Sheltering in Jerusalem and Looking at the Iran War
The missile program is another matter. Iran’s conventional warheads pose no imminent threat to the United States, and their threat to American bases and its allies in the Gulf, which has become deadly since the start of this war, was only a contingent threat. But for Israel, their threat is tangible – and permanent. Iran’s missile buildup portends wars of attrition, like the current one, in which each side attempts to wear down the other. Thus, Israel – preemptively or in response to attacks – aims to eliminate Iranian missile launchers and vast production facilities; Iran aims to degrade Israel’s economic life and endanger international shipping. But neither side seems capable of achieving a decisive victory.
Militarily, Iran seems clearly at a disadvantage. Its air defense was decimated in October 2024 – when Israel attacked after Iran fired missiles in retaliation for Israel’s aerial assassination of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah in Lebanon – and again in June. Like the Times Correspondent Mark Mazzetti noted, “Netanyahu began to see the costs of a war against Iran as lower,” which helped “sell the United States.” [on] get involved. » The assassinations of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and many senior officials during the early days of this war may have seemed to confirm an accelerating asymmetry.
But Israel finds itself at another disadvantage. Its high-tech economy depends on advanced global networks, severely disrupted by wars. The Israeli attack on Iran in June resulted in the closure of non-essential Israeli businesses; it froze trade, travel and tourism for a month, forced the cancellation of conferences featuring Israeli startups and temporarily closed the country’s natural gas fields. Schools were closed, as they are today. The wars have accelerated the departure of some of Israel’s most educated people for jobs in American, European and Australian businesses, universities and hospitals. (In the last three years of Netanyahu’s rule, from his attacks on the justice system to the protracted war in Gaza, some two hundred thousand Israelis have left the country.)
Moreover, along with Iran, Israel must patrol the skies of a country whose population is close to that of Turkey and whose territory is roughly the size of Alaska, with approximately two hundred planes (the number believed to have participated in the initial attack on Iran in February) which must fly to targets more than a thousand kilometers away and be refueled in flight. Meanwhile, Israel’s Home Front Command must shoot down penetrating missiles and drones that cost only twenty thousand dollars each, with interceptor missiles typically costing four million dollars and taking much longer to manufacture. Furthermore, much of Iran’s missile production infrastructure lies deep underground, where most Israeli and American bombs cannot reach. The Israeli Air Force’s highest priority is therefore to destroy ground-based missile launch facilities; On Monday, the Israeli army claimed to have eliminated around eighty percent of them. But over time, they can be rebuilt and installed on new sites.
Before the calamitous war that followed the attacks of October 7, 2023, Israel fought five wars with Hamas, between 2008 and 2021. Unfortunately, the war with Iran reproduces in the macrocosm what these wars taught in the microcosm. “Look at how quickly” Iranian security forces in Tehran “are adopting characteristics that resemble those of the Gaza Strip,” Ohad Hemo, Channel 12 Arab affairs correspondent, said on March 3. “The Revolutionary Guards and the Basij” – the volunteer civilian paramilitary force under the command of the Guards – “are evacuating their headquarters, leaving their bases and seeking refuge in mosques and schools.” And their firing of ballistic missiles across Israel is reminiscent of Hamas’ rocket attacks on Israeli border towns. Israel’s response to these earlier wars, of periodically “mow[ing]the lawn” (as IDF commanders infamously put it while bombing Gaza installations, tunnels, and command posts), appears to be mirrored in the Israeli Air Force’s campaign in Iran, except that it is now mowing a distant pasture. And although Netanyahu has kept the post-October 7 war going for far longer than even prominent voices in the security establishment have deemed necessary, resulting in thousands more civilian deaths and the destruction of even more buildings and infrastructure in Gaza, Hamas is still in power, with little capacity to attack Israel, for now – but enough to intimidate Gazans. There is a lesson here too.
One might have concluded, given the foreseeable danger facing Israel, that a diplomatic initiative to prevent this war would have been attempted long ago. In March 2022, before Netanyahu returned to power, Israeli Foreign Minister Yair Lapid and US Secretary of State Antony Blinken hosted a summit in Israel with Abraham Accord signatories Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates and Morocco, apparently with the blessing of the Saudis. The leaders explored, among other things, something akin to a solution in the Middle East. NATOto contain Iran. But a process of this type has always meant involving the Palestinian Authority and considering the path to a Palestinian state, and that That means abandoning annexation of the West Bank – a prospect that is anathema to Israel’s religious extremists, who now set up shop in what they call Judea and Samaria, and with whom Netanyahu has been allied since the start of his career.
