Middle East tinderbox — Israel sees war looming with Iran
TEL AVIV, Israel — There have been coups and revolutions, external invasions and proxy conflicts, but the Middle East hasn’t seen a head-to-head war between major regional powers since the 1980s.
There’s a growing risk that one is about to break out in Syria, pitting Israel against Iran.
The Islamic Republic’s forces are entrenching there, after joining the fight to prop up President Bashar Assad. The Jewish state, perceiving a direct threat on its border, is subjecting them to an escalating barrage of airstrikes. Nobody expects those strikes to go unanswered.
The path to escalation is clear, and the rhetoric is apocalyptic. “We will demolish every site where we see an Iranian attempt to position itself,” Israel’s Defense Minister Avigdor Liberman told the London-based Saudi newspaper Elaph, adding that the Iranian regime is “living its final days.”
In Tehran, Hossein Salami, deputy commander of the Revolutionary Guards, said that “100,000 missiles are ready to fly” in Israel’s direction, and warned they could bring about its “annihilation and collapse.”
Iran and Israel have been exchanging threats for decades. What’s different now is that Syria’s civil war, which sucked in both countries, provides a potential battlespace — one that’s much closer to Jerusalem than to Tehran.
Israeli officials say there are 80,000 fighters in Syria who take orders from Iran. As they help Mr. Assad recapture territory, militiamen from Hezbollah have deployed within a few miles of the Golan Heights on Israel’s border. Iran has vowed to avenge its citizens killed by the Israeli airstrikes, and it has plenty of options to do so.
It’s a tinderbox, says Ofer Shelach, a member of the foreign affairs and defense committee in Israel’s parliament. “I’m worried about the possibility that a match ignited in the Golan will light up a war going all the way to the sea.”
Even more troubling is the absence of firefighters.
Israelis lament that Washington has become a bit-part player, unable to impose a Syrian settlement that would guarantee its ally’s security. Absent that, “we can only represent our interests through force,” Mr. Shelach says.
Far from tamping down tensions, President Donald Trump — egged on by Israel — has been ramping them up. By threatening to withdraw next week from the international agreement to curb Iran’s nuclear program, he’s added another volatile element to the regional mix.
The only power with channels open to both sides, and the clout to play mediator, is Russia.
President Vladimir Putin’s intervention in 2015 to shore up Mr. Assad has left Russia as the strongest actor in Syria. Mr. Putin is seeking to impose a peace that would lock in his political gains, so he has every interest in averting any spread of the war.
But that doesn’t mean he’s able or willing to rein in Iran. While Russia has cordial ties with Israel, they’re likely outweighed by the confluence of interests with the Islamic Republic, whose ground forces were crucial to the success of Mr. Putin’s Syrian gambit. Repeatedly threatened with attack or regime-change by its enemies, Iran sees the sympathetic governments in Damascus and Beirut as providing strategic depth.
Now, the Iranians in Syria have graduated from helping Mr. Assad to “building their strategic presence against Israel,” said Paul Salem, senior vice president at the Middle East Institute in Washington. “It appears that neither the Russians nor the Assad regime are in control or can limit these things,” he said. “The situation is highly unstable and highly unmanaged.”
One test of Russia’s ability to manage it may come in southern Syria, where Islamic State and other radical jihadis and rebels still hold territory near Israel’s border — enclaves that are among the likely next targets for Mr. Assad’s advancing army.