Moral qualms and related misgivings aside, you gotta hand it to Israel.

They’ve proven, and not for the first time since 1948, that when push comes to shove… well, let’s just say you don’t want push to come to shove.

Everyone in the region knows that, which is to say knows better. The military asymmetry’s hopeless. There’s the nukes, yes. But it’s not just the nukes. And it’s not just American weapons, although that’s obviously a big part of it.

It’s also the mentality, which can be every bit as fanatical (and on some vectors more so) than the most committed Shiite “resistance” fighter or the most psychotic Sunni extremist.

At the risk of stumbling across a trope or two — and with apologies to moderate, secular Jews for whom this isn’t necessarily accurate — this is a small tribe hell-bent on the idea that they’re God’s chosen people with a divine right to occupy some of the world’s “holiest” territory. They’re ready and willing to die behind that territorial claim, and they’re heavily (heavily) armed.

This is — and I feel like I should preemptively apologize again, even though it’s the unvarnished, undeniable truth — a tightly-knit group of religious fanatics possessed of a fully modernized military and boasting the world’s most capable intelligence service, bar none. That’s a terrifying prospect, and it’s made all the more so by the fact that the Israelis suffer from acute collective PTSD having been subjected to history’s most heinous genocide.

In the simplest possible terms, these people have a point (several points) to prove, and you don’t want to give them an excuse. They’ll kill you, as well as everyone who looks like you, if you step over the line. And they’re surrounded by people who step over the line. Habitually. This is a state the size of New Jersey with the war-fighting capacity to subdue most world powers surrounded on all sides by habitual line-steppers. It’s a comically combustible setup.

Everyone in the Allahu Akbar crowd knows a gloves-off fight with the Israelis is a suicide mission. Alas, that crowd’s famous for suicide missions (it’s kinda their thing), and over the last couple of decades, Iran and its proxies convinced themselves that Israel’s conventional, non-nuclear military advantage wasn’t as daunting as it seemed.

That delusion was perpetuated by Hassan Nasrallah who saw, or thought he saw, weakness in Israel’s withdrawal from Lebanon in 2000 and the IDF’s failure to achieve its military goals in the short-lived 2006 war with Hezbollah.

To be fair to Nasrallah (and I’m not sure that’s a courtesy I should afford him), his infamous “spider web” characterization of Israel wasn’t so much an effort to downplay Israel’s military capabilities as much as it was to suggest that Israeli society didn’t have the fortitude to sustain a long war. Maybe that’s right, maybe it’s not, but it didn’t end up mattering for Nasrallah, because when Israel took the gloves off with Hezbollah in September, the war was very, very short.

Although part and parcel of Yahya Sinwar’s post-October 7 plan was to drag Hezbollah and Iran into a direct conflict with Israel, I doubt seriously he believed a military victory, on a strict definition of the term, was possible. His goals were more nuanced, and while he underestimated Yahweh’s wrath, he did achieve some of what he set out to accomplish.

Sinwar derailed a normalization of Saudi-Israeli ties, for example. He also shoved the Palestinian cause back into the global limelight. And he sacrificed 1,200 innocent Israelis and more than 50,000 Gazans in the service of showing the world the Israeli right’s inhumanity. Put differently: He murdered, in cold blood, 1,200 Jews in order to goad Israel into committing genocide in Gaza. It was a dastardly, wicked plan. And it worked. No one will ever look at Israel the same way again.

That brings me to reports that Benjamin Netanyahu’s considering strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities. Reputationally, Israel has nothing left to lose. Why not go for it? That’s a serious question. I might if I were him. The international community can’t hate him any more than they already do.

The reporting comes from CNN, which said that “public and private messaging from senior officials [suggests Israel] is considering” the strikes. Not only that, “intercepted Israeli communications and observations of Israeli military movements” may suggest such strikes are “imminent.”

A few things here. First, we’ve heard this before, but the unique thing about IDF rumors is that they’re usually a semblance of true. Typically, when someone says “we’ve heard this before,” it means the rumor can be safely dismissed. With the IDF, “we’ve heard this before” often means the opposite — that is, it wasn’t a rumor then, it’s not a rumor now and if you want to dismiss it, you do so at your own risk.

Second, the idea that Israel would jeopardize US military aid by blowing up (literally) Donald Trump’s nuclear negotiations with Iran isn’t as far-fetched as it might sound. 30,000 (give or take) dead women and children in Gaza and a million more currently starving, could attest that Israel’s ready and willing to thumb its nose at Washington if that’s what Netanyahu thinks is necessary for national security. Israel doesn’t have a vote in Trump’s prospective “deal” with Iran, but if Netanyahu deems the terms to be unacceptable, he’s not averse to registering his complaints with bombs.

Third — and CNN mentioned this — Israel doesn’t have, that we know of, the munitions and aerial refueling capabilities it needs to cripple Tehran’s nuclear program. But that doesn’t mean Netanyahu can’t do some damage. He can, and as we’ve seen time and again over the years, Mossad’s creativity can compensate for what the IDF might lack, which anyway isn’t much.

Fourth, and most importantly, Israel could be, and probably is, manipulating Trump. Like this: “Look at us! We’re locked and loaded over here. If that ‘deal’ you’re working on is like all your other ‘deals’ — namely, if it’s sh-t — we might have to take matters into our own hands.”

Finally — and I mentioned this repeatedly in October after Netanyahu dismantled Hezbollah in an awe-inspiring show of guile, guts and force — there’s never been a “better” time to deliver a death blow to the regime in Tehran. The proxies are done for. The IRGC has lost almost all its capacity to project. And regardless of what Netanyahu does, the US and the UK will defend Israeli airspace. The IRGC’s missiles and drones are more or less useless, and it anyway wouldn’t matter, because the minute Iran actually tries to hit something important in Israel is the minute it’s over for Khamenei.

So, where does this leave things? Well, it leaves Tehran and, frankly, Washington, at Netanyahu’s mercy. As we saw last year, Iran wants nothing to do with a real fight (those missile volleys were purely a face-saving exercise for Khamenei) and it’s hard to imagine Trump, the man who ordered the assassination of Qassem Soleimani, taking the side of Iran in the event Israel decides it’s finally time to do what Netanyahu’s wanted to do for a very, very long time.

Of course, if Israel goes through with a strike on Iran’s nuclear program, it’d be an embarrassment for Trump on multiple levels, not least of which is that it’d prove to all the emirs and princes he just spent a week with that he’s no more able to control Israel than Joe Biden, or any other American president.

There’s no love lost between the Sunni powers and Iran. That said, Riyadh and Tehran have pursued rapprochement over the last few years, and just generally speaking, no one “over there” loves the idea of the Israelis flying around blowing stuff up of their own accord, unchecked and undeterred by The White House.

We’ll see what happens. My guess is that Netanyahu’s bluffing. But the first (and only) rule of Israeli bluffs is that you don’t call them.