ISRAEL’s war on Gaza, now in its seventh month, has always carried the risk of spiralling into a wider regional conflagration. After all, the veneer of shadow-boxing between Israel on the one side and Iran and its partners and proxies on the other could only be stretched to a point before it ruptured. That rupture came on the night of April 13 as Iran launched a wave of kamikaze drones and missiles towards Israel. This was the first time after four-and-a-half decades of fiery rhetoric against its ‘Zionist enemy’ that Iran had actually carried out a strike directed at Israeli territory. An immutable red line had been breached, some analysts felt. The gloves were off and a devastating revenge strike by Israel would inevitably take the region closer to the abyss. But is that really the case, or are we simply witnessing a new act in a long-running shadow-boxing drama? The next few days will be crucial as PM Netanyahu weighs US pressure against domestic politics to fashion a response that could have far-reaching consequences. The fire and brimstone that characterise Iran’s declamations in support of the Palestinian cause often conceal an underlying reality that is now quite apparent. The government of the Islamic Republic under its supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei is actually a lot more cautious and risk-averse and has shown little appetite for a frontal confrontation. Its preferred approach towards deterrence is to deploy its advanced capabilities in asymmetric warfare through proxies to send warnings to unfriendly states, even as it maintains a plausible deniability of its own actions. The operative principle, as the old song goes, is ‘samajhne waale samajh gaye hain...’
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