The West must stand behind Israel after Iran’s attack

Stephen Daisley I 14 April 2024 I The Spectator Australia

Iran’s drone and missile attack on Israel is an escalation from the fiery but ultimately empty rhetoric we are used to from Tehran. In different times and with a different prime minister in Jerusalem than the gun-shy Benjamin Netanyahu, it is the kind of inflammatory move that could have provoked a much graver Israeli response than last night’s events are likely to. However, Israel can neither afford nor does the current leadership particularly want a hot war with Iran at this point. Of course, it is already in such a war, indirectly at least, since the Islamic Republic was the guiding hand behind the October 7 massacre. But there is a larger consideration to the north, in the form of another Iran proxy, Hezbollah, which is more heavily armed than Hamas on several orders of magnitude. Hassan Nasrallah’s forces have been rattling their sabres even louder than usual over the past few months. Bluntly, Israel cannot fight Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran at the same time.

Or at least it can’t in the new geopolitical moment created by Joe Biden’s decision to turn on Israel. Jerusalem now knows that the United States can no longer be relied upon to support its right of self-defence, even in response to the barbarism of last October. The US has joined the ranks of lesser nations like Canada, France and Britain in pummelling Israel diplomatically for the benefit of its regional enemies and certain domestic demographics. So while Iran will pay a price for tonight, it will be a price that Israel calculates the Biden administration can live with. Certainly, the White House has sounded a little doughtier in the last 72 hours or so, when this offensive was being forecast, but once you lose your nerve and turn on an ally your dependability is shot for the considerable future.

Dishonest days lie ahead. Tehran will tell its populace that this was a devastating blow against the Zionist entity when outrageous though its actions are, they are more theatrical in nature than substantive. Netanyahu will assure his people that the IDF and/or the Mossad will settle scores with the mullahs for this aerial incursion when the settling will be similarly theatrical without driving fear into the heart of the Islamic Republic. The international community will fire off their usual statements and they will be as worthwhile as ever. If there is one thing the Israelis and Iranians can agree on it’s that if the West had anything of value to contribute it wouldn’t be contributing it via the likes of Joe Biden, Ursula von der Leyen and David Cameron. When world powers turn unserious, they get treated as such – deservedly so.

But while there will be an awful lot of going through the motions tonight and in the days to come, it should not occlude an immutable truth: Iran continues to be the great destabiliser of Western Asia. That threat is articulated most belligerently towards Israel but no one should be in any doubt that Tehran’s malign influence is felt far beyond the Middle East. Instability there means instability here, not only when it comes to trade and transiting goods but because it helps drive the arrival on these and other shores of mass-scale migration, legal and otherwise. Until the Iranian regime can be replaced with one more conducive to regional calm and less ideologically hostile to the West, Tehran will continue to be a problem. Not just for Israel, but for the rest of us too.

There is no appetite in the West for intervening to overthrow the mullahs in favour of Jeffersonian democracy, and nor should there be. Been there. Tried that. Ask the Taliban how it worked out. But since there is no option to steer well clear of it when this rogue state can undermine our economic and border security, the wisest tack would be to stand strongly behind Israel, especially when Iran helps orchestrate bloody conflagrations with the Palestinians like the current one. There is no polite way to put this but Israel is the West’s bouncer on the door of a particularly rough nightclub and Iran is the most troublesome patron of the lot, aided by its wingmen in Hamas and Hezbollah. Israel’s methods might not be the ones we would opt for but we can either let the muscle do what it has to do to subdue Iran and reap the benefits of regional and global stability, or we can continue our periodic bouts of hand-wringing queasiness, and accept that the virtuous glow we yearn to feel comes with consequences.

Author: Stephen Daisley