A Terrifying Moment for Iran

Iran’s attack on Israel yesterday evoked a sense of déjà vu. On April 13, too, Iran targeted Israel with hundreds of missiles and drones—at that time marking a first-ever in the history of the two countries. The latest strikes were notably similar: more show than effect, resulting in few casualties (April’s injured only a young Arab Israeli girl, and today’s killed a Palestinian worker in Jericho, in the West Bank). No Israeli civilians were hurt in either attack, although it’s likely that Iran’s use of more sophisticated missiles brought about greater damage this time.

Now, as then, my sources suggest that Iran has no appetite for getting into a war and hopes for this to be the end of hostilities. And yet, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei decided to take the risk. In the past month, Iran has had to watch while Israel made quick work of destroying Hezbollah’s command structure and killed its leader, Hassan Nasrallah. Tehran was fast losing face, and Khamenei apparently made up his mind to shore up his anti-Israel credibility. History will show how consequential this decision was.

Shortly after the missile barrage, Benjamin Netanyahu publicly announced that Iran had made a “big mistake” and would “pay for it.” Israel’s dedicated X account echoed this threat in Persian. Former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett called on Netanyahu to attack Iran’s nuclear and energy sites, claiming that this could lead Iranians to rise up and bring down their regime at last. Israel has had no better chance in half a century to change the region fundamentally, Bennett said.

[Read: Ordinary Iranians don’t want a war with Israel]

This is a terrifying moment for Iran. Khamenei has long pursued what he calls a “no peace, no war” strategy: Iran supports regional militias opposed to Western interests and the Jewish state but avoids actually getting into a war. The approach was always untenable. But Iran is not ready for an all-out war: Its economically battered society does not share its leaders’ animus toward Israel, and its military capabilities don’t even begin to match Israel’s sophisticated arsenal. Iran lacks significant air-defense capabilities on its own, and Russia has not leapt to complement them.

“We don’t have a fucking air force,” a source in Tehran close to the Iranian military told me, under condition of anonymity for fear of reprisals. Of the attack on Israel, he said,  “I don’t know what they are thinking.”

Iran’s diplomats have said that the attacks were an exercise of self-defense under Article 51 of the United Nations Charter. Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said that Iran targeted “solely military and security sites” that Israel was using to attack Gaza and Lebanon (an odd fit for self-defense claims, because neither of these is Iranian territory). He added that Iran had waited for two months “to give space for a cease-fire in Gaza,” and that it now deemed the matter “concluded.” Other regime figures have contributed more bluster. “We could have turned Tel Aviv and Haifa to rubble, but we didn’t,” said Ahmad Vahidi, the former head of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ Quds Force. “If Israel makes a mistake, we might change our decision and turn Tel Aviv into rubble overnight.”

For Israel, a war is worth avoiding for strategic reasons. “Israel has no choice but to retaliate,” Yonatan Touval, a senior policy analyst at Mitvim, a Tel Aviv–based liberal-leaning foreign-policy think tank, told me. But the Axis of Resistance is on its back foot, and for this reason, he said, Israel has a stake in not escalating: “Israel should ensure that, whatever it does, it does not reinforce an alliance that is remarkably, and against all odds, in tatters.”

In the past couple of weeks, Israel’s blitzkrieg actions against Hezbollah have neutralized Iran’s most potent threat—that of Hamas and Hezbollah missiles pointing at Israel from two directions. Some observers have compared the moment to 1967, when Israel decisively defeated Jordan, Syria, and Egypt in the Six-Day War. Israel seemingly holds all the cards; it could still choose to “take the win,” as President Joe Biden urged Netanyahu to do back in April, and carve a new place for itself in the region through diplomacy. In one sign of the possibility for goodwill, as in April, Arab states such as Jordan intercepted some of the Iranian missiles aimed at Israel.

But Biden has remained strangely silent for the past two days, and one wonders whom Netanyahu is listening to now.