Israel received an unexpected gift in its struggle against Iran last week in the form of the drone attack on a ship off the coast of Oman.
The air force of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards, which was behind the attack, succeeded too well in its mission: a suicide drone was detonated close to the ship’s bridge and hit the crew’s quarters below. The Romanian captain and a British security officer on the Mercer Street, which is managed by a London-based company owned by Israeli businessman Eyal Ofer, were killed.
The maritime campaign was launched not by Iran but Israel, which for two years has been striking tankers – albeit without causing loss of life – which were smuggling oil from Iran to Syria, in transactions whose profits are transferred to Hezbollah.
The seaborne assaults are only part of a broader Israeli campaign, known as the “war between the wars,” which in the past decade has seen hundreds of attacks on Iranian targets and organizations associated with Iran, such as Hezbollah and other Shi’ite militias across the entire region. But the Iranian mistake – killing two civilians from European countries – fell into Israel’s hands at a convenient moment.
The first media responses, last Friday evening, attested to an intent to quickly settle accounts with the Iranians. That was the militant spirit heard from Prime Minister Naftali Bennett and Israel Defense Forces Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Aviv Kochavi. The first to urge that the diplomatic channels be played out first was Defense Minister Benny Gantz.
At the directive of the political decision-makers, Kochavi spoke with his counterparts in Britain and other countries, and showed them incriminating intelligence of Iran’s responsibility for the attack. The Foreign Ministry also took part in the diplomatic effort. As time passed, the reactions from London and Washington became more irate.
During the week, Israel pressed for a statement condemning the Iranian aggression to be issued by the UN Security Council. However, that is not likely to happen without the support of Russia and China, who probably have no desire to go down that path.
Bennett’s remarks in a visit to Northern Command on Tuesday reflected the current Israeli order of priorities: Israel is trying to mobilize the international community to publish a condemnation of Iran; a direct response – in the form of a cyberattack or an explosion of some sort somewhere – can wait.
In order to offset anticipated criticism from the opposition about Israeli softness in dealing with Iran, the prime minister added a threat that Tehran will not be able to sit back tranquilly and ignite the region. The budget increment approved for the IDF, he said, is intended to upgrade offensive capabilities against Iran.
Iran’s embarrassment was compounded by a peculiar incident that occurred on Tuesday evening when five ships all lost power in the Arabian Sea. One of them was reported to have been seized by armed Iranians. The next morning, the Panama-flagged, British-owned Asphalt Princess was allowed to proceed on its way after the crew disabled the engines and the hijackers were unable to sail it. Iran denied any involvement in the incident, just as it dissociated itself from the drone attack the previous Thursday.
The drone incident denial is groundless. However, the second incident seems rather dubious: What did the Iranians hope to gain from hijacking a British vessel, especially as its hawkish new president, Ebrahim Raisi, was about to be inaugurated?
Exploiting the good atmosphere
The Israeli company Windward, a maritime AI company, voiced doubts on Thursday about the nature of the Arabian Sea incident. According to an analysis it released, there is evidence indicating that most of the ships that ground to a halt in the Gulf on Tuesday have been involved in the past in activities connected with the oil smuggling industry the Iranians have been running in that area for years.
The Asphalt Princess itself anchored in Iranian ports several times in recent months, and there are signs that it engaged in “dark activity,” the company said. The sailing history of this ostensibly hijacked ship raises questions about the entire affair.
From Israel’s viewpoint, the developments in the Gulf are directly related to the important strategic question currently on the agenda: the resumption of the negotiations between Iran and the world powers on the nuclear deal from which the United States under then-President Donald Trump withdrew in 2018. The Vienna talks might resume toward the end of the month, but the Israeli intelligence community is no longer so certain that Iran is seeking a new agreement.
Bennett, who is planning to meet with U.S. President Joe Biden in Washington around that time (depending on the spread of COVID-19 in Israel), will be looking to caution the Americans about the implications of a new agreement, given the progress Iran has made of late toward acquiring nuclear-weapons capability.
Gantz said this week that Iran needs only 10 weeks to reach the “breakthrough point” at which it will have accumulated a sufficient quantity of enriched uranium whose conversion will enable it to produce one nuclear bomb. (Completion of the process entails the manufacture of a nuclear warhead, which could take another year to two years.)
It’s important to reiterate that this progress was achieved as a result of the failure of the policy spearheaded by Trump and former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Contrary to Netanyahu’s expectations, Tehran did not crack under the onerous U.S. sanctions and the application of maximum pressure. Those moves only pushed Iran to persist with its nuclear project.
As Bennett has hinted, with some justification, his predecessor apparently did not take advantage of the three years that passed since 2018 to hone the Israeli military option, even though it was clear that the Iranians had resumed the enrichment of uranium more intensively.
The premier will seek to exploit the good atmosphere in which the relations between his new government and the current administration in Washington were launched, in order to find an attentive ear for the Israeli demurrers. This week, the new head of Israel’s National Security Council, Dr. Eyal Hulata, met with his U.S. counterpart, Jake Sullivan, in the White House, in preparation for Bennett’s visit.
Biden knows that Bennett is not capable and will not try to stir up Washington against him, as Netanyahu tried to do against President Barack Obama in his 2015 speech to Congress, following the signing of the original nuclear accord.
On the other hand, Biden is expected to press Bennett to accede to U.S. demands to limit Israel’s technological ties with China. Netanyahu succeeded in rebuffing most of the Trump administration’s requests in this matter for four years, but the new administration is more committed to the struggle against China – and the Americans’ patience appears to have run out.
The diplomatic process with the Palestinians occupies a relatively low place in the administration’s order of priorities. Still, the Americans will likely want to see progress, even of a symbolic nature. Bennett continues to object to meeting with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, both on practical grounds (progress on that front is out of the question with the present governing coalition) and for reasons of principle (“Abbas is persecuting IDF soldiers in the International Criminal Court in The Hague”). He will try to placate the Americans by telling them about the economic goodwill gestures his government plans to initiate in the West Bank.
In the meantime, the Supreme Court this week made an intelligent start toward defusing the Sheikh Jarrah landmine by devising an arrangement that will postpone the evacuation of the Palestinian families from the East Jerusalem neighborhood.
The IDF’s behavior, though, is continuing to endanger the relative stability in the West Bank. The multiplicity of incidents in which Israeli soldiers have shot and killed civilians – children among them – is heating up the territory in a period in which the Palestinian Authority is committed to calm.
The senior army command appears not to have discerned the seriousness of the situation yet.
Connected battle fronts
While Israel is occupied with tactical issues – the blows that will be landed in its battles with the Iranians – Iran is thinking strategically, for the long term. Its moves were not confined just to standing up resolutely to U.S. pressure or its insistence on resuming the enrichment of uranium. Last year, it signed a 25-year agreement with China under which Beijing undertook to grant Tehran technological, military and intelligence aid worth hundreds of billions of dollars, in return for Iran’s promise to supply it with oil at a low price.
A joint agreement for battling terrorism was signed with Russia, including the supply of high-resolution Russian satellite images that cover the entire region. And Iran also undertook to supply Syria with air defense systems, which are meant to help Damascus fend off Israeli airstrikes (many of which target Iranian interests in Syria).
At the same time, Iran is bent on expanding its influence in Lebanon by increasing its aid to the country, which is groaning under a severe economic crisis. The IDF is insisting that there is no connection between the rockets fired from Lebanon into the Galilee on Wednesday – the fifth such incident in less than three months – and the recent events in the Gulf. The three 122mm Grad Katyusha rockets were launched from the eastern sector of southern Lebanon. Two of them landed in the Kiryat Shmona area. The shooting is attributed to a loose organization, not entirely hierarchical, of armed Palestinians from Tyre and from the nearby refugee camps.
Somewhat surprisingly, senior IDF officers were heard almost defending Hezbollah: it didn’t know. According to the IDF’s analysis, the Shi’ite organization’s hold in southern Lebanon has weakened. The entire country is in a state of chaos, and Hezbollah – which is occupied with ensuring a supply of food and fuel to its people, and to the Shi’ite population as a whole – is no longer investing major efforts to control the border region.
Under these circumstances, there are also more cases in which foreign workers, from Turkey and Sudan, are sneaking across the border into Israel, in the hope of finding work here.
This was the logic that underlay the unusual aerial attack in southern Lebanon on Wednesday night, which targeted the two sites from which rockets were fired at Israel recently – one near the town of Aaichiyeh and one near the Rashidieh refugee camp. The claim is that Hezbollah is not the address in this case. And by the same token, it is said, punitive action against the bruised and battered government of Lebanon will also achieve nothing.
The IDF insists it does not discern an Iranian directive to Hezbollah to heat up the border with Israel, though the army does admit that this is liable to occur as a result of the accumulation of additional incidents.
Still, the convenient explanation offered by Israeli intelligence raises doubts. Is Hezbollah so busy and bothered that it is no longer capable of entering refugee camps, cracking a few heads and imposing its will there? Israel failed in the past under similar circumstances in Gaza to identify the connection between Hamas and “wayward” Palestinian factions who supposedly violated the cease-fire of their own accord.
Another question concerns the way that the different fronts influence one another. We already saw something of a dress rehearsal for this when, during May’s flare-up in Gaza, rockets were fired twice from Syria at the Golan Heights and rockets from Lebanon were launched three times at the Galilee. It’s also known that Hezbollah and Hamas have tightened their operational ties. If things deteriorate soon into “days of combat” – rounds of escalation for a limited period in Lebanon or Gaza – it needs to be taken into account that the escalation could be felt on a number of fronts simultaneously.
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