When it comes to the Middle East, it’s the pessimists who look smartest. Predict the worst and you’ll rarely be proved wrong. If you are, it’s usually because your forecast was insufficiently bleak.
So put on your gloom-tinted spectacles and assess the events of the last week. You’ll see the dawn of a grim new era, in which the region’s two strongest powers, Israel and Iran, trade blows directly. Last weekend, Iran crossed what had previously been a red line, aiming a barrage of missiles and drones directly at Israeli territory for the first time. In the early hours of Friday morning, Israel responded with a series of drone strikes on targets inside Iran, including Isfahan, site of an airbase and the country’s burgeoning nuclear programme. You don’t have to be Clausewitz to know that two regional powers, one an aspirant nuclear state, the other already there, engaged in a tit-for-tat exchange of fire aimed at each other’s sovereign terrain spells danger.
The pessimist draws little comfort from those who insist that both sides are clearly trying to avoid a major escalation into all-out war. The Iranian assault on Israel involved 170 drones, more than 30 cruise missiles and more than 120 ballistic missiles – about three times the number of projectiles unloaded on Ukraine in the first shock-and-awe night of the Russian invasion in February 2022. It was only Israel’s ability to defend itself, and the support of its allies in that effort, that prevented devastating loss of life.
As for Israel’s response, it may look like it was carefully calibrated to send nothing more lethal than a message – even if that message was, as a former Israeli intelligence officer put it, “that, if we want to, we can send a stronger message”. The details are still murky, with neither country in a hurry to spell out exactly what happened, but reports suggest that Israel may have unleashed previously dormant, remote-controlled “quadcopters” – apparently already secreted inside Iran itself – on some of the country’s most sensitive and highly valued military installations. The objective may have been no more than an Israeli desire to tell the Iranian military they know where they live – and can reach them – but even that is a move fraught with risk. Because things can so easily go wrong. Both sides are playing with some serious matches in a neighbourhood built from tinder.
So, yes, the authorities in both countries may brief, in their different fashion, that they’ve got things under control, with the Iranians adamant that the Israeli attack was a humiliating failure that left barely a scratch, and the Israelis confident that Iran is now deterred. But the peoples of the region, anxiously looking up at the sky, have good reason to be sceptical.
Recall that it was the supposedly all-seeing experts of Israeli military intelligence, and their political masters, who promised that Hamas was deterred before 7 October – and Israelis know all too well how that worked out. And it was those same Israeli sages who similarly thought there would be no major Iranian reaction to Israel’s assassination of a senior commander of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), along with his deputy, in Damascus on 1 April – when it was that incident that prompted last weekend’s massive retaliation.
The Iranians, too, are capable of misreading the signs, judging by the conduct of their proxies in the region. There is good evidence that Hamas massively underestimated Israel’s response to the 7 October attacks – which were always going to bring a terrible retribution – and that it believed months of street protests against Benjamin Netanyahu’s judicial coup would leave the country too debilitated to hit back. The price for that miscalculation continues to be paid by the Palestinian civilians of Gaza, who have lost so much and so many.
It doesn’t help that the leaderships in both Iran and Israel are under constant pressure from elements that are even more bellicose. At odds though it might be with his global image, Netanyahu was among the more moderate voices in the room as Israel weighed its options after the Iranian fusillade. It was not just the ultra-nationalist extremists Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir who were demanding Israel punch back hard, with the latter denouncing Friday’s yesterday’s operation as “feeble”. Benny Gantz, an opposition leader drafted into Netanyahu’s war cabinet, was urging the prime minister to order an instant response last weekend. In Tehran, the supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, who turned 85 on Friday, is the theocratic face of a military dictatorship that, in the IRGC, includes those who harbour imperial ambitions for Iran – an aspiration that is hardly the stuff of fantasy, given Iran’s control, mainly through proxies, of large parts of Syria, Lebanon, Yemen, Iraq and Gaza. (As the New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman puts it, the Iranian general killed by Israel in Syria earlier this month “was not there on a tourist visa”.)
All of these are reasons to be fearful about the lines that have been crossed and the taboos that have been broken, as the decades-long standoff between these two powers turns direct. And yet, if you put down the gloom goggles and replace them with glasses of a rosier tint, you can, if you squint a bit, see a more hopeful picture.
Of course, the risk of escalation, even in error, is real. And yet, it’s significant that both sides are at least taking steps to avoid that outcome, even as they try to satisfy internal pressure for robust action. Both the Israeli attack, and Iran’s efforts to play down its impact, were partly about saving face, but also about containing a situation that could otherwise spiral. It is a small mercy, but we should be grateful for it all the same.
Perhaps more surprising is this: you can glimpse in this shadow war the outline of a different, more peaceful future for the region. Because Iran targeting Israeli territory directly was not the only historic first last weekend. Also unprecedented was the fact that Israel kept out those missiles thanks to an alliance of, yes, the US along with the UK and France, but also Jordan and, reportedly, the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia. That’s right: Israel was protected from Iranian fire by a group of Arab states.
This is a big deal. It means the hitherto crypto-alliance of Israel and those Sunni states that fear Tehran more than they fear Tel Aviv has stepped into the light. Last weekend, it became something real. That represents an enormous diplomatic opportunity, one that could give Israel the thing it has lacked since its founding: an accepted place in the Middle East. “The prize of a different relationship between Israel and its region is still there on the table, despite what’s been happening in Gaza,” Tom Fletcher, a former Downing Street foreign policy adviser, told the BBC on Friday morning.
To grasp that prize, Israel would have to do what the US and others are asking: offer the Palestinians a political horizon, one that holds out the prospect of an eventual Palestinian state. That will not be easy for Israelis to stomach, not after 7 October, when so many fear any such state would soon become a launchpad for further, similar attacks against them. But if Israelis can make that move, an entirely new future could be unlocked – one that would see Iran finally hemmed in by a coalition of countries united in their resolve to stop Tehran wreaking regional havoc via the militias and regimes it controls. It’s achievable, but not without the replacement of Netanyahu by a leader ready and able to seize the opportunity that this week has revealed. Will that happen? Remember: the quickest way to lose money is to bet on hope for the Middle East. But hope, like gambling, is a hard habit to break.
Jonathan Freedland is a Guardian columnist
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