Israeli-Iranian auctions mask the reorganization of alliances in the Middle East

For a year now, we have witnessed proud declarations and threats from the Israeli and Iranian authorities. Each, like a rooster standing on its spurs, assures us that we will see what we will see, that its response will be final and painful. Yet the two Iranian attacks (Operation “Honest Promise” on April 13 and October 1) and the two Israeli attacks (April 19 and October 26) have not kept their promises. Neither Tehran nor Tel Aviv sought to destroy strategic objectives in their adversary.

A month ago, I published an article [1] highlighting the deep and numerous links between a part of the Iranian ruling class and the “revisionist Zionists” [2]. I insisted on the fact that these groups are very much a minority in their own country, although the former have acceded to the presidency of the Islamic Republic several times and the latter are now in power at the head of the Hebrew state. Even if it is difficult to admit, neither of these two nations is a democracy and their leaders can hold speeches very far removed from reality without being overthrown by their people (although the Iranians overthrew the Shah 45 years ago).

However, the two armies, although they were forbidden from significantly injuring their adversary, did not limit themselves to staging fireworks. They have used their missile launches, ground-to-ground for Iran and air-to-ground for Israel, to test their anti-aircraft defense systems and to try to destroy their offensive capabilities (Iran by attacking the F-35 airbase and Israel by attacking the solid fuel manufacturing plants for hypersonic missiles)

To date, it appears that the Iranian Armed Forces can strike Israel wherever they want without it and its Western allies being able to shoot down its hypersonic missiles, if they still have them. It is much more problematic for the Israeli Air Force to bomb Iran in depth. Its planes have significant difficulties reaching the borders of the Islamic Republic to fire their long-range missiles. But Israel knows that it can count on the in-flight refueling of its planes by the US Air Force and on the passivity of the Zionist Arab regimes, that is to say the Jordanians and the Saudis.

On the political level, it should be noted that the latest Israeli operation (that of October 26) was justified as a response to the attack on the Palestinian Resistance on October 7, 2023 (Operation "Al-Aqsa Flood"). Indeed, Tel Aviv could not claim to respond to the bombing of April 13 carried out in retaliation for that of the Iranian diplomatic premises in Damascus on April 1, which in itself constituted a serious violation of international law. Nor could it invoke the Iranian bombing of October 1, which responded to the assassination of a foreign leader on its soil (Ismail Haniyeh, on July 31) and that of General Abbas Nilforoushan in Lebanon (during that of Hassan Nasrallah, on September 27). It is becoming increasingly difficult for Tel Aviv to justify its actions credibly in international law: holding Iran responsible for the Palestinian attack of October 7, 2023 was not mentioned at the time and no new data allows it to be credited. It is even an aberration in light of the doctrine of the "Axis of Resistance" of General Qassem Soleimani, according to which each national unit must act in full independence. It is just a resumption of the Western vision according to which, on the contrary, these national units are only proxies of Iranian imperialism.

In Israel, the attack of October 26, 2024 was presented as punishment, one year later, for the “worst pogrom” in history, that of October 7, 2023.

Let us first observe that the assimilation of the operation of the Palestinian Resistance against a colonial fact to a pogrom, that is to say to an anti-Semitic action, is an absurdity; as Francesca Albanese, the special rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967, pointed out.

Then, let us note that Israel has already commemorated this attack, one year after it occurred to the day. This second date refers, according to the Jewish liturgical calendar, to the festival of Simh’at Torah, which this year falls three weeks after that of 2023. However, the State of Israel has never invoked the liturgical calendar until now. The very choice of the name “State of Israel” when its army proclaimed itself on May 14, 1948, aimed to avoid choosing between the “Republic of Israel” desired by secular Jews and the “Kingdom of Israel” chosen by religious Jews. We are therefore witnessing an evolution towards an assumed theocracy in “Jerusalem” as in Tehran (I put Jerusalem in quotation marks here because it is not the internationally recognized capital of the Hebrew state).

The Iranian attitude is incomprehensible to its regional allies. Tehran did not strike Israel as it had announced and refused to help Hezbollah. It warned the West in advance of what it was going to do so that they could intercept its missiles and is continuing its negotiations with the United States. In doing so, it itself put an end to the “Axis of Resistance.”

At the same time, Tehran pushed Hezbollah to choose first Sayyed Hashem Safieddine, to succeed Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, then Sheikh Naim Qassem after his assassination. However, Safieddine was above all "the man of Tehran" and Qassem is "the man of the mullahs". Both, as respectable as they may be, were not for the first and are not for the second, capable of maintaining the independence of Hezbollah. The Lebanese Resistance will undoubtedly continue, with or without Tehran, which will mean with or without Hezbollah.

Staging the turnaround of his country, Masoud Pezeshkian, Iranian president, never ceases to proclaim that, "if Muslims are united" (which they are not), the Zionist regime will no longer be able to commit crimes.

Hamas’s turnaround, for its part, is already perceptible. While it is not known who succeeded Yahya Sinwar, the most likely outcome is that the organization will now be led in Gaza by a hard-line member of the Muslim Brotherhood, Khalil Hayyé. In this way, Hamas will become again what it was before 2017: an Islamist political party fighting against the secular Fatah (that is, against other Palestinians) and not a resistance network against Israeli colonization.

Once again, we are witnessing one of these historic moments of recomposition of alliances, the logic of the institutions not being that of the causes they claim to defend.