Forty-four years ago this June, I sat in the cockpit on the Israeli air force mission that destroyed Iraq’s Osirak nuclear reactor. In one daring operation, we eliminated Saddam Hussein’s nuclear ambitions. In 2007, when I was serving as Israel’s chief of defense intelligence, we destroyed a nuclear reactor in Syria built with North Korea’s help near the Euphrates River.

Today the challenge is far greater: Israel faces an advanced, sprawling, multisite Iranian nuclear program, deeply fortified and far more complex. Yet despite the scale, a successful Israeli campaign holds the potential not only to neutralize a grave threat but also to reshape the strategic landscape of the Middle East and make the region profoundly safer.

Israel and the United States have the prospect of a rare strategic opening. What has for years been a reactive approach in the Middle East can now be transformed into a proactive vision: one that curbs Iran’s malign ambitions and efforts, stabilizes Gaza and lays the foundation for a new Middle Eastern order built on security, integration and peaceful relations.

Since the Islamic Revolution in 1979, Iran’s leadership has made the destruction of Israel a central pillar of its ideology. Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the revolution’s founder, denounced Israel as a “cancerous tumor” that must be removed. His successor, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has continued this doctrine, pronouncing that Israel will cease to exist by 2040.

For decades, pundits and even government officials around the world have dismissed these threats as propaganda designed to rally domestic support by uniting the public against an external enemy.

Israel has never dismissed Iran’s threats as empty. It insisted that the regime meant every word. The Oct. 7, 2023, offensive suggested that Iran — through its proxies, chiefly Hamas and Hezbollah — sought to translate its longstanding vision of Israel’s destruction into reality. Documents seized in Gaza show that Hamas believed it had the support of Iran and Hezbollah as part of a broader plan: a multifront offensive designed to overwhelm and destroy Israel. The Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar might have launched the Gaza attack prematurely, possibly fearing the plan’s exposure and believing that Iran’s entire axis of resistance would soon join in.