Operation Shield and Arrow looked deceptively similar to the rounds of fighting between Israel and Gaza that happen every couple of years.
There are always some variances in the details, but broadly speaking: Palestinian terrorists shoot a bunch of rockets at Israel, and Israel responds with airstrikes. There are more rockets and more airstrikes. Egypt jumps in to negotiate a ceasefire. There’s a final rocket salvo right before it goes into effect, and the mini-war is over until next year.
There’s good reason to believe that Israel’s enemies thought this round would be different and they would strike a much greater blow. Thanks to Israelis’ resilience, however, the enemies were proven wrong.
Israel was hit by rockets from Lebanon and Gaza, in April, during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, and the leaders of Hamas and Hezbollah, both backed by Iran, met in Beirut, releasing a photo of the occasion under a picture of Iran's former and current Ayatollahs. The message, that the terrorist groups on Israel's borders are working together under Iran's guidance, was clear.
Days before Operation Shield and Arrow began last week, Iranian news site Tasnim published a lengthy article predicting an "Israeli Winter," in contrast with last decade's "Arab Spring." The lengthy analysis provides a litany of Iran-backed threats to Israel from Syria, Lebanon, Gaza, Judea and Samaria, at sea, and in other parts of the Middle East, and points out that Israel has made do with narrow victories. And that’s without even mentioning Iran’s own nuclear program.
"The unification of all areas of resistance and the launching of the Zionist regime is a scenario that the Israelis predicted a decade ago. Why, despite this, no serious action was taken by Israel to prevent the unity of the resistance fronts?" the Tasnim analysts wondered, expressing confidence, of course, at Israel’s impending defeat.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu remarked on day one of Operation Shield and Arrow that “95% of Israel’s security problems come from Iran.”
“We are dealing with an attempt by Iran to start a multi-front campaign against us. My instruction to the IDF and security branches is to be prepared for a multi-front campaign…If we need to, we can do it,” Netanyahu said at a conference for Habithonistim, a right-leaning forum of former senior defense officers.
As Senior Vice President for Research at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies Jonathan Schanzer wrote in Commentary, “Israeli military officials are now openly warning that Israel’s first multi-front war since the 1973 Yom Kippur War may be imminent.” That war would be “coordinated out of the Islamic Republic of Iran, but fought along Israel’s borders by Tehran’s terror proxies.”
Iran has threatened Israel on multiple fronts for years, but the boldness of its proxies and fellow travelers is more intense in 2023.
The mullahs’ mouthpieces at Tasnim gave some reasons for the timing in which Iran chose to try to tighten its vise around Israel. Israel is even worse placed to confront these threats than before "after the defeat of the United States in Afghanistan and Ukraine and Israel being involved in a major internal crisis at the same time...The rapid developments in the region [are] not at all in favor of this regime."