Israel & Iran: A very dangerous game

Reasons to worry from someone not prone to worry about these things

[Preliminary note: Not sure how well this hangs together as an essay, but just something I felt I had to write this morning, and being that I am on sabbatical, I had the time to write it. I hope you find value in at least some of the observations. Thanks as always for reading. -Kevin]

I have been studying politics for well-over half of the nearly 47 laps I’ve made around the sun. My speciality is international politics and though I don’t work in that area much anymore, IR theory was one of my PhD examination fields.

I mention this not to boast (certainly there are probably much better uses of one’s time) but rather to establish some bona fides in terms of why my call to particularly worried about the situation with Israel and Iran.

Much as medical doctors often develop emotional calluses and a certain sardonic dissociation with the matters of life and death, my life as a student (and now middling scholar) of international politics has instilled a proclivity to generally feel that media coverage of varying crises are sensationalist and overwrought.

To be clear, this is not an impulse that implies a sort of nihilistic lack of concern for the scores of death and suffering wrought by various international conflicts. Indeed, those familiar with my writing know well that I retain, and defend, an almost romantic humanism. Perhaps retaining these seemingly contradictory outlooks is part of what makes me such a weirdo, but I digress..

All this said, at least from my reading of the US press, I believe the coverage is to a large degree under-wrought. The top line story is fairly well known, i.e. Israel in a somewhat tacit alliance with Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and the Gulf States has been locked in a geopolitical struggle for regional hegemony with Iran and its array of proxies in Syria, Lebanon, and Yemen.

Of course there is a vast, complicated history that has brought us to this point that could easily fill hundreds of volumes. But what I want to do here is keep it brief(ish) and try to explain what are some of the factors driving events and in turn why they are particularly troubling.

Israel has a unique history that is part and parcel to many of the dilemmas it faces today. Namely, its situation is defined by the fact that an elemental aspect of Israeli state identity is tied to retaining an ‘overwhelming’ majority of Jewish citizens while governing a territory that is roughly split between Jews and Arabs in population terms.¹

Now of course the rub is whether that insistence is valid or legitimate, (especially given that the prospect of a genuinely sovereign Palestinian state is basically zero) is a whole different question. Indeed, one could argue that it is the question animating the highly charged emotions and opinions around Israel-Palestine. Of course, there is a lot more to say on this and I made an effort to dig into some of the more pertinent issues in an essay I wrote a few months back.

In sum, the desire to formally annex the West Bank and Gaza is not at all a ‘fringe’ position among the Jewish Israeli population and is a core objective for major actors in Netanyahu’s cabinet, and seemingly, Netanyahu himself (see photo of the map he held up at his recent UN speech).

Alas, though this dispute is often (correctly) filtered through a valiance as an ethnic/religious political dispute, it is also wed to another unique aspect of Israel that has nothing to do with religion or ethnicity. Namely, that it is both very small and extremely strong militarily.

And from my perspective this duality gives us some insight into both how the elite in the Israeli state see the present situation and why it may be one of the more dangerous moments the world have faced in decades.

To get at this, we need to think about time, or political time. Because of its size and relatively small population, Israel punches at the level of a world power in the very short term, but is extremely vulnerable to any long term engagement with a major, or even regional (i.e. Iran), power.

To be sure, this is why Israel placed a very high premium on establishing and maintaining peace with Egypt-it was (at the time) seen as the only large hostile regional power. Indeed, Israel’s relinquishing of its control of the Sanai Peninsula as part of the deal is almost unimaginable in the present climate and was certainly not very popular then.²

In sum, Israel’s action over the past few months capture this strange admixture of strength and weakness. Accepting that (certainly valid) humanitarian concerns for the Palestinians or Lebanese are unlikely to move the Netanyahu government, there are many good economic and security reasons for not wanting to open new fronts Israel’s struggle with Iran.

Nonetheless, the Israeli government has clearly made a determination to make significant steps up the escalation ladder.

Though the tech ‘revolution’ (or perhaps devolution) has led us to prioritize technological prowess in our assessments, we should not lose sight of the old school geopolitics variables of land area and population size.

While Israel’s technical prowess is reflected in the sizable disparity in nominal GDP per capita, the land area and population ratios make it clear that Israel simply cannot fight any sort of war of attrition with Iran.

Its capacity and strategic outlook are wholly centered around extreme speed, hence ‘the Six Day War’. A large part of this is tied to Israel’s extremely small geographical scope. In short, it simply has nowhere to retreat and regroup amidst an invasion. By contrast, we can see that for several years now Ukraine has maintained a functioning state apparatus and military resistance despite large swaths of the country being under Russian control.

Indeed, many in the Israeli government view the addition of the West Bank to Israel proper as essential to adding at least some extended buffer in the event of an attempted assault. To be clear, I don’t find this to be even strategically reasonable, and it is certainly not a satisfying rationale for denying the Palestinians a homeland of their own.

And this is where we get to the truly frightening part. You will often hear foreign policy wonks state that neither Israel nor Iran are looking for an all out war. I have generally signed on to this proposition.

However, my sense now is that that is no longer the view among many governmental elites in Israel. I am writing this on the day Iran fired missiles for the second time into Israel with nearly all of them being shot down by Israel’s missile defense system. Suffice to say, we will know a lot more about how this is going to unfold in the coming days or weeks when we see Israel’s response.

What troubles me most is this question, as we move closer to full-on open, direct hostilities between the two states, what is the scope for Israel’s willingness to inflict damage upon Iran? To be clear, I am focusing on Israeli state’s outlook here because as I noted above their time horizon is extremely compact while the Iranian government sees these matters through a much more extended time horizon.

Most of the Iranian state’s actions have seemed meant to demonstrate capability rather than get into a direct conflict. This is not to frame the Iranian state as a blameless victim, but rather to try to understand the very different way they see they conflict and its temporal components.

Here it is important to circle back to the domestic situation in Israel and the sort of political actors steering the proverbial ship of state. A certain fervent ethic-nationalist messianism that used to live on the far fringes of Israeli political culture has made its ways into the central corridors of power.³

As we have seen in Gaza, and now Lebanon, the Israeli state has the capability, and is willing, to cause significant loss of life and catastrophically degrade living conditions for millions to ensure its objectives are met. My great fear is that it has genuine designs to take the fight directly to Iran, or even attempt to decapitate the regime—that the hive mind currently settled upon the levers of power for the Israeli state are increasingly coming to the view that this is their moment to settle all scores.

Indeed, they may very well be able to inflict massive harm upon the Iranian regime and in course almost certainly kill 10s if not 100s of thousands of Iranians. But what then? Are we to believe that in the wake of such an assault, a more pro-Israel regime will emerge? Ditto Lebanon, is there a sense that by degrading Hezbollah though firing missiles into apartments buildings, a new more pro-Israel politics will emerge?

Its worth considering that Hezbollah itself emerged in conjunction with Israel’s 1980s invasion of Lebanon. Similarly Hamas was stoked or tolerated for years given its seeming usefulness as a foil to the PLO. What we are seeing is a small, massively armed state of less than 10 million people fully committed to achieving all of its aims again a collection of adversaries with populations totaling over 100 million and controlling nearly 100 times more territory.

More pointedly, if Israel is required to repeatedly employ massive force that inflicts civilian casualty in the 10s of thousands what exactly have they won?

Lastly, the elephant in the room we have not mentioned is the United States, which as a staunch defender of Israel and itself a hyper-power militaristic state, serves as the proverbial ace in the hole for Israel’s defense posture. Supporting Israel is one of the few genuinely bipartisan issues left in the US—sure their are a few sharp critics in Congress, but they are the exceptions that proves the rule.

I guess since I am an American I will ask what sort of qualifications, if any, lie behind the standard bromides of ‘I stand with Israel’ or ‘Israel has a right to defend itself’. I guess the US has a ‘right to defend itself’ but it certainly had no right to invade Iraq causing the deaths of 100s of thousands.

If Israel is serious about moving full on against Iran, I have little doubt that this will involve a massive loss of civilian life. For the reasons discussed above it will necessarily have to be swift and of vast scope. I am no lover or supporter of the Iranian regime, but this course strikes me as extremely fool hardy and dangerous. Sadly, the Biden administration has basically seemed willing to step aside and every now-and-then shrug and say ‘the Israelis didn’t tell us they were going to do this’, whatever the latest ‘this’ is.

And if the death of scores of wholly innocent Iranian civilians is not something that moves you, I can say that the economic fall out from such a looming move against Iran will be swift and catastrophic.

Iran is neither Hamas nor Hezbollah, they may not be a ‘superpower’ but they have a vast array of instruments at their disposal. The last time Israel fought a ‘traditional’ war against a regional power was in 1973, quite a bit has changed in the last half-century. I really hope I am misguided in my concerns for the sake of all of us, including the undoubtedly countless Israeli civilians just going about their lives.

Call me a radical dreamer, but I long for a day when the everyday sensibilities of a regular person on the street of Tel Aviv or Tehran, who I would bet share a great deal more in common than with their respective state commanders, guide our politics, . As for now, we are stuck bending to the whims and inhumane calculations of kindred spirits like Netanyahu and the Ayatollah Khamenei.

1. From my perspective, the state of Israel is the ultimate sovereign authority within the borders they govern and control, this certainly includes the West Bank and Gaza. This is the basis for the formulation I make. I am not saying there are not different conceptions, but that is mine.

2. It’s worth considering the symmetry of Israel neutralizing the threat from one regional power just as the revolution in Iran was setting the stage for the emergence of the one it is locked in struggle with at present.

3. The personal trajectory of current Minister of National Security, Itamar Ben-Gvir, aptly captures this transformation. If you don’t know much about him, I recommend looking into it.