Israel still doesn't know how to re-establish its ability to act as a deterrence, after six months of a chaotically waged war in Gaza, which has killed more than 33,000 Palestinians, and a campaign of strikes in Lebanon and Syria of an intensity not seen for a decade. Its Western allies had made this worrying observation quietly, even before Iran loudly made this point, on the night of Saturday, April 13, by launching more than 300 drones and ballistic missiles toward Israel.
This attack has put Benjamin Netanyahu's government at an impasse. Israel cannot retaliate against Iranian territory without risking an escalation, which its American ally rejects out of hand, fearing a regional war. But, if it doesn't, it lets Iran set a new standard: Direct ballistic missile strikes are now a potential response to Israeli attacks against its interests.
Faced with this dilemma, Netanyahu is stalling. A telephone exchange with the US president, Joe Biden, at around 2.30 am on Sunday, seemed to put off a response that Israel had assumed would be immediate and far-reaching. Since then, the Israeli prime minister has issued only a brief statement on X: "We intercepted. We blocked. Together, we will win." A meeting of the war cabinet ended without any announcements, in the evening. Then schools were allowed to reopen on Monday, signaling a possible de-escalation.
Leaks attributed to high-ranking Israeli security service officials spread in the press on Sunday, signaling their dismay at debates within the government that had been described as war-mongering for days. These officers expressed their fear of a hasty and ill-considered retaliation to the Iranian strikes, without minimizing their importance. More generally, they deplored the absence of any political vision in this multi-front war, whose objectives Netanyahu refuses to define beyond a promise of "total victory."
For its part, the US feared that the prime minister might be tempted to expand the war in Gaza into a regional conflict, having tried again at the end of 2020 to convince former US president Donald Trump to launch strikes during the last months of his term against Iranian ballistic and nuclear facilities.
Netanyahu is being pressed on his right by his religious fundamentalist allies, who are excluded from the narrow circle of ministers in the war cabinet who alone decide on the follow-up to the Iranian strikes. First among these firebrands, Minister of National Security Itamar Ben-Gvir on Sunday rejected any logic of containment and proportionality in the face of Tehran, believing that Israel had gone astray for 15 years in the face of Hamas in Gaza. He said he wanted his country to "go crazy" in order to "create a deterrent in the Middle East."
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