C asual observers could be forgiven for thinking that the massive attack on Israel that the Iranian regime unleashed on April 13 changed nothing. The first direct attack on Israel by the Iranian military occasioned no mass gatherings in the West. It inaugurated no wider war in the Middle East. Israel’s calibrated reprisal, which the New York Times alleges was originally set to be “much broader in scope,” seems to have nevertheless achieved its desired deterrent effect through the selective application of advanced weapons systems capable of evading Iran’s Russian-made air defenses. Perhaps Iran’s attack wasn’t much of a sea-change after all.
That may be a defensible interpretation of recent events, but it is wrong, nonetheless.
Previously, the campaign of anti-Western warfare targeting both Israeli and American interests (and producing American fatalities) had been limited to Iran’s terrorist proxies. Those who might be unversed in the region’s dynamics could dismiss the spasmodic episodes of violence attributable to Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis, and the Shiite militias in Iraq and Syria as the acts of those groups alone rather than their foremost sponsor in Tehran. No longer. With its attack on Israel — an attack the Iranian regime telegraphed in advance as a reprisal for an Israeli strike that killed one of the architects of the 10/7 massacre — Iran took ownership of the conflict it previously prosecuted by proxy. The effects were immediate.
Indeed, they were apparent on the night Iran launched its attack. In a dramatic display of defensive coordination, Israeli forces joined with not just their allies in America and Europe but Middle Eastern states like Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates to repel Iran’s assault. Such coordination between erstwhile enemies would have been unimaginable just ten years ago.
The usual suspects soon warned that Israel risked the integrity of this defensive architecture if it retaliated against Iran, but that made little sense at the time. Why would a proto-alliance organized around containing Iran be undone by an effort designed to contain Iran — particularly in a region in which national strength is the currency? The reaction to Israel’s calibrated response to Iranian aggression has been subdued. If the region is experiencing growing discomfort with expressions of Israeli hard power, that discomfort hasn’t been noticeable.
The effects of Iran’s attack on Israel are visible domestically, too.
A flurry of reports in the immediate aftermath of Iran’s attack alleged that the Biden White House had softened its opposition to an Israeli incursion into Rafah to finish the job against Hamas. The administration subsequently denied that it had given a “green light” to execute the operation inside Rafah. The administration did not, however, deny the substance of the reports indicating that both Biden and Israel’s regional Arab partners saw Iran’s entry into the conflict as having muted the significance of Palestinian issues. That effect is especially apparent in the sudden outburst of hostility toward anti-Israeli disruptions on college campuses from Biden and his Democratic allies.
As we observed in our editorial on the outbreak of antisemitic harassment on Columbia University’s campus, the tone of the Democratic reaction to what has become an intolerable feature of modern college life has shifted. Joe Biden’s condemnation of the “blatant” Jew hatred on campus made no effort to establish a moral equivalence between the demonstrators and Israel’s sympathizers, as had become customary for this White House. Congressman Jerry Nadler denounced the efforts to create an “environment that is unsafe for Jewish students.” Representative Debbie Wasserman Schultz savaged the “pro-Hamas campus rioters [and] feckless administrators” who have turned a blind eye to the disgrace on their campuses. Congressman Jared Moskowitz went so far as to issue an ultimatum. “If the University won’t protect” its Jewish students, he warned, “Congress will!”
The signs of declining patience with campus activists among Democrats are explicable as a function of the shifting nature of Israel’s multifront war against Iranian proxies. The campus radicals still maintain that their activism is animated by their desire to protect and preserve Palestinian life, but the terms of the debate have shifted beneath their feet. Protesters who shout antisemitic slogans and advocate outcomes that produce dead Jews, who wave Hezbollah flags and festoon themselves in regalia signifying affiliation with Hamas, who distribute literature advocating “death to America” could be written off when their cause was Palestinian nationalism. They cannot be similarly dismissed when they position themselves on the side of Iran — a nation with American blood on its hands and a mission statement that compels it to kill ever more Americans.
The allegiances of the activists who have so tormented pro-Israel Democrats since the 10/7 attacks were always obvious to the Jewish State’s supporters, but while Iran remained content to fight Israel through its proxies, the president and his allies could afford to delude themselves about the true nature of the menace to their left. That was a luxury. Iran’s direct entry into the war has raised the stakes for Democrats. Even the Americans who might have been skeptical of the methods Israel used in its war against Hamas are not similarly ambivalent when it comes to Iran. A nation with a 1 percent “very favorable” rating in polls of American respondents is not one for which any politician with an instinct toward self-preservation will be willing to risk his or her career.
With Iran’s attack on Israel, global geopolitics shifted. It has been subtle enough that the dogmatic activist class has missed it, but professional politicians and practitioners of statecraft in the Middle East have not. The demonstrators are no longer making common cause with the nebulous Palestinian territories. They are now in league with a terrorist entity that murders Americans — an alliance that seems to cause them no discomfort. These are no longer protesters or demonstrators. They are subversives arrayed alongside a military force engaged in hostilities with the armed forces of the United States overseas. That realization has the power to focus the minds of even the most blinkered university officials and Democratic politicians. Here’s hoping that it has not come too late.