How Iran attacks exposed Israel’s weakness
A missile is launched during a military exercise in Isfahan, Iran, 28 October 2023
David Hearst writes in Middle East Eye on 15 April 2024:
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu knew exactly what he was doing when he ordered the attack on the Iranian consulate in Damascus two weeks ago, killing Iran’s top soldier Brigadier General Mohammad Reza Zahedi, among other Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) commanders.
This attack went well beyond the existing tactics of limiting the arms flow to Hezbollah, the Lebanese movement, or pushing back Iranian-backed groups from its northern border.
This was an attempt to eliminate the Iranian leadership in Syria.
After six months, the war in Gaza is going badly. Israeli ground forces are facing stubborn Palestinian resistance which shows no sign of surrendering or fleeing, amid the biblical scale of destruction and the real suffering of its people.
If anything, the mood among Hamas fighters has hardened. They feel they have survived the worst and have nothing to lose. The people of Gaza have not turned against them and the occupation of Rafah, they claim, would make no difference to them. They pour scorn on Israel counting Hamas’ strength in battalions. After such an onslaught, they have a limitless supply of recruits and weapons.
Multiple messages
As Israel’s offensive in Gaza stalls, opposition to Netanyahu’s leadership is mounting and there is real pressure to strike a deal that would start returning the hostages alive.
The differences with his chief backer, US President Joe Biden, are now out in the open and he is rapidly losing world opinion. Israel, under Netanyahu’s stewardship, has become a pariah state.
Once again, Israel needed to play the victim, to sustain the myth that it is fighting for its existence. What better time for Netanyahu, the gambler, to throw the dice and attack an Iranian consulate, knowing full well what that meant?
The US also knew what Netanyahu was doing, which was to try to drag America into an attack on Iran for at least the third time in 14 years. That is why the US told the Iranians directly they had nothing to do with the strike and only knew about it when the planes were in the air.
Iran bided its time. It saw what happened in the Security Council, when a statement drafted by Russia condemning the consulate attack was vetoed by the US, the UK and France. It then said it would not strike Israel if there was a ceasefire in Gaza. This, too, was ignored. Then every western country told Iran not to strike Israel. Biden had one word of advice for Iran: “Don’t”.
When it came, the strike was carefully choreographed to deliver a number of messages to the US, Israel and the Arab region.
Tehran wanted to establish a precedent that it could hit Israel directly without triggering a full-scale war. It wanted to tell Israel that it could hit it. It wanted to tell the US that Iran was a power in the Gulf that was here to stay and which controlled the Strait of Hormuz. It wanted to tell every Arab regime that kowtows to Israel that the same could happen to them.