I’d like to share a personal, not organizational perspective this week.

We woke up last Shabbat, and within a short time, we all knew that the war had started.

That sounds like a statement of fact, but the truth is, it is incorrect.

• On November 4th, 1979, followers of the emerging Iranian supreme leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini occupied the American Embassy, sovereign US territory, taking hostages for 444 days.
• In October 1983, an Iranian regime-directed Hezbollah suicide truck bomber killed 241 US servicemen in Beirut.
• In 1983 and 1984, Iranian regime-directed car bomings killed 40 people including many Americans, in Beirut.
• Throughout the 1980s, Iranian regime- directed terrorists sought out, hijacked, kidnapped, and took hostage dozens of Americans, many of whom were tortured and killed, including service members, diplomats, and Federal employees.
• During the 1990s and early 2000’s, many Americans were killed in the unrelenting terror campaigns of the regime’s proxies in Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and Hezbollah.
• In 1992 and 1994, Iranian regime agents bombed the Israeli embassy and the AMIA Jewish Community Center in Buenos Aires, Argentina killing 114 people and wounding hundreds, including many Americans.
• In the early 2000’s, Iranian regime-backed Shia militias killed over 600 US troops in Iraq.
• In the last two years, Iranian regime and proxy attacks have injured almost 200 US service members across the Middle East.
• And we are all too intimately aware of what the Iranian regime’s proxy, Hamas - armed, trained, funded, guided, and strategically integrated - did on October 7th, including the killing of over 40 Americans, and the taking of 12 Americans hostage.

These actions - all of them, and many, many more, which I have not recounted here, are acts of war by the Iranian regime, on the sovereign territory and against the citizens of the United States - not incidental, but as a matter of stated policy by the Iranian regime.

History is replete with conflict, to be sure. But many in our day and age have an antiseptic, tidy, video-game like concept of war. It starts, it ends, and like redcoats on a battlefield, the combatants and the landscape are easy to see - and also quickly forgotten. But that is neither the reality of history nor that of current events.

Europe alone presents examples of generational war to us that are echoed in conflicts around the world, and students of history are familiar with their names. The Thirty Years War, fought over the Lutheran reformation in what would become Germany, and the Hundred Years War, fought between Britain and France over succession, territory, and resources. And others.

The Iranian regime launched a 47 year war on the United States, on Israel and the Jewish people in 1979. It has fought that war directly and indirectly the entire time since then - against Democrat and Republican administrations alike. It slaughtered Americans. It murdered Jews. It massacred Kurds, Iraqis, Lebanese, Syrians, Yemenis, Saudis, and anyone else it perceived as an impediment to its apocalyptic ideology.

In the last two months, it has also brutally killed tens of thousands of its own unarmed citizens, marching in the streets demanding a better, freer life.

These are facts. This war has gone on since I was in the sixth grade.

Could the governments of Israel and the United States have additional considerations beyond that? I’m not oblivious. Of course they could. Not least are the geopolitical implications that go far beyond the Persian Gulf, or the politics of being a wartime leader. Even so.

I’ve been paying attention to this particular conflict for more than forty years. So have many of you. Do you really need another talking head to adjudicate for you how you should feel about a course of action that is

     A. Commensurate with the grave and deadly harm already inflicted by the regime?
     B. Commensurate with blocking the stated aim of the regime in eliminating the great Satan (USA) and the little Satan (Israel)?
     C. Commensurate with the threat of nuclear weapons and the ballistic missile arsenal that immunizes its development?
     D. Commensurate with diminishing or halting the repression and massacre of the millions of Iranians who have taken to the streets, and the tens of thousands who have been butchered by the regime?

I’m not writing to convince anyone how to feel about this war; and I have not focused on the impact it is having on our sisters and brothers in Israel. I am, however, writing to share the perspective that this may be the closing chapter of a story begun while Jimmy Carter was still President, “My Sharona” was the song of the year, and a bottle of Coke was 25 cents. If this action can accomplish that for the US, if it can bring freedom any closer for the Iranian people, if it can remove or greatly diminish a generational, existential threat to Israel, it may be worth considering that this 47 year war initiated by the Iranian regime has gone on long enough, and it's time to bring it to a conclusion.