How Will Israel Retaliate? | Opinion

If the penultimate question last week was how Iran would respond after Israel bombed an Iranian diplomatic facility in Syria on April 1, the question this week is how Israel will strike back against Tehran. President Joe Biden and his advisers have been spending the last few days trying to persuade Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to stand down. No further action is warranted, they argue.

Biden has a point. As much as Iran may have bedazzled the television cameras by sending 350 attack drones, cruise missiles, and ballistic missiles toward Israel late at night—an unprecedented attack far beyond what many analysts expected—the entire operation was essentially a dud. Operationally speaking, Israel didn't experience much damage. There were no fatalities, only a single casualty, and some minor scuffles at an Israeli military base in the desert. The United States, with the assistance of the United Kingdom, France, and Jordan, shot down most of the devices before they even entered Israeli airspace. An Israeli military spokesperson reported that 99 percent of the projectiles were neutralized courtesy of Israel's own missile defense system, U.S. fighter aircraft, and two U.S. warships in the eastern Mediterranean.

If Netanyahu was smart, he would take the win and bask in the glory. That's precisely what U.S. officials are telling their Israeli colleagues. Yet the message doesn't seem to be getting through. Retaliation of some kind, Israel says, is coming. Lieutenant General Herzi Halevi, Israel's top general, said on Monday that Iran's attack "will be met with a response."

The U.S. would like to know what the Israelis are planning but thus far don't have an accurate picture of what options are being drawn up, let alone what decision Israeli leaders have made. Just as speculation was rampant before Iran's drone and missile swarm last weekend, speculation is running rampant today. Unnamed U.S. officials told NBC that an Israeli response will likely be limited in scope, designed to send a message rather than degrade Iran's military capability.

However, what we do know is that Israel's options, much like Iran's before last weekend, run the spectrum from symbolic and low-impact to devastating and high-risk.

The word "retaliation" is a broad term, and it doesn't necessarily have to include the use of force. Israeli Foreign Minister Israel Katz has talked about a "diplomatic offensive" in the Middle East, which would exploit the momentum generated by Jerusalem's partnership with several Arab-majority states to ensure Iran's attack wasn't successful. This offensive could include everything from tabling resolutions at the U.N. Security Council to ostracize Iran to working with like-minded countries in Europe and Asia to tighten the financial squeeze on Tehran's primary money-making enterprises: oil, gas, and manufacturing. Whether that would scratch Israel's itch for retaliation, though, is unknown, particularly when some members of Netanyahu's cabinet have said that nothing short of an Israeli air campaign against Iran would be satisfactory.

A massive cyberattack on Iran's nuclear, missile, or military industries is an option as well, and one Israel has used effectively against Tehran in the past. The most successful cyber operation occurred in 2010, when Israel, in partnership with the U.S., introduced a bug (codenamed Stuxnet) in Natanz, Iran's main enrichment facility, that destroyed more than 15 percent of Tehran's centrifuges. More than a decade later, in 2021, another Israeli cyber operation took aim at the same plant's electricity grid, causing a shutdown. Cyber options have worked remarkably well for Israel. As the old saying goes: If it ain't broke, why fix it?

Alternatively, Israel could up the ante with military action. This might include additional airstrikes against Iranian proxy networks in the region, in Syria and Lebanon in particular. This would be nothing new from Israel's standpoint; hundreds of strikes have occurred in Syrian government-controlled territory over the years, first targeting Hezbollah weapons storage facilities and supply lines but now increasingly focusing on Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) generals and advisers. Tehran, however, may no longer differentiate attacks on its own people outside of Iran from attacks on Iranian soil. Israel's April 1 strike against an Iranian embassy annex in Syria's capital, which killed IRGC General Mohammad Zena Zahedi, has changed the game for Tehran in terms of what they are willing to tolerate.

Some foreign policy hawks in the U.S. are recommending an even more dramatic option: take out Iran's nuclear program. Former national security adviser John Bolton is leading the charge on television, arguing that now is a golden opportunity for Israel to destroy Tehran's nuclear work entirely. Yet this would be a fool's errand, not because Israel couldn't drop bombs on those facilities but rather because it would increase the chance of Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei explicitly green-lighting a dash toward a nuclear weapon. It should be noted that Iran has yet to make this decision, as CIA Director William Burns said last year. An Israeli bombing would be liable to pushing him over the edge. Iran, too, would also rebuild what was destroyed, harden whatever enrichment facilities they managed to create, and bury them deeper underground. International nuclear inspectors might even be booted out of the country.

Israel should think long and hard before pulling the trigger. Ideally, the trigger wouldn't be pulled in the first place.

Daniel R. DePetris is a fellow at Defense Priorities and a syndicated foreign affairs columnist at the Chicago Tribune.

The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.