A dangerous escalation in the Middle East
For months, there have been concerns that the worsening Gaza crisis might push the shadow war between Israel and Iran into open conflict, said Samer Al-Atrush in The Times. On Saturday night, those fears were spectacularly realised when Iran launched more than 300 drones and missiles at Israel. The vast majority of the weapons were intercepted before reaching Israeli airspace, with the help of the US, the UK, and neighbouring Jordan; Israel’s air defences destroyed almost all the rest. The lone casualty was a seven-year-old Arab-Israeli girl, who was injured by falling debris. Iran declared that it had achieved its stated goal – a necessary retaliation for a presumed Israeli strike on its consulate in Damascus this month that killed two leading Iranian generals and five other soldiers – and that it now considered the matter closed. “A promise fulfilled”, read a banner on Iranian state TV, alongside a fiery scene that was actually old footage of Chilean vineyards in flames. President Biden urged the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, not to escalate hostilities in response to the successfully neutralised attack, telling him: “You got a win, take the win.”
There was an unmistakable element of “political theatre” to Iran’s strike, said Lt Col Stuart Crawford in the Daily Express. Tehran gave neighbouring countries 72 hours’ notice of the raid and chose to lead the attack with slow-moving drones, giving Israel and its allies ample time to prepare for the onslaught. True, said Andrew Neil in the Daily Mail, but you don’t target a country with an assault of this scale “unless you’re aiming to cause a lot of death and destruction”. That it failed to achieve this should not be a factor in determining Israel’s response. Can you imagine Britain agreeing to sit on its hands and “just move on” if we’d been targeted with a lethal barrage like this?
Israel faces a difficult choice, said Alon Pinkas in The Independent. Retaliating in kind against the attack – the Islamic Republic’s first-ever direct strike on Israel – would be a dangerous escalation. Yet failing to offer a firm response would “set in place a new paradigm”, that Iran can attack Israel on its own soil with impunity. Israel has no choice but to strike back hard, said Elliot Kaufman in The Wall Street Journal. We’ve seen over recent years how it has come to accept occasional rocket fire from Iran’s proxies, Hamas and Hezbollah, as an unfortunate fact of life, and how this has progressively emboldened those groups. It mustn’t make the same mistake again. On Sunday, the head of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard said: “From now on, if the Zionist regime anywhere attacks our interests, assets, figures and citizens, we will reciprocally attack it from Iran.” Israel cannot afford those to become the new “rules of the game”.
Israel has every right to defend itself and “re-establish its capacity for deterrence”, said Bret Stephens in The New York Times, but it would be well advised not to rush into anything. A punitive Israeli attack now would lack the element of surprise. Better for Israel to bide its time and stick with the clandestine forms of warfare that have helped keep Tehran “paranoid, vulnerable and guessing. It’s the sort of place where a wise nation wants its enemy to be.” For the Israelis to escalate hostilities with Iran would be a big mistake, said William Hague in The Times. They’ve proved that they can defend themselves, and nobody doubts that they could “hit back massively against a full-on Iranian attack”. Why needlessly jeopardise the alliances that bolster Israel’s security?
“Iran, like its ally Russia, no longer acts like a rational calculator in the game of deterrence”
Israel should instead seek to make the most of this moment, said Attila Somfalvi on Ynetnews. The focus is off Gaza for a change, and the world has just watched Israel successfully fend off a vicious attack by a much larger aggressor, with the help of moderate allied countries in the Middle East. There is “huge potential here to turn all the spotlights towards Tehran, the global capital of terror”. Israel should not “squander” its replenished stores of international goodwill lightly, agreed Paul Mason in The Spectator. An Israeli counter-strike wouldn’t have the desired effect in any case. “Iran, like its ally Russia, no longer acts like a rational calculator in the game of deterrence.” They both feed on chaos. “The more states that fail, the more tit-for-tat force replaces the language of diplomacy”, the more these regimes like it – because it all serves to weaken the international rules-based order. Israel, and the wider West, must get wise to their tactics and avoid any kneejerk responses to provocations. “De-escalation is not appeasement: it is smart geopolitics.”