Each morning when my grandchildren arrive at their Jewish day school here in my hometown, a man is already standing outside the building.

He is the armed security guard posted in the parking lot at the entrance. Over time we have gotten to know him the way you get to know people who quietly become part of daily life. Parents nod to him as they pull into the drop off lane. Kids wave on their way through the doors.

We usually stop and chat with him for a moment, most often about the weather. Sometimes the kids, Max, Abby, and Cam, wave to him again before running back to the car. It is a small, ordinary ritual, the kind that happens outside schools across America every morning. But the reason Steve is standing there is never far from our minds.

Security has become part of ordinary Jewish life.

A generation ago the idea that Jewish day schools would need armed guards would have seemed extraordinary. Today it barely registers as unusual. It is simply part of daily life in Jewish communities across America.

This morning, the news out of Detroit made that reality feel even closer.

Early reports say that a man drove his car into the grounds of the largest Reform synagogue in the United States, located outside the city. According to early reports he exited the vehicle carrying a rifle before being shot by synagogue security guards. The incident is a grim reminder of the world Jewish communities increasingly inhabit.

Sadly, scenes like this have become increasingly familiar. Fortunately, someone like Steve was standing there too, making sure that children and families could leave the building safely.

For many Jews, threats are rarely treated as abstract rhetoric. History has taught us that the most dangerous words are often the ones people assume cannot possibly be meant literally. The guard outside the school, the barriers outside synagogues, the cameras outside community centers all reflect the same truth.

Israel exists, in part, because Jews learned that sometimes the only reliable security is the ability to defend themselves. For Jews in Israel, this instinct operates at the level of national survival rather than community security.

Which helps explain a remarkable fact about Israeli politics right now.

A country famous for political division has suddenly reached an extraordinary level of agreement. Roughly ninety percent of Israeli Jews support confronting the Iranian regime. Israelis have spent decades living with enemies who openly describe what they intend to do. When someone says they want to destroy you, you learn to take them seriously.

That level of consensus is rare in Israeli politics. For years Israel has been locked in one of the most bitter domestic struggles in its history. Hundreds of thousands protested Benjamin Netanyahu in the streets. Former military and intelligence leaders attacked his policies. Many Israelis blame him directly for failures that contributed to the catastrophe of October 7.

Concern about Iran is not new in Israeli strategic thinking. As early as the 1990s, Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin warned that Iran’s long term ambitions posed one of the most serious threats Israel would face in the future. Rabin believed Israel needed to reduce immediate conflicts in order to focus on what he saw as the larger strategic danger emerging in Tehran.

Yet on the question of Iran, the argument largely disappears. But that raises an obvious question:

If Israelis across the political spectrum see the Iranian regime as an existential threat, why does confronting it remain so controversial in the United States and much of the West?

The Revolution the West Misread

There is an important reason Israelis tend to take the Iranian regime’s rhetoric more seriously than many Western observers. They remember how badly the world misread the revolution that created it.

In the late 1970s large parts of the Western intelligentsia viewed the uprising against the Shah through the familiar lens of anti colonial politics. The revolution was widely interpreted as a popular movement against an authoritarian monarch backed by the United States. Many assumed that whatever replaced the Shah would be more democratic, more modern, and more humane.

History turned out differently.

The monarchy fell, but what emerged was not a liberal revolution. It was a theocratic regime that fused religious authority with revolutionary ideology and created a system of power built around clerical rule, militant security institutions, and explicit hostility toward Israel and the West.

Within a few years the Islamic Republic had established the Revolutionary Guards, exported its ideology abroad, and begun defining itself through confrontation with what it called the arrogant powers. The warning signs were visible from the beginning. They were simply not taken seriously.

That early misreading still echoes in Western debates today. Many observers continue to interpret the Islamic Republic primarily through the frameworks of nationalism, anti imperialism, or regional politics.

Israelis tend to see something different. They see a revolutionary regime whose ideology has remained remarkably consistent for forty five years, and they listen carefully when its leaders describe their goals.

Why Israelis Recognize the Pattern

The Islamic Republic of Iran is often described in Western debate as simply another authoritarian government. That description misses something essential. The regime that emerged from the 1979 revolution fused political power, militant theology, and hostility toward Israel into a single governing doctrine.

To understand why Israelis take these threats seriously, it also helps to understand the religious worldview that shapes Iran’s ruling clerics. The Islamic Republic is rooted in a revolutionary interpretation of Twelver Shiism, which teaches that a messianic figure known as the Mahdi, the twelfth Imam, will one day return to establish divine justice on earth.

Within the regime’s ideology, the struggle against Israel and the United States is often framed as more than politics. Iranian leaders routinely describe Israel as the “Little Satan” and the United States as the “Great Satan.” In this worldview the conflict is not merely geopolitical. It is part of a larger sacred struggle.

Some figures within the regime’s revolutionary tradition have suggested that global upheaval could hasten the arrival of that redemptive moment. Whether taken literally or used as rhetoric, the implication is unsettling: chaos and confrontation are not always seen as dangers to avoid, but events that might serve a larger divine purpose.

This is one reason Israel’s leaders view Iran’s nuclear ambitions with such alarm. Nuclear weapons in the hands of any authoritarian state are dangerous enough. Nuclear weapons in the hands of a revolutionary regime that sometimes interprets world events through an apocalyptic religious lens pose a different kind of risk.

For forty five years the leaders of the Islamic Republic have been explicit about their hostility toward Israel. Many Western observers dismiss such language as rhetorical theater. Israelis do not. Jewish history has taught them to pay attention when regimes openly declare their intentions. As the Israeli writer Yossi Klein Halevi has often observed, Israelis tend to judge their enemies by actions rather than intentions. A society that has repeatedly faced wars of survival learns to take hostile declarations seriously.

The regime in Tehran is not Nazi Germany, and the Holocaust remains historically unique. But historians of totalitarian movements often look for warning patterns rather than exact repetitions. Leaders who openly call for the destruction of their enemies. Revolutionary ideologies that justify violence in the name of redemption. Propaganda systems built around myth and grievance. Security institutions that operate above ordinary law.

Those patterns are visible in Iran today. Inside Iran the regime has repeatedly demonstrated a willingness to use extraordinary violence against its own citizens. Political prisoners were executed during the prison massacres of 1988. Protest movements have been met with mass arrests, torture, and lethal force. In the protest earlier this year, it is estimated that the regime killed tens of thousands of civilians in order to retain their control.

The Iranian people understand this reality better than anyone. In many ways they are the regime’s first victims. But the regime’s ambitions do not stop at its own borders. Through the Revolutionary Guard and its Quds Force, Tehran has spent decades building what analysts call a ring of fire around Israel via proxies in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and Yemen. Palestinian militant groups have received years of Iranian funding, training, and weapons.

This is not random instability. It is strategy. And it helps explain why Israelis view October 7 not as an isolated terrorist attack but as a warning.

When Israel’s defenses were briefly breached, the world saw what genocidal violence looks like. Entire families murdered in their homes. Civilians burned alive. Women raped. Children executed.

For Israelis the lesson was clear. When a regime repeatedly declares that it wants to destroy you and builds the military infrastructure to make that possible, the responsible response is not disbelief.

An Uncomfortable Moment for Americans

Americans experience the Iranian threat differently.

Iran’s leaders speak openly about Israel’s destruction, fund militant groups on Israel’s borders, and have spent decades building military pressure around the country. For Israelis the danger is immediate and existential.

For Americans the threat feels distant. The United States is not surrounded by Iranian proxies, and many Americans understandably view the current conflict as a war of choice rather than a war of survival.

After Iraq and Afghanistan, Americans have little appetite for another war in the Middle East. That perception did not begin with the current administration. For decades American policy toward Iran assumed that deterrence and containment were sufficient. Presidents from both parties believed the Islamic Republic could be managed rather than fundamentally confronted.

Donald Trump did not invent the Iranian problem, and his motivations are not always easy to decipher. His instincts are often impulsive and personal rather than doctrinal. But he did break with the assumption that the regime could simply be managed indefinitely.

At the same time, the current administration has done a poor job explaining the stakes of this conflict to the American public. Wars of this magnitude require seriousness and clarity. Congress and the country deserve a sober explanation of the objectives, the risks, and the potential costs.

Unfortunately, that seriousness has often been missing from the public presentation of this conflict. War is not a video game and it is not a Hollywood action sequence. Innocent people die, cities burn, and families live with the consequences. Watching official American social media accounts celebrate bombings with the tone of a computer game demeans the gravity of the moment and weakens the credibility of the case being made to the American people.

When leaders treat war lightly, it becomes harder for citizens to think clearly about the real stakes involved. Because the true test of any war is not the rhetoric surrounding it. The real test is much more personal.

One way to test the case for any war is to ask a very simple question:

Would you send your own children to fight a war like this?

Wars may begin with strategy, but they are fought by young men and women whose families live with the consequences. I sometimes find myself asking that question in a very personal way. I think about my own grandchildren.

Would I want Max, Abby, Cam, or Maddie to fight in a war like this one day?

No grandparent wants to imagine that future. But questions like that are also the reason the character of the enemy matters. When a regime openly declares its intention to destroy another country, arms militias dedicated to that goal, and builds the military infrastructure to carry it out, the moral calculus begins to change.

War is always terrible. The real question is whether failing to confront such a regime now will make the eventual cost far higher. That is the dilemma Israelis believe they are already facing. For them the debate is not theoretical. It is about whether the threats they hear every day will eventually have to be confronted by their own sons and daughters.

Which brings us back, in a quieter way, to Steve standing outside the school each morning.

For many Jews the question of security is no longer abstract. It is the guard at the door, the cameras on the building, the small rituals of protection that allow ordinary life to continue. It is the reason children like my grandchildren, Max, Abby, and Cam, can walk safely through those doors.

Israelis have long understood the tragic moral burden that comes with defending a small country in a dangerous neighborhood. As Golda Meir once put it, “We can forgive our enemies for killing our children. We cannot forgive them for forcing us to kill theirs.” It is a stark reminder that wars of survival are never celebrated in Israel. They are endured.

For forty five years the leaders of the Islamic Republic have been telling the world what they want. Israelis believe them. The lesson of the twentieth century was not simply “never again.”

It was something more demanding.

When regimes tell you who they are, believe them.

History has shown what happens when the world does not.

And sometimes the hardest question a society must answer is whether it is willing to confront those threats before the next generation is forced to.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)