The Iranian government has found itself in a difficult bind since Operation al-Aqsa Flood. It persuasively denied all foreknowledge of the attack, but has extended political support to Hamas and Islamic Jihad. In coordination with its closest ally, Lebanon’s Hezbollah, it has endeavoured to achieve a delicate balance: engaging the Israelis in the north to deflect resources and materiel to a secondary front, without provoking a wider war that would engulf the region. On the one hand, they have sought to uphold their commitment to the cause of Palestine and pan-Islamic solidarity. Yet this uneasily co-exists with the practical constraints of the inter-state system, raison d’état and a pursuit of ‘strategic patience’ – keeping conflict at bay and beyond its own territorial borders in a highly unstable and imperially penetrated region. The pendulum swings between these two tendencies, but the latter is most important for the system.

Netanyahu’s modus operandi has been to goad the Islamic Republic into retaliation, allowing him to then paint it as a global pariah and grave threat to ‘Western civilisation’, with Israel all the while continuing its genocidal assault on Gaza. The Israeli state may also be calculating that only under the cover of a full-blown regional conflagration will it be able to complete its ongoing campaign of ethnically cleansing Gaza and to a lesser extent the West Bank. The Iranian leadership is of course fully aware of Israel’s strategy of deflecting pressure to halt the war on Gaza – and now Lebanon – by switching attention to Iran and attempting to lure it into a wider regional war. From the outset, Tehran has also understood that, in the words of Ali Larijani, a former parliamentary speaker and current member of the Expediency Discernment Council, generally seen as a pragmatist, ‘We are not only dealing with Israel. The command-and-control centre is in the hands of the US’.

On 1 April 2024, the Israeli air force attacked the Iranian embassy complex in Damascus, killing 16 people, including several senior Iranian commanders. Iran retaliated with Operation True Promise I on 13 April, launching cruise missiles, attack drones and a small number of ballistic missiles. As many noted at the time, the Iranian response had been prepared well in advance, relying upon dated technology and weaponry. This show of force was an attempt to reassert clear red lines: its message was that Iran did not want further escalation, but was willing to launch a direct attack if Israel continued its flagrant assaults. Many of the projectiles were shot down, although some did hit the Nevatim airbase. Yet direct hits were not the point. Iran’s hope was to restore a balance of deterrence. Following the strikes, the Biden administration was quick to declare that the US would not participate in any planned Israeli retaliation: ‘You got a win. Take the win’, he urged Netanyahu. A week later, Israel mounted a targeted operation against Iran’s Russian-supplied S-300 radar system in Isfahan. The scale of the damage was widely disputed, but it was perceived by Tehran as not warranting a counterstrike. The two regional adversaries appeared to have pulled back from the brink.

The reprieve did not last long. On 28 June, Israel’s air force chief announced that, with Hamas close to being neutralized, the IDF was pivoting to take on Hezbollah. On 30 July, the day of Masoud Pezeshkian’s inauguration as Iran’s new president, Israel launched an airstrike killing Fuad Shukr, a founding member of Hezbollah and leading commander in its armed wing. This was followed the next day by the assassination of Hamas’s political bureau chief, Ismail Haniyeh, in the heart of Tehran, mere hours after attending Pezeshkian’s inauguration. Assassinating such a consequential guest in state care was designed to humiliate Tehran’s leadership. The Netanyahu government seems to have had two other objectives in mind: to derail negotiations for a ceasefire with Hamas and to foreclose any good will the new Pezeshkian administration might be able to garner with European countries by forcing Tehran’s hand. A core pledge of Pezeshkian’s election campaign had been to do everything in his power to achieve sanctions relief. Any Iranian response worth its salt would render the necessary diplomatic engagement next to impossible. According to Pezeshkian himself, Iran was also told that a ceasefire with Hamas was in the offing, another reason to ‘exercise restraint’.

The Netanyahu administration, however, had its own plans. On 17 and 18 September, Mossad’s devastating pager and walkie-talkie attacks (marvelled at by countless Western journalists) targeted Hezbollah’s senior ranks, at a huge cost in civilian lives. This latest assault culminated in the assassination of Sayyid Hassan Nasrallah on 27 September, Iran’s single most important ally and partner. To kill him, the Israelis fired 80 US-made bunker-buster heavy bombs, flattening several apartment complexes and killing three hundred civilians. Notably, days before his death Nasrallah had agreed to a 21-day ceasefire. Brigadier General Abbas Nilforoushan, a senior commander in Iran’s Quds Force, was also killed in the attack. This represents a huge blow to Hezbollah and the ‘Resistance Axis’ more broadly.

Netanyahu clearly hoped to ‘break the back’ of Hezbollah once and for all. Yet this proved wishful thinking: Hezbollah’s operational command rapidly regrouped, inflicting a heavy round of casualties on the IDF, bringing the much-touted Israeli ground incursion to a grinding halt. Following this setback, the Israeli military resorted to one of its tried and tested tactics, prosecuting an indiscriminate bombing campaign (with US-supplied F-35s) against the densely populated districts of Beirut.

It was amid this maelstrom that Iran’s armed forces launched over 180 ballistic missiles at Israel on 1 October, striking two major air bases: the Nevatim airbase in the Negev desert and Tel Nof airbase in Israel’s central district, as well as Mossad’s HQ in Glilot, a suburb of Tel Aviv. Unlike Operation True Promise I, the sequel included the more advanced hypersonic Fatah-1 missiles, and there was no doubt that targets had been hit. Arms experts have counted 33 impact craters at Nevatim alone. The reaction was mixed. Netanyahu, visibly shaken, vowed revenge. Biden sought to downplay the damage, insisting that the attacks had been ‘defeated and ineffective’, while US national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, promised there would be ‘severe consequences’. Biden later gave credence to the possibility of a US-supported Israeli strike on Iran’s oil refineries.

Meanwhile, former Israeli prime minister Naftali Bennett sought to resuscitate the spectre of ‘regime change’ and the imperial fashioning of a ‘New Middle East’, in histrionic statements insisting that now was the time to ‘to destroy Iran’s nuclear programme, its central energy facilities, and to fatally cripple this terrorist regime’. Trump, speaking at a campaign event in North Carolina, remarked with habitual nonchalance that Israel should ‘Hit the nuclear first and worry about the rest later’. Even though Biden had publicly come out against such a strike, Trump’s murmurings could be read as a signal to Netanyahu to impose a fait accompli on a weak president who periodically reaffirms his unswerving commitment to Zionism. An outright attack on Iranian nuclear sites, even if the US took the lead and essentially carried it out, would at best set the programme back a couple of years; it should also prompt Iran finally to withdraw from the NPT pact altogether.

Last Friday, Khamenei delivered his first sermon at the Grand Mosalla mosque in Tehran since the Trump administration’s assassination of Major-General Qasem Soleimani in January 2020. Before a huge crowd and broad spectrum of the country’s political elite, he reiterated Iran’s steadfast commitment to its allies in the ‘Resistance Axis’ and that Iran’s attack was a direct response to the assassinations of Haniyeh and Nasrallah. His decision to switch from Persian to Arabic and directly address Arab publics throughout the region is testament to the high regard in which he held Nasrallah personally. It was an act of public diplomacy to reassure Tehran’s allies that they had not been abandoned and that the Islamic Republic remained resolute in its opposition to Israel and its powerful backers. Less commented upon was Khamenei’s insistence that international law gave Iran and its allies the right to self-defence, and that Iran would ‘not delay, nor [act] in haste’. As usual, the Ayatollah tried to strike a balance between defiance and calculation, insisting that the Islamic Republic’s next steps would be carefully considered and calibrated. Given the significant economic and political vulnerabilities on the domestic front there is little doubt that Iran’s leadership and the new Pezeshkian government would prefer to bring this latest round of escalation to a close. But they know that a new regional war may already be getting underway, and that there is no ‘partner for peace’.

Read on: Rashid Khalidi, ‘The Neck and the Sword’, NLR 147.