For nearly 45 years, Israel and Iran fought a war under the radar, meticulously avoiding direct conflict, too scary for either side to ponder.
That ended on Saturday night with the Islamic Republic’s juggernaut-style attack.
The end of that era raises the question of what new paradigm will replace the old one.
Officially, the shadow war dates back to the 1979 Islamic Revolution, when the ayatollahs declared Israel “the Little Satan,” partially because of their Islamist ideology, but also because they saw Jerusalem as so closely aligned with the toppled shah of Iran.
In reality, though, the shadow war rose to several levels of intensity already in the early 2000s, when prime minister Ariel Sharon assigned Mossad chief Meir Dagan to thwart Iran’s nuclear weapons program.
By the time Dagan left office in 2011, a host of Iranian nuclear facilities had been sabotaged, and a range of nuclear scientists had mysteriously been blown up or otherwise died.
The conflict hit yet another high gear during Yossi Cohen’s helm in 2016-2021.
By 2017, Iran was trying to create a “ring of fire” around Israel, with militias and operatives in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, the West Bank, and Gaza.
The IDF tried to combat this ring of fire with the MABAM – the war between wars – constant airstrikes on Iranian proxies who tried to build new fronts against Israel, especially in Syria. Jerusalem rarely took credit.
Cohen ordered and managed the 2018 heist of Iran’s nuclear archives, something that eventually flipped the entire West – including the IAEA – against the Islamic Republic, breaking a period where the ayatollahs had, to a large extent, won over the West to neutrality by signing the 2015 nuclear deal.
In January 2020, the US assassinated the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps Quds Force chief Qasem Soleimani, the second most powerful man in Iran at the time after Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei – but only with significant assistance from Israel.
From July 2020 to June 2021, at least three (probably more) Iranian nuclear facilities were destroyed, the Mossad was accused, and Iran’s nuclear weapons program founder, Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, was assassinated.
There were additional aggressive actions against Iran that were attributed to the Mossad, including the destruction of drones in 2022 and January 2023.
By February of that year, IDF intelligence concluded that Iran saw Israel not only as “the Little Satan,” but as its core competitor for power and influence in the region.
Iran greenlit acts of aggression against Israel without any international blame
This was the much broader context for Hamas’s October 7 attack. Iran did not specifically order the attack, but throughout 2023, it was pushing hard on Hamas and Hezbollah to hit Israel in more aggressive and risky ways, unsatisfied with how much the Jewish state was interfering with its plans to expand its sphere of regional influence.
And yet, Iran continued to use proxies to strike Israel, while Jerusalem refused to take credit for hits on sensitive Iranian targets, even hiding its backup role in Soleimani’s killing for over two years to avoid retaliation.
Israel grew frustrated with Iran’s ability to claim immunity while ordering attacks, and in December assassinated Sayyed Reza Mousavi, a senior IRGC commander, in an Israeli airstrike near Damascus.
Maybe Israel thought that this rebalanced things and put Iran in its place.
And maybe, because of that, Israeli intelligence misjudged Tehran and believed that it would take the assassination of Mohammad Reza Zahedi on April 1 lying down, without a big fight, as long as Israel again did not claim credit.
This was a grave misjudgment.
Though Israel emerged virtually unscathed from the more than 300 drones, ballistic missiles, and cruise missiles launched on Sunday, the attack in and of itself has forever shifted the balance of power.
Those who say that Iran will be deterred because Israeli air defenses were so successful perhaps have forgotten October 7, when Hamas, at long last, used more than 10 years of experimenting to outdo Israel’s defenses, thought to be impregnable.
Israeli intelligence thought Hamas could not fire more than several hundred rockets per day when in reality, the terrorist organization fired 3,000 in concentrated areas in only four hours.So, Tehran is only deterred for the moment.
If the scales are not rebalanced, if the ayatollahs pay no major price for what they did, there is no reason for them not to try again and again, until they succeed in the catastrophe they promised.
So far, nearly all top Israeli officials with power in the cabinet are tempering expectations for any imminent counterstrike.
Very intelligent commentators have noted that horrible scenarios could result if a general war breaks out due to Israel’s retaliation, including Hamas firing 3,000 rockets and invading 22 towns, Hezbollah firing over 3,000 rockets and anti-tank missiles and forcing 80,000 residents to indefinitely evacuate their homes in the North, and Iran firing 300 drones and rockets. But guess what? All this has happened anyway.
The Jerusalem Post has queried top Israeli officials; no one was able to actually point out how much worse Iran could hit Israel, more than it already did on Saturday night.
What seems most likely is that Israel will try to continue the narrative of the shadow war, as Iran starts to plan for more direct attacks.
The officials seem simply unable to switch paradigms, or perhaps they are overloaded with the Gaza war, or maybe they naively believe that appeasing the US by not attacking Iran now will guarantee permanent American support later for other military actions, ones it would never approve of.
All the while, the two sides will continue to compete over the future of Gaza, along with shadow wars in Lebanon and Syria.
October 7 showed that Iran and its proxies were unhappy with losing the shadow war to Israel and wanted to shake up the paradigm. Saturday night showed how deeply committed the Islamic Republic is to changing those dynamics.
Israel can still use shadow games sometimes and may even be the best at them, but ignoring the altered strategic situation is to its peril.