Iran Attack Marks Significant Turn in Israel’s ‘War Between Wars’

Israel’s operations in the Palestinian territories and its daring attack at Isfahan, Iran, are part of the same long war — and both seem to serve America’s interests. “It is the responsibility of everyone to take steps to calm tensions, rather than to inflame them,” Secretary Blinken said upon arriving in Israel Monday. “That is the only way to halt the rising tide of violence that has taken too many lives, too many Israelis, too many Palestinians.”Mr. Blinken is on a Mideast tour that, in addition to Jerusalem, will also take him to Ramallah Tuesday. At least publicly, he is widely expected to mostly deal with the fear of escalation in Arab terrorism and Israel’s measures to stop it. Those measures have been focused in the last few months on the northern West Bank area around Jenin and Nablus. There, Tehran-backed factions such as the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Hamas, and gangs with names like the “Lion’s Den” have become dominant. The Palestinian Authority has lost control, and its security officials have either withdrawn or joined the terrorists. The Palestinians have their own goals in this fight, but increased violence also advances the Iranians’ overarching goal: obliterating the Jewish State. “Iran has been pouring money into the Islamic Jihad organization, which began to establish new armed groups” in the northern West Bank, an analyst for the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, Yoni Ben Menachem, wrote recently. Following a Monday meeting with Mr. Blinken, Prime Minister Netanyahu wrote on his Hebrew Twitter account that “Israel’s policy has been and will be to do everything possible to stop Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons and the means to deliver them.” An attack over the weekend at Isfahan and a subsequent obliteration of an arms-carrying truck caravan on the Iraqi-Syrian border are parts of that war. Jerusalem has declined to comment, but the Wall Street Journal reports that the drone operation against a military target at Isfahan was carried out by Israel, and the New York Times specifically pointed to the Mossad as responsible. The Isfahan attack seems like a significant turn in the “war between wars” that Israel has quietly waged for some years. Reportedly conducted with quadcopter drones, it targeted, and apparently left heavily damaged, a previously unknown arms manufacturing site. The Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps facility was reportedly built as an advanced missile development site. Israeli sources are reporting that it could have been connected to research and development on hypersonic missiles. Iran has “an interest in developing such missiles because they can reach five times the speed of sound, are very accurate, and highly maneuverable,” a veteran Israeli military analyst, Ron Ben Yishai, writes on the news website Ynet. Hypersonic missiles, he notes, “can successfully bypass Israel’s air defense systems.”As of yet, only Russia and Communist China have developed the weapon. If indeed Russia is helping Iran join that group even before America has acquired hypersonic missiles — or the means to defend against them — it must be keeping Washington policymakers awake at night.As the state department’s Iran envoy, Robert Malley, said in a BBC interview Monday, “no other country is supporting Russia the way Iran is.” The effect of that relation on the Ukraine war, as well as on a growing rebellion inside Iran, increasingly turns even the most Tehran-favoring actors at Washington and European capitals away from diplomacy and toward a more hawkish stance. “Iran is producing weapons for Russia and Russia is overseeing the production of weapons that they’re buying,” a senior researcher at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, Jonathan Schanzer, tells the Sun. Attacks on Iranian facilities therefore benefit both Israel and America, he adds. The Israeli apparent attack at Isfahan followed meetings that the CIA director, William Burns, conducted in the country last week, and Israel and America have just conducted their largest ever joint military exercise. Dubbed Juniper Oak, it simulated attacks on a deeply buried facility, such as Iran’s nuclear plant at Fordo. For now, while America argues over the utility of a fatal military strike to halt Iran’s nuclear program, Israel is conducting a highly successful, continuous campaign of pinpoint attacks.Iran’s denial over the weekend that the Isfahan facility suffered a hit beyond minor damage to the roof only emphasizes the campaign’s success. Attempts to minimize hits against it betray Iran’s fear that public admissions would force it to counterattack, risking an all-out war. “Israel has identified a gray zone in which it can operate with near certainty that Iran would not retaliate in kind,” Mr. Schanzer said. Instead, Tehran uses its proxies to conduct terrorist attacks inside Israel, and erode international support for the country each time Israeli forces act against Iranian-backed terrorist cells.Mr. Schanzer says the Israelis are winning in that tit-for-tat war between wars. Israel can contain West Bank terrorism, he says, “but can you compare that to Israel taking out a missile factory?”

Iran Attack Marks Significant Turn in Israel’s ‘War Between Wars’

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