Since June 13th, hundreds of missiles have streaked across Middle Eastern skies while diplomatic phones ring unanswered. Israel’s unprecedented assault on Iran’s nuclear facilities killed 78 people and eliminated senior military commanders. Iran retaliated with hundreds of ballistic missiles targeting Israeli cities and killing at least two dozen, thus far.

This escalation represents the inevitable conclusion of a 46-year cold war that began not with ancient hatreds, but with a revolution that fundamentally challenged the regional order. What we’re witnessing is the collision of two incompatible forces: the Iranian resistance to American hegemony and Israel’s dependence on it.

To understand why Iran and Israel are finally exchanging direct strikes, you must know how they became enemies. Most analyses start with 1979 and treat their hostility as inevitable—ancient religious antagonisms finally erupting. That interpretation misses the crucial point entirely.

They weren’t always enemies.

When Allies Become Enemies

Before 1979, Iran and Israel maintained a strategic partnership that extended far beyond diplomatic courtesy. Under Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the relationship encompassed shared intelligence operations, joint military projects, and billions in bilateral trade.

The alliance formed part of Israel’s “Alliance of the Periphery,” a strategy devised by David Ben-Gurion to establish partnerships with non-Arab powers along the region’s periphery. Turkey, Ethiopia, and especially Iran served as counterweights to hostile Arab nationalism.

Iran became Israel’s most valuable regional ally. The Iranian monarchy supplied Israel with oil through a joint pipeline. El Al operated direct flights between Tehran and Tel Aviv. Israeli construction firms built infrastructure across Iran. Mossad trained SAVAK, the Shah’s secret police. When Arab nations imposed economic boycotts, Iran filled the gaps.

The collaboration extended beyond commerce. Declassified documents reveal extensive military cooperation, including joint development projects for weapons. During the Iran-Iraq War, Israel covertly supplied Iran with weapons and spare parts while maintaining official neutrality.

This partnership reflected cold strategic calculation. Both countries faced common threats: Soviet-backed Arab nationalism, particularly Nasser’s Egypt, and the growing influence of leftist movements across the Middle East. The alliance served concrete material interests on both sides.

Iran’s revolutionary upheaval changed everything.

Revolution as Imperial Threat

Khomeini’s revolution terrified ruling classes throughout the Middle East because it proved that seemingly invincible, American-backed autocrats could be overthrown by popular movements. More significantly, the revolution explicitly challenged the entire imperial order that had dominated the region since the end of World War II.

Iran’s new Islamic Republic opposed not just Israel, but the entire system of Western domination that Israel represented. When Khomeini branded America the “Great Satan” and Israel the “Little Satan,” this constituted a materialist analysis expressed in religious language. Both nations embodied imperialist control over the region’s resources and peoples.

The revolution’s anti-imperial character explains why opposition to Israel became central to Iran’s new identity. Supporting Palestinian liberation wasn’t merely solidarity with fellow Muslims—it represented a challenge to the geopolitical architecture that had subordinated Iran to Western interests for decades.

When the new regime severed relations with Israel in February 1979, transferred the former Israeli embassy to the PLO, and began supporting Palestinian resistance movements, it declared its intention to reshape the regional order entirely. This wasn’t a religious war between Jews and Muslims. It was a revolutionary challenge to imperial hegemony.

Israel understood the implications immediately.

The Shadow War Doctrine

What followed were decades of proxy warfare. Unable to confront each other directly without triggering superpower intervention, Iran and Israel fought through intermediaries across the region.

Iran armed and trained Hezbollah in Lebanon, transforming a militia into one of the world’s most sophisticated non-state armies. It provided weapons and funding to Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad. The “Axis of Resistance” emerged—a network spanning from Yemen to Lebanon, united in opposition to Israeli and American domination.

Israel responded with its own shadow campaign, establishing a doctrine of preemptive strikes that began with Iraq’s Osirak nuclear reactor in 1981. That surprise air raid destroyed Saddam Hussein’s nuclear program and established a clear message: Israel would not tolerate any Middle Eastern power developing atomic capabilities, regardless of international law.

Iran took note of this lesson and spread its nuclear infrastructure across multiple sites, buried key facilities underground, and surrounded them with sophisticated air defenses.

The Nuclear Chess Game

Iran’s nuclear program became the central battleground in this shadow war. For two decades, Israel has waged systematic warfare against Iranian nuclear development through sabotage, assassination, and cyberattacks:

Natanz, Iran’s primary enrichment facility, has suffered repeated attacks. Explosions in 2020 and 2021 damaged thousands of centrifuges, resulting in a delay of several months in uranium enrichment. Power systems failed mysteriously—equipment malfunctioned in ways suggesting sophisticated sabotage.

Fordow, heavily fortified and buried underground, has proven more resistant but remains vulnerable. Israeli intelligence has repeatedly attempted to compromise its underground facilities.

Isfahan’s Uranium Conversion Facility has endured multiple attacks that damaged both conversion infrastructure and facilities producing uranium metal, materials essential for weapons development.

This campaign represented methodical degradation of Iranian nuclear capabilities, conducted with military precision but covert deniability. Each attack forced Iran to rebuild and re-secure facilities while advancing no closer to weapons capability.

Simultaneously, Mossad assassinated Iranian nuclear scientists in operations of remarkable sophistication. Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, considered the father of Iran’s nuclear program, was killed by a remote-controlled machine gun in 2020. Majid Shahriari died when a bomb attached to his car exploded in 2010. Masoud Alimohammadi was killed by a booby-trapped motorcycle in 2010.

Each assassination conveyed the same message: working on Iran’s nuclear program carried a death sentence, executable anywhere, anytime, regardless of security measures.

This proxy phase served the interests of both sides for decades. Iran could challenge Israeli power without risking total war. Israel could degrade Iranian capabilities without triggering a regional conflagration. But proxy wars have their own logic. Each escalation demands a response. Each response raises the stakes.

Gaza Changes Everything

Israel’s response to Hamas’s October 7 attack changed everything. The campaign that followed—now over a year and a half old—has killed over 40,000 Palestinians. By systematically destroying Gaza and launching attacks into Lebanon, Israel demonstrated both its willingness to use overwhelming force and its utter disregard for international law.

For Iran, Israel’s Gaza campaign represented both a threat and an opportunity. The danger was obvious: if Israel could conduct unlimited warfare against Palestinians with American support, Iranian allies faced similar vulnerability. The opportunity was equally clear: Israel’s actions had alienated much of the international community and exposed contradictions in American rhetoric about international law.

Iran’s strategic calculation shifted. For decades, the strategy had been building capabilities while avoiding confrontation. But Israel’s escalating attacks on Iranian positions in Syria, assassinations on Iranian soil, and threats against Iran’s nuclear program suggested that conflict was inevitable regardless of Iranian restraint.

Imperial Logic and Regional War

Understanding this conflict requires looking beyond Tehran and Jerusalem to Washington. The Iran-Israel confrontation is fundamentally about American hegemony in the Middle East and Iran’s challenge to it.

The United States has spent decades building Israel into a regional superpower, specifically to prevent challenges like Iran from emerging. American aid—$3.8 billion annually, plus additional military support—doesn’t just protect Israel. It maintains American control over the region’s most strategic location.

Iran represents the one significant Middle Eastern power that refuses integration into the American-dominated order. Unlike Saudi Arabia, Egypt, or Gulf monarchies, Iran won’t subordinate its foreign policy to American interests. This makes it an existential threat not to Israel’s survival, but to the regional architecture guaranteeing Israeli supremacy.

From Iran’s perspective, this architecture explains why accommodation with Israel remains impossible. As long as Israel serves as America’s regional enforcer, any Iranian weakness will be exploited to restore something resembling the Shah’s regime—perhaps not monarchical, but indeed subordinated to Western interests.

This dynamic traps both sides in an escalation spiral neither can escape through diplomacy alone. Israel cannot accept Iranian power because it threatens American guarantees. Iran cannot accept Israeli supremacy because it represents imperial domination.

Breaking the Cycle

The current missile exchanges are the logical endpoint of this contradiction. Both sides have concluded that their core interests require either the other’s destruction or submission. Neither can retreat without risking everything built since 1979.

The tragedy is that this conflict serves the interests of the elite on all sides. Iranian hardliners can rally support against foreign enemies. Israeli leaders can justify unlimited military spending and authoritarian measures. American defense contractors profit while Pentagon strategists justify an expanded military presence.

Meanwhile, ordinary people—Iranian scientists, Israeli civilians, Palestinian families—bear the costs of a conflict none chose but all must endure.

The current escalation will eventually exhaust itself temporarily. Neither Iran nor Israel can sustain unlimited warfare indefinitely. But without addressing the underlying imperial dynamics that created this conflict, any ceasefire simply resets the countdown.

As long as the Middle East remains organized around American hegemony and Israeli supremacy, Iran will challenge that order. As long as Iran builds capabilities to resist regional domination, Israel will seek to destroy those capabilities.

The missiles illuminating Middle Eastern skies aren’t just weapons—they’re symptoms of a more profound crisis. A regional order built on imperial control and sustained through overwhelming violence has produced enemies it cannot defeat and conflicts it cannot resolve.

The ghosts of 1979 still haunt this conflict because the revolution’s core challenge remains unanswered: whether Middle Eastern peoples can determine their own fate, or whether that fate belongs permanently to powers beyond their borders.

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