[News] Israel continues to claim victimhood, even as it slaughters children in Iran

[Anti-Imperialist News]

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Israel continues to claim victimhood, even as it slaughters children in Iran
Ahmad Ibsais
June 13, 2025
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[image: GtVHBloXAAAaBnB.jpg]
Screenshot from a video circulating on social media showing a child who was
killed by Israeli attacks on Iran on June 12, 2025.

In the early hours of June 13, Israeli fighter jets struck deep into
Iranian territory, targeting military installations, apartment blocks, and
reportedly killing senior Iranian officials, including the commander of the
Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. The attacks came without warning. They
were neither reactive nor defensive. And yet, the Israeli government, true
to form, rushed to describe the assault as a “preemptive strike”—as if the
law bends itself to match the anxieties of a nuclear-armed state.

But language cannot disguise illegality. Israel’s framing collapses under
the weight of international law. Article 51 of the UN Charter authorizes
the use of force only in cases of self-defense if an armed attack occurs.
In exceptional cases, states have tried to invoke anticipatory
self-defense, citing an imminent and unavoidable threat. But even under
this controversial doctrine, the bar is extraordinarily high: the threat
must be “instant, overwhelming, and leaving no choice of means and no
moment for deliberation,” as the Caroline case—still the prevailing
standard—puts it. By Israel’s own admission, this was not a response to any
immediate Iranian attack. There was no missile barrage, no ground
incursion, no declaration of war. It was, at most, a preventive strike—an
illegal act of aggression dressed up in the language of legitimacy.

Israel’s defenders will claim that Iran’s nuclear program poses an
existential threat, even though U.S. intelligence agencies continue to
affirm that Iran is not currently developing a nuclear weapon. Others will
point to Iran’s regional influence or its support for proxy forces. But
none of this justifies bombing another sovereign country without an
imminent threat. There is a difference between “anxiety” and legality, and
Israel cannot continue to collapse the two every time it chooses to strike.

This attack was not isolated. It is the latest flare in a sustained pattern
of extraterritorial violence. In the past three years alone, Israel has
bombed Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, and now Iran—each time under the pretense of
defense, each time flattening civilian infrastructure, killing children,
and then turning to the world with outstretched hands, insisting it is the
aggrieved party. It is a state that moves as if it were always under siege
and always entitled to strike first, not in response to threat, but in
response to the possibility of parity.

Indeed, Israeli officials seem to understand what their actions might
provoke. In the hours following the attack on Tehran, Defense Minister
Israel Katz announced that Israel was bracing for a “significant attack
from the east.” A state truly acting in self-defense does not expect
retaliation from the victim of its own aggression. What this reveals is not
fear, but strategy. Israel struck Iran knowing it could provoke a
response—knowing it could then leverage that retaliation to justify further
escalation, knowing the cycle would deepen, and that the U.S. would once
again be called upon to “stand by its ally.”

This is how Israel manufactures permission. It imposes a logic of perpetual
exception onto itself, one in which its borders are elastic, its enemies
ever-expanding, and its right to violence absolute. And perhaps more
dangerous than the strikes themselves is Israel’s unshakable role in global
diplomacy as the one state whose aggression is never met with consequences.
It alone can claim existential peril while occupying, besieging, and
bombing at will. It alone can kill across borders and call it peacekeeping.
It alone can claim the mantle of victimhood while its weapons systems light
up the skies of half the region.

This is not just a military problem. It is a discursive one. For decades,
Israel has mastered the art of narrative manipulation, presenting itself as
the eternal target, even as it becomes the aggressor. This victimhood is
selective and theatrical. It centers fear while erasing context. When Hamas
fires rockets, the world is shown a nation under siege. When Israel drops
American-made bombs on hospitals and refugee camps, the world is told it is
defending itself. When its neighbors resist, they are described as
terrorists. When it kills their scientists and children, it is called
deterrence.

This asymmetry is not incidental, it is the cornerstone of Israel’s
political project. Zionism depends on the notion that any challenge to its
authority is existential, that any people with the capacity to resist must
be rendered defenseless. And so, Palestinian existence becomes a threat.
Iranian enrichment becomes a threat. Lebanese sovereignty becomes a threat.
And the response is always the same: preemptive, punitive, and
unaccountable.

But the consequences of this violence are not Israel’s alone. Already, the
United States has begun evacuating diplomatic personnel across the Middle
East, bracing for retaliation. Already, pundits in Washington are openly
debating whether Iran’s response will force American involvement. This is
not an Israeli war. It is a regional destabilization campaign backed by the
full financial, diplomatic, and military weight of the U.S. government. And
it is being carried out in our name.

The irony is that even Israeli security experts know these strikes will not
achieve their stated goals. Iran’s nuclear program
<https://mondoweiss.net/2025/06/how-israel-and-the-u-s-manufactured-a-fake-crisis-with-iran-that-could-lead-to-all-out-war/>is
vast, fortified, and distributed. Facilities like Natanz and Fordow are
buried under granite and reinforced concrete. Experts like Harrison Mann, a
former executive officer at the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency, have
admitted plainly that these strikes cannot destroy Iran’s capabilities. At
best, they may delay progress for a few months. At worst, they could
trigger the very outcome they claim to prevent: the collapse of diplomacy
and a sprint toward weaponization.

And yet, none of that seems to matter to Netanyahu. What matters is power,
optics, and longevity. He bombed Iran just as he bombed Gaza, just as he
plotted the assassination of Hezbollah’s Nasrallah last year, all while
facing increasing isolation, domestic unrest, and global condemnation. This
is the same man who stood before the UN as 149 countries voted to demand
Israel comply with international law, then responded by sending jets to
bomb Tehran. The message could not be clearer: Israel does not respond to
law. It responds to defiance with violence. It responds to condemnation
with escalation.

We are told, again and again, that Israel is defending itself. But the
truth is harder to stomach. Israel is defending its right to act with
impunity. It is defending a regional order in which its supremacy is never
questioned and its borders are wherever it decides they are. It is not fear
that drives these actions. It is entitlement.

And until the international community is willing to stop rewarding that
entitlement with silence, impunity, and weapons, the violence will
continue. The region will burn. And Israel, cloaked in the language of
self-defense, will remain what it has long become: a rogue state, posing as
a victim, at the center of an unfolding catastrophe.
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