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Israel’s pre-emptive, illegal strike on Iran’s nuclear infrastructure was not merely an attempt to arrest an alleged existential threat from yielding fruit, it is a murderous exercise of institutional decapitation.

Instead of widespread condemnation, Washington, Brussels and other European capitals showed a cool nonchalance: Israel is within its right to limitlessly expand its idea of “self-defence”, a concept that has become a .

We have seen how that notion of “self-defence” operates.

In Gaza, it functions to starve, level critical infrastructure, kill scores of civilians, displace populations by the hundreds of thousands, murder aid workers and shoot those desperately in need of humanitarian aid as private security companies ration it.

Regarding Iran, the flexible scope of Israeli “self-defence” includes killing military leaders, preferably while sleeping. Such figures  Mohammad Bagheri, chief of staff of the Iranian armed forces; Hossein Salami, head of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC); Amir Ali Hajizadeh, head of the air force wing of the IRGC; Esmail Qaani, commander of the IRGC’s Quds Force; and Ali Shamkhani, an aide to Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

Of the scientists associated with Iran’s nuclear program, some 25 are on the assassination list, or what Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu  “Hitler’s nuclear team”.

So far, 14  murdered. The Israeli Defense Forces have published some of their names, including nuclear engineering specialist Fereydoon Abbasi; physics expert Mohammad Mehdi Tehranchi; chemical engineer Akbar Motalebi Zadeh; and nuclear physicist Ahmadreza Zolfaghari Daryani. Many are said by Israel to have been the intellectual progeny of Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, the touted father of Iran’s nuclear project.

Having killed Fakhrizadeh in 2020, Israel is now seeking to exterminate the rest. According to the Times of Israel, the IDF  that “the elimination of the scientists was made possible following in-depth intelligence research that intensified over the past year, as part of a classified and compartmentalized IDF plan”.

The attacks have broadened, suggesting a nationwide program of destabilisation.

Oil and gas facilities , including the world’s biggest gas field, the South Pars. Defence Minister Israel Katz  to attack Iran’s media outlets, and was true to his word in an IDF strike on Iranian state broadcaster IRIB, even as news anchor Sahar Emami was broadcasting — a crime captured in real time.

Israel is replicating its own efforts in Gaza, where it has killed 178 journalists since October 2023, the most lethal conflict ever recorded for media workers.

Netanyahu will not stop there. He wants regime change, just as his American counterparts did before their illegal invasion of Iraq in 2003. His target remains the religious leaders of the country, telling ABC news that killing Khamenei would not escalate the conflict so much as end it.

He had been dissuaded from doing so by United States President Donald Trump, according to Reuters, Associated Press, Axios and Israel’s Channel 13. To Axios, a US official  that the administration had “communicated to the Israelis that President Trump is opposed to that. The Iranians haven’t killed an American, and discussion of killing political leaders should not be on the table.” Given Israel’s elastic stretching of “self-defence”, such restraint is likely to change.

Netanyahu would have the world think he has done it a moral service. “I’ll tell you what would have come if we hadn’t acted,” he  in a video message. “We had information that this unscrupulous regime was planning to give the nuclear weapons that they would develop to their terrorist proxies. That’s nuclear terrorism on steroids. That would threaten the entire world.”

His words are a chilling echo of the rationale used by the George W. Bush administration before attacking Saddam Hussein in Iraq, ostensibly to disarm him of weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) that had already been eliminated.

As part of Washington’s global “war on terror”, Bush explained in his  address that North Korea, Iran and Iraq constituted an “axis of evil, arming to threaten the peace of the world”. By seeking WMDs, such states “could provide these arms to terrorists, giving them the means to match their hatred.” Many justifications for using force in international relations, especially regarding the language of illegal war, are reruns of plagiarism.

For Netanyahu, killing Iranian leaders and the scientific intelligentsia was a salvaging antidote to impress on his US allies. “Our enemy is your enemy … We’re dealing with something that will threaten all of us sooner or later. Our victory will be your victory.”

Forget international law, its disciplining protocols and hindering conventions. In its place, we have an unvarnished rogue state which, by any other name, would be as criminally dangerous.

[Binoy Kampmark currently lectures at RMIT University.]