This Editor’s Note was sent out earlier Wednesday in ToI’s weekly update email to members of the Times of Israel Community. To receive these Editor’s Notes as they’re released, join the ToI Community here.

The annual transition from Memorial Day to Independence Day is always emotionally complex: Israel moves in a few moments from a day of national mourning for those who lost their lives in our defense to the celebration of our consequent capacity to live here in safety and freedom.

This year, though, the transition is less acute — not so much a shift from deep grief to happiness unbounded, as from anguish to a joy and national pride tempered by trepidation over where our nation is headed. The safety is relative and the freedom is under assault.

For we face two existentially threatening realities, both of which also affect Jews around the world.

First, as throughout our modern history, Israel’s enemies are seeking to destroy it — but in the shape of Iran and its proxies they have lately come closer than ever to attaining the capacity to do so at a stroke, in an often indifferent if not actually supportive international climate.

And second, we are being ripped asunder and morally compromised from within under a leader who has brought Jewish supremacists and violent racists into the heart of government, encouraged the entire ultra-Orthodox community to shirk its national responsibilities, and proven incapable of accepting his own personal culpability in the worst enemy attack since the establishment of the state.

The threat posed by Iran that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu constantly harps upon is not exaggerated. The regime genuinely intends to destroy Israel. As both Netanyahu and US President Donald Trump have stated, were it to attain nuclear weapons, there should be no doubting its readiness to use them.

Indeed, if Hamas’s leader Yahya Sinwar had trusted Iran’s leaders sufficiently to tell them exactly when he was planning to send thousands of terrorists bursting through the Gaza border to massacre the residents of our unconscionably unprotected south, he would have enabled the Islamic Republic to muster all its missile, proxy and other forces and join in simultaneously. Then there is no telling where the October 7, 2023, invasion would have ended and what would have been left of Israel when it was over.

If the war that the US and Israel launched against Iran on February 28 comes to a permanent stop with the regime retaining its stockpile of highly enriched uranium, if it still has any path to a bomb, if it is still able to build an arsenal of thousands of ballistic missiles, the existential danger will merely have been temporarily reduced.

Whatever Trump and Netanyahu may wish to say right now, the goal of the war was to bring down the regime. But the challenge was underestimated, and the danger the Islamic Republic poses to Israel and anybody that gets in its way — including its own people — will remain potent for as long as it holds power.

Hamas, too, is much weakened but not finished........

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