Israel Is Enabling Iran's War of Attrition

TEL AVIV – In 2017, Iran unveiled a digital clock counting down the days to the destruction of Israel in 2040. The display, located in Tehran’s Palestine Square, embodies the Islamic Republic’s long-held commitment to annihilating the Jewish state. Some view this promise as a mere rhetorical exercise to rally support at home and throughout the Muslim world. But as the Gaza war drags on and seems poised to expand, many in Israel, including former Prime Minister Ehud Barak, see an actionable plan that Iran seeks to execute, the consequences be damned.

The drive to eliminate Israel is rooted in the Shia eschatological belief that the Mahdi, the Twelfth Imam and Islamic messiah, will reappear at the end of the world. The Iranian regime increasingly sees Israel’s eradication as a necessary step for the Mahdi’s return. The founder of the Islamic Republic, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, attributed Islam’s historical decline to a foreign conspiracy, accusing Western powers of using Zionism to penetrate the Middle East. From this perspective, liberating Islamic holy sites in Jerusalem from Israeli control and destroying the Zionist regime would redeem and renew contemporary Islam.

Worryingly, many in the Iranian regime have indicated that the time is right to achieve this sacred goal. In 2020, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Khomeini’s successor as supreme leader, called the Zionist regime a “cancerous tumor” that will “undoubtedly be uprooted and destroyed.” Late last year, Hossein Salami, the head of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps, vowedto remove Israel “from the face of existence” after an Israeli airstrike in Damascus killed a high-ranking Iranian general.

From Adolf Hitler to Vladimir Putin and even Osama bin Laden, history has taught us to take threats of ideologically inspired attacks at face value. But the Islamic Republic has amply demonstrated its cautiousness – being radical doesn’t necessarily mean being irrational and suicidal. Rather than a historic showdown, nuclear or conventional, Iran seems to be waging a long-term war of attrition against Israel.

The Gaza war has illustrated Iran’s strategy of surrounding Israel with a network of proxy forces, including Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas in Gaza, Islamic Jihad in the West Bank, the Houthis in Yemen, and Shia militias in Syria and Iraq. The aim is to wear down Israel while avoiding a direct confrontation. True, Iran’s massive drone and missile attack against Israel in April was a notable exception, but it was necessary to maintain credibility as the leader of the so-called Axis of Resistance and among its conservative constituents.

Iran’s recent decision to step up pressure on Israel through its proxies was influenced by Hamas’s surprising capacity to isolate the country and expose its weaknesses. Specifically, Iran could not ignore the fact that Hamas’s attack on October 7 thwarted Saudi Arabia’s plan to join the Abraham Accords and normalize diplomatic relations with Israel. The murderous attack and the war that followed have scuppered US President Joe Biden’s grand vision of an American-backed Sunni Arab-Israeli alliance, which Iran sees as an existential threat.

Moreover, Iran has recently made “alarming and unprecedented progress toward a military nuclear program,” according to Israel’s Institute for National Security Studies. But this doesn’t mean that Iran would launch its first bomb at Tel Aviv. Instead, with this nuclear umbrella, Iran could redouble its efforts to weaken Israel, using conventional means to bring about its collapse. Given Israel’s alleged second-strike capabilities, Iran understands that a nuclear showdown would likely result in its own destruction.

When Iran warns, as its mission to the United Nations did on June 28, of “an obliterating war” should Israel attack Lebanon, it wants to deter Israel and prevent a non-nuclear war that could destroy its Lebanese assets. Hezbollah joined the war against Israel only to save face with the Palestinians, and would be happy for Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu to agree to a ceasefire in Gaza that would extricate the Shia militia from the conflict.

Against this backdrop, the key enabler of Iran’s war of attrition is, in fact, Israel’s own government. Netanyahu’s unrealistic goal of achieving “a complete victory” in Gaza serves Iran’s strategy of miring Israel in an inconclusive conflict while orchestrating a long-term plan to destroy the Jewish state. By unnecessarily prolonging the war and refusing to accept a role for the Palestinian Authority in Gaza’s governance, Netanyahu’s government has isolated Israel, strained relations with its American benefactors, and eroded its own strategic deterrence.

It turns out that the only truly irrational, trigger-happy fanatics in this lethal equation are Netanyahu and his theo-fascist allies, who are determined to engage in an apocalyptic war in Gaza and Lebanon. As northern Israel burned from Hezbollah’s largest rocket barrage to date, and its civilian population was evacuated, Orit Strock, the minister of settlements and national missions from the Religious Zionist Party, exclaimed that this was a “time of miracles” for West Bank settlements. Strock was referring to the belief that God will destroy Israel’s enemies and bequeath them the land.

These messianic hallucinators have a willing collaborator in Netanyahu. Together, they are doing more to annihilate the Jewish national project than Iran could ever hope to achieve on its own.

Shlomo Ben-Ami, a former Israeli foreign minister, is Vice President of the Toledo International Center for Peace and the author of Prophets Without Honor: The 2000 Camp David Summit and the End of the Two-State Solution (Oxford University Press, 2022).

Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2024.
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