The ghost of Assyrian king Nebuchadnezzar (642-562 BC) would have probably gleefully approved of the recent first-ever direct projectile exchanges between Iran and Israel. After all, he sowed the seeds of this historic animosity in 586 BC by destroying the first Jewish temple, sacking the Jewish kingdom of Judea and taking its citizens in captivity to Babylonia. Jewish scripture Jeremiah described Nebuchadnezzar as the “Destroyer of Nations”.
A long enmity
While much water has flown down the Nile during the tumultuous regional history, the Jew-Persia enmity has survived 26 centuries; barring last century’s Pahlavi era in Iran when the two non-Arab, pro-American states had a tactical alliance. But the advent of the Islamic Republic in 1979 restored the historic “normalcy”, and the Mullahs in Tehran have been unswerving in denouncing Israel as “smaller Satan” and vowing its destruction. To this end, Iran has pursued weapons of mass destruction capacity, including drones, missiles and nuclear weapons. Leaders of Israel, the region’s only putative nuclear weapon state, consider Iran an “existential threat” and have vowed to never allow Iran to acquire nuclear weapons.
