For decades, Arab and Muslim leaders have fed their people a poisonous myth — that Israel dreams of ruling the Middle East, that it seeks to drive out Arabs and Muslims, that its goal is a genocidal “Greater Israel.” They have said it from Cairo pulpits and Riyadh conferences, shouted it at the United Nations, and woven it into the political DNA of generations.

Yet reality told a different story — 230 straight days of restraint.

From October 26, 2024, when Israel obliterated Iran’s air-defense network, until June 13, 2025, when it finally struck Iran’s nuclear weapons sites, Israel had total air supremacy over the Islamic Republic. For more than seven months, Israel could have flattened Tehran, crippled the oil fields of Khuzestan, or plunged the country into darkness by bombing power plants and airports. Instead, it waited.

The Iranian regime — the self-declared spearhead of the “Axis of Resistance” — had launched a multi-front war: Hezbollah in the north, the Houthis from the south, militias in Iraq, drones from Syria. Yet Israel responded surgically, destroying Iran’s air defenses and exposing the regime’s weakness. Then it stopped. No mass civilian targets, no vengeance against cities — only vigilance.

When Israel finally acted again, its aim was limited and precise: the nuclear enrichment facilities that Tehran had openly threatened to use to annihilate the Jewish state. The operation was not about conquest; it was about survival.

Had the situation been reversed — had Iran dismantled Israel’s air defenses — the results would have been catastrophic. Iran’s own rhetoric, and its record of missile and drone attacks on Israeli cities, show exactly what it would have done: unleashed devastation on civilian population centers. Annihilating the “Zionist regime” as an excuse for eliminating the the threat of a “Greater Israel.”

For 230 days, Israel had the power to destroy Iran and chose not to, just as it could have obliterated Gaza from the first day of the war. Those months are the clearest refutation of the propaganda long sold across the Muslim world about “Greater Israel” and “genocide.” Israel does not seek domination or extermination — it seeks to live.

Two hundred thirty days of restraint. Two hundred thirty days of truth.