After being attacked: It’s called defence.

People tend to lump them all together, judge them by the way they dress, but they are not a monolith, nor do they all share the extremist nature of this Itzhar crowd.

People also forget that some of the secular or atheist Zionist fanatics, who are non religous can be just as genocidal and repulsive. Most of Bibi’s right wing fanatics fall into this category, Lieberman is one such, you could call these nationalist fanatics,

To complicate things further, they don’t like each other even though they share the same goal of a greater Israel with only Jews or non Jews as second class or inferior citizens. Exactly as Hamas want in their imagined greater Palestine.

I think Torat HaMelech definitely resonates among all or almost all Orthodox settlers (excluding my friends Myron Joshua and Rabbi Froman). IT would certainly resonate among far-right Orthodox Israelis living within the Green Line as well. I’ve written here before about some of their rabbis like the chief rabbi of Tzfat, Rabbi Wolpe, Yeshivat HaRav, etc.

They are merely the only WMD that think tanks can get their heads around.

The Iranian nuclear enrichment programme is very theatrical in nature and quite possibly intended to lead a sucker onto a sucker punch. There are a couple of ways the Iranians could have in the past or could in the future make a nuclear weapon without it, and rather more in which they could produce or obtain chemical weapons capable of killing many more people than a handful of nuclear bombs.

The real unknown about Iranian capability, however, lies in signals intelligence and cryptology. If these turn out to be better than anticipated (or if the IDF and Israel’s mighty advisor haven’t even given the matter any thought at all, which would indeed be Hitler-like) then the Israeli attack might inflict nil damage as well as provoking and legitimising massive retaliation.

It mustn’t be presumed that only superpowers can do this sort of thing: during WW2, the Siemens T52 and T53 series teleprinter cypher machines -orders of magnitude more complex than “Enigma”- were broken so completely and so much as a matter of routine by Swedish Intelligence, that British and American Intelligence largely ignored the “Sturgeon” traffic on the assumption they’d get a warning from Stockholm if anything was seriously up.

If there was a single area of military technology where Persians ought to excel, it is cryptology -and the drone hijacking incident indicates a capability without really showing its scope and limits.