Tension? What Tension?!

"[Iran will not negotiate with the United States.] Neither we, nor them [sic] is seeking war. They know that it is not to their benefit."
"Achieving 20 percent enrichment is the most difficult part. The next steps are easier than this step." 2019
"Should the Iranian nation beg for the right of exploitation of nuclear energy from the bullying world powers until they accept that the nation has a nuclear right?... No. This is not the way of a free and independent nation... Rights cannot be achieved by entreating. If you supplicate, withdraw and show flexibility, arrogant powers will make their threat more serious." 2007 
"Today, America poses a threat to peace and security in the world. Therefore, the slogan 'Death to America' is no longer used only by our people. Today, you see throughout the world people setting fire to the effigy of the American president and chanting the slogan 'Death to America'. This is because of the American regime's exaggerated demands, its arrogance, its vanity, and its desire to control, and because it is a pawn in the hands of the Zionists." 2006
"Israel Is A Hideous Entity In the Middle East Which Will Undoubtedly Be Annihilated." 2010
"There are documents showing close collaboration of the Zionists with the Nazi Germany, and exaggerated numbers relating to the Jewish holocaust were fabricated to solicit sympathy of the world public opinion, lay the ground for the occupation of Palestine and to justify the atrocities of the Zionists. There is even evidence on hand that a large number of non-Jewish hooligans and thugs of Eastern Europe were forced to migrate to Palestine as Jews. The purpose was to install in the heart of the Islamic world an anti-Islamic state under the guise of supporting the victims of racism and to create a rift between the East and the West of the Islamic world after 1400 years of unity between those two parts." 2001
"Iran's stance has always been clear on this ugly phenomenon [Israel]. We have repeatedly said that this cancerous tumor of a state should be removed from the region… No one will allow a bunch of thugs, lechers and outcasts from London, America and Moscow to rule over the Palestinians." 2000
Grand Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Islamic Republic of Iran

Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei waves his hand, as he delivers a speech on the first day of Persian New Year, also known as Nowruz in Mashhad, northeast of Tehran, Iran March 21, 2019. Khamenei.ir/Handout via REUTERS

"Olmert hadn't asked for a green light and I hadn't given one. He had done what he believed was necessary to protect Israel."
President George W. Bush, 2008

"Our stance against Israel is the same stance we have always taken. #Israel is a malignant cancerous tumor in the West Asian region that has to be removed and eradicated; it is possible and it will happen. 7/31/91#GreatReturnMarch."
Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Seyed Ali Khamenei  2018

Iran has been acting out again. Its leader states "no one is seeking war", while he warns in the next breath that the Islamic Republic will easily enrich uranium to weapons-grade quality, even as tensions rise. All non-essential non-emergency U.S. government staff has been alerted they must leave Iraq immediately. Houthi rebels in Yemen launched a drone strike on a critical oil pipeline in Saudi Arabia at the behest of the Republic, while Hezbollah is thought to be responsible for sabotaging oil tankers off the coast of the United Arab Emirates.

A US Air Force B-52H Stratofortress aircraft assigned to the 20th Expeditionary Bomb Squadron takes off from Al Udeid Air Base, Qatar, May 12, 2019. (Staff Sgt. Ashley Gardner, US Air Force via AP)

An aircraft carrier strike group and B-52 bombers were dispatched by Washington into the region even as Khamenei affirms yet again that he has no intention of conducting any negotiations with the United States, since such efforts as diplomacy represent "poison". If no new nuclear deal arises to take the place of the one that the U.S. has pulled out of, threatens Tehran, they are poised to enrich uranium beyond the level the deal permits, within a period of four days' the 20 percent threshold for weapons-grade uranium.

"An aircraft carrier that has at least 40 to 50 planes on it and 6,000 forces gathered within it was a serious threat for us in the past but now it is a target and the threats have switched to opportunities."
"If [the Americans] make a move, we will hit them in the head."Amir Ali Hajizadeh, commander, Aerospace Division, Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.

In this Thursday, May 9, 2019 photo released by the US Navy, the Nimitz-class aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln transits the Suez Canal in Egypt. (Mass Communication Specialist Seaman Dan Snow, US Navy via AP)

The step following that, warns Khamenei is 'easy', the production of nuclear arms, and the fitting of a nuclear tip to those ballistic missiles the Republic has been busy perfecting for range and accuracy, recalling the sneering promise that one well-aimed ICBM would wipe Israel off the face of the Middle East. Israel takes these statements as seriously as they are meant to be received. It, after all, as the junior Satan, is within easy reach of Iran's missile trajectory, whereas its reach to the U.S. coast is a trifle more demanding.

But Israel also has experience in demolishing the nuclear plans of its geographic-co-located enemies, implacable in their determination to exterminate the Jewish state. Syria's nuclear reactor which its collaboration with North Korea made possible at Deir al-Zour was months from activation, in 2007, recognized as an imminent threat to Israel's existence in its very backyard, prompting then-Prime Minister Ehud Barak to authorize a destructive attack decommissioning the reactor before it could be activated, targeting it with Israeli F-15 and F-16 fighter jets.

A like fate awaited Iraq's nuclear reactor, earlier in 1981. Israel has a track record of defending itself against impossible odds. It is the only nation on Earth to have destroyed two nations' nuclear reactors with precision strikes and the use of specific military force in the face of an existential threat. The country recognizes that if one of its enemies demonstrates the potential to use a nuclear weapon against it, it must act in its own defence for no one else ever will. Now, in facing that same threat from Iran, Israel fully understands the added complexity of Iran's underground facilities protected from conventional air strikes.

In this September 24, 2017 file photo, surface-to-surface missiles and a portrait of the Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei are displayed by the Revolutionary Guard. (AP Photo/Vahid Salemi)

Even so, there is confidence within the Israeli military that the Israeli air force is capable of causing sufficient damage to those threatening facilities built into the side of a mountain as well as the others built with massively credible reinforcement to withstand conventional air strikes, to enable an Israeli strike force to visit critical disabling damage to the nuclear program the Republic is so proud of achieving representing a lethal threat to the entire Arab community of Sunni nations by Shi'ite Iran.

The U.S. has the time and the distance in its favour to withhold taking pre-emptive strikes against a hostile, theistic terror-state, but Israel does not have that luxury, vulnerable as it is to a surprise attack from a near-abroad enemy state which has openly boasted time and again of its intentions to destroy the "Zionist entity". Iran plans to "eradicate" Israel in its entirety in keeping with its Islamist ideology.

Israel plans to destroy the lethal components of destructive capacity; a world of difference from two different world orders.

A view of the nuclear enrichment plant of Natanz in central Iran. Photograph: EPA