Iran’s second large-scale missile attack on Israeli territory on October 1, less than six months after its first missile attack on April 13, draws attention to Israel’s regional policy that appears out of sync with its Middle East security reality.
Israel’s military posture follows a playbook it has applied consistently since it obtained statehood in Palestine in 1948, with its ultimate objective of controlling most, if not all, of the territory of Palestine while securing itself from external threats.
First, given its limited size and lack of strategic depth, any confrontation should take place on enemy territory, not on its own territory, and, as a consequence, there is little margin for defence, only overwhelming attack.
Second, given the fact that it is surrounded by countries that are all potentially hostile to its claims to Palestinian land and ostensibly to its existence and with whom it shares a history of warfare (Egypt, Jordan, Syria and Lebanon), it must always thwart a combined attack and take on one adversary at a time.
Diplomacy was used to achieve the latter objective. Peace treaties were signed with adversaries (Egypt in 1979, Palestine Liberation Organisation in 1993, Jordan in 1994) with the aim of focusing its war efforts on those adversaries (Syria, Lebanon, Iran) and their proxies that did not respond to Israel’s objective of establishing normalised, diplomatic relations.
Taking advantage of regional divisions and domestic ones inside Arab states allowed for such a divide and rule policy. Notably, Lebanon was invaded in 1982, three years after the signing of the Egypt-Israel Peace treaty in 1979, and, again, bombed in 1996 after the signing of the Jordan-Israel Peace treaty in 1994 and the PLO-Israel Oslo Accords of 1993.
The 2006 attempted invasion of Lebanon followed the withdrawal of Syrian forces from Lebanon and domestic weakening of Hezbollah in 2005 that saw its domestic rivals attempting to disarm the Party of God. The current invasion of Lebanon follows the signing of the Abraham accords in 2020 that established diplomatic ties between Israel, Morocco, Bahrain and the UAE.
In addition, it occurs after one of its main adversaries, Hamas, has been so thoroughly decimated that Israel feels confident that the current combined attack on Gaza and Lebanon can be sustained.
Meantime, the conflict moved away from Arab states to non-state actors, Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in the Palestinian territories, following the internal weakening of Arab states, which increasingly accepted the existence of Israel as a fait accompli.
Concomitantly, Iran has made its support of anti-Israel forces, called the Axis of Resistance that includes Hezbollah, Hamas and the Houthis in Yemen, its own raison d’être. It empowered those non-state actors to act outside of the realm of established states. For Iran, keeping this Axis of Resistance alive has been vital and, with it, Hezbollah’s and the Houthis’ one year of low intensity rocket attacks on Israel during the war in Gaza.
The purpose was to prevent any divisions among allied groups that, in the long run, would threaten and isolate Iran. After all, since the Islamic revolution of 1979, Iran has remained a US and Israeli target and has feared a US military campaign amid repeated US policy declarations that the US was seeking regime change in the country.
The result of this was that Israel targeted individuals from within these organisations and regions with assassination attacks. Israel assassinated not just Hezbollah’s Hassan Nasrallah in 2024 and Sheikh Yassine in 2004, the founder of Hamas, but also thousands of political leaders in sometimes spectacular and secretive assassination plots.
As these individuals acted outside of the realm of the state, the state and international law did not provide for the type of protection that the state would provide, including state-to-state retaliations.
Yet, Israel has moved on. Its assassinations now include clearly marked state actors and Iranian territory.
Iran is no longer off limits to massive Israeli retaliatory strikes- James Sater
While the killing of Abbas Nilforoushan, commander of the Iranian Quds Force on September 27, occurred on Lebanese soil in the offices used by Hezbollah during the air strike on Hassan Nasrallah, both the assassination of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh on July 31 and that of Mohamed Reza Zahedi on April 1 occurred in Tehran and Iran’s embassy in Damascus respectively.
In other words, they constituted direct attacks on the sovereignty of the state. Iran’s retaliations, direct missile attacks that Iran had until then refrained from using, showed that Israel must now defend its own territory from Iranian long-range missiles and that it partially depends on US, British, French and Jordanian air defence systems to achieve this. In the past, Israel counted on the US to protect it against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq in the 1990s. Now, it hardly coordinates its own military strikes with others and acts with few, if any external constraints.
The legality of the targeted assassinations, and whether Iran’s responses are proportionate to the attacks sustained, is a question that is disputed among international law experts. Regardless, for Middle East people, Israel remains a terrorist state because of these assassinations and the destruction and death that Israel’s disproportionate use of violence has caused for decades.
This is also why the destruction caused in Gaza and now in Lebanon may temporarily limit the military threats emanating from Lebanon and the Occupied Territories, yet, they are unlikely to have what should be the desired long-term effect, that of establishing relations with Palestinians and Lebanese citizens that would allow Israelis to live in security and safety from external threats.
Conversely, missile attacks are perceived as existential threats for Israeli citizens and no amount of successful air defences will make it appear as proportional for Israeli citizens. If the current attack on Israel, or the ongoing bombing campaign, assassinations and ground invasion of Lebanon and Gaza are instructive of anything, then it is that an escalation of violence triggers more violence and destruction.
In turn, no amount of overwhelming force that Israel is using will have any deterrent effect, neither on Hezbollah, Hamas, or Iran. It has not had any in the past and it will not in the future.
In some ways, the October 7, 2023 attacks, Israel’s brutal response and Hezbollah’s rocket attacks may have already reduced to rubble any hope that Israel can achieve to live in security and safety from external threats by relying on regional diplomatic relations without the continuous and ever escalating use of its armed forces.
If an attack of that magnitude already occurred, and if its northern territories are already exposed to Iranian produced missiles located in Lebanon, it would appear that there is no point in restraining Israel’s military activity. Iran is, therefore, no longer off limits to massive Israeli retaliatory strikes, especially because the decapitation of Hezbollah leaves Israel less vulnerable to attacks coming from its northern neighbour. This appears to be the new consensus inside Israeli political-military circles.
This would be a mistake. The ongoing escalation and hardening of military resolve show that this playbook is conceptually wrong and broken and subject to miscalculations with dire consequences.
Amid this escalation, people on the ground will be seeking safer places to call their homes. This includes not only those internally displaced people along the Lebanese-Israel border but also, worryingly for the Israeli state, the hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of Israelis who are passport holders of other countries.
Israelis may choose, like the 500,000 Israelis since the war in Gaza broke out, to leave and settle elsewhere if faced with ongoing and ever-escalating violence and repeated, imminent, existential threats. One may therefore recall that Israel not just lacks the strategic depth of territory in the current episode of escalation but also the strategic depth of an immobile population that is, as in much of the Middle East, stuck inside its state’s borders.
James Sater is an academic and lecturer at the Department of International Relations, University of Malta.