Over the past several years Israel has intensified its attacks on selected military targets in Iran and on Iran-sponsored militias in Syria and Iraq. Iran’s nuclear programme sites, including the crucial Natanz nuclear facility, other military and sometimes even non-military but equally vital infrastructure have been attacked by Israel. The latest incident believed to be an Israeli attack was the “mysterious fire outbreak” that led to the sinking of Iran’s largest warship in the Gulf of Oman.
In the wake of each attack, Israel would either maintain “guilty silence” or react in clear terms obvious enough to suggest its responsibility yet ambiguous enough to exempt it from any legal or diplomatic consequences.
While it’s an open secret that Israel is always behind such attacks, Iran is faced with an awkward dilemma. As a regime known for its extremely harsh anti-Zionist rhetoric and threat to “wipe Israel off the earth”, acknowledging those attacks will definitely prompt the expectation of its admirers to see, at least, its (Iran) appropriate retaliation if not the elimination of Israel as it has always threatened. However, knowing deep down that it’s too incapable to confront Israel, Iran has chosen to feign ignorance of the attacks or attribute them to some accidents to tactically save its face.
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On its part, Israel carries on its attacks on Iran and its interests elsewhere capitalising on that dilemma knowing that Iran can neither dare to retaliate nor even cry out for that matter, because while retaliating would expose it to humiliating defeat and possible collapse of its regime, crying it out would expose the emptiness of its ego.
Besides, the clandestine operations conducted by the notorious Israeli intelligence agency, Mossad, in Iran have exposed the extent of its strategic vulnerability. Though, Mossad is arguably the world’s most efficient intelligence agency outclassing even the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) of the United States, the extent to which it has managed to infiltrate the Iranian regime doesn’t only prove its obvious superiority over its Iranian counterpart but equally exposes the Iranian regime’s structural weakness.
That’s obvious given the fact that in conducting its covert operations within Iran, the Mossad relies entirely on Iranian officials and security personnel who it has managed to turn into its undercover agents.
Referring to that high-level infiltration, the former Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad dropped a bombshell recently when he stated that (at a point) the very head of the department responsible for Iran’s counterintelligence operations against Israel who was responsible for tracking down and preventing Mossad’s covert operations in Iran turned out to be a Mossad undercover agent himself.
Also referring to the assassination of the senior Iranian nuclear scientist and official of the country’s nuclear programme, Brigadier-General Mohsen Fakhrizadeh late last year in Iran by a team of Iranian undercover Mossad agents, the former president alluded to the roles of some officials of Iran’s intelligence agency in covering the tracks of the assassins and the tracks of other Iranian Mossad agents who assassinated Iranian nuclear officials on various occasions. The Iranian intelligence agency’s officials in question were obviously secret Mossad agents too.
Ahmadinejad also lamented how Mossad managed to steal some 50,000 hardcopy documents and 163 discs of Iran’s nuclear programme archive from a supposedly extremely secure Iran’s intelligence agency’s warehouse in Turquzabad district near Tehran in 2018. The dramatic seven-hour Mossad operation was a culmination of a two-year preparation and was executed by 20 Mossad agents – none of them was Israeli. The details of the operation, as recently revealed by Yossi Cohen who lately retired as the Director of Mossad, were too embarrassing for the Iranian regime and explained why Iran couldn’t publicly acknowledge the theft until after Israel disclosed it three months later.
Iran disguises its weakness in a tactical exaggeration of its military capabilities and systematic flaunting of its military hardware and weaponry including the display of prototypes as “real” weapons.
However, Israel’s persistent unprovoked attacks on Iran suggests its (Israel) realisation that Iran is a mere paper tiger that’s not only too weak to retaliate but also too vulnerable to defend itself for that matter.
Interestingly, both Iran and Israel benefit from each other politically in a quite interesting way. On the one hand, though Israel knows deep down that Iran doesn’t pose any threat to it, yet it capitalises on Iran’s rhetoric of eliminating it to get more sympathy, solidarity and support from the international community. Equally, Israeli politicians use the rhetoric in their political campaigns to strike fear into the Israeli electorate then reassure them that only voting for them can guarantee Israel the maximum security from “Iranian threats”.
On the other hand, Iran has maintained its anti-Zionist rhetoric and empty threats against Israel, for that’s her most effective political tool, which she manipulates to win and keep the sympathy of the gullible among Muslims who are too carried away by their longing for the liberation of AlQuds to realise Iran’s real agenda behind its purported anti-Israel stance.
Anyway, though Arab countries in the region, which are Iran’s real targets, equally realise that Iran is indeed a paper tiger, they endure its bullying nonetheless because they are already infiltrated by it through its Shi’ite loyalists and/or sponsored militias among their respective populaces. There is hardly an Arab country in the region and beyond that’s not threatened by such moles and militias. While in some countries (i.e. Lebanon, Yemen, Iraq and Syria) those militias have already grown stronger than the states, other countries are at various degrees of exposure to Iran-sponsored destabilisation plots.
