Israel’s strikes on Iran, which began early on Friday morning and were aimed at demolishing Iranian nuclear enrichment facilities, weren’t a surprise. American officials had been openly predicting them in recent days, and US diplomatic personnel were being moved out of countries near Iran, in particular Iraq. The only question, which has now been answered, was when exactly Benjamin Netanyahu would decide to attack.
In the end, the Israeli prime minister’s strike was characteristically audacious but also risky, militarily and politically. Iran has a large array of missiles and drones with which to hit back. Despite the strikes on its missile bases, Iran was able to launch ballistic missiles at Israel late on Friday in retaliation. And Netanyahu has a full-on war afoot in Gaza, one that has yet to yield the outcome he wants: Hamas’s destruction and the return of all Israeli hostages. Add to that Israel’s continuing intermittent attacks on Syria, Lebanon and Yemen, and the relentless missile attacks it has faced from the Iran-backed Houthis in Yemen. Netanyahu has also taken a big political risk by attacking Iran despite knowing that Donald Trump opposed it and was still in negotiations with Tehran toward an agreement to end the Iranian uranium enrichment program — talks that Netanyahu was opposed to. (Whether Trump will ultimately settle for a scaled-down enrichment arrangement as part of a regional consortium remains unclear, even though he has insisted on zero enrichment.) Indeed, the American president apparently told the prime minister that Israel would be on its own if it chose to strike Iran. Yet Netanyahu took the plunge and chose to strike anyway.
You’d think that under these circumstances Netanyahu would have been ill-advised to take on Iran, a far more powerful foe than any other that Israel faces. But, then again, the Israeli prime minister has never lacked in audacity. The most plausible explanation for his decision to proceed is that he sensed that despite the obstacles that lie ahead, the US and Iran might somehow manage to finesse their disagreements on Iran’s uranium enrichment program and strike a deal. Rightly or wrongly Netanyahu, despite Ayatollah Khamenei’s pledges that Iran would never build nuclear weapons, remains convinced that the emergence of a nuclear-armed Iran is a question of when, not if; and he has been bent on preventing that outcome, convinced that his objective can only be achieved by military means. Assuming that these were indeed the prime minister’s calculations, a US-Iran deal, which Trump still seems determined to seek, would have deep-sixed his longstanding goal to destroy Iran’s nuclear programme — and, as part of that endeavour, ideally even precipitate the fall of Iran’s regime, which he considers the primary threat to Israel’s security.
Netanyahu has also gambled politically by effectively defying Trump, possibly displeasing him. That matters because US goodwill is still critical for Israel. No country comes close to the US in its political, economic, and military support; the latter two forms of American assistance have totalled $300 billion-plus dollars since 1948, the year Israel achieved statehood. Ideally, Netanyahu would have wanted his attack on Iran to be a joint operation supplemented by the US’s massive military power and formidable intelligence resources. A combined attack would have increased the chances, remote though they are, that Iran’s nuclear enrichment infrastructure, some of it concealed deep underground, would have been destroyed, if not totally than substantially. In such a scenario, Israel, now politically more isolated than it has ever been because of the carnage and starvation it has caused in Gaza, would have had political cover, courtesy of Washington.
Netanyahu appears to have bet that facing Iran’s retaliation, Trump will come under immense, even irresistible, pressure from Israel’s many influential allies within the US not to leave it unprotected. Those calls are certainly already being made. And so Netanyahu has put Trump in a bind and, for now at least, put any potential US-Iran deal in jeopardy.
Yet the prime minister’s gamble may still pay off. For now, Trump, not one to be upstaged, seems to have set aside whatever irritation he may be feeling toward the Netanyahu and, instead, chosen to warn Iran to accept a nuclear deal on his terms if it wants to avoid even more punishment. The president is miscalculating; Iran will not agree to dismantle its nuclear enrichment facilities completely and has made that clear repeatedly, including during the ongoing talks with the US.
The Israeli strike had obviously been long in the making — for many months at least — because it killed several top-level Iranians within a few hours. They include Hossein Salami, commander-in-chief of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps and other top generals, as well as Ali Shamkhani, Ayatollah Khamenei’s top foreign policy adviser and a long-time senior figure in the Iranian national security apparatus. The strikes also killed at least six important nuclear scientists, including Fereydoon Abbasi, Mohammad Mehdi Tehranchi and Seyed Amir Hossein Feqhi.
This list is perforce incomplete; other Iranian luminaries almost certainly remain on Israel’s target list. Clearly Israel had a long-running, well-planned intelligence operation running inside Iran, one that likely reached right into the upper echelons of the Iranian government. Once this campaign ends, a witch-hunt will commence in Iran to get at the root of what has been a colossal, embarrassing intelligence failure.
Particularly in light of these losses, but also as a matter of national pride, Iran was always going to retaliate. First there was the drone attacks, which Israel repelled; then the ballistic missile strikes later on Friday, some of which hit Tel Aviv, killing and injuring civilians. We should not be surprised if Iran announces its departure from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, thereby openly putting itself on a path to build nuclear weapons — the very outcome Netanyahu sought to prevent with this attack. Yet Iran faces a tough choice: whether to ditch the negotiations with the US by striking Israel in full force or to respond in a measured manner so as to continue the talks with Washington in hopes of cutting a deal that would leave it with a limited enrichment capacity and lift at least some of the crippling economic sanctions imposed by the US. Hitting back hard – particularly if that hit included American assets in the region — would increase the probability that Trump will be forced to jump into the fray to defend Israel. That would make Iran’s military predicament far worse.
On another front, Netanyahu, who just survived a no-confidence vote in Israel’s parliament, the Knesset, has, for now anyway, silenced his critics. Attacking the prime minister during a war with Iran — the archenemy — won’t work to the advantage of his political opponents; Israelis, even those who dislike Netanyahu, will now rally around the flag in the midst of a new war. Whether this brazen strategy of Netanyahu’s works in his favour in the longer run depends on how much damage Israel suffers, not just militarily but politically, with respect to its relationship with the US.
If Trump ends up being dragged into this war, he won’t soon forget, let alone forgive, what Netanyahu has done. The president is famous for holding grudges but has also never quite warmed to Netanyahu, ironically perhaps because of the similar personality traits the two leaders share, notably outsize egos. Still, the US is not likely to break with Israel and Netanyahu knows that. Whatever damage is done to the relationship will prove temporary and minimal, Trump’s mercurial temperament notwithstanding. Moreover, we cannot dismiss the possibility that, from the outset, Trump may have approved, even if only with the equivalent of a wink and a nod, Netanyahu’s decision to strike Iran. The president may have calculated that an Israeli attack would have put pressure on Iran and forced it to accept a zero-enrichment agreement, which he could then take credit for — but without being seen as having colluded with Israel or having to participate in its war.
But elsewhere, Israel’s attack on Iran will be condemned, and rightly so. Netanyahu has launched a war of choice, not of necessity, against a country that, though certainly a major adversary, was not taking any steps that suggested, even remotely, that it was gearing up to attack Israel. Seen thus, Netanyahu’s defense that Israel had no choice but to launch a preemptive attack —which means a response in advance to an enemy’s self-evident preparations to wage war — won’t play well internationally, including in Europe, particularly given the human toll that Israel’s war in Gaza continues to take. This makes his defiance of Trump all the more dicey. What is still unclear is how Trump will handle Israel’s rush to war despite his opposition.
For now, this much can be said with certainty about this latest war in the Middle East: nothing is certain. Pundits and prophets should be leery about offering sure-fire predictions.
[See also: Labour MPs are revolting over Gaza]
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