Israel's 'campaign between the wars' with Iran
The latest capture of a vessel carrying weapons en route to the Gaza Strip reveals Israel's ongoing battle against Iranian attempts to gain a military foothold in the region — while nuclear negotiations follow their course.
The most intriguing question that arises after the March 5 interception of the arms vessel Klos-C by the Israeli navy in the Red Sea is whether Iran’s president, Hassan Rouhani, was aware of this smuggling operation and whether it was planned and authorized with his consent.
Over the past day, senior intelligence officials from the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) were inclined to believe that Rouhani was not involved in the affair, becoming aware of it following the statement by the IDF spokesman on March 5. If this was indeed how the affair transpired, what we were seeing here is another episode in the political drama unfolding right now in Iran. This is a struggle between Iran of the ayatollahs and the Islamic Revolution and Iran as it would like to be seen in the future, namely a reformist country that’s yearning for international recognition, a Western embrace and acceptance by the family of nations. This Iran could be termed “Rouhani’s Iran,” but even that is not entirely certain. After all, Rouhani himself is counted among the masterminds of Iran’s nuclear program and its built-in subterfuges. What Israel calls this Iran is an Iran as Rouhani’s voters and followers would have liked to see.
When a very senior Israeli defense establishment official told me a few weeks ago that “something dramatic was afoot in Iran,” this was precisely what he was alluding to, to wit: the struggle between generations, approaches and doctrines. This week, the reformist Iran, the one which winks at the West, sustained quite a blow from IDF intelligence and naval forces when it was caught ''red-handed'' pouring gasoline onto the Middle East bonfire, while still putting on an act of the brotherly and peace-seeking country that only wants to coast along peacefully.
Iran’s reaction to the military operation and the intelligence exposure was typical. This was another Zionist hallucination, Iranian spokespersons alleged. However, behind the scenes and inside the back rooms, Iran — and more specifically the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and Quds Force — is frantically abuzz. It realizes that someone — in his holy of holies — singled out the containers in which M-302 rockets were stashed. Originally, they had been taken from the arsenals of the Syrian army, flown from Damascus to Tehran, transported in trucks to the port of Bandar Abbas and loaded onto an innocuous-looking Panamanian cargo ship amid cement-laden containers. From there it sailed, as a decoy, to Iraq, where an additional 50 containers of cement were loaded. Then they set sail for their last leg, which was to take them to Port Sudan (and from there to the terrorist organizations in Gaza or Sinai). Instead, on March 8, they will reach their final destination at the southern Israeli port of Eilat.
