Is Israel at War With Iran? – GWC Mag

The October 7 attacks on Israel by the Palestinian terror groups Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad are being compared to 9/11 and Pearl Harbor. In fact, with more than 600 Israelis dead at the time of this writing, the proportional death toll is several times higher than that of 9/11, and the factor of surprise is arguably greater than at Pearl Harbor.

But 9/11 and Pearl Harbor weren’t just tragic attacks. They were casus belli for seismic wars. Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has declared his country to be heading into “a long and grueling war.” The air attacks he ordered in Gaza have already resulted in hundreds of Palestinian casualties. Will October 7 also lead to a broader conflagration in the region? Most important, can Israel rightly consider itself to be engaged in a shadow conflict with Iran?

Many commentators scoff at bringing Iran into an analysis of Israel’s conflict with the Palestinians. The sentiment is understandable. Some Beltway pundits name-drop Iran primarily to drive their own agendas. And the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is not primarily about Iran: It is rooted in Israel’s decades-long occupation of Palestinian territories, its brutal siege of the Gaza Strip, and its deprivation of dignity to millions of Palestinians under its rule.

Nevertheless, Iran has meddled enough in internal Arab politics that no proper analysis of October 7 can ignore its role. Hamas has occasionally gotten some cash and political support from countries such as Turkey and Qatar. But Turkey has extensive security relations with Israel, and Qatar has previously acted as a mediator with Israel and officially stands for the two-state solution. Only one state in the world doesn’t just give Hamas money but also lends significant military and political support. It is also the only state in the world still promising to fight Israel to total destruction: the Islamic Republic of Iran.

More important than material support, Tehran offers Hamas membership in an anti-Israel club with forces arrayed across the region. The Axis of Resistance counts the membership of Houthis in Yemen, Hezbollah in Lebanon (right on Israel’s northern borders), and various Iraqi and Syrian militias. As others have pointed out, Tehran’s arming of these forces with its advanced missile technology has changed the face of warfare in the region. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, the militia that now holds much of the economic and political power in Iran, coordinates all of these forces via its external operations wing, the Quds Force, whose footprint extends over the region and to places as far away as Paraguay and the Central African Republic.

Does all of this mean that Iran had a direct hand in planning the October 7 attacks? A White House official has concluded that it’s “too early” to make such claims. But senior members of Hamas and Hezbollah have suggested that IRGC officials gave the green light for the assault at a meeting in Beirut last Monday. The operation, whatever its details, must have taken months of preparation, and Hamas would almost certainly not simply surprise Tehran with something on this scale. Some coordination seems the very minimum. Of the analysts saying so, not all are your usual D.C. Iran hawks. Ali Hashem, a Lebanese Al Jazeera correspondent who is an expert on the IRGC’s regional alliances and used to work for the Hezbollah-friendly channel Al Mayadeen, has said that the attacks were “probably an axis decision.”

Read: A message from Iran

The Iranian regime has shown resolute support for the attacks. It organized fireworks celebrations in Tehran’s Palestine Square. Members of parliament shouted “Death to Israel” in the Majlis. Yahya Safavi, a former top commander of the IRGC (1997–2007) and currently a top adviser to Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, spoke in no uncertain terms: “We support this operation, congratulate Palestinian fighters on it, and are sure that the Axis of Resistance will back it too.” Ali Akbar Velayati, another top adviser to Khamenei and a longtime former foreign minister, also lent his support, writing to Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad leaders: “This victorious operation will surely facilitate and accelerate the collapse of the Zionist regime.” The IRGC’s media outlets are meanwhile busy publishing posters, some in Hebrew, brandishing messages such as we told you to sell your homes in the Zionist regime before it’s too late and anti-Semitic cartoons portraying Israeli Jews fleeing the country.

Lebanon’s Hezbollah, the jewel in the crown of Iran’s axis, has backed the Hamas attacks strongly and exchanged fire with Israel in the north. But, crucially, Hezbollah attacks have so far been limited to Shebaa Farms, a small strip of land that Lebanon considers its own territory (most countries count the strip as part of Syria’s Golan Heights, currently under Israeli occupation) and not Israel proper. Having come close to total destruction after its 2006 war with Israel, Hezbollah knows a full-on conflict could be suicidal.

One reason the attacks are surprising to so many is that, for months, the trend in the Middle East has been toward diplomatic reconciliation and the smoothing-over of rifts. Despite its murderous record, the Syrian regime was readmitted to the Arab League; Turkey has had a rapprochement with Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Egypt; and Iran has restored diplomatic ties with Saudi Arabia. In his annual “Islamic unity” speech this week, on the occasion of the Prophet Muhammad’s birthday, Khamenei expressed support for this reconciliation trend: “If Iran and countries such as Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Jordan adopt a common position on fundamental questions,” Khamenei said, “oppressive powers won’t be able to interfere in their domestic affairs or foreign policy.” The three countries Khamenei named were all U.S. allies not usually on good terms with Iran; Cairo doesn’t have diplomatic ties with Tehran, and those between Iran and Jordan are very limited. Both have had relations with Israel for decades, as they were the first Arab countries to recognize the Jewish state.

But in the same speech, Khamenei left no doubt as to where Tehran stands on Israel. The supreme leader claimed that the “Zionist regime” was full of “hatred” toward all of its neighbors and pursuing a goal of dominating the region “from the Nile to the Euphrates.” He went on to promise that “the Zionist regime is dying” and warned countries seeking to normalize ties with Israel that they were “making a mistake … betting on the losing horse.” Israel, he said, is “a cancer that will be uprooted and destroyed by the people of Palestine and forces of resistance in the region.” Shortly after the October 7 attack, Palestinian leaders, including Hamas’s Ismail Haniya and Palestinian Islamic Jihad’s Ehsan Ataya, issued explicit messages to Arab countries seeking normalization with Israel, warning them in strikingly similar tones.

Saudi Arabia might appear to be receptive to this messaging. Its foreign ministry’s statement following the attacks carefully avoided condemning Hamas and instead reminded Israelis of “repeated warnings of the dangers of the explosion of the situation as a result of the continued occupation, and deprivation of the Palestinian people of their legitimate rights, and the repetition of systematic provocations against its sanctities.” But Riyadh has hardly needed Iran to determine this position, which has been Saudi Arabia’s historical stance, and which it has never said it would change: No recognition of Israel so long as Palestinians remain stateless.

Read: The Israeli-Saudi deal had better be a good one

Therein lies the real dilemma for the Israeli government. The decades-long delusion that Israel could ignore, manage, shrink, or simply forget its conflict with its Palestinian neighbors has been a costly blunder. Netanyahu imagined that he could sustain the occupation of the West Bank without hampering the country’s continued diplomatic and economic success. But as other Israelis have long warned, this was a bubble ultimately due to burst. The Iranian regime is arming Palestinians and driving them toward its own murderous agenda vis-à-vis Israelis. But Israel’s continued subjugation of Palestinians is what allows such a festering wound to exist in the first place, giving Tehran an easy issue to exploit.

Allying with Tehran, doing its bidding, and bringing terror upon innocent Israeli civilians will not bring Palestinians any positive outcomes. Seven million Jewish Israelis and the State of Israel are not going anywhere, and so long as Palestinians don’t seek a strategy predicated upon coexistence, they will find no path forward. We have been here before: During the Second Intifada of 2000–05, the murders of Israeli civilians by Hamas and other Palestinian factions served only to weaken Israel’s pro-peace camp and lay the ground for the rise of the far right. A similar outcome today will not be in either society’s interest. Nor will it help the Iranian people, many of whom have long shown their opposition to the regime’s anti-Israel obsession, and some of whom are already protesting the regime’s support for the Palestinian attacks. They have no interest in a conflict with Israel.

As he was hurrying to the northern front on Saturday, a reserve senior officer of the Israel Defense Forces told Haaretz: “We were living in an imaginary reality for years.” He was talking about Israeli intelligence failures, but an equally imaginary reality is that Israelis can have normal lives so long as millions of Palestinians don’t. We can only hope that responsible actors in the region and beyond can bring about a cease-fire in the days ahead, before the conflagration gets any bigger. But in the long term, countering Tehran’s murderous agenda will require a durable solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict itself.