Israel conducted a strike against Iran on Friday but, for now, appears to have prevented opening a dangerous new stage of the wider conflict in the Middle East. Israeli drones reportedly hit the central city of Isfahan Friday morning in revenge for Iran’s assault on Israeli territory last week. Iran’s attack, which implicated more than 300 drones and missiles, was itself a reaction to an Israeli strike on an Iranian diplomatic building in Damascus, Syria, that destroyed several members of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), including Gen. Mohammed Reza Zahedi.
The tit-for-tat attacks threatened major escalation between the regional adversaries amid the war in Gaza, in which more than 33,000 people have been killed since October, and in which ceasefire talks persist to stumble. That conflict has increased the temperature across the region, with Iraqi and Syrian militias bombarding US military outposts in those countries and Yemeni Houthis striking vessels and disrupting trade in the Red Sea.
Iran and Israel have long employed in rhetorical — and physical — back-and-forth. But the direct aggression of the past few weeks has been different: Not only did they come amid a period of high strains due to the war with Hamas, but both sides demonstrated a willingness to cross lines they’ve shied away from earlier, raising the limit of what’s sufficient in their decades-long conflict. For now, Iran is de-emphasising the extent of the damage from the attack, and both Iran’s attack last weekend and Israel’s Friday appear to indicate a willingness to keep the scope of this special exchange limited. However, there’s no obvious offramp to ongoing tension, either, especially as truce talks between Hamas and Israel continue to stall out.
Israel and Iran once had immediate economic and strategic ties; Iran imported Israeli arms and Israel purchased Iranian oil before the Iranian revolution in 1979. Both nations also had close ties with the US and prioritized opposing the Soviet Union and the spread of communism as a component of their foreign policy, according to the US Institute for Peace.
The Islamic Revolution transformed all that since Shia hardliners witnessed Israel as an interloper in Muslim regions and the US as its enabler. Now, “Israel and Iran have been immersed in a multidimensional cold war against one another for a long time,” Ali Vaez, Iran program director at the International Crisis Group, told Vox in October. In recent years, there’s been a rise in military operations, though more on the Israeli flank than from Iran. Israel has waged cyberattacks against Iranian infrastructure, like the huge Stuxnet attack against Iran’s Natanz nuclear material enrichment building and targeted assassinations of military commanders and nuclear scientists.
Hardliners within the Iranian government — a pack Iran’s leaders are heavily hanging on amid weakening public support for the government — had publicly disparaged the lack of response to multiple prior assassinations and escalatory moves attributed to Israel. To Israel’s latest attack, however, it appears as though there’s no immediate reaction planned on Iran’s part. Iranian official sources declined to even pin the raids on Israel in an interview with Reuters.
