From the moment Hamas launched its unprecedented attack on Israel last weekend, Iran’s role in the massacre has come under scrutiny. Though it does not appear Iran directly orchestrated Saturday’s carnage, the longtime nemesis of Israel actively supports Hamas and has been increasingly wary about diplomatic negotiations between Israel and Saudi Arabia that could further isolate it on the world stage. To gauge what Iran stands to gain or lose from Hamas’s incursion and Israel’s attacks on Gaza, I spoke with Ray Takeyh, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations who is the author of several books on Iran.
The Wall Street Journal reported the other day that Iran had helped plan the Hamas attack, but U.S. government officials say they haven’t seen any confirmation of that, and Iran denies it. Other outlets have reported that Iran was caught unawares by what happened, and the Journal walked back its original claims to say that Iran knew a Hamas operation was in the works but not the specifics of it. How do these conflicting accounts align with what you know?
I would say the following: The Iranian government has a very close relationship with Hamas. It has a relationship that is financial — they do transfer military assistance to them, including projectiles and missiles. That’s acknowledged by Hamas’s leadership. The Hamas leadership are regular visitors to Tehran, and they meet with the highest leaders, including Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. The question of did they order this or not is important, but narrow. It is possible that they didn’t say to Hamas, “Can you launch an operation on Saturday at 7:30?” But would they be unaware that Hamas was planning something? I don’t think so. I don’t think Israeli intelligence or American intelligence were unaware of those reports. They may have misinterpreted the data points that they were getting.
It seems like Israeli and U.S. intelligence were unaware. This was a massive intelligence failure on all sides, from what I’ve read.
I tend to be sensitive about “intelligence failure,” because I’m sure the intelligence community saw things being mobilized, but did not feel that it would lead to conflict — that Hamas was not about to launch an operation irrespective of his adherent military preparations. So it wasn’t failure to detect movement and motion, it was failure to acknowledge that that movement motion could actually lead to conflict.
The Iranians certainly wanted Hamas to attack. Hamas wanted to attack. So there was a meeting of minds. Now, whether there was operational coordination to the level of detail people want to know is important, but in some ways, I think, besides the point.
Well, there’s been speculation that the timing of this attack was intended specifically to destroy or at least delay the big negotiations happening between the U.S., Saudi Arabia, and Israel, which would further isolate Iran and sideline the Palestinians. If Iran wasn’t as intimately involved with the attack as some people thought, that would seem to cast doubt on this motivation.
For the Iranian side, the motivation would be multilayered. There have been shadow, low-intensity conflicts taking place between Iran and Israel for some time. Israelis have successfully seemingly assassinated some Iranian officials, and the Iranians have been trying to assassinate Israeli officials. In Syria, the two sides have gone at it. The Iranians are hoping that their allies will inflict pressure and damage on Israel. So putting pressure on Israeli frontiers would be an aspect of Iranian motivation, and the increasing Saudi-Israeli cooperation would be an aspect of it.
Hamas’s calculations may have been slightly different. Hamas is not Hezbollah — it has its own agenda and its own objectives. In that sense, it’s different in terms of its relationship with Iran. Their motivation may have been, to some extent, to scuttle what is happening, to inflict damage on Israel, which always works for them. So the two sides may have overlapping motivations and slightly different ones, but the conclusion that they both arrived at would be that they should do something on the Israel front. They both sense regional politics, I think, better than Israelis or the Saudis or the Americans, because they seem to have understood that what’s agreed on in conference rooms can be undone by the street. They understood that street politics still mattered. A lot of people in America didn’t.
What you’re saying is that Arab countries’ rapprochement with Israel over the last few years is not broadly popular in those countries.
Yes, that’s right. Only 3 percent of Saudis are supportive, I think, something like that. These were agreements between Israelis, Americans, and Arab despots who are afraid of the people they rule. The Iranians understood that, because they knew that street politics hadn’t left the Middle East. They’re right.
So an attack of this scale could be something of a happy surprise for Iran.
They’re jubilant up to a point. As Israelis go into Gaza, they get bogged down. There’ll be civilian casualties, there’ll be international programs and all that stuff. And that essentially preoccupies Israelis for some time if they’re insisting, as they rightfully should, to cleanse Gaza of Hamas. And then what do you do with Gaza? Who rules it? Nobody wants it. Israelis are going to be busy for a very long time, and that suits the Iranians just fine.
So why jubilant only up to a point?
If things get out of hand, that could lead to a more direct Israeli-Iranian confrontation, then not so. So that’s the angle that one has to watch. But at this point, I think Israelis have their hands full.
Since Saturday, there have been limited exchanges of fire between Israel and Hezbollah on Israel’s northern border. Hezbollah is much more a direct Iranian proxy than Hamas is. Do you think Iran would want them to take the fight to Israel now or be a bit more restrained?
This is just my guess, because people are throwing out the old assumptions. But my guess is they would not want the northern border to be inflamed, because then there’s a real risk of a confrontation that could drag Iran potentially into it, and it certainly would be very damaging to Hezbollah. Obviously, it’d be substantially damaging to Israel — Hezbollah has 150,000 rockets and so forth. But I think they would want the Israelis to be preoccupied with Gaza and essentially be mired in that particular quagmire. But we’re in a situation where things can be unpredictable and things can get out of hand.
Yes, we’re talking about an event that nobody predicted in the first place, and then asking people to make predictions based on that event.
Exactly. We’re also talking about an event where the two protagonists, Israelis and Hamas, are both talking about throwing out the old playbook. Hamas certainly threw away the old playbook with this attack on Israel, which is far more substantial than anything it has done before. Israelis are talking about throwing out their playbook of retaliation and retreat. So if everybody’s discarding traditional assumptions and old playbooks, then we may be in a new era.
Probably not a good one.
Certainly not a good one. I’m just thinking the laws of gravity still hold on the northern front. These are famous last words.
Going back to the big Saudi-Israel-U.S. deal — again, this is something that we can only speculate about, but do you think those negotiations are dead? Delayed? Or we don’t know?
I think it’s dead for now. Because what is the practical value of that rapprochement for the Israelis? The Saudis are supposed to present themselves as a regional actor of consequence. Well, this regional actor of consequence certainly exercised no restraint on Hamas.
But could they have exercised restraint on Hamas if they wanted to?
Probably not. But if they haven’t, then what is the practical value of that rapprochement? And for the Saudis, I think you always saw them hedging. They were negotiating with the Israelis, but they were also negotiating a mobilization agreement with the Iranians. Saudi Arabia is not the rock you want to build your church on in the Middle East.
Iran has seen a lot of domestic turmoil over the last couple of years — huge protest movements that may be reigniting again. Could this attack help the hard-liners maintain their power?
This does not help the Iranian regime at home, because the Iranian people are not Saudis. They don’t care about Arab conflicts or Arab civil wars. The regime has gotten the country involved in these Arab conflicts whose costs are obvious. There isn’t much benefit as far as the average Iranian is concerned. They don’t care which set of Arabs lives in the Gaza Strip. That’s different from public opinion in places like Saudi Arabia and Egypt and so forth. And it’s different from public opinion in the West Bank, where people are supportive of Hamas. Not so much in Iran. This doesn’t work among the Persians.
It’s almost like an inverse of the split between public and elite opinion in Saudi Arabia and other countries leaning toward peace with Israel.
Exactly. Getting involved in this particular conflict for reasons that are not obvious, and certainly not compelling, at the time when the country is in economic distress — this doesn’t address the domestic quandaries that the Islamic Republic has.
Presumably the Iranian government doesn’t really care much about public opinion and just wants some level of chaos.
Ideologues have their own perspective, their own values. They think the Iranian people should care about this, and if they don’t, they’re all wrong.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
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