Iran and Israel march into the unknown

It seems the Middle East is fast approaching the very war that most reasonable observers of the region’s geopolitics have long dreaded: a direct confrontation between Iran and Israel. It might be argued that the direct confrontation has been slowly simmering for almost two decades. But in recent months, the continuing war in Gaza, the spread of hostilities to Lebanon, and a series of clashes between Israel and Iran have made it more likely than ever that the situation will boil over into a direct confrontation.
The question now is whether both sides are too committed to back away from the brink, and are prepared to enter into a full-scale war with the illusory aim of achieving a decisive result. For Israel, a war against Iran would mean facing a more evenly matched foe than in its confrontations with Hamas and Hezbollah.
When enemy nations engage in decades of extremely hostile rhetoric, while building alliances and capabilities to match their mutual perceptions of a total, existential threat, it creates an air of inevitability about the eventual eruption of direct hostilities, even if it is a confrontation that both sides have long threatened to put into practice but pragmatically and sensibly avoided so far.
Several senior Israeli decision-makers seem to have concluded, however, that there is now a window of opportunity to break the “ring of fire” that Tehran has methodically built around Israel, never mind the long-running goal of halting Iran’s march toward nuclear military capability.
After years during which Israel was more or less successful in containing what it refers to as the “tentacles of the octopus,” and resorting to covert operations when it was necessary to target its head now, to extend this popular Israeli metaphor, authorities believe the time is right to attempt to decapitate Iran once and for all and cut it off from its proxies.
Moreover, after the shock of the Oct. 7 attacks, which represented a failure by Israel to foresee and prevent the deadly Hamas incursion, authorities in the country judge that they have regained the military initiative and appear confident they now have the upper hand.
By surprising Iran’s main proxy, Hezbollah, through the use of accurate intelligence and combining unconventional methods with a massive military force, Israel has decimated the Lebanese group’s leadership, eliminated its long-serving and powerful leader, Hassan Nasrallah, and put sustained pressure on the organization’s military capabilities.
The operations in Lebanon are as much a message to Tehran as they are to Hezbollah. This week, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu urged the Lebanese people to overthrow Hezbollah, but his call came with the chilling, blatant threat that if they fail to do so, “destruction and suffering like we see in Gaza” awaits them.
While the influence of Hezbollah, backed by Tehran, on Lebanese politics and society has been an indisputable, unmitigated disaster for Lebanon, and the organization’s hostility toward Israel has more to do with maintaining its own relevance in domestic politics and retaining Iran’s support than anything else, the Israeli leader’s decision to threaten the Lebanese people with indiscriminate killing and the destruction of their country if they do not rise up against the movement reveals both a lack of judgment and actual criminal intent.

If anyone is capable of limiting Israeli military operations in Lebanon and Iran, it is Washington.

Yossi Mekelberg

But Israel’s war on Hamas and Hezbollah is no longer confined to those two fronts; it has extended to Iran itself. Tehran knows that as much as it would like to believe (or, more accurately, delude itself) its attack on Israel at the beginning of this month with 181 ballistic missiles was its retaliation to the assassinations of Hamas political leader Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran and Hassan Nasrallah, and therefore the scores are now even, Israeli retaliation for the attack is just a matter of time.
After all, the missile attack caused some damage to Israeli military bases and was also directed at the civilian population. Israel is determined to respond forcefully; whether it can afford a prolonged, direct war with Iran is a different matter.
The message from Iranian officials, political analysts, and media commentators has been repeated warnings that any attack by Israel on critical strategic infrastructure in Iran — such as military bases or gas, oil and desalination facilities, let alone nuclear development sites — would result in a massive military response that would attempt to take advantage of Israel’s vulnerability arising from its lack of physical strategic depth, and a civilian population that is concentrated in a relatively small area.
Self-evidently, the risk of such an escalation, which would threaten the stability of the entire region, has led to intense diplomatic efforts to avert the possibility. The US continues to send public and private messages urging the Israeli government to do more, and quickly, to de-escalate the confrontations it is embroiled in on several fronts, and to avoid any strikes against Iranian energy production facilities or nuclear sites.
Washington considers de-escalation to be as much in its own best interest as Israel’s. An Israeli attack on Iran’s oil and gas installations, for example, would send energy prices soaring and the US economy, which has performed well over the past year, might suffer a serious setback as a result. With just a few weeks to go before a presidential election this is a particularly sensitive issue.
There are also extensive regional efforts, led by Saudi Arabia, to prevent an Iranian-Israeli confrontation from escalating into all-out regional war. Urgent meetings have taken place in Doha between Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Faisal bin Farhan and Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian, as well as visits by Iran’s Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi to Riyadh and other Gulf capitals.
The message is clear: There is a crucial need to prevent any further escalation that could spiral out of control, at the very least by agreeing to a temporary ceasefire. For now, however, merely managing to limit the scale of the conflict seems the more likely outcome.
The role of the Biden administration amid the turmoil remains somewhat enigmatic. If anyone is capable of limiting Israeli military operations in Lebanon and Iran, it is Washington. However, even though Biden and other senior American officials have been highly critical of Netanyahu and the way Israel is using military force with no diplomatic foresight or horizon for peace, they have been doing very little to stop it from happening, or to leverage America’s power over Israel to de-escalate a situation that might prove very costly to the US as well.
It is not only the fact that its credibility in the region is being severely dented, but in the event a full-scale war between Israel and Iran does break out, the US would be compelled to intervene and find itself directly involved in a war it was so keen to prevent. Some might argue that this is exactly what Netanyahu had in mind from the start, to drag the US into the conflict to do what Israel cannot do on its own: destroy Iran’s conventional and, more importantly, nuclear capabilities. If just a few weeks ago this seemed a highly unlikely scenario, we all must acknowledge it is now a much more realistic and perilous one.

• Yossi Mekelberg is a professor of international relations and an associate fellow of the MENA Program at Chatham House. X: @YMekelberg