Iran Enabled Benjamin Netanyahu. That's a Bad, Bad Thing.

Some initial thoughts on Iran's escalatory-but-not-too-escalatory attack.

Photo by Marek Studzinski on Unsplash

In retrospect it was fitting that I was watching Alex Garland’s Civil War as Iran launched more than 150 ballistic and cruise missiles at Israel, an attack that resulted in “very little damage” but was nonetheless a big f**king deal. The missile strikes were a significant escalation of the Iranian-Israeli conflict from warfare-by-proxy and warfare-in-third-party countries to an out-and-out direct attack from Iranian soil onto Israeli soil. Garland’s film is about a lot of things — more on this later in the week — but a key theme is that while some wars might be just, all wars eat the souls of their participants. The Middle East looks like it is about to re-teach this lesson that human beings forget on the regular.

Seriously, I want to envision a way that this conflict de-escalates, but with the current roster of actors I only see one pathway out, and it is not a likely one.

To set the context: ever since the October 7th Hamas assault, Israel and Iran have been engaged in pretty open indirect warfare, with Iran enabling its proxy forces to attack Israeli assets. Iran’s direct attack, however, was in response to Israel’s bombing of an Iranian consulate in Damascus that housed several Quds Force leaders and Revolutionary Guard officials, an attack that, “appeared to signify an escalation of Israel’s targeting of military officials from Iran, which supports militant groups fighting Israel in Gaza, and along its border with Lebanon,” in the words of the Associated Press. The analysis by the Guardian’s Peter Beaumont and Emma Graham-Harrison echoes this point:

While senior Israeli officials have framed this weekend’s Iranian attack as “revealing the true face” of Tehran, the reality is that the proximate cause was Israel’s misjudgment in its strike on an Iranian diplomatic compound in Syria that killed two senior Iranian generals, among others.

After years in which both sides operated within the framework of a largely undeclared set of “rules”, Israel – as analysts have pointed out – bulldozed through every red line to attack a location that Tehran maintains was tantamount to attacking Iranian soil.

“Israel went too far in assassinating the Iranian general, probably, in a diplomatic location,” said Yagil Levy, a professor of military sociology at the Open University of Israel.

“Israel is led by the availability of its weapons systems. And whenever the country or the leadership feels that they have a good intelligence, a good opportunity and available weaponry systems that can do the job, Israel strikes,” he added.

“Israel doesn’t have a really strategic approach … the attempt to identify the [connections] between specific military actions and expected benefits is not in the repertoire of the Israeli leadership.”

It is worth remembering that a lot of Israel’s friends condemned Israel’s attack on Iran’s consulate.

After vowing revenge, why did Iran choose to respond in such a flashy-yet-militarily-inconsequential way? Michael Hirsh’s latest Politico column offers some observations that I share: this attack was calibrated to simultaneously be an escalatory step while also signaling a move short of outright war:

“There is a greater willingness to run risks by Iran than ever before,” said Behnam Ben Taleblu, a senior fellow at the right-leaning Foundation for Defense of Democracies and an expert in Iran’s missile capabilities. “Until now, Iran had never directly targeted Israel from Iranian territory in an overt and attributable fashion,” said Taleblu. “The strike also was the first ballistic missile attack from Iranian territory against a defended target.”

“Iran wanted to break the taboo of targeting Israeli territory,” he said. “After being able to support the October 7 terrorist attack and orchestrate a multi-front proxy campaign against Israel and not have to pay the price, there’s no doubt Tehran was tempted to press its advantage.”

Until now Tehran has signaled that it doesn’t want an all-out war, having restrained its Hezbollah ally in Israel’s north from launching more than sporadic token attacks. But “Iran’s government appears to have concluded that the Damascus strike was a strategic inflection point, where failure to retaliate would carry more downsides than benefits,” said Ali Vaez of the International Crisis Group.

At the same time, Vaez added, Tehran’s choice of weaponry was cautious. “They could have used a much higher number of projectiles, synchronized drones and missiles in a way that would have swarmed the air defense systems, and could have fired their new hypersonic missiles,” he said. “They clearly wanted something spectacular but not fatal.”

And this leads us to how Israel will choose to respond to what is undeniably an escalatory attack. Everyone is calling on Israel not escalate even further — again, including Israel’s allies who were vital to thwarting Iran’s missile attack. At the same time, the far-right elements of Netanyahu’s governing coalition want an immediate response.

What concerns me is that the key decision-maker in all of this remains Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu, a politician who was unpopular before the October 7th Hamas attack and has become even more unpopular since the attack. Netanyahu is a political survivor über alles and Iran has just thrown him a lifeline. That much seems clear in the latest from Politico’s Jamie Dettmer, Gabriel Gavin, and Christian Oliver:

Iran could also hardly have timed it better, throwing Netanyahu a lifeline just as international patience with the right-wing leader was hanging by a thread. Compounding spiraling civilian casualties in Gaza, Netanyahu was pushing back against U.S. President Joe Biden, who wanted him to avoid a full onslaught on the border city of Rafah, and was under extreme pressure over Israel’s killing of seven aid workers from World Central Kitchen.

Tehran looks set to let him off the hook….

Yaakov Amidror, a former national security adviser to Netanyahu, agreed the attack gifted his former boss a golden opportunity.

“Bibi’s been given two good options — and that seldom happens,” Amidror, a retired general and former head of the research department of Israeli military intelligence, told POLITICO.

“He can either go for the head of the octopus, which is Tehran, arguing we have the legitimacy to do so now. Or he can say to the Americans: We understand that you don’t want us to escalate with Iran and we are ready to compromise, but what we want in return is that America will give Israel all the help needed to destroy the military capability of Hamas in Gaza, including in Rafah,” Amidror said….

“This wasn’t symbolic from Iran, it was a major attack,” said Charles Freilich, a former Israeli national security adviser. But he noted that did not make direct retaliation inevitable. “Under normal circumstances, Israel would have to respond to an attack of this nature and scale. But, in this case, Israel may have to go along with American preferences; which certainly goes against some of the fundamental principles of Israel’s national security strategy.”

But a serving Israeli official told POLITICO there would be a response, while still cautioning it would have to be measured avoid an all-out Middle Eastern war. 

That last part sounds promising, and the fact that markets have been sanguine this AM offers the hope that maybe Netanyahu will use this moment to reinforce U.S. ties and not escalate further in a direct attack on Iran. If Biden if forthright to Netanyahu about what the U.S. will and will not support as a response, then maybe Israel can thread the needle and respond without escalating — an unspectacular but fatal response, if you will. And Biden has started to do that very thing.

I really, really want to believe that is true. Unfortunately, the hard-working staff here at Drezner’s World is pretty sure about three things:

1. Israel’s leadership has learned very little from its response to the October 7th attacks on Hamas. So in all likelihood its actions in Gaza will continue to alienate the rest of the world. All the while, Israel’s lack of a day-after plan for Gaza will continue to loom over any possible cessation of military action.

2. Benjamin Netanyahu will always try to gamble for his political resurrection even if the odds are long. A larger war with Iran would be one of those risky gambits.

3. Because Iran represent a near-existential threat to Israel, I am pessimistic about Joe Biden being able to constrain Netanyahu despite his very-frequently-leaked exasperation with Bibi.

Now I could very well be wrong about (2) and (3). And if I am, I will be happy to acknowledge Israel acted in a strategically savvy manner. But let’s be honest: that would represent a fundamental change in how Netanyahu’s government has behaved over the past year. And I just do not see that happening.