Last Friday, an Italian citizen was killed and seven other tourists were wounded in a brutal terror attack in Tel Aviv. This comes after a barrage of rockets were fired into Israel from both Gaza and Lebanon, and as two young British Israeli citizens were killed in a horrific shooting in Judea and Samaria, with the mother of the girls severely injured.
All of these terror attacks have one thing in common and that is that Iran appears to be the one standing behind them indirectly. Immediately after that poor Italian man was murdered, the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, a proxy of the Islamic Republic of Iran, was out in the streets, celebrating. Indeed, just days prior to these terror attacks, the PIJ and Hamas warned that this would happen due to the tensions surrounding the Al-Aqsa Mosque.
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However, the tensions surrounding the Al-Aqsa Mosque are just a ruse designed to excuse more terror attacks against Israelis. Is the real reason why the terror is escalating at this particular time in Israel is that Iran would like to punish Israel firstly for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's brave stance against Iran's nuclear program, threatening to act while the rest of the world just whines and complains, and secondly, for Israel successfully building a strategic alliance with Azerbaijan, right alongside Iran's borders?
According to a recent report in Al-Jazeera, Iran's Foreign Ministry recently claimed that the establishment of Azerbaijan's new embassy in Tel Aviv, which was accompanied by a press conference where Israeli Foreign Minister Eli Cohen called for a "united front" to be formed against Iran, constituted a clear national security threat to Iran, which cannot be ignored.
The Iranians are greatly concerned with the fact that their neighbor is increasingly becoming close to a country that it calls the "little Satan," with Azerbaijan supplying Israel oil and Israel being one of the main arms suppliers for Azerbaijan.
However, while relations between Baku and Tehran have been tense for quite some time, these relations have reached a boiling point after Azerbaijan opened its embassy in Tel Aviv. Around this period of time, six Iranian spies were arrested in Baku and four Iranian diplomats were declared persona non grata in Azerbaijan, thus forcing them to leave their posts. These incidents occurred after Iran attempted to assassinate an Azerbaijani MP and attacked the Azerbaijani Embassy in Tehran, killing a security guard.
As Tehran seeks to punish the Azeris for opening an embassy in Tel Aviv, they also seek to punish Israel for having the audacity to build an alliance with the Turkic states against Tehran. They believe that this alliance together with the Iran protests has the potential to cripple their regime. In fact, the Iranian regime recently blamed Dr. Mordechai Kedar, who sits on the Board of the Dona Gracia Center for Diplomacy, for the recent Iran protests alongside an Ahwaz dissident.
The greatest fear that the Iranians got is that Israel, Azerbaijan, and Turkey will join forces with the Azerbaijanis inside of Iran, who will work together with the other ethnic groups in the country, to topple the mullah's regime. In the eyes of Tehran, this is a greater threat even than a direct Israeli military attack on Iran's nuclear facilities, as it could spell their own doom. That could also suggest that their proxies the PIJ, Hezbollah, and Hamas seek to punish Israel for trying to create such a union, just as they already punished the Azeris for befriending "the little Satan." And for this reason, we can assume Iran is the brains behind all of the terror that we have witnessed in recent days.
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