Although much of the world is breathing a sigh of relief that Iran and Israel appear unwilling to push their exchange of missile and drone attacks further, potentially plunging the Middle East into a wider war, the danger of another escalation has not passed. Rather, the concern has shifted to a possible Israeli offensive against Hezbollah in Lebanon. Israel has threatened this, and U.S. officials and others in the region fear that such a plan has been in the works for months.

For Israeli hawks, a major blow against Hezbollah has never seemed more opportune, but Washington dreads the prospect because the prime directive of American policy on the Gaza war has been containment of the conflict, particularly regarding Lebanon. The Biden administration’s worry is that an all-out Israeli assault in Lebanon could end up dragging the U.S. and Iran into not just a regional conflagration but a direct confrontation. Indeed, Washington fears that scenario may be just what some Israeli leaders want: Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has for years urged but failed to effect U.S. strikes against Iran’s nuclear facilities.

Israel could launch a powerful assault on Hezbollah, hoping to damage and humiliate its most potent immediate adversary, and then withdraw behind a new buffer zone. Such a campaign is particularly tempting after the trauma of the October 7 attack by Hamas because, in contrast to the nightmarish quagmire now enveloping Gaza, Lebanon seems to offer the promise of a quick and decisive victory that can set the world aright for the badly shaken Israelis. But the assumption that such an invasion will enhance Israel’s sense of power and security could prove a ruinous folly.

[Robert F. Worth: Hezbollah goes to the theater]

The Biden administration’s diplomatic effort to manage this crisis has chiefly relied on heavyweights such as CIA Director Bill Burns, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, and National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan. They have focused on the most high-profile issues of hostages, humanitarian aid, and a cease-fire, pursuing complex indirect negotiations between Israel and Hamas. But a crucial role may now fall to the less well-known Amos Hochstein, who has taken the lead in trying to broker an understanding between Israel and Hezbollah that could prevent intensified hostilities. He is working with French President Emmanuel Macron to find such a formula.

Hochstein achieved an extraordinary breakthrough in October 2022 between Israel and the Hezbollah-influenced government in Beirut over maritime boundaries that should allow both countries to exploit offshore oil fields without menacing each other. Because of that success and the ties Hochstein developed among the parties, including Hezbollah, the State Department energy adviser became the point person when the Biden administration sought to manage unrest on that border.

Hochstein’s new brief is more challenging. For months, he has tried fruitlessly to achieve a limited pullback of Hezbollah’s elite border force to about five miles into Lebanon. Israel was demanding a withdrawal of more like 20 miles, to around the Litani River. Hezbollah flatly rejected the idea of redeploying from its southern-Lebanese heartland. The group justifies maintaining its own private militia—and therefore an independent foreign policy—by claiming that it is protecting southern Lebanon from Israel and trying to liberate small areas still occupied by its adversary, so Hezbollah’s national power derives from its paramilitary presence there.

From the outset of the Gaza war, Hezbollah—with Iran’s backing—has made it clear that it does not seek a broader war with Israel. Lebanon, mired in economic and political turmoil, is in no position to withstand an Israeli onslaught. Hezbollah could face a terrible backlash, including within its own Shiite constituency, if it dragged the country into a pointless and devastating conflict. Tehran needs to ensure that Hezbollah’s military capability remains intact so it can continue to serve as a deterrent against Israeli or U.S. attacks on Iran itself, especially its nuclear facilities.

For Iran, Gaza lacks any inherent strategic significance. Hamas is regarded as an unreliable partner, a Sunni Muslim Brotherhood group that fits uneasily within the largely Shiite pro-Iranian alliance. When, after 2011, civil war broke out in Syria, where the predominantly Alawi (a Shiite offshoot faith) regime soon found itself fighting Sunni Islamist rebels, the Hamas politburo was compelled to flee Damascus for Doha, in Qatar, where it remains to this day. For its part, Hezbollah feels no obligation to sacrifice its political and military strength for either Gaza or Hamas.

In any case, hawks in Tehran believe that the Gaza war has given their alliance the upper hand, and that the only way for Israel to alter the situation is to engineer a broader regional conflict. To preserve that advantage, they argue, Iran and its Arab-militia clients should take care to deny Israel any opportunity to escalate and avoid overstepping.

[Read: Israel versus Hezbollah, round three?]

Some Israeli leaders appear keen for such an opportunity. In mid-October, Defense Minister Yoav Gallant and others reportedly began pressing for a major preemptive attack against Hezbollah. The group had launched rocket and artillery attacks on Israeli positions on October 8, “in solidarity” with Hamas’s attack on Israel the previous day. “Our history, our guns and our rockets are with you,” a senior Hezbollah official proclaimed. Forceful objections from the Biden administration and the need to focus on Gaza prevented such an attack. But Gallant and a growing group within the war cabinet continue to push for a “northern campaign.” Because of Hezbollah’s attacks, Israel evacuated about 80,000 residents in the border region. A similar number of Lebanese self-evacuated from southern towns and villages.

The demand for war thus became centered on the insistence that these Israelis could not return to their home not just until Hezbollah ceased its cross-border barrage, but until Hezbollah’s forces were driven from the area, to prevent its immediate recurrence. This demand may be framed as a new need for border security because of the October 7 attacks, but it smacks of rationalization. The Israeli calls for a war predated the evacuations anyway, but most important, relocating Hezbollah commandos would not address the primary threat of the group’s massive arsenal of missiles, rockets, and drones. This force, estimated at about 150,000 projectiles, is capable of striking anywhere in Israel and probably of overwhelming its air-defense systems.

The conviction among some Israeli leaders that a decisive war with Hezbollah is inevitable and necessary explains Israel’s ongoing strikes against Hezbollah; Israel claims to have eliminated fully half of the group’s southern commanders. Such belligerence also explains Israel’s strike on a diplomatic facility in Damascus that killed three Iranian generals, key leaders in Tehran’s regional axis. The Iranians clearly felt the need to retaliate directly against Israel for this attack on what diplomatic norms deem its own soil.

Iran’s resolve to restore deterrence and bolster national morale took both the Israelis and the Americans by surprise, yet Iran was careful to telegraph the aerial attack well in advance. About half of its missiles and drones reportedly malfunctioned; almost all of the rest were shot down by U.S., Israeli, U.K., and Jordanian forces. Israel’s response attack inside Iran was more sophisticated but also carefully calibrated. No one was killed in either attack, and both sides have been able to declare themselves vindicated and victorious.

[Andrew Exum: The hubris of Hezbollah]

The most obvious aspect of Iran’s relative restraint was that it did not unleash Hezbollah’s daunting arsenal. This underscores the fact that Iran doesn’t want Hezbollah drawn into conflict with Israel. But the constant threat of that arsenal remains the strongest argument of Gallant and his war party for an attack into Lebanon.

Israeli leaders have a further incentive. The lack of clarity about an endgame in Gaza, and what an incontrovertible win would even look like, makes the prospect of a quick, decisive campaign against Hezbollah all the more appealing. The Lebanese militia is a much more conventional force than Hamas, and some Israelis argue that inflicting losses and degrading Hezbollah’s military machine would be more readily quantifiable, providing a rapid, needed boost for Israel’s battered national morale. In the long run, they say, degrading, deterring, and humiliating the formidable Iranian proxy is much more important to Israel’s national security than neutralizing Hamas.

The logic of belligerence, however, risks obscuring its hubris. Hochstein and his colleagues in the Biden administration might do well to remind Israeli leaders that, ever since Hezbollah was founded, following the 1982 invasion of Lebanon, each time the Israel Defense Forces have squared off against the organization, they have consistently encountered a more disciplined, organized, and competent adversary than they expected. Much, therefore, rides on Hochstein’s diplomacy to broker an Israeli-Hezbollah understanding. If that effort fails, President Joe Biden may be the only person alive who has any chance of saving Israel and Lebanon from a catastrophic and avoidable conflict.

International Criminal Court could issue warrants for arrest of senior Israeli officials.

The Iranian attack on Israel has heightened the fierce cross-pressures shaping President Joe Biden’s conflicted approach to the war in Gaza.

Throughout Israel’s military engagement, Biden has struggled to square his historic inclination to support Israel almost unreservedly with growing hostility in his party toward Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s conduct of the war. For months, Biden has been escalating his criticism of Netanyahu, but once the Iran attack began, the president snapped back to his instinct to rally behind Israel.

The barrage of missiles and drones that Iran fired at Israel on Saturday may have a similar short-term effect on slowing what has been a steady increase in congressional Democrats urging Biden to suspend offensive weapons sales to Israel until it fundamentally changes its strategy in Gaza. Yet, unless Israel and Iran descend into a full-scale confrontation, last weekend’s hostilities are not likely to end that pressure. That’s especially so because some of the same Democrats critical of Israel’s behavior in Gaza also believe the Jewish state was misguided to launch the air strike on senior officers of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps in Syria that precipitated the current exchange.

If the Iranian threat tilts Biden back toward his instinct to lock arms with Israel, it will widen the breach between him and the increasing number of Democrats who want a more fundamental break in U.S. support for the Gaza war.

Before Saturday’s attack, Biden faced greater division in his own coalition over his handling of the Israel-Hamas war than any other Democratic president has confronted on a foreign-policy choice in decades.

The Democrats who have preceded Biden as president over the past 50 years—Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama—all faced discontent within their ranks over key foreign-policy decisions. But many veterans of previous Democratic administrations believe that none of those controversies generated as much sustained discord as Biden is now experiencing on three central fronts: criticism in Congress, disapproval in public-opinion polls, and persistent public protest.

“It’s very powerful when people who don’t ordinarily get involved in foreign policy do,” Ben Rhodes, who served as the deputy national security adviser for strategic communications under Obama, told me. “I don’t remember that happening in my administration or the Clinton administration. But now there has been a coalescence of real core pillars of the Democratic base that are just totally repelled by what is happening and a lack of pressure on Israel to change course. I can’t really think of anything like this.”

The current conflict hasn’t divided Democrats as badly as the second Iraq War, which began in 2003; former Senator Hillary Clinton’s vote to authorize the use of force against Iraq was one reason she lost the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination to Obama. But those internecine conflicts centered on how Democrats responded to the decision to launch the war by a Republican president, George W. Bush.

The breadth of public and congressional discontent over this conflict also doesn’t compare to the magnitude of party opposition that developed against Democratic President Lyndon B. Johnson’s escalation of the Vietnam War in the 1960s. But although the current dissent doesn’t approach that historic height, it has exposed Biden to a distant echo of the charge from those years of supporting an unjust war.

Aides in the Biden White House and on his reelection campaign uniformly expressed optimism to me that, despite polls showing growing unease about the war among Democratic partisans, the conflict would not cost the president votes among people otherwise inclined to support him against former President Donald Trump. Not everyone in the party agrees that that optimism is justified. But many Democrats fear that even if Biden’s team is correct for now, the president’s political risks will only grow the longer the war persists.

[Alan Taylor: Gaza on the brink of famine]

“If it stops in three months, there is probably enough time” for Biden to recover, said one senior administration official, who asked for anonymity while discussing internal deliberations. “If it doesn’t stop in six months, we are going to really feel it.”

The fear among party strategists is not so much that Democrats discontented over Biden’s approach to the war, especially young people, will vote for Trump. He is even less likely to impose constraints on Israel, and his top immigration adviser, Stephen Miller, has openly threatened to deport pro-Palestinian demonstrators. Instead, the concern is that with many younger voters already unenthusiastic about Biden, his handling of the war will provide them with another reason to choose a third-party candidate or to simply not vote at all. “I think it has complicated Biden’s current standing with young people,” Ben Tulchin, who served as the lead pollster in both of Senator Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaigns, told me. “It’s just one more thing he is going to have to mend fences on. The hope is, in six months from now, the temperature gets turned down.”

The discontent among Democrats about the war and Biden’s approach to it is mounting across all three measures of dissent.

The first is in Congress. After the Israeli missile strikes that killed workers from the World Central Kitchen, a group of 56 Democratic House members sent Biden a letter urging him to suspend the transfer of offensive weapons to Israel until an independent investigation into the attack is completed. Senator Tim Kaine of Virginia, a centrist who served as Hillary Clinton’s vice-presidential nominee in 2016, earlier this month also called on Biden to stop the transfer of “bombs and other offensive weapons that can kill and wound civilians and humanitarian aid workers.”

Earlier this year, a group of 19 Democratic senators led by Chris Van Hollen of Maryland filed a bill that could have restricted U.S. military aid to Israel. To defuse the threat, the Biden administration issued a national-security memorandum establishing a new process for assessing whether Israel, and other countries receiving U.S. military aid, are using the weapons in accordance with international law, and also cooperating in the distribution of humanitarian aid provided either directly by the United States or by international organizations it supports. If that report, due on May 8, finds that Israel has failed to meet those standards, it could encourage more Democrats to demand that Biden suspend the transfer of offensive weapons.

“There is growing frustration with the pattern of the president making reasonable requests and demands, and the Netanyahu government mostly ignoring them and doing so with impunity, in the sense that we send more 2,000-pound bombs,” Van Hollen told me. “I think there are a growing number of senators who agree we can make more effective use of all the policy tools at our disposal. Our approach cannot be limited to jawboning Prime Minister Netanyahu.”

In the near term, the Iranian attack may inhibit more Democrats from demanding a suspension of offensive weapon transfers to Israel, such as the F-15-fighter-jet sale to the Jewish state that Biden is lobbying Congress to approve over resistance from some party leaders. (Iran’s assault highlighted the difficulty of distinguishing between offensive and defensive weapons; two squadrons of American F-15s helped intercept the Iranian attack.) But several Democratic opponents of the arms transfers issued statements this weekend reaffirming their position. In one of those, Van Hollen said Sunday that although the U.S. “can and should continue to replenish” the defensive systems Israel employed against the Iranian barrage, “the Biden Administration should use all the levers of its influence to” sway the Israeli decisions on Gaza; that’s clear code for indicating Van Hollen believes Biden should still threaten a suspension of offensive weapon transfers.

Public-opinion polls offer another vivid measure of Democratic discontent over the war and the U.S. approach to it. In a recent national Quinnipiac University poll, almost two-thirds of Democrats said they opposed sending further military aid to Israel. In a CBS News/YouGov national poll released Sunday but conducted before Saturday’s hostilities, most Democrats wanted the U.S. to support Israel if Iran attacked it. But two-thirds of Democrats again opposed weapons transfers to Israel for the war with Hamas, and nearly half said Biden should push Israel to entirely end its military action; another fourth of respondents said he should encourage it to wind down the campaign.

These negative opinions about the war, and Biden’s approach to it, have been especially pronounced among younger voters. That points to a third central measure of dissension within Democratic ranks: widespread campus-based protests. One telling measure of that challenge for Biden came earlier this month, when the president of the University of Michigan issued new policies toughening penalties against disruptive campus protests.

The fact that the leading university in a state that is virtually a must-win for Biden felt compelled to impose new restrictions on protest underscored the intensity of the activism against the Gaza war. Protest “has been pretty persistent since October,” Ali Allam, a University of Michigan sophomore active in the TAHRIR coalition leading the campus protests, told me. “I don’t know very many people who are planning on voting for Biden, because they have seen time and time again, he is a person who says, ‘We’re concerned about the situation,’ and yet he continues to sign off on providing more and more weapons. And that is just not something young people are willing to get behind.”

Michigan is a somewhat unique case because of the state’s large Arab American population, which provides an especially impassioned core for the protest movement. But the student hostility to the war has extended to a broad range of left-leaning younger voters that Democrats count on. In Michigan, for instance, some 80 campus groups are part of the TAHRIR coalition, including organizations representing Black, Latino, Asian, and Jewish students, Allam said. Ben Rhodes, who now co-hosts a popular podcast aimed primarily at liberal young people, Pod Save the World, sees the same trend. “It’s not just Arab and Muslim Americans in Michigan, or foreign-policy lefties,” he told me. “It’s this kind of mainstream of the young part of the Democratic coalition.”

As Biden advisers point out, the other recent Democratic presidents also provoked internal opposition in Congress or in polls to some of their foreign-policy decisions. But it’s difficult to identify an example under Carter, Clinton, or Obama that combined all three of the elements of Democratic discontent Biden is now facing.

Probably the most controversial foreign-policy decision of Carter’s presidency, for instance, was his support for the treaty ceding control of the Panama Canal back to Panama. That produced a heated and lengthy public debate, but the conflict was fought out mostly against conservative Republicans led by Ronald Reagan: In the end, just six Senate Democrats voted against the treaty.

[Graeme Wood: What will Netanyahu do now?]

The principal foreign-policy controversies of Clinton’s presidency revolved around his anguished decisions on whether to intervene in a series of humanitarian crises. After an early military action in Somalia went badly (in the events depicted in the book and movie Black Hawk Down), a chastened Clinton stood aside as a horrific genocide unfolded in Rwanda in 1994. Clinton also wavered for years before launching a bombing campaign with NATO allies in 1995 that ultimately produced the peace treaty that ended the Serbian war in Bosnia. Later, Clinton launched another bombing campaign to end Serbian attacks in Kosovo.

Although neither party, to its shame, exerted any concerted pressure on Clinton to act in Rwanda, he did face congressional demands to more forcefully intervene in the Balkans. Shortly before the 1995 bombing campaign, both the House and the Senate approved legislation essentially renouncing Clinton’s policies in Bosnia, and almost half of Democrats in each chamber voted against him. But the issue did not provoke anything near the public activism now evident on the Israeli war in Gaza, and even in Congress, the issue scrambled both parties. Many Democrats from all of the party’s ideological wings shared Clinton’s caution.

“I don’t think domestic opinion per se affected” Clinton’s choices about the Balkans, James Steinberg, who served as his deputy national security adviser, told me. “There were Democrats and Republicans on both sides of the issue. It was more Clinton’s own feeling about responsibility, leadership, and America’s role in the post–Cold War world.”

Obama faced intermittent discontent among some Democrats over his major foreign-policy choices, including his “surge” of additional military personnel into Afghanistan and his plans for air strikes during the Syrian civil war. But none of these generated sustained resistance across all three of the fronts now challenging Biden. Nor did many Democrats dissent from what was probably Obama’s most controversial foreign-policy move—the treaty he reached during his second term to limit Iran’s nuclear-weapons program. In the end, just four Senate Democrats voted against approving the pact.

The Democratic unity behind the Iran agreement was notable because it came despite an intense lobbying effort against it from AIPAC, the leading pro-Israel group in the U.S., and Netanyahu himself. In an extraordinary intervention into U.S. domestic politics from a foreign leader, Netanyahu, who was also Israel’s prime minister then, delivered a speech to Congress opposing the deal at the invitation of congressional Republicans.

Netanyahu’s long history of aligning closely with U.S. Republicans and conflicting with Democratic presidents meant that few Democrats began the Gaza war with much confidence in him. Many Democrats have also been outraged by Netanyahu’s efforts to eviscerate judicial review of government actions in Israel, which has drawn comparisons to Trump’s efforts to weaken pillars of U.S. democracy. A recent Quinnipiac University poll found that just one in 20 Democrats have a favorable impression of Netanyahu.

Biden initially insisted that his best chance to influence Israel’s policies was to wrap Netanyahu in a “bear hug.” But given all this history, many Democrats outside the administration viewed that strategy as doomed from the start.

“The administration’s initial approach seemed to be based on the belief that the best way to maintain influence with the Israeli government was to sympathize with their objectives and be inside the discussion rather than outside the discussion,” said Steinberg, who also served as deputy secretary of state for Obama and is now the dean of the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. “But everything that has happened over the past months reinforces the view that, with Netanyahu, that strategy counts for little.”

Over the past several months, as the devastation inside Gaza has mounted and Netanyahu has openly dismissed Biden’s calls for a two-state solution after the fighting, the president has significantly intensified his public criticism of the Israeli prime minister. When I asked the senior administration official whether Netanyahu has exhausted whatever goodwill he possessed when the war began within the administration and with Democrats in Congress, the official replied, “It’s awfully close.”

But Biden has so far refused to match his critical words for Netanyahu with concrete consequences. Administration officials point out that the ongoing arms transfers to Israel are primarily occurring under a long-term arms deal approved during the Obama presidency. And they note that providing Israel with sophisticated weaponry advances U.S. strategic interests in deterring Iran—an argument that gained relevance after Saturday’s Iranian barrage. The October 7 attack also provoked genuine outrage across the American political spectrum and cemented a broad bipartisan conviction that Israel is justified in seeking to disable Hamas.

But many of the national-security experts I spoke with argued that Biden’s reluctance to push harder against Netanyahu also reflects the fact that the president formed his fundamental vision of Israel decades ago, when the country was an underdog besieged by larger neighbors, which is no longer the way many Democrats see the nation. “This is a generational issue, and in Biden’s head, he’s of the kibbutz generation,” Jeremy Rosner, a senior adviser at the National Security Council under Clinton, told me. “I don’t think it was tactical on his part, how he responded, or political; I think it was heartfelt.”

The rising tension with Iran will likely delay a reckoning between Biden and Netanyahu over Gaza. But it will grow only more difficult for Biden to avoid a deeper breach with the Israeli government around the war. For instance, the administration probably won’t be able to avoid sharp criticism of Israel in the May 8 report to Congress. Senator Van Hollen says the report cannot credibly claim that Israel has met the required performance for allowing the distribution of international aid over the duration of the war, even if it is now allowing in more shipments after Biden’s stern phone conversation with Netanyahu about the deaths of the World Central Kitchen workers. “If anybody suggests that the Netanyahu government has met the standard [on facilitating humanitarian aid] for the last many months, it would be hard to have any confidence in that conclusion,” Van Hollen told me.

A larger inflection point is looming over Rafah. Netanyahu has insisted that Israel is still planning a full-scale military operation in the last major Gaza civilian center that it has not invaded; Biden has urged him to instead use only more surgical military missions against Hamas leadership and, in an MSNBC interview last month, called an all-out attack of Rafah a “red line” that Israel should not cross.

Yet in that interview, Biden sent mixed signals about what consequences, if any, he would impose if Netanyahu crossed that line. Likewise, administration officials have remained vague about what penalties, if any, they will impose if they judge that Israel has failed to meet the performance standards mandated in the May 8 report.

Biden has no simple political choices on the conflict. In polling, about one in four Democrats consistently express support for Israel’s conduct of the war—roughly that many in the party, for instance, said in the Quinnipiac poll that they support more military aid to Israel and, in recent Pew Research Center polling, said that they view the Israeli government favorably. Biden might alienate some of those voters if he imposes more constraints on Israel. The veteran Democratic pollster Mark Mellman, the president of the pro-Israel group Democratic Majority for Israel, recently argued to Politico that if Biden took a harder line on the war, he would lose support not only among voters who strongly back the Jewish state but also from others who would view him as weak for reversing direction under political pressure.

Any move to limit arms sales to Israel would also draw intense attacks from Republicans, who seized on the Iranian barrage to denounce the Democratic criticism of Israel over Gaza. “Get behind the Israeli government,” Republican Representative Mike Lawler of New York insisted on CNN while the attack was under way.

Yet the political risks to Biden of staying on his current course are also apparent. Already, a clear majority of the Democratic base disapproves of Israel’s conduct of the war. The number of Democratic voters and elected officials critical of the invasion is likely to grow as the conflict persists—particularly if Israel continues to employ the same harsh tactics. As the senior official told me, the administration expects that “if there isn’t a cease-fire and this thing drags on and there isn’t a dramatic change in the ways the Israelis operate, the erosion” in Democratic support for Biden’s posture toward the war “is going to continue.” Even among independent voters, Israel’s position has dipped into the red: In a recent Gallup survey, independents by a ratio of 2 to 1 disapproved of the Israeli military action, and in Sunday’s CBS News/YouGov poll, the share of independents who said the U.S. should no longer send arms to Israel was nearly as high as the percentage of Democrats.

[Hussein Ibish: The United States and Israel are coming apart]

Biden’s team still holds out hope that, partly because of his tougher tone, Israel will agree to a cease-fire with Hamas that in turn could unlock a broader agreement for normalization of Israeli relations with Saudi Arabia that includes steps toward negotiating a Palestinian state. Such a transformative deal could erase much of the discontent among Democrats about Biden’s approach to the war.

But with Hamas displaying even more resistance than Israel to another cease-fire, such a sequence of events seems very distant. (The unprecedented step of Iran launching attacks from its own territory into Israel might encourage Saudi Arabia and other regional adversaries of Tehran to consider aligning more closely with Israel and the U.S., but the overall increase in regional tensions may not be conducive to an immediate diplomatic breakthrough.) This means the most likely prospect in the coming weeks is for more fighting and more civilian suffering in Gaza that exacerbates the tensions inside the Democratic Party over the war.

“This can get worse,” Rhodes said. “I don’t think people have their heads fully around that, because what’s already happened feels extreme. But if the current status quo continues for another couple of months, where there is an Israeli military operation in Rafah and there are extreme restrictions on aid getting in, we are going to be looking at a much worse situation than we are today.”

If the administration’s months of support for Netanyahu on the Gaza war ultimately costs Biden support in November, then the president’s failure to break from a right-wing aspiring authoritarian in Israel may doom his effort to prevent the return to power of a right-wing aspiring authoritarian in America.

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Israel’s response to Iran’s attack this past weekend signals an “astonishing win,” my colleague Graeme Wood wrote yesterday. With help from several allies, Israel managed to fend off what could have been a mass-casualty event (though one 7-year-old girl sustained life-threatening injuries). But the attack was also “a gift to the hapless Benjamin Netanyahu,” Graeme argues. I called Graeme in Tel Aviv yesterday to talk about how the prime minister could use this moment as an opportunity to revitalize Gaza negotiations—and why he’s not likely to do so.

First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic:

Gavin Newsom can’t help himself. Trump’s willing accomplice The RFK Jr. strategy clicks into focus. What the upper-middle-class left doesn’t get about inflation

A Realignment

Isabel Fattal: You wrote yesterday that Israel’s response to Iran’s attack signals an operational and strategic win. How so?

Graeme Wood: For the past two weeks, since it struck Iran’s consulate in Damascus, killing multiple officers and senior officials of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, Israel has been on anxious footing waiting to figure out how Iran was going to attack. There was some doubt, I think, in ordinary people’s minds about how Israel would handle whatever Iran was going to do next. What Iran eventually decided to do was to send more than 300 drones and missiles toward Israel. And Israel not only survived that, but by dawn the next day, the country was up and running as if nothing had happened. The ability for Israel to weather the attack was beyond anyone’s expectations—both as a matter of technical ability and also as a kind of moral ability, to have life go on after what Iran promised was going to be a serious challenge.

Isabel: You write that this could be the moment for Netanyahu to tell his more militaristic right flank to stand down.

Graeme: The way that a lot of people naturally understand these types of attacks is as a matter of tit for tat. Of course there are many in Israel who think, We need to respond in kind. That is the view from Netanyahu’s right. But it is not the most productive way that the aftermath of this attack can be used.

Whenever something big like this happens, it’s almost impossible to put oneself into the mindset of 24 hours ago. But 24 hours ago, many of us would have said, Israel’s in a horrible muddle because it has waged an absolutely brutal war in Gaza. It has not succeeded in dislodging Hamas. It has not gotten its hostages back. There is a humanitarian catastrophe. And there is no negotiation that’s anywhere near happening that could redeem Israel from this pickle that it’s partially put itself in.

Now there is this kind of realignment of the security paradigm. Could a creative, thoughtful, competent government use that realignment to move forward from what seemed like an intractable position in Gaza? Yes. There are angles that a government could take so that tomorrow is not like yesterday. Part of that includes just acknowledging, where did this success come from? The success came in part because Israel, over the past several years, has created what turns out to be a pretty durable and effective alliance with the governments of Arab states in the region. We’re talking about Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates. Without those states, the prospects for having only one casualty in Israel from the Iranian attack would have been nil. That means that there’s gratitude to be doled out to those states, and there are compromises that can be made as part of that expression of gratitude.

Isabel: So you think that now there could be an opening for negotiation that didn’t exist before the attacks?

Graeme: Yes, exactly. The reason that opening didn’t exist previously is that Netanyahu has consistently tried to mollify those to his right who have maximalist views of the post-Gaza situation—maximalist views meaning that, at the end of the day, there’s not just no Hamas, but no Palestinian government or security force whatsoever in Gaza, and no Arab security force whatsoever. That’s not a reasonable hope for the future, and it has prevented Netanyahu and his government from considering any reasonable future at all.

Among the things that they could have considered are creative solutions that would have involved these Arab allies who have populations, as well as governments, who are not thrilled by what they’re seeing in Gaza. And in the past 24 hours, Israel’s need for those countries has been demonstrated. It’s a moment where a trusted, courageous leader could step in and perhaps create some kind of change in policy that would allow the Gaza war to, if not conclude, then come closer to its conclusion.

Isabel: What’s Netanyahu’s window to do something like this?

Graeme: If you see what’s being spoken about in Israel, it’s Netanyahu being pressured to retaliate. This is not an incomprehensible command. If there were 300 drones sent toward any country, the population of that country would say, We have to do something material to cause those who sent them to regret having done so. It’s unclear whether Netanyahu is going to take that bait, or do what a great politician has to do sometimes, which is to say to people, You’re not going to get what you want; you’re going to get what you need. And what we need as a country is something other than this. That’s what the situation really calls for, and it’s a call that would probably have to be answered in, I would say, the next week.

Isabel: What else should readers keep in mind as they’re following this story?

Graeme: One thing that I think will be a nagging question for a lot of people is, What did the Iranians want to happen? Even if they didn’t want massive death and destruction, what they did was an unambiguous act of aggression. But another possibility, which is reasonable to consider, is that they didn’t expect most of those drones and missiles to get through. They needed to retaliate, and as soon as they did so they said, Okay, we’re done here. Even before the missiles and drones would’ve reached their targets, they said that. So we have to consider the possibility that this was a half-hearted attack.

Isabel: This attack is also unprecedented in a few ways, isn’t it?

Graeme: They’re attacking from Iranian territory. And if you attack from Iranian territory, you invite retaliation on Iranian territory, which is a huge change from the status quo ante. This really is a before-and-after moment. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps commander said this publicly, which means it’s probably an official statement of doctrine now: From now on, if Israel attacks Iranian interests, figures, and citizens anywhere, we will retaliate from Iran. If that’s what they’re going to do, that’s a new disposition.

Related:

What will Netanyahu do now? The coalition of the malevolent

Today’s News

Jury selection is under way on the first day of Donald Trump’s hush-money trial in Manhattan; it marks the first time a former president has been on trial for criminal charges. The civil war in Sudan has now reached the end of its first year. More than 14,000 people have been killed, according to some estimates; last month, the UN warned that nearly 5 million people could soon suffer a “catastrophic” level of hunger. The FBI opened a criminal probe into the recent collapse of Baltimore’s Francis Scott Key Bridge. The investigation will cover, in part, whether the ship’s crew knew their vessel had “serious system problems” before leaving port, according to The Washington Post.

Dispatches

The Wonder Reader: Savor your favorites while you can—the ongoing cocoa shortage may change the future of chocolate forever, Isabel Fattal writes.

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Philip Shribman, in a college photo from around 1940; behind it, an excerpt from a wartime letter he sent to the sociology professor George F. Theriault Sources: Courtesy of David Shribman; Wieland Teixeira / Getty

The Man Who Died for the Liberal Arts

By David M. Shribman

Philip Alvan Shribman, a recent graduate of Dartmouth and just a month away from his 22nd birthday, was not worldly but understood that he had been thrust into a world conflict that was more than a contest of arms. At stake were the life, customs, and values that he knew. He was a quiet young man, taciturn in the old New England way, but he had much to say in this letter, written from the precipice of battle to a brother on the precipice of adulthood …

He acknowledged from the start that “this letter won’t do much good”—a letter that, in the eight decades since it was written, has been read by three generations of my family. In it, Phil Shribman set out the virtues and values of the liberal arts at a time when universities from coast to coast were transitioning into training grounds for America’s armed forces.

Read the full article.

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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.

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.

On March 29, a friend of mine, the Iranian journalist Pouria Zeraati, was crossing the road outside his Wimbledon home in southwestern London, to get his car. A man approached him and asked for change; then another man, with his face covered, gave Zeraati a bear hug while the first man stabbed him several times in the back of his thigh.

This was no petty street crime. The assailants left Zeraati’s iPhone, brand-new AirPods, pricey watch, and wallet full of cash untouched. With the help of a driver, they fled the scene and then the country, to an undisclosed destination, according to British authorities. The London police are investigating the attack as a potential case of terrorism. Its methods suggest that the assailants’ intention was not to kill Zeraati but to hurt him in a way that would warn all of us Iranian journalists working in the West: You could be next.

[Mary Louise Kelly: Why I went to Iran]

The Islamic Republic chose Zeraati as a target for a reason. For the past three years, he has been a lead anchor on Iran International, a Saudi-funded Persian-language broadcaster based in London and Washington. Launched in 2017, the channel has made itself a thorn in the side of the Iranian regime. (Some of my friends were among the channel’s founders, and I have done occasional work for it as a writer and commentator.) Iran International was an unapologetic champion of the nationwide protests that broke out in Iran in September 2022; the network spread the opposition’s message and gave airtime to its would-be leaders. In short, it played a similar role to that of Al-Jazeera during the Arab Spring of 2011.

The regime’s response was ferocious. The minister of intelligence declared that Tehran considered the channel to be a terrorist organization. In November 2022, with no hint of subtlety, a major Iranian news agency published a wanted: dead or alive poster emblazoned with faces of four anchors from Iran International. Zeraati was one of them. Since then, he has only added to the government’s fury: He interviewed Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel in March of 2023 and continues to host harsh critics of the regime on his show.

Another face on the poster was that of Sima Sabet, a journalist who had worked for BBC Persian for more than a decade before joining Iran International in 2018 as a lead anchor. Back in December, an ITV News investigation uncovered a plot, commissioned by associates of Iran’s closest ally, Syria’s Bashar al-Assad, to assassinate Sabet and a fellow anchor on the channel, Fardad Farahzad (also a friend of mine). Sabet and Farahzad got lucky: The people-smuggler hired to do the job turned out to be a spy working for a Western intelligence agency, and he broke the story to a British outlet.

When Sabet first heard about the attack on Zeraati, she felt “shock and rage,” she told me in a phone conversation. “An indescribable anger: How can you be in your own home in Britain and be attacked right outside it?” Shortly afterward, police told her to leave her residence. I spoke with her more than a week later, and she still hadn’t been able to return home.

Farahzad now runs a popular Iran International show from Washington, where we met for coffee recently. “To be honest,” he told me of the London attack, “I was hoping that this was just a criminal action by local gangs. But the evidence so far shows that this is probably not the case.”

This month, the Indian-born British American novelist Salman Rushdie will publish Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder, his first book since the attempt on his life in August 2022. Hadi Matar, the young man who tried to kill Rushdie with a knife and cost him his left eye and use of one hand, was from New Jersey, born to immigrant parents from Lebanon. But his inspiration was unmistakable: a 1989 fatwa by the founder of the Islamic Republic, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, which continues to be supported by Tehran, complete with a promised bounty of $3.3 million.

With all the murder and mayhem that the Islamic Republic causes inside and outside its borders, the thankfully unsuccessful attempts on the lives of Rushdie and my friends from Iran International might seem secondary. But the fact that such attacks could take place on Western soil, in leafy Wimbledon or sedate Chautauqua, makes them especially harrowing.

They also fit a disturbing but familiar pattern. The Islamic Republic has tried to kill its opponents abroad ever since its founding in 1979. In 2020, the State Department counted that the Iranian regime had carried out as many as 360 assassinations in about a dozen countries over the past 45 years. Most of the victims were Iranian dissidents who threatened the Islamic Republic in one way or another: A social-democratic former prime minister, diplomats from the Shah’s regime, Marxist leaders, and a TV showman are on the long list. In 2019, the regime shocked Iranians by luring Ruhollah Zam, a prodemocracy journalist based in Paris, into Iraq before kidnapping him and sending him to Iran. He was executed two years later.

Attempting to gun down opponents abroad is very on brand for the Islamic Republic. The pace of such activities slowed for several years but then picked up again over the past decade, during which time the regime has kidnapped or assassinated several of its opponents on European soil as well as plotted to bomb an opposition gathering. A Belgian court sentenced the Iranian agent responsible for the bombing plot to 20 years in prison, only to release him last year as part of a prisoner exchange.

On U.S. soil, perhaps no one has been the target of more Iranian plots than the activist Masih Alinejad, who is best known for her effort to organize Iranian women against the compulsory hijab. The FBI has documented at least two plots to kidnap or kill Alinejad since she moved to the United States in 2014. These have included a plan to send her on a fast ship to Venezuela, or for mercenaries to simply kill her in the United States. Hired killers even showed up at her apartment in Brooklyn and were caught on CCTV. In 2021, the U.S. Congress passed the Masih Alinejad HUNT Act, imposing sanctions on foreign nationals who harass human-rights activists on behalf of Iran’s government.

The Iranian regime’s renewed interest in pursuing its opponents abroad is an ominous sign of the times. Authoritarian regimes—Vladimir Putin’s Russia is a prime example—are leaving nothing to chance, preferring instead to chase down their critics even far from their borders. And the Islamic Republic in particular may well imagine that, having mired the West in multiple interlocking disputes, including those over its nuclear program and its support for terrorist groups in the wider Middle East, it has exhausted the energy or attention its rivals might pay to the abuse of Iranian citizens at home and abroad.

[From the December 2021 issue: The bad guys are winning]

Iran’s regime clearly feels threatened by the journalism of exiled reporters who break its monopoly on truth. And yet, if the threat of assassination was meant to silence these voices, it has failed, and even invigorated those targeted instead. Zeraati is already back on the air. The very fact the Iranian regime is attacking journalists, Farahzad told me, shows how necessary their work is. Sabet has since left Iran International but continues to report; she told me, “We know that the spread of information is the biggest threat for the Islamic Republic. Thanks to the media outlets abroad, there is little that goes on in Iran today without people knowing about it.”

She’s right. Millions of Iranians count on satellite channels based abroad for news because they can’t trust the state media. When I was an anchor on one such London-based channel, a traffic official from northern Iran once contacted me and begged for us to share relevant information about road closures on the air. “It’s on the state broadcaster, but no one watches that!” he said. The Islamic Republic knows that Persian-language media operating abroad have reach and power, and so it now seeks to intimidate these journalists, to injure them, kidnap them, and perhaps to kill them.

When I think of what Western countries might do to counteract Iran’s campaign of terror against its citizens abroad, I recall one of Tehran’s most egregious acts on European soil. In 1992, in a Greek restaurant in Berlin, agents of the Islamic Republic killed Sadegh Sharafkandi, the leader of the Kurdistan Democratic Party of Iran alongside three of his associates. Sharafkandi was there to meet some leaders of the Swedish Social Democratic Party, including a former prime minister, but the Swedes canceled at the last minute. If they hadn’t, the Iranian regime might have killed them, too. Perhaps for that reason, in April 1997, a German court issued arrest warrants, not just for the perpetrators at the scene, but for their masters in Tehran. The verdict implicated Iran’s foreign minister, intelligence minister, then-President Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, and Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. That ruling was a devastating blow to the regime and likely changed its calculus. A long lull in state-sponsored assassinations abroad followed, ending only around 2015.

The German response offers a model for other Western countries to follow when the Islamic Republic violates their sovereignty in order to persecute its enemies. As Farahzad told me after the knife attack on his colleague, Iran’s authorities are watching to see whether Western governments will play along with their games of deniability or make Tehran pay for its role: “If they know it comes with a high cost, they’ll probably think twice before doing anything.”

PM Benjamin Netanyahu said on Thursday that Israel is preparing for 'scenarios' in other areas besides Gaza.

US President Joe Biden has criticised Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s actions on Gaza as a "mistake”.

A phone call between Joe Biden and Benjamin Netanyahu leads many UK front pages.