Iran has handed him an opportunity. Can he find a way to blow it?
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.
