Iran’s Strike on Tel Aviv: A Reckoning Long Overdue

As Tel Aviv smoulders under Iran’s missiles, much of the world sees not tragedy, but justice — the delayed collapse of Zionist exceptionalism and impunity.

For Israelis, the past week has been seven days of miscalculated hell — where hubris, arrogance, and delusional invincibility collided with Iran’s might, turning Tel Aviv into rubble and ruination. What began with Israel’s illegal June 13 attack on Iranian soil — a move calculated to provoke but not to suffer consequences — has morphed into a nightmare no Israeli thought possible.

Israel lit a fuse it was never prepared to handle. The self-proclaimed “only democracy in the Middle East,” long shielded by American power and Western media complicity, has found itself cowering before the force of Iran’s ballistic response. No longer the untouchable regional bully, Israel now reels — exposed, isolated, and screaming for sympathy. But the world is no longer listening.

Where once there would have been knee-jerk declarations of solidarity with Israel, now there is silence. In its place, a quiet global exhale. A sense that justice — raw, retributive, and long-denied — has finally arrived. For decades, Israel has inflicted horrors across the Middle East with impunity, from Gaza to Lebanon, from Damascus to Baghdad. Now, the consequences have come home.

The footage tells the story. The dancing and joy once seen in Israeli streets as Palestinians were slaughtered under a hail of bombs have vanished. Instead, those same streets are filled with smoke, blood, and panic. What once was celebration — grotesque, bloodthirsty, and televised — has turned into a national mourning, not of introspection or remorse, but of disbelief that Israel’s shield has finally cracked.

This is not cause for pity. It is a moment of reckoning. And for many around the world — especially in the Global South, across the Arab world, and within communities long demonised for standing with Palestine — it is a moment of long-awaited clarity.

For twenty months, Gaza has been reduced to ashes. Entire neighbourhoods, hospitals, schools — obliterated. Over 250,000 Palestinians killed since October 2023. Entire generations erased. Israel called it “self-defence.” Western governments, led by the US and UK, nodded along, bankrolled the bombs, and silenced dissent. It wasn’t just complicity. It was active participation in genocide.

And yet now, as Tel Aviv burns, the West struggles to find its moral compass. Their beloved ally has finally drawn retaliation — not from ragtag resistance, but from a nation-state that refused to be cowed. Iran’s response was not senseless aggression, but a declaration: Enough. No more Israeli impunity. No more US-backed terror cloaked in democratic double-speak.

Iran must now be seen for what it is in this context — not a pariah, but a moral combatant. A bulwark against the hegemonic jackboot of US and Israeli duplicity. Like Yemen, like Lebanon, like Iraq, Iran refuses to be subjugated, refuses to kneel. In doing so, it has reminded the world of what power looks like when wielded not for domination, but for deterrence and justice.

Iran’s destruction of Tel Aviv has stirred emotions that challenge conventional Western narratives. Satisfaction. Even joy. Not for suffering, but for accountability. Not for violence, but for the rupture of a system built on lies.

For those of us who have watched in horror as Gaza was turned into a mass grave — as Western media recycled IDF press releases and criminalised empathy — this moment is a release. The horror visited on Israel is not indiscriminate. It is targeted, military, and symbolic. It reminds the world that no nation is above consequence.

And in this retribution, we also see the myth of Israeli exceptionalism shatter. Zionism — the ideological engine behind the apartheid state — has long convinced itself and others that it was morally superior, eternally justified, and perpetually under siege. But in reality, it is a project of ethnic cleansing, built on a foundation of theft, occupation, and dehumanisation.

The Israeli state has spent decades propagandising its people and the world, sanitising its crimes behind slick PR and the trauma of the Holocaust. But trauma cannot excuse tyranny. And history cannot absolve the present.

The world has changed. The unipolar moment of American dominance is gone. And with it, the illusions that Israel could forever operate as an untouchable rogue state. Iran’s strike was not just military. It was metaphysical. It tore through the illusion of invincibility and reminded the region that Israel can bleed.

Israelis must now face what they’ve long denied — that the pain they’ve inflicted can be returned. That the region they’ve brutalised for generations will no longer stay silent.

There will be calls for de-escalation. For ceasefires. For the restoration of “stability.” But we must ask: stability for whom? For a state that has never known peace unless it came at the barrel of a gun? For a nation whose idea of security is the permanent destruction of its neighbours?

Whatever the outcome, Iran’s defiance must be remembered as a turning point. Not just in the military balance of the region, but in the moral one. It is a challenge to the world to reimagine who the villains and heroes truly are.

This moment is not about Iran alone. It is about a new global awareness. A refusal to be gaslit. A refusal to weep for the architects of suffering while the victims remain buried in dust and silence.

Let this be the end of Israel’s unearned moral supremacy — and the beginning of something more honest.