After days of dialectical war and threats of all kinds between Israel and Iran, the anecdote speaks for itself. The Iranian Foreign Minister, Hossein Amir Abdollahian, was heading this Friday to a meeting with ambassadors of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation when a journalist asked him: Any comment on last night's attack? “Will Iran retaliate?” The minister ignored the questions and a member of his entourage responded without stopping: “What attack?”
The two countries appear to be trying to turn the page after Israel's measured retaliation. At least for now, it is a kind of return to the hidden war that they maintained until the bombing of an Iranian consular building in Damascus, which has raised fears of a regional war in the last three weeks. Israel remains silent after a retaliation that allows it to save face, both before the great American ally and before its public opinion, without adding much fuel to the already burning fire in the Middle East. And Iran downplays it and even sows doubts about who is behind it, exempting itself from the symbolic obligation to launch the “painful” and “imminent” response that it had promised.
“It is a postponed crisis, not a resolved crisis,” summarizes Ali Vaez, director of the Iran project at the American analysis center International Crisis Group, by telephone. Israel has shown its archenemy that “it cannot unilaterally rewrite the rules of strategic competition” that they maintain, without at the same time putting it “in a position that would force it to retaliate.” “Most likely it is due to Israel's reluctance to open war in which it would have to fight on many fronts at the same time and pressure from the United States. As long as it remains a one-off episode, it can be considered closed, but there is still the possibility of an outbreak” because, in this new and “ambiguous”
status quo
, it is no longer clear where the red lines are.
Tehran hides behind the limited nature of the attack and doubts about authorship to not respond immediately. Four days earlier, Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi had made it clear that “the slightest action” by Israel would receive a “painful” response. And the Deputy Foreign Minister, Ali Bagheri, who would arrive “in seconds.”
Air defenses shot down quadcopter drones, according to Iran's National Space Center spokesman Hossein Dalirian. These are precisely unmanned devices with four propellers
and medium-sized to which explosive charges can be added and which Israel has used against Iranian territory in the past. The most recent, in January 2023, against a military center, also in Isfahan, in an action that official US sources attributed to Mossad, the secret service abroad. Also in 2021, in a sabotage of uranium enrichment centrifuges and, two years earlier, in Beirut, the capital of Lebanon, against a stronghold of Hezbollah, Iran's main allied militia.
The Brent thermometer
Join EL PAÍS to follow all the news and read without limits.
Subscribe
The markets have also perceived the desire for a clean slate. The barrel of Brent oil is a great thermometer of how nervous the conflict in the Middle East makes markets, because Iran is the eighth largest producer in the world and a founding member of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC). Upon learning of the activation of air defenses in the province of Isfahan, which houses the heart of the Iranian nuclear program, it shot up 4.5%. After more details became known, the International Atomic Energy Agency confirmed that no nuclear installation had suffered damage and a senior Iranian official clarified that he did not plan to respond immediately, the increase remained at 1% ($88.2).
The impression now is that both are returning to the starting box with achievements to claim. Israel, two: having the last word (which usually shows who is the strongest in an action-reaction dynamic) and having fulfilled its promise to respond directly with an attack on Iran, which Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu made when Tehran gave clear signals that it would not let the killings in Damascus go. And Iran can present the response as a sign that Israel was afraid and boast about how cheap it was to break the unwritten rules and launch an unprecedented attack last week.
The escalation began on the 1st. Israel killed 13 people, including three senior officers of the Revolutionary Force. Both the profile, the place (a consular building in Damascus, considered sovereign territory) and the moment (after six months of bloody invasion in Gaza) decided Tehran to draw a red line and show with facts that this attack, unlike others, would not remain unanswered. Last Saturday, for the first time in the history of the two countries, it launched an attack from its territory against Israel, with more than 300 drones and missiles.
Publicly, Israel downplayed reports that Tehran had warned neighboring countries and that the United States (which shot down most of the projectiles) had negotiated the scope of the response through Turkey, raising fears of that the escalation degenerated into open war. Iran also raised its tone with unprecedented threats and Netanyahu, who is now silent, maintained the belligerent rhetoric, with one eye on his electorate and another on his American ally, which had asked him for restraint in his response after the successful interception.
The message of the Iranian show of force, announced and almost choreographed as a spectacle, was not so much the damage as the ability to do so and the possession of weapons to hit the enemy anywhere. Just like Israel this Friday. An official US source told ABC that the attack not only included drones, but also three missiles launched from outside Iran against the air defense radar system that protects the Natanz uranium enrichment center. It was, according to the source, “very limited.” That is, a message of the ability to leave Natanz unprotected.
Israel rarely acknowledges its operations abroad, at least not immediately. But he could have been quick to gain muscle with one of the typical statements in which a high-ranking political or military official suggests authorship, without expressly acknowledging it. Only the Minister of National Security, the far-right Itamar Ben Gvir, has spoken out, with a one-word message (translatable as “weak”) that reflects his disappointment that it was not more powerful. His ministry controls the police, but he is not part of the war cabinet that makes military decisions, so it has been almost unanimously interpreted as a way to distinguish himself at a time when polls place him out of power.
Israeli government sources have criticized the message from anonymity and the leader of the opposition, the former prime minister, Yair Lapid, has been particularly harsh: “Never has a security cabinet minister done so much damage to the country's security, to his image and its international status. In an inexcusable one-word tweet, Ben Gvir has managed to mock and embarrass Israel from Tehran to Washington.”
Both Israel and Tehran also have other ways to respond later. The first, with more murders of members of the Revolutionary Guard in Syria or Lebanon, murders of nuclear scientists or cyber attacks. The second, with attacks abroad against Israeli interests or through its allied militias, mainly Hezbollah, in Lebanon. And, of course, he has the nuclear ace up his sleeve. This Thursday, the commander of the Revolutionary Guard in charge of nuclear security, Ahmad Haghtalab, dropped the possibility of "reviewing nuclear doctrine and policies to deviate from the considerations announced in the past" in the face of the use of "the threat of "attacking nuclear centers as a tool of pressure."
nuclear arsenal
Israel is one of the few countries in the world and the only one in the Middle East with an atomic arsenal, although it is voluntarily ambiguous about its existence because it violates the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Agreement. In fact, during the Iranian attack, the army gave special instructions to the population in the city of Dimona, whose nuclear power plant is considered the heart of the program.
To continue maintaining this strategic superiority (which it obtained with the help of France in the 1950s and perceives as a guarantee of its survival), the Jewish State champions the heavy hand of sanctions and military threats, and actively boycotted the international agreement with Tehran to control its atomic program, which the United States abandoned in the era of Donald Trump.
He has also done it with force of arms. In 1981 he bombed a nuclear reactor in Osirak, in Saddam Hussein's Iraq. In 2007 he destroyed an attempt by another in Syria. It is one of the few bombings abroad that it has formally recognized (11 years later). In his longest period in power (2009-2021), Netanyahu was on the verge of decreeing an attack on Iran's nuclear facilities in the face of voices warning that the development of an atomic weapon was a matter of months.
Russian support
The Israeli population was also divided on the issue, aware both that Iran is a state and much more powerful than Hamas, the militia that launched the October 7 attack, and that a war with a regional power fully supported by Russia The schism with the West over the war in Ukraine would not result in the loss of some 260 soldiers, who are in half a year of war in Gaza. While the invasion of the Strip continues to have solid support, 52% of those surveyed opposed their country responding to the Iranian attack, according to a poll released on Monday by the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
Among the 48% who supported retaliation, more than half even if it had degenerated into open conflict, is Zaki Shalom, an expert on Israeli defense policy at the Jerusalem-based Misgav Institute for National Security and Zionist Strategy, who regrets the loss of a “unique opportunity” to respond on the same night of the attack to show the entire region the price of provoking Israel. “I do not agree that this is going to be the new security equation with Iran. It does not put us in a good place as a deterrent force,” he notes by phone.
Israel would have been able to overcome Iranian air defenses in a broader attack. They are, in fact, similar to those in Syria since 2015, where its air force frequently bombs (the last this Friday) against targets linked to Tehran and has been collecting information for a decade on how to avoid them. The former head of the Israeli air defense, reserve brigadier general Zvika Haimovich, recalled this Thursday. The Ayatollah regime is a “superpower in tactical ballistic missiles and drones”, but not in air defense, supported mainly by Russian systems or their local equivalents, even with American fighters dating from the time of Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, ally of Washington and overthrown by the Islamic revolution in 1979.
_