Full-On War Between Israel and Iran Isn’t Inevitable
5 min read
It took 25 days, but in the early hours today, Israel responded to Iran’s salvo of missiles earlier this month. The operation, named “Days of Repentance,” was the most significant attack on Iran by any country since the 1980s. The Iranian regime’s years of waging a shadow war on Israel have finally brought the violence home, something the regime had repeatedly promised its people it would avoid.
The attacks were significant, and likely to cause considerable damage. At least four officers of the Iranian army, serving in missile-defense units, were killed. Nevertheless, Iran is relieved that its worst fears didn’t come true. A day before the attacks, Israel had used intermediaries to warn Iran about them, to make sure they wouldn’t cause massive casualties, Mostafa Najafi, a security expert in Tehran with connections to the regime’s elites, told me. He said the attacks weren’t “as vast and painful as Israeli officials had claimed” they would be. Israel did not target Iran’s infrastructure, such as its oil and gas refineries, nor did it assassinate political or military leaders.
Because of this, Iran has an opportunity to call it quits by giving a weak enough response that wouldn’t invite Israeli retaliation. Iran can stop the tit for tat, if it’s willing to resist the hard-line voices that want the country to escalate and even widen the conflict.
Life in Tehran has quickly sprung back to normal. The city’s streets were clogged with traffic as usual on Saturday, the first day of the week in the country. Although all flights had initially been suspended, Tehran’s two main airports are back in operation.
“I believe Iran will respond to the attacks,” Afifeh Abedi, a security expert in Iran who is supportive of the government, told me. “But I doubt there would be escalation,” she said. “Countries of the region will stop this, and the U.S. will try to manage the situation.”
Abas Aslani of the Tehran-based Center for Middle East Strategic Studies agrees. “The evidence doesn’t currently point to a broader war,” he told me. “But this doesn’t necessarily mean that Iran won’t respond.”
I also spoke with two senior Iranian politicians, a conservative and a reformist, both of whom requested anonymity for fear of reprisals. They said that Iran wasn’t looking to broaden the conflict now. Iran and the U.S. had implicitly agreed to allow a limited Israeli strike followed by no significant Iranian response, the conservative figure, who is close to the parliamentary speaker, Mohammad-Bagher Ghalibaf, told me.
The reformist politician, who has served in cabinet-level roles before, said that the diplomatic efforts of Iran’s minister of foreign affairs, Abbas Araghchi, helped ensure that the Israeli attacks were restricted to the military targets. Araghchi visited about a dozen nearby countries in the past few weeks, and he is believed to have asked them to put pressure on the U.S. and Israel to keep the attacks limited.
Across the region, there is broad opposition to widening the conflict. Saudi Arabia condemned the latest Israeli attacks on Iran as “a violation of its sovereignty and a violation of international laws and norms” and reiterated its “firm position in rejecting the continued escalation.” Similar condemnations have been issued by Turkey, Iraq, Lebanon, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Oman, Qatar, Kuwait, Jordan, Algeria, Mauritania, and, farther afield, Switzerland, Pakistan, Indonesia, and the Maldives. Jordan, which is a neighbor of Israel’s and signed a peace treaty with it 30 years ago on this very day, also confirmed that no Israeli strikers had been allowed to use Jordanian airspace. Trying to maintain neutrality, Jordan had previously helped Israel defend itself against Iranian drone and missile attacks.
Iran knows that its future prosperity and success rely on economic development, which is actively hurt by its isolation from the international economy and its current war footing. Yesterday, the Paris-based Financial Action Task Force, a G7 initiative that helps enforce global anti-money-laundering rules, declared that it was going to keep Iran on its blacklist alongside only two other countries, North Korea and Myanmar. On Saturday, the U.S. dollar was selling for 680,000 Iranian rials, a historic high. These are not problems you can solve by fighting Israel.
Yesterday, in a rare candid moment, Ghalibaf acknowledged the stakes: “Sadly, our economy is not doing as well as our missiles. But it should.”
And yet, Iran is still a long way from taking the necessary steps to drop its anti-Israel campaign, overcome its international isolation, and focus on its domestic problems. Currently, any deviation from the anti-Israel orthodoxy leads to quick backlash by the hard-liners. Last month, the Assembly of Scholars and Instructors at the Qom Seminary, a reformist-leaning body of Shiite clerics, issued a statement that condemned Israel’s ongoing attacks on Lebanon while calling on it “to go back to its legal borders before the 1967 aggression” and urging the “formation of an independent Palestinian state.” This endorsement of theatwo-state solution incensed the hard-liners, some of whom called for the seminary to be shut down, but its position has been defended by the reformist press.
And some hard-liners are clamoring for all-out war with Israel.
“The Zionist regime is on decline, and Iran won’t let this attack go without a response,” Hossein Shariatmadari, the editor in chief of the hard-line daily Kayhan, told me. “Our response will be ever more decisive and crushing.”
Shariatmadari is known for outlandish pronouncements. Najafi, who tends to be more levelheaded, also believes that the Iranian-Israeli clashes are set to continue “in the medium term, especially after the U.S. elections.”
Some supporters of Israel also hope that the conflict will escalate. Mark Dubowitz, the CEO of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a Washington, D.C.–based think tank, said on X that Israel must now prepare for the “next phase” of its strategy: helping Iranians overthrow their regime, followed by “decisive decapitation strikes.”
As long as Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, is alive and in power, the country’s attitude toward Israel will not decisively shift. But he is 85, and, in preparation for an eventual succession struggle, the regime’s different factions are already squabbling over the country’s future direction. The hard-liners are not as politically powerful as they once were. They lost the presidency recently and are being marginalized in other institutions as well.
“The likes of Shariatmadari don’t matter to anyone,” the conservative politician told me. “Iran is set to change.”
If Iran wants to avoid a war, it can’t change fast enough.
