The series of killings of top leaders of Iran’s proxy militia – the Hamas in the Gaza Strip and the Hezbollah in Lebanon –by Israel, and Iran’s decision to retaliate by firing a salvo of over 200 ballistic missiles at Israel on October 1, has sparked fears of the conflict turning into a full scale war.
In this episode of The Gist, Prof C. Raja Mohan, former director of the Institute of South Asian Studies, National University of Singapore, and one of India’s leading foreign policy analysts, took time out to put the conflict into perspective.
According to Dr Raja Mohan, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s three minute video addressed to the ‘Iranian people’ on September 30, was actually an attempt to “set an end goal to this military operation which began on October 7” with the Hamas strike on southern Israel.
Netanyahu was “essentially saying that so far, the focus has been on debilitating Iran’s proxies” But for Israel, it was always clear that “Iran is the source of the problem.” The strength of Hamas and Hezbollah “stems from the support of Tehran.” The metaphor being used by the Israelis these days, Raja Mohan said, was that “there’s no point just attacking the octopus’ tentacles, you have to get the head of the octopus.”
Those familiar with the Middle East know that Israel has “consistently viewed Iran as their principal threat in the region, and that’s one of the reasons why they were eager to make up with others in the region, Iran’s neighbours in the Gulf as well as the other Arab states,” he said.
“What came to light on October 7 was how dangerous these proxies were,” said Raja Mohan. “The Israelis know that the brutal attack on Hamas in the Gaza Strip, which has cost over 40,000 lives,” and now the attacks on Hezbollah’s leaders and the ground assault into Beirut and other parts of Lebanon, “are not an end in itself, they have to deal with Iran.”
So Netanyahu “is basically telling the Iranian people that Israel has nothing against you, and that we have a common enemy in the form of the theocracy that has run Iran since 1979.” And once this regime ends, “there’s actually a lot Israel and Iran can do together.”
“If you go to the days of the Shah of Iran, who was the king of Iran till 1979, there was actually fairly substantial cooperation between Israel and the monarchy of Iran. At one point they were even jointly developing a missile,” notes Raja Mohan.
“The Islamic Republic of Iran, which was not only anti-monarchical, it also claimed to be a revolutionary, said it was going to take up Muslim causes. For them the Palestinian question of fighting Israel was not just an Arab issue, it was a Muslim issue,” points out Raja Mohan.
“So one of their legitimising ideologies was the need to fight against Israel.” At one level “they were claiming that they were more Arab than the Arabs, and that they are more committed to fighting Israel. And that rhetoric they never gave up.” And “death to America and Death to Israel were the two main slogans of the Islamic Republic.”
So for Israel, the threat has been real for a long time.
As for reports that Netanyahu was using the Hamas attack to stave off political dissent against him in Israel, Raja Mohan felt that while Netanyahu’s reputation had gone up, particularly after the killing of Hezbollah chief Nasrallah, “it was not all about domestic politics, it was also about security.”
“Yes, he was in trouble politically before October 7th, but Israelis have also said that look, we dislike this leader, he was responsible for what happened on October 7, but we have to rally around the flag, and we have to deal with our enemies,” Raja Mohan said.
“The assumption was that once this war ends, his future was in doubt, but now he has really shored up his position by what he has done in Lebanon,” he added. “The cost of this of course was too high, but he’s got some more support from the right, and some centrist forces have also backed his strategy, so I think he has really improved his position.”
However, “what he is now planning –to really take on Iran– is much more ambitious,” says Raja Mohan. “How he will do it, the ways in which it is going to unfold, that is what we are going to see over the next few days.”
“If Israel retaliates to the missile attack by Iran, in what form we don’t know, and if Iran pushes back again, I think it is inevitable that the Americans will be drawn into this conflict sooner than later, and it could be an all out war, it could be a total war.”
So what Netanyahu is saying is that “the regime in Tehran must be changed, and it is a bigger, bolder objective that Israel is setting for itself,” he says.
“And while the Biden administration in the U.S. has been going along because it has no other choice, if Trump wins, the Republicans will be quite supportive of any action Israel takes to ensure a regime change in Iran,” says Raja Mohan.
To understand the compulsions and the choices before Tel Aviv, Tehran and Washington D.C. as they jostle for influence in the region, and to gain deeper insights into what each country wants and how it hopes to achieve it, watch the full interview.
