It was in the Beersheba, about a thousand kilometers and 2,500 years from Babylon, that Benjamin Netanyahu suggested on Thursday that the time had come for the Jews to repay their ancient debt to Cyrus the Great and bring liberation to Iran.
The Israeli prime minister had just made a tour of Beersheba’s Soroka hospital which a few hours earlier had sustained a direct hit from an Iranian ballistic missile on one of its buildings. It was for that reason the scene of an escape which was already being dubbed miraculous by Israel’s leaders.
The hospital’s director had only just ordered the evacuation from that particular building’s upper floors, and the last of the patients had only been moved out hours before the missile struck. If he had not acted, Soroka could well have gone down in history as Israel’s worst loss of life since the Hamas massacre of civilians on 7 October 2023.
Netanyahu’s long grip on power had looked irretrievably broken on that date 20 months ago, as his security forces had been powerless to save Israeli lives. But now, two wars on, with over 55,000 more people dead, the prime minister is carrying himself as a man of destiny.
Increasingly confident of fundamentally redrawing the map of the Middle East, he toyed with the idea of regime change in Iran – the leader of a 10 million-strong nation calling on a population almost ten times bigger to overthrow the clerical regime that has ruled the country since the 1979 revolution.
“People ask me – are we targeting the downfall of the regime?” Netanyahu said, talking to the press in a hospital compound strewn with broken glass for hundreds of metres, glinting in the desert sun. “That may be a result, but it’s up to the Iranian people to rise for their freedom. Freedom is never cheap. It’s never free. Freedom requires these subjugated people to rise up, and it’s up to them. But we may create conditions that will help them do it.”
If Israeli bombs were to break down the pillars of the Islamic Republic, Netanyahu said it would represent the paying of millenia-old dues, dating back to the liberation of the Jews from captivity in Babylon, by the Cyrus of Persia, the legendary predecessor of the ayatollahs.
“I want to tell you that 2,500 years ago, Cyrus the Great, the king of Persia, liberated the Jews. And today, a Jewish state is creating the means to liberate the Persian people,” he said.
When Cyrus stormed ancient Babylon, it was by land invasion. There are fewer guarantees that an aerial bombing campaign – not an option for the ancients – can change another country’s leadership in the way favoured by the bombers.
So far there are signs that even fervent opponents of the oppressive regime are rallying to its cause in the face of an outside threat. At worst, bombing campaigns can bring monsters to power, as the US bombing of Cambodia helped create the Khmer Rouge.
On this occasion, Netanyahu had come to the southern city of Beersheba, on the edge of the Negev desert, to paint Iran’s leaders as monsters for the bombing of the Soroka hospital.
“We’re targeting missile sites. They’re targeting a hospital,” he said. “They’re targeting civilians because they’re a criminal regime. They’re the arch-terrorists of the world.”
An hour earlier, Israel’s president, Isaac Herzog, had stood in the same spot, with the same charred building behind him, and made the same argument, telling Iran’s leaders: “Your crimes against humanity, your war crimes, won’t deter us.”
Herzog left without taking questions, nor was Netanyahu challenged with questions over Israel’s relentless destruction of the hospitals and clinics of Gaza, where 2.2 million Palestinians have been locked in, under conditions of near-starvation reminiscent of accounts of Middle East sieges of ancient times and the Middle Ages.
Aryeh Myers, a spokesperson for the Israeli Magen David Adom emergency services, argued that there was a critical distinction, pointing to Israeli claims of Hamas strongholds under Gaza’s medical facilities.
“The main difference between this hospital is it is a totally civilian hospital,” Myers said, as he helped oversee the evacuation of bedridden patients to other hospitals in the region. “There are no tunnels underneath [Soroka] – it’s not housing terrorist headquarters. This hospital is for the civilians who live in the Negev region – whether they are Jewish residents, Muslim residents, whoever it is.
“We’ve got a huge Bedouin community that live in this area who are served very much by this hospital. And the fact that this hospital was targeted is a horrendous state of affairs,” he said.
International humanitarian law affords strong protections to hospitals, clinics, ambulances, and their staff, who are to be protected at all times. The bar for infringement is set very high.
Iran’s foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, argued that the Iranian missile had been aimed at a nearby Israeli military headquarters and claimed Soroka hospital only suffered “superficial” damage from the blast wave. There was no question the damaged hospital building had been hit directly, however, and the map Araghchi used to illustrate his online claims bore little relation to the actual downtown area of Beersheba.
On the other hand, Netanyahu’s claims that he knew all of Israel’s military sites and there was not such a site “for miles and miles around”, also seemed open to interpretation.
The prime minister has a reputation for creativity when it comes to spinning a narrative, especially in this mood, as he surveyed thousands of years of history. Ultimately, he suggested, final liberation for Jews and Persians could depend on another latter day king far beyond these shores, whose evangelical supporters have also likened to Cyrus the Great.
Netanyahu described Donald Trump as a saviour in waiting – “a tremendous friend, a tremendous world leader”, who he praised for “his resolve, his determination, and his clarity”. The message has been consistent for several days now: if Israel is to play the transformative role for the ages that Netanyahu has in mind, it is clearly going to need a lot of help.