Retaliation

Iran strikes back on Israeli territory for the very first time.

Iranian missiles being intercepted over the Knesset, Israel’s parliament.

“What we’re seeing here is, in a sense, the growing—the birth pangs of a new Middle East, and whatever we do, we have to be certain that we’re pushing forward to the new Middle East, not going back to the old Middle East.”

- US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, following the 2006 Israeli invasion of Lebanon

Even after the attacks of October 7th, there is still a tendency, deep-set in the minds of the public, that certain paradigms, certain ways of the world, remain ironclad, unchanging. Those who grew up in a world where the Islamic Republic was the only Iran they ever knew may see certain sets of images and not even blink. A painting of Nasrallah praying in a theoretical, liberated Jerusalem. A photoshopped picture of Supreme Leader Khamenei giving a sermon in front of the Dome of the Rock. Invocations of this sort, always discussing the possibility of a conflict with Israel, perhaps striking a blow directly against the “usurping regime”, has been a constant for years.

The Mossad, Israel’s intelligence service, has long been engaged in a campaign of assassinations against Iranian nuclear scientists, sabotaging Iranian infrastructure, and infiltrating sectors of Iranian society. The Israel Defense Forces have similarly been long engaged in an open military campaign against the Iranian military in Syria, killing officers in the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps in airstrikes, a campaign that has intensified in scope and casualties since the outbreak of the assault against Gaza.

Despite years of these strikes, promises of striking back have abounded, yet rarely materialized in any substantive form. The restraint is not without obvious explanation: striking back at Israel directly, as a sovereign state, is unthinkable, as any strike would invite the full intervention of the world’s sole superpower, and perhaps an all-out war that Iran will suffer intensely at the hands of.

Nevertheless, insistence of a coming retaliation at the time and place of Iran’s choosing without action has created some dissatisfaction within the Islamic Republic’s own constituency, even leading to some analysts on Iran’s own state television voicing their frustration that Israel was not being punished:

“When they killed the Martyr [Qassem] Soleimani, we said there would be a harsh revenge. We got that revenge. Some time after that, they killed Sayyid Razi [Mousavi], and we again said there would be harsh revenge. Then they killed [Saleh] al-’Arouri, the officials of the Popular Mobilization [Forces] and the officials of Hezbollah, and again we said there would be harsh revenge, and called for patience, because where you do not think we will hit, we will. We don’t know the time of the retaliation that they don’t expect, when or where it will be. Yes, we’ve hit places, we’ve struck Ain al-Asad [Airbase], we’ve struck Erbil, but we need to ask our government whether these were enough.”

In the daylight hours of April 1, a consulate of the Islamic Republic of Iran, within the compound of the country’s embassy complex in Damascus, was struck, killing 16, including two Syrian civilians who were nearby. The primary target appeared to have been Mohammad Reza Zahedi, a Brigadier General in the IRGC’s Quds Force, a man who had held important command posts in the Iranian military since the 1990s. Zahedi did not have the place in the Iranian consciousness that Soleimani did, nor was he as high-level as he had been. But Israel had stepped over a line it most likely knew it had crossed: striking the consulate, even if it was technically in Syria, meant it had struck Iranian territory.

At the funeral prayers in Tehran, Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei looks over the coffins of the IRGC soldiers who were killed in the Israeli airstrike in Damascus. Source: Khamenei.ir