In the early summer of 2025, the world watched with bated breath as Israel launched a sudden, high-tech military campaign against Iran. The strikes were described as “precise,” “calculated,” and “surgical” — a showcase of military might seemingly calibrated to prevent Iran from becoming a nuclear threat. Yet once the smoke cleared, it became evident that this so-called war was never intended to function as a war at all. It was something else entirely: a masterfully orchestrated performance — a spectacle of power serving media, politics, and propaganda far more than strategic interests.

Despite the grand narrative pushed by Western allies, the operation achieved no real military objectives. Iran’s nuclear capabilities were dented, not dismantled. No regime change occurred. No weakening of Tehran’s theocratic junta. On the contrary — as in every authoritarian system under attack — the regime emerged more unified, its grip on the population stronger than before. Internally, the airstrikes served as a rallying cry, silencing dissent, shifting focus outward, and reinforcing the state’s legitimacy. Externally, the operation changed the subject — which is, as it turns out, its true purpose.

The Strategic Vacuum

Even from a purely military standpoint, the campaign made little sense. As any sober analyst will confirm, Iran’s nuclear infrastructure is widely dispersed, buried deep underground, and structured for survivability. No short-term blitz — not even one as technologically impressive as “Operation Midnight Hammer” — could eliminate Iran’s long-term ability to restart its nuclear program.

While Israel claimed to have eliminated several Iranian commanders and nuclear scientists, the core leadership and command structures of the regime — the Supreme Leader, the Revolutionary Guard hierarchy, the religious and political elite — remained untouched. This was not decapitation. It was theatre. The regime’s real nervous system stayed intact.

Meanwhile, Iran’s economy — already crippled by sanctions and corruption — was pushed to the brink. Oil exports plummeted. The rial collapsed. Inflation soared. Yet none of this brought the regime closer to collapse. Instead, the Revolutionary Guard — the economic and political backbone of Iran’s power elite — tightened its control. As usual, destruction proved profitable for those who rule over ruins.

The Political Theater

So why strike at all? The answer lies not in Tehran, but in Tel Aviv — and even more so in the personal office of Benjamin Netanyahu. The war’s clearest victor is not Israel’s strategic position, but Netanyahu’s political career.

At the time of the strikes, Netanyahu was facing multiple corruption indictments, including bribery and breach of trust — cases that had been dragging through the courts for years, threatening both his legacy and his freedom.

Facing mounting legal troubles, deeply unpopular at home, and increasingly isolated abroad, Netanyahu found in this war a divine reset. Literally. In a country steeped in Biblical symbolism, there is no cleaner redemption arc than that of a leader “cleansed by fire,” returned to national prominence as the savior against the existential threat of Persia. Charges were delayed. Protests silenced. The judiciary retreated. The man who should have faced impeachment emerged as a prophet — or at least as a Teflon Messiah.

But the benefits go beyond one man.

Gaza Forgotten

Perhaps the most cynical — and effective — result of the war was its displacement function. In the months leading up to the Iran strikes, Israel was under mounting international pressure over its actions in Gaza. Entire neighborhoods flattened. Civilian death tolls in the tens of thousands. Allegations of ethnic cleansing growing louder by the day. International courts circling like vultures.

And then — in one swift stroke — the global gaze was redirected. Instead of images of wounded Palestinian children, we were treated to slick montages of drones flying across the night sky. Instead of moral outrage, there was marvel. Instead of protest, applause. Gaza, which had dominated headlines just weeks earlier, was suddenly demoted — from urgent moral crisis to distant background noise, buried under the gleam of a smart-bomb war: non-lethal, high-tech, and emotionally digestible.

Israel, it seems, has mastered the art of distraction warfare. Strike the right target, and the world forgets the wrong one.

Radical Right: Mission Accomplished

The war also served Israel’s radical Right in other, less visible ways.

Domestically, it reignited the siege mentality. A nation under existential threat does not argue about court reforms, corruption trials, or democratic backsliding. It obeys.

Militarily, the IDF received renewed prestige and funding. Criticism over its conduct in Gaza was swept aside by a sudden burst of patriotic fervor.

Diplomatically, the war allowed Israel to reframe itself — not as the aggressor in Palestine, but as the victim of an Iranian threat. Sympathy shifted. The narrative, masterfully managed, was reset.

This is the logic of perpetual war: not victory, but the endless justification of power through managed insecurity.

The Bulgarian Mirror

Nowhere is the success of this PR strategy more depressingly visible than in countries like Bulgaria.

A country with its own brutal history of ethnic repression — the so-called “Revival Process” of the 1980s, during which hundreds of thousands of Bulgarian Muslims were forcibly renamed and displaced — should be the last to celebrate ethnic cleansing in the Middle East.

And yet, here we are. In much of Bulgaria’s mainstream media and commentary, “experts,” pundits, and moralizers have hailed Israel’s strategy as “wise,” “measured,” even “heroic.” Not only do they ignore Gaza — they ridicule anyone who dares bring it up. Those who dissent are now branded “useful idiots” of Tehran, while the real idiocy parades in patriotic costume on TV and Facebook.

It’s a perfect inversion of values. The same figures who once issued high-minded condemnations of Bulgaria’s own past crimes now clap for far greater atrocities abroad. Why? Because the perpetrators this time are more successful. More Western. More modern.

The Bulgarian intelligentsia, long adrift between slavish admiration of the powerful and self-congratulatory moralism, has once again chosen cowardice. And worse: it has learned to disguise this cowardice as righteousness.

The Final Irony

The Israel–Iran war will be remembered not for what it destroyed, but for what it erased. It did not cripple Iran, nor did it topple tyrants. What it did do — brilliantly, ruthlessly, and with global complicity — was bury Gaza under a pile of shiny missiles and photogenic explosions.

It was not a war. It was an ad campaign.

And we bought it.