Israel and Iran step toward the brink

Iran has sworn that it will answer Israel’s recent airstrike on Tehran’s diplomatic compound in Syria, raising concerns over a wider conflict in the Middle East. In reality, however, the feared regional war has been underway since last fall, driven by a strategic reordering that was decades in the making. Specifically, Iran has been expanding and consolidating its influence in areas around Israel, whose ability to manage the threat from Iranian-backed non-state actors has been weakening. Direct confrontation does not currently suit either side, but their intensifying conflict could accelerate the destabilization of the Arab world – to the advantage of Iran and Sunni Islamists.

The Strike and Its Aftermath

On April 1, an Israeli attack in the Syrian capital flattened a building in Iran’s diplomatic compound, killing a very senior Iranian general and six other officers from the country’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ elite Quds Force.

U.S. and Israeli officials told Axios that Israel notified the Biden administration about the planned strike in only the broadest of terms and with just minutes to spare. Washington also said it had communicated its noninvolvement directly to Tehran, which was apparently unconvinced and relayed its opprobrium to the U.S. through the Swiss and Omani governments. Within hours of the attack, Iran convened its Supreme National Security Council for a late-night session, during which authorities reportedly agreed on their response.

According to Israel, the attack targeted a building next to the Iranian Embassy that the Quds Force was using to threaten Israel’s security. Other reports suggest that the building housed the embassy’s consular affairs section, which does not invalidate the Israeli claim; intelligence agencies everywhere commonly use diplomatic cover to place their operatives abroad. Moreover, ensuring the survival of the Assad regime is the biggest operation of the IRGC’s overseas arm. Iran came to the Syrian regime’s rescue in late 2011, following the Arab Spring uprising and the outbreak of civil war, and today it uses Syrian soil as a base of operations against Israel.

The Israelis have targeted Iranian facilities dozens of times over the years, and by one estimate, they have killed 17 IRGC officers – including senior commanders – since late December. Presumably, the IRGC has been taking steps to enhance its operational security. Although it apparently lacks the capability to protect Quds Force personnel and hardware from airstrikes, Tehran could restrict leadership gatherings to diplomatic facilities to try to deter Israeli attacks. But if this was Iran’s calculation, it evidently underestimated the scale of the threat that Israel perceives and what it is prepared to risk.

More important, the killing of so many senior IRGC officers suggests that Israel had real-time intelligence on their whereabouts.

The Iranians likely suspect elements within the Syrian security establishment of providing the Israelis with intelligence on the movements of their people. As a result, the Iranian-Syrian relationship will suffer. Iran may be more circumspect about its operations in and information sharing with the Syrian regime, which relies on Tehran and its proxies for its own security.

The Strategic Picture

These implications pale in comparison to the dynamic that is emerging in the region as a result of the war in Gaza, which so far has killed tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians and created a humanitarian crisis affecting 2 million more. The Arab states are, at best, secondary players in this crisis.

Turkey has relationships with both sides of the conflict but has been unable to take advantage. Even the United States has been unable to stop the fighting, and its efforts have in fact opened a rift in the U.S.-Israel relationship.

The Middle East has effectively become a battlespace between the Iranians and the Israelis – a natural outcome of the region’s trajectory over the past two decades. The U.S. invasion of Iraq and the 2011 Arab Spring uprisings destabilized many of the region’s autocratic regimes and set up a competition between Tehran and jihadist groups – first al-Qaida and then Islamic State – to fill the strategic vacuums.

The U.S. then stepped in to try to neutralize the transnational Islamist movement, inadvertently helping Iran to consolidate a contiguous sphere of influence all the way to the Eastern Mediterranean.

Meanwhile, the emergence of the Houthis as the dominant force in Yemen gave the Iranians a major outpost at the intersection of the Arabian and Red seas. It also placed Iranian proxies in positions to strike Israel from both the north and the south, as they have done using drones launched from Yemen, Syria and Iraq since the start of the Gaza war. And with Israeli forces busy trying to topple the Hamas regime in Gaza, Hezbollah and Israel have been engaged in increasingly intense clashes along the IsraeliLebanese frontier.

Israel’s loss of international backing for its Gaza campaign, especially in the United States, has emboldened Iran even more. This may make Israel more desperate to counter Iran’s encirclement strategy, leading to more and more aggressive moves and a greater risk of an escalatory spiral.

Nevertheless, the geographic distance between them and the presence of more immediate threats make a sustained war unlikely. Israel will be dealing with Gaza long after any cease-fire, and the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is threatened with popular unrest. Hezbollah and the Houthis also will divert Israeli attention.

For its part, Iran set up its network of proxies in the Arab world so that it could avoid direct military conflict. Its own domestic situation is much worse than Israel’s, and given Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s advanced age, a historic leadership transition could occur at any time. Falling global support for Israel’s actions is also to Iran’s benefit, so it will likely try to avoid making itself the center of controversy and instead permit regional conditions to continue to deteriorate in its favor.

A case in point is the unrest brewing in Jordan, which the Iranians see as an opportunity to expand influence into the Hashemite kingdom and from there to the West Bank, thereby gaining the ability to press Israel from the east.

The question is how Iran can retaliate against Israel to reestablish deterrence without upsetting the favorable regional dynamics. This is always a difficult balance to achieve, and Iran and Israel are already several rungs up the escalatory ladder.

The risk of miscalculation is great, and should either side strike at the other’s territory directly, the region would be plunged into uncharted waters.