Israel had grown used to targeting Iranian officials without head-on retaliation from Iran, an assumption overturned by Iran’s attacks on Saturday.
Israel had grown used to targeting Iranian officials without head-on retaliation from Iran, an assumption overturned by Iran’s attacks on Saturday. “I think we miscalculated,” said Sima Shine, a former head of research for the Mossad, Israel’s foreign intelligence agency. “The accumulated experience of Israel is that Iran doesn’t have good means to retaliate,” Ms. Shine added. “There was a strong feeling that they don’t want to be involved in the war.”
Instead, Iran has created “a completely new paradigm,” Ms. Shine said.
Iran’s response ultimately caused little damage in Israel, in large part because Iran had telegraphed its intentions well in advance, giving Israel and its allies several days to prepare a strong defense. Iran also released a statement, even before the attack was over, that it had no further plans to strike Israel.
Iran has demonstrated that it has considerable firepower that can only be rebuffed with intensive support from Israel’s allies, like the United States, underscoring how much damage it could potentially inflict without such protection.
Iran also needed to show proxies like Hezbollah that it could stand up for itself, Mr. Vaez added. “To demonstrate that Iran is too afraid to retaliate against such a brazen attack on its own diplomatic facility in Damascus would have been very damaging for Iran’s relations and the credibility of the Iranians in the eyes of their regional partners,” he said.
Aaron David Miller, an analyst at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a Washington-based research group, said that Israel had now made two major strategic errors in less than a year: Before Oct. 7, Israeli officials had publicly — and wrongly — concluded that Hamas had been deterred from attacking Israel.
Then Hamas launched the deadliest attack in Israel’s history.
“When it comes to conceptions, Israel is batting 0 for 2,” said Mr. Miller. “They failed to read Hamas’s capacity and motivation correctly on Oct. 7 and they clearly misjudged how Iran would respond to the April 1 hit.”
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