Iran and Israel’s War Comes Out of the Shadows

Last night, Israel struck a military airbase near the city of Isfahan in Iran. Iranian officials also claimed to have shot down small drones near the northern city of Tabriz. Despite these strikes constituting a direct and overt attack on Iranian territory, the Israeli assault appears limited so far. Although Iranian leaders have promised retribution to “the tiniest act of aggression” on their soil, their response, for the time being, seems muted. The news of the bombings and their small scale sparked initial assessments that both sides might be seeking to climb down from their spiraling conflict.

Still, the latest episodes in this cycle of bomb-and-response represent a new, more troubling phase in the ongoing clash in the Middle East. Last week, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps—the preeminent branch of Iran’s armed forces and a pillar of its ruling regime—launched a mix of over 300 low-flying flying drones, cruise missiles, and high-altitude ballistic missiles in an attempt to overwhelm Israel’s defenses and cause severe damage to military targets in the country. The attack showcased Iran’s growing might and its willingness to strike at its adversaries. It was also a testament to the dominance of policy hawks within Iran’s security establishment. That faction, which both controls the upper echelons of the IRGC and prevails among young, up-and-coming officers, has had an outsize imprint on Iran’s foreign policy for decades and has become especially influential since the assassination of Qasem Soleimani, the commander of the IRGC’s external operations wing, in 2020, by the United States. Its adherents reject pragmatism in dealings with the West, remain deeply committed to the Islamic Revolution’s founding ideological principles, and are particularly invested in using Iran’s military power and proxy network to advance their long-term objectives of destroying Israel as a Jewish state and ending U.S. influence in the Middle East.

The strikes marked the first time that Iran had directly attacked Israeli territory. And yet many outside observers saw in Iran’s attack a degree of prudence. The salvo, they claimed, was an act of restraint, one meant primarily to signal resolve rather than cause damage. After all, Tehran had telegraphed its intentions, alerting its neighbors days earlier that it would respond to Israel through military force. Because 99 percent of its weapons failed to hit their targets—they were mostly intercepted by Israel and its Western partners, and a sizable proportion (perhaps up to half) of the 110 ballistic missiles that Iran fired at Israel did not properly launch or failed en route—some outside observers concluded that Iran’s attack had never been intended to do any damage at all. In this view, Iran’s actions were meant primarily to deter Israel from broadening the current conflagration. Tehran was showcasing both its strength and its self-control.

But such thinking underplays a more consequential dimension of Iran’s response: that it responded overtly at all and at such immense scale. Iranian decision-makers could have chosen to keep waging their conflict with Israel through existing means and practices, such as through covert action or proxies, or through a more discreet missile attack. A limited attack would still have signaled Iran’s resolve while not straining the IRGC’s capabilities and—as has become the case—exposing its limitations. Iran went the other way, launching an unprecedented attack and employing nearly every type of weapon it possesses that could conceivably reach Israel. Such an action did not exhibit calculated restraint. On the contrary, the operation revealed the ascendance of the IRGC’s hawks in Tehran and the depth of their desire to take Israel head-on.

THE SHADOW WAR

Iran’s barrage was ostensibly retaliatory. It followed an Israeli strike in Damascus two weeks earlier that killed 16 people, including eight IRGC officers, in a building associated with Iran’s consulate. Tehran considered the Israeli attack a brazen act of escalation, but in truth Israel has struck at IRGC positions in Syria hundreds of times before. That campaign, which Israel has waged since 2013, has sought to discourage the IRGC from cementing its military presence in the country and to disrupt the supply of weapons to Hezbollah and other anti-Israeli militant groups in the Levant. Syria has therefore long been a frontline in the undeclared war between Iran and Israel—a conflict that began with the radicalization of Iranian foreign policy following the 1979 revolution and gained momentum as Iran’s influence spread across the region in the wake of the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003 and the tumult sparked by the Arab Spring nearly a decade later.

The Iranian-Israeli conflict has played out mostly in the shadows of the Middle East’s larger wars. Iran’s principal mode of waging this fight has been to supply advanced weaponry—especially missiles and drones—to militant groups hostile to Israel in the Gaza Strip and in Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, and Yemen. Iran has further sought to provide lighter arms, such as automatic rifles and grenades, to militants in the West Bank. Tehran wants to destabilize Israel by ensnaring it in persistent conflict and surrounding it with enemies that it cannot easily defeat through military action. The IRGC’s support for the Palestinian militant group Hamas has been a cornerstone of that larger strategy. That support helped hone Hamas’s military capabilities, providing it with the technology and know-how to produce an extensive arsenal of rockets and missiles and to deploy that weaponry tactically and strategically. Hamas’s murderous insurrection on October 7 was in many ways the fruit of the IRGC’s covert campaign. The war that followed has highlighted the nearly insurmountable challenge that Israel faces. A brutal Israeli offensive has failed to snuff out Hamas, while the killing of tens of thousands of Palestinians has earned Israel global condemnation.

To counter Iran’s regional game plan, Israel has tried to impose costs on the regime both abroad and at home. The focal point of that campaign has been covert Israeli activity in Iran. Attacks, presumably conducted by Israel’s Mossad intelligence agency, have included bombings inside Iran’s most guarded nuclear and military facilities and assassinations of high-ranking officials, officers, and scientists. Perhaps the most audacious of those operations was the murder of Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, the IRGC’s top nuclear official, who was killed in 2020 by a remote-controlled machine gun as he returned to Tehran from holiday. Israel’s ability to conduct such precise and devastating operations has repeatedly exposed the fragility of Iran’s internal security. Each attack was more humiliating than the next, especially since Iran seemed unable to prevent them and was incapable of responding to Israel in kind.

The Iranian attack did not exhibit calculated restraint, but rather a desire to take Israel head on.

Although Iran strove to punish Israel through tit-for-tat attacks of its own, such as through attempts to assassinate prominent Israelis abroad and by attacking Israeli shipping, it relented from lashing out against Israel directly. That was partly out of concern that doing so could prompt a wider war with Israel and the United States. Many in the IRGC would welcome such a fight, but the prevailing consensus within the regime has long been that even though it might survive such a conflict, it could not win one. More pragmatic elements within the regime also sought to downplay the significance of the Israeli attacks within Iran. Although the successes of Israel’s shadow war were embarrassing for Iran, Israel’s operations were limited, did not meaningfully hurt Iran’s strategic programs, and could not fundamentally challenge Iran’s regional behavior. Guided by the cautiousness of the supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, who has emphasized the long game and considers Iran’s victory over its enemies to be inevitable, these relative pragmatists viewed the status quo as favoring Iran more than Israel. Before October 7, Iran’s regional campaign was progressing well: its regional clients were ascendant, the United States’ grip on the Middle East was slipping, and Israel’s political divisions were steadily pushing the country toward crisis. Iran’s conflict with Israel remained loosely within mutually constructed parameters and was manageable. As long as Iran was willing to suffer the costs of the game, it would continue to hold the advantage over its opponents.

The October 7 attacks and the war in Gaza strengthened Iran’s hand. Israel had suffered an unprecedented and humiliating defeat, its much-lauded defenses proving weaker than anybody imagined. Its subsequent bloody campaign in Gaza has revived support for the Palestinian cause both in the region and around the world. Sympathy for Israel has dissipated, particularly in the West, where denunciation of Israel’s war and its treatment of the Palestinians is becoming more voluble. Iranian officials were not in any rush to help end the war in Gaza, either by providing greater military aid to the Palestinians or by confronting Israel directly. The war, in fact, suited Iran’s agenda. Even though it endangered Hamas, Israel’s war was steadily harming the country’s image, exposing the hypocrisy of its Western backers, and resurrecting the Palestinian issue as a popular cause. Moreover, Iran did not need to intervene, because it could instead enlist its proxies to conduct mostly symbolic attacks on its behalf. To that end, Hezbollah has been routinely shelling northern Israel, and the Houthis in Yemen have launched numerous unsuccessful missile and drone strikes against Israel. Neither has dented Israel’s war effort, even if the Houthis repeated attacks off the coast of Yemen have succeeded in disrupting global shipping.

Israel’s April attack against the IRGC in Damascus forced Iranian officials to make a more difficult choice. Because the attack was perceived to have hit an Iranian consulate building, Iran’s leaders considered it to be escalatory. The regime had a decision to make: either refrain from overt retaliation and continue to benefit from the present situation or respond to Israel with force and walk into a potential trap. Restraint would allow Iran to earn sympathy from Israel’s critics, to keep the spotlight on the atrocities in Gaza, and to watch Israel’s government sink deeper into a quagmire. Retaliating openly and with force would help Iran restore a more favorable status quo by discouraging Israel from again straying from the tacit parameters the two parties had established through the shadow war.

Both routes carried risks. Restraint might encourage Israel to up the ante, forcing Iran’s hand at a later date. Retaliation would also be risky. An overt Iranian attack could heal the rift between Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and U.S. President Joe Biden. Iranian military action could also distract the world from Israeli conduct in Gaza, deflect blame from Israel, and trigger a wider conflict. A war between Israel and Iran could also easily draw in the United States, and if that were to happen, Iran’s chances of success would severely diminish.

NO TOUCHBACKS

The regime’s move to retaliate overtly, and with an immense show of force, has signaled that decision-makers are no longer convinced by the logic of restraint. Policy hawks in the IRGC have advocated for a muscular response to Israel for a long time, and finally they convinced Khamenei to greenlight significant military action. The notion that Iran intentionally launched a weak attack does not stand up to scrutiny. Iran hoped to land an impressive blow against Israel. It gains nothing by revealing its own weaknesses while underlining Israel’s strengths. If Iran had wanted to simply send a message, it could have done so with far fewer munitions and at far less cost. As with all of its recent acts of military aggression, such as those that followed the killing of Soleimani, Iran combined the boldness of overt action with diplomacy aimed at forestalling or limiting retribution; it wants to have its cake and eat it, too. Knowing that the United States seeks to avoid being drawn back into a Middle Eastern war, and that Israel cannot easily conduct a war against Iran on its own, Tehran sought to provide both its rivals an off-ramp. By telegraphing its intentions, directing its strikes at only select military targets instead of population centers, and announcing afterward that those attacks would conclude its retaliatory actions, Iran hoped to stave off an Israeli military retort.

But Israel may not want to give Iran the last word. Soon after Iran’s attack, Israel announced that it would respond through some sort of military action of its own. The first, and perhaps only, volley of that immediate retaliation appeared to come in a predawn operation on April 19 targeting an Iranian military base near Isfahan. The small-scale assault, involving a limited number of missiles or drones, succeeded in penetrating Iran’s air defenses but also seemed to message a desire for an end to the escalatory cycle. Even so, Tehran will have to decide whether it will follow through on its threat to retaliate with even greater force should Israel strike Iranian territory. In the aftermath of the attack, however, Iranian state-affiliated media personalities took to social media and dismissed the action as insignificant, with some suggesting that it had not involved serious weapons at all, but rather micro-quadcopters—nothing to get alarmed about.

Israel’s minimal retaliation might succeed in staving off another exchange of overt hostilities, at least for a time. But what is missing here is any option that would in a definitive way end the conflict between the two countries. That is because this conflict is a war of choice, one largely imposed on Israel—and the region—by Iran. There are only two certain off-ramps: Israel could concede to Iran and end the project of the Jewish state or Iran could reverse its policies toward Israel. Solving the Palestinian issue, such as through a two-state solution, could also undermine Iran’s campaign and gradually encourage it to shift course. None of those things are likely to happen any time soon, which suggests that the conflict will persist.

As long as Iran continues to press in its strategy of encircling Israel, and funneling advanced weapons to militant proxies that threaten Israeli population centers, Israel will be compelled to pursue its countervailing campaign against Iran. The longer that dynamic continues, the more likely open warfare between the two countries becomes. Such a war could not be fought by Iran and Israel in isolation. It would invariably draw in the United States, Iran’s regional proxies, and perhaps even neighboring states. It would range across a large swath of the region and, because of the many actors involved, would probably not be short. In truth, whether in a week, a year, or another decade, an open war between Iran and Israel in some form is all but inevitable. Indeed, the region may already be on the precipice, awaiting the plunge.