The Shallow Roots of Iran’s War With Israel

Foreign Affairs –May 29, 2024

By Ali M. Ansari

In early April, the cold war between Iran and Israel suddenly turned hot. A dramatic Israeli air attack in Damascus that killed seven senior commanders in Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps put Iranian leaders in a bind. If they launched a commensurate military response, they risked an escalation that could destabilize the very foundations of their regime. If they did not, they faced a credibility crisis among their own hard-liners and allies in Iran’s axis of resistance, a network that includes Hamas in the Gaza Strip, Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Houthis in Yemen, and various Iranian-backed militias in Iraq and Syria, several of which were already chafing at Iran’s restraint in responding to the war in Gaza.

In the end, through a mixture of telegraphing and technical incompetence, Iran’s leaders managed to produce a Goldilocks outcome. On April 13, they launched a massive aerial assault on Israel with more than 300 missiles and drones. But sound Western intelligence and the advanced warning technology and air defenses deployed by Israel and its allies ensured that there was little damage. Iran’s supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, proclaimed that it was the attack itself and not the “hitting of the target” that mattered. Israel was encouraged to “take the win” and, after a restrained retaliation of its own, the status quo between the two sworn enemies was restored with surprising alacrity.

In the weeks since Israel and Iran came perilously close to war, other developments have for the moment pushed the episode into the background. Since the deaths of Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi and Iranian Foreign Minister Hossein Amir Abdollahian in a helicopter crash on May 19, international attention has returned to the regime’s stability and the looming issue of who will succeed Khamenei. Similarly, the events of early April and their unexpectedly speedy resolution raise significant questions about the regime and the ways in which the Islamic Republic’s strident antagonism toward the Jewish state has often been tempered by its increasingly fractious domestic politics.

For one thing, ordinary Iranians have shown relatively little interest in the war in Gaza. Although Iran is Hamas’s chief backer, it is the one Muslim country in the Middle East whose government has struggled to generate enthusiasm for the Palestinian cause, which is notable even when taking into account the regime’s anxiety about allowing excitable crowds to gather in the streets. Indeed, in stark contrast to the large-scale protests against Israel that have gripped Western and Arab capitals, the largest such gathering in Tehran since the war began involved a paltry 3,000 people.

The Iranian government has struggled to generate enthusiasm for the Palestinian cause.

There are some obvious political reasons for this, starting with general dissatisfaction among Iranians with the leadership in Tehran and with Islamism in general. Many Iranians see a win for Hamas as a win for the repressive clerical regime that rules over them. Moreover, Iranians tend to be focused on their own problems, including high unemployment and a declining quality of life. When they do stage protests, it is common to hear the chant, “Neither Gaza nor Lebanon, my life for Iran!” Fighting for rights in their own country that many in the West take for granted, they are at once bewildered and horrified by the pro-Hamas commentary coming from university campuses in the United States.

But Iranian ambivalence about the war also has deeper social and cultural roots. Beneath the regime’s long-dominant rhetoric about a “Zionist occupying state” lies a more complex dynamic with Israel. In the pre-Islamic era in particular, successive Persian states enjoyed a surprisingly intimate connection to the Jewish people. For several decades of the twentieth century, Iran and Israel seemed to have more in common with each other than either country did with the Arab world. Nor did this affinity entirely end with the Islamic Revolution in 1979. One of the most important thinkers behind the revolution wrote a laudatory account of the young Jewish state, and until the early years of this century, Iranian leaders at times showed a surprisingly nuanced view of Israel’s role in the Middle East.

Today, this legacy is submerged by hard-liners on both sides, and the proxy conflict between Iran and Israel could still erupt into a catastrophic direct war. Yet the long history of Persian and Jewish coexistence suggests that the current geostrategic rivalry may be considerably more contingent than it appears. However great the enmity between the region’s arch-antagonists, their shared history offers alternatives that could, under different circumstances, be tapped in the future.

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