After weeks of uncertainty, the special Media & Research Institute delegation of Philippine-based journalists to Israel is again on track for next month, and I couldn’t be happier! The big question, of course, is what exactly we’ll find there.
Two days before our scheduled departure in June, the embattled Jewish state suddenly began bombing Iran, and all bets were off. Flights were canceled. Airports closed. And those of us not yet airborne—which meant all of us—were torn between the disappointment of having our trip canceled and the relief of not being stranded in Tel Aviv under a barrage of exploding Iranian missiles.
What prompted the attack was Israel’s conviction that its Persian neighbor—which has long vowed to destroy the tiny Hebrew state—was dangerously close to having enough nuclear weaponry to finally do so. So, for 12 days, Israeli fighter jets hammered the nuclear production facilities of its nemesis, aiming to inflict major damage.
Then the United States—long opposed to Iran’s nuclearization—joined the fray, dropping 30,000-pound bunker-busting bombs on two of the country’s most critical underground enrichment sites and showering an important fuel-conversion facility with submarine-launched Tomahawk missiles.
The attacks, the Wall Street Journal editorialized, performed “a favor for the world.”
But not everyone agreed. Shortly after the bombings, CNN and the New York Times—neither known for its love of Israel or Donald Trump—reported on an allegedly leaked US intelligence assessment concluding that only minimal damage was done, setting Iran’s nuclear program back by just a few months. And dozens of commentators and columnists—including some at this newspaper—immediately fell into line.
“…the president who had promised to end all of America’s wars nearly brought the world to the brink of a third world war,” bleated one Manila Times columnist. “Does Iran represent a threat to everybody else or is it the victim of false propaganda by hostile powers? As the world teeters on the brink of nuclear confrontation between rivals, I can only wonder how our state authorities are able to remain in deep sleep without any seeming awareness of what is happening.”
Ah, but then the consensus changed. Given more time to examine the situation on the ground, the New York Times recently reported, “Israel, the United States and now a growing number of outside experts agree that all of Iran’s working centrifuges…were damaged or destroyed, probably beyond repair.”
That doesn’t mean, however, that the threat is gone.
“The question they are now examining,” the newspaper concluded, “is how long it would take the Iranians to rebuild some or all of that capability, especially after the top scientists in their nuclear program were targeted and killed.”
Writing for The Times of Israel, David Horovitz concurred. “Israel’s military planners and operational chiefs consider the initial attack to have been an incredible success,” he declared, “and so too the 12 days of concerted assaults that followed.”
Nonetheless, Horovitz went on, “There is…absolutely no room or reason for hubris. Israel allowed itself to slip into existential peril, and the astounding success of the 12-day war is a temporary accomplishment…This was a knockout blow in a life-or-death fight. But it is not the end of the existential struggle.”
It is into that environment of uncertainty that next month’s delegation of journalists will ascend with open notebooks and, hopefully, open minds. “This initiative,” the original invitation from the Israeli Embassy in Manila noted, “is to foster goodwill and strengthen diplomatic ties by providing media practitioners with firsthand exposure to Israel’s dynamic media landscape, technological innovations, and geopolitical environment.”
We are likely to meet and talk with, among others, military and government officials, scholars, media personalities, hostage families, and, of course, any Filipino OFWs remaining in the country, one of whom recently died from injuries sustained in the counterattack.
The fundamental question on everyone’s mind: what’s happening now and what happens next?
Stay tuned.
David Haldane is an award-winning American journalist and author with homes in Joshua Tree, California, and Surigao City, Mindanao. His latest book, Dark Skies: Tales of Turbulence in Paradise, is available on Amazon. This column appears weekly in The Manila Times.
