Is the Purim War of 2026 the final curtain for Israel’s modern Persian foe?

Photos: AP Images

As the Iranian regime hemorrhages, two leaders have joined forces to deal the death blow to the 47-year-long saga of Khomeinist fundamentalism. Is the Purim War of 2026 the final curtain for Israel’s modern Persian foe?

The senior Iranian leadership who gathered at 8 a.m. on Shabbos morning likely thought that they’d lived to fight another day. Despite the vast aerial and naval armada assembled on their doorstep, another tense night had ended with only breakfast on the horizon.

First, Thursday night had passed without an Israeli strike of the kind that it had unleashed in last June’s 12-Day War. Then Friday night had passed without American stealth bombers unleashing their deadly payloads over the vast country.

So, as the sun lit up the skies of Tehran on Saturday — the first day of the Iranian workweek — Ayatollah Khamenei and his senior security officials knew that they were safe, at least until nightfall. The Americans and Israelis, they knew, never struck in daylight.

Or so they thought — because one six-decade-old historical lesson had escaped them. On June 5, 1967, at 7:45 a.m., as Egyptian pilots concluded their dawn patrols and headed for breakfast, the Israeli Air Force struck in an opening blow that changed history.

One and a half thousand miles further east, most Israelis missed the outgoing planes. The sirens that rang out startled many people, but shocked very few. Just days before Purim, the proximity of old Persia and modern salvation was on all lips.

The war that has broken out is a tale of Netanyahu and Trump — two leaders who find themselves on the same page for different reasons.

The view from Israel is simple. The new war is just the latest stage in an existential clash with Iran and its proxies, underway now for more than two years and decades in the making.

Israel can no more live with Iran’s destructive and rapidly growing ballistic missile arsenal than it could with its nuclear program, which was allegedly destroyed last June.

But over in Washington is a different story. If regime change was his goal all along — and the negotiations were to build a case for war among his skeptical base — this strike is the biggest gamble of Trump’s career.

All now depends on whether the regime in fact falls. If it does, Trump will have pulled off a foreign policy coup for the ages. Iran’s potential return to the Western fold would reset global politics.

And it would draw a dramatic line under a 47-year-long confrontation between America and Israel on the one side, and a messianic, fundamentalist regime on the other.

The nearly five decades of shadow war with the Iranian ayatollahs contain many subplots. The West has lurched between hubris and fear. Israel has alternately supped with the devil and traded blows with it. The story of the rescue and rebirth of Iranian Jews as the Shah fell has sat alongside fears for the dwindling community still in Iran.

And as Israel absorbs the tragedy of war, over it all hovers the thought: Is this the endgame? Will the Purim war spell the downfall of a regime that has held grim sway for so long?