Iran’s leaders will surely remember April 1, 2024, as a day that will live in infamy. In the middle of the day, an Israeli air strike on an annex next to the Islamic Republic’s Damascus embassy killed two Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) generals and five officers, three of whom reportedly directed Iranian operations in Yemen, Iraq, and Lebanon and Syria. The strike was the biggest hit that the IRGC has suffered in decades. Presaged by the assassination of three other IRGC commanders in Lebanon and Syria since Hamas’s October 7 assault on Israel, the April 1 attack has not only fractured the regional infrastructure of Iran’s “resistance” forces. It has also portrayed Israel’s ability to penetrate the very heart of Iran’s military-security apparatus. For Iran’s regime, the assault was a deeply humiliating shock.
The Logic of Restraint and Retaliation
Given the strategic and psychological costs to Iran of Israel’s attack, it seems possible that a wider regional war might now be in the offing. Some observers even argue that Israel’s purpose in launching the April 1 attack was to spark such a conflict. But it is far more likely that Israel wagered that, while Tehran would strike back hard, it would still avoid an all-out war. Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s statement that “we will make them regretful about the crime and similar acts,” certainly got Israel’s attention. But Israel’s bet that Iran will not risk a war that could produce horrific costs for Lebanon and Hezbollah (not to mention for Israel) could turn out to be correct. Moreover, beyond the horror of a full-scale Israeli-Hezbollah-Iran war, there are two broad and overlapping reasons why Iran may retaliate in a manner that causes Israel real pain but falls short of provoking a wider war.
With the March 1 elections for the parliament and the “Council of Experts”—a body slated to pick the next Supreme Leader—behind him, Khamenei still needs to shield what promises to be a complex struggle to choose the next Supreme Leader from regional conflict.
The first reason is the desire of Khamenei and his domestic allies to continue setting the stage for his succession. With the March 1 elections for the parliament and the “Council of Experts”—a body slated to pick the next Supreme Leader—behind him, Khamenei still needs to shield what promises to be a complex struggle to choose the next Supreme Leader from regional conflict. Second is the need to sustain an engagement strategy with Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates that has been threatened by hostilities between Iran’s regional allies on the one side, and by Israel and the United States on the other. By encouraging (or pushing) Hezbollah in Lebanon and Kataeb Hezbollah and Harakat al-Nujaba in Iraq to avoid uncontrolled escalation with Israel or the United States, Iran has not only shielded its diplomatic outreach to Arab Gulf states, but may also be keeping the door open to play an indirect role in any post-war Gaza negotiations. At the same time, the pressure Tehran has exerted on its regional allies has prompted claims by some regime hardliners that Iran’s “restraint” has undercut its capacity to deter Israel. While the April 1 Damascus attack multiplied such fears, the regional and domestic calculations that have inclined Khamenei to avoid a broader war remain compelling—even as Iran mourns its newest martyrs.
Managing the Domestic Arena
The dictum that “all politics is local” applies in an imperfect if useful way to Iran’s resistance strategy, the ultimate purpose of which is to ensure the regime’s survival. While facing a myriad of regional security threats, the regime’s focus from Khamenei on down has been to entrench hardliners’ power after nearly two years of street protests and domestic instability. Iran’s leaders have their eyes on the prize, which is the Supreme Leader succession struggle to come.
The impetus to cement hardliners’ power has grown with the declining role of faith in the wider populace. A February poll sponsored by the government indicates that “73 percent of the… population support separation of religious and political institutions.” The regime’s response to this stark reality has been to exclude any significant voices favoring even a modest reopening of the political arena. Indeed, a massive number of the March 1 parliamentary candidates were disqualified by the Guardian Council, thereby giving hardliners 200 out of the 245 seats in the first round. Although 45 remaining seats will be determined in an April or May run-off, the die has been cast. As only 41 percent of the voting populace cast ballots—the lowest turnout in the history of parliamentary elections—this already greatly weakened parliament will be denuded of any capacity to represent the wider populace, much less to offer an arena of elite negotiation over domestic policy.
The combined effect of the regime’s efforts to mobilize support in rural and poor areas on the one hand, and the record low turn-out in Tehran on the other, is to expand the divide between Iran’s urban secularizing population and its more conservative sectors.
Moreover, as a leading scholar of Iran noted, the combined effect of the regime’s efforts to mobilize support in rural and poor areas on the one hand, and the record low turn-out in Tehran (which accounts for 13 percent of parliament’s seats) on the other, is to expand the divide between Iran’s urban secularizing population and its more conservative sectors. This is not only a recipe for further polarization in a society that is already profoundly divided; stripped of any mediating role, the already very weakened parliament will not provide a forum for a credible discussion of what Khamenei himself declared on March 20 was “the main issue facing the country again this year…the economy.” Instead, the accelerating drive to cement an alliance between a discredited clerical elite and a sprawling security apparatus controlled by the IRGC will undermine efforts to address Iran’s economic woes, thus deepening the regime’s legitimacy crisis.
The parliament’s evaporating significance contrasts with the enduring importance of the “Council of Experts of the Leadership.” Although elected, because only senior clerics can run for this 88-member body, the Council has never galvanized the kind of national attention—or competition—that the parliament once attracted. Nevertheless, the Council may now be more important than ever because its main function is to choose a new Supreme Leader and because the institutional and economic power of the “House of the Leader” has greatly expanded. The Leader enjoys almost unlimited constitutional powers to define the main lines of national policy: and he exercises this authority with the backing of an array of economic, security, and administrative offices whose collective clout rivals that of the IRGC.
Given the importance of the Leader and his office, it is not surprising that in the runup to the March 1 elections for both the parliament and the Council, Khamenei used his considerable influence to help shape the Council’s elections. Whether, as one of several experts has argued, this was “an apparent effort to elevate President Raisi’s chances” to succeed Khamenei only time will tell. It is certainly too early to confidently speculate about which possible candidates—including Khamenei’s son Mujtaba—might prevail. But what is clear is that both the Council and the Office of the Leader will be arenas of intense (if circumscribed) rivalry as different leaders in the clerical establishment and the IRGC vie to choose the new Leader. If much of this will happen behind closed doors, Khamenei is taking an active role in entrenching a ruling elite that he hopes will embody the ethos of resistance at home and abroad that he has favored.
What is clear is that both the Council and the Office of the Leader will be arenas of intense (if circumscribed) rivalry as different leaders in the clerical establishment and the IRGC vie to choose the new Leader.
The Regional Arena: Sustaining Resistance Before April 1
The highest ranking Iranian officer killed on April 1 was Brigadier General Mohammad Reza Zahedi, an IRGC al-Quds Force commander who over the last decade-plus played a major role in coordinating Iran’s resistance strategy with armed groups in Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, the West Bank, and Gaza. To appreciate the symbolic and strategic significance of this loss for Iran, it should be noted that in 1998 Zahedi was appointed commander of the IRGC Quds Lebanon Force by none other than Major General Qassem Soleimani, who was killed in Iraq in January 2020 by a US drone strike. Considered by some Iran watchers to be the second-most powerful leader after Khamenei, Soleimani was the architect of Iran’s regional security strategy. In the three years following his killing, the regime appointed a series of commanders in a determined bid to sustain its resistance strategy.
Zahedi’s role in this effort was pivotal, especially after he was named as the Quds Force Syria and Lebanon commander, succeeding Sayyed Razi Mousavi, who was assassinated on December 25, 2023, in an Israeli air strike. In short, Zahedi was killed in a line of IRGC commanders, all of whose deaths the regime failed to prevent. While he and the other IRGC officers who died next to him are being celebrated as “martyrs,” it was Israel’s technological and military capacities that made their sacrifice possible. In a long shadow war that has come into the full light of the direct Israeli Iranian conflict, Iranian leaders have good cause to worry that at least for now, Israel has had the deadly upper hand. Hence the intense pressure they are feeling to show that Israel will pay a far higher price for its actions than ever before.
The challenge for Iran has been how to respond to the April 1 assassination without undermining Tehran’s multi-dimensional resistance strategy. That strategy depends on using alliances with regional allies—the most important of which is Hezbollah—to threaten Israel and the United States but without getting itself sucked into a sustained military confrontation with either state or both. Enhanced by Iran’s renewal of relations with Saudi Arabia and by its engagement with the United Arab Emirates, this “no peace and no war” formula widened Iran’s room for maneuver. But its efficacy also required a kind of negative calm between the region’s key protagonists.
[Iran’s resistance] strategy depends on using alliances with regional allies—the most important of which is Hezbollah—to threaten Israel and the United States but without getting itself sucked into a sustained military confrontation with either state or both.
This calm was broken with Hamas’s October 7 “Operation Al-Aqsa Flood” and Israel’s ensuing military onslaught on Gaza. Seeking to shore up its resistance strategy, Esmail Qaani, commander of Iran’s Quds Force, together with none other than Major General Hossein Salami, the commander in chief of the IRGC, met with militia commanders from Yemen, Iraq, Lebanon, and Syria in Tehran. “At the end,” one Palestinian source reported, “all the participants agreed that Israel wanted to expand the war and falling in that trap should be avoided as it will justify the presence of more U.S. troops in the region.” Not long after that, Iran got its allies in Iraq to cease attacks on US forces. As for the Lebanon front, Iran also pressured Hezbollah to modulate its escalating tit-for-tat strikes with Israel. But while Hezbollah’s leader Hassan Nasrallah had insisted during a meeting with Qaani in Beirut two days after the Tehran meeting that “this is our fight”—and even claimed that Hezbollah would fight “on its own”—the Tehran meeting established Iran’s bottom line, i.e., that even as Hezbollah increased its fire across the border with Israel, Tehran would oppose an escalation of hostilities that could lead Iran into the very “trap” of which Qaani had warned.
Avoiding Traps and Clinging (Precariously) to Deterrence
Whether they believe it or are simply leveraging the notion of a “trap” to justify restraining Iran’s response, since the April 1 attack Iran’s leaders have been leaning into the idea of a snare in ever more creative if ambiguous ways. For example, an adviser of President Ebrahim Raisi’s issued a statement warning “the US leadership not to get dragged in Netanyahu’s trap for the US: Stay away so you won’t get hurt. In response US asked Iran not to target American facilities.” While this statement could be seen as a kind of taunt designed to embarrass the Biden administration, it could also signal that Iran’s response to “Netanyahu’s trap” (my emphasis) will not be sufficiently broad to create a wider regional conflict.
Commentaries in Iran’s semi-official press echo this caution. For example, Shargh argues that “the occupiers were trying to make the Islamic Republic of Iran quickly enter an emotional atmosphere and a suicidal reaction with this attack. The use of diplomatic and legal tools such as the use of pressure levers in the UN Security Council can be among the first steps to make the Zionist regime answer about this act. Benjamin Netanyahu and the radical right-wing parties that support him are…trying to drag the United States of America into a war…” Similarly, speaking to Ham Mihan, an Iranian analyst warned, “The Israelis want Iran to show a reaction that is in their favor, but just as Iran has acted rationally in the past six months during the war in Gaza, it will behave wisely at this time as well. Iran’s reaction will be such that Israel will not be able to make excuses.”
This implicit call to behave wisely suggests an appreciation of the increasingly fraught nature of US-Israeli relations, and in that context, an awareness that Israel’s leaders, as one analyst put it in the Tehran Times, worry about “the potential pitfalls of unrestrained aggression against Iran.” The possibility of a wider regional war, she added, “serves as a sobering deterrent, compelling Israeli policymakers to tread cautiously…This is particularly true now that Israel’s Netanyahu is at odds with President Joe Biden, who is…turning up the heat on the Israeli regime for its atrocities in the Gaza Strip.”
Resistance and Interests of State
The above-mentioned “sobering deterrent” applies as much to Iran as it does to Israel. While Iran’s reaction to the Damascus attack could still provoke a wider war, it is safe to say that the leaders of Israel’s War Cabinet launched the assault believing that their Iranian counterparts, starting with the Supreme Leader, are equally rational. Moreover, although the killing of Zahedi and his colleagues was a very heavy blow, the wider regional and global situation has not been unfavorable to Iran. On the contrary, and as many Israeli analysts have noted, by pursuing a military campaign in Gaza that is devoid of a wider geo-strategic and political vision, the resulting carnage and famine has isolated Israel on the regional and global stages, yet has failed to produce the “victory” over Hamas that Netanyahu promised. Under these conditions, Iran’s leaders can bide their time, while telegraphing to all regional states, including Saudi Arabia and the UAE, that Tehran wants what they want: a permanent ceasefire. And although the Biden administration has not yet embraced this position, if Israel goes into Rafah the White House might join the international consensus that the war must stop. For Iran, such an outcome would confirm the efficacy of its resistance strategy.
While Iran’s reaction to the Damascus attack could still provoke a wider war, it is safe to say that the leaders of Israel’s War Cabinet launched the assault believing that their Iranian counterparts, starting with the Supreme Leader, are equally rational.
Indeed, Israel’s April 1 Damascus attack has reinforced Khamenei’s resolve to protect this strategy. Toward this end, he has evinced a kind of pragmatism reflected in his notion of “heroic flexibility.” That concept is animated by a doctrine of state or government “expedient interests” whose ultimate content is defined by the Leader himself. Khamenei has invoked these themes to justify various diplomatic initiatives and arrangements, not least of which was the 2015 nuclear deal, or Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). While the chances for reviving that deal are probably dead now—and while Iran has sustained its enrichment program despite the International Atomic Energy Agency’s repeated objections—Iran’s interests would not be well served by an Iranian response that opens the door to a wider conflict.
Still, the mutual desire of Iran and Israel to avoid the abyss does not mean the actions of one or both adversaries will prevent an outcome that both want to avoid. And it is for this reason that the international community will have to push not merely for a ceasefire in Gaza, but for a return to a wider diplomatic vision.
The views expressed in this publication are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect the position of Arab Center Washington DC, its staff, or its Board of Directors.
