war did not begin on the morning the bombs fell. For years I had followed the slow tightening of the confrontation with Iran — the regime’s pursuit of nuclear capability, its expanding ballistic missile program, and its sustained investment in the “Ring of Fire”: Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis, and other proxy militia armies across the region, funded, trained, armed, and strategically guided as extensions of its reach.

I was aware as well of the longer entanglement between Iran and the United States, stretching back at least to the overthrow of the democratically elected Mohammad Mossadegh in 1953 and the installation of the Shah. Nothing about that history is simple or morally clean. It includes the 1979 hostage crisis in Tehran, which coincided with the birth of the Islamic Revolution — a moment that seared humiliation and anger into the American psyche. The failed helicopter rescue attempt that followed only intensified that wound. It extends through episodes like the 1983 bombing of U.S. Marines in Beirut, widely attributed to Iranian-backed forces, and continues across decades marked by mutual hostility, miscalculation, and escalation.

That reach was not confined to the Middle East. It extended far beyond it, including the 1994 bombing of the Jewish community center in Buenos Aires, carried out by Hezbollah operatives and widely attributed to Iranian direction and support — an attack that killed 85 people and wounded hundreds more.

It is in that context that, over the past two-and-a-half years, watching events closely, I began to feel an uneasiness I could not dismiss. Israeli analysts spoke increasingly of a narrowing window. Iran’s nuclear progress appeared to accelerate. Its missile development continued even after the dramatic U.S. bombings at the end of the Twelve Day War of 2025. The atmosphere carried the sense of something approaching.

I remember telling my wife, weeks before the first strikes in late February 2026, that it felt as though events were moving toward a collision. I had no idea what form it might take. If anything, I assumed that the confrontation, if it came, would be between Israel and Iran alone.

When the war finally arrived — and when the United States entered it alongside Israel — I was as startled as anyone. What struck me, beyond the dramatic nature of the alliance itself, was how unprepared the American public seemed for what was unfolding. In my experience, many Americans are not consistently attuned to international affairs, and I found myself puzzled that so little effort appeared to have been made to explain or contextualize the stakes of this moment. In Israel, by contrast, the reality of war is not abstract. It is woven into daily life, into memory, into expectation. That difference in lived experience matters.

In the absence of preparation, the news seemed to land here on familiar ground — older narratives of Israel as aggressive, war-driven, or self-interested. Without a shared understanding of the pressures Israel perceives itself to be facing, those interpretations appear to fill the gap.

I cannot know how broadly this perception is held. But I notice, in the conversations around me, that where outcomes are uncertain or ambiguous, suspicion tends to deepen rather than soften. In that atmosphere, judgments about Israeli intransigence — and, at times, something that feels uncomfortably close to older patterns of anti-Jewish sentiment — seem........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)