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By Johnathan Spyer, Middle East Forum
As the dust settles on the latest confrontation between Israel and Iran in the Middle East, the nature of the Israeli strikes against Tehran this weekend is becoming clear.
It is a mark of the extent to which clashes between these two regional powers have become normalised over the last six months that the details, rather than the fact of the attack itself, are the main subject of focus and discussion.
It should first be noted that what has just taken place is the largest operation against the Islamic Republic of Iran on its own soil in 40 years.
What is taking place now in the Middle East is historic. It is therefore worthwhile to take a moment to look back in time, to better grasp the significance of the present moment.
This confrontation between Iran and Israel has been underway since the very first days of the Islamic Revolution in 1979.
The regime’s first act was the sacking of the Israeli embassy in Teheran in that year by an incited crowd chanting Islamic slogans, and the subsequent handing over of the embassy to the PLO leader Yasser Arafat.
The roots go back still further: to the first stirrings of Islamist agitation in Iran in the 1950s and 60s. Young clerics and activists—such as Navab Safavi, Mostafa Chamran, Ayatollah Hussein-Ali Montazeri, along with the more well known Khomeini and Khamenei—found their way to the emergent Sunni political Islam of the Muslim Brotherhood.
Creating their own Shia and Iranian version of this, they imported it back to their home country and brought it to power.
Hatred of Jews has been there from the start in the Teheran regime. Four long decades of political and proxy warfare against Israel have been its poisoned fruit.
The result has been the collapse of countries across the Arab world, through the insertion of Iranian created proxy deep states.
First Lebanon, then Syria, Iraq, Yemen and the Palestinian project all fell victim to this system.
The intention was and remains the slow bleeding to death of the Jewish state, as part of a larger ambition to establish an Iranian-led alliance of Islamic governance as the key power nexus in the Middle East.
The result of this project can be seen most clearly in Lebanon today, because Lebanon was its earliest target.
Political dysfunction, economic collapse, de facto rule by a brutal Islamist militia, and the launching of war against a more powerful neighbour with the inevitable suffering this entailed are the result of 40 years of Iranian regime activity in that country.
These are the fruits that Iran brings to all the countries in which it is allowed to grow its proxy political and military forces.
This challenge is not limited to the Middle East. Sky News Arabia reported on Saturday that Russia provided Tehran with intelligence data on the upcoming Israeli attack just hours before it commenced.
Iran’s relations with Russia are complex, and laden with the burden of history. But the general trend toward greater cooperation by powers with a common interest in confronting the West is plain, and obvious.
This long war against Israel erupted for the first time onto the conventional level with Iran’s missile and drone raid on Israel on April 14. On October 1, Teheran broadened and deepened the scope of its campaign, with the launch of over 200 ballistic missiles against the Jewish state.
Israel’s response this weekend demonstrates Jerusalem’s superior conventional capacities, striking first at Iranian air defences and then at missile manufacturing and launching sites in Teheran, Khuzestan and Ilam provinces.
Iran has clearly chosen to downplay the damage suffered. An Iranian source informed me that people living close to one of the sites noted that fire trucks and ambulances called to the area were ordered not to use their sirens.
The regime evidently wants to draw a line, understanding that it is bound to come off worst in any further escalation.
This does not, of course, mean that anything is settled. Iran’s long war by proxy against Israel and the regional order remains in motion.
For this unpopular, unsuccessful and in many ways inept regime, this strategy is the one thing that continues to deliver results.
Iran’s preference, clearly, is to now return to the slow bleeding of Israel using dispensable, allied Islamist organisations.
Israel’s lethally effective, high-tech display over Iran’s skies will not change this. The last 48 hours have borne witness to just how alive the broader Iranian and Islamist strategy remains—with four Israeli soldiers killed in south Lebanon, two civilians killed by Hezbollah rocket fire on the town of Majdal Krum, and 35 people wounded in a suspected terror attack at Glilot Junction, north of Tel Aviv.
Israel’s problem is that it is currently prevented, by pressure from allies rather than enemies, from utilising its conventional superiority.
A truly killer blow could be delivered to Iran that might actually stop its current strategy. But Israel’s allies oppose any such move, and Israel concurs.
This is reflected in the limited scope and nature of the targets struck on the night of October 25.
For as long as these restrictions remain in place, or for as long as the Jewish state chooses to adhere to them, we are unfortunately in for a continuation of the situation where Iran is permitted to continue its lethal war by proxy, even as it gets the periodic bloody nose.
The problem relates ultimately to an absence of will, perhaps partly on Israel’s own part, but mainly on the part of its allies, most importantly the US. This is unfortunate.
There is an old phrase that Polish patriots used to employ, generally in vain, to exhort their western allies to understand the nature of the common challenge.
The phrase is, “For your freedom and ours.” These five words also fit Israel’s fight against Iran and its Islamist enemies, who bring slavery and ruin wherever they achieve power. It is past time for the West to understand this, and to draw the appropriate conclusions.
