Tehran’s Longest War |
Iran has waged war on Jewish communities for thirty years. The response still isn’t working.
Three weeks into the war with Iran, a second front has opened that receives far less attention than the missiles and the oil shock—but may prove more consequential for the security of Western democracies. On March 12, a man drove an explosives-laden truck into Temple Israel in suburban Detroit, one of the largest Reform synagogues in the United States, while 140 children were in its preschool. Between March 9 and 16, a previously unknown group bombed and firebombed synagogues across Belgium, the Netherlands, and Greece. Three Toronto synagogues were hit by gunfire in a single week. Two Israeli Americans speaking Hebrew were beaten in broad daylight in San Jose. This morning, arsonists in London set fire to four Jewish community ambulances in Golders Green. Belgium has stationed soldiers outside Jewish schools. Italian troops are patrolling Rome’s Jewish quarter. These are all facts from March 2026.
I study how states destroy minority communities. The mechanisms differ, but the sequence is stable: the community is redefined as an agent of a foreign enemy; surveillance and harassment become routine; violence is outsourced to actors who provide deniability; each escalation is met with statements of concern and insufficient action, which the perpetrators correctly interpret as permission to continue. The Islamic Republic of Iran has been running this sequence against Jewish communities worldwide for more than thirty years. The war did not create the campaign. It accelerated it. And the Western response—designations, expulsions, joint statements—has not yet caught up with what is, by any honest assessment, a state-directed war against a civilian population conducted across five continents.
Take the doctrine. In 1994, a truck bomb destroyed the AMIA Jewish community center in Buenos Aires, killing 85 people. Argentine prosecutor Alberto Nisman spent years building a case that the bombing was approved at the highest levels of the Iranian government and carried out by Hizballah. Nisman was found dead in his apartment in 2015, the night before he was to present his findings to Congress. In April 2024, Argentina’s Court of Cassation ruled that Iran planned the attack. The man Nisman identified as having approved the operation was Ahmad Vahidi, then the founding commander of the IRGC’s Quds Force. Vahidi is wanted by Interpol. He subsequently served as Iran’s defense minister and interior minister, and is sanctioned by both the United States and the European Union. On March 1, 2026, he was appointed commander-in-chief of the IRGC. Iran denies everything. It always does. But the operational record is not a matter of allegation. It is a matter of court rulings, intelligence assessments, and bodies.
In October 2025, the Mossad publicly identified the Quds Force commander running the current campaign: Sardar Ammar, head of Unit 11,000, roughly 11,000 operatives deployed against Jewish and Israeli targets across Europe, North America, and Australia. The Mossad’s term for how the network operates was “terror without Iranian fingerprints.” The Australian case showed exactly what that means. After arsonists hit a kosher restaurant in Sydney and firebombed a Melbourne synagogue before dawn in late 2024, ASIO traced the funding directly to the IRGC, which had used local organized crime figures as cut-outs. The people who struck the match may not have known who was paying them. Australia expelled Iran’s ambassador in August 2025—the first such expulsion since the Second World War. Similar operations were disrupted in Athens, Berlin, and London. In July 2025, fourteen governments signed a joint statement condemning Iran’s assassination, kidnapping, and harassment plots. In January 2026, the EU designated the IRGC a terrorist organization. Iran called the decision “illogical.” All of this happened before February 28.
Then the war started, and a new element appeared. Between March 9 and 16, a group calling itself Harakat Ashab al-Yamin al-Islamia—“The Islamic Movement of the Companions of the Right”—claimed five attacks across Europe: a synagogue bombing in Liège, an attack in Greece, an arson at a Rotterdam synagogue, an explosion at a Jewish school in Amsterdam, and a firebombing at an Amsterdam office tower. The group had no history, no social media presence, no prior statements. Yet its attack videos circulated within hours on Hizballah and IRGC Telegram channels, edited and captioned, as though the infrastructure was waiting for the content. Israel’s Diaspora Ministry assessed it as an Iranian front. The Dutch government says it is investigating. Anyone who has followed Iranian proxy doctrine recognizes the pattern: organizations that exist only long enough to claim an attack before dissolving, leaving nothing to designate, nothing to sanction, and just enough ambiguity for governments to avoid acting decisively. Belgium’s response—fifty soldiers guarding twenty synagogues and four Jewish schools—tells you how seriously European governments take the threat. The absence of anything beyond defensive deployments tells you how far behind the response remains.
The Michigan attack exposes something the policy debate has not adequately confronted. Ayman Mohamad Ghazali, 41, a naturalized American citizen born in Lebanon, sat in the parking lot of Temple Israel for two hours before he drove through the entrance. His truck carried gasoline and commercial-grade fireworks. A week earlier, an Israeli airstrike had killed two of his brothers in Lebanon; the Israeli military said one was a Hizballah commander. His ex-wife called police that morning to say he was “not stable” and had told her to take care of his children. The FBI has not formally linked Ghazali to any terrorist organization. But the analytical question is not whether he received orders from Tehran. It is whether a three-decade campaign that treats Jewish civilian life as a legitimate military target—a campaign now commanded by a man wanted for bombing a Jewish community center—has created the ideological architecture in which a grieving man with Hizballah connections concludes that a synagogue full of children is an appropriate target for his rage. The same question applies to the May 2025 shooting at the Capital Jewish Museum in Washington, where Elias Rodriguez killed two Israeli embassy staffers and posted a manifesto calling armed action against Jewish targets “the only sane thing to do.” Rodriguez had no Iranian handler. He did not need one. The logic was already in the air.
The ADL has documented twenty antisemitic terrorist plots or attacks in the United States since 2020; thirteen occurred in just the last twenty months. The Secure Community Network reports a 95 percent increase in violent online threats against the Jewish community in the war’s first six days. American Jewish communities now spend more than $760 million a year on security. Western intelligence has been effective at detection—the Mossad exposed Unit 11,000, ASIO traced the Melbourne funding chain, British police arrested the London surveillance operatives. The political response has also escalated: fourteen governments issued a joint condemnation, the EU designated the IRGC, Australia expelled an ambassador. And since all of that happened, the attacks have accelerated. The gap is not in intelligence or in language. It is in operational disruption—the sustained, cross-border campaign needed to dismantle the infrastructure that connects an IRGC officer in Tehran to a crime syndicate in Melbourne to a disposable front organization in Liège. The IRGC runs its campaign through the seams of the Western system: criminal networks, encrypted channels, organizations that exist for a week. A counterterrorism framework designed for al-Qaeda’s fixed hierarchy has not caught up with an adversary that wages war through petty criminals and phantom brands.
Concretely, this means several things. Western governments need to treat the targeting of Jewish communities with the same operational urgency they apply to threats against government facilities—not as a hate crime problem to be managed by local police, but as a front in a state-directed campaign requiring coordinated intelligence, law enforcement, and financial disruption across jurisdictions. The criminal ecosystems the IRGC exploits—drug networks, money laundering operations, organized crime syndicates—must be targeted as counterterrorism infrastructure, not handled as separate criminal matters. The Telegram ecosystems that serve as both command channels and propaganda platforms for operations like Ashab al-Yamin require real-time monitoring and disruption capacity. And the fourteen governments that signed the July 2025 statement need to move from declaratory policy to operational tempo—the day-after-day, cross-border disruption that would make Iran’s proxy network as costly to maintain as it is to endure.
No senior Iranian official was ever held to account for the AMIA bombing. That was 1994. The man accused of approving it now commands the IRGC. The impunity is not incidental to what has followed—it is the foundation of it. Every firebombed synagogue, every surveillance operation outside a Jewish school, every disposable front organization that appears and vanishes in a week, every truck driven into a house of worship where children are studying—all of it rests on a single calculation: that the cost to Iran of targeting Jewish civilians will never exceed the benefit. Thirty-two years of evidence have not yet proven that calculation wrong. That is where we are this morning, in Golders Green, where the ambulances are still smoldering.