The current state of heightened tensions in the Middle East is not the first time in recent memory that Iran finds itself on the precipice of an all-out military conflict. Threats of an imminent invasion or coordinated attacks on its nuclear facilities originating from its chief adversaries Israel and the United States have been consistent in the past twenty years, wielded in tandem with speculations about the timing of a hypothetical blitzkrieg.

Since the late 2000s, when Iran’s nuclear program emerged as a source of constant controversy, warranting intervention by the United Nations Security Council, American and Israeli leaders have intermittently brandished the specter of the use of force as a sword of Damocles. The warnings were rehashed so routinely that Iranians often dismiss them as hollow rhetoric.

Why a country that has never sought to colonize its neighbors or others has evolved into the pivot of the region’s war talk is in and of itself a riddle. Still, the external image of Iran as an entity perennially implicated in one conflict or another has been so globally ingrained that many who do not follow the headlines closely often conjure a war-torn, starved nation whenever they hear the name Iran.

A Ben-Gurion University professor who had served in the Israeli military for 23 years wrote in a July 18, 2008, New York Times opinion piece that Israel would strike Iran within the “next four to seven months”. Ben Morris laid out the specifics of such an operation, explaining the benefits for the Middle East and the world. 

In 2011, an Israeli air force general told the Tablet Magazine, “We have no illusion. We will attack Iran successfully but that won’t be the end of it. Two, or three, or five years later, we will have to go back there again.”

A year later, mainstream media unanimously agreed an Israeli aerial assault against Iran was inevitable. The Washington Post’s David Ignatius quoted U.S. Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta as saying Israel would attack Iran in April, May, or June 2012. 

A while later, Israeli media reported that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had planned an attack in October of that year, but called it off at the request of then-U.S. President Barack Obama running for reelection. Obama had argued that an Israeli act of aggression could interfere with the U.S. electoral process.

The apparition of military action was so vivid that The Atlantic set up an Iran War Dial in 2012, enlisting experts to share their predictions of a showdown between the Islamic Republic and its two primary nemeses, the United States and Israel. The archives of the countdown are no longer available online, but at one point in March 2012, the odds of war were calculated at 48%. 

The impressive roster of political scientists chiming in to this doomsday clock run by Swarthmore College Professor Dominic Tierney would make any observer wonder if the clarion calls of war could really be heard. Distinguished authors and scholars such as Stephen Walt and Kenneth Timmerman were seriously debating the statistical chances of a flare-up, so it couldn’t have been taken lightly. 

War of Words

Unfulfilled prophecies about Israel pounding Iran reciprocated by Tehran’s apocalyptic reprisal have constituted an unvarying theme of catastrophic scenarios imagined in the Middle East since the Islamic Republic was founded in 1979.

The two states have been locked in a bitter struggle since, and their proxy fight has remained one of the trappings of political life in the Middle East. But it was only after the ultra-conservative Mahmoud Ahmadinejad became Iran’s president in 2005 that they drifted into a high-octane undeclared war, actively undermining each other’s security without descending into a one-on-one collision. 

In different phases of the indirect spat, Tehran and Tel Aviv eliminated each other’s nationals in third countries, spied on each other, and transmitted computer viruses to cripple the rival’s critical infrastructure, but still avoided direct armed conflict. For news organizations and individuals perceiving war forecasts as a fancy activity, it’s been useful to have a potential battle looming large to generate headlines and interest. 

These stabs at political fortunetelling complement the entreaties made to both the U.S. government and Israel to administer the coup de grace against the Iranian regime. From the late Saudi king Abdullah and his ambassadors extorting their U.S. counterparts to set off the war to U.S. administration officials John Bolton, Thomas P.M. Barnett, and Matthew Kroening identifying different occasions as the “right time” to attack, saber-rattling has been in vogue and uninterrupted in frequency.

But the fact that the full-fledged confrontation envisioned by doomsayers hasn’t yet happened doesn’t mean the voices of peace have silenced the hawks. First, much of the rhetoric has been about warmongers bluffing to scare off the opponent without intending to take action. Despite the dominant immaturity that has defined their behavior, both Iran and Israel have shown restraint at times when the slightest missteps could have triggered a transnational conflict. 

The Islamic Republic has been imprudent enough to repeatedly deny the Holocaust and invite notorious anti-Semitic conspiracy theorists, from David Duke to Robert Faurisson, to give talks in Tehran and meet senior politicians in intimate settings. Israel has been insensitive enough to browbeat former U.S. President Donald Trump into abandoning the 2015 nuclear deal that had momentarily alleviated the strain of decades of sanctions against Iranians. 

No matter how ill-advised their postures have been, both Iran and Israel have shown the degree of circumspection needed to keep a bloody conflict at arm’s length. After all, even if disregard for the lives of civilians has been the common denominator of words expressed and actions taken by the stakeholders in the fracas, they have equally been concerned about their survival. A clear and mutual understanding of the other side’s track record of recklessness has functioned as an inhibitory mechanism staving off untamed violence.

Iran and Israel had long settled on an unspoken agreement to confine their mediated squabbling to a low-intensity altercation. Their respective motives vis-à-vis each other have predominantly been existential, and even their most soft-spoken politicians have expressed their desire for the obliteration of the other. But these ideologues, too, appreciated that unbridled warmongering would come at a price they might not be able to afford.

There are nations whose relations are built solely on perpetual enmity. But in the case of Iran and Israel, the underlying animus has been much deeper, and they’ve been committed, at least nominally, to eradicating each other. 

Before Iran emerged as a camouflaged belligerent in the Gaza war, the two adversaries sought force projection in targeted killings, acts of sabotage, and diplomatic humiliations. These ploys marked the crescendo of their exchange of animosity.

Iran understood that Israel remained an undeclared nuclear state enjoying support from the world’s mightiest militaries. Israel understood that Iran’s proxies, including Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Afghan Shia Fatemiyoun Brigade, were dotted in its neighborhood and, as non-state actors, would not adhere to the rules of the game. 

Upping the Ante

In the wake of the Hamas attacks last year and Israel’s ongoing response, their mutual animus appears to have advanced to a new level. October 7 and what ensued dismantled the proverbial shock absorber that prevented the two states from aiming at each other directly; they now appear to have thrown caution to the wind.

On April 1, 2024, Israel bombed the Iranian consulate in Damascus, killing seven Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) members, along with 10 others. Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei vowed “punishment”.

“When they attacked our consulate, it is as if they’ve attacked our soil, and this is the world’s convention,” he said in a public address. On April 13, Iran launched 300 missiles and drones against Israeli territory for the first time. Most of the projectiles were intercepted before landing, but some inflicted damage. Israel hit back on April 19, destroying parts of an S-300 air defense system in the city of Isfahan. 

Then, on July 30, shortly after the inauguration of President Masoud Pezeshkian, the state’s VIP guest Ismail Haniyeh, the top political secretary of the Palestinian militant group Hamas, was killed in a predawn airstrike at his guesthouse in Tehran. Israel never acknowledged responsibility, but Tehran inculpated Tel Aviv as the perpetrator.

In the cyclical, ongoing tug-of-war, Iran believes it must now take the turn to retaliate for the killing of a foreign official in its capital. This will serve both as a cover-up for a mortifying security breach, and as a much-needed face-saving gesture. Warnings of a “harsh revenge” have spawned a collective climate of unease and anxiety. 

But from the taxi driver in the city of Rasht trying to secure a minimum wage to support his children’s school tuition to the widow in Karaj floundering to make ends meet with the mediocre disbursements from the state’s relief fund Komite Emdad, are Iranians willing to be caught in an onerous game of ghost in the graveyard while their allegiance to the ideology that has bred the ongoing clash is diminishing? 

Attitudes toward an armed conflict with Israel, or any other party for that matter, are not homogeneous in a society where there’s no unanimity on any given question. The divisions stoked by the Islamic Republic have become so deep-seated that people even wrangle on such uncontroversial matters as whether to cheer on their national athletes clinching medals in the Olympic Games. It is understandable, then, that perceptions of how a war may affect their fortunes are incongruous.

Defying the Official Narrative

Debate on the Israeli–Palestinian conflict has taken a more rebellious turn, however, courtesy of the relative freedoms occasioned by the growth of social media. Piecemeal deviations from the official narrative have resulted in academics and commentators still tolerated by the establishment speaking out about the epistemes of hostility against Israel. These discursive departures have not emerged overnight.

In the not-so-distant past, the very articulation of the idea of negotiations with the United States would have been construed by the Islamic Republic as sacrilegious. Countercurrents introduced as part of the reform movement, gaining momentum with the election of President Mohammad Khatami in 1997, have depleted the theocracy’s dogma. The proposition of the “heroic flexibility” neologism by the all-powerful supreme leader Khamenei made direct Iran–U.S. talks a possibility in 2013. The inking of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), also known as the Iran nuclear deal, was facilitated as a result. 

The rare compromise faltered when Donald Trump walked away from it in May 2018. But the world had obtained new evidence that even the most stubborn autocracies couldn’t say no to good deals. The JCPOA wasn’t flawless. With its imperfections, it set a new precedent in overcoming diplomatic gridlocks. Above all, in the middle of what wasn’t short of a Cold War, armistice triumphed, even if briefly. 

With Israel, the dynamics have always been more complicated. The expectation of the easing of hostilities, at least by the Islamic Republic, remains a non-sequitur. Iran has consciously reproduced the tensions and wouldn’t be open to diffusing them. Yet, the ruling elite’s intransigence doesn’t mean ordinary Iranians navigating the complex web of survival while wrestling with domestic repression and international sanctions ever had a penchant for military adventures. 

At home, multiple cycles of uprisings against corruption and authoritarianism have been quashed in recent decades, the most glaring instance being a violent crackdown on the Woman, Life, Freedom protests that exploded across Iran in September 2022. Externally, the international community has burdened Iranians with draconian economic sanctions that have scarcely weakened the ruling clerics but made daily life taxing for the citizens. Still, none of these hardships have made Iranians a warlike nation. 

The architects of Iran’s political and religious establishment certainly have sympathizers who happily chant “death to Israel” in state-sanctioned demonstrations. Empirically, this is not the line of thinking the plurality of Iranians subscribe to. Those chants should be contrasted with the surreal sights of students on Iranian university campuses changing their walking routes so that they don’t trample on American and Israeli flags painted on the ground.

The status quo, notwithstanding, is one of turbulence and frenzy. Muscle-flexing between Tehran and Tel Aviv has almost never sounded more alarming. And the Iranian people’s alacrity for peace has never been more pronounced. Partisans of the ruling elite benefit from beating the drums of war, but excluding those fringe voices, it is unlikely that the average citizen will admit they’d like to see a new bout of conflict upending their lives. 

A large segment of Iranian society cannot relate to the possibility of a full-scale war with Israel. Many believe that their country inserting itself in the battle for Palestinian emancipation is intrusive and uncalled-for. There is consensus among middle-class Iranians and the more educated youths that the establishment is better off if it extricates itself from the Arab–Israeli conflict. 

These sentiments are echoed by Palestinians, who do not find Iran’s footprint particularly constructive. Princeton University’s Arab Barometer 2020 showed only 34% of Palestinian public supported improved economic relations with Iran. A survey conducted last December by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research found a mere 30% of West Bank residents and 41% of the people of the besieged Gaza Strip were “satisfied” with Iran’s role in the conflict that followed the October 7 attacks. 

In the same vein, Iranians are resentful that their government has been expending the nation’s assets on an extraterritorial pursuit while the national economy is nosediving. Hyperinflation, unemployment, devaluation of the rial, and unrelenting international sanctions have worked in lockstep to render the economy nearly insolvent. Iranians would rather see their abysmal living conditions improve before the establishment hunkers down to “export the revolution”.

Public disavowal of the unpopular policy of anti-Israel warmongering is not solely driven by a fraught economic landscape. A nation that has lived through a war of expansion waged by the late Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein knows what it means to be gripped in the throes of another strife. Iranians recognize odds will be stacked against them, and are not convinced about the raison d’être for a confrontation with Israel. 

Polls reflecting the attitudes of Iranians toward a potential flareup are sporadic, if not totally absent. Polling in the country has been one of those contraband ventures the government is deeply skeptical about. Every independent poll can potentially indicate the extent of the gap between the state and the people. Last October, an online survey conducted by the Shargh Daily revealed that 84% of the respondents objected to the enforcement of compulsory hijab. The newspaper’s managing director was immediately convicted by the judiciary of spreading falsehood. He issued an apology but defended the authenticity of the results. 

The absence of yardsticks like polls not manipulated by the state makes it difficult to pass judgment about the Iranian people’s preference for or opposition to a face-off with Israel. 

Experiential evidence isn’t scant, though, and it points to an overwhelming resistance to ominous outcomes such as a regional conflagration. Also, available data appear to corroborate the hypothesis that Iranians aren’t in favor of war. In a 2021 poll conducted by the Netherlands-based Group for Analyzing and Measuring Attitudes in Iran to gauge the Iranian people’s attitude to international relations, 65% of the respondents said they were opposed to the government-manufactured motto “Death to Israel”.

As part of parliamentary legislation, Iran’s Ministry of Culture has been conducting a periodic survey of the “values and attitudes of Iranians” since 2000. The last publicly-available survey was conducted in 2015, and results from the fourth edition, completed last year, remain confidential. Media organizations that have been able to access the partial results note that the most significant development, which the Raisi administration probably wished to withhold from the public, is the marked decline in the religiosity of Iranians. 

The 2015 study showed a military invasion of the country was the second-most immediate concern in a list of 16 life-threatening events that could potentially affect respondents. Road accidents and unsafe driving habits were cited as the most serious concern. Participants were asked to assign a value of 1 to 10 to each factor, with 10 being the highest level of threat perception. War scored 7.708 on average. 

There are enough problems Iranians grapple with that they probably aren’t prepared to countenance the misery a conflict of this caliber can bring about.

Voices of Aggression

An upshot of the heterogeneity of Iran’s complicated social collective, despite the leadership’s lack of tolerance for diversity, is the amplification of voices making a case for war. The suit-wearing progenitors of inimical relations with the world are unapologetically advocating for a morally outrageous position—one with a uniquely esoteric appeal. They are urging the Islamic Republic to “finish the job”, knowing that they won’t be paying the price. 

On state TV and in Friday prayer sermons in different cities, Iranian hardliners have been restlessly espousing a Game of Thrones-style match-up against Israel. Earlier in March, a pundit flaunting his Ph.D. in international relations and the array of books he has published, stated in a live interview what many of his like-minded allies are whispering these days.

“Israel is currently playing the role of the Nazi regime [of Germany]. It means if it doesn’t receive a harsh response and is not confronted, the magnitude of war will expand,” Mehdi Khanalizadeh said.

“The missiles we are seeing, the beautiful footage we’re seeing, these drones, they all preclude the war and lay the groundwork for the realization of peace in West Asia,” he said in a show on Iran’s TV 3 after Tehran’s April 13 operation targeting Israeli territory. 

Khanalizadeh is a former member of the Basij militia—the repressive volunteers group affiliated with the IRGC—and is being touted as one of the faces of the Islamic Republic’s well-traveled, English-speaking intelligentsia. He had taken part in the November 2011 storming of the British embassy in Tehran. That event underpinned the suspension of Tehran-London ties; Iran had to pay £1.3 million in damages to the British government before then-Foreign Secretary Phillip Hammond agreed to the resumption of diplomatic relations in 2015. 

Voices like Khanalizadeh’s are not scarce. Deluded by the assumption that swagger would deter an archvillain and forestall further provocations, they aspire to a much-awaited confrontation with Israel, which they think should happen sooner rather than later. This mindset is powered by a blend of their Shia nationalism and militant appetites. 

Shortly after the Gaza war started last year, a cryptic group named the Popular Cyber Network of the Islamic Revolution, operating under the aegis of the IRGC, launched an online campaign titled “I am your opponent”. The function of the petition was to recruit volunteers to travel to the Occupied Territories to fight Israel. 

The website currently shows 12.5 million people are prepared to join the battle. Still, the way the platform is designed has made it possible to cheat. Every user clicking the “expression of readiness” button adds the fighters’ count by one. An individual can be counted as five applicants if they use five different devices to click the same button. 

An illustration printed on the occasion of the petition surpassing 10 million signatures reads, “Millions of Iranians love the annihilation of Israel.” This is, of course, factually misleading as there’s no gauge of the Iranians’ propensity for the upending of political order in Israel or the country ceasing to exist. 

In January 2021, a group of lawmakers submitted a motion to the parliament meant to canonize a set of retaliatory measures in response to the January 3, 2020, killing of the IRGC Quds Force commander Qassem Soleimani. One of the provisions of the bill that eventually failed to muster support to become law demanded the government leverage its resources and pave the way for the dissolution of the State of Israel by 2041. 

Ahmad Naqibzadeh, a professor of political science at the University of Tehran, had said that the parliamentary action was “dramatic” and “ludicrous”, and that it had embarrassed the Iranian people. Calling such proclamations the output of a populist parliament, he questioned in an interview with the Etemaad Daily, “How can the parliament obligate the administration to destroy another country that is a United Nations member state?”

In 2013, Seyed Abdollah Hosseini, head of the Islamic Center of Johannesburg run by the Iranian government, published a book titled “2022, Year of the Collapse of Israel”. The Shia seminarian had predicted using religious scripture and “mathematics” that by 2022, the State of Israel would disappear. The promised year lapsed, and the cleric is still in charge of the well-heeled institution, having faced no accountability.  

In the symphony of pro-war protagonists, what’s more counterintuitive is the increasing tendency of diasporic Iranians to root for war. Some of the most hardcore anti-regime activists have joined the hawks in Tehran and Tel Aviv, encouraging the two rivals to bring their standoff from the sidelines to the center. Their motives may be different, but their conduct is equally startling.  

Their calculations are premised on the conviction that Iran and Israel going to war will wreak so much havoc that as the next step, the theocracy in Tehran will intrinsically implode. They expect the path will be paved for a resurrection of the pre-1979 monarchy or at any rate a secular government that will replace the unpopular ayatollahs. 

On social media and in programs aired by the London and Los Angeles-headquartered Persian-language broadcasters, tacit pleas for war are a common thread. As if a military expedition against a country of 85 million people will not involve any civilian casualties, the figureheads of the exiled opposition don’t believe they need to put on a false front of being worried about the safety of their siblings, grandparents, and friends back home.

Against this backdrop of confusion, the people of Iran are largely firm in their position. They believe there’s no logical justification for such an entanglement, and they don’t wish to be the collateral damage of quests for supremacy. Since 1979, the Islamic Republic has been a key, and often irresponsible, actor in many of the fault lines of the Middle East. But a full-fledged conflict, initiated by either side, is a no-go zone for a lot of Iranians—even if we don’t know the exact numbers.