Since Pesach, a flurry of unforeseen events has stricken the Middle East. Iran is days away from producing a nuclear bomb and has at the same time incited its Hamas and Hezbollah proxies into stepping up attacks from Lebanon. Meanwhile, Israel is at work cementing regional alliances with Central Asian Shiite countries and Sunni countries neighboring Iran – even with even close-by Arab ones. This in preparation, perhaps, for an attack aimed at denying Iran a nuclear weapon and ending the clerical regime long devoted to destroying the Jewish state.
Indeed, according
to both Israeli and American intelligence experts an Israel-Iran war is now
imminent. Given Israel’s current internal strife, however, and the conflicting
religious, ideological, and strategic interests of these alliances, as well as the
interests of the superpowers, what can we expect should a war come to pass? Let’s
review recent events and then consider how such a war might play out.
Shifting Allies
Just before Pesach,
a Chinese-brokered Saudi-Iran reconciliation made headlines as the foreign
ministers of the two Moslem rivals announced a restoration of relations and the
imminent state visit of the Saudi king to Iran. The reconciliation surprised
the world because just last November the two Islamic adversaries nearly went to
war as the Saudis were cozying up to Israel, even allowing the media to expose
a secret visit by the newly elected Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu.
Saudi-Iranian
rivalry continued heating up into this year, with Iran accelerating its nuclear
bomb-making capacity and continuing proxy warfare in Yemen between the Iranian-backed
Shiite-led government and Saudi-backed rebels. Although Iraqi, Omani, and
Qatari mediators tried to cool the hostilities between Saudia Arabia (which
leads the world’s Sunni Moslems) and Iran (which leads the world’s Shiite
Moslems) it was to no avail. Meanwhile, the war in Ukraine and the Corona virus
crisis brought the ostracized world outlaws, Russia and China, into an alliance
with Iran, as the U.S., under President Biden, hibernated.
While Saudi Arabia
and Iran reconcile, Israel is cementing its likely allies, especially with those
countries neighboring Iran. Azerbaijan just announced the opening of an embassy
in Tel Aviv, which had been long postponed out of deference to its fellow-Shiite
neighbor Iran. Now, however, the Azeris were angry at Iran for subtly backing
Christian Armenia in the recent Azeri-Armenian war in 2020. (Iran accuses
Azerbaijan of fomenting revolt within Iran’s own Azerbaijan province, where
Turkic Azeris comprise 40% of Iran’s population.) Israel became an Azeri hero
for providing the advanced weaponry necessary for Azeri battlefield success.
Last week, Israeli Foreign Minister Cohen visited Azerbaijan, and then
Turkmenistan, to open a formal Israel embassy just 15 miles from the Iranian
border.
Prime Minister
Netanyahu, speaking to the U.S. media, downplayed the Saudi-Iran reconciliation
and noted that the Saudis know who their true friends are in the region. He
suggested that the recent visits by PLO Authority and Hamas leadership to Saudi
Arabia may have been to dissuade them against further attacks.
Internal Dynamics
How will Israel’s internal
strife affect the Israel-Iran war-in-the-making? International theorists have
long argued whether a country’s internal stability or instability provokes war.
A stable country without strife is more unified to carry out an attack, while
an unstable country might seek to rally and unify its disgruntled divisive
masses around a banner of national defense.
In the case of Iran, its multi-ethnic makeup and its recent protests against
the clerical dictatorship, combined with Western sanctions, makes Iran very
unstable. A growing younger generation of disaffected Iranians has been
alienated by the Iranian theocracy of aging ayatollahs, including the mass
murderer, Ayatollah Raisi. They began mass protests last fall over a Kurdish
woman dying in custody of the regime’s religious police for not wearing a head
covering. The protests demonstrated total disillusionment with the clerical
regime, with the crowds’ chants professing honor to the former Pahlavi monarchy
rattled Islamic Republic leaders.
The regime also
faces dissent in the potential break-away ethnic provinces Azerbaijan,
Khuzestan, Kurdistan, and especially Baluchistan, where Sunni Islamists are in
open rebellion. With divided opposition abroad, the Pahlavis have made a
comeback. Last week, Israel embraced the former Shah of Iran’s son as he
visited Yerushalayim’s Kotel and recent Arab terrorist victims from Judea and
Samaria, promising to restore his father’s Iran-Israel friendship under a
future “Cyrus accords.”
Israel is not
immune to dissent that could affect a war. But, beleaguered as it is in a sea
of hostile Arabs, especially radical Islamized attackers, Israel is less
susceptible to disunity in war. Nonetheless, demographic changes led to the
election of a more Torah-abiding coalition government under Prime Minister
Netanyahu – making obvious the waning of the old secular socialist guard – which
has provoked the recent anti-government protests, including calls to boycott
the security forces.
The Arab Wild Card
The repressive
countries of Russia, China, Syria, and Iran are emerging as close allies, and they
naturally line up with Iran against U.S.-backed Israel. The tricky piece is the
unpredictable Arab lineup because of the opposing goals of the Abraham Accords
and the Iran-Saudi reconciliation. Netanyahu may be right, though, to downplay
that reconciliation, given the long, historic Sunni-Shiite religious divide,
fought in numerous “Sushi” (Sunni-Shiite) wars since Islam’s birth.
Other motives
could be at work. Saudi Arabia may have suspended its hostility to Iran to
smother a lurking Shiite revolt in its Eastern oil-rich provinces, where the
repressed Shiite populace is exploding. In 2016, the Saudis’ beheading of a
rebellious, Iranian-trained, Saudi Shiite cleric resulted in Iranians storming
the Saudi Tehran embassy and a break in relations. Iran may have also buried
its hostility to Saudi Arabia to quell Sunni Islamicists in Baluchistan.
Despite a new
young Saudi crown prince flirting with Israel, including opening its airspace
for Israeli civilian air traffic, Saudi behavior is unpredictable. Factors
weighing against Israel are a truce in Yemen as well as the likelihood of Assad-ruled
Syria being welcomed back into the Arab League. (Syria was suspended from the
Sunni-dominated Arab League during the Syrian civil war, when Sunni Islamists
succeeded in nearly defeating the Alawite Assad regime before Russia entered
the war. The Alawites are an offshoot of Shiite Islam.)
The Saudis refused
to enter the Abraham Accords in contrast to many of their fellow Arabs,
especially Saudi-allied United Arab Emirates (UAR) and Bahrain. Neighboring
Qatar and Oman have dealt with Israel as Qatar serves as a Hamas mediator, and
Oman just granted permission for Israeli civilian aircraft to fly over its
airspace. Oman still refuses to enter the Abraham Accords despite offering to
mediate with Iran and granting Netanyahu an official visit a few years ago. If war
should break out, Israel can hope that the Saudis will step aside should Israel
use its UAE and Bahrain allies in an attack on Iran. These Saudi allies, who
are emerging as close friends of Israel, may pressure the Saudis not to react
beyond verbal protest.
Alternatively, out
of deference to Iran, the Saudis, with their allies, may refuse to assist
Israel altogether in the name of Islamic solidarity. The UAR has played both
sides, actively participating against Israel at the UN to uphold the Jordanian
Arab hegemony outlawing Jewish worship at Har Habayis, while also having its
emir telephone Netanyahu to express Passover greetings to the Jewish people.
(Minus the korban Pesach!). While the U.S. shunned Israeli coalition government
officials Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir because of their support for
Jewish access to the Temple Mount and Judea and their Samaria annexation views,
the UAE hosted them as guests of honor at their National Day event in their Tel
Aviv UAR embassy last fall.
The Superpowers
Superpowers will
be constrained in their active support for either Iran or Israel. Russia is
bogged down in a war in Ukraine, which it has failed to swiftly swallow as the
world, including Israel, voices sympathy for Ukrainian leader Zelensky, a Jew.
Russia has had to call upon its allies – Syria for soldiers and Iran for shoddy
drone weaponry. It still controls Syrian skies after turning around the
country’s civil war in favor of Assad. Nonetheless, Russia has been helpless to
stop daily Israeli attacks against Syrian military infrastructure, which is
hosting Iran’s Revolutionary Guard and Hezbollah.
China makes for an
odd bedfellow with Russia, Iran, and Saudi Arabia. China has had a long
historical rivalry with Russia, and it has harshly repressed its Moslem
populace, especially the Uyghurs, who seek a breakaway state. The aging
communist party-ruled economic power has drawn U.S. rebuke and sanction because
of its negligence regarding the Corona virus as well as its military exercises
in the Pacific Rim, which threaten democratic allies of the U.S.
The differences among
these allies could get temporarily put aside should an Israel-Iran war spark a
larger world war. Political drama will tend to hide who is on which side, just
as, shortly before World War I, the Kaiser of Germany hosted his first cousin,
Czar Nicolas of Russia. They posed for the photographer wearing the exchanged
military uniforms of their adversarial empires and yet were shortly thereafter
embroiled in war. Before World War II, too, the Soviet-German 1939
non-aggression pact fooled war strategists. The 1941 Nazi invasion of the
Soviet Union violated the pact, proving that enmity may be temporarily set
aside for strategic goals, only to quickly reignite.
Like Iran, China
suffers from an aging leadership, and its communist ideology alienates a
populous younger generation, which has been harmed by Western economic
sanctions. China’s recent offer to mediate the Arab-Israeli conflict is a
non-starter, given its insistence on land for peace and the creation of a so-called
Palestinian state on all Israel’s pre-1967 borders. Even the Abraham Accords
professes a realistic solution, which denies the outright expulsion of over
half-million Jews in Judea and Samaria.
The U.S. will
likely have to stand behind Israel, given Iran’s aggressive behavior toward
producing a nuclear bomb; its threats to close the Strait of Hormoz, through
which substantial oil traffic passes; and its repression of recent protests.
The Biden administration’s attempt to woo Iran back into nuclear negotiations
has admittedly failed. Biden faces an upcoming election, in which Republican opponents
are openly criticizing his failure to embrace Israel enough. The U.S. certainly
does not want to see a Soviet-and-Chinese-backed Iran going nuclear or creating
a further energy crisis with its subversive activities in the Persian Gulf.
The War to Be
How could open war
be sparked? The most likely scenario is a surprise Israeli attack on Iran’s
underground nuclear sites before an Iranian bomb comes into being. The attack
would hopefully knock out Iran’s nuclear potential. This would be followed by an
attempt to use Israel’s agents, who are well-penetrated within the regime, to help
foment internal unrest aimed at a counterrevolution in favor of a Pahlavi-led,
democratic-minded, younger generation. The attack would probably be launched
from neighboring allies and/or the Persian Gulf. As with Hamas’ Gaza tunnels,
the attack would have to be lethal enough to knock out deep underground
installations. Fomenting internal strife to overthrow the regime is trickier as
the Raisi regime’s fierce repression of protesters with mass executions,
according to the UN, has muzzled dissent.
Raisi is a mass murderer who, as one of Iran’s chief judges, put to
death tens of thousands of alleged Iranian dissenters following the conclusion
of the Iran-Iraq war in 1988. Imitating Czarist Russia, harsh repression does
curtail dissent in the short term, while war and forced relaxation of
suppression, which Czar Nicolas provided in the aftermath of the 1905
Japan-Russian War, unleashed eventual revolution. Israel’s likely allies within
Iran, the ethnically alienated Azeris and Kurds, might mobilize for resistance.
If Israel’s allies can establish a “Free Iran” territory with a counter-government,
they may be able to inspire further dissent to bring down the Islamic Republic.
But Iran also has
an attack strategy, which it just began. It provokes Hezbollah, and now Hamas
terrorists, to launch attacks into northern Israel from Lebanon, as a second
front beyond Gaza. Israeli air strikes over Syria have so far frustrated
Iranian efforts to establish a strong front for attack. Hezbollah and Hamas
attacks may force Israel into attacking and/or securing territory in Lebanon.
And it could assist anti-Assad rebels left over from a waning civil war to
reignite rebellion against the Syrian regime. While in the past, Soviet
intervention against Israel was feared, the Ukrainian war curtails the
possibility of large-scale Russian intervention. Arab insurrection is also
likely, especially in Judea and Samaria, where there is already an uptick of attacks
against Jews. Considering that the likelihood of war increases with Iran’s near
nuclear bomb-making capacity, Hamas’ entry into Lebanon to join its Hezbollah
hosts, and apparent Sunni-Shiite reconciliation, will Israel be able to
withstand enemies? As we go from marking Pesach miracles, we daven for and
await not only Hashem’s protection but the true redemption of Israel with the ushering
in of the final geulah and binyan Beis Hamikdash, bimheirah biyameinu. Amen.
The author is a U.S. Foreign Service veteran. As
Middle East Professor at Community College Baltimore County (CCBC), he developed
and taught the course “The U.S. and the Middle East.” He now serves as Shoel U’Mesheiv
at Yeshiva Toras Chaim in North Miami Beach, Florida.
