Um… Shabbat Shalom, I guess? Or, since it’s after havdalah now and I can finally sit down and actually write this, Shavua tov. Good week. Let’s hope.
I woke up this morning to sirens. Not the gentle kind that eases you into Shabbat, but rather the kind that gets you out of bed and across the street to the basement mamad (bomb shelter) before your brain has even fully booted up. I’m Shabbat observant, so I grabbed exactly one thing: my phone, for the Home Front Command alerts. That’s it. No news, no tabs, no doomscrolling. Just the phone and my pajamas and the weird specific adrenaline of running across the street on what should have been a peaceful Shabbat morning not entirely sure what’s happening.
What I found in the basement was my neighborhood in miniature. There’s a reason I love this place. It’s a mostly secular Ashkenazi crowd, I am, as usual, the token Moroccan Jew, and at this hour it was a beautiful cross-section of Jerusalem chaos: young Israeli families with toddlers who somehow found the whole thing exciting, a couple of Anglo retirees from the US trying to get a signal on their phones, a grad student who knew more than anyone about what was probably going on, and old Shimon, who is in his 80s, has been through rather more of this than any of us, and had arrived with a folding chair and a bag of sunflower seeds and the general air of a man who has seen everything.
He offered me some seeds. We cracked them together in companionable silence.
“Nu,” he said eventually. “What took them so long?”
I didn’t have a great answer. Nobody did, really. We pieced together what we could from each other, the grad student had been half-awake when it started and had caught the first alerts, one of the Anglo retirees had a son in Tel Aviv who was texting updates, and the young Israeli dad across from me had a brother in the reserves who had gone quiet, which told its own story. That’s how I spent much of Shabbat: in a basement across the street from my apartment, in my pajamas, learning about a war from my neighbors.
Because yes, while we were running across the street, Israel and the United States launched a massive joint military operation against Iran, codenamed Operation Roaring Lion (Mivtza Sha’agat HaAri) on the Israeli side, and Operation Epic Fury by the US Department of Defense. I didn’t read the actual details until after havdalah. Everything below is what I found when I finally opened the news.
What Actually Happened
Defense Minister Israel Katz confirmed the strike early this morning, describing it as a “preemptive attack” intended to “remove threats to the State of Israel” and declaring an immediate state of emergency across the country. Shortly after, President Trump announced that the US had begun “major combat operations” in Iran, going further than anyone expected and making clear this wasn’t just a targeted strike on nuclear facilities, the stated goal is regime change. Trump addressed the Iranian people directly: “When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take. This will be probably your only chance for generations.”
Strikes hit Tehran, Isfahan, Qom, Karaj, Tabriz, and Kermanshah. According to the CFR, targets included Iran’s nuclear and missile infrastructure, its navy, and, most dramatically, the regime’s senior leadership itself. Satellite images show Khamenei’s Tehran compound reduced to smoldering rubble. Whether the 86-year-old Supreme Leader was there at the time remains unclear; Iranian state media insists he’s safe and has been moved to a secure location. Iranian President Pezeshkian was also reportedly targeted.
Iran retaliated fast and hard, firing ballistic missiles at Israel and at US military bases across the region, Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, the UAE, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and Iraq all got dragged in. Bahrain activated air raid sirens. The Houthis announced they’d resume Red Sea attacks. Iran’s Revolutionary Guard reportedly sent radio transmissions warning that no ships would be allowed through the Strait of Hormuz. So, you know: lo nora, nothing to worry about.
Footage from Tehran shows burned vehicles, wrecked buildings, and massive plumes of smoke. Al Jazeera’s reporter on the streets of Tehran described cellphone communications as largely disrupted. Internet connectivity in Iran reportedly plummeted to 4%. The images coming out are genuinely devastating, I want to be clear about that, and we’ll talk about the human cost in a moment, because it matters.
Back in the Basement
We went up and down a few times over the course of the day as the situation shifted. Israel’s Home Front Command sent alerts telling people to stay close to shelters, avoid non-essential travel, know where their nearest protected space was. The IDF said the first alert was “proactive”, they didn’t need us in the mamad just yet, but to know where it was. Then Iran’s missiles started flying toward Israel and knowing where it was suddenly became urgent.
The second time down, there were more people. The academics from down the street had joined us, one of them, a historian of the Middle East as it happens, was explaining the situation to the Anglo retirees with the patient delivery of someone who has been waiting years to deploy this particular lecture. The toddlers were less interested in geopolitics and more interested in Shimon’s sunflower seeds and the many bags of Bamba their parents had prepared for them. Shimon, to his credit, shared his sunflower seeds widely.
I’m Moroccan. My family is Mizrachi. I grew up inheriting a tradition that understands, in the bones, what it means to live as a Jew in an Arab country, the complicated coexistence, the sudden ruptures, the departure that was never really a choice. Living in this very Ashkenazi neighborhood, being the guy whose culinary references nobody quite gets and whose family’s story runs through Casablanca rather than Warsaw, it gives you a particular vantage point on days like this. The Jewish story has many threads. Today all of them were running in the same direction.
Magen David Adom reports treating 89 people for injuries from the Iranian strikes, the vast majority of them lightly hurt, most because they fell while running to shelters. A 16-year-old in Kfar Qasim was hurt by shrapnel. A man in his 50s was hit by a blast shockwave. Six people were treated for acute anxiety. Which, I mean, understandable. Running across the street to a basement in your pajamas on Shabbat morning is not nothing.
The Purim Connection That Everyone Is Talking About
You knew this was coming. Purim is literally four days away. The operation began the Shabbat after Parshat Zachor, the portion we read every year before Purim commanding us to remember the existential threat posed by Amalek. Netanyahu, who never misses a religious reference even when the situation would perhaps counsel restraint, went full Megillah in his statement: “Twenty-five hundred years ago, in ancient Persia, a tyrant rose against us with the very same goal, to utterly destroy our people. Today as well, on Purim, the lot has fallen, and in the end this evil regime will fall too.”
Ancient Persia. Modern Persia. Haman. Khamenei. The Book of Esther and the Book of Geopolitics, apparently converging on the same page.
I’ll be honest with you, I find the religious framing both genuinely resonant and genuinely complicated. The resonance is obvious: Iran has been chanting “Death to Israel” for 47 years. Its regime has funded Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis and every proxy that has tried to kill Jews, for decades. The nuclear threat has been existential and well documented. Netanyahu’s Purim parallel isn’t purely theatrical, there’s something real there about a regime that has made the elimination of the Jewish state its organizing national principle, finally facing serious consequences. That’s not nothing.
The complicated part I’ll get to in a moment.
Am I Supposed to Be Celebrating Right Now?
Here’s the thing. Part of me, a part I’m not sure I’m entirely comfortable with, felt something reading after Shabbat about Iranians in the street, not running from the strikes, but celebrating them. Women dancing. Students at a school in Tehran chanting “Death to Khamenei.” A woman shouting that they’ll soon take down the flag of the Islamic Republic. Reza Pahlavi urging Iranians to “prepare to resume protests as the Islamic Republic collapses.”
These are the Iranian people. Not the regime. The same people who have been in the streets in massive numbers since December, who have been massacred by their own government, protests that spread to over 100 cities, the largest since 1979, driven by economic collapse and decades of repression. The same people whose daughters and sisters have been fighting for the right to exist without a hijab wrapped around their freedom.
Because this is a developing military situation with heavy state-controlled information flow, details regarding casualties, both civilian and military, may change as independent international observers gain access to the site. We don’t know for sure which members of the Mullah regime and their IRGC and Basji attack dogs have been eliminated. We don’t know how many civilians have been hurt.
What I do know is this: the Iranian regime is not the Iranian people. That distinction has never mattered more than it does today.
A Note to the Persian People, From Us
If any Iranians, inside Iran or in the diaspora, stumble across this modest Jewish blog today, I want to say something directly to you:
We know you’re not Khamenei. We know you’re not the IRGC. We know millions of you have risked your lives in the streets demanding freedom, dignity, and a future that doesn’t involve a theocratic regime that represses you as brutally as it threatens us. You deserve that future. You deserve it more than we can say.
The Jewish people and the Persian people have a history that is long, complicated, and, honestly, mostly pretty good before 1979 got in the way. Cyrus the Great freed our ancestors from Babylonian captivity. We named our kids Mordechai and Esther after characters who lived among you. Purim is, at its core, a story about Jewish survival in Persia, not from it. The enemy in the Megillah is Haman, not the Persian people.
May you be safe. May your children be safe. May the regime that has oppressed you for 47 years fall swiftly, and may what comes next be something worthy of the great civilization you are.
Be’karov, b’yameinu. Soon, in our days.
After Havdalah
Shabbat ended and the phone lit up like a pinball machine. My mother called from abroad within about four minutes of nightfall, she had apparently been watching the news all day, increasingly agitated that she couldn’t reach me, and had a lot of questions, the first and most urgent of which was if the kids were ok. I told her yes. Then she asked whether we had enough food in the house. I told her yes. She asked again, differently. I told her yes again. We talked for a long time.
The neighborhood WhatsApp groups exploded, of course. The Anglo retirees were processing loudly in English. The young Israeli families were sharing basement selfies. The academics were posting long threads. And somewhere in all of it, a message from the grad student: turns out her thesis is on Iranian civil society. “I’ve been waiting for this day for three years,” she wrote, “and now that it’s here I have absolutely no idea how to feel about it.”
Yeah. Same. Sort of?
The flights are grounded. El Al has halted ticket sales through March 21 and is organizing rescue flights for Israelis stranded abroad. The hospitals have moved patients and surgeries to underground facilities. Schools and large gatherings are on hold. Life as we know it is on pause while something very large and very consequential plays out.
But Shimon’s sunflower seeds were excellent, the neighbors are solid, and the basement across the street, for all its fluorescent lighting and occasional mildew, held us together today the way basements in this country always have.
Stay safe out there, wherever there is for you. And Am Yisrael Chai. The people of Iran will survive this and persist, just hopefully soon under different management.
