Iran is Sliding into a Tenuous Situation
Cross-border attacks between Israel and the Lebanese militia Hezbollah in recent weeks have raised fears that the war in the Gaza Strip could lead to wider regional conflict. Hezbollah is the frontline Iranian proxy, raised to counter and destroy Israel. Apprehensively, a wider regional conflict could suck other regional militias and proxies into its vortex.
Iran had begun arming the Lebanese Shiite forces in the 1980s, now known as Hezbollah. Its arming expanded with the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003. Iran supported Syrian President Bashar al Assad in his country’s civil war. In presuming that it was the defender of the Muslim community (ummah) over the world—Shiites in particular—Iran armed even many of the Sunni militants who confronted a regime not favourably disposed towards Iran’s viewpoint of the Islamic Revolution.
Political commentators often ask why Iran is fanatically hostile to Israel when there is no apparent reason. Its enmity essentially stems from the victimised neurosis of a nation of Aryan stock converted by the Arab warriors from the Zoroastrians to the Islamic faith in CE 641. However, Iran presents some uniqueness in the history of Islamisation of the Middle East. Iran maintained its prominent pre-Islamic mores and secondly, usually prized her ethnic sensitivity.
It should be noted that while the Semitic nations of the Middle East and the Gulf refrained from exuding zealotry in their Muslim-Jewish narrative, Iran is singled out as an uncouth and rancorous adversary openly advocating the destruction of the Jewish state as per the injunction of the scriptures. This dogmatism has pushed Iran to the realm of irrationality which is evident from the reconstructed foreign policy of many Arab States in and out of the Gulf, particularly Saudi Arabia.
Israel has the right to defend its sovereignty and territorial integrity as any free nation has. The existential threat brazenly pronounced by Iran and also physically intensified through proxies, has been a strong catalyst for Israel to arm itself with the most modern and lethal weaponry. It is a unique state surrounded by unrelenting enemies and swarms of armed assailants.
Operatives of the October 7 genocide of innocent Israeli unarmed civilians have not only to be resisted but also punished severely if the Jewish state and universal humanism have to survive on the globe. This perception lies at the root of Israel’s rejection of the US-led proposal for the ceasefire. PM Netanyahu cannot barter existential threat with Biden’s party politics.
Iran’s supreme religious leader exudes a litany of charges against Israel for the consumption of his coterie, and in the same breath, legitimises the genocidal activities of October 7—hypocrisy incarnate.
Hezbollah has been firing projectiles into northern Israel in solidarity with allied Iran-backed militant groups. Israel had to respond. The eliminated Hezbollah leader Nasrallah had reshaped Hezbollah into an archenemy of Israel, cementing alliances with the ayatollahs.
This act of Israel in self-defence has put the conceited religious supremo not only to shame but also to helplessness. He had been boasting of effacing the State of Israel but after Nasrallah’s elimination he had to knock at the door of the Security Council and supplicate for “human rights” and “justice”, both of which are elusive for his regime.
Iran’s retaliation is nothing but face-saving tactics because Tehran has been cut to its size.
Theocratic Iran has become a festering wound. It is internally split and externally isolated. Within Iran, the anti-clergy movement has gained momentum after the custodial killing of the Kurdish girl Mahsa Amini followed by the unleashing of terror in which more than 500 lives of protesting Iranian women were lost and thousands still behind the bars.
Internationally isolated, economically squeezed by sanctions, shunned by the leadership of the Muslim world, ostracised by the European countries, Iran finds itself in a precarious position when China and Russia, the two so-called friendly states are watching how the country is sliding into the abyss of irrelevance. An anti-theocratic revolution in Iran is in the offing.
The writer is the former Director of the Centre of Central Asian Studies, University of Kashmir, India