Exceptionalism and Its Discontents: Israel, Iran, and the Crisis of Global Norms

Abstract

This essay scrutinizes a particular 'normal' in international politics - Israeli nuclear exceptionalism and immunity from critique - by explicating the legal, normative, discursive, and regional security dimensions of the crisis precipitated by Israel's June 2025 military strikes on Iran. These strikes lacked the imminence required for preemptive warfare and constituted unprovoked aggression, a breach of international law, and a disregard for diplomacy,violating ongoing US-Iran nuclear negotiations. They reflect a long-standing policy that allows Israel to maintain an undeclared arsenal and remain outside the Non-Proliferation Treaty. Israeli prerogatives are sustained by a Western consensus that renders them a persistent double standard - this time contested by Spain and France. Examining the legal, strategic, and normative fallout of what has become a politically correct Western double standard, the essay also explores how Israeli nuclear exceptionalism operates through discursive and epistemic violence - unpacked via engagements with earlier scholarship on discursive deconstruction revealing the multifaceted clerical political thought, the transnational investment bloc, and Iran's pragmatically driven survival strategies. Ultimately, the essay calls for deconstructing entrenched narratives shaped by Orientalist bias and foregrounds Gulf-based nuclear consortiums as multilateral alternatives that challenge dominant constructions of power, threat, and legitimacy in international politics.