Israel and Iran: Where is the conflict heading?

Speculation continues to swirl about how Israel will respond to the Iranian regime’s launch of 200 ballistic missiles. What will become of the tensions between Joe Biden and Benyamin Netanyahu? And after the U.S. elections, where will the war lead? Is peace in the region even a possibility?

Key players in the war
To understand the origins of the current Middle East conflict, we must look back to 2020. The first significant factor shaping the war was the signing of the Abraham Accords by high-level delegations from Israel, the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain on Sept. 15, 2020, in the White House, brokered by the United States. (Saudi Arabia has conditioned its participation on the acceptance of a two-state solution with regard to the Palestinians.) This agreement marked the beginning of normalized relations between these Arab countries and Israel, sparking a new era in the region. This progress incited hostility from the Iranian regime, as it directly undermined their longstanding and stated goal of “Death to Israel.” Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei perceived this development as a threat to his authority.

“Death to Israel” slogan a tool for masking internal repression
An offspring of medieval ideologies and unable to meet the needs of its people in the 21st Century, the current Iranian regime since its inception – a result of a historical accident – has relied heavily on repression for survival. To disguise this domestic repression, the mullahs turned outward, expanding their influence through war, crises and terrorism. This strategy has become the regime’s core approach to ensuring its own survival.

Beginning in 1980, as part of this warmongering policy, the Iranian regime started forming proxy forces in the region, pushing this effort further in 1982 in Lebanon. To solidify its regional influence, the regime used slogans like “Death to Israel” and “Death to America” to rally backward forces to its side. Its vast revenues from oil and gas sales served to fuel this critical agenda.

The 2022 uprising in Iran
An analysis of uprisings in Iran shows that each wave of rebellion hits the regime with increasing intensity. Although the 2022 uprising, which lasted several months, was ultimately suppressed by unprecedented brutality, unrest still simmers beneath the surface. The Iranian regime had previously quelled the 2019 uprising by killing 1,500 rebellious youths. This time, however, with a far more organized presence of Resistance Units, led by the main opposition People’s Moujahedin, the regime’s sworn enemies, the street forces in Iran could unite to topple the regime.

Before the end of Hassan Rouhani’s presidency in 2021, Iran’s supreme leader Khamenei openly declared that Iran needed a “Hezbollah-style government” modeled after the leadership of Qassem Soleimani, the Quds Force ex-commander killed in 2020 by an American drone in Iraq.

Khamenei now finds himself encircled by both internal and external pressures, and breaking this siege is imperative for him.

In March 2022, Ali Khamenei delivered a speech in Mashhad in which he explicitly called for full support of the “Axis of Resistance” – a coded signal indicating the regime’s preparation for regional war.

Warmongering, the lifeblood of the Mullahs’ regime
In 1982, after Iraqi forces withdrew from Iranian territory during the eight-year Iran-Iraq war, creating conditions for peace, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, or IRGC, inspired by then-Supreme Leader Ruhollah Khomeini, published a map outlining an expansive military vision. This map depicted Iranian forces advancing from five axes, converging in Karbala, and then moving towards Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan, Syria, and Jerusalem, to “liberate” them all.

This was a literal interpretation of Khomeini’s war slogan: “The liberation of Jerusalem through Karbala.”

When Khomeini was forced to accept a ceasefire with Iraq, he famously called it “drinking from the cup of poison.” His successor, Ali Khamenei, recently acknowledged that the Iran-Iraq war, which cost a trillion dollars and millions of lives, had been a cover for an internal war to preserve the regime. In December 2016, Khamenei remarked, “If we hadn’t stopped the seditionists [freedom-seekers] in Syria, we would have had to stop them in Tehran, Khorasan, and Isfahan,” referring to the resistance of the Iranian people.

Remarkably, despite its strong influence in Iraq, the Iranian regime never signed a peace treaty with the country. Throughout its existence, the regime has perpetually been embroiled in war and crisis. This warmongering and its ability to generate regional crises are the very essence of the regime’s survival strategy. It would be naïve to believe that even after losing its proxies in the region, the Iranian regime would abandon the war-driven policies at its core.

Where is the current war headed?
Tracing the trajectory of the war since October 7 of last year, a spiral pattern comes into view, revealing direct confrontations between the Iranian regime and Israel occurring with increasing frequency and intensity. Initially, Khamenei denied any involvement in the conflict, but after Israel targeted the mastermind behind an attack at the Iranian embassy in Syria, Iran retaliated.

Israel responded by striking the regime’s nuclear defense systems at Natanz and assassinating Hassan Nasrallah, the regime’s most important strategic figure. Recently, Iran launched ballistic missiles at Israel, signaling that military clashes are likely to continue.

The engine driving this war is a paradox inherent in the region – namely, the warmongering nature of the Iranian regime. The regime sought to create a regional crisis, transforming its own warmongering into a broader conflict between Muslims and Jews. However, it never intended nor desired a war of this scale, which appears to be progressing toward a critical breaking point.

The Iranian regime now faces two options
1. Accept direct confrontation with Israel, meaning the regime will continue to support its proxies. If this happens, Israeli strikes could destabilize the regime, leading to the very outcome Khamenei sought to avoid – a scenario that could ignite another wave of uprisings.

2. Drink from the “cup of poison” by halting support for its proxies. In this case, the regime would have to open up domestically and ease its repressive measures. Until now, the regime has maintained control through violent suppression, masked by its warmongering. Once this tool is taken away, the pressure of 40 years of repression could cause an explosive backlash.

In either scenario, it is the Iranian people and their organized resistance who hold the key to overthrowing the regime and freeing both Iran and the region from its grip. The international community must finally stop its policy of appeasement, which has allowed this regime to survive and helped it in policies that caused the deaths of hundreds of thousands in the Middle East. A clear example of this appeasement is that although European representatives have overwhelming called for the IRGC to be designated as a terrorist organization, governments have consistently refused to act.