Although the US has said that it would not take part in any retaliatory strike from Israel in response to Iran’s largely thwarted salvo over the weekend, the Biden administration’s “ironclad” support for the country could still prompt Israel to launch a direct attack on Iranian soil – with potentially disastrous results.
As rank after rank of soldiers marched by, Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi surveyed his troops and spoke of victory. In a speech delivered to members of the country’s armed forces on a parade marking Iran’s annual Army Day on Wednesday, Raisi said that the sight of Iranian missiles crawling across the night sky towards Israel just days before had “brought down the glory of the Zionist regime”. Although their attack on their adversary had been limited, he said, the “tiniest invasion” by Israel in response would be met with no mercy. “Nothing would remain,” he said.
But Raisi was not speaking from the parade’s normal site on a highway south of Tehran. Instead, the parade had been relocated without explanation to a military barracks north of the capital. Nor was the parade being broadcast live, as it had been in past years. Despite all the military hardware on display, it seemed Iran, too, was keeping one eye fixed on the skies, anxious to see how Israel would respond.
On Saturday night, Iran launched a salvo of more than 300 drones and missiles at Israel in retaliation for an apparent Israeli bombing of its embassy compound in Damascus two weeks earlier that killed seven members of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), including two generals. With Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states having been warned days before of the impending strikes – warnings that seem to have been promptly passed on to the US – the barrage was almost completely shot out of the sky by Israel alongside US, British, French and Jordanian forces. The few missiles that made it through reportedly did little damage to their military targets, although they did manage to seriously injure a young Bedouin girl. It is the first time that Iran has launched a direct attack on Israeli soil; and one that seemed precisely calculated to fail.
Since the strikes, not a night has gone by that Israel’s war cabinet has not met to talk about how the country will respond. The country’s allies have urged restraint: US President Joe Biden, who stressed his “ironclad” support for Israel, has apparently advised Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu to “take the win”. The British and German foreign ministers, who were the first of Israel’s allies to visit the country in the strikes’ aftermath, have likewise urged the government to avoid escalation. Netanyahu publically brushed aside their entreaties, saying that Israel “will reserve the right to protect itself”.
“We will make our decisions ourselves,” he said after a meeting with the ministers.
Crossing a line
Just what that decision might be has set the region on a knife’s edge. For its part, the Biden administration has flatly refused to take part in any direct Israeli attack on Iranian soil, wary of becoming entrenched in another war in the Middle East so close to the US presidential election.
Diba Mirzaei, a doctoral researcher at the German Institute for Global and Area Studies (GIGA), said that there was still space for Israel to de-escalate the situation.
“There have been some voices in the Israeli government and IDF, let’s say the more hard-line part of the government, that have called for further escalating and directly targeting Iran, but so far nothing has happened,” she said.
“From Iran’s side the matter has been settled – that’s what they said on the night of the attack. So I believe that if Israel acted wisely, it would refrain from attacking Iranian soil, because that would be crossing a red line.”
Instead, Mirzaei said, Israel could respond by hitting Iranian military targets in Iraq or Syria, or else targeting its allies in the so-called “axis of resistance”, such as Hezbollah in Lebanon or the Houthis in Yemen. Other less-dangerous options include hitting Iran with cyberattacks targeting key energy or even nuclear infrastructure, or else intensifying Israel’s covert operations both in and outside of Iran, including the targeting of more of the IRGC leadership.
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Whether these more indirect responses to an attack on Israel proper – albeit a failed one – would allow Netanyahu’s government to claim that the country is still capable of deterring direct assaults on its territory remains an open question.
Nor is it at all clear that Netanyahu and his war cabinet are convinced on the need to de-escalate. Mirzaei’s colleague and GIGA research fellow Hamid Talebian said that it seemed unlikely that Israel would not respond to the strikes on its soil in kind.
“Israel has historically dealt with a strong sense of ontological and existential insecurity as a result of feeling constantly threatened within its immediate neighbourhood,” he said. “Disproportionate military response has therefore been the primary response to any threat or even perceived potential threats. All in all, it is hard to imagine that there won’t be any Israeli military response to the Iranian attack. The question is more like ‘when’ it will be happening.”
Mirzaei pointed to Netanyahu’s own deepening unpopularity as a potential trigger for a direct response. The Israeli prime minister has been met with widespread domestic protests over his failure to defeat Hamas in Gaza despite months of relentless assaults, or to secure the freedom of the hostages taken in the October 7 attacks.
“If Israel escalated, it could be an attempt by Netanyahu to take the spotlight away from himself and point it somewhere else,” she said.
If Israel does decide to respond militarily, Talebian said, there were several targets in Iran that would prove tempting.
“Striking targets inside Iranian territory including military and IRGC bases, warehouses, and repositories, and crucial nuclear facilities are among the most probable,” Talebian said. “‘Eradicating’ Hezbollah in Lebanon by waging a war against the country on a much bigger scale than what we have seen could potentially be a formulated response by the IDF.”
Iran is unlikely to let such an attack go unchallenged. IRGC head of nuclear protection and security Ahmad Haghtalab was clear that Iran would respond severely to any attack on the country’s nuclear sites.
“If the Zionist regime (Israel) wants to take action against our nuclear centres and facilities, it will definitely and surely face our reaction," the official news agency IRNA quoted Haghtalab as saying. "For the counterattack, the nuclear facilities of the (Israeli) regime will be targeted and operated upon with advanced weaponry."
For now, Israel seems to have restrained itself from an immediate military response – just. US broadcaster ABC News reported on Thursday that three unnamed Israeli sources had told journalists that the country had “prepared for and then aborted retaliatory strikes against Iran on at least two nights this past week".
Moral hazard
With the US and the EU trumpeting a new range of economic sanctions against Iran’s drone and missile producers as a measured yet meaningful response to the strikes, Israel’s allies appear to be hoping that Netanyahu can be talked down from taking any action that could spark a wider conflict.
Short of diplomacy, though, the US may find it has little leverage over its most important ally in the region. Bilal Saab, a former Pentagon official now working as a fellow at the London-based Chatham House think tank, said that the US was unlikely to bring material pressure to bear on Israel to pull it back from the brink of a regional war.
“I don’t expect a significant US effort to use negative incentives to discourage Israel from retaliating against Iran,” he said. “The Biden administration will continue to use public and private messaging and hope that works.”
Others worry that the US’s unflinching support of Netanyahu’s government throughout its much-criticised Gaza offensive, which local health authorities say has killed more than 33,000 people and left the coastal enclave in ruins, has already made it clear that the Biden administration will continue to stand by Israel in any confrontation.
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Gilbert Achcar, professor of development studies and international relations at SOAS University of London, said that Biden’s commitment to defend its regional ally could provide Israel with the confidence – and cover – that it needs to launch a direct attack on Iranian soil.
“Basically the US said they won’t take part in an attack in Iranian territory. But at the same time Biden said the US commitment to defend Israel is ironclad,” he said. “So the Israelis understand they would be very optimistic to believe Washington would join them in a joint attack on Iran – but it is sufficient for them to have a commitment from the US to cover them. That could entail refuelling their planes if they employ an air attack.”
GIGA’s Talebian also suggested that the Biden administration’s seemingly unconditional support for Israel since the October 7 attacks has left the superpower with little room to manoeuvre if an Israeli counterstrike provoked Iranian retaliation.
“We have already seen that in the face of the war against Gaza and vast violation of international law by the IDF, the strategic and long-term (military) support of the US has remained intact,” he said. “It is difficult to see this equation changing anytime soon even in the face of an Israeli strike inside Iranian territory.”
The nuclear option
Perhaps the most drastic option available to Israel would be to launch a strike against infrastructure crucial to Iran’s nuclear programme. Iran, which maintains that its nuclear programme is purely intended for civilian energy production and scientific research, has increased its uranium enrichment to near-weapons-grade levels since the US under former president Donald Trump unilaterally withdrew from a nuclear agreement designed to limit the country’s pursuit of nuclear arms.
Israel has previously targeted Iran’s nuclear facilities in the past through sabotage, cyberattacks and an assassination campaign against the country’s nuclear scientists. Any attack aimed at destroying Iran’s nuclear capabilities altogether, on the other hand, would involve a series of air strikes deep into Iranian territory.
“Logically what they would do is seize this opportunity, which they have created themselves in a sense with provocation after provocation, to strike inside Iran and specifically at the nuclear facilities,” Achcar said. “Which is the kind of strike that would be met with understanding in the West, because Western countries are very worried about Iran turning nuclear.”
Any attack of this magnitude, however, could trigger an all-out military response from Iran – one that Israel could not brush aside so easily.
“Iran always has the option of regional wide onslaught, especially through Hezbollah,” Achcar said. “Hezbollah is the main weapon that Iran has, and when I say Hezbollah I mean the thousands upon thousands of missiles that Iran has sent to them.”
The consequences of such an exchange, Talebian said, could be enormous.
“Even though the US has warned that it won’t participate in an Israeli retaliation (to signal de-escalation), it is hard to imagine the Americans not getting involved in the aftermaths of an Israeli attack on Iranian soil,” he said. “The latter can dangerously trigger a wider conflict in the region – especially in the case of an Iranian counterstrike. In such a scenario, the US will be dragged into the war one way or another.”
