In the past two years, Kurdish militias known as Peshmerga have proved to be the most successful local forces fighting Islamic State. They have also offered refuge to, and earned the loyalty of, a number of persecuted religious minority groups—such as the Kakei and Yazidis (local sects with relatively small populations) and Assyrian Christians. In addition, writes Seth Frantzman, the Kurds and their allies display a strong affinity with Israel:

There is a general sense among the various minority groups in [the region of] Kurdistan that their war against jihadists is similar to what is happening in Israel. There is a great deal of respect for Israel’s fight against Islamist terror, and recognition that what was once done to the Jews has now been visited upon the Kurds and other minorities. In the 1980s, when Saddam Hussein was planning attacks on Israel, he was also committing the Anfal massacres against the Kurds, in which 4,000 villages were damaged and up to 180,000 people murdered. Saddam used the same poison gas on Kurds with which he threatened to “burn Israel” in 1991.

The commander of a Peshmerga unit, when asked which country he feels the Kurds are closest to, [cites] Israel. “We think Israel is our closest friend in the struggle,” he says. “We have a common history.” . . .

Indeed, for decades, Arab nationalists, Islamists, and the Iranian regime have described the Kurdish struggle in terms of Israel. On July 21, for example, the former Iranian foreign minister, Ali Akbar Velayati, was reported to have claimed that the U.S. was “plotting to establish a second Israel in the region” in the form of a free Kurdistan.

Opposition to racism and genocide, and the feeling that both Iran’s mullahs and extremists in the Arab world have targeted them as a “second Israel,” have cemented a unique Kurdish bond with the Jewish state, and with the idea of preserving the kind of regional diversity that Israel represents.

While I’ve seen much speculation—some reasonable and well informed, some quite the opposite—about why Jerusalem chose Friday morning to begin its campaign against Iran, the most obvious explanation seems to be the most convincing. First, 60 days had passed since President Trump warned that Tehran had 60 days to reach an agreement with the U.S. over its nuclear program. Second, Israeli intelligence was convinced that Iran was too close to developing nuclear weapons to delay military action any longer. Edward Luttwak explains why Israel was wise to attack:

Iran was adding more and more centrifuges in increasingly vast facilities at enormous expense, which made no sense at all if the aim was to generate energy. . . . It might be hoped that Israel’s own nuclear weapons could deter an Iranian nuclear attack against its own territory. But a nuclear Iran would dominate the entire Middle East, including Egypt, Jordan, the United Arab Emirates, and Bahrain, with which Israel has full diplomatic relations, as well as Saudi Arabia with which Israel hopes to have full relations in the near future.

Luttwak also considers the military feats the IDF and Mossad have accomplished in the past few days:

To reach all [its] targets, Israel had to deal with the range-payload problem that its air force first overcame in 1967, when it destroyed the air forces of three Arab states in a single day. . . . This time, too, impossible solutions were found for the range problem, including the use of 65-year-old airliners converted into tankers (Boeing is years later in delivering its own). To be able to use its short-range F-16s, Israel developed the “Rampage” air-launched missile, which flies upward on a ballistic trajectory, gaining range by gliding down to the target. That should make accuracy impossible—but once again, Israeli developers overcame the odds.