[Music]
The war between Israel and Iran is a
conflict that’s been building for
decades and is now spiraling out of
control. The Israelis began this phase
with a huge wave of strikes on June the
13th that have continued for days,
dealing damaging blows to Iran’s nuclear
weapons program and taking out key
scientific and military personnel.
Iran’s response has been to fire missile
and drone barges while some Israeli
leaders speak openly of regime change in
Thran. So, are you going to target the
Supreme Leader? We’re doing what we need
to do. The threat of war between Israel
and Iran has hung over the Middle East
for more than 40 years. And we look at
some of the key events and alliances
that have shaped this proxy war and
brought it out of the shadows. The new
Jewish state is born. Iran and Israel’s
relationship used to be very different.
After the creation of Israel in 1948,
Iran was the second Muslim majority
nation to recognize the newly formed
state. The two countries had diplomatic
relations. Israel imported Iranian oil
and there were daily flights connecting
Tel Aviv and Tehran with a substantial
Jewish community living in Iran.
But then came the Iranian revolution of
1979. Iran’s former leader the sha who
was seen as a puppet of the US and the
UK was overthrown in a violent coup. In
his place Ayatollah Kamani took power
and from the very beginning of his rule
the new religious republic described
Israel as an enemy of Islam. the little
Satan to its powerful ally America, the
great Satan.
Iran embraced the Palestinian cause,
handing the hastily abandoned and
ransacked Israeli embassy in Thran over
to the Palestinian Liberation
Organization under Yasa Arafat.
Iran under its new leaders called on all
of the Muslim world to unite against
Israel.
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But despite becoming enemies, the two
countries have chosen to work together
in the past when it strengthens their
cause. In a marriage of convenience,
Israel provided military equipment to
Iran to support its long war against
Saddam Hussein’s Iraqi forces in the
1980s.
Iran was desperate for weapons,
specifically more advanced weapons from
the US that Israel could provide. And
for Israel, the calculation was that
while Iran’s rhetoric was alarming, it
was Iraq and Saddam Hussein that posed
the more immediate threat. The war
between Iraq and Iran eventually ended
in a stalemate in 1988, and it had a
profound effect on Thran’s thinking.
Firstly, the need for powerful weapons,
missiles, and nuclear power. Iraq’s use
of ballistic missiles on Iranian cities
made Thran develop their own. And while
Ayatollah Kamani had initially declared
nuclear weapons unislamic, his
replacement Ali Ham told the country’s
nuclear scientists regarding atomic
energy, “We need it now to let our
enemies know that we can defend
ourselves.” That effectively marked the
start of the Islamic Republic’s nuclear
ambitions with the aim of joining the
only other nuclear power in the Middle
East, Israel. Israel itself does not
publicly acknowledge it has nuclear
weapons, but it’s believed to have been
developing an arsenal since the 1960s.
And secondly, the war in Iraq exposed
how isolated Iran was in the region with
Syria its only real ally in the Middle
East. The end of the conflict now
allowed Iran to focus on building not
just the state, but also its alliances
with anti-Israel forces in the region.
As far back as 1982, even as the country
was receiving weapons from Israel, Iran
helped the formation of Hezbollah, a
militant Islamic group fighting Israel
in Lebanon. Iran also backed Hamas and
Palestinian Islamic Jihad in Gaza, which
were formed in the 1980s, and they also
supported the Houthis in Yemen, who
emerged in the early 1990s. Iran
supported the Assad regime in Syria
throughout his reign. And following
Saddam Hussein’s removal from power in
2003, Iran has backed dozens of Shia
militia in Iraq. Iran’s extensive
influence in the region and its ongoing
nuclear program are central to Israel’s
existential fears. Which brings us to
Israel’s most crucial ally, America.
Israel security is completely tied to
the United States, which has provided
substantial military support and
brokered diplomatic ties with regional
players such as Egypt, Jordan, the UAE,
Qatar, and Bahrain. And political
leaders in both the US and Israel have
long viewed Iran as a hostile and
dangerous actor with US imposed
sanctions on the Islamic Republic, a
near permanent feature since 1979.
This was Israel’s new young prime
minister speaking to the US Congress
about the Iranian threat back in 1996.
If Iran were to acquire nuclear weapons,
this could preage catastrophic
consequences.
By the time Benjamin Netanyahu returned
to power in 2009, Israel and the US were
already collaborating to sabotage Iran’s
nuclear program. A sophisticated cyber
attack that began in 2005 targeted the
computers controlling Iran’s uranium
enrichment facilities, severely
disrupting nuclear fuel production in
2010. Netanyahu also took more direct
action. Israel carried out multiple
assassinations of key nuclear scientists
between 2010 and 2020, including the
head of Iran’s nuclear program, Mosen
Fakrazad. Prime Minister, but while the
US and Israel agreed that Iran posed a
threat, there was a difference of
opinion between President Obama and
Netanyahu when it came to Iran’s nuclear
future. Netanyahu insisted that Tran
should not enrich any uranium, whereas
Obama realized that in order to get a
long-term diplomatic solution, there
would need to be some concessions.
Relations between the US and Israel
chilled in 2015 after the signing of the
joint comprehensive plan of action,
widely known as the Iran nuclear deal.
This agreement negotiated by Iran with
the UN Security Council and backed by
Obama placed restrictions on Iran’s
nuclear program and allowed inspections
in exchange for sanctions relief.
Because of this deal, the international
community will be able to verify that
the Islamic Republic of Iran will not
develop a nuclear weapon. Netanyahu
vehemently opposed the deal because it
still allowed Iran to enrich some
uranium, calling it a mistake of
historic proportions. The Iran nuclear
deal put Netanyahu’s government in
direct opposition with Washington over
Iran. But that was all about to change.
This is one of the worst deals ever made
by any country.
Donald Trump’s surprise victory in
November 2016 was a boost to Netanyahu
with the new president inviting him to
the White House in his first month in
office.
Then during a trip to Israel, Trump made
a clear break from Obama’s approach to
Iran with the US President and Netanyahu
now firmly aligned. Together, we can
thwart Iran’s unbridled ambition to
become a nuclear weapons state.
In 2018, during a presentation involving
a slideshow in front of a backdrop of
files and CDs, Netanyahu said that Iran
had lied to the world about its nuclear
intentions when signing the 2015 deal.
And just a few days later, Donald Trump
withdrew the US from the agreement. This
was a horrible one-sided deal that
should have never ever been made. Trump
reimposed sanctions on Iran and
assassinated their top general, Casim
Solommani in 2020 while he was visiting
Iraq as a US president began to pressure
Iran in an effort to sign a new expanded
agreement. But that deal has never
materialized. and instead critics say
the US withdrawal from the 2015 deal has
seen increasing violations of its terms
by Iran and an acceleration of the
nuclear program. In early 2023, a
confidential report by the International
Atomic Energy Agency said it had
detected uranium particles enriched to
83.7%
at one of Iran’s nuclear plants, very
close to weapons grade.
Then that same year, events in Israel
set the stage for a conflict with Iran
that would erupt nearly 2 years later.
The October the 7th attacks by Hamas
were the deadliest on Israeli soil since
the nation’s founding.
Netanyahu’s government immediately
retaliated, waging a war in Gaza that
Palestinian officials say has killed
more than 55,000 people.
While the military threat from Hamas has
all but been removed, Israel has
weakened other Iranian allies, invading
southern Lebanon and decimating
Hezbollah’s fighting force and killing
its leader, Hassan Nazalla. They carried
out joint strikes with the US on Houthis
in Yemen. And they also bombed the
Iranian consulate in the Syrian capital
of Damascus in April 2024, as well as
assassinating Hamas’s political leader,
Isma Haneir, while he was in the Iranian
capital, Tehran, in July of the same
year.
When Syria’s president Fashia al-Assad
was overthrown in December 2024, Israel
took the opportunity to destroy any
remaining threats to Israel’s air force
within Syria, effectively creating a
safe corridor for future strikes on
Iran. And so in just 14 months, Iran’s
network of proxy military support was
all but gone.
So the attacks on Iran come at a time
when Thran has few allies to turn to.
Israel’s targeting and killing of key
Iranian military personnel and nuclear
experts a seemingly non-existent Iranian
air defense and Israel’s own ability to
defend against most retalitary strikes
has given Netanyahu a clear upper hand.
But the war again highlights his
nation’s reliance on the United States.
While Israel could not have carried out
its attacks on June the 13th without the
Americans being made aware of their
plans, the US has resisted direct
involvement in the conflict so far. I
may do it. I may not do it. I mean,
nobody knows what I’m going to do. Trump
has demanded unconditional surrender,
but he’s no fan of conflict, having
spent the past decade in politics
promising not to get America involved in
any more wars. What the US president
decides to do next is the central
question in this conflict. Israel’s
objective of destroying Iran’s nuclear
program is not possible without the use
of heavy bunker busting ordinance which
only the United States possesses. or if
the US and Israel are aiming for Iran’s
full surrender or even regime change,
then Ali Ham shows little sign of
offering that.
For more than 40 years, the potential
for war between Israel and Iran has cast
a shadow over global politics. The
attacks since June the 13th have changed
everything and brought this fight out
into the open.
And now to discuss more about Iran and
Israel’s long and fraught relationship,
I’m joined by Sir Lawrence Freriedman,
Emiritus Professor of War Studies at
King’s College, London. So um, Professor
Freriedman, was this conflict inevitable
um, at all ever since 1979 when we saw
the modern relations between Iran and
Israel uh, effectively end? Nothing is
inevitable. There’s always choices uh
and a number of choices have been made
and at some points the possibilities not
of reconciliation but of some sort of
peaceful coexistence were there but the
relations have certainly been fraught.
Um
not wholly immediately afterwards um but
certainly uh once Israel invaded Lebanon
in 1982 and the rise of Hezbollah uh
this possibility has always been there.
And when we talk about the history of
these two nations, you know, there seem
to have been these big events, the
aftermath of the Iran Iraq war, the end
of the Iran nuclear deal in 2015, and
then October the 7th, those key moments.
Are any of those particularly pivotal,
do you think, in terms of where we are
right now? Well, they’re all I mean,
they’re a sequence and one leads to the
other. So, there was a deal in 2015. In
fact, in in principle, it’s still in
existence. But the United States walked
away from it. Uh Iran responded almost
inevitably by enriching more uranium and
uh uh and the Obama administration had
sold this as something that could at
least keep the cap on until about now.
Uh that moment was coming to an end
anyway. So this year was always going to
be pretty crucial. I think really what
made the difference and what made these
sort of attacks possible was uh the
events after 7th of October and the
dismantling of the military capacity
first of kamas and then of
the downfall of Syria and that creates a
situation in which Iran is left pretty
looking pretty weak and able to help its
um its proxies when they’re being
pushed. Uh and they have their own
exchanges. This isn’t the first exchange
of fire between Israel and Iran. There
were a couple of occasions last year and
on the last occasion Israel took out a
lot of Iran’s air defense capabilities.
So, it created the conditions for this.
uh then that was all put on hold while
the Trump administration uh tried to
negotiate and that uh and it’s the end
of that or what looked like the end of
that that prompted the Israeli attack
and as you say one of the key um
influences behind Netanyahu making this
decision now is the weakness of Iran’s
proxies given that Iran has spent all
these decades as you say since 1982
building up these proxies within the
region
the fact that within 2 years they are so
weakened after the events of October 7th
and what’s happened does that show well
a failure on Iran’s part to not have a
much stronger axis it’s an interesting
question because I think they were
keeping back as a deterrent so if Israel
had tried something like this again or
the Americans had tried something like
this then they would have an immediate
source of retaliation I think what
happened was that when Hamas launched it
attack which I don’t think or Iran
really knew was coming on the 7th of
October
felt they had to do something. So rather
than go all in with Hamas at the time
which probably would have given Israel
some real difficulties when it was still
coping with pretty strong Hamas uh then
comes in on the other side of the
country a pretty strong instead of that
they just sort of held their own. they
they there was some exchanges of fire,
evacuations on both sides of the border
um but nothing really that big and then
as soon as kamas was effectively
defeated as certainly as an offensive
force then
uh Israel turned on it it couldn’t cope.
So I think it’s it’s a it’s a salutary
exercise because it shows that if you’ve
got a pretty ruthless adversary with
pretty uh well-developed capabilities,
uh however tough and robust you may
sound when it cames to the crunch, they
just couldn’t cope. I think what’s going
on in Iran at the moment is is a real
blow to the clerical regime because uh
they’ve built up all this massive
missile stalk, you know, it’s not
trivial. It’s not uh doing no damage at
all to Israel, but it’s much easier for
Israel to absorb what Iran is doing to
to them than it is for Iran to absorb
what Israel is doing to Iran. And within
that, given that Israel has been able to
so successfully um attack and
assassinate um military leaders, senior
figures within Iran, does that not also
show, you know, that there are leaks
within the Iranian system, that Israel’s
been able to penetrate it quite easily?
Again, we’re talking about even if
America doesn’t get involved, that
Israel has really penetrated this the
upper echelons of the Iranian regime.
the extent of Israeli penetration of of
higher levels of of the is Iranian
system has been evident for some time. I
mean, they’ve always seem to have a
pretty good idea on what’s going on,
who’s where. Uh, and many assassinations
have taken place over the years. The the
level of knowledge is extremely um
impressive and it has an impact and that
must be very scary for the Iranians. Uh
and and it’s not just the ability to
target individuals. Um they’re also able
to target now with with free access over
Iranian air a lot of their ballistic
missile launchers, stocks and so on.
This again should risks them losing a
lot of what they based their regional
power upon. So, um I think it’s the
combination of Israel’s capabilities uh
in in hardware and its knowledge of of
what’s going on inside Iran that’s put
Iran at a real disadvantage. And so,
just finally, does this war, as you
know, scary and and worrying as it is
right now, does it have the potential
possibly for a long-lasting peace in the
region?
Well, I mean, I think what’s going on at
the moment is is reshaping the whole
region. Um, the Palestinian issue, uh,
in some ways is in a wretched state
because Israel sees far less interest in
a in a two-state solution than it did
before, and there’s nobody putting
particular pressure on it. On the other
hand, um, Hezbollah is now a much weaker
force in Lebanon. You’ve got a
completely new government in Syria uh
which has made some positive moves and
the big question is whether the clerical
regime lasts in um in tyran and if my
view is if it falls and it’s not
impossible it won’t be because of Israel
other than the fact that that uh a lot
of Iranians must question whether um the
sort of the the uh the rhetoric and and
the determination to be the leader of
anti-Israeli forces in the region has
really been a good strategic choice
choice for the country. But it it’s
basically the state of the economy uh
the the repression the lack of
individual freedom. Those are the sort
of things in the end that that weaken
the regime probably fatally if it
happens and it will happen for by
Iranian means and for Iranian reasons I
don’t think by Israel or the United
States can overthrow the regime as such.
Professor Sir Lawrence Friedman, thank
you very much for your time. Thank you.
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