Israel Launches strike against Irans Nuclear Programme

meanwhile cnn seem to think trump is giving iran 2 weeks so he can move aircraft carriers into place

They can't distinguish a child from a Hamas terrorist but they know when they blow up a single nuclear scientist….

Absolute sense and balance here. Makes a change from the incessant Israel bad bad bad bad posts littering the thread

Posing a threat to a regime and a country are very different things.

Israel wants regime change within a country. Iran wants Israel to stop existing as a state.

israel seem to have switched focus from the nuclear plants to regime change instead

Katz instructs IDF to ‘destabilize’ Iranian regime with intensified airstrikes

Nonetheless, they still pose a threat to their neighbours. I keep reading about how Israel is 'under threat' and yet they are the ones bombing five or six different countries i.e. they themselves pose a substantial threat to others.

Turkey threatens the mass migration card just when europe is reaching boiling point on the issue:

The war between Iran and Israel could have a “harmful” migration impact on Europe, Turkey’s President Recep Erdoğan has warned.

The conflict could spark a surge in migration that would affect Europe and the region, Erdoğan said, according to AFP.

“The spiral of violence triggered by Israel’s attacks could harm the region and Europe in terms of migration and the possibility of nuclear leakage,

Does every response have to be whatabout Israel?

There were two inaccuracies in your post - that Iran was just a threat to Israel and not a long-standing active combatant and that Iran was good-faith interested in peace - that you were using to shape a narrative. I was just correcting those inaccuracies. I note that you did not challenge my corrections.

It's all inter-connected.

Iran funds Hamas and Hezbollah to attack Israel, leads to Israel attacking Lebanon and Gaza - and not saying that's right or wrong, just providing context - and once it destroyed those two proxy armies, it moved onto Iran, which it sees as the head of the snake.

Obviously Israel has periodically attacked other Iranian-backed militias but to nowhere near the same extent, Hamas and Hezbollah have always been Iran's biggest threat projectors.

Iran wasn't even on Israel's radar until 1979, in the sense that Iran-Israel had perfectly normal relations. Once the Ayatollahs took over, they viewed a Jewish state in the region as completely unacceptable and needing to be destroyed.

They basically picked up a mantle that Israel's actual neighbor states had dropped by 1979 and accepted wasn't going to happen - the destruction of Israel as an independent nation.

I'm not naive enough to think that if the Iranian revolution never happened, everything would be fine or Israel wouldn't be stealing land and responding brutally disproportionately against Palestine, but it certainly made the regional situation worse.

There's a reason Israel doesn't go bombing Egypt for example, because Egypt embraced the logical route of peace and diplomacy in the 1980's and it's held since despite Egypt very much not liking Israel.

There's also a reason why Iran has no regional allies at state-level because the regime is hated by everyone. The regime is deeply unpopular in Iran, just like Hezbollah is not popular in Lebanon. Hamas did enjoy more support but I would imagine that's fallen massively too.

None of this is justifying anything Israel does, but it is what it is.

Iran spent 40 years pursuing a dual strategy of deterrence (ballistic missiles) and proxy war (Hamas and Hezbollah) to shield itself from any consequences from Israel.

Now that dual strategy has completely failed and they are certainly suffering major consequences. If the regime survives it will be very interesting to see what they attempt to do over the next few years.

If Iran would give up on its religious quest to wipe out Israel, it would be better for the people of Iran, Israel, Lebanon and countless other places in the region that Iran has spread its fundamentalist tentacles into.

Then, in terms of Israel-Palestine, that's a whole separate thing outside Iran and Hamas and deserves far more than the single line I'm giving it here - but at least there could be far more focused effort on finding a solution and calling Israel to account for what it has done, is doing, and will do in the future.