On Wednesday April 27, 2022, according to Syria’s defense ministry
backed by the UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR), Israel
launched a missile attack on positions near Damascus killing four Syrian
soldiers. The Syrian state news agency
claimed the missiles had been launched from Tiberias in north-eastern Israel.
According to the head of SOHR, Rami Abdel Rahman, the missile attacks hit arms
depots in several suburbs of Damascus used by Iran-backed groups. At least five separate sites were targeted.
The SOHR was established
in 2006 to catalogue human rights violations by the dictatorial regime of
Bashar al-Assad in Syria. Since the Arab
Spring rebellion against the Assad regime in 2011, it has set up a vast intelligence-gathering
network in every region of Syria, and become an authoritative source of
information about the effects on the civilian population of Assad’s ruthless
conduct of the conflict, backed – as his forces are – by both Russia and Iran.
Israel issued no statement on the reported April 27 attack, nor
about one reported on April 14 when several missiles hit Syrian army positions
near Damascus. What Israel has said in
the past is that any Iranian or Iranian-supported presence near its northern
frontier is a red line, and that it targets the bases of Iran-allied militias,
such as Lebanon’s Hezbollah group, which has fighters in Syria backing the Assad
regime.
Israel has also said it
attacks arms shipments believed to be bound for the Iran-supported militias. For example, in December 2021, hours after
the Israeli military reportedly struck arms shipped from Iran in Syria’s
Latakia port, Defense Minister Benny Gantz said: “Israel will not allow Iran to
stream game-changing weapons to its proxies and to threaten our citizens.”
Of the many conflicts in
the Middle East, the ongoing proxy war between Iran and Israel is potentially the
most explosive. Built into the DNA of
the Iranian Revolution from its start in 1979
was the aim of destroying Israel, as a preliminary step toward the
destruction of Western democracy as exemplified by the US. In pursuit of this fundamental objective,
Iran’s leaders have provided funding, weapons, and training to groups including Lebanese Hezbollah,
Hamas, and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ))
which have carried out attacks on Israel, and which have been designated
terrorist organizations by many countries,
Because Israel perceives
the Iranian regime as a threat to its very existence, it has consistently
opposed Iran’s nuclear weapon and missile programs. It seeks also to downgrade Iran's allies and
proxies, and prevent Iranian entrenchment in Syria,
another sworn enemy of Israel.
For years, Iran and
Israel have engaged in a shadow war, quietly attacking each other –directly or
by proxy – on land, by air and at sea. Escalation to all-out war has been
deliberately avoided, and attacks usually remain either unattributed or
plausibly denied. For example, the assassination of five Iranian nuclear
scientists between 2010 and 2020 remains unexplained and unacknowledged, to say
nothing of the series of mysterious explosions at various of Iran’s nuclear
facilities in 2020. In April 2021, Iran blamed Israel and vowed revenge
for an explosion at its largest uranium enrichment facility in Natanz, which it
said caused significant damage to its centrifuges. It was the second time in
less than a year that the site had been hit by a suspicious blast. Israel
neither confirmed nor denied it was responsible for either attack.
A cyber attack that
paralyzed Iran’s gas stations nationwide on October 26, 2021, has also not been
acknowledged.
Backed heavily by Iran’s
Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, Hezbollah’s military forces in Lebanon have,
if the boasts of its leaders are to be believed, accrued a vast arsenal of
rockets and missiles along the border. Israeli forces have repeatedly struck at
Hezbollah’s rocket pipeline within Lebanon, and Hezbollah has on occasion
retaliated by firing rockets into Israel and attacking Israeli troops along the
border.
As for Syria, ever since
the civil conflict started in 2011 Iran has been strengthening its military
presence in the country in support of Assad.
Using its so-called “Shia Crescent” Iran transfers weaponry meant for
Hezbollah through Iraq and Syria. In an effort to stop the arms flow and
counter this second hostile presence on its northern border, Israel has
conducted an increasingly open campaign of air strikes in Syria against the
flow of weaponry and its storage.
At sea, tit-for-tat attacks on commercial vessels in and around the Gulf of Hormuz began in 2019 – again with little by way of explanation for each incident. Since several targets have been Iranian tankers carrying oil towards Syria, media and the public have been left free to speculate.
There is always a risk of
this long-standing proxy war suddenly igniting into direct military conflict
between Israel and Iran. Whether this
nightmare scenario ever materializes turns on how Iran’s nuclear program
emerges from the current negotiations in Vienna around reviving the nuclear
deal. The administration of President
Joe Biden seems dead set on concluding a new agreement which, all reports
indicate, would delay but not eliminate Iran’s eventual acquisition of a nuclear
military capability. Iran‘s leaders say
they have no ambition to build nuclear weapons. The hoard of secret documents spirited
out of Iran in 2018 suggests otherwise.
In Washington on October
20, 2021 foreign minister Yair Lapid warned that Israel was prepared to
use military force to stop Iran from gaining nuclear weapons capability.
“Iran has publicly
stated it wants to wipe us out,” said Lapid. “We have no intention of letting
this happen.”
Should force be required
to stop an Iranian bomb, Israel would have to act, and almost certainly act
alone. That is how the long-standing Israel-Iran proxy war could assume a
terrible reality.
Published in the Jerusalem Post and Jerusalem Post on-line, 12 May 2022:
https://www.jpost.com/opinion/article-706449
Published in Eurasia Review, 13 May 2022:
https://www.eurasiareview.com/13052022-israel-iran-could-the-proxy-war-ignite-oped/
Published in the MPC Journal, 14 May 2022:
https://mpc-journal.org/israel-iran-could-the-proxy-war-ignite/
Published in Jewish Business News, 13 May 2022:
https://jewishbusinessnews.com/2022/05/13/israel-iran-could-the-proxy-war-ignite/
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