Last December 26, while the Feast of St. Stephen was being celebrated in the Christian world, Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant declared: «We were attacked from seven fronts: Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, the West Bank, Iraq, Yemen and Iran. We reacted and operated in six of those areas.” With that “six out of seven” Gallant implied that the only enemy to which the Jewish State had not responded was the Islamic Republic of Tehran.
Four months after those words, however, the red line has been crossed: Israel finds itself face to face with the ayatollahs for the first time in a direct exchange of raids that keeps the Middle East (and the entire world) in suspense.
Now that the conflict seems to have entered a new phase, analysts are wondering how this worsening of tensions between the two regional powers could affect the continuation of the Israeli offensive in the Gaza Strip.
What strategy?
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu immediately made it known that he does not intend to retreat: Gaza, he explained, “is part of a larger system” because “behind Hamas and behind Hezbollah there is Iran”. “We are determined to win there and defend ourselves on all fronts,” he confirmed.
And war cabinet minister Benny Gantz, former chief of staff and opposition leader to Netanyahu, also warned: “We will continue the military campaign with determination and responsibility.”
Moreover, the clash vis à vis with Iran it materialized precisely in the weeks in which the IDF was withdrawing from Khan Younis, a city in the south of the Strip now devastated by months of fighting and bombing. According to the Israeli newspaper Haaretzthe partial disengagement could mark the beginning of a new strategy in the war against Hamas, characterized by more targeted and smaller-scale operations, but Netanyahu assures that the plans have not changed and that the next objective is the city of Rafah, the last stronghold of Palestinian fighters on the border with Egypt.
What is certain is that the siege on Gaza is not having the desired success. Minister Gadi Eizenkot, a member of the same political group as Gantz and also a former chief of staff, complains about Hamas' failure to free the hostages. “The weakest enemy in the Middle East has caused us the greatest damage, we must change our strategy”, observes, he who in December lost a son in the Strip, killed by an explosive device during a roundup.
According to the former British ambassador to Israel Tom Phillips, “Hamas has won”: in an editorial published on HaaretzPhilips noted that the Palestinian armed group “flipped the script of a militarily invincible Israel and exposed the fragility of its international support, raising difficult questions about its long-term sustainability.”
But Netanyahu also has to deal with calls for calm coming from the chancelleries of the United States, Europe and the UN. At this point, there are those who maintain that, with the attack on the Iranian embassy in Damascus, the prime minister of the Jewish state wanted to provoke Tehran's reaction to divert international attention from Gaza.
“It was a deliberate attempt to involve Iran in a regional war and to shift US and Western attention away from Israel's war in Gaza and towards the regional bogeyman, Iran,” he wrote on Al Jazeera Simon Speakman Cordall, journalist expert on the Islamic world. Also for analyst Nomi Bar-Yaacov, associate member of the prestigious London-based think tank Chatham House, “Netanyahu's plan is to divert attention from the war in Gaza and bring the United States and other Western allies back to the Middle East.”
And Rafah in Teheran
Il New York Times asked some former Israeli soldiers about what could happen now in the Strip. The assessments that emerged are quite divergent from each other.
Shlomo Brom, a retired brigadier general and former director of the IDF's strategic planning division, believes that a conflict with Iran could push the Jewish state to at least delay the planned offensive on Rafah. But – he adds – it could also result in putting an end to hostilities in Gaza: “It is not convenient for us to have simultaneous, high-intensity wars in multiple theaters”, argues the general. “There is the idea that to resolve a crisis the situation must first get worse.” For Brom, an escalation followed by a global ceasefire between Israel and Iran could lead Tehran to pressure its regional “proxies” to stop fighting with the Jewish state.
Other military experts, however, disagree. “There is no connection” between tensions with the Islamic Republic and the ongoing operation in the Strip, says Amos Gilead, a retired major general who served in Israeli military intelligence: for Gilead, the IDF has sufficient resources to fight against Iran and simultaneously continue to wage war against Hamas.
Some analysts also always report the New York Timespoint out that the military means necessary to face the ayatollahs are different from those used in Gaza: in the first case fighter planes and air defense systems are needed, while in the second it is necessary to make use mainly of ground troops, drones and attack helicopters .
Giora Eiland, a retired major general and former head of the Israeli National Security Council, also maintains that there is no correlation between the two fronts. However, according to the soldier, the success of the coalition of countries which, on the night between 13 and 14 April, repelled Tehran's attack could convince the Jewish State to exploit this moment to its advantage to overcome the negative image that rose to international level and put an end to the war in the Strip. Eiland also speculates that US support in defending Israel from Iranian missiles and drones could increase Washington's influence over Tel Aviv and lead to a ceasefire.
Pariah status
Even more so if the war against Hamas continues, the new direct conflict with Iran will make the permanent state of emergency in which Israelis have been living for more than seventy years even more oppressive.
“This is the failure of the dreams of Israel's founders and generations of Israelis,” he writes on The Guardian political analyst Dahlia Scheindlin, resident in Tel Aviv, underlining how Israel was born to be a safe haven for the Jewish people. On the contrary, Scheindlin observes, today “Israel is moving towards pariah status,” a land where “Israelis huddle in shelters, squeezed into shrunken borders within their own country.” Netanyahu's policy, the analyst warns, risks isolating the Jewish state even more: “In democratic countries, where people vote freely, in the future leaders will be chosen who will be much less kind to Israel.”
