Israel Plots razing Iran, but it has 330K STEM graduates per Year
Juan Cole 04/02/2026
Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – The Apartheid government of indicted war criminal Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has turned to using Gaza genocide-style tactics against Iran — even while the genocide against Gaza continues and an ethnic cleansing campaign proceeds in Lebanon. Israel is now striking civilian objects in Iran in hopes of collapsing Iranian society. It is blowing up pharmaceutical factories making anti-cancer drugs and steel factories and university campuses that do not have a direct military tie. Because of heavy US and European sanctions, Iran had to develop its own drug manufacturing capabilities. The sanctions do not typically interdict medicine, but they have crashed the value of the Iranian currency and made imported medicines expensive. Manufacturing pharmaceuticals domestically helps insure that the public has access to them. Now, in some cases, they won’t.
Netanyahu believes that if he can devastate Iran the way he did Gaza, he can provoke a major change in government or can leave the country in turmoil and reduced to fourth-world economic status in the medium or even long term. His theory about this, as with almost everything else, is incorrect. Countries can rebuild after wars, and can rebuild quickly if they have an educated populace. Germany was devastated in 1945 but ten years later an economic miracle was in train. You don’t need chemical factories nearly as badly as you need chemists, and Germany had loads of know-how.
Iran ranks third in the world in the number of engineers it graduates annually, some 230,000, seventy percent of whom are women. There are 4.7 million students currently at university, half of them women. STEM graduates come to some 330,000 a year. About 17% of Iranians have a university degree. Just Iranian undergraduates along come to nearly the entire Jewish Israeli population resident in Israel. Thousands are studying abroad, not only in Europe but also in China, India and other countries with STEM and engineering expertise. Behind the scenes, China and Russia will help with Iran’s rebuilding after the war. Iran is now exporting more petroleum than it did in February and getting twice as much for it, which can rebuild a lot of factories.
This is why, according to the BBC Persian service, Israel on March 28 launched airstrikes on the University of Science and Technology in Tehran. It also has allegedly twice hit a university in Isfahan. But the Israelis cannot commit scholasticide in Iran the way they did in Gaza, where they wiped out all the schools and universities. Very unfortunately, Iran replied by threatening American educational institutions in the Middle East. New York University Abu Dhabi has just gone to virtual classes for this reason. The American University in Sharjah, in Sulaymaniyyah, and the American University in Beirut have all been put in danger by Israel’s illegal bombing of Iranian universities.
The initial Israeli pretext for its aggression on Iran was to destroy the country’s ballistic missile launchers. That is, it was justified as a preventative war a la George W. Bush. The rationale of the war was the Iran would eventually have so many ballistic missiles that they could penetrate Israel’s web of interceptors, posing a dire danger to the small country. This rhetoric, however, does not actually make any sense, since Israel is a nuclear power and can’t be existentially threatened by a few Iranian missiles — as indeed it has not been even when Iran has been hitting it with everything it has.
Journalist Elena Farhadi at DW reports that this week on Tuesday, March 31, a heavy Israeli missile barrage struck the the pharmaceutical raw materials production plant of the Towfiq Daru pharmaceutical company in the Vardavard region west of Tehran. The company is owned by the Social Security Investment Company of Iran, that is, by Iranian retirees and workers, whose retirement benefits were those direct targeted. It manufactured anti-cancer drugs, anesthetics, multiple sclerosis-specific medications, treatment of diseases caused by hormonal disorders, strong painkillers including fentanyl, and other specialized drugs. Farhadi quoted Deputy Minister of Health Mehdi Pirsalehi, as saying, “It was one of the most important manufacturers of raw materials for hospital medicines and drugs used in the operating room. The impact of the missiles caused the complete destruction of production units and the research and development branches of the factory.”
Israeli propaganda claims that Towfiq Daru supplied the Iranian Revolutionary Guards are considered implausible by Iranian physicians in exile in Austria, Farhadi writes.
We saw the destruction of most hospitals and health facilities in Gaza by the Israeli military on similar grounds that they had military purposes (patching up wounded guerrillas?), but these arguments are rejected by international law specialists. You can’t go around destroying civilian objects just because you are at war with a country and the civilian infrastructure occasionally is used by the armed forces.
Pirsalehi said that since the beginning of the war, about 24 pharmaceutical factories, medical equipment and distribution companies have suffered minor or major damage.
Farhadi quotes Dr.Hassan Nayeb Hashem, a human rights activist resident in Austria, as saying that “A large portion of the country’s pharmaceutical production was at this factory. It was supplying 50 kinds of strategic drugs and had moved in the direction of localized production. Because of the recent attacks, a large number of pharmaceutical items have been removed from the domestic production cycle, and it is extremely difficult to procure this volume of medicines from abroad.”
As Israel’s attack on cancer wards in Gaza doomed many cancer sufferers, so now it has made it impossible for Iranian oncologists to prescribe needed medicines to patients.
Some medicines are imported from India, but an American attack on Mashhad International Airport on Wednesday damaged a Mahan Air plane that was preparing to set out on an aid mission to bring medicines from India, a mission that has now be cancelled. The airplane was manifestly not being used for a military purpose when it was hit, so this was a serious war crime.
Photo of scene in Isfahan by Reza Ghasemi on Unsplash
Last Friday, Israel and possibly the US struck the massive steel production complexes at Isfahan and Khuzistan. These were key to Iran’s civilian industrial society and their destruction is intended to help deindustrialize Iran. These are civilian industries and this was a major war crime. In response, Iran threatened to strike the Israeli steel industry at Akko and to lash out at steel plants in the Gulf Arab states. The Iranian officials are not wasting their breath complaining about Israel’s and America’s war crimes against it, but trying to figure out ways to inflict similar pain on its adversaries and their allies. This sort of retaliation and damage to civilian society is why International Humanitarian Law was enacted after WW II, to stop people from acting as the Nazis did in Poland. But if the law is broken, it invites reprisals. As Mohandas K. Gandhi observed, “An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind.”
Netanyahu thought Israel was immune from Iranian counter-strikes, but it is not, even if Iran still has only landed relatively ineffectual blows.
Israel is running out of interceptors and it is not clear that Iran’s ballistic missile capabilities will be gone before the interceptors are. Already Iran’s missiles and drones are penetrating Israeli defenses occasionally and plunging Israeli cities into darkness for at least a while.
The Israeli dream of a deindustrialized and supine Iran is a chimera. The Israeli elite has grown megalomaniacal because of knee jerk American support, but Iran is the meal they won’t be able to digest. They think they can just start back up the bombing when Iran attempts to build back, but the world is not going to put up with a repeated Israeli tax on gasoline and fossil gas, the prices of which will spike every time Israel starts bombing Iran again. Iranians have tens of thousands of drones that can close the Strait of Hormuz and sabotage oil facilities and ships. Netanyahu doesn’t realize yet that he has been outmaneuvered, and still dreams of an Israeli superpower in the region. It is a foolish dream, and we will all be paying for it for years to come.