September 12, 2024:
At the end of July 2024, Ismail Haniyeh, the political leader of Islamic terror group Hamas was killed in a government guest house in the Iranian capital. A day earlier, an Israeli air strike in Lebanon killed Fuad Shukr, a senior member of Hezbollah. Shukr was believed responsible for rocket attacks on northern Israel that killed twelve children. The Israeli air strike also killed four nearby civilians and wounded 80 others. The Israelis gained access to Hezbollah’s communications and then told Shukr to drive, with his bodyguards, to another location. When the vehicle Shukr and his associates were in a relatively open area, the Israeli aircraft launched a missile and that was the end of Shukr.
Israel believes that these attacks on leaders who plan and carry out mass attacks makes these terrorist leaders less eager to act. Attacks like this appear to have some impact. Islamic terrorist attacks diminish when you kill the group leaders, especially if you kill replacements in rapid succession.
Iran does not attack its enemies directly but prefers to use non-Iranian organizations to do it for them. This makes it possible for Iran to claim they had nothing to do with violence against people or groups Iran wants killed and often openly backs and supports such violence. American and Israeli intelligence agencies are able to quickly identify who is actually responsible to Islamic terrorist violence.
Iranian foreign relations include the goals of Death to Israel and Death to America. This is what the current Iranian religious dictatorship demands, while most Iranians want their government to disappear. Much of the government violence is directed at Iranians who want an elected government. This is considered un-Islamic by the current Islamic dictatorship. This is a conflict that has been going on since the 1980s when a revolution overthrew the Iranian monarchy. The revolutionary groups then fought each other over what the new government should be. Most Iranians wanted a democracy, but the religious parties, and their Islamic militias, demanded a government led by senior religious leaders. The Islamic militants were more violent and got their way.
Islam is a religion with some unique characteristics. The Arab word Islam translates into English as Submission. That includes accepting an Islamic lifestyle and rule by religious authorities and Islamic sharia law. This form of law is medieval in its origins and despotic in practice. Sharia in its purest and most extreme form calls for non-believers to be killed or enslaved if they refuse to become Moslem. Non-Islamic nations are to be feared and attacked in any way possible until destroyed. That’s why religiously inspired mobs in Iran call for Death to America and Israel. Most of the people in Iran want to live in the United States or an Iranian version of it. Before the Iranian monarchy was overthrown, Iran had good diplomatic, military and economic relations with the United States and Israel. Since the 1980s, when religious parties seized power in Iran, the economy has been crippled by sanctions triggered by Iranian hostility to non-Islamic states in America and Europe. Israel, an entrepreneurial democracy and the wealthiest, per capita, country in the region, is declared by Iranian religious leaders as a nation of apostates for not acknowledging Islam as the true religion. For the Iranian Islamic readers there is no possibility of compromise with Israelis unless they convert to Islam.
For nearly a decade the Iranian government has known that Israeli intelligence operations in Iran involved Israelis unofficially, and often anonymously, working with many Iranians who want to overthrow their religious dictatorship. The Iranian government is also disturbed by increasing protests by the ethnic minorities that comprise half the population. While half the population is ethnic Iranian, an Indo-European people long called Persians, a quarter of Iranians are a Turkic group called Azeris. This group is seen as the most loyal non-Persian group in Iran. The 25 percent of other Iranians who are not Persian or Azeri are less loyal. Many senior members of the clergy are Azeri, including the senior member of the ruling Guardian Council and supreme leader Ali Khamenei. That is no longer an asset because most Iranian Azeris have turned against the religious dictatorship and are calling for the end of religious rule and better relations with neighboring Azerbaijan, which is allied with Israel. This ethnic affinity has long been a problem for Russia and Iran.
The Israeli Mossad agents who recruited these Iranians to help carry out sabotage attacks were themselves Iranian in the sense that they often Iranian Jews, or their descendants who Iran over the last half century but had not lost their Iranian customs, like using Farsi, the Indo-European Persian language, and other Iranian cultural practices. These Israelis made excellent Mossad operatives in Iran where they looked Iranian, spoke Iranian and knew Iranian customs. When recruited Iranian scientists safely escaped from Iran after their role in a major attack became known, they discovered the Iranians who recruited them were Israelis. This eventually got back to fellow Azeri Iranians in Iran, which most Iranian Azeris saw as a good thing. Jewish-Iranians were historically one of the smallest Iranian minorities but were always considered Iranians first, something that made an impact on Iranians in general. It also impressed the Russians, who have had a long and often violent relationship with Iran over who should rule the Azeris.
Subsequent Israeli revelations confirmed that many of the Iranian scientists and engineers who worked with Israel to sabotage Iran’s nuclear weapons development thought they were working with fellow Iranian opponents of the Islamic dictatorship. This is persuading more members of the Guardian Council to oppose the current hardline policy of the Council and willingness to get Iran into a war with Israel and the growing number of Israeli allies, which now includes Azerbaijan and many Arab states.
Most Iranians initially backed the idea of Iran having nuclear weapons, because this is seen as justified for the major local superpower in the region. This is a role the Persians have played for thousands of years. But now most Iranians agree that their current religious dictatorship should not have these weapons because all the neighbors and their superpower allies oppose it.
Before the 1979 revolution Iran and Israel had long been allies. Given a choice between returning to Israel as an ally instead of Israel being a more powerful neighbor Iranian religious leaders wanted to destroy, Iranians quietly back a return to Israel as an ally. The current religious dictatorship is not just considered corrupt and incompetent, but insane and in dire need of replacement.
Israel takes the threat of nuclear attack more seriously than the Iranian religious dictatorship. The Iranians are smart and generally competent. Despite decades of sanctions, they have built ballistic missiles and are close to producing nuclear weapons. Their nuclear development projects are well protected but they are not invulnerable. Israeli espionage and sabotage operations against the nuclear program have proved that.
Israel wants to avoid a military strike against the Iranian nuclear weapons program because it might result in widespread nuclear contamination around the nuclear fuel processing sites, and kill and injure many Iranians. This would be expensive to clean up and the nuclear contamination could get into the local water supply or, if on the surface, into the air. The Iranian techs who joined the resistance realize this, but their religious dictatorship doesn’t care because God is on their side and whatever happens it is God’s Will. Israel has the resources to locate the nuclear facilities and the specialized weapons to neutralize them. Details are kept secret but experience demonstrates that whatever the Israelis come up with usually works. Failure is not an option when your worst enemies are seeking nothing less than the extermination of Israel and Jews in general.
Meanwhile Iran is still perplexed at how the Israeli economy continues to thrive while the economies in neighboring Moslem nations, such as Iran, stagnate or decline. Israeli unemployment is the lowest rate in the region. Arabs, especially Palestinians, blame Israel for their poorly performing economies. The real cause of the economic woes is corruption and bad government in general. But few Moslem governments are willing to admit that.
The most dangerous Islamic threat to Israel is not even Arab. In Iran supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei recently reminded everyone that the official Iranian position is that any Moslem nation, especially Saudi Arabia and Turkey, that improves relations with Israel is betraying Islam. Along those lines Khamenei also repeats his belief that the United States cannot be trusted and he makes a big deal about how the economic sanctions the July 2015 treaty lifted are not the main economic problem Iran has to deal with. The main problem for Iran is the two years of very low oil prices, which is Saudi Arabia’s way, in cooperation with some other local Sunni oil states, of depressing Iran’s oil income.
One reason for seeking nuclear weapons is to give Iran the ability to threaten the Saudis into shipping less oil and let the price go up. After that there will be the demand to let Iran run the Moslem holy places in Mecca and Medina. The Saudis are not willing to make deals that involve Iranian domination of the region and remain firm on their oil policy. Khamenei regularly lets the Iranian people know that their continued poverty is the fault of the Gulf Arabs and their allies, especially Israel and the United States. What Arabs and Iranians both downplay is that the American fracking technology changed the oil market. Add to that recent natural gas deposits discovered and rapidly developed in Israel coastal waters and you can see why political relationships are shifting in the Middle East.
Seen from the other side, the Gulf Arab nations have been getting closer to Israel for years and are now quite open about it. Arab states, especially Saudi Arabia created and sustained the Islamic terrorism but can’t admit that. Israel is the most successful local power when it comes to dealing with Islamic terrorism and is willing to work with Arab states and not make a big deal about where all the Islamic terrorism comes from in the first place. That’s a problem the Arabs in particular and Moslems in general have to deal with.