Israel’s Dangerous Game With Iran

TIME-April9th2024

The destruction of an entire building in Syria’s capital on April 1 was impressively precise. Whoever fired missiles at Iran’s consular offices in Damascus—and anyone with an iota of experience knows it was Israel’s air force—wanted to destroy that edifice and kill whoever was inside. Then came the information, from Iran’s government itself, that among the dead was the vice commander of the Quds Force, the multinational spearhead of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), along with senior officers who coordinated Iran’s activities in Syria and Lebanon.

No one claimed responsibility, but sources in Israeli intelligence tell us that IRGC Brigadier-General Mohammed Reza Zahedi was tracked by the Mossad and by Aman, Israel’s technology-driven military intelligence agency, for years. And when Israel’s spies were certain of where he was, and whom he was with, they immediately wanted to take the shot. They had to get Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s approval, and despite all the current pressures on Israel, he readily agreed.

That was a mistake. It was the right action, perhaps, but at the wrong time.

We can see why the Israelis wanted to do it. When they looked back at how America assassinated the charismatic head of the Quds Force, Major-General Qassem Soleimani—a daring decision made by President Donald Trump in January 2020, with a small Israeli role in tracking their quarry—they considered that Iran’s response was little more than bluster.

Right now, however, with the war in Gaza a costly and painful burden for six months and counting, Netanyahu is risking a much wider war. He is stirring the hornets’ nest, represented already by rocket attacks on Israel by Iranian proxies in Lebanon and in far-off Yemen and Iraq. Hours after the explosion in Damascus last week, many of Israel’s almost 10 million people went into a panic: hearing pundits in the media predict a massive retaliation by Iran, Israelis stocked up on food and rushed to ATM’s to draw cash from their accounts in case of all-out war.

A fresh round of panic was the last thing that the people of Israel needed, half a year after the Hamas attack of last October 7 with its massacres and the kidnapping of over 200 hostages. Netanyahu probably saw flattening an Iranian building in Syria as part of restoring Israel’s deterrence—meaning its ability to intimidate its hostile neighbors. But, as is typical of Israel’s longest serving prime minister, Netanyahu’s main concern was his own image. He wants to look bold, in the wake of a security and intelligence failure for which he must share the blame. He hasn’t stopped playing politics for a second, since the trauma of the worst attack on Jews since the Nazi Holocaust, and every hour of every day he is seeking to reverse his vulnerable political fortune.

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https://time.com/6964765/israel-iran-war/