Commentators within Israel have described a sense of business as usual in the wake of the country’s joint attack with the United States against Iran.
“It’s Saturday, so the streets are naturally quiet,” political analyst Ori Goldberg said from outside Tel Aviv, as he returned from his shelter for the second time.
“I think, politically, there’s a sense of triumphalism, of having attacked an enemy regime. Not really because we’re greatly invested in the future of the Iranian people, but because, through the genocide on Gaza, we’ve devalued human life,” he said, referring to the Israeli attacks on the besieged territory since October 2023.
Returning to shelters around the country is now the stuff of everyday life for most Israelis, he said.
Israel has been on high alert since it launched a wave of attacks on Iran, the country that its leaders have consistently portrayed as its nemesis for decades.
Announcing the attack through a video post on X, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu framed the attack in characteristically apocalyptic terms, saying Israel and the US had launched attacks to “remove the existential threat posed [to Israel] by the terror regime in Iran”, and going on to call upon the Iranian people to rise against their own leaders in response to the US and Israeli unprovoked strikes upon their cities.
Iran has retaliated with its own waves of missiles and drones against Israel and US assets in the region. At least one person was reported wounded in northern Israel.
But the latest strikes against Iran were met warmly by Israel’s political elite.
“I want to remind us all: The people of Israel are strong. The IDF [Israeli army] and the Air Force are strong. The strongest power in the world stands with us,” opposition leader Yair Lapid wrote on social media, referring to the US.
“In moments like these we stand together – and we win together. There is no coalition and no opposition, only one people and one IDF, with all of us behind them.”
In a subsequent post written in Farsi, he echoed the prime minister’s calls for Iran to enact regime change from within, a longstanding Israeli policy.
‘It’s crazy’
Accounts of the relative calm in Israel stand in sharp contrast to previous escalations, when sources described panic and bulk buying before an anticipated Iranian response to the wave of strikes Israel launched against targets in Iran.
“People here are well trained,” Aida Touma-Suleiman, a Palestinian member of the Israeli parliament representing the left-wing Hadash-Ta’al faction, which is almost alone in opposing the strikes, said from her apartment near Haifa, where she had just returned from her shelter.
“This is what they’re saying all the time in the media: How well-trained and ready we are. It’s crazy. I don’t think any country in the world has experienced more war than we have, so this is what they mean by ‘trained’,” she said, referencing the wars on Iran, Lebanon, Yemen and Gaza that Israel has waged since the Hamas-led attack of October 2023.
As Touma-Suleiman spoke, she was interrupted by an alarm on her phone. “That’s not the alert. That’s a warning on my phone telling me there’s going to be an alert and then I’ll have to return to the shelter,” she explained, laughing drily. “You see what I mean about being well trained?”
Texting from Israel, Ahron Bregman, a senior teaching fellow at the Department for War Studies at King’s College London, described the relative calm and almost relief felt by many within the country that the uncertainty over war with Iran was at an end.
“Both Israel and the US are after the Iranian leadership. They hope to weaken it substantially, though I doubt they could topple it from the air,” he said, raising the possibility of a prolonged conflict.
However, how ready Israel might be for a lengthy war, and to what degree that might be Israel’s choice, was far from certain, Touma-Suleiman said.
“It will be the United States that determines how long the war will be. They’ll continue until they’ve achieved whatever it is they want,” she said.
“I don’t think Israel is ready for that. People are exhausted. The army is exhausted. I don’t know if they even have the reserves to manage a long war, and this is what Netanyahu is willing to gamble with, just so he can say to the public before elections: ‘Here is at least one victory.’”
