Threats are issued in thunder. Leaders promise crushing blows. Clerics invoke divine punishment. Militias vow revenge. Presidents boast. Crowds chant slogans that, in another political culture, would be understood as career-ending extremism.

Americans and Europeans, trained on diplomatic language and press-release caution, often ask the same question: do they really mean it?

The honest answer is: sometimes yes, sometimes no, and sometimes the words themselves are part of the weapon.

That is what makes the subject so difficult. Hyperbole in the Middle East is not always casual exaggeration. It can be a deterrent. It can be performance. It can be a way to rally supporters, frighten enemies, preserve honour, or shape negotiations. It can also be a warning label attached to a real program.

The mistake is not taking harsh rhetoric seriously. The mistake is taking all harsh rhetoric the same way.

In just the past few days, the region has offered a seminar in the language of threat. President Trump, angry over conflicting reports about a possible agreement with Iran, called the Iranians dishonourable, accused them of bad faith, and warned that they had better get their act together fast. In another moment, he reportedly said the United States had hit Iran hard and would hit it hard again. Then, trying to restrain Israel from retaliation after Iranian missiles were fired toward northern Israel, he reduced the exchange to the language of neighbourhood roughhousing: Israel had its strike, Iran had its strike, and “each of them had their fun.”

That is hyperbole of one kind: blunt, undiplomatic, personal, sometimes crude, and often intended to dominate the negotiation.

Iran’s language is of another kind. Iranian military and political figures have warned that if Iran is attacked, no American will be safe, that fire will burn America and its allies, and that Iran’s response will be fast, decisive, and beyond American calculations. Tehran’s billboards have threatened Israelis with a “rain of missiles” and the warning: “You start, we finish.”

That is not merely colourful language. Coming from a regime that arms Hezbollah, Islamic Jihad, Hamas, the Houthis, and militias across the region, it is the language of a power that has built the machinery to act on its threats.

Still, Israel should not pretend that harsh rhetoric belongs only to its enemies.

Consider Yitzhak Rabin. Before he became the Israeli prime minister who shook Yasser Arafat’s hand on the White House lawn, Rabin was the defence minister during the First Intifada. He was associated with the brutal phrase about breaking the bones of Palestinian rioters, a phrase that has never disappeared from Palestinian memory or from the anti-Israel indictment of his career.

We should not sanitise it. The language was harsh. It reflected a hard military response to unrest, stone-throwing, firebombing, and disorder in the territories. Rabin was not a dreamer floating above the conflict. He was a soldier, a chief of staff, a defence minister, and a man of force.

But Rabin also complicates the discussion. His later course showed that hard language was not the endpoint of his politics. He came to understand that Israel could not permanently rule another people by force alone. He signed Oslo. He made peace with Jordan. Whether one supported or opposed Oslo, Rabin’s career showed that a leader can speak in the severe language of conflict and still search for a political exit.

Ariel Sharon offers a similar lesson. Sharon was nobody’s idea of a soft-spoken diplomat. He spoke and acted like a general. Yet the same Sharon who built his career on toughness later spoke about painful concessions and carried out the Gaza disengagement because he believed Israel’s long-term security required difficult choices. One may argue whether he was right. But his language, however rough, was tied to national survival, deterrence, and security policy.

That is not the same as Hamas or Iran.

Hamas does not merely use heated language in a conflict. It built an ideology around Israel’s disappearance. Its leaders have repeatedly married words to action: suicide bombings, rockets, tunnels, kidnappings, massacres, and the glorification of death. When Hamas speaks about liberation “from the river to the sea,” Israelis do not hear poetry. They hear a program.

Iran’s language is also not merely theatre. Tehran’s leaders have spent decades threatening Israel while funding, training, and arming forces that attack it. Hezbollah in Lebanon, Islamic Jihad in Gaza, Hamas, the Houthis, and Shiite militias across the region are not footnotes to Iranian rhetoric. They are the machinery that gives the rhetoric meaning.

That does not mean every Iranian threat will be carried out exactly as spoken. Middle Eastern rhetoric often contains theatre. It is meant to impress friends and intimidate enemies. But Iran has earned no presumption of innocence. A regime that arms proxies, fires missiles, sponsors terrorism, and calls for Israel’s disappearance cannot ask the world to treat its threats as metaphor.

The Western temptation is to flatten everything. Rabin said terrible things; Sharon said hard things; Trump says crude things; Hamas says terrible things; Iran says terrible things; therefore, everyone is the same. That is intellectually lazy and morally unserious.

There is a difference between the ugly language of a state fighting for security and the eliminationist language of movements committed to another state’s destruction. There is a difference between deterrent speech and genocidal ideology. There is a difference between a leader who later seeks compromise and regimes or organisations that educate generations toward permanent war.

Words matter in the Middle East because words prepare people for action. They define enemies. They justify violence. They tell supporters what is honourable and what is forbidden. Sometimes they are bargaining chips. Sometimes they are warnings. Sometimes they are confessions.

So yes, listen carefully when leaders in the region speak. Do not faint at every insult. Do not assume every threat is a battle plan. But do not make the opposite mistake either. When people who have built missiles, funded terror, and celebrated murder tell you what they want, it is foolish to pretend they are only speaking figuratively.

In the Middle East, hyperbole is often not the opposite of policy. It is how policy announces itself.