In the West, Iran is often seen as an aggressor state, one whose actions challenge the West and perpetuate conflict. But who is the real escalating force in the Middle East? Associate Professor Christian Emery argues that Iran's latest attacks fall directly into Netanyahu’s trap, they indicate de-escalation is not on everyone's agenda, and that the gulf between Israeli and American interests is wider than ever.

When Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu pledged that Israel would ‘change the Middle East’ in response to the unparalleled horror that followed Hamas terrorists storming communities in southern Israel, he provided no elaboration on what he meant. Six months of carnage in Gaza and across the region have followed, and the first direct attack on Israel by another state since 1991 is one of several changes that Netanyahu surely didn’t anticipate.

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The question now is whether both sides decide to return to their decades-long shadow war, or whether the fall-out from the third and deadliest war in Gaza is a permanent willingness to strike directly at each other’s territory.

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However performative, Iran’s decision to launch an assortment of over 300 drone and missiles against Israeli targets represents a deeply worrying paradigm shift in how Iran and Israel manage their geopolitical conflict. For over four decades this conflict has been characterised by an overriding reluctance to avoid open military conflict. This is to say that it was underpinned by a high degree of mutual restraint, pursued using proxy forces, covert operations, cyber-attacks, and fiery rhetoric, in a manner that led to perpetual conflict but made conventional war highly unlikely. The question now is whether both sides decide to return to their decades-long shadow war, or whether the fall-out from the third and deadliest war in Gaza is a permanent willingness to strike directly at each other’s territory.

Most sensible observers see Iran’s missile and drone strikes as grand in scale but carefully calibrated to dampen escalation risks. It should also be remembered that it was Israel that changed the dynamics of the conflict by bombing an Iranian consular mission in Syria a few weeks ago. Iran had hoped that the international community would see Iran’s response as being provoked by this reckless action. It may even have hoped there would be some acknowledgement that it had carefully telegraphed its retaliation. It certainly calculated that Israel’s options for retaliation would be heavily circumscribed by US pressure and an international reaction that increasingly blamed the chain of events threatening to engulf the Middle East on Israel’s decision to pursue the wholesale destruction of Gaza with wanton disregard for civilian life, even to the point of inflicting famine, in pursuit of its security.

It wasn’t necessarily an unreasonable calculation. Just hours before Iran launched its first-ever direct attack against Israel, Israel was facing a barrage of condemnation for killing humanitarian workers; prominent Democrats in Washington were demanding Prime Minister Netanyahu’s resignation and there was even talk about a pause in the supply of weapons to Israel. In Washington, President Biden was warning of a sea-change in America’s policy of unconditional support to Israel if it didn’t protect civilians and aid workers in Gaza. Mr Netanyahu was also increasingly running out of road politically at home, with the ultranationalist fanatics he relies on to keep his fragile coalition together threatening to walk if he relented to US pressure to allow more aid into Gaza and rein in Jewish settlers pressing for the reestablishment of settlements removed nearly 20 years ago.

But Iran has miscalculated. It seems to have fallen into a trap of Netanyahu’s making. Instead of appearing isolated, Israel was able to call upon an alliance of seven states, including Arab ones, to help protect it from Iranian drones and missiles. Wavering US security guarantees to Israel have been restated. Israel continues to launch deadly strikes against civilian areas in Gaza with impunity. Israel’s allies agree that Iran crossed a red line and have effectively priced-in some form of retaliation.

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It’s fair to say that Iran would have probably wished more of their missiles and drones had breached Israeli air defences and landed fairly harmlessly, but they are signalling that the deterrence lies in them demonstrating their willingness to strike Israel directly.

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All the signs from Iran suggest that it wants to go back to its ‘forward defence’ strategy, based on using regional non-state actors operating as far away from Iran’s borders as possible as pressure points it could activate to deter its enemies. The strategy was honed over several decades by Iran’s former head of the Revolutionary Guard, Qassam Soleimani, whose assassination on Donald Trump’s order in 2020 created a vacuum at the top of Iran’s security apparatus that in many ways has not been filled. One faction that has clearly risen in influence is the IRGC Aerospace Force (IRGC-AF) - a lesser-known part of the IRGC than Qods that is responsible for developing Iran’s ballistic missile technology. It seems to have successfully persuaded Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei that their services were best placed to retaliate after Israel crossed a major red line for Tehran when it targeted Iranian consular facilities in Damascus, killing several high-ranking members of the Revolutionary Guard. Russia’s showcasing of Iranian missiles and drones in Ukraine has been a grotesque testing ground and shop window for the IRGC-AF, but the relative ease with which Israel and its allies shot down the vast majority of Iran’s missiles illustrates how much more the West could be doing to protect Ukrainian towns and cities if the political will was available to do it.  

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With political defeat comes the very real prospect of inprisonment for fraud

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Iran insists that it all but ensured that its missiles would be intercepted by tipping off Turkish, Jordanian, and Iraqi officials up to 72-hrs before the attacks were launched. As soon as the strikes happened, Iran sent a message privately to the Americans, and more publicly via a tweet from its permanent representative to the UN, that they had settled the score without causing much damage and now considered their matter over. It’s fair to say that Iran would have probably wished more of their missiles and drones had breached Israeli air defences and landed fairly harmlessly, but they are signalling that the deterrence lies in them demonstrating their willingness to strike Israel directly. They point out that they could have inflicted far more damage if they had simultaneously launched missiles from Syria and southern Lebanon.

The problem with trying to restore your deterrence is that you inevitably must do something new and scary and that risks triggering the other party into believing they must in turn restore their own deterrence. That’s essentially the problem the Israeli war cabinet is mulling over. The IDF must respond to an unprecedented attack from Iran, and has declared it will, but this is greatly complicated by several factors. The first relates to the unusual situation Israel finds itself in within its leadership. Usually, in an escalatory cycle, both parties have a shared interest in de-escalation. Yet it’s far from clear that de-escalation is in the best interests of Prime Minister Benjamin "Bibi" Netanyahu. He knows, as do many of his colleagues, that once the immediate crisis in Israeli national security is over calls for a general election that he will almost inevitably lose will be impossible to resist. And with political defeat comes the very real prospect of imprisonment for fraud. Both to preserve his freedom and do what he can to rebuild his shattered reputation, Bibi may try to establish his legacy as having eliminated both the Iranian and Hamas threats.

Netanyahu has stated many times, and many Israelis agree, that Iran is a genocidally motivated existential threat that must not be allowed nuclear weapons. He must at least be mulling over using Iran’s recent attack as a justification for a sustained bombing campaign against Iran’s nuclear and ballistic missile facilities. President Biden has insisted that he’d be going it alone, but it wouldn’t seem an unreasonable gamble to assume that Washington, having reasserted its "ironclad" commitment to Israel's security, would soon come to Israel’s aid if it faced a sustained Iranian attack.

Yet working against this instinct is the realisation that the nature of Iran’s retaliation has presented Netanyahu with a new set of opportunities. Major escalation is now an unlikely option. Israel genuinely would risk isolation if it plunged the region into its most dangerous moment since the 1973 Yom Kippur War. It cannot have escaped the notice of Israeli society (and indeed the rest of the region) that Israel leaned heavily on its allies to shoot down so many Iranian drones and missiles before they even reached Israel. And even Bibi will be reluctant to squander the international support Israel recently looked perilously close to losing. And because Iran failed (deliberately or not) to inflict any damage beyond seriously injuring an Israeli-Arab child, there is a degree of strategic and political cover for Israel to choose a relatively restrained response. It can make the case that Iran’s attack failed to dent Israeli defences, and therefore Israeli deterrence isn’t seriously weakened, and that all Iran has done is reveal its true colours as a reckless and malign actor. This is the line that David Cameron, the British foreign minister, is strongly pushing in the hope that it will usher Bibi towards the door marked de-escalation. If he chooses to open it, Bibi can expect to extract concessions from Israel’s allies. Perhaps the unblocking of US arms sales that are currently held up by a vicious partisan political war in Washington. Or a renewed US commitment to isolate Iran, enacting new sanctions aimed at its ballistic missile programme, and maybe even a clear public ultimatum that the US will use military action to prevent Iran from building nuclear weapons.

In the end, there will have to be some kind of Israeli reaction, but it seems likely that it will avoid the response that would likely lead to a major conventional war: direct Israeli strikes on Iranian soil leading to significant loss of life and widespread destruction. And there are promising signs that strong voices within the Israeli cabinet are also urging restraint.

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It’s perfectly possible that Netanyahu will play on Biden’s overriding fear of a major regional war to extract concessions on his war against Hamas.

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The impact of the war in Gaza is harder to predict. Unfortunately, history tells us that the international community put a lot more energy into securing peace between Israel and its neighbouring states than securing peace and dignity for the Palestinian people. In the short term, the world’s attention is not on the plight of Gazans and Israel can probably intensify its strikes without arousing more international pressure. It’s perfectly possible that Netanyahu will play on Biden’s overriding fear of a major regional war to extract concessions on his war against Hamas. Muted US criticism of a final Israeli assault on Rafah may be the price he tries to extract for de-escalating the conflict with Iran.

Iran’s decision to attack Israeli soil was a mistake that, in the words of veteran BBC correspondent Jeremy Bowen, ‘offers Netanyahu a lifeline’. But more than six months on how can we evaluate his pledge that Israel would ‘change the region’? In one sense, Netanyahu was probably making an off-the-cuff threat towards Israel’s external enemies and the grandiose terms which was issued were meant to capture a public mood that intuitively felt that, when it came to Israel’s pursuit of its security, the rules had changed.

But Netanyahu’s statement was also picking up on the vision for a new Middle East he presented at the UN General Assembly the month before Hamas stormed out of Gaza with such murderous intent. Building on months of painstaking negotiations brokered by the Biden administration, it’s an ambitious plan built around normalised relations with Saudi Arabia, leaving Qatar as the only Arab state to not recognise the Jewish state. More practically, it would lay the foundations for rapid economic cooperation and overt, rather than covert, cooperation in containing Iran. Critically, Netanyahu believed it would break Palestinian resistance by decisively tipping the balance of power against Iran and forcing it to abandon militant groups like Hamas and Hezbollah. Without a vast arsenal of powerful ballistic missiles able to swarm the Iron Dome missile defence system, Israelis could be confident that reprisals from militant Palestinian groups would have minimal impact on their lives. Netanyahu could continue with his divisive judicial reforms and give ministries to ultra-right-wing nationalists who oppose Palestinian rights, let alone the right to a state, without the ensuing political crisis compromising his reputation as 'Mr Security'.

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For many observers, particularly outside the West, Biden’s refusal to condemn Israeli’s collective punishment of the people of Gaza, only further exposes long-standing double standards on the world stage

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But destroying Hamas has proved an extraordinarily difficult and appallingly bloody task that looks almost certain to fail and only makes it more difficult to normalise relations with Riyadh. It also risks a major confrontation with Hezbollah and with that upsetting Israel’s delicate relations with Russia. More critically, even if the US-Israeli relations have warmed somewhat in the wake of the renewed Iranian threat, the war in Gaza has created permanent doubts about whether Israel is a strategic liability for Washington given how little influence it seems to have on the country even when it’s pursuing actions that seriously undermine America’s interests and Biden’s political survival. For many observers, particularly outside the West, Biden’s refusal to condemn Israeli’s collective punishment of the people of Gaza, only further exposes long-standing double standards on the world stage and undermines the entire normative framework for how Washington presents itself as the defender of a rules-based order imperilled by states like Russia who govern by brute force alone.

To the extent that this war will change the region, none of the current outcomes improve Israeli security and certainly not international security. Yet Israel does have the ability to change the region in a way that would benefit its own and regional security enormously, but it involves eventually committing to a negotiated peace deal with the Palestinians and that means accepting that some concessions will have to be made on difficult issues. That seems unthinkable given the current Israeli public mood, but the equally inescapable conclusion is that the horrific events since October 7 show that neither foreign policy nor extraordinary technological advantage can protect Israeli citizens without any parallel political process.