On June 13, 2025, Israel launched Operation “Rising Lion,” a military campaign that will likely reshape Israeli security doctrine for generations.
For many years, the debate surrounding Iran revolved around one central question: What are its intentions?
Does the regime in Tehran truly seek to destroy Israel? Are its threats aimed primarily at domestic audiences? Is the Iranian leadership rational? Is deterrence working?
These were important questions, but they were not the right questions.
The great lesson of “Rising Lion” is that national security cannot be based on assessing intentions. It must be based on preventing capabilities.
Intentions can change overnight. Leaders change. Regimes fall. Political circumstances shift.
Capabilities remain.
A state possessing thousands of ballistic missiles, a vast drone arsenal, and a military nuclear infrastructure does not become less dangerous simply because one expert or another believes it has no immediate intention of using them.
Jewish and Israeli history teaches this lesson again and again.
In the 1930s, there were those who argued that Nazi Germany merely sought to correct the injustices of World War I.
In May 1967, many focused on analyzing Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser’s intentions. Israel’s government ultimately chose to focus on facts: the closure of the Straits of Tiran, the expulsion of UN forces, and the concentration of Arab armies in Sinai. These were not declarations. These were military capabilities.
In October 1973, senior intelligence officials assessed that Egypt and Syria were not interested in war.
On October 7, 2023, Israel paid a heavy price for a conception that focused on intentions instead of capabilities.
Hamas possessed a terror army of tens of thousands of terrorists, a vast rocket arsenal, tunnels, and Nukhba forces. For years, the public was told that Hamas was deterred, that it sought arrangements, that it was focused on economics and governance.
The capabilities remained. One day, the intentions materialized as well.
‘Rising Lion’ shows a shift in Israel’s actions
This is precisely why Operation “Rising Lion” marks a profound strategic shift.
Israel did not wait for the moment Iran crossed the nuclear threshold. It did not wait for nuclear warheads to be mounted on ballistic missiles. It did not wait for final proof that the Iranian regime truly intended to carry out what it had declared for decades.
It acted to deny the enemy the capability.
During the operation, nuclear facilities, missile sites, command centers, and senior figures within Iran’s security establishment were targeted. The entire world was exposed to the depth of Israeli intelligence penetration and the extraordinary operational capabilities of the IDF, the Mossad, and Israel’s other security branches.
The message was clear: when an existential threat is in the process of being built, a responsible state does not wait for the threat to mature. It acts beforehand.
This is, in fact, one of the oldest principles of Zionist security doctrine.
Israel’s first prime minister David Ben-Gurion understood that a small state cannot afford to absorb the first blow.
Prime minister Menachem Begin applied this principle when he destroyed Iraq’s nuclear reactor in 1981.
The same principle guided the strike in Syria decades later.
Operation “Rising Lion” continued that same strategic tradition.
It serves as a reminder that the first duty of leadership is not to predict the future, but to prevent dangers before they become reality.
One year after the operation, it is still too early to know the long-term extent of the damage inflicted on Iran’s nuclear program. It is also too early to know what Iran will look like a decade from now.
But one thing is already clear.
On June 13, 2025, Israel returned to one of the most important principles of its security doctrine: never to entrust our existence to assessments regarding an enemy’s intentions.
Enemies are not judged by what they say they will do.
They are judged by what they are capable of doing.
And that is precisely why a nation that seeks life must remove strategic threats while they are still in the realm of capability, rather than waiting for them to become reality.
Those who remember prevail.
The author is the deputy chairman of the Institute for Security Policy of the Israel Defense and Security Forum (IDSF) and served as a policy adviser to former strategic affairs minister Ron Dermer.
