Israel’s attack on Iran was not the ferocious response that US President Joe Biden and other Western leaders feared.
They had urged the Israeli government to end the dangerous series of events that began with Israel’s assassination of a top Iranian general in Damascus on April 1.
More than six months after Hamas attacks on Israel, the war continues in Gaza and has spread to both sides of the Lebanon-Israel border and to the Persian Gulf.
The fear is that the Middle East is on the brink of all-out war, with both global and regional dangers.
The Iranians are downplaying what happened in Isfahan.
Initial reports said there had been no attack. Later, a state television analyst claimed that air defenses had disabled drones launched by “infiltrators.”
Official media outlets published humorous photographs of miniature drones.
Israel responded to last Saturday’s attack from Iran. Despite years of enmity and threats, it was the first time since the establishment of the Islamic Republic in 1979 that Iran launched a direct attack from its territory on Israel.
During that attack, the Iranian government launched more than 300 missiles and drones. Almost all of them were destroyed by Israel’s air defenses, supported by forces from the United States, the United Kingdom and Jordan.
The Iranians made their intentions clear, giving Israel and its allies time to prepare, and quickly issued a statement at United Nations headquarters in New York that their retaliation was over.
Biden urged Israel to “accept victory,” but Israel insisted it would hit back.
From the beginning, this crisis has shown how poorly Iran and Israel understand each other. Both miscalculated, deepening the crisis.
Israel seemed to believe that Iran would respond with nothing stronger than outrage when it killed General Mohammed Reza Zahedi in Damascus.
Their airstrike destroyed the consulate in the Iranian diplomatic compound in Damascus and killed six other people, including another general.
Pressures for Netanyahu within his government
Iran announced that it considered the incident an attack on its own territory. Israel claimed the facility was not protected by diplomatic conventions as Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps had turned the site into a military outpost.
Iran, like Israel’s Western allies, did not accept a unilateral reclassification of the building’s status, and the government in Tehran hoped that Israel would agree to end the developments after its response.
That was another serious miscalculation.
If no more attacks follow the attack on Isfahan, then immediate tensions will ease.
What happened overnight could be Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s attempt to respond, without antagonizing Biden any more than he already has.
If so, another question is whether the attack will be enough for Israel’s former war cabinet generals, who are believed to want a strong response, restore, as they see it, Israel’s ability to deter its enemies.
Allies in Netanyahu’s ultranationalist coalition also demanded fierce retaliation from Israel.
National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir said Israelis must have “freaked out” when Iran attacked.
In a social media post, he described the Isfahan attack as “weak.”
The best option for the region, in the opinion of Western governments, is for both Iran and Israel to end the saga.
However, although this is the end of this stage of this crisis, new precedents have been established.
Iran attacked Israel with a direct offensive and Israel responded with its own direct attack.
This is a change in what is often referred to in the region as “the rules of the game” governing the long-running conflict between Iran and Israel.
The long clandestine war between the two countries has come out of the shadows.
In the process, Iran and Israel demonstrated that for all the obsessive attention they devote to each other, they are not good at reading each other’s intentions.
In a highly flammable part of the world, that’s not encouraging.
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