Regime Reckoning

Netanyahu’s airstrikes on Iran aim not just to degrade its nuclear capacity, but to unseat its rulers.

For decades, Israel has warned of the allegedly existential menace posed by Iran’s theocratic regime following the latter’s race to turn nuclear and its sponsorship of terror against the Jewish state cloaked in revolutionary zeal. Last week, after years of shadow wars and covert skirmishes, Benjamin Netanyahu took the fight to the heart of Iran’s military elite. The Israeli prime minister, often derided for his hawkish instincts, launched Operation Rising Lion in what may become his most consequential gambit yet: to shake the foundations of the Islamic Republic.

The missile strikes, which were aimed at dismantling Iran’s nuclear facilities, were surgical and devastating besides killing several of Iran’s military and scientific elite. Expectedly, Tehran retaliated by lobbing missiles against Israeli cities.

But Netanyahu’s ambitions go further. His language, unusually directed at the Iranian people themselves, suggests a long-term goal in encouraging a popular uprising to bring down Iran’s repressive Islamic regime of the Ayatollahs that has dominated the country since 1979.

The strategy is risky. For years, Western efforts to engage Iran diplomatically have yielded diminishing returns. The clerical regime has advanced its nuclear enrichment, expanded its proxy networks across the Arab world and brutally repressed dissent at home. Netanyahu’s view, long unpopular in European capitals but quietly acknowledged in others, is that Iran’s regime is a destabilising force whose survival is antithetical to regional peace.

The patience with Iran ran out on the morning of October 7, 2023, when thousands of Hamas militants (aided and abetted by Iran) broke through Israeli border fences and launched the bloodiest assault in the country’s history, they were not merely testing the resilience of the Israeli state. Since then, Netanyahu has unleashed a military doctrine with few recent parallels in Israeli history.

Rather than contain or manage the problem, Israel is now systematically dismantling Iran’s axis of resistance by pounding Gaza, finishing off the Hamas’ leadership, decimating Iran’s biggest proxy Hezbollah in Lebanon, and now striking at the very ‘head of the snake.’

The latest strikes inside Iran are the culmination of a campaign whose tempo has only increased with time. While many view these events as escalation, the Israeli strategy is far from impulsive. It is built on a history of targeted deterrence stretching back to the 1960s, when Israeli agents tracked down and killed figures responsible for anti-Israel attacks in Europe and beyond.

During the early 2000s, Israel responded to the Second Intifada with a policy of ‘mowing the lawn’ - a metaphor for periodic, tactical military operations meant to degrade but not destroy adversaries like Hamas and Hezbollah.

The October 7 attack changed that calculus. Netanyahu’s government concluded that limited deterrence was no longer viable. Hamas’s incursion was too brutal, too expansive and too deliberate to be seen as anything but a broader Iranian proxy operation. Israel responded by striking not just at the foot soldiers of these ‘resistance’ movements, but reaching upward into their strategic and political leadership - whether in Gaza, Beirut, Damascus or now, Tehran.

The results have been stark. In Gaza, Hamas’s tunnel networks have been systematically collapsed and its command echelons severely weakened. In Lebanon, Israel has launched targeted strikes against Hezbollah commanders, munitions convoys, and military infrastructure. It has repeatedly pushed Hezbollah forces further north of the Litani River, disrupting Tehran’s most capable militia in the Levant.

Syria has been another front in this undeclared war. Israel has carried out hundreds of airstrikes on IRGC facilities and Iranian intelligence posts to erode Iran’s ability to project force westward.

What distinguishes the current campaign is the willingness to escalate openly. Unlike previous Israeli governments, Netanyahu has decided to make Iran pay for its regional misadventures. The strikes on Iran represent not just a bold military gamble, but a strategic vision that seeks to redraw the regional order by dismantling its most dangerous pillar. Regardless of how comprehensively he succeeds, Netanyahu’s actions will undoubtedly shape the Middle East for years to come.