Iran has waged war on Jewish communities for thirty years. The response still isn’t working.

Three weeks into the war with Iran, a second front has opened that receives far less attention than the missiles and the oil shock—but may prove more consequential for the security of Western democracies. On March 12, a man drove an explosives-laden truck into Temple Israel in suburban Detroit, one of the largest Reform synagogues in the United States, while 140 children were in its preschool. Between March 9 and 16, a previously unknown group bombed and firebombed synagogues across Belgium, the Netherlands, and Greece. Three Toronto synagogues were hit by gunfire in a single week. Two Israeli Americans speaking Hebrew were beaten in broad daylight in San Jose. This morning, arsonists in London set fire to four Jewish community ambulances in Golders Green. Belgium has stationed soldiers outside Jewish schools. Italian troops are patrolling Rome’s Jewish quarter. These are all facts from March 2026.

I study how states destroy minority communities. The mechanisms differ, but the sequence is stable: the community is redefined as an agent of a foreign enemy; surveillance and harassment become routine; violence is outsourced to actors who provide deniability; each escalation is met with statements of concern and insufficient action, which the perpetrators correctly interpret as permission to continue. The Islamic Republic of Iran has been running this sequence against Jewish communities worldwide for more than thirty years. The war did not create the campaign. It accelerated it. And the Western response—designations, expulsions, joint statements—has not yet caught up with what is, by any honest assessment, a state-directed war against a civilian population conducted across five continents.

Take the doctrine. In 1994, a truck bomb destroyed the AMIA Jewish community center in Buenos Aires, killing 85 people. Argentine prosecutor Alberto Nisman spent years building a case that the bombing was approved at the highest levels of the Iranian government and carried out by Hizballah. Nisman was found dead in his apartment in 2015, the night before he was to present his findings to Congress. In April 2024, Argentina’s Court of Cassation ruled that Iran planned the attack. The man Nisman identified as having approved the operation was Ahmad Vahidi, then the founding commander of the IRGC’s Quds Force. Vahidi is wanted by........

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