The Domestic Pressures Impacting Iran and Israel

In the early hours of April 19, Israel’s military struck deep inside Iran, at a military air base near Isfahan. Iran says it fended off a separate attack in Tabriz, about 500 miles north of Isfahan.

All of this—unprecedented as it is—was a retaliation to Iran’s own unprecedented attack on Israel on April 13, when Tehran launched hundreds of armed drones as well as cruise and ballistic missiles at Israel. (And that, to get the sequence of events right, was in response to a suspected Israeli strike on an Iranian diplomatic compound in Damascus, Syria, on April 1.)

Iran and Israel have long been engaged in a shadow war, using intermediaries to gnaw at each other and generally refraining from direct territorial attacks. The latest set of strikes and counterstrikes in April suggests a new phase in their struggle, opening up the possibility of more dangerous counterattacks and escalations.

The latest episode of FP Live took place right before Israel’s strike on Iran. What follows below is an edited and condensed portion of that discussion, focused on how Iran and Israel are navigating domestic pressures as they look to conduct their foreign policy. I spoke with Suzanne Maloney, an Iran expert at the Brookings Institution who has advised both Democratic and Republican administrations, and Ronen Bergman, an Israeli staff writer for the New York Times Magazine and Israeli paper Yedioth Ahronoth. Subscribers can watch the full interview in the video box atop this page or follow the FP Live podcast.

Ravi Agrawal: Suzanne, I’m wondering if you can talk a little bit about the various domestic pressures that Iran is facing right now, from the hijab protests to economic concerns. And you also have succession planning underway for Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Talk to us a little bit about how all of this plays into the decision-making in Tehran.

Suzanne Maloney: I think that’s a really important dimension to this issue.

Iran’s revolution is aging. And it is nearing a very, I think, significant succession process. The supreme leader is in his mid-80s. He has been in that position since 1989. And there is not a very clear successor.

There are various candidates for that position, none of whom have a considerable amount of charisma or political skills. The current president, Ebrahim Raisi, is probably the best-known among those contenders. But he stands credibly accused of crimes against humanity in some of his prior positions and has demonstrated a fairly tone-deaf approach to some of the challenges that the country is facing.

The other very well-known rumored successor who is often talked about is Mojtaba Khamenei, the son of the current supreme leader. That would, of course, invoke the precedent of the monarchy that the Islamic Revolution displaced. So I think that’s probably not a likely outcome. But certainly, Mojtaba is a key figure within the system. So there’s this debate about precisely how and when succession comes.

More generally, there is turnover of leadership within the system itself because many members of the original revolutionary generation are now in their 70s and 80s. They have begun to pass from the scene. But they’ve also begun to become excluded from political life, whether it’s the former president, Hassan Rouhani, who was very much involved with the politics behind the 2015 nuclear deal or other senior figures who have been under house arrest for more than 15 years because of their support for reform within Iran.

This is a system that is beginning to pass to the hands of a younger generation, to the battle-hardened veterans of the Revolutionary Guard, of the Iran-Iraq War, and of all the skirmishes that Iran has been involved with since that time. And what we’ve seen is a real hardening of the system in the hands of these individuals.

What happened last weekend, in many respects, was the culmination of a leadership that has been more inclined to adventurism, to risk tolerance. We know, of course, that they’ve targeted former U.S. officials from the Trump administration, many of whom are still under protective custody. They’ve targeted dissidents and others around the world, including some in the United States, in a very serious and dangerous fashion. They’ve also, of course, expanded and entrenched their role across the region and their willingness to use violence to try to advance their own interests and aims.

When I first studied in Iran and had an opportunity to understand that country 25 years ago, many of us anticipated a modest liberalization, some kind of reform that might gradually make Iran a more responsible player at home and on the international scene. That hasn’t happened at all. And in fact, we’ve seen just the opposite.

RA: And Ronen, let me ask you about Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s standing amid all of this. The protest movement against him had really picked up again in the last month or so. What kinds of domestic pressures is he facing?

Ronen Bergman: Iran’s strikes were seen by much of the Israeli public as just another failure of Netanyahu. Just another disaster. In a way, it’s aligning some of the public behind the military or the defense establishment (although trust in those institutions after Oct. 7, 2023, is also very, very low).

The only advantage that Netanyahu could see now is that it took some of the attention off the hostage issue. He is struggling between the pressure of the families and the public, which support a deal even at the cost of a total cease-fire, and the [Israeli government] coalition. The ultra-right parties of this coalition say, “if you surrender to Hamas’s demands, we will disassemble the coalition.”

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RA: Suzanne, how is Iran thinking about all of these proxy groups that it funds in the region, the so-called axis of resistance?

SM: For a regime whose primary goal is simply to stay in power, this is a very dangerous and unpredictable moment for them. They’ve survived an awful lot over the course of the past 45 years—internal terrorism, external invasion, earthquakes, drought, pandemic.

In terms of what this moment means for the proxies, Lebanon-based Hezbollah is the most valuable asset that Iran has. Obviously, the Israelis have been hitting back at Hezbollah throughout the course of the Gaza war. And even before that, Hezbollah has been a significant concern to the Israelis because of its massive arsenal of very advanced and precision-guided missiles.

And so, Hezbollah is the jewel in the crown for the Iranians. It will be critical to Iran’s ability to coordinate and deploy these other militias. I think what happens to Hezbollah is the other big concern for Iran and its future strategy.

RA: Ronen, it was striking to me that the United States shot down more Iranian drones and missiles than Israel itself. And that’s despite the fact that the so-called ironclad alliance between Israel and the United States has been strained in recent months. Add to that fact, the Arab and Gulf countries that also came to Israel’s assistance—notably including Jordan, which has been increasingly critical of Israel’s actions in Gaza. Do any of these countries have more leverage to push Israel to change its strategy at all?

RB: The last few months have shown us that the organ of gratitude does not exist for the Netanyahu regime. The prime minister is continuing his policy that basically cherishes the integrity of the [domestic] coalition above everything else. Even when the Israeli military is so dependent on the continuous flow of munition, and Iron Dome interceptors, etc. Even as U.S. President Joe Biden stood so firmly with Israel after Oct. 7 and is risking his political career because of Israel, losing support from some of his base. The government and the prime minister feel that it will serve their popularity to keep in the coalition together, so they have no problem with publicly fighting with the U.S. president.

And this doesn’t make any sense unless you understand that the integrity of the coalition, the continuation of the war at a lower intensity, and doing everything possible to stop the public from going into the streets to demand an inquiry, an investigation, and new elections. And so this is the only thing. It is the dominant reason why Israel did not yet sign the hostage deal. This explains everything.

This goes back to your question. Because it feels such gratitude to the Americans, the defense establishment is now very keen on not doing anything without fully coordinating, or at least not totally objected to, by the United States. According to multiple sources, it seems that the United States has said “we will not support you if you go strike Iran. But if the strike is containable, if there’s a chance that Iran would not react. Then we will continue to defend you in case it does.”

We are talking about two enemies that don’t want an all-out war. We also see this with Israel vis-a-vis Hezbollah throughout the last six months. Israel wants to make sure it is not risking war, so what they do is very limited.

What Iran did was an enormous risk. I know a lot of people in Israeli intelligence are looking at Iran’s thinking, wondering what the supreme leader’s new mindset is. Even with the need to make a point, and get revenge, and respond to demands from the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, why did the supreme leader take such a risk?

My speculation is that he saw Israel at its weakest. Just like [Hamas leader Yahya] Sinwar making the call back in October to strike Israel, because he saw weakness. The supreme leader saw the immense international pressure that Israel is under, that the operation in Gaza is going nowhere, and he saw the rift between Netanyahu and Biden. And he said, now is our time to do something.

RA: Suzanne, assuming that Israel’s status quo will not improve much in the next six months, how will this Israeli weakness guide Tehran’s reactions and its use of proxies?

SM: The explanation that Ronen is just offered is completely consistent with how Iran has approached the war. And even before the war. The supreme leader gave a speech in early October in which he used very traditional rhetoric about Israel passing from the passage of time or whatever the proper translation of the Persian expression is. But what you see from that speech is that he predicts that Israel will die of rage.

Since the revolution itself, the Islamic Republic has not been particularly interested in going to war with Israel for a variety of reasons, including the expectation that it might not win. But also, the presumption has always been that Israel was going to just simply collapse or erode. They—and I’m sure as Ronen said, Sinwar—interpreted the intense divisions within Israeli society and Israeli politics over the past year or so as a huge opportunity. The same way that they looked at the Trump period in the United States as evidence of polarization, as a weakening corrosion of society and politics.

This is part of why we’re seeing more assertive action from the Iranians. They think that there’s an opportunity here. They want to make the most of it. And their best levers to do so have always been using the various proxies to try to apply as much pressure as possible, and to try to ensure that Israel shrinks within its own borders, that Israel is delegitimized around the world, and that the political divisions within Israel, as well as the economic cost of the conflict, contribute to this long-term process of the failing of the Israeli enterprise. That’s what they believe about Israel. It’s what they believe about the United States, for that matter.

RA: Ronen, if you look at Oct. 7 as the start of this phase of the war, what happens next in Gaza? Given everything you’re saying about Israel’s moment of weakness, and given everything you’ve described about Netanyahu’s incentives.

RB: I think that there are basically two options. And I know it’s very risky to say something like that about the Middle East, especially this time.

I think that now, either Israel is forced in few months to evacuate. And again, Israel is not fighting a war, but a very limited military incursion in Gaza since mid- to early-January. This is not to say anything about the unbelievable suffering of the refugees, the hunger, the people dying. The idea of a cease-fire is by itself a vote of disconfidence in the ability to achieve the targets of the war.

So either Israel is forced to withdraw by the United States and the international community and internal pressure that no longer believes in this war. Or Israel agrees to a discussion to the so-called “day after” that allows the Palestinian Authority to take control with the help of the Gulf states and the United States with some kind of reform. That would also be as part of a full hostage deal for Palestinian inmates that would also give Hamas the release of some very famous inmates and a total cease-fire.

This is, of course, preferable. It will enable Israel to reap the fruits of the limited success of the military. But I think that Netanyahu will do everything he can to stop it, because this will be the end of his coalition. He’s trying to maintain some kind of leverage to Hamas instead of allowing the Palestinian Authority in, because he will be forced to discuss a two-state solution and lose his base. So again, we go back to his coalition.