In moments of war, diplomats do not merely explain events; they attempt to define their meaning. At a press conference in New Delhi, Israel’s Ambassador to India, Reuven Azar, sought to do precisely that.
What emerged was not only a defence of Israel’s military campaign alongside the United States against Iran, but a larger argument: that the conflict now unfolding is about far more than missiles, airstrikes, or immediate retaliation. In Israel’s telling, it is a struggle over the future architecture of power in West Asia.
Azar’s remarks were strategically calibrated for an Indian audience deeply attentive to questions of energy security, regional stability, and the geopolitical consequences of prolonged conflict in the Gulf.
He rejected the suggestion that Israel had been drawn into a changing or improvised war. On the contrary, he insisted that the purpose of the campaign had remained constant: to dismantle Iran’s nuclear and ballistic missile capabilities, to degrade its military machine, and to prevent a regime hostile to Israel from acquiring the means to permanently destabilise the region.
“The aims of this operation haven’t changed a bit,” Azar said, pushing back against questions that suggested Israeli objectives had evolved as the conflict intensified. In his formulation, the war is not a drifting enterprise, but a strategic necessity born of accumulated failures in diplomacy. Israel, he argued, had watched for years as Iran negotiated, delayed, concealed, fortified, and advanced.
This was the central thesis of the ambassador’s briefing. Diplomacy, in Israel’s view, did not fail because it was attempted too little; it failed because it was exhausted too long. Azar repeatedly suggested that Iran had used negotiations not as a path to settlement, but as a shield behind which it expanded nuclear enrichment, deepened underground military infrastructure, and continued supporting armed proxies across the region.
The implication was unmistakable: military action, however dangerous, had become for Israel the final instrument left on the table.
That argument acquired sharper force when Azar turned to the military balance itself. He claimed that Iran’s ballistic missile production capability had been brought “down to zero” and that its launch capacity had been degraded by about 70 per cent. Israeli operations, he said, were still focused on commanders, missile infrastructure, and what remained of Iranian military production networks.
He also alleged that Iranian forces were increasingly operating from civilian spaces, including schools and public establishments, a claim intended to rebut accusations that Israeli strikes were deliberately hitting civilian locations.
Yet the strategic breadth of Azar’s remarks was perhaps even more striking than the battlefield claims. He did not describe Iran merely as an adversary of Israel. He described it as a source of systemic disorder: a state whose nuclear ambitions, missile arsenal, proxy networks, and coercive posture threaten not only Israel but the entire regional order. In this interpretation, Israel’s campaign is not only self-defence. It is also a form of regional intervention in the name of a more durable balance.
This was where his message appeared directed most clearly at India. Azar sought to connect the war to questions that resonate strongly in New Delhi: maritime security, trade connectivity, Gulf stability, and the welfare of millions of Indians living and working in the region. He argued that while the present military operation may produce short-term turbulence, the alternative would have been far more dangerous.
A nuclear-armed Iran, fortified by thousands of missiles and an expanding drone capability, would cast a much darker shadow over the region’s economic future.
“What Israeli defence is doing is not only serving our self-interests,” he said, “but it is actually a service that we’re doing for the region.” It was a sweeping assertion, one that placed Israel’s war effort within a much larger geopolitical narrative: that the conflict is a painful but necessary correction before an even greater strategic collapse.
On the question of diplomacy, the ambassador’s position was not the rejection of negotiations, but their conditional reordering. He acknowledged that Israel remained in consultation with the United States, countries in the region, and partners such as India. Diplomatic channels, he suggested, were active and important. But they would only become meaningful again once military pressure had altered Tehran’s calculations. In this framework, force is not the opposite of diplomacy; it is its precondition.
Azar was particularly emphatic that Iran could no longer claim the ordinary rights of a compliant state under the international nuclear order. In his view, Tehran had forfeited those claims through years of deception, non-cooperation, and concealment. The ambassador argued that Iran had not approached negotiations “with clean hands,” and that any future diplomatic arrangement would have to begin from the recognition that the old formulas had collapsed.
His comments also revealed the extent to which Israel sees the conflict as psychological and political, not merely operational. When asked about the future, Azar outlined two broad possibilities.
In one, the Iranian regime changes course, accepts meaningful diplomatic engagement, and retreats from its present trajectory. In the other, military operations continue until Israel believes it has exhausted the utility of force, or until internal political change within Iran alters the strategic environment. He did not formally declare regime change to be an Israeli objective, but the underlying suggestion was unmistakable: lasting peace, in Israel’s view, may require transformation within Iran itself.
The moral contest over civilian harm and legitimacy surfaced repeatedly during the interaction. Azar rejected Iranian claims that Israel was intentionally targeting civilian infrastructure and accused Tehran of embedding military assets in civilian settings. He contended that collateral damage had been limited relative to the scale of the operation and argued that the Iranian regime, given its own record of repression, was in no position to claim moral authority.
Such responses underscored a core reality of this war: it is being fought not only through missiles and air defence systems, but through competing narratives of victimhood, law, and responsibility.
The ambassador was equally determined to project resilience. He acknowledged that Iranian retaliation had been intense and at times broader than expected, but maintained that Israel and its partners had absorbed and contained the assault. He emphasised the strength of Israeli civil preparedness and suggested that the visible damage, though serious, remained far below what Iran had intended to inflict.
Beneath that emphasis on endurance lay a larger political message: Israeli society, he implied, understands that it is living through a campaign meant to alter history, not merely survive an episode.
At one point, Azar dismissed the view that the conflict was simply “Israel’s war” being fought by the United States on its behalf. “Every country looks after its interests,” he said. “India looks after its interests. Israel looks after its interests. America does the same.”
That line was revealing. It was both a rebuttal to conspiracy-laden interpretations of the war and a plain statement of how Israel wishes its actions to be understood: not as manipulation of allies, but as convergence among states that believe Iran’s rise poses a shared strategic danger.
The press conference in Delhi therefore served two functions at once. It was an exercise in explanation, aimed at clarifying Israel’s immediate military rationale. But it was also an exercise in persuasion, designed to frame the war as a defining struggle over the future of West Asia. In Azar’s account, the stakes are not limited to Israel’s security.
They extend to the stability of Gulf economies, the safety of maritime routes, the future of international trade, and the broader question of whether revisionist power backed by ideology, missiles, and nuclear ambition can reshape the region through intimidation.
That is the argument Israel’s envoy brought to New Delhi: that the present conflict, however grave, is still the lesser danger. Whether the world accepts that proposition remains uncertain. But Azar made one thing unmistakably clear. Israel wants this war understood not as an isolated confrontation, but as a decisive test of regional order, strategic will, and the limits of diplomatic patience.
(Anoop Verma is Editor-News, ETGovernment)
