Neville Teller
However many charges of aggression, mass murder and worse the Iranian regime chooses to level against Israel, there is no disguising the fact that it is Iran that seeks to destroy Israel, not the other way around.
On April 13, 2024 Iran – which essentially means the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei – committed a major strategic blunder. Israel’s audacious attack on the Iranian diplomatic compound in Damascus on April 1, 2024 had taken out seven Iranian military advisers, including Mohammad Reza Zahedi, a senior commander in the élite Quds Force of the IRGC (Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps). Such an operation would normally have provoked Iranian ire and an armed response on northern Israel from Hezbollah. Not on this occasion. Instead the incident was used as the trigger for a fundamental shift in Iranian policy which has led to negative consequences for Iran. They are still to be fully worked through and may, in the final analysis, prove existential.
For 45 years – namely, since its foundation in 1979 – the Iranian regime had pursued its self-imposed mission of encompassing the destruction of Israel and its people through funding, arming and supporting organizations, groups and militias prepared to attack the Jewish state. At some point in the period leading up to April 13 Khamenei decided that the time had arrived to change tack. It must have been intense analysis and calculation by his advisers that led him to break the principle that had guided Iran’s foreign strategy for so long, and finally launch Iran’s very first direct onslaught on Israel.
How must the figuring have gone? “Israel has never been weaker. It is bogged down in its war in Gaza. It hasn’t succeeded in eliminating Hamas or recovering its remaining hostages. It is being condemned on all sides for vast numbers of civilian deaths. Hezbollah is attacking it daily on its northern border. Houthi missiles are getting through its defenses. It is the subject of an investigation by the International Court of Justice on a charge of genocide. Imagine the effect of a direct Iranian attack. Think of bombs falling on Israeli cities. Think of Israelis in their hundreds slaughtered and injured. Israel will be humbled. The Abraham Accords will disintegrate, and any hope of their extension will be snuffed out.”
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