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How the Israel-Iran rivalry started, the long "shadow" war and Saturday night's 300 drones to the "little devil"

2024-04-15 12:13:10Kosova&Bota SHKRUAR NGA REDAKSIA VOX

How the Israel-Iran rivalry started, the long "shadow" war and

Iran launched a drone strike against Israel on Saturday night.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu convened the cabinet and reported that the country's "defense systems" withstood the attack.

Iran had vowed retaliation after two of its top military commanders were killed on April 1 in an attack on its consulate in Damascus, which it blamed on Israel.

Anticipation for a possible response to the Iranian war had grown in recent hours, after the president of the United States, Joe Biden, said on Friday that "sooner or later" an attack from Tehran was expected.

This is the latest episode of an old feud.

Israel and Iran have been engaged in a bloody rivalry for years, the intensity of which fluctuates depending on the geopolitical moment. The pulse of this rivalry has become one of the main sources of instability in the Middle East.

For Tehran, Israel is the "little Satan", the ally of the United States in the Middle East, which Iran calls the "big Satan".

Israel accuses Iran of financing "terrorist" groups and carrying out attacks against its interests motivated by the Ayatollahs' anti-Semitism.

The rivalry between the "enemies" has caused a large number of deaths, often as a result of covert actions, for which neither government bears responsibility, and the war in Gaza has only made matters worse.

How the rivalry between Israel and Iran began

Indeed, relations between Israel and Iran were quite cordial until 1979, when the so-called Islamic Revolution of the Ayatollahs took power in Tehran.

In fact, although it opposed the partition plan for Palestine that led to the creation of the State of Israel in 1948, Iran was the second Islamic country to recognize it, after Egypt.

At the time, Iran was a monarchy ruled by the Shahs of the Pahlavi dynasty and one of the United States' main allies in the Middle East. For this reason, Israel's founder and first head of government, David Ben-Gurion, sought and achieved Iranian friendship as a way to counter the rejection of the new Jewish state by its Arab neighbors.

But in 1979, Ruhollah Khomeini's Revolution overthrew the Shah and imposed an Islamic republic that presented itself as the protector of the oppressed and had as one of its main hallmarks the rejection of the "imperialism" of the United States and its ally, Israel.

The new ayatollahs' regime severed relations with Israel, stopped recognizing its citizens' passports, and seized the Israeli embassy in Tehran to hand it over to the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), which at the time was leading the fight for a Palestinian state against the Israeli government.

Alí Vaez, director of the Iran Program at the International Crisis Group, a think tank, told the BBC that "hostility towards Israel was a pillar of the new Iranian regime because many of its leaders had trained and participated in acts of war guerrillas with the Palestinians in countries like Lebanon." But in addition, Vaez believes, "the new Iran wanted to project itself as a pan-Islamic power and raised the Palestinian cause against Israel that Arab Muslim countries had abandoned."

Thus, Khomeini began to claim the Palestinian cause as his own, and large pro-Palestinian demonstrations with official support became common in Tehran.

Vaez explains that "in Israel, hostility towards Iran only started later, in the 1990s, because Saddam Hussein's Iraq was perceived as a greater regional threat."

So much so that the Israeli government was one of the intermediaries that made possible the so-called Iran-Contra, the covert program through which the United States diverted weapons to Iran for use in the war it waged against its neighbor between 1980 and 1988 in Iraq.

But over time, Israel began to see Iran as one of the main threats to its existence, and the rivalry between the two went from words to deeds.

A "shadow war" between Israel and Iran

Vaez points out that, also facing Saudi Arabia, the other major regional power, and aware that Iran is Persian and Shiite in a predominantly Sunni and Arab Islamic world, "the Iranian regime understood its isolation and began to develop a strategy that intended to prevent his enemies who one day attacked him in his own territory"

Thus, a network of organizations aligned with Tehran spread and carried out armed actions favorable to its interests. The most famous is the Lebanese Hezbollah, classified as a terrorist by the United States and the European Union. Today, the so-called "axis of resistance" stretches through Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and Yemen.

Israel has not stood idly by and has exchanged attacks and other hostile actions with Iran and its allies, often in third countries where it finances and supports armed groups fighting pro-Iran.

The war between Iran and Israel has been described as a "shadow war" because the two countries have attacked each other without officially acknowledging their participation on many occasions.

In 1992, the Islamic Jihad group, close to Iran, blew up the Israeli embassy in Buenos Aires, killing 29. Shortly before that, Hezbollah leader Abbas al-Musayi had been killed, an attack widely attributed to Israeli intelligence services.

For Israel, it has always been an obsession to curtail Iran's nuclear program and prevent the day when the ayatollahs have atomic weapons.

Israel does not believe Iran's messages that its program pursues only civilian goals, and it is widely acknowledged that it was its services that, in cooperation with the United States, developed the Stuxnet computer virus, which caused serious damage to Iranian nuclear facilities in the first decade of the 2000s.

Tehran has also accused Israeli intelligence of being responsible for attacks against some of the top scientists in charge of its nuclear program.

The most famous was the 2020 assassination of Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, considered the person most responsible for the nuclear program. The Israeli government has never acknowledged its involvement in the deaths of the Iranian scientists.

Israel, along with its Western allies, has accused Iran of being behind drone and missile attacks on its territory in the past, as well as carrying out several cyber attacks.

The civil war started in Syria since 2011 was another reason for confrontation. Western intelligence shows Iran has sent money, weapons and instructors to support President Bashar al-Assad's forces against rebels seeking to topple him, raising alarm bells in Israel, which believes neighboring Syria is one of the main routes through which Iranians send weapons and equipment to Hezbollah in Lebanon.

According to the American intelligence portal Stratfor, at various times both Israel and Iran carried out actions in Syria aimed at deterring the other from a large-scale attack.

The Shadow War reached the sea in 2021. That year, Israel blamed Iran for attacks on Israeli ships in the Gulf of Oman. Iran, for its part, accused Israel of attacking its ships in the Red Sea.

Hamas attack on Israel

After the October 7, 2023 attacks by the Palestinian militia Hamas against Israel and the massive military offensive launched by the Israeli army in Gaza, analysts and governments around the world expressed concern that the conflict could provoke a chain reaction in the region and an open and direct confrontation between Iranians and Israelis.

Clashes between Israeli forces and militias suspected of being linked to Hezbollah on the border with Lebanon have increased in recent months. Also clashes with Palestinian protesters in the occupied territories of the West Bank.

Until this Saturday, Iran and Israel had avoided escalating their hostilities into full-scale fighting. That changed with the launch of drones and missiles from Tehran.

According to Vaez, “the irony is that no one wants a large-scale conflict right now. Israel is six months into its devastating war against Hamas in Gaza, which has greatly damaged its reputation on the international stage and left it more isolated than ever."

The analyst warned that, unlike Hamas, Iran "is a state actor and therefore much more powerful."

But, at the same time, "he has many economic problems and his government suffers a crisis of internal legitimacy".

The attack on its diplomatic headquarters in Damascus, which left 13 dead, including some of Iran's most prominent top commanders such as Revolutionary Guards General Mohammad Reza Zahedi and his deputy, Hadi Hajriahimi, particularly hurt Tehran.

Its Foreign Ministry then promised "punishment for the aggressor" and its ambassador to Syria, Hossein Akbari, announced that the response would be "decisive".

It will certainly not be the last of this long conflict./ VoxNews


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