Soleimani hit may push off Israel-Iran confrontation – Analysis

JANUARY 5, 2020 18:24

Iran Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei with Hezbollah Secretary General Hassan Nasrallah and IRGC Quds Force Commander Qasem Soleimani

On December 25, in a key speech at the IDC in Herzliya where he discussed Israel’s strategic challenges for the upcoming year, Chief of Staff Lt.-Gen. Aviv Kochavi lamented that Israel was the only actor taking offensive action against the Iranians in the region.

“Iran has changed its policies over the last year, and has become much more active and aggressive,” Kochavi said of Iran’s policies in the region. “This policy is first and foremost aimed at the Persian Gulf countries.”

But the response to the Iranian aggression, he added, has been “no response, no counter action, no retaliation, no deterrence.”

This failure to respond gave the Iranians more self confidence,  something Kochavi said translated into the possibility of a limited confrontation – or more than that – between Israel and Iran.

Israel, he said, did not want this scenario, but was preparing for it.

Then he added, the situation would have been better “were we not the only ones to be going on the offensive against them [the Iranians], but that is the situation now.”

In other words, the chief of staff was bewailing that no one, except Israel, was taking offensive action to stop Iran’s belligerence and aggression in the region.

What a difference nine days makes.

Following the United States’s assassination Friday of the IRGC’s Quds Force commander Qasem Soleimani, Israel is now by no means the sole force to have taken strong, active and offensive measures against Iran in the region.

But is the Israeli-Iranian confrontation that Kochavi was talking about now more likely to take place, or – possibly – has it now been averted? Were Kochavi to have delivered that speech today, would he still have spoken about an inevitable clash with the Islamic Republic? Would he have omitted that line altogether, or – perhaps – would he have gone even further and said that the Soleimani hit brought a full-fledged war between Israel and Iran closer.

As opposed to the lack of response to Iran’s actions in the region from other countries, Israel has responded to Iranian movies in the neighborhood over the last several years.

For instance, in February, 2018, the Iranians sent an armed drone from Syria to attack Israel that was intercepted in Israeli airspace. Helicopter gunships obliterated the drone, and then the IAF attacked the Iranian command-and-control center at an airbase in Syria that the Iranians used to launch it. It was not the Iranians’ finest military moment.

And late in November, 2019, after the Iranians – perhaps flush in the lack of response to their strike earlier in the year on a Saudi oil installation or the downing of a US drone – fired four rockets from Syria toward the Golan Heights that were intercepted by the Iron Dome air defense system. Israel responded to that by striking at Iranian forces stationed near Damascus, killing at least 21 people.

Again, not a red-letter day for the Iranian military.

Between those two events, there were scores of other military incidents with Israel reportedly taking action in Syria, Lebanon and Iraq against Iranian assets to prevent the Iranians from either transferring equipment to Hezbollah in Lebanon to upgrade its missiles into precision guided ones, or to create a local manufacturing capability in Lebanon to build precision guided missiles.

These alleged Israeli actions have exposed Iranian weakness, at a time when the country is keen on projecting an image of power and strength throughout the region.

It is safe to assume that if Iran – either directly or through its Hezbollah proxy in Lebanon or its Palestinian Islamic Jihad proxy in Gaza – chooses to respond to the Soleimani assassination by striking Israel, the IDF is sure to respond in a way that will again expose Iran’s weakness and vulnerability.

And this is not something that Iran will want exposed at a time when it may precipitate a military confrontation with the United States. At this time Tehran wants to project a sense of military invincibility, not have the holes in its armor visible for all to see.

The Iranians are threatening to hit US assets in the region, as well as US allies.

But not all of America’s allies in the region are equal.

The Iranians hit the Saudi oil fields in September, and there was no response. The Iranians hit oil tankers in the Straits of Hormuz in June,  but there were no responses.

But Iran surely knows that if it strikes out at Israeli targets to avenge Soleimani’s assassination, even indirectly through its proxies, Israel will respond. And it also surely realizes that Israel’s capabilities are much more advanced and developed than those of the Persian Gulf countries that could not, or would not, respond to their provocations. Iran also, as recent experience has shown, knows that Israel both can and will respond – something that it is unlikely to want to invite upon itself as it faces off against America.