Two wars have been avoided over the past year. The first would have been an escalation of the well-known conflict with Hamas in the Gaza Strip. The second is the understandable but less well-known conflict with Iran.
Although Israel and Iran do not share a border, this is nevertheless Israel's most active front at the moment.
The heads of the IDF's Northern, Central and Southern commands are very busy people, but none is as busy as GOC "Iran Command." Officially, there is no such position and missions pertaining to Iran are divided mainly between Military Intelligence Director Maj. Gen. Tamir Heyman and Israeli Air Force Commander Maj. Gen. Amikam Norkin, with Maj. Gen. Nitzan Alon acting as special project coordinator on Iran. In practice, IDF Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Gadi Eizenkot acts as the de facto commanding officer on this issue, because Iran dominates his schedule.
On Tuesday, Eizenkot was scheduled to attend a ceremony marking the 30th anniversary of the Judea and Samaria Brigade, one of the IDF's top formations, which deals mainly in counterterrorism missions.
But Eizenkot was conspicuously absent from the event, while another ceremony – the appointment of Brig. Gen. Ran Kochav as head of the Air Defense Command – was pushed up and rushed.
Later, the news gave a clue as to why, when Syrian media accused Israel of targeting military positions in the western province of Hama and the coastal city of Tartus. The targets of the alleged Israeli strikes were two missile component production facilities.
As a new Jewish year begins, as far as Israel is concerned, Iran remains the source of all the ills of the Middle East. The turmoil in Yemen, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and the Gaza Strip can all be traced back to Iran. If Iran was removed from the equation, everything would be much simpler.
Israel has been shouting this warning from the rooftops, in every possible language, for several years, but the world has largely refused to listen. The international community has been far more preoccupied with eliminating the Sunni Islamic State group, and as a result bolstering the Shiites and their beneficiaries, chief among them Syrian President Bashar Assad.
The world is willing to ignore the fact that Assad has murdered hundreds of thousands of his own countrymen and displaced millions of others in the seven-year civil war, which he has mostly won with the help of Iran and Russia.
The shift in the world's position on Iran's involvement in Syria has been very recent. Washington leads the pack, as expected, and to a lesser extent, a similar understanding can be seen in Moscow and European capitals.
A senior security source said this week that U.S. President Donald Trump, Russian President Vladimir Putin, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Assad himself have only one thing in common: their desire to see Iran leave Syria. This statement may not be entirely accurate, but it is certainly headed in the right direction.
Diplomatic activity is underway to complement the military actions. This week, the IDF revealed that it has struck over 200 Iranian assets in Syria over the past two years.
This is a phenomenal figure, pointing to an average of one attack every three days. The number may very well be higher, considering that besides the acknowledged attacks there are countless cyber operations aimed at achieving the same goal of thwarting, or at least significantly slowing, Iran's efforts to establish itself militarily in Syria.
These moves aim to undermine Iranian operations in Syria directly, by targeting the bases and facilities Iran is building to house its forces, as well as indirectly, by targeting Iran's proxy, Hezbollah, mostly by eliminating missile production sites and weapon convoys bound for Lebanon, where Hezbollah is based.
Preventing the situation from boiling over
Efforts to stop Iran are underway all over Syria as well as outside it. Most recently, foreign media reported on an alleged Israeli strike on the Syria-Iraq border, hundreds of miles away from Israel. The U.S.-led coalition was also operating in the area at the same time, fighting Shiite militias as part of the power struggle in the region.
This was most likely why Iran reportedly deployed long-range missiles on its border with Iraq, far from the Syrian sphere but still close enough to threaten all its enemies in the region.
Israel has no plans to attack Iraq, not because of any military difficulty, but because it does not want to compromise the U.S., which has taken Iraq and its current regime under its wing.
The Shiites in Iraq are already embroiled in an internal battle between U.S. and Iranian loyalists, and Israel has no interest in undermining the U.S. there. On the contrary: All of Israel's efforts are currently focused on convincing the Trump administration to keep American forces in eastern Syria to block Iran and counterbalance Russia.
The report on Iran's activity in western Iraq coincided with reports that Tehran has been using a pseudo-civilian airline to smuggle weapons to Lebanon. This is nothing new: Hundreds of flights have taken the same route in recent years with civilians on board and weapons in the cargo hold.
Realizing that they had been compromised, the Iranians apparently deduced that Israel also knows about these flights and to avoid having their planes intercepted, they decided to "play it safe" and use civilian aircraft, with innocent passengers as shields.
These reports were intended not only to expose Iran's illicit activity but also to pressure Tehran. In the wake of the U.S. withdrawal from the 2015 nuclear deal and the renewal of the economic sanctions, the ayatollah regime in Tehran is facing one of its most challenging periods in recent memory. The regime is under attack both domestically and internationally, and the Iranian people are leveling unprecedented criticism at their leaders over the country's dire economic situation.
The idea behind this campaign is to push Iran into a corner and force it to give up its dreams of exporting the Islamic Revolution, as well as terrorism, for the sake of its rulers' political survival. However, there are no signs of this happening anytime soon and while the Iranian conservatives engage in heated debates about the issue among themselves, the Quds Force – the Revolutionary Guards' elite black-ops arm – is continuing on its path uninterrupted.
Iran will undoubtedly remain the focus of Israeli activity in the coming year.
Things will be more of the same, in different variations. This means efforts to calm the situation on the ground in other sectors, mainly in Gaza and to a lesser extent in Judea and Samaria, and continued, combined action against Iran on the military, economic, political, technological and media fronts.
The imminent end of the civil war in Syria presents Israel with a new challenge: so far, Israel has been able to carry out attacks in Syria relatively uninterrupted, but this stands to change soon. This means higher-risk missions with a higher likelihood of escalation.
Israel has already made it clear that, given no other choice, it is willing to walk down that road in order to stop the Iranian tide before it floods the region.
