This punishment is not just the direct outcome of Israel’s deadly attack on the Iranian consulate in Damascus on April 1, but an overdue retaliation to many such aggressions.
Why is Israel targeting Iran?
Israel has been bombing Iranian facilities in Syria for years.
Additionally, and though Israel does not claim official responsibility, Tel Aviv has also hit Iranian targets on Iranian soil as well, including the assassination of top Iranian scientists.
Quite often, attacks on Iran are coordinated between Tel Aviv and Washington, if not other Western capitals.
These attacks have exponentially increased since October 7, when Israel launched a major war, turned genocide, against the Gaza Strip in retaliation of the Palestinian Resistance Operation, Al-Aqsa Flood.
Yet Israel could easily continue to bomb targets belonging to Iran’s allies in the region. In fact, it is already doing so in its daily clashes with the powerful Lebanese Resistance group, Hezbollah.
Therefore, the Israeli attack on the consulate, considered a sovereign territory according to international norms, can only mean one thing: escalation.
Why does Israel want to escalate?
The Israeli government has lost its war in Gaza, according to Israeli political analyst Nadav Eyal, writing in Yedioth Ahronoth on April 8.
“The entire failure is rooted in the failed politics (of the Israeli government – PC). War is not won just by killing,” he wrote.
Eyal is merely one of many Israeli voices who have reached this conclusion after six months of a relentless Israeli genocide, which killed tens of thousands of Palestinians, but failed to defeat their resistance.
This view is now shared widely in the US, with the likes of New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman arguing that Tel Aviv’s strategy in the Gaza Strip has locked Israel “into a politically unwinnable war”:
Even US President Joe Biden, who has served as the main enabler to Israel’s genocidal war, has now admitted that he does not agree with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s approach to Gaza, calling it “a mistake”.
All of these statements are now the direct outcome of elaborate intelligence estimates, not unsubstantiated political views.
It follows that Netanyahu knows this well. But for the embattled Israeli leader, a defeat in Gaza means Israel’s greatest defeat in its military history.
It also means his demise as a politician, and possibly future imprisonment. Thus the need to escalate, with the hope that an Iranian retaliation would force the US to intervene, again, on behalf of Israel.