Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said last week that Israel had launched its war against Iran “to roll back the Iranian threat to Israel’s very survival.”
For decades, he said, Iran’s leaders have “brazenly, openly” called for Israel’s destruction and backed up their rhetoric with a program to develop nuclear weapons.
Here’s a look at why Israelis have long viewed the prospect of a nuclear-armed Iran as an existential threat.
The language of destruction
Since the early 1960s, before Iran’s 1979 Islamic revolution, hostile rhetoric from some quarters has been on Israel’s radar. Israeli diplomats in Tehran sent back reports about anti-Israeli broadsheets distributed by the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, then a leader in the city of Qom, according to Israel’s state archives.
The verbal attacks against Israel have not abated. In October 2005, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, then Iran’s new conservative president, was quoted as saying that Israel should be “wiped off the map” during a speech to students at a program called, “The World Without Zionism.”
The White House said at the time that Mr. Ahmadinejad’s statement underlined U.S. concerns about Tehran’s nuclear ambitions.
Scholars debated for months whether Mr. Ahmadinejad’s words had been translated and interpreted correctly. Some argued that he was not actively threatening to destroy Israel but was merely quoting a prediction, or aspiration, of Ayatollah Khomeini, the supreme leader from 1979 to his death in 1989, that the power occupying Jerusalem “must vanish from the page of time.”
But Mr. Ahmadinejad appeared to stand by the translation of his remarks.
Ten years later, in 2015, Mr. Khomeini’s successor, Ali Khamenei, predicted that Israel would not exist by 2040. He reiterated that message the next year, writing on Twitter, “As I‘ve said before, if Muslims & Palestinians unite & all fight, the Zionist regime will not be in existence in 25 years.”
In 2017, anti-Israel protesters unveiled a digital countdown clock in Tehran’s Palestine Square, showing 8,411 days — almost 24 years — to what they said would be the “destruction of Israel.” The clock reportedly stopped working in 2021 amid widespread power cuts in the Iranian capital.
Just last month, in a televised speech after President Trump’s visit to the region, Mr. Khamenei described Israel as “the lethal cancerous tumor of the region,” adding, “It has to be uprooted, and it will be uprooted for certain.” The audience responded with a familiar chant: “Death to Israel! Death to Israel!”
Nuclear vulnerability
In territorial terms, Israel is only slightly larger than New Jersey. Half the country is sparsely populated desert. The majority of its population of 10 million people and most of its vital infrastructure and commercial life is concentrated along its narrow Mediterranean coastal plain.
So even though Israel is widely believed to possess its own nuclear arsenal, despite its policy of maintaining ambiguity on the issue, its population is vulnerable to attack and keenly aware that one Iranian nuclear bomb could have devastating consequences.
Iran, by contrast, covers a vast territory more than twice the size of Texas, with a population of more than 90 million.
The threat
Much of the world views Iran’s nuclear program with alarm, and experts say its stockpile of highly enriched uranium has grown fast.
The International Atomic Energy Agency, an arm of the United Nations, has estimated that Iran has more than 400 kilograms — about 900 pounds — of uranium enriched to a high level, that is short of the level needed for an atomic bomb, but well within reach. No other nation without nuclear weapons has such highly enriched uranium, the agency said.
A U.S. military assessment presented to Congress just days before the Israeli bombing campaign began said that if Iran wanted to raise that uranium to weapons grade, it could produce “enough for up to ten nuclear weapons in three weeks.”
If it generated that fuel, Iran would still need to build an atomic bomb, and possibly a missile capable of delivering it. Mr. Netanyahu has said it could be just a matter of months to develop a bomb.
How Iran’s capabilities stand after the Israeli bombardment is unclear. The attacks have damaged some of Iran’s key nuclear sites, but much of its nuclear program remains, at least for now, including an enrichment plant at Fordow that is buried deep under a mountain on an Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps base.
Mr. Netanyahu, Israel’s longest serving prime minister, has been warning of a nuclear Iran for decades. Critics have accused him in the past of fear mongering to remain in power.
In another indication of Iran’s hostile intentions, Israelis have also watched as Tehran funded and trained proxy forces such as Hezbollah, Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad across Israel’s northern and southern borders, and more distant enemies, such as the Houthis in Yemen.
“They created a ring of fire around Israel,” said Jeremy Issacharoff, a former vice director-general of Israel’s Foreign Ministry and a former Israeli ambassador to Germany.
“If you put together the rhetoric, the building of capabilities and the focused hostility toward Israel,” he said of the threat from Iran, “you take it seriously.”
Isabel Kershner, a Times correspondent in Jerusalem, has been reporting on Israeli and Palestinian affairs since 1990.
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