How Op Rising Lion is Netanyahu’s boldest gamble

Israel’s precision attacks at the nuclear facility in Natanz and swiftly decimating Iran’s top brass of Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and military commanders once again highlight Tel Aviv’s superior military-intelligence reconnaissance, unparalleled espionage networks, and enviable tech capability.

However, as has been witnessed throughout history, calibrated hellfire missiles and targeted assassinations have seldom changed long-term outcomes. New commanders spring up to take the place of their deceased comrades, and the vicious cycle continues.

The frenzied cult of martyrdom in Iran and its proxies is nourished with wellsprings of blood. Death is merely another sacred rite of passage and window to the eternal hereafter. That’s how the quasi-theocratic Iranian regime perceives it.

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Modern Iran is a country of glaring contradictions and paradoxes, with a vast shadow economy and vibrant youth subculture. The country is infused with vigour and energy. Over 70 per cent of the Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) graduates in Iran are women, exponentially more than anywhere else. Simultaneously, Iran is also notorious for a rigid stance on the mandatory hijab and imprisoning women who defy the hijab ban.

In Arabia Without Sultans, the Irish journalist Fred Halliday wrote that the Middle East is among the most misunderstood and stereotyped regions in the world. The same, to a great extent, holds true for Iranian society as well as its rhetorical bombast and hysteria-obsessed regime. As an old joke goes, in Iran everything that is forbidden is mostly flouted and overlooked.

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“If you really want to understand Iranian society, you only need to watch the queue for the bathroom as your plane nears Iranian airspace on an inbound flight to Tehran,” wrote the BBC journalist Paul Danahar in The New Middle East: The World After Arab Spring

“Each woman goes in looking like she just walked out of a disco, and each one comes out looking like she’s ready to step into a mosque,” Danahar adds.

Suffice to say, Iran is a much bigger and more complex Pandora’s Box than Iraq turned out to be for the US in 2003. A cursory reading of modern Iran and its various contradictions will point to this.

The Persepolis Gambit

In a televised speech, Benjamin Netanyahu has called for a regime change in Iran, alluding towards a pre-1979 status quo ante, when a monarchist Pahlavi-ruled Iran was the only ally of Israel in West Asia.

Invoking ancient Persian culture and heritage, all the way back to Cyrus the Great, he signalled his willingness to establish normal, friendly ties with the country post the overthrow of the Islamic Republic.

With the fall of Assad in Damascus and Hamas & Hezbollah salving their wounds before they regroup, triumphalism in Israel is natural. Tehran is at its weakest point in decades. The so-called Axis of Resistance and crescent from Baghdad to Beirut are gone.

Damascus was the logistics hub to transfer retrofitted missiles, drones, and other armaments to Hezbollah in Beirut. The fall of the Alawite-Baathist regime was a fatal blow to Tehran’s grand designs that, by simultaneously feeding off and amplifying the export of Salafi extremism, has turned West Asia into a sectarian cauldron always on the boil since the Islamic Revolution.

Netanyahu, the son of a historian, is misreading some of the lessons of history. Since the days of the Qajar Dynasty’s extractive concessions to the British, Russians, and French in the 19th century, Iranians have fiercely resisted foreign intervention and the garage sale of the country’s natural resources. There’s no evidence to the contrary that they will now welcome Mossad and Shin Bet as liberators.

“To support his lavish tastes, Nasir al-din Shah sold government jobs, imposed oppressive taxes, and confiscated the fortunes of wealthy merchants. When there was no money left for him to take, he came up with the idea of raising cash by selling Iran’s patrimony to foreign companies and governments,” writes Stephen Kinzer in All the Shah’s Men.

Grassroot Movements

The Qajar downfall, ultimately, was triggered by local defiance, including that of the palace begums boycotting tobacco pipes. Tobacco was a state monopoly as well as a prized commodity in Iran. A social boycott of it was open defiance against the heir of the Peacock Throne.

Israel’s military operation is titled Operation Rising Lion, seen as a tribute to the emblem of Pahlavi Iran, but actually borrowed from an Old Testament verse that talks about a rising lion that will ‘not lie until he eats of the prey and drinks the blood of the slain’.

The pro-West Shah regime was widely unpopular, as the coalition of young students, feminist groups, leftists and Islamists protesting against it demonstrated. The rising rage and discontent against the Pahlavis, mainly due to soaring inequality, arbitrary arrests, and dwindling opportunities, was the crucible from which Ayatollah Khomeini emerged.

The tales of torture by the Savak, the Shah’s secret police, were no less gruesome than other autocratic states. Apart from the diaspora, there’s no mass support for the return of the king in Tehran, Zahedan, or Bandar Abbas.

Netanyahu has staked it all in the final showdown with Iran. Either he will redraw the political map of West Asia or bid a final goodbye to his political career. To the victor goes the spoils – and vice versa.

The writer is a communications professional who is intrigued by the intersection of society, popular culture, technology, and history of ideas. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views.