It took 25 days, but in the early hours today, Israel responded to Iran’s salvo of missiles earlier this month. The operation, named “Days of Repentance,” was the most significant attack on Iran by any country since the 1980s. The Iranian regime’s years of waging a shadow war on Israel have finally brought the violence home, something the regime had repeatedly promised its people it would avoid.

The attacks were significant, and likely to cause considerable damage. At least four officers of the Iranian army, serving in missile-defense units, were killed. Nevertheless, Iran is relieved that its worst fears didn’t come true. A day before the attacks, Israel had used intermediaries to warn Iran about them, to make sure they wouldn’t cause massive casualties, Mostafa Najafi, a security expert in Tehran with connections to the regime’s elites, told me. He said the attacks weren’t “as vast and painful as Israeli officials had claimed” they would be. Israel did not target Iran’s infrastructure, such as its oil and gas refineries, nor did it assassinate political or military leaders.

Because of this, Iran has an opportunity to call it quits by giving a weak enough response that wouldn’t invite Israeli retaliation. Iran can stop the tit for tat, if it’s willing to resist the hard-line voices that want the country to escalate and even widen the conflict.

[Read: Iran is not ready for war with Israel]

Life in Tehran has quickly sprung back to normal. The city’s streets were clogged with traffic as usual on Saturday, the first day of the week in the country. Although all flights had initially been suspended, Tehran’s two main airports are back in operation.

“I believe Iran will respond to the attacks,” Afifeh Abedi, a security expert in Iran who is supportive of the government, told me. “But I doubt there would be escalation,” she said. “Countries of the region will stop this, and the U.S. will try to manage the situation.”

Abas Aslani of the Tehran-based Center for Middle East Strategic Studies agrees. “The evidence doesn’t currently point to a broader war,” he told me. “But this doesn’t necessarily mean that Iran won’t respond.”

I also spoke with two senior Iranian politicians, a conservative and a reformist, both of whom requested anonymity for fear of reprisals. They said that Iran wasn’t looking to broaden the conflict now. Iran and the U.S. had implicitly agreed to allow a limited Israeli strike followed by no significant Iranian response, the conservative figure, who is close to the parliamentary speaker, Mohammad-Bagher Ghalibaf, told me.  

The reformist politician, who has served in cabinet-level roles before, said that the diplomatic efforts of Iran’s minister of foreign affairs, Abbas Araghchi, helped ensure that the Israeli attacks were restricted to the military targets. Araghchi visited about a dozen nearby countries in the past few weeks, and he is believed to have asked them to put pressure on the U.S. and Israel to keep the attacks limited.

Across the region, there is broad opposition to widening the conflict. Saudi Arabia condemned the latest Israeli attacks on Iran as “a violation of its sovereignty and a violation of international laws and norms” and reiterated its “firm position in rejecting the continued escalation.” Similar condemnations have been issued by Turkey, Iraq, Lebanon, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Oman, Qatar, Kuwait, Jordan, Algeria, Mauritania, and, farther afield, Switzerland, Pakistan, Indonesia, and the Maldives. Jordan, which is a neighbor of Israel’s and signed a peace treaty with it 30 years ago on this very day, also confirmed that no Israeli strikers had been allowed to use Jordanian airspace. Trying to maintain neutrality, Jordan had previously helped Israel defend itself against Iranian drone and missile attacks.

[Read: Iran cannot be conciliated]

Iran knows that its future prosperity and success rely on economic development, which is actively hurt by its isolation from the international economy and its current war footing. Yesterday, the Paris-based Financial Action Task Force, a G7 initiative that helps enforce global anti-money-laundering rules, declared that it was going to keep Iran on its blacklist alongside only two other countries, North Korea and Myanmar. On Saturday, the U.S. dollar was selling for 680,000 Iranian rials, a historic high. These are not problems you can solve by fighting Israel.

Yesterday, in a rare candid moment, Ghalibaf acknowledged the stakes: “Sadly, our economy is not doing as well as our missiles. But it should.”

And yet, Iran is still a long way from taking the necessary steps to drop its anti-Israel campaign, overcome its international isolation, and focus on its domestic problems. Currently, any deviation from the anti-Israel orthodoxy leads to quick backlash by the hard-liners. Last month, the Assembly of Scholars and Instructors at the Qom Seminary, a reformist-leaning body of Shiite clerics, issued a statement that condemned Israel’s ongoing attacks on Lebanon while calling on it “to go back to its legal borders before the 1967 aggression” and urging the “formation of an independent Palestinian state.” This endorsement of the two-state solution incensed the hard-liners, some of whom called for the assembly to be shut down, but its position has been defended by the reformist press.

And some hard-liners are clamoring for all-out war with Israel.

“The Zionist regime is on decline, and Iran won’t let this attack go without a response,” Hossein Shariatmadari, the editor in chief of the hard-line daily Kayhan, told me. “Our response will be ever more decisive and crushing.”

Shariatmadari is known for outlandish pronouncements. Najafi, who tends to be more levelheaded, also believes that the Iranian-Israeli clashes are set to continue “in the medium term, especially after the U.S. elections.”

Some supporters of Israel also hope that the conflict will escalate. Mark Dubowitz, the CEO of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a Washington, D.C.–based think tank, said on X that Israel must now prepare for the “next phase” of its strategy: helping Iranians overthrow their regime, followed by “decisive decapitation strikes.”

As long as Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, is alive and in power, the country’s attitude toward Israel will not decisively shift. But he is 85, and, in preparation for an eventual succession struggle, the regime’s different factions are already squabbling over the country’s future direction. The hard-liners are not as politically powerful as they once were. They lost the presidency recently and are being marginalized in other institutions as well.

“The likes of Shariatmadari don’t matter to anyone,” the conservative politician told me. “Iran is set to change.”

If Iran wants to avoid a war, it can’t change fast enough.

Life returned to its normal rhythm within hours in Iran, but a sense of trepidation remains.

There is something ironic about the fact that, of all the countries in the Middle East, Iran is the one that now finds itself on the brink of war with Israel. Iran is not one of the 22 Arab states party to the decades-long Arab-Israeli conflict. Its population, unlike those of many Arab countries, harbors little anti-Israel sentiment. During the past year, mass rallies in support of the Palestinians have taken place in cities all over the world: Baghdad, Sanaa, New York, and Madrid, to name only a few. Nothing like this has happened at scale in Tehran—when Iranians really protest en masse, they tend to do so against their own regime and its obsession with Israel.

Alas, wars are waged by governments, not peoples. And because the regime ruling Iran has long made hostility toward Israel central to its identity, Iran now faces a direct confrontation with the Jewish state, regardless of whether most Iranians want such a war. For the country’s opposition, the prospect has occasioned a divide—between those who fear that the next round of fighting will be a costly setback to their efforts and those who cautiously hope that it will shake something loose.

In the first camp are many Iranian dissidents, both inside and outside the country, who loudly protested Iran’s missile attacks on Israel in April and October. Now they are also opposed to an Israeli counterattack on Iran: All-out war between the two countries, these activists say, would be a disaster in both humanitarian and political terms, making life worse for ordinary Iranians without weakening the Islamic Republic.

Narges Mohammadi, the Nobel Peace Prize laureate and human-rights advocate imprisoned in Tehran, and Atena Daemi, an activist who recently fled Iran after years in prison, have issued statements decrying a potential war. Mohammad Habibi, the spokesperson for Iran’s teachers’ union, wrote on X that he opposed “any war”; he added that he considered Hezbollah and Hamas terrorists, and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu a war criminal. Sadegh Zibakalam, an outspoken political-science professor at the University of Tehran, has repeatedly criticized the Iranian regime’s declared goal of destroying Israel.

The position of this part of the Iranian opposition is friendly neither to Iranian aggression against Israel nor to Israeli strikes on Iran, on the grounds that such hostilities are most likely to preserve the power of the current regime. An Israeli attack on the Iranian oil industry would just collapse the country’s infrastructure and immiserate its people, Hossein Yazdi, a social-democratic activist and former political prisoner in Tehran, told me, and attacking the country’s nuclear sites could bring about a humanitarian disaster. Politically, Yazdi said, an Iran-Israel war would have terrible consequences. “Iranians are the least Islamist people in this region,” Yazdi says. “They are mostly secular and friendly to the West. But a war can make fanatics out of people and give a new lease on life to the Islamic Republic.”

[Read: Iran is not ready for war with Israel]

Many of the regime’s most vociferous opponents in exile think along similar lines. Hamed Esmaeilion, a 47-year-old novelist based in Toronto, has emerged as a major voice for Iran’s secular democratic opposition in recent years. His wife and 9-year-old daughter were among the passengers on PS752, the Ukrainian airliner downed by the Iranian regime under suspicious circumstances in January 2020. Esmaeilion became renowned for his advocacy on behalf of those victims’ families. He published a statement on October 5, a few days after Iran’s latest missile attacks on Israel, calling for opposition both to the Iranian regime and to the “fundamentalist government of Israel, which ignores international treaties and kills many civilians.”

By spelling this out, Esmaeilion was speaking to another group of Iranians who oppose their government: those who favor a war with Israel, or at least regard it as a potentially useful lever for toppling the regime. I encountered such sentiments among many Iranians I talked with—and sometimes in surprising quarters. A mid-level manager at a government ministry told me, “We are in limbo now. If Israel attacks, things can be done with the regime once and for all.” I spoke with some Iranians who said they just hoped that an Israeli attack would hurt the regime leaders and not ordinary people, and some who fantasized that a military confrontation with Israel would lead to a mass uprising that would finally end the regime.

Some in this camp, though not all, support the leadership aspirations of Reza Pahlavi, who was Iran’s crown prince before his father was overthrown in the 1979 revolution. Pahlavi and his supporters have drawn close to Donald Trump and other elements of the international right. In April 2023, the Iranian royal visited Israel and met with Netanyahu. Some of Pahlavi’s supporters work for hawkish Washington, D.C., outfits, such as the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, and Pahlavi spoke at the National Conservatism conference, held in July in Washington. Last month, he was a keynote speaker at the Israeli American Council’s annual summit in D.C., alongside Trump.

Pahlavi has long vocally opposed military attacks on Iran. But in the days after Iran’s October 1 missile barrage against Israel, when an Israeli retaliation seemed imminent, Pahlavi published a video message that some took to be an implicit invitation. He called on the people of the region not to fear chaos if Iran’s regime should collapse. “We will not allow a power vacuum,” he promised, pledging that “patriotic Iranians” would replace the regime.

In the days that followed, Pahlavi clarified that he still opposed war. “We have seen diplomacy fail, and war is not a solution,” he told Fox News on October 16. The West must “invest in the Iranian people,” Pahlavi added, meaning that it should “abandon the policy of appeasement” and exert “maximum pressure on the regime” while also giving “maximum support” to the Iranian people to organize themselves.

Cameron Khansarinia is a well-known Pahlavi supporter and the vice president of a Washington-based Iranian American organization that backs the Iranian royal. I asked Khansarinia whether he supported an Israeli attack on Iran. He said that he disagreed with the “framing of the question.” He told me that he hoped “no innocent Iranians are injured in Israel’s inevitable retaliation,” and that he supported Pahlavi’s policy of “maximum pressure” alongside “maximum support” for Iranians. Khansarinia pointed to Israel’s killing of Hamas and Hezbollah leaders in recent weeks as an effective means of putting pressure on the Iranian regime while supporting the people.

[Read: War is coming. Will our next president be ready?]

I even spoke with an Iranian socialist activist in Washington who has come to support both Pahlavi and Israel’s war (a very unusual stance within his corner of the opposition): Farhad Moradi, who arrived in the United States as a refugee a few years ago, told me that Israel should avoid attacking Iran’s nuclear sites or port infrastructure, because doing so wouldn’t help ordinary Iranians or weaken the regime politically. But he did support Israel hitting military sites or assassinating regime figures.

Esmaeilion, the novelist and spokesperson for the passengers killed on the Ukraine-bound flight, worries that those who embrace the possibility of war with Israel do so based on delusions about what both war and regime change really entail. Iranians need a “revolution” to bring down their regime, he said in his statement—not a foreign conflict. And doing battle with Israel could be terribly costly. “The current Israeli government has shown that it’s not really committed to international law,” he told me. “Many innocent people have died. If a broad war breaks out between Iran and Israel, many more innocents will die. The regime will also use people as human shields and cannon fodder.”

Esmaeilion is of the generation that can vividly remember the Iran-Iraq War of 1980–88. Many of his novels are set during that conflict, which killed as many as half a million people. The talk of potential Israeli attacks on Iranian infrastructure recalls very specific traumas. “My father worked at the Kermanshah refinery when it was bombed on July 24, 1986,” he said. “He lost six of his colleagues there. Three days later, my uncle was killed when Iraq bombed the aluminum works in Arak. Many of my relatives died at the front in that war. What remained was pain and suffering for many years to follow. War can be terrible.”

Esmaeilion agrees with Hossein Yazdi, the activist in Tehran, that a war with Israel risks strengthening the regime. The opposition is fractious, and the Islamic Republic could use war as a pretext to clamp down on fragile networks that need shoring up: “We must organize our forces, bring about strikes and uprisings and finish this nightmare of a regime once and for all,” he told me. “A war will hurt this process.”

[Read: The collapse of the Khamenei doctrine]

The divisions within the Iranian opposition are deep and often rancorous. Yazdi told me that he found Pahlavi’s intervention ominous. “It’s very scary for the prime minister of Israel to meet with a fugitive Iranian prince,” he told me. Many Iranians will even back the current regime if the alternative is an Israeli-backed restoration of the fallen monarchy, he said. Last year, Esmaeilion joined an anti-regime coalition that included Pahlavi and others, including the U.S.-based women’s-rights activist Masih Alinejad—but the effort collapsed in less than a month over disagreements about Iran’s future.

In the end, debates among Iranian dissidents over the desirability of an Israeli attack matter only so much. The Iranian opposition does not get to decide what Israel will do. It is watching events, not shaping them—and until and unless it gets organized, that will be true within Iran as well.

The ex-soldier created "completely fake" documents to get the Iranians to trust him, the court heard.

A year of conflict in the Middle East has destroyed the foreign-policy approach of Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. His strategy was always implausible, but its collapse has led Iran to the brink of its first international war since 1988.

What I like to call the Khamenei Doctrine—those close to him have variously dubbed it “strategic patience” or, more to the point, “no peace, no war”—rests on a duality that has remained constant through Khamenei’s 35 years in power. Iran refuses any public dealings with Israel, clamoring instead for the Jewish state’s destruction and surrounding it with Arab militias that seek to destroy it. Iranian officials deny the Holocaust and chant “Death to America” at events and ceremonies. And yet, at no point does Khamenei intend to get into a direct conflict with Israel or the United States—because he knows very well that such a confrontation could be fatal for his regime.

So what is the point of holding this contradictory posture? Khamenei is a true fanatic. He forged his beliefs as a revolutionary in the 1960s, when he read Sayyid Qutb and Mao Zedong. But he isn’t blind or stupid. Rather, he is patient and pragmatic. He appears to have accepted that his dream of destroying Israel won’t be realized in his lifetime, but he remains ideologically committed to it as a long-term goal for Islamists across generations. He has declared that Israel won’t exist in 2040—a year he will see only if he lives to be more than 100. But he seeks to advance the cause to the extent he can, building the strength of Israel’s enemies, and then handing off the task to his successors.

Khamenei knows that his extreme worldview is not popular among most Iranians, or even among much of the country’s ruling elite. And so he adjusts the institutional balance among the Islamic Republic’s various political factions, using the competition among them to gain breathing space when necessary, but never wavering from his objectives.

He makes international adjustments with similar strategic caution. He pursued the 2015 nuclear deal with the United States and other world powers to alleviate the diplomatic and economic pressure on Iran. But during the negotiations, Iran made clear that its support for regional militias, and its anti-Israeli and anti-American orientation, was nonnegotiable. Iran would talk only about its nuclear program, despite the concerns that Western negotiators expressed over Iran’s “regional behavior.” Then President Donald Trump tore up the deal in 2018 and brought a policy of maximum pressure to bear on the Islamic Republic. Khamenei delivered his response in a sermon in 2019: “There will be no war, and we won’t negotiate.” He was referring to the United States, but the phrase was an apt summary of his approach to Israel as well.

From the point of view of many Iranians, Khamenei’s policies have been disastrous, bringing international isolation, economic ruin, and political repression. But for his own purposes, before October 7, 2023, the leader might have seen his policy as a great success.

When Khamenei ascended to power in 1989, most of the region’s Arab states had long since given up the fight against Israel; Khamenei picked up the anti-Zionist mantle and made Iran the sole supplier for anti-Israeli militias across the region. He built a so-called Axis of Resistance, uniting armed groups in Palestine, Lebanon, Yemen, Syria, and Iraq to shoot at Israel, call for its destruction, and occasionally skirmish with U.S. forces in the region. All of this was a win for Islamist internationalism. In the service of that agenda, Khamenei has shown little compunction about sacrificing Iran’s potential as a country for its nearly 90 million inhabitants.

But the Khamenei Doctrine was always untenable, and the events of the past year have shown why. The strategy—build up anti-Israeli forces incrementally, without getting into a direct confrontation—required a certain adroitness. At times, Khamenei has had to restrain the Axis forces with calls for prudence. And the Axis is itself a problem—unwieldy, sometimes insubordinate, and unpopular at home and abroad.

[Read: Iran’s proxies are out of control]

Most of the Axis militias are Shiite (Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad are the exceptions), and some have participated in the region’s sectarian civil wars, which claimed thousands of Sunni Muslim victims—Iraqis, Syrians, and Palestinians. For this reason, not even anti-Israeli populations in the region are unreservedly enthusiastic about the Axis. Within Iran, meanwhile, Khamenei has a hard time selling his animus against Israel to a populace that largely does not share it, and that holds him to account for problems closer to home. When Iranians rise up against their regime—as they did in 2009, 2017, 2019, and 2022—they often use slogans that signal their displeasure with Iran’s support for the Axis. Probably the best-known is “Neither Gaza, nor Lebanon, I give my life to Iran!”

The October 7 attack on Israel and the war in Gaza that followed at first looked like a gift to Khamenei. The conflict would foreclose the possibility of a Saudi rapprochement with Israel and disrupt what Israelis had taken to calling their “growing circle of peace” with Arab countries (Khamenei has long sought to prevent such normalization). But a year later, Khamenei’s doctrine has never looked weaker. Iran and its Axis claim to be the defenders of the Palestinian cause—but they have so far avoided directly intervening in a war that they themselves call “genocide.” At the beginning of the conflict, Iranian hard-liners expressed anger that Tehran was not joining the fight. “Children die under rubble while our missiles rot in their silos,” tweeted a well-known anchor on Iranian state television. Hezbollah, some regional analysts grumbled, was being held back by Iranians consumed by their own narrow interests.

In April, Israel attacked an Iranian consular building in Damascus, and Iran finally did what it had not done in its entire history: It fired missiles and drones directly at Israel. Far from being deterred, Benjamin Netanyahu’s government has since only upped the pressure on the Islamic Republic, killing Iranian and Axis commanders wherever it can and intensifying the war in Lebanon. It is pummeling Hezbollah with special intensity, killing dozens of its top commanders, including its leader, Hassan Nasrallah, and, most probably, his would-be successor, Hashem Safieddine. After much reticence, Khamenei launched another round of missile attacks on October 1. And Israel has vowed to retaliate.

[Read: Iran is not ready for war with Israel]

Khamenei has thus brought his country to the brink of a war that he has long sought to simultaneously suggest and avoid. Mostafa Najafi, a Tehran-based security expert who supported the Iranian attacks in April and October, assured me that Iran was prepared for whatever force Israel might bring to bear. The country has readied itself with “all of its defense capabilities” on alert, he said; it has invested in domestic air defenses and acquired Russian-made S300 surface-to-air missile systems. Still, Najafi conceded that Iran’s size will make it difficult to defend. Other experts I spoke with took a bleaker view. “It is not clear how Tehran can climb out of this situation,” Mojtaba Dehghani, an Iranian expert with a close understanding of the regime elites, told me. “They are not ready for this war.”

Many in the Iranian opposition argue that Tehran should stop stoking hostilities with Israel and the United States and prioritize economic development instead. The stipulation is found in most opposition political platforms, including those of leftist groups, many of which support a two-state solution for Israel and Palestine. Dehghani agrees with the demand and thinks that some in the regime leadership might concur. But he says that such a big “paradigm shift” will be difficult to pull off with Khamenei still in power. The leader is 85, and no one really knows who will succeed him, or whether that succession will bring in new outlooks and commitments; such uncertainty complicates planning for anything beyond the visible horizon.

In the meantime, Khamenei holds his nation hostage to a doctrine that courts the conflict it also seeks to avoid. Iran needs to make a historic shift if it is to avert a disastrous war that few Iranians want—and begin building a better future instead.

Social media users express a mixture of pride, uncertainty and fear after Iran's strike on Israel.

Iran’s attack on Israel yesterday evoked a sense of déjà vu. On April 13, too, Iran targeted Israel with hundreds of missiles and drones—at that time marking a first-ever in the history of the two countries. The latest strikes were notably similar: more show than effect, resulting in few casualties (April’s injured only a young Arab Israeli girl, and today’s killed a Palestinian worker in Jericho, West Bank). No Israeli civilians were hurt in either attack, although it’s likely that Iran’s use of more sophisticated missiles brought about greater damage this time.

Now, as then, my sources suggest that Iran has no appetite for getting into a war and hopes for this to be the end of hostilities. And yet, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei decided to take the risk. In the past month, Iran has had to watch while Israel made quick work of destroying Hezbollah’s command structure and killed its leader, Hassan Nasrallah. Tehran was fast losing face, and Khamenei apparently made up his mind to shore up his anti-Israel credibility. History will show how consequential this decision was.

Shortly after the missile barrage, Benjamin Netanyahu publicly announced that Iran had made a “big mistake” and would “pay for it.” Israel’s dedicated X account echoed this threat in Persian. The former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett called on Netanyahu to attack Iran’s nuclear and energy sites, claiming that this could lead Iranians to rise up and bring down their regime at last. Israel has had no better chance in half a century to change the region fundamentally, Bennett said.

[Read: Iranians don’t want a war with Israel]

This is a terrifying moment for Iran. Khamenei has long pursued what he calls a “no peace, no war” strategy: Iran supports regional militias opposed to Western interests and the Jewish state but avoids actually getting into a war. The approach was always untenable. But Iran is not ready for an all-out war: Its economically battered society does not share its leaders’ animus toward Israel, and its military capabilities don’t even begin to match Israel’s sophisticated arsenal. Iran lacks significant air-defense capabilities on its own, and Russia has not leapt to complement them.

“We don’t have a fucking air force,” a source in Tehran close to the Iranian military told me, under condition of anonymity for fear of reprisals. Of the attack on Israel, he said,  “I don’t know what they are thinking.”

Iran’s diplomats have said that the attacks were an exercise of self-defense under Article 51 of the United Nations Charter. Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said that Iran targeted “solely military and security sites” that Israel was using to attack Gaza and Lebanon (an odd fit for ‘self-defense’ claims since neither of these are Iranian territory). He added that Iran had waited for two months “to give space for a cease-fire in Gaza,” and that it now deemed the matter “concluded.” Other regime figures have contributed more bluster. “We could have turned Tel Aviv and Haifa to rubble, but we didn’t,” said Ahmad Vahidi, the former head of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ Quds Force. “If Israel makes a mistake, we might change our decision and turn Tel Aviv into rubble overnight.”

For Israel, a war is worth avoiding for strategic reasons. “Israel has no choice but to retaliate,” Yonatan Touval, a senior policy analyst at Mitvim, a Tel Aviv–based liberal-leaning foreign-policy think tank, told me. But the Axis of Resistance is on its back foot, and for this reason, he said, Israel has a stake in not escalating: “Israel should ensure that, whatever it does, it does not reinforce an alliance that is remarkably, and against all odds, in tatters.”

In the past couple of weeks, Israel’s blitzkrieg actions against Hezbollah have neutralized Iran’s most potent threat—that of Hamas and Hezbollah missiles pointing at Israel from two directions. Some observers have compared the moment to 1967, when Israel decisively defeated Jordan, Syria, and Egypt in the Six-Day War. Israel seemingly holds all the cards; it could still choose to “take the win,” as President Joe Biden urged Netanyahu to do back in April, and carve a new place for itself in the region through diplomacy. In one sign of the possibility for goodwill, in October as in April, Arab states such as Jordan intercepted some of the Iranian missiles aimed at Israel.

But Biden has remained strangely silent for the past two days, and one wonders whom Netanyahu is listening to now.