The following is a postscript by Peter Hallward, dated yesterday 17 June 2025, to his essay “From a Right of Self-Defence to the Fact of Conquest,” reproduced on Communis from Humanity Journal last 11 June. This postscript will appear on Humanity as well. It is published first on Communis with the author’s permission.
“Yes, Iran should comply fully with the International Atomic Energy Agency—and so should Israel and the US [..] If the matter of principle here concerns the risk of a state acquiring a lethal weapon that it might then use to force concessions from its enemies, how might this principle justify Israel more than Iran? Iran and the resistance movements it supports in Palestine, Lebanon and Yemen face opponents who already possess an inexhaustible supply of both nuclear and conventional weapons, opponents who have consistently demonstrated their readiness to kill their interlocutors rather than negotiate with them. If imitation remains the sincerest form of flattery, what do Israel and the US expect Iran to do, if not to learn from Israel’s example and try to acquire its own nuclear deterrent as quickly as possible?”
— Peter Hallward
As of 17 June 2025
Early on Friday 13 June 2025, a few hours after an overwhelming majority of the UN General Assembly voted to condemn Israel’s “use of starvation and the denial of aid as tactics of war,” the IDF abruptly launched a massive aerial assault on Iran, targeting its air defences, military leadership and nuclear facilities.
Like the endless wave of “targeted killings“ that has swept over Gaza, like the series of remotely-controlled bombings that decimated Hezbollah’s leadership in the autumn of 2024, this new assault was planned and executed less like a conventional act of war than as a coordinated exercise in mass assassination. On Saturday 14 June the IDF reported that in addition to six top military commanders and more than a dozen other key figures in Iran’s “security apparatus” (to say nothing of scores of civilians), it had also killed at least nine leading scientists it associated with the country’s nuclear programme. A number of other Iranian scientists have been assassinated in multiple operations dating back to 2010, including the head of Iran’s nuclear program Mohsen Fakhrizadeh in November 2020. By Tuesday 17 June (when I stopped trying to update this article) the list of IDF kills had grown to include at least eleven top generals along with some of their replacements; major general Ali Shadmani was killed on Tuesday only four days after he was appointed to be the new wartime commander of Iran’s armed forces.
Today it takes some effort to remember that there was once a time, prior to Obama’s normalisation of drone warfare and prior to that “Likudinisation of the world” which began after 9/11, when such murders were still considered a novel and scandalous crime. It’s much easier, by contrast, to see how assassination now figures as a routine and integral part of US-Israeli conceptions of “self-defence.”
Announcing his new assault Netanyahu presented it as “a targeted military operation to roll back the Iranian threat to Israel’s very survival.” His ambassador at the UN characterised it as “an act of national preservation.” Right on cue, Israel’s allies took up the familiar chorus. In a statement posted on the afternoon of 13 June French president Macron explained that “France has repeatedly condemned Iran’s ongoing nuclear program and has taken all appropriate diplomatic measures in response. In this context, France reaffirms Israel’s right to defend itself and ensure its security.” German chancellor Merz reaffirmed his government’s support for “Israel’s right to defend its existence and the security of its citizens […] The goal must remain that Iran does not develop nuclear weapons.” In a phone call with Netanyahu, prime minister Starmer was likewise “clear that Israel has a right to self-defence, and set out the UK’s grave concerns about Iran’s nuclear programme.”
After initially sending some mixed signals, the US administration also quickly reasserted its unconditional backing of Israel’s strike. “Israel advised us that they believe this action was necessary for its self-defence,” said Trump’s secretary of state Rubio, before reminding Iran that the US would of course do whatever it considered necessary to defend its own forces, partners and “interests” in the region. “Let me be clear: Iran should not target US interests or personnel.” Republican Speaker of the House Mike Johnson chimed in to say “Israel IS right—and has a right—to defend itself!,” while fellow Republican Senate Majority Leader John Thune declared that “the United States Senate stands ready to work with President Trump and with our allies in Israel to restore peace in the region and, first and foremost, to defend the American people from Iranian aggression, especially our troops and civilians serving overseas.”[1] After confessing that he was “not too much in the mood to negotiate” with Iran and issuing an instruction to “immediately evacuate Tehran,” by 17 June Trump himself appeared to have settled on a clear war aim: “unconditional surrender!”
Alongside the usual appeals to Israel’s expansive right of self-defence, the quasi-universal response that followed its 13 June strike on Iran, across the geo-political spectrum, was a call for immediate “de-escalation.” Yes, Israel had just hit more than a hundred targets in Iran and decapitated its senior military leadership in a single stroke, but in the face of this blatant act of aggression Iran was essentially instructed to take it on the chin. Now that Israel had unilaterally destroyed Iran’s own more limited means of self-defence it was time for everyone to calm down and adjust to the new facts on the ground. NATO secretary general Mark Rutte, for instance, announced that “the first order of the day” was immediately “to de-escalate,” and Israel’s allies have all echoed the point, on social media and in the UN, with striking consistency. Above all, Iran was ordered to avoid any sort of retaliation that might affect the local armed deployments of these allies, notably those of the US, the UK and France. (Given their track record, if countries like the US or the UK were themselves ever to be hit by a similar strike, Rutte’s readers may be entitled to ask whether they would likewise be expected to contain their response within diplomatic channels).
In addition to the sheer scale and impunity of the assault there are several noteworthy aspects to this latest and most ominous expansion of Israel’s practice of self-defence.
1.
First of all, Israel says its planes struck Iran in order to disrupt if not eliminate its capacity to develop nuclear weapons—but they did so right in the middle of ongoing international negotiations brokered by its main ally and designed precisely to prevent Iran from developing such weapons. As its secretary general Antonio Guterres immediately observed, the UN should be “particularly concerned by Israeli attacks on nuclear installations in Iran while talks between Iran and the United States on the status of Iran’s nuclear programme are under way.” These talks were going well enough that in late April even Israeli and American officials acknowledged that they were likely to end in an agreement that would make further military action unnecessary. Netanyahu has now kicked that unwelcome prospect into the long grass. Rather than waste further time on talks that might have resolved the conflict, observers impressed by the IDF’s deadly efficiency can instead admire the way they successfully managed to kill so many leading figures of Iran’s high command as they slept in their beds—clearly the targets hadn’t realised that when the US and its associates proposed peace negotiations they were actually inviting them to bare their necks.
It’s true, as American and Israeli officials were quick to point out, that on 12 June (i.e. a few hours before Israel launched its attack), the board of the UN’s nuclear watchdog accused Iran of breaching obligations incumbent upon signatories to the nuclear non-proliferation treaty (NPT). “Iran’s many failures to uphold its obligations since 2019 to provide the Agency with full and timely cooperation regarding undeclared nuclear material and activities at multiple undeclared locations in Iran,” judged the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), “constitutes non-compliance with its obligations under its Safeguards Agreement with the Agency.” Such an accusation further prepares the ground, as Reuters reported, for referring Iran to the UN Security Council.
Compliance with IAEA inspections and proliferation criteria is certainly a matter of vital international importance—which makes Israeli and US hypocrisy here all the more difficult to swallow.
In 2018 it was Trump’s administration and not Iran that torpedoed the non-proliferation deal that Obama had helped to broker back in 2015. On 25 March 2025 no less a person than the Trump-appointed US Director of National Intelligence (Tulsi Gabbard) reassured the Senate that in the opinion of the US intelligence community “Iran is not building a nuclear weapon and Supreme Leader Khamenei has not authorized the nuclear weapons program he suspended in 2003.” On 17 June further US intelligence sources again confirmed that Iran was “not actively pursuing a nuclear weapon” and that the country was “up to three years away from being able to produce and deliver one to a target of its choosing.”
Last week Iran was threatened with possible referral to the Security Council sometime in the future; by contrast Israel has already and repeatedly been referred to the Security Council on precisely this score, dating back at least as far as an SC resolution of 19 June 1981 in which, among other things, “the Council called upon Israel urgently to place all its nuclear facilities under International Atomic Energy Agency safeguards.” Last week the IAEA accused Iran of failing to cooperate fully with their inspections; by contrast, since Israel (unlike Iran) stubbornly refuses to sign the nuclear non-proliferation treaty it has also always refused to tolerate any sort of IAEA inspections of its weapons facilities. As Qatar’s ambassador reminded the UN in March 2025, for decades Israel has ignored any number of resolutions by the UN Security Council, the UN General Assembly, the IAEA, and the 1995 Review Conference of the NPT, all of which “have called on Israel to subject all its nuclear facilities to IAEA safeguards and to join the NPT as a non-nuclear state.”
Yes, Iran should comply fully with the IAEA—and so should Israel and the US.
2.
It’s likewise worth remembering that by “defensively” bombing Iran’s nuclear energy sites, Israel has chosen some of the most dangerous targets on earth. The UN’s IAEA had something to say about this too. Nuclear facilities “must never be attacked,” warned the head of the IAEA Rafael Grossi, while calling “on all parties to exercise maximum restraint to avoid further escalation. […] I reiterate that any military action that jeopardises the safety and security of nuclear facilities risks grave consequences for the people of Iran, the region, and beyond.”
3.
Third, it is again remarkable that Israel should try to justify this assault in terms of legitimate “self-defence” when it is again obvious that such aggression is in direct contravention of international law. In keeping with its standard practice, Israel argues that it had to attack Iran in order to prevent Iran from attacking Israel, but as law professor Marko Milanovic quickly demonstrated in another clarifying blogpost of 13 June, “there is unanimous agreement among international lawyers that [this] position is legally untenable. […] After all, Russia, the US and China have the ability to destroy each other within hours, but that kind of capability cannot automatically mean that they can start a war and call it self-defence. […] In short, this ‘preventive’ form of self-defence is simply not self-defence at all.”
It’s obviously absurd for anyone to suggest, as Milanovic notes, that “Iran was about to attack Israel with a nuclear weapon which it doesn’t even have.” The more pertinent argument is whether Iran’s support for the “axis of resistance” that includes Hezbollah, Hamas and the Houthis, combined with insults it has thrown at “the Zionist entity,” provide Israel with an adequate casus belli for pre-emptively attacking Iran. Ayatollah Ali Khamenei hasn’t made himself popular in Israel by insisting that “Palestine belongs to Palestinians, and the fate of Palestine should also be determined by the Palestinian people. The issue of Palestine is a criterion for judging how truthful those claiming to support democracy and human rights are in their claims.” It’s also true that some of Iran’s leaders have in the past described Israel as “a cancerous tumour” and called for an end to “the occupying Zionist régime of Jerusalem;”[2] Israeli politicians have likewise vowed to “wipe Hamas from the face of the Earth” and promised to “attack every location and every target of the Ayatollah regime.” Some might argue that in both cases such calls have been made primarily to domestic audiences for domestic political reasons; as far as inter-national relations are concerned, however, what matters is whether such calls can demonstrably be linked to clear and present government intentions that are themselves tied to clear and imminent government actions.
Israel has said Hamas should be wiped from the map, and it has duly proceeded to change the map of Gaza beyond all recognition. Israel’s current leaders have asserted their Biblical title to the West Bank and they are again altering its map accordingly. In the past Iran has indeed said comparably inflammatory things, but can anyone plausibly argue that it is actually and actively seeking a war of annihilation with Israel, rather than some sort of détente? Can anyone plausibly show that, even if Iran were one day to acquire a nuclear weapon, it is actually determined to make imminent use of it despite the certainty of US-Israeli retaliation? Is there any reason to doubt the judgment of someone like the former US secretary of state Colin Powell who, when asked to consider this possibility in 2015, told an associate that the “Iranians can’t use one if they finally make one. The boys in Tehran know Israel has 200, all targeted on Tehran, and we have thousands. As Akmdinijad [sic] [said], “What would we do with one, polish it?” […] We’ll blow up the only thing they care about—regime survival. Where, how would they even test one?”
On 14 June one of Milanovic’s readers (Yonatan Hizmi) succinctly summarised the opposing view. “Iran is not a neutral actor. It is a theocratic dictatorship that funds and arms terrorist groups, calls openly for the destruction of Israel, suppresses its own people violently, and pursues nuclear capabilities with hostile intent. These are not marginal details — they are central to the legitimacy and necessity of Israel’s defensive actions.” By this logic, faced with an adversary like Iran, surely Israel is entitled to attack and destroy its means of defence. The problem with this logic is that it also entitles Iran to do exactly the same thing to Israel. The current Israeli government can also be described as fundamentalist, it calls openly for the destruction of the Palestinians, it violently suppresses some of its own people, it murders its adversaries, it relies on state terror and it has vigorously pursued both conventional and nuclear capabilities not merely to deter or intimidate but with repeated and devastating aggressive effect. Partisans of Israel may still argue that since the country has long been engaged in a proxy war with Iran it can now choose to continue this war by more overtly belligerent means—but they clearly cannot ground this argument in terms of a right to self-defence.
If the matter of principle here concerns the risk of a state acquiring a lethal weapon that it might then use to force concessions from its enemies, how might this principle justify Israel more than Iran? Iran and the resistance movements it supports in Palestine, Lebanon and Yemen face opponents who already possess an inexhaustible supply of both nuclear and conventional weapons, opponents who have consistently demonstrated their readiness to kill their interlocutors rather than negotiate with them. If imitation remains the sincerest form of flattery, what do Israel and the US expect Iran to do, if not to learn from Israel’s example and try to acquire its own nuclear deterrent as quickly as possible? If the only options now available to Iran are to follow the lead of either North Korea or Libya, why should anyone expect it to prefer the latter to the former? If Israel can do whatever it likes to Iran thanks to the military support of the US and its allies, why shouldn’t Iran do all it can to build regional solidarity and renew its appeals to Russia and China for protection? If Israel and the US themselves pay only empty lip service to international law and refuse to cooperate with the International Court of Justice, why should they expect anyone else to abide by it?
4.
Fourth, it’s also worth remembering that Israel regularly refers to Iranian aggression, just as the US regularly condemns Iran for making “unprovoked attacks” on Israel, without drawing attention to the fact that while asserting its right of self-defence Israel has repeatedly and pre-emptively attacked Iran. Among other things Israel is widely believed to be responsible for a wave of attacks that killed Iranian scientists and soldiers in 2010-11, and for previous cyber-attacks on or bombings of Iranian nuclear facilities in November 2011, in October 2014, in June-July 2020, and in October 2024. On 1 April 2024 Israel took the unprecedented step of bombing Iran’s consulate in Damascus, killing the country’s leading general along with other Revolutionary Guard commanders; on 30 July 2024, when the political leader of Hamas paid an official state visit to Tehran, Israel assassinated him in his guesthouse.
5.
More importantly, it’s remarkable that Israel has attacked Iran in order to prevent it from accomplishing something that Israel itself accomplished long ago: the successful development of nuclear weapons. It’s perhaps even more remarkable that this blatant contradiction so often passes without remark or condemnation. Somehow or other, western governments and their media are generally happy to report that Israel has repeatedly bombed Iran, and clearly plans to keep bombing Iran for the foreseeable future, expressly in order to block them from acquiring a weapon that Israel itself (to say nothing of its allies) already possesses in plentiful supply.
Though rarely mentioned in Anglo-American circles, the actual international consensus on this point is not difficult to interpret. The UN General Assembly has repeatedly resolved, for instance in December 2022 by a vote of 149 to 6, that Israel must “renounce possession of nuclear weapons.” In that same December session the Assembly also overwhelmingly approved a motion calling for the “establishment of a nuclear-weapon-free zone in the region of the Middle East”: Iran and 174 other countries voted in favour, and only Israel (with the US and Singapore abstaining) voted against.
It would be a different story if Israel and the US were trying, alongside other UN partners, to make a principled case for keeping nuclear weapons out of the Middle East altogether. In reality, of course, Israel and the US are simply determined to preserve their monopoly ownership and control of them. Why should people living in the Middle East (or anywhere else) accept such a double standard? If Anglo-American media coverage is anything to go by the most effective way of answering this question is to ignore it.
6.
Perhaps it’s even more remarkable that Israel and its allies persist in their strategy of unilateral domination when it should be obvious even to them that in the longer term it cannot succeed. Israel seems to believe that, protected by its iron dome and its accompanying blanket of legal impunity, it is equipped and entitled to destroy its adversaries’ own means of defence now and forever after. As many observers have tried to point out, by acting this way Israel simply gives Iran every possible incentive for developing a bomb or for acquiring one from its allies. By telling every current and future Iranian military leader that it is willing and able to assassinate them and their families and associates, along with uncountably many of their allies in Palestine and Lebanon, Israel also seems determined to give them the strongest possible motives for using such a suicidal weapon should they ever manage to acquire one.
* * * * *
Peace on the basis of equality and respect would undeniably demand some short-term concessions from those currently profiting from Israel’s military supremacy and colonial projects, and for that reason such paths to peace are routinely dismissed as impracticable or impossible; the eventual alternative, however, may turn out to be just another variation on that mutually assured destruction that offers no future to anyone at all.
Such longer-term questions may not count for much so long as Netanyahu stands to make short-term gains at his old enemy’s expense. Over the past eighteen months Iran’s allies in Gaza, Lebanon, and Yemen have all been dramatically weakened if not eliminated altogether. The recent overthrow of Assad in Syria helps to clear a flight path for Israeli jets en route to Tehran. Needless to say most Iranians recognise that Netanyahu’s project is “not at all aligned with their values,” but after repeatedly cracking down on its own internal critics, after repressing the courageous mobilisation for women’s rights that began in September 2022, Iran’s government may struggle to rally its population to defend the régime; the country may be less isolated today than in previous years but as things stand it remains poorly positioned to coordinate a regional response to Israel’s assault. Most immediately, a spectacular strike on Iran is a helpful way of distracting attention from the ongoing slaughter back in what the UN describes as “the hungriest place on earth.” As a Guardian headline of 14 June summarised things, “Strikes on Iran ease pressure on Israel to end starvation in Gaza.” On 17 June alone some sixty Palestinians were killed and hundreds injured as they waited for food trucks in Khan Younis.
In addition to helping keep his government in power, for Netanyahu the prospect of another rousing “war of self-defence” promises to accomplish several things at once. A new call to arms may serve to deflect growing domestic and international criticism of the way Israel is systematically destroying Gaza and killing its inhabitants. It should further delay and compromise the summit on Palestine statehood that France and Saudi Arabia had been planning to hold on 17 June.[3] More importantly, perhaps, in addition to degrading Iran’s military capabilities, this new offensive also offers Israel and its backers ample and open-ended opportunity (in keeping with the geopolitical priorities that led the US and the UK to invade and re-structure Iraq in 2003) to damage all kinds of infrastructure and to weaken Iran as a regional economic and diplomatic rival.
Israel has decided that might makes right, and as things stand Iran’s means of defence are clearly no match for Israeli’s means of attack. Perhaps the IDF will now succeed in damaging the Islamic Republic as profoundly as it has damaged Hamas and Hezbollah. But who still believes that by assassinating Iran’s leaders today, Israel can lay the foundations for peaceful coexistence with them in the future? For all its might, who still believes that Israel is right?
Notes
[1] In some conservative US circles, however, support for this new phase of Israeli aggression seems noticeably less unanimous than in the past. “Anyone slobbering for the U.S. to become fully involved in the Israel/Iran war,” warned Republican Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene on X, “is not America First/MAGA. […] We are sick and tired of foreign wars. All of them. […] America First!!! That is how we Make America Great Again!!!!!” On the same platform, Republican Senator Rand Paul reminded Trump that “the American people overwhelming[ly] oppose our endless wars, and they voted that way when they voted for Donald Trump in 2024. I urge President Trump to stay the course, keep putting America first, and to not join in any war between other countries.” The Tucker Carlson Network took a similar line in its newsletter of 13 June. “If Israel wants to wage this war it has every right to do so. It is a sovereign country, and it can do as it pleases. But not with America’s backing.” War with Iran might either “fuel the next generation of terrorism” or lead to US troops being killed on behalf of a foreign power and “it goes without saying,” concludes the Network, “that neither of those possibilities would be beneficial for the United States. But there is another option: drop Israel. Let them fight their own wars.”
[2] As the London-based professor Abbas Edalat tried to explain in 2007, “Ahmadinejad’s own call for regime change in Israel—’the occupying Zionist’ regime of Jerusalem should cease to exist in the page of time”— has been mistranslated and distorted into the notorious phrase, ‘Israel should be wiped off the map’ by the western media. What is never reported is that Ayatollah Khamenei stated unequivocally immediately afterwards that ‘the Islamic Republic has never threatened and will never threaten any country.’”
[3] As the Guardian’s Emma Graham-Harrison notes, “the Franco-Saudi summit on a two-state solution raised expectations that major European nations were preparing to unilaterally recognise a Palestinian state. It alarmed Israel and its allies in the US so much that Washington issued a formal diplomatic warning against attending. […] For now, at least, that sense of diplomatic momentum that might halt the war in Gaza has gone. Even governments that have become more openly critical of Netanyahu’s war in Gaza will be reluctant to press for its end while missiles from Tehran are killing people in Tel Aviv.”
