In a 2022 televised interview, Naftali Bennett, then Prime Minister of Israel, challenged his interviewer, Christiane Amanpour, CNN’s chief international anchor, with a pointed observation: “There you go again, starting the story in the middle.”

The remark captured more than a moment of frustration. It exposed a structural habit in contemporary media and policy discourse: the tendency to isolate events from the chain of actions that produced them. What appears as a sudden crisis is often the visible tip of a long, unfolding process.

That same habit resurfaced in the resignation of Joe Kent, a senior U.S. counterterrorism official, who justified his departure by stating that “Iran posed no imminent threat to our nation.” At first glance, the statement seems cautious, even responsible. But it rests on a narrow and ultimately misleading concept of threat—one that recognizes danger only at the final moment before action.

Iran’s posture over the past decades cannot be understood in such terms.

This is not a state whose behavior is episodic. It is a regime that has systematically constructed a network of influence and force across regions. In Lebanon, Hezbollah—armed, trained, and financed by Iran—has become a military actor with tens of thousands of rockets. In Gaza, Hamas has received support enabling repeated cycles of conflict. In Iraq and Syria, Iranian-aligned militias have targeted U.S. forces and reshaped local balances of power. In Yemen, the Houthis have used Iranian-supplied missiles and drones against regional infrastructure and international shipping routes.

The pattern extends beyond the Middle East. The 1994 bombing of the AMIA Jewish community center in Buenos Aires, attributed to Iranian-backed operatives, demonstrated global reach. More recent plots uncovered in Europe and the Americas point to an enduring capability and intent to operate far from Iran’s borders.

These are not isolated events. They are components of a continuous strategy: the projection of power through proxies, the accumulation of capabilities, and the normalization of confrontation as policy.

To assess such a posture only through the lens of immediate “imminence” is to misunderstand its nature. A threat built over decades—declared in rhetoric, embedded in institutions, and enacted repeatedly—does not suddenly become real at the final moment before execution. It is already real in its trajectory.

The insistence on a narrowly defined “imminent threat” compresses time into a single instant. It demands visible activation while ignoring the processes that make activation possible. In doing so, it transforms continuity into invisibility.

Bennett’s remark thus carries broader significance. To begin “in the middle” is not merely a narrative flaw. It is an analytical failure. By compressing time, it disconnects cause from effect. By disconnecting cause from effect, it obscures responsibility. And by obscuring responsibility, it distorts judgment.

The question is not whether a threat appears in its final, unmistakable form at a given moment. The question is whether a sustained trajectory—visible, cumulative, and intentional—has already crossed the threshold at which it must be recognized as real.

What appears as caution may, in fact, be blindness.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)