When Sympathy Runs Out: Israel’s Lie About Iran

Global sympathy for Israel is waning, not from indifference, but from exhaustion with decades of deception, brutality in Gaza, and false nuclear alarms about Iran.

In the arena of geopolitics, the currency of credibility is both precious and precarious. As Israel once again finds itself under threat, this time from the Islamic Republic of Iran, it does so amidst a crumbling edifice of its own making: a long and increasingly untenable history of manipulating existential fear to justify aggression, and of demanding global sympathy while withholding it from others.

There is, to be sure, a genuine danger. Iran’s theocratic regime is hostile to Israel, funds armed proxies such as Hezbollah and the Houthis, and is strategically positioned to inflict harm. Israeli civilians are indeed under threat, and their fear is real. However, this reality cannot be disentangled from another, equally pressing one: that the Israeli state, led by a government with diminishing international trust, has consistently distorted the nature and scope of that threat most egregiously in its relentless insistence, over the course of nearly three decades, that Iran is perpetually on the brink of developing nuclear weapons.

This claim has not only been wrong, it has been repeatedly, demonstrably false¹. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the longest-serving figurehead of this narrative, has made a career of predicting Iran’s imminent nuclear breakout. In 1996, he confidently asserted that Iran would be capable of producing a nuclear bomb within "three to five years" without importing any materials. In 2006, he warned the US Congress, "Ladies and Gentlemen, time is running out," and declared that Iran would be capable of producing 25 nuclear bombs annually within a decade. In 2012, he insisted they were "six months away" from having 90% of the enriched uranium necessary for an atomic bomb. Again in 2015, before the UN Security Council, he warned that Iran was "weeks away" from acquiring weapons-grade material. And still again in 2018, he told CNN that Iran had the know-how to "make a bomb very quickly." As recently as 12 June 2025, Netanyahu repeated his refrain: "If not stopped, Iran could produce a nuclear weapon in a very short time. It could be a year, it could be within a few months."

Yet, despite these perennial alarms², often delivered with breathless urgency and theatrical flair, not a single prediction has materialised. The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the global authority on nuclear verification, has repeatedly stated there is no conclusive evidence that Iran is actively developing a nuclear weapon³. Iran’s enrichment of uranium, while provocative and potentially destabilising, remains within the technical limits of reversibility and has not crossed the line into actual weaponisation. The 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA)⁴, which Israel vehemently opposed, succeeded in dramatically curbing Iran’s nuclear activities under strict inspections, until it was unilaterally undermined by the United States under Donald Trump’s administration, with tacit Israeli approval⁵.

Meanwhile, Israel, a non-signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, maintains an undeclared nuclear arsenal believed to contain over 80 warheads⁶. It refuses inspections, resists disarmament talks, and yet insists that Iran must be bombed for a programme it has never proved to exist. This is not a principled stance, it is geopolitical hypocrisy dressed as moral clarity.

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