AS`AD AbuKHALIL: Iran’s Crucial Decision on Israel

Tehran will eventually need to address Tel Aviv, maybe even more so after the pager terrorist attack in Lebanon. But Iran will do so on its own terms, not on the timeline dictated by its enemies. 

By As`ad AbuKhalil
Special to Consortium News

Iran faces probably its most difficult decision since its 1979 victory in the Iranian Revolution.

Israel has launched strikes deep into the heart of Tehran and Beirut’s southern suburbs, significantly strengthening its strategic position.

[On Tuesday, Israel was accused by U.S. officials of planting explosives in pagers made in Hungary, which were sold to Lebanon and then remotely detonating them, killing 12 people and injuring more than 2,700. Hezbollah vowed revenge on Israel.]

Before the pager terrorist attack, Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah conceded that the two earlier strikes on Iran and Lebanon were an Israeli achievement, a rare concession from any Arab leader. 

But Israel’s bold and risky aggression must be understood in the context of Tel Aviv’s strategic failure to eliminate Hamas in its war on Gaza.

Israel’s Free Hand to Kill

Israel has succeeded in exterminating tens of thousands of Palestinians and rendering much of Gaza uninhabitable. A state that has historically shown little compunction for ethnically cleansing the native Palestinian population in favor of European immigrants, has once again prioritized its occupation’s security over humanitarian concerns and international law. 

As long as Israel enjoys unconditional American support, it knows it can violate international norms and laws of war, and perhaps even resort to the deployment of nuclear weapons — with U.S. backing.

Since the assassination of Qasem Soleimani, the former chief of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, during the Trump administration, Iran has struggled to reassert its sovereignty and project deterrence against Israel. 

Iran’s relatively open society presents vulnerabilities, unlike Saddam Hussein’s tightly controlled Iraq, for instance, where foreigners were thoroughly scrutinized or banned altogether. Iran’s tourism industry and dual citizenships have allowed the Mossad to infiltrate Iranian society and to recruit spies and saboteurs. 

Several assassination attempts, some successful, have targeted Iranian scientists and regime figures. Additionally, Israel and Saudi Arabia have collaborated to fund and support domestic ethnic opposition groups and the terrorist organization Mujahideen-e-Khalq (MEK), which was previously supported by Saddam Hussein’s regime and is now backed by the Mossad, the Saudi regime, and the Israel lobby in Washington.  (The U.S. once classified it as a terrorist organization for its resort to indiscriminate bombings, but Israel managed to have it delisted).

Iran, a nation with diverse ethnicities and religious groups, has long seen its adversaries exploit these internal divisions. These enemies leverage inequalities to stir unrest and recruit spies for the Mossad and other hostile forces. 

The U.S., under a president with questionable mental acuity, continues to support Israel unconditionally, even as Israel’s mass violence against Palestinians escalates. There seem to be no red lines for the White House, perhaps even if Israel were to resort to nuclear weapons against its enemies.

Iran does not wish to confront Israel directly while the U.S. is prepared to deploy warships across the region in Israel’s defense. Israel’s need for direct U.S., European, and even Arab military intervention to defend itself against non-state actors in Palestine and Lebanon exposes its own strategic vulnerabilities.

Israel used to be able to take on several Arab armies without external military support and now it cries for help from NATO when threatened by the relatively small armies of Hamas and Hezbollah. 

Political Dissent in Iran

The recent Iranian presidential election revealed significant dissatisfaction among the Iranian population. Opposition to the regime is no longer confined to young college students in major cities. In this election, a candidate aligned, openly, with the Iranian Revolutionary Guards faced off against a representative of the so-called reformist opposition, and the latter emerged victorious. 

The regime faces a crisis of legitimacy as the revolutionary credentials that once sustained it wane over time. Economic reform and job creation have become the government’s top priorities — more important even than retaliation against Israel.

Furthermore, recent visitors to Iran report strong manifestations of dissatisfaction among the population regarding generous Iranian support for the Palestinian struggle. Many Iranians maintain that the needs of the Iranian people should be prioritized over the military requirements of Arab resistance against Israel.

Foreign policy is a big priority for the regime but less so for the populace, and we should not rule out the possibility that Western propaganda has actually succeeded inside Iran as it succeeded in the former Soviet bloc countries during the Cold War.
Iran under the Shah was not only unconcerned over the plight of Palestinians but the Shah was a very close ally of Israel and helped fund and arm its clients in the region including the Phalange and their allies in Lebanon — as early as 1958 during the mini-civil war (and the later civili war in 1975). 

It was Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini personally who injected Palestine into the core of the ruling doctrine of the government and even of the religious-political ideology that came to power in Iran.

Some elements of the reformist opposition, who are aligned with the duo of former President Hassan Rouhani and former Foreign Minister Javad Zarif, believe that if Iran were to make further concessions, the U.S. will lift the sanctions and usher in economic prosperity. 

The Rouhani government operated under this assumption, negotiating a nuclear deal that ultimately did not serve Iran’s interests. Foolishly, they agreed to the pact in the final days of the Obama administration without securing a durable, U.S. Senate-approved treaty. As a result, when Donald Trump took office, he easily dismantled the agreement, despite its earlier endorsement by a United Nations Security Council resolution with U.S. assent.

Iran’s Decision

Iran must take all these factors into consideration when contemplating how to responded to its sovereignty being directly violated by Israel multiple times over the past year — first with the attack on its consulate in Damascus, and more recently with the assassination of a Hamas leader in a government guesthouse in Tehran. 

While Iran’s response to the first violation was symbolic but strong, a similar symbolic response to the second could harm Iran’s strategic position with Israel. Iran wants to send a clear message of deterrence but does not want to escalate into an all-out war.

It also naively fears that Israel could drag the U.S. into a military confrontation with Iran. 

Although it’s possible that a second Trump administration, or the present one, might support Israel in an attack on Iran, it is highly unlikely that the U.S. would participate in a full-scale war against Iran, especially after the failures of recent U.S. military interventions in the Middle East.

As former Defense Secretary Robert Gates famously warned once at West Point, any president who considers starting a new war in the Middle East should have his head examined.

For Iran, relying too heavily on its regional allies to respond to Israeli aggression could damage its standing in the Arab world. It must respond on its own terms, or its regional influence will suffer. 

Gulf media outlets have already accused Iran of avoiding direct confrontation with Israel, even though there is no geographical border between the two nations. These same outlets rarely miss an opportunity to undermine support for Iran on behalf of Israel. 

This war, involving key Iranian allies Hamas and Hezbollah, is one of the longest in the history of the Arab-Israeli conflict (perhaps with the possible exception of the war of attrition between Egypt and Israel, 1968 and 1970). 

While Iran remains the only country willing to risk its own stability and economic well-being to provide military and financial support to Arab resistance groups, there is growing pressure from Arab public opinion for Iran to take more direct action against Israel if it is to benefit from its continued support for the Palestinian cause.

Iran can’t leave its sovereignty violated repeatedly by Israel, in both Syria and Iran.  This is a major vulnerability that the “resistance axis” has to address at some point, and probably in coordination with the Russian government, which still remains aligned with Netanyahu over Israeli aggression in Syria.

Iran will eventually need to address Israel. But it will do so on its own terms, not on the timeline dictated by its enemies. 

Iran will have to decide: how to protect Iranian sovereignty and strategic deterrence without starting a regional war with Israel and instigating a direct U.S. military intervention against the Islamic republic. 

Thus it has little choice but to wait out this period of intense U.S. attention and presence in the waters of the Middle East. 

As`ad AbuKhalil is a Lebanese-American professor of political science at California State University, Stanislaus. He is the author of the Historical Dictionary of Lebanon (1998), Bin Laden, Islam and America’s New War on Terrorism (2002), The Battle for Saudi Arabia (2004) and ran the popular The Angry Arab blog. He tweets as @asadabukhalil

The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.

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