Hezbollah says it detonated 'explosive devices' targeting Israeli soldiers who crossed the border into Lebanon.

Updated 11:29 a.m., April 14, 2024

The moment we were all afraid of finally arrived yesterday evening. For me, it was announced by a phone call from a terrified teenage cousin in Iran. Had the war started? she asked me through tears.

Iran had fired hundreds of drones and missiles on Israel, hitting much more widely than most of us had anticipated. Only thanks to Israel’s excellent defenses, and the help of its Western and Arab allies, have almost all of these been intercepted. The only casualty so far is a 7-year-old Arab girl in southern Israel.

Nevertheless, the Rubicon has clearly been crossed. Iran and Israel have been fighting a shadow war for years, but on April 13, the conflict came into the open. No longer hiding behind deniable actions, the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, the militia that holds most of the power in Iran, declared that it was behind the attacks, which seem to have been launched from various cities in Iran as well as by Tehran-backed militias in Yemen and Lebanon. The IRGC said that it was responding to Israel’s April 1 attack on an Iranian consular building in Damascus, which killed several commanders, including Mohammad Reza Zahedi, the IRGC’s chief official in the Levant region.

You don’t need to be an expert on Iran to know some facts about Iranians in this moment: First, most are sick of the Islamic Republic and its octogenarian leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who has been in charge since 1989, and whose rule has brought Iran economic ruin, international isolation, and now the threat of a war. You need only look at the majority of Iranians who have boycotted the past two nationwide elections, this year and in 2021, or the hundreds killed in the anti-regime protests of recent years to know that this government doesn’t represent Iranians.

Second, the people of Iran have no desire to experience a war with Israel. Despite decades of indoctrination in anti-Israel and anti-Semitic sentiment by their government, Iranians harbor very little hostility toward Israel. In the past few months, many Arab capitals have seen mass demonstrations against Israel, but no such popular event has taken place in Iran. In fact, in the early stages of the Israel-Hamas war that broke out in October, many Iranians risked their lives by publicly opposing the anti-Israel campaign of the regime.

[Read: What Hamas promises, Iranians know too well]

Third, Iranians have a recent memory of how terrible war can be. I was born in Tehran in 1988, in the final throes of the brutal eight-year conflict that began when Iraq’s Saddam Hussein invaded Iran and continued for way too long because of the Iranian regime’s ideological crusade. My mother spent many nights in Tehran’s bomb shelters when she was pregnant with me, taking refuge from the missiles that Iraq rained down on Iran. A cousin of mine was killed in that war, and my father was among the many injured. Iranians remember those years too well to want to repeat the experience. (Incidentally, some also remember that Israel gave occasional military help to Iran in that war.)

The people of Iran know that their main enemy is at home, and that war will bring them only more repression and hardship. Hours before Iran started firing missiles on Israel, it sent police around Tehran to crack down on women’s compliance with the mandatory veiling rules. After the attack, for hours past midnight, thousands of cars thronged gas stations around Tehran; a friend FaceTimed me from a Tehran supermarket crowded with people frantically stocking up. Another friend told me he had retreated to his rooftop and was refusing to sleep for fear of an attack.

The U.S. dollar was already trading for a record 647,000 Iranian rials yesterday morning, and now Iranians are bracing for another increase, which will further diminish their livelihoods. As a point of comparison, in 2022, the dollar sold for fewer than 220,000 rials. I’m old enough to remember when it was just 8,000; in 1979, it was 70. The collapsing Iranian currency reflects Iran’s economic destruction.

Many Iranians will hold their own regime accountable for the horror that a hot war with Israel could bring. Labor unions have already said as much. “With firing hundreds of drones and missiles on Israel, the Islamic Republic has adventurously begun a war that could turn a society of 90 million to a torched ground,” declared the Independent Iranian Workers Union, which represents thousands of workers around the country. “The regime is concluding its final mission to destroy Iran.” A teacher’s union issued a similar call. On X, a user well-known for her support of former President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad wrote, “I spit on anybody supporting this war on either side. Poor Iran and the people of Iran who are saddled by you.” The Persian-language hashtag #no_to_war has been shared by thousands of Iranians inside and outside the country. Many have used it to attack Khamenei and the Islamic Republic.

The regime has tried to muster a show of public support for the strikes on Israel, with unimpressive results. Videos of a Saturday-night rally for this purpose in Tehran’s Palestine Square appeared to show a couple of hundred people there at most. A gathering at Zahedi’s grave in Isfahan looked to consist of fewer than 30 people. Only slightly more assembled at the grave, in Kerman, of Qassem Soleimani, IRGC’s leading commander who was killed by a U.S. drone strike in 2020.

For his part, Israel’s troubled prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, may want nothing more than a war with Iran to distract from his failing war in Gaza and his declining popularity at home. The United States and its European and Arab allies, who rightly stood by Israel against Iranian aggression tonight, would be wise to push Netanyahu to avoid a broader conflagration that will benefit no one in the region, least of all the people of Iran or Israel. Saudi Arabia, which joined Jordan last night in helping to intercept Iranian missiles, has started off well by calling for immediate de-escalation. Israelis should remember that even after six months of their brutal war in Gaza, several Arab nations stood by them against aggression from Tehran.

Decision makers in Riyadh and Amman, as well as elsewhere, are well aware that Khamenei and his murderous regime are a threat to the peace and security of their own people, the region, and the world. The interests of the whole region lie in helping the people of Iran in their long-lasting quest to overthrow Khamenei and build a different Iran. Short of such a victory, it is quite likely that when the octogenarian Khamenei dies, Iran’s rulers will move away from his disastrous policies, which have brought Iran to the brink of a disastrous war. Even many of Iran’s current elite don’t want such a conflict.

More than a decade ago, in 2012, when Israel came close to attacking Iran over its nuclear program, an online campaign began in Israel that led to thousands of ordinary Iranians and Israelis posting their pictures online with a seemingly naive message: “Israel loves Iran” and “Iran loves Israel,” an announcement that the people of these two nations had no desire to die in a war with each other.

This fundamental reality has not changed. The people of Iran don’t want a war against Israel. And the people of the region and the world can’t afford one.

My wife the photo archivist likes to point out that all stills are a double crop—a crop in time (we do not know what happened before or after) and a crop in place (we do not know what was outside the photographer’s frame). So, too, are pulses of violence, like Iran’s recent salvo of 300 drones, cruise, and ballistic missiles aimed at Israel. To understand what we are observing, we have to push out beyond the frame of what we at first see.

The attack last night was not a mere response to the Israeli strike in Damascus on April 1 that killed two Iranian generals and five other officers in the Revolutionary Guard Corps. Rather, it represents an inflection point in a semi-covert war that has been going on for years. That conflict has included attacks on shipping by both sides, the bombing of Jewish and Israeli civilian targets, the launch of rockets across Israel’s northern border, and the occasional assassination of key figures, such as Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, the godfather of the Iranian nuclear program.

Israel’s sardonic war humorists have been cracking jokes about the first direct flight from Tehran to Jerusalem since 1979, but as tends to happen, the joke has a kernel of insight: Unflinching hostility toward Israel is part of the Islamic Republic’s DNA. That hostility, moreover, is inextricably linked to its hostility toward the United States: One is the lesser Satan, the other the great. Reconciliation with either is ideologically impossible; hostility toward both, and the belief that the two are intertwined, is unshakeable.

But there is a departure here. Iran’s semi-covert war has used Hezbollah in Lebanon (and elsewhere in the world), Iraqi militias, and Yemen’s Houthis to attack and kill its enemies. That inhibition has begun to dissolve. Firing more than 300 guided weapons, and claiming responsibility for doing so, is an overt declaration that Iran is willing to wage war in the sunlight and not just the shadows.

This, in turn, is part of a larger pattern of Iranian belligerence: It includes the use of Iraqi militias to attack American bases, and the arming and assistance of Houthi militias in their attacks on civilian shipping in the Red Sea and beyond. It forces the question: Why has Iran begun to act more blatantly, less cautiously, and at greater ranges than ever before?

One answer may be the seemingly irrevocable march of that country to the possession of nuclear weapons, a march that was briefly slowed by the American invasion of Iraq in 2003 (which was followed by a pause in the Iranian program) and the ill-fated and time-limited Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) negotiated in 2015, abandoned by the Trump administration and unsuccessfully attempted to be revived by the Biden administration.

A second and deeper answer, however, is Iran’s entry into a coalition—not an alliance—with Russia, China, and North Korea. Iran now plays an important role in Russia’s war in Ukraine. Iranian drones fly every night at Ukrainian cities, revealing and stressing Ukrainian air defenses to pave the way for Russian cruise and ballistic missiles. Iran has reportedly helped with the construction of Russian factories to manufacture the drones, presumably in exchange for Russian assistance on other fronts.

It is this bigger geopolitical shift that makes the Iranian attack on Israel so significant. The major players in the Russia–China–Iran–North Korea coalition are increasingly willing to use open violence (against Ukraine, Israel, and the Philippines), and to threaten much worse, including the use of nuclear weapons. They are united by a growing belief that their moment is coming, when a divided and indecisive West, richer but flabbier, will not fight.

In response, as is so often the case, the Western states turn to technological and tactical solutions. In the short term, they work. The Israelis, assisted by the United States, Great Britain, and possibly other powers (there have been references to France and Jordan), shot down almost every single projectile heading their way. It is an amazing feat, and will undoubtedly create a great deal of demand for Israeli antimissile technology. In the same way, American and European warships have been shooting down most Houthi (actually, Iranian) missiles flying at merchant ships attempting to approach the Suez Canal.

But antimissile defense is, in the long run, a mug’s game. If every defensive missile you fire, together with all of the systems that cue and direct it, costs an order of magnitude more than the incoming missile, even the richest countries are going to bankrupt themselves. Such systems are not currently mass produced, although that may change. Furthermore, the new era of missile and drone warfare is still at an early stage. As the drone war over the fields of Ukraine shows, the numbers, sophistication, and quantity of such systems grow fast under the spur of actual conflict. The game becomes one of measure and countermeasure, and in any case, no defense is 100 percent effective in the long run. And so, sooner or later, ships will sink, apartment buildings will explode, civilians will die.

In such exchanges the attacker wins, because of the larger effects. Shippers will avoid certain routes, companies will hesitate about doing business in a war zone, and tourists and corporate executives will stay away from airports where the sirens go off periodically. That is the larger strategy at work here, and make no mistake: The Iranian purpose is, as has been repeatedly and unambiguously stated, the extermination of the Israeli state, an objective shared by Hamas, and possibly by the crowds shouting “From the river to the sea” on the streets of New York or London. In itself this is not new; it was, in the middle of the previous century, the objective of Egypt and Syria, but that was through a single climactic battle or two. This is something much more protracted.

The aim here is also something a lot bigger than the struggle to destroy Israel. The target of the Russia–China–Iran–North Korea coalition is the overthrow not of a “rules-based international order”—a phrase that misleads more than it informs, because there have always been rules of some kind—but of the American-led world order, which is an artifact of the past 75 years. The coalition’s frame, as it were, is a large one, in which the United States and its allies represent one frangible whole that, if tapped hard in several places, will disintegrate.

It is in this frame, then, that the United States and its allies have to consider next steps. The Iran versus Israel campaign is just one campaign in a much larger conflict. In the mid-1930s, it was a mistake to treat the Italian invasion of Abyssinia, the Spanish Civil War, the German reoccupation of the Rhineland, and Japan’s launching of war in China in 1937 as a set of unique and unconnected events. Rather, they represented one big problem. American leaders will err if they similarly attempt to compartmentalize each of their challenges today: the Ukraine war, Chinese aggression in the South China Sea, the Middle Eastern conflict.

That a coalition of the West and its partners were willing to act in countering the Iranian missile barrage is a promising sign. Still, until Iran pays a visible and heavy price for its behavior in attacking not only Israel directly but its Arab neighbors and global shipping through its proxies, the problem will only get worse.

If ever there was a time for strong American statecraft backed by military muscle, this is it. But even as the United States berates its allies for failing to spend enough, its own defense spending as a percentage of gross domestic product is declining to levels not seen since the halcyon days of 1999, down to 2.7 percent. That does not begin to give the politicians the big stick they need if their soft words are to carry conviction.

Until the United States gets serious about what it needs to preserve the order it helped create and sustain, benefiting itself and others enormously in the process, many more missiles will fly at the cities of democratic allies. It is cold comfort that others will pay the price in blood long before Americans do—but sooner or later, we will as well.

On April 1, Israel killed Mohammad Reza Zahedi, a senior official of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, by attacking Iran’s consulate in Damascus. Iran spent the next two weeks promising revenge, and the world tried to imagine what form that revenge might take. Missile strikes on the Golan Heights? Bombing an Israeli embassy? (Iran has practice at this one.) When I flew from Dubai to Tel Aviv a few days later, I wondered whether Iran would go old-school and attack an El Al check-in counter, the way the terrorists used to in the 1980s. Emirati airport authorities, it turns out, had anticipated that move. They placed the El Al counter next to that of an Iranian airline, so anyone who rolled a grenade at Israelis would also do some damage to passengers bound for the Iranian holy city of Mashhad.

Now we know the form of the retaliation. Late Saturday night, about an hour before midnight Israel time, Iran launched more than 300 drones and missiles from its own territory, as well as from Iraq, Lebanon, and Yemen, at the country it refers to as “the Zionist entity.” Almost all were shot down, officials said, eliminated by Israeli air defenses and, notably, by the militaries of the United States, the United Kingdom, Saudi Arabia, and Jordan. No drones even entered Israeli airspace. This morning, Admiral Daniel Hagari, the Israeli army spokesman, beamingly called the defensive operation an “unprecedented success.” The Iranians, for their part, professed happiness with the outcome, though they also seemed eager to forestall an Israeli counterstrike. While the drones were still in the sky, Iran’s UN mission tweeted that the matter of the assassination “can [now] be deemed concluded.”

To summarize: Israel blew up an Iranian general in an Iranian diplomatic mission—the sort of facility normally inviolable under international law, though the Iranian regime is rather famous for its disregard of such proprieties—and for two weeks, Israel and its allies have been preparing for a regional war or unprecedented terror campaign, something that would make the October 7 Hamas attack and the subsequent Gaza War look like mere prelude. Instead, after its drones and missiles were swatted down like flies, Iran is now suggesting that the two countries call it a tie.

This tie is an astonishing Israeli win. As Hagari suggested, it is an operational triumph, because it demonstrated that swarming attacks from a sophisticated adversary are not effective against Israel over long ranges. These are the same Iranian-made drones that, in Russian hands, have been terrorizing Kyiv for the past two years. In Tel Aviv last night, no air-raid sirens went off. (I didn’t bother setting my alarm, because I was confident that at least a few drones would get through and I’d have to scamper to shelter. I assume many others in Tel Aviv are still snoozing as I write this.) The uneventful night was also a strategic triumph. Iran’s Arab adversaries—Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates—all cooperated, taking concrete measures to keep Iran’s response ineffective. Iran’s Arab allies, Syria and Hezbollah in Lebanon, did not enter the operation in a significant way. The Israeli skydome held up. The strategic alliance held up. Israeli kids get a day off school as a precaution, but other than that, my neighborhood of Tel Aviv looks normal, with the same population of bleary-eyed hipsters out looking for cappuccinos. (The only reported injury was to a 7-year-old Israeli girl, wounded by falling shrapnel. Inconveniently for Iran, she was Arab.)  

The attack is also a gift to the hapless Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, whose incompetence was universally acknowledged just a day ago. Now, after botching the response to the worst terrorist attack in Israel’s history, Netanyahu’s government gathers credit for having repelled the most significant Iranian attack in Israel’s history. This morning, one could argue that Israel is safer than it has been since before October 7. “I think there are strategic opportunities,” the IDF spokesperson said in his briefing, and “we should look for those opportunities.” Netanyahu does not even have to launch a counterattack. Joe Biden has advised him that the U.S. will not support one, which relieves Netanyahu of the obligation. European countries that have criticized Israel over Gaza have stopped to condemn Iran instead.

But just because Netanyahu could decide to do nothing precipitous doesn’t mean that he will. He and his cabinet are constantly in search of new and ingenious ways to squander an opportunity. So today in the Middle East everyone is trying to imagine how they will misspend the credit Iran has just extended them. If Netanyahu behaves uncharacteristically, he could reach out to Israel’s Arab allies, and to its international critics, and try to reboot Gaza negotiations and bring home the Israeli hostages who are still alive. With Gaza at least partially in rubble and in famine conditions, and with essentially zero progress in negotiation with Hamas, some jolt to the status quo is necessary. Hamas has shown little interest in achieving a viable deal, and now its position has weakened slightly, because Iran seems so obviously disinclined to intervene in its favor by regionalizing the war. This reminder that Israel’s enemies are not limited to Hamas, and that Israel owes debts to its Arab friends who wish to see Gazans return to their homes (and who not-so-secretly also wish Israel could somehow eliminate Hamas without fuss once and for all), could catalyze a new Israeli reaction to the conflict.

​​These Arab allies deserve Israel’s gratitude. They also might be reminded of what is in their own interest. After all, Iran’s overseas ventures are not limited to Israel. Iran evidently feels free to violate Jordanian airspace as it pleases. If it is willing to swarm Israel with drones, why not Saudi Arabia too? It already attacked Abqaiq, Saudi Arabia’s largest oilfield, in 2019, an attack that went unanswered by Saudi Arabia and the United States. Iran, its Revolutionary Guards Corps at the front, has already wrecked Iraq, Yemen, and Lebanon. Who is next? The Gaza war has alienated Israel from these allies, and in particular from their citizens, who see images of the devastation daily on Al Jazeera. Now Israel can point to Iran’s aggression and disregard of national boundaries as a common cause with which to begin to undo that alienation.

Netanyahu’s government is beholden to right-wing elements that have made a hostage deal difficult to strike and post-invasion Gaza planning almost non-existent. These same right-wing elements want retaliation: If Iran sends 300 drones and missiles to Israel, Israel should send 300 back. (Unlike the Iranian ones, many of the Israeli ones will reach their targets.) Now could be the moment for Netanyhu to tell his right flank to stand down. The reasons Israel is not on a war footing this morning—children are merely in Zoom lessons today, and there have been no further call-ups of reserve troops—are technological (an incredible air-defense system) and diplomatic (a partnership extending from the Levant to the Persian Gulf), not ideological. Many Israelis would welcome a shift back to a national-security-focused right, and away from a fundamentalist religious one. Not long ago, Netanyahu had a sort of proprietary hold on that position in Israeli politics. Now the religious right has a hold on him.

Netanyahu is a master of self-preservation, and he knows he likely will not be the one to lead such a shift. His instinct to stay in power would, in that case, come into conflict with his instinct to preserve and improve Israel’s geostrategic position. Unfortunately, in the contest between those two instincts, the outcome is unlikely to be anything close to a tie.