Tension in the Middle East is on the rise.
Iran launched an attack with dozens of missiles against Israel on Tuesday in response to recent actions by Israeli forces in Lebanon, Gaza and elsewhere.
The Israeli army has bombed Beirut and other points in the neighboring country in recent days, and its attacks ended the lives of Hassan Nasrallah and other senior leaders of the Hezbollah militia party, an ally of Iran.
Furthermore, this Tuesday the Israeli army began a “limited” ground invasion on Lebanese soil.
The Israeli offensive against Hezbollah in Lebanon adds to the military intervention underway since last October against Hamas, the Palestinian armed organization that carried out the October 7 attacks that left nearly 1,200 dead in northern Israel and kidnapped to more than 250 people.
This Tuesday’s Iranian attack has aggravated fears of open war in the Middle East. The United States and the United Kingdom reiterated their calls for a ceasefire that would allow tension to be relaxed.
But for now there is little reason for hope, with both Israel and Iran exchanging warning messages.
These latest events are the last episode of an old enmity.
Israel and Iran have been engaged in a bloody rivalry for years, the intensity of which fluctuates depending on the geopolitical moment. Its pulse has become one of the main sources of instability in the Middle East.
For Tehran, Israel is the “little Satan,” an ally of the United States in the Middle East, which they call the “great Satan.”
Israel accuses Iran of financing “terrorist” groups and carrying out attacks against its interests motivated by the anti-Semitism of the ayatollahs.
The rivalry between the “archenemies” has left a huge number of dead, often the result of covert actions for which neither government admits responsibility.
The war in Gaza and Lebanon has only made things worse.
Actually, Relations between Israel and Iran were quite cordial until 1979 when the so-called Islamic Revolution of the Ayatollahs conquered power in Tehran.
In fact, although it opposed the plan for the partition of Palestine that led to the creation of the State of Israel in 1948, Iran was the second Islamic country to recognize it, only after Egypt.
At that time, Iran was a monarchy ruled by the Shahs of the Pahlavi dynasty and one of the main allies of the United States in the Middle East. For this reason, the founder of Israel and its first head of government, David Ben-Gurion, sought and achieved Iranian friendship as a way to counteract 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 defender of the oppressed and had one of its main hallmarks of identity in its rejection of the “imperialism” of the United States and its ally Israel.
The new regime of the ayatollahs broke off relations with Israel, stopped recognizing the validity of its citizens’ passports and seized the Israeli embassy in Tehran to hand it over to the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), which was then leading the fight. for a Palestinian state against the Israeli government.
Alí Vaez, director of the Iran Program at the International Crisis Group, an analysis center, told BBC Mundo that “animosity toward Israel was a pillar of the new Iranian regime because many of its leaders had trained and participated in actions guerrilla warfare with the Palestinians in places like Lebanon and they had great sympathy for them.”
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 the Arab Muslim countries had abandoned.”
So, Khomeini began to claim the Palestinian cause as his own and the large pro-Palestinian demonstrations With official support they became regulars in Tehran.
Vaez explains that “in Israel, hostility toward Iran did not begin until later, in the 1990s, because Saddam Hussein’s Iraq was previously perceived as a greater regional threat.”
So much so, that the Israeli government was one of the mediators that made possible the so-called Iran-Contra, the covert program through which the United States diverted weapons to Iran so that it could be used in the war that it waged against its neighbor between 1980 and 1988. Iraq.
But over time, Israel began to see Iran as one of the main dangers 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 great regional power, and aware that Iran is Persian and Shiite in a predominantly Sunni and Arab Islamic world, “The Iranian regime realized its isolation and began to develop a strategy aimed at preventing his enemies from one day attacking him in his own territory.”
Thus, a network of organizations aligned with Tehran proliferated and carried out armed actions favorable to its interests. The Lebanese Hezbollah, classified as terrorist by the United States and the European Union, is the most prominent. Today, the so-called Iranian “axis of resistance” extends through Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and Yemen.
Israel did not sit 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-Irans.
The standoff between Iran and Israel has been described as a “shadow war” because both countries have attacked each other without, in many cases, either government officially admitting their participation.
In 1992, the Islamic Jihad group, close to Iran, blew up the Israeli embassy in Buenos Aires, causing 29 deaths. Shortly before, Hezbollah leader Abbas al-Musawi had been assassinated, an attack widely attributed to Israel’s intelligence services.
For Israel, it has always been an obsession to truncate the Iranian nuclear program and prevent the day from arriving when the ayatollahs have atomic weapons.
Israel does not believe Iran’s messages that its program pursues only civilian purposes and it is widely accepted that it was its services that, in collaboration 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 denounced Israeli intelligence as responsible for the attacks against some of the main scientists in charge of its nuclear program.
The most notable was the 2020 assassination of Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, considered the program’s top official. The Israeli government has never accepted its involvement in the deaths of Iranian scientists.
Israel, along with its Western allies, accused Iran of being behind drone and rocket attacks on its territory in the past, as well as having carried out several cyberattacks.
The civil war unleashed in Syria since 2011 was another reason for confrontation. Western intelligence indicates that Iran sent money, weapons and instructors to support President Bashar al Assad’s forces against insurgents seeking to overthrow him, setting off alarm bells in Israel, which believes that neighboring Syria is one of the main routes through which the Iranians send weapons and equipment to Hezbollah in Lebanon.
According to the US intelligence portal Stratfor, at different times both Israel and Iran carried out actions in Syria aimed at deterring the other from launching 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 in response, analysts and governments around the world expressed concern that the conflict could lead to a chain reaction in the regionand an open and direct confrontation between Iranians and Israelis.
Skirmishes between Israeli forces and militiamen allegedly attached to Hezbollah on the border with Lebanon had increased in recent months. Also the clashes with Palestinian protesters in the occupied territories of the West Bank.
Until last April, both Iran and Israel had avoided escalating their hostility and large-scale fighting. That changed with Tehran’s launch that month of dozens of drones and missiles against Israel.
It was the response to the Israeli attack on its diplomatic headquarters in Damascus, which left 13 dead, including some of the most prominent Iranian senior commanders, such as Revolutionary Guard General Mohammad Reza Zahedi and his deputy, Hadi Haji-Hajriahimi.
The Iranian Foreign Ministry He then promised “punishment for the aggressor.” and its ambassador to Syria, Hossein Akbari, announced that the response would be “decisive.”
This occurred on April 13 and Israel responded with another attack on Iranian soil on April 19.
After Iran launched missiles on Israel this Tuesday, tension is once again at its highest.
According to Vaez, “the irony is that no one wants a large-scale conflict now. “Israel is months into its devastating war against Hamas in Gaza, which has greatly negatively affected 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, “has many financial problems and his government suffers a crisis of internal legitimacy” after months of protests led in many cases by women fed up with religious restrictions.
*This article was originally published in April 2024 and was updated following Iran’s missile attack on Israel.
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