The Road From Damascus

TWO STRIKES, ONE deliberate and the other an admitted mistake, may come to frame Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza, its patrons in Tehran and their regional proxies, almost six months since the casus belli of the October 7 attack in southern Israel that led to the death of nearly 1,200 Israelis, the highest count in Jewish deaths in a single day since the Holocaust. The strike on an aid convoy in western Gaza that killed three British citizens along with a Pol­ish, US and Australian national each, as well as a Palestinian has resulted in a rare admission of error by Lt General Herzi Halevi, the chief of staff of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), and an apology from President Isaac Herzog. While the outrage factor, from US President Joe Biden to British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and the heads of government of Poland and Australia, has stolen the headlines about the deaths of the World Central Kitchen (WCK) workers, it is the import of the IDF air force’s missile strike on the Iranian consulate adjacent to Tehran’s embassy in Syrian capital Damascus on Monday, April 1, that has Middle East watchers and geostrategists worried about what happens next.

Although as per policy Israel neither admits nor denies as­sassination attempts or strikes against hostile targets abroad, a handful of Israeli officials confirmed the strike but denied the diplomatic status of the building. But Tehran’s admission that seven officers of the Revolutionary Guards were killed, including Brigadier Generals Mohammad Reza Zahedi and Mohammad Hadi Haji-Rahimi, is key to understanding the significance of the blow Israel has dealt Iran, the sponsor of both Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon, which has been targeting northern Israel with its rockets to “help Hamas” in the south. By all accounts, Zahedi is the highest-ranking Iranian military officer to be killed since the death of Major General Qassim Suleimani in a US drone strike in 2020. For the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), it is a major setback, not least because Zahedi was reportedly ac­tively involved in coordinating actions by Iran’s proxies from Damascus. Israel alleged that the IRGC officers killed were guilty of attacks on Israeli and US assets in the past and were planning more and underscored the fact that the embassy itself had not been hit. For their part, in claiming violations of international law and the UN Charter by Israel, both Ayatollah Khamenei and Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi have vowed revenge. It is this promise, just when it seemed Iran was backing down or discour­aging its proxies, right down to the Houthis in Yemen, from fur­ther provoking the US and its allies, that cannot but be read as a guarantee of escalation, the very escalation that was feared since the beginning of the war in Gaza.

Three generals were killed in the strike among others, all three belonging to the Quds Force that takes care of external military and intelligence action for the IRGC. The Revolutionary Guards and especially the Quds Force are the cream of the Iranian military elite and Tehran, which had emerged as the most irresponsible actor in West Asia of late, may not stop with rhetoric after suf­fering what American analysts have called a “serious blow”. But most of the same analysts, including one former CIA official, have called the Israeli action “incredibly reckless”. The Pentagon’s fear is that Iranian proxies will now target US troops and assets in the region as a result of the Damascus strike—in other words, Israel might have helped bring the US much closer to the action than the Biden administration, already on the backfoot since its initial unambiguous support for Israel at the start of the Gaza war against the backdrop of the looming presidential election in November and Biden’s poor ratings, would have liked. While US troops in southern Syria did shoot down an attack drone after the Israeli strike, it’s the Houthis in Yemen and their persistent targeting of shipping in the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden that would have most of the trading world worried apart from the US navy. The Houthis were brought back under the terrorist tag by the US in February in an attempt to cut them off from funding—a non-starter when their money comes from Tehran—and making them liable targets for the US and its allies.

Speaking to the New York Times, a former Pentagon Middle East policy official said, “It should have [a] strategic effect on how the Quds Force operates abroad and should erode any semblance of invincibility or deniability that this terrorist organization only brings instability and violence to the places it seeks to operate.” However, the fallout of this “Israeli version of the U.S. strike on Qassim Suleimani” cannot be predicted without understanding how the post-Suleimani era changed the Quds Force’s modus operandi. “We have seen Iran-backed militia groups take deci­sions into their own hands under the leadership of [Ismail] Qaani [the current Quds commander], as well as the rise of rival power centers in Iran,” said the same expert, adding, “This has led to a more diffuse, but not less lethal, Quds Force-led network abroad. But Iran’s core strategy never changed. Tehran will continue to invest in its terrorist network abroad in or­der to keep the fight away from its own borders.” But now that Israel has driven home the message that Quds officers are not safe anywhere?

Iran’s capacity to strike Israel, demonstrated or not, is very lim­ited. Thus the Quds MO has always involved targeting Israeli and Jew­ish individuals and assets, including kidnappings, abroad. The officers killed in Damascus on Monday were also accused of plotting along simi­lar lines with Iranian proxies. In fact, there is much credibility to the Israeli allegations given the his­tory of Iranian diplomacy, or what passes for it, in countries like Lebanon and Syria, to say nothing of Yemen. These states, along with Iraq, constitute, in Tehran’s own term, the “axis of resistance” against the US and its allies as well as Israel. The evidence to that ef­fect was a leaked comment from former Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif that military priorities determined Teh­ran’s foreign policy in the region. Be­sides, sources from inside the IRGC said that Israel’s strike in Damascus had actually targeted a meeting of Iranian officials and Islamic Jihad, Hamas’ rival in Gaza which is also funded by Tehran.

In another context, Monday’s strike might have been a footnote in the long shadow war between Is­rael and Iran. But even the seeming departure from policy in practically owning up to the attack shows why it’s different this time. Why have Israeli officials done so though? Ronen Bergman seems to have pro­vided the classic insight on this “par­ticularly Israeli contradiction” in Rise and Kill First: The Secret History of Israel’s Targeted Assassinations (2018): “On the one hand, nearly everything in the country related to intel­ligence and national security is classified as ‘top secret’. On the other hand, everyone wants to speak about what they’ve done. Acts that people in other countries might be ashamed to admit to are instead a source of pride for Israelis, because they are collectively perceived as imperatives of national security, necessary to protect threatened Israeli lives, if not the very existence of the embattled state.”

Perhaps Israel is testing Iran’s resolve. If that’s the case, then it’s far too dangerous a game to play at this stage of the conflict, with the images of the aftermath of the al-Shifa hospital raid by the IDF grabbing eyeballs across the globe and shaping public opinion. There’s a lot that Benjamin Netanyahu’s government got wrong at the start, including the lapses that allowed Hamas to break into Israel and carry out its massacre. There’s almost everything Netanyahu is getting wrong about the course of the war against Hamas, including the completely lost cause of the battle of narra­tives when the dead and orphaned in a starving Gaza seem to be the primary, and perhaps only, consequence of his response to October 7. Increasingly, his war in Gaza, in its effect, has come to resemble the George W Bush administration’sinvasionofIraq, with the difference of course that Hamas was in Gaza unlike Saddam Hussein’s WMD.

The real diplomatic worry for Israel appears to have come not from Biden’s changed rhetoric and demands for a ceasefire. It has come from what would have been an unexpected quarter till the other day. Donald Trump, as of now the candidate more likely to win the US presidency in November, recently told a couple of Israeli journalists that Israel should “finish up” its war in Gaza and get out: “You have to get it done. We have to get to peace. We can’t have this going on.” Trump didn’t mention the 130 Israeli hostages still in Hamas’ cap­tivity. Heard and read one way, Israelis and the old Republican establishment were in shock. John Podhoretz, editor of Commentary and a former Reagan aide, opined: “The only difference between Trump and Biden—and I say this as somebody who is not a supporter of Biden—is that Biden has put his money where his mouth is.” But others, such as Trump’s former ambassador to Is­rael David Friedman, argued that it’s a misreading of what Trump said, that he meant Israel had to finish the job by reaching its objectives. However one looks at it, Netanyahu, or his succes­sor, cannot take Trump 2.0 for granted unlike Trump 1.0. And no matter what Trump meant by finishing up, one wonders if Netanyahu himself still re­members what his original goals were, apart from hanging on to power at home.

Hanging on to power at home looks increasingly untenable for Netanyahu although without a total collapse of his govern­ment, there’s nothing that can compel him to leave office. Despite the optics of the huge demonstrations against him in Israel, it should be remembered that for every protester on a Tel Aviv street, there’s one who still fully backs Bibi, in a clash of what has come to be called Israel 1.0 vs Israel 2.0, aka the old, largely Ashkenazi Eu­ropean-origin elite and the new immigrant demography, many of whom are settlers on the West Bank. Therefore, a humanitarian and security catastrophe, by itself, may not be enough for a change of political leadership in Jerusalem.

The Indian stand on October 7 and the Gaza war to date has ably demonstrated New Delhi’s ability to calibrate its diplomacy between pragmatism and humanitarian concern, on both sides of the divide. There is no bashfulness about owing up to its special relations with Israel and how far bilateral ties have stepped out of the closet over the last three decades. Thus, Delhi had backed Israel’s right to defend itself apart from condemning the October 7 massacre, and showed that it understands the precariousness of Israel’s existence. But, as in backing the UN call for a ceasefire, it has also shown that its diplomacy is not heartless and cannot abandon Gaza’s suffering civilians. Meanwhile, it is to be hoped that Iran doesn’t come up with a newfound capacity to trigger a broader war in the name of revenge.

DamascusGazaIsrael-IranIsrael-Palestine conflictSyria