Menachem Begin knew that history has shown that no other nation will come to our rescue.

The unprecedented fourth speech by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to the U.S. Congress amidst innumerable standing ovations should not lull Israel into thinking that it can rely on a polarized America to save it from the existential threat that a nuclear Iran poses. If Israel does not destroy Iran’s production of nuclear weapons, no one else will.

Israel has been here before. In 1981, Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin faced a similar decision. Under Saddam Hussein, Iraq had been pressing ahead with its nuclear program. Just like Iran, Saddam had issued genocidal threats against Israel. According to many reports, the country was less than a month away from full nuclear capability.

And so Menachem Begin ordered a daring Israeli Air Force operation on the eve of Shavuot, June 7, 1981. Begin’s trusted adviser Yehuda Avner, in his book The Prime Ministers, describes in dramatic detail how the Israeli pilots flew below Saudi, Jordanian and Iraqi radar to destroy the nuclear facility situated at Osirak in the heart of Baghdad and return home unscathed.

In a statement issued as the jets returned to base safely, Begin said:

The atomic bombs which the reactor was capable of producing would have been of the Hiroshima size, thus a mortal danger to the people of Israel progressively arose. All our aircraft returned safely to base. Let the world know that under no circumstances will Israel ever allow an enemy to develop weapons of mass destruction against our people. If ever such a threat reoccurs, we shall take whatever preemptive measures are necessary to defend the citizens of Israel with all the means at our disposal.

Afterward, as expected, Begin faced a barrage of criticism. The Reagan administration suspended delivery of F-16 aircraft to Israel and voted in support of a U.N. Security Council resolution condemning Israel’s actions.

Reagan wrote in his diary, “I swear Armageddon is near.” The U.S. ambassador to the U.N. described the raid as “shocking” and compared it to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. U.K. Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher accused Israel of a “grave breach of international law.” The French, who had helped Iraq build the nuclear reactor to begin with, insisted that Israel’s action had not “served the cause of peace in the area.”

Begin was unfazed. He said: “Whenever I have to choose between saving the lives of our children or getting the approval of the Security Council and all those other fair-weather friends, I much prefer the former.”

Begin had this to say about Reagan’s Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger, who despite his Jewish origins took a particularly hard line against him:

By what moral standards does a man like that live? Who is he trying to punish? Israel, which acted in self-defense? Or the tyrannical Iraqi slaughterer who seeks to wipe us off the map? Hasn’t Mr. Weinberger heard of the 1.5 million Jewish children who were thrown into gas chambers and choked to death with Zyklon B gas? What greater act of self-defense could there be than to destroy Saddam Hussein’s nuclear potential that was intended to bring Israel to its knees, slaughter our people, vaporize our infrastructure, destroy our nation, our country, our very existence?

Begin wrote an impassioned letter to Weinberger:

Dear Mr. Secretary, I feel I have a moral obligation to ask you whether in any of your actions and judgments, you consider the following: At a time when your children and grandchildren live and continue to live in the big country of America, my children and grandchildren will keep on living in small Israel, which has many enemies that would like to see her totally destroyed and disappear. Does Israel have to be punished by a weapons embargo because of this? After you read this letter, when looking at the pictures of your children and grandchildren, you might think that a million of them are living in Israel. It is about them that I write.

And so we’ve been through all of this. We’ve seen it before. None of it is new. Today, Israel faces the same situation with Iran.

If there’s one thing that Oct. 7 has taught us, it is that the implacable hatred of the proponents of violent jihad knows no bounds. For them, no evil is too horrific to perpetrate. Anything is possible.

Hamas is Iran’s proxy army. It operated in that capacity on Oct. 7 and gave an inkling of what Iran would do from the moment it possesses nuclear weapons.

Iran has stated clearly on many occasions its determination to wipe Israel off the map; an objective deeply embedded in the jihadi worldview. The prospect of mutually assured destruction, which deterred the atheist secular Soviet regime during the Cold War, won’t deter Iran. As the great political analyst Charles Krauthammer once observed, mutually assured destruction for jihadists who glorify death and martyrdom is an incentive, not a deterrent.

Moreover, as New York Times bestselling author Annie Jacobsen emphasizes in her new book Nuclear War, missile defense systems—even extremely advanced and sophisticated ones like Israel’s Iron Dome—have limited capabilities against a nuclear attack. So, a nuclear Iran places the 7 million Jews of Israel in mortal danger. This is so horrifying it is almost impossible to say out loud.

The U.S. and the West cannot be relied upon to protect Israel from Iran’s nuclear weapons. History has shown that no other nation will come to our rescue. We learned this from bitter experience when boats of German Jewish refugees were turned back by America and Britain, and when the Allied forces refused to bomb the railroads to Auschwitz.

Should the unthinkable come to pass, God forbid, we can be sure that in the West, just like after World War II, there will be tears, handwringing, sorrowful memorials, moving addresses about the tragedy and solemn commitments about “never again.” They will build museums, asking the question with deep angst: How could it be that another Holocaust happened within living memory of the first?

The question that Netanyahu should ask himself is the one that, as recorded by Yehuda Avner, moved Menachem Begin to act: “No nation can live on borrowed time. For months I’ve had sleepless nights. Day after day, I asked myself, ‘To do or not to do?’ What would become of our children if I did nothing?”

For years, Netanyahu has given many speeches in the U.N. and the U.S. Congress warning about this. The time for talk is over. Act now. Save Israel. And prepare to be condemned for doing it.

In the end, if Netanyahu acts decisively to save Israel, history will judge him favorably, just as it did Begin. As Bill Clinton put it in 2005: “Everybody talks about what the Israelis did at Osirak, in 1981, which, I think, in retrospect, was a really good thing. It kept Saddam from developing nuclear power.”

In 2006, a joint statement of the U.S. Congress thanked Israel for taking action in 1981:

Far from praising this heroic act that benefited humanity, the world community responded with condemnation, even outrage. Yet in hindsight, is anyone so foolish as to assert that Israel should have waited for the United Nations to confirm that a threat existed, that Israel should not have taken action to destroy the reactor, even in defiance of the international community? Had Israel not acted, the future of the Middle East and the West would likely have unfolded quite differently and far more tragically.

But for now, Israel needs to know that it is alone in the world. The next few months leading up to the U.S. elections will be particularly perilous for Israel, with all the political instability and deep polarization in America, and Iran’s nuclear breakout period, according to many experts, measured in weeks and months, not years.

It is no coincidence that in the Torah portion read in synagogues throughout the world on the Shabbat before Netanyahu’s address, we read the prophetic words in the book of Numbers, describing the Jewish people: “Behold a nation that dwells alone.”

To “dwell alone” means to do the right thing even if you are alone against a world of opposition. Abraham, our founding father, was the first person to be called a “Hebrew,” an “Ivri,” which the sages of the Talmud say has a root meaning of standing alone and refers to how Abraham stood on one side and the rest of the world stood on the other. Abraham stood alone with his message of faith in one God with the Divine values of compassion and kindness against a brutal pagan world.

Now, almost 4,000 years later, Abraham’s descendants and spiritual heirs in Israel must do the same thing. Israel must stand alone and do the right thing. Nuclear weapons in the hands of a violent, oppressive jihadi regime like Iran, the greatest state sponsor of global terrorism, is a danger not only to Israel but to the freedom and dignity of every decent human being in Iran itself, the Middle East and the world. The “nation that dwells alone” must act now to save itself and the world.

We are alone but not helpless. Three-quarters of a century ago, God blessed the Jewish people with an independent state. Now those who are in charge of its military forces need to act, placing their faith not in America but in God, and use the full might of the sovereign Jewish state that He has granted our generation to protect and defend the people of Israel and the cause of freedom and justice for all.

At this historic moment, let us utter in heartfelt prayer the words of King David, the great psalmist and leader of Israel: “May God grant strength to His people; may God bless His people with peace.”

Rabbi Warren Goldstein is the chief rabbi of South Africa and the founder of the International Shabbat Project.