The news that Israel is somehow involved in the US-led naval mission's efforts to protect vessels traveling through the Strait of Hormuz, in the Persian Gulf, against Iranian aggression cannot be separated from the overall campaign Israel has been waging against the Islamic republic in recent years.
This campaign – which began in the previous decade in an effort to quash Iran's nuclear aspiration and has evolved to include preventing the ayatollah's regime from entrenching itself militarily in Syria and curtailing the quantity and quality of weapons it funnels to militias in the Middle East, especially to Hezbollah – has made Israel the world's number one expert on the Iranian issue.
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This is not a theoretical, university-style debate, but an actual specialty that combines intelligence gathering efforts and operations the defense establishment refers to as the "campaign between the wars" – a strategic concept that encompasses a host of covert and low-intensity military and intelligence efforts to prevent enemy states and terrorist organizations from becoming stronger and thwart their offensive activity.
The overt part of this struggle includes countless operations and strikes on Iranian assets – in 2018, then-IDF Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Gadi Eizenkot spoke of over 1,000 operations in years. The covert part of this effort includes extensive intelligence-gathering operations meant to ensure Israel remains at least one step ahead of Iran.
In fact, Israel's intelligence-gathering superiority in the Persian Gulf is so great that we have used it for other avenues such as, for example, surveillance on ISIS in Syria in the later years of the civil war there.
In operations against the jihadi terrorist group, the acting force may have been Western, but the intelligence which they were working off of was purely blue and white. It is not for nothing that Mossad Director Yossi Cohen has gone on the record as saying that Israeli intelligence has saved thousands of lives in the Middle East and Western countries.
Therefore, it is not surprising to find that Israel is assisting its Western allies in their dealings in the Persian Gulf, as well as its (less obvious) emirate friends there.
It's safe to assume this assistance is mostly with intelligence and not an operational one. The Israeli defense establishment is unlikely to risk exposing operational activity to non-American entities and moreover, an active Israeli partnership in an international coalition may prove to be a double-edged sword: much like during the first and second Gulf wars, Israel is expected to stay on the sideline, knowing that any detectible operation on its part could be used by the opponent – in this case, Iran – to undermine the main effort.
Still, it is doubtful whether Israel refrains from taking action against targets it defines as threats to its national security. All one has to do is look at the strikes on various targets in Syria and, according to Arab media reports, in Iraq.
It is important to remember, however, that Israel is not taking the lead when it comes to the fight against Iran's ambitions in the Persian Gulf or its nuclear aspirations – nor should it. The United States should lead this campaign, along with other countries, and it wouldn't hurt Europe to get a little more involved. Israel's role here is to provide assistance, mainly intelligence-wise, and to maintain deterrence within its borders, so as to ensure that tensions in the Gulf do not spill over into the Middle East.
