Israel And Iran
You’re looking at a section of Tel Aviv as it burns from an Iranian missile. The photo comes courtesy of AP’s Tomer Neuberg.
Let’s dispense with the barebones facts first. Israel, a state with a keen sense of its military prowess and impunity, attacked Iran, a state with a keen sense of its isolation and vulnerability.
The declared aim was to destroy or seriously degrade Iran’s nuclear capabilities. The real one is some form of regime change.
To achieve it, Israel has killed practically all the key Iranian military and security commanders, attacked major strategic assets, destroyed Iran’s air defenses, and exploded assassination car bombs, hoping that the wide scope and force of the assault would break the backbone of an apparently brittle regime and induce it to fracture or collapse.
The Iranian leadership, although yet again mystifyingly caught by surprise, has withstood the Israeli blitz and is hitting back. So far, conventional Western analysts are unimpressed with Iran’s response. Scenes from Israel’s cities, alternative media reports, eyewitness accounts, and other expert analyses strongly suggest a far more nuanced picture. If in fact the Islamic Republic is responding with enough force, it would be demonstrating to the Jewish state that, for the first time since its inception in 1948, the costs of war will be felt deep in its vitals.
We are therefore in the throes of a titanic clash, the kind of which the Middle East has not experienced in its modern history. Indeed, the stakes, for both regimes, may well have turned existential. For Bibi Netanyahu, an Iranian capitulation is imperative. Equally so, an Israeli retreat for Ali Khamenei, Iran’s Supreme Leader. The survival of each hinges on such colliding outcomes.
Israel and Iran are in many ways a study in contrasts. On one side, the darling of the West’s ruling elites, on the other pariah. One with carte blanche, the other with a sword over its head. The first, with full Western cover, a non-signatory to the Treaty of Nonproliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) and armed to its teeth with them; the other a signatory to the treaty and heavily sanctioned by the West for supposedly having similar ambitions. The former, so very young, necessarily Jewish, and compact, boasting no more than 7.7 million Jewish Israelis; the second so very ancient and sprawling, boasting 92 million from different races and sects.
At $570 billion, Israel’s PPP (Purchasing Power Parity) GDP is just one gauge of a vibrant economy internationally encouraged, even impelled, to prosper; at a towering $ 1.7 trillion PPP-GDP, a tightly encircled and hobbled Iranian economy clearly hints at huge promise.
Israel has done very well with its blessings. The military and intelligence instruments it has built over the decades are almost an embarrassment of riches. The Iranian republic, beleaguered but ever the wily opportunist, has long mined every regional vacuum, honed its subversive tools, and imposed its presence on a very unwelcoming geopolitical map.
Of course, most of these yardsticks are expressions of Western double standards and bias. By their measure alone, the odds are heavily stacked against Iran in this fight. It’s expected that a favorite child of Western colonialism and a longstanding target of it would find themselves at such extreme ends of a skewed spectrum. It is also foretold that two powers with formidable hegemonic pretensions would furiously compete for reach and dominance.
But what is often left out of this argument are the reasons that have made this war inexorable, when it was easily avoidable. Between the Islamic Republic and the Zionist state are two traits hardwired into their character: a zealous fundamentalism and a fierce sense of exceptionalism––in the Israeli case emboldened by boundless Western indulgence, in the Iranian one inflamed by visceral Western antagonism.
Such messianism has rendered strategic pivots, both inside the countries and out, almost impossible for two actors who are otherwise very intrepid and nimble. It’s been at once fascinating and frightening to behold Israel take every possible advantage of Western permissiveness, even to its own long-term detriment. The most glaring example is, of course, the Palestinian debacle in all its sorry chapters, especially this last one about Gaza. In full view of domestic upheaval and very unsympathetic international political and legal trends that should give it serious pause, the Israeli government presses on as if impervious to the fallouts.
It’s been no less puzzling and unnerving to observe, over long decades, revolutionary Iran insensibly exalt in its rogue status and brag about its bullheadedness as some kind of divine calling. While the rewards for the theocracy have been vaporous and illusory, the costs for state and people have been enormous. Home to a magnificent culture and a stubbornly vibrant civil society, and rich with resources and talent that would have effortlessly ensured its place in the region’s sun, Iran has instead opted to take the hardest and thorniest route.
Such is the immovable rationale of messianic ideologies. But while Iran’s recoils, Israel’s thinks the wind is at its back. For their people, the yearning for normalcy has predictably become acute. But while most Iranians wisely look for it everywhere outside the ideology and its body politic, the Israelis are still desperate to find it somewhere inside Zionism itself, where they are certain never to find it.
In recent conversations with Ravi Agrawal and Ezra Klein, respectively, Professor Vali Nasr, perhaps the world’s sharpest expert on Iran, and former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert offered these coinciding insights about this search for normalcy:
Vali Nasr:
Iran’s population has been arrested for a while. It’s tired of isolation, it’s tired of economic pressure, it’s tired of authoritarian pressures that enforce rules on the population. Actually, the majority of Iranians want a normal state like any other country in the world. Not necessarily pro-American or pro-Israeli, but they don’t see why they need to be this isolated, and they’re not supportive of their government’s position. I think both of these are playing out in this war.
Ehud Olmert:
I think [Naftali Bennett’s] appeal today is not because of his politics, which is largely a right-wing politics. I called him “Ben-Gvir with a suit” because, in a much nicer, simpler, decent, nonaggressive manner, he more or less expresses the same ideas of Greater Israel and settlements…
But I think that his appeal presently is…that he seems to be normal. He’s a normal person. And it’s about time that we bring Israel back into some kind of normalcy, which is a desire of many. Those who are maybe not where I am politically…they understand that these messianic people are a danger and that the personality and the spirit and the values of the Netanyahu family — all of this is something that is rotten and that needs to be changed. So for the time being, Naftali Bennett is a good parking place for these potential votes. Where will they end up? It’s hard to say.
Will they ever happen upon it? Will any of us in the region? Alas, the answer is way above my pay grade––and yours, I suspect.
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On Another Note