Israel faces a Shakespearean dilemma – to retaliate or not to retaliate, that is the question

After Iran’s unprecedented missile attack on Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu must consider his next move dispassionately, says Israel’s leading foreign affairs adviser Alon Pinkas. To return fire would lead almost inevitably to a region-wide conflict – but the shocks would also be felt around the world, from the US to China

Prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu after the Iranian missile attacks on Israel (Israeli prime minister’s Spokesperson)

Israel’s current Iran policy conundrum can be concisely summed up by paraphrasing Prince Hamlet: “To retaliate or not to retaliate, that is the question. Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, or to take arms against a sea of troubles and by opposing end them.”

Two significant paradigm shifts occurred in the last two weeks in the semi-belligerent Israeli-Iranian relationship. The first was Israel’s 1 April strike against Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps generals in an annexe of the Iranian embassy in Damascus, Syria, killing four. It was an expression of “strategic proportionality”, meaning that Israel hit Iran directly, rather than its proxies throughout the Middle East, as it has done before. Israel has operated against Iran inside Iranian territory before – but that was part of a decades-long covert war. That war had rules of the game and rules of engagement. That mould was broken in Damascus.

The second was Iran’s audacious retaliation last weekend. In the small hours of Sunday morning, Iran launched almost 200 armed drones, 36 cruise missiles and approximately 110 surface-to-surface missiles. Although it was a retaliation that Tehran pledged would be coming, the massive attack represented a potential game changer in that it struck Israeli territory directly. The fact that the vast majority of the missiles and drones were intercepted and destroyed in mid-air by Israel, the US, Britain, France and, most notably, Jordan, and the fact that the damage was minimal, the scale and scope of the attack, again, broke the mould.

So now, Israel is facing a major dilemma: to retaliate or not to retaliate.

An Israeli retaliatory strike, commensurate with the scale of the Iranian attack, would not merely represent a tit-for-tat reaction, but may also potentially constitute escalation, with far-reaching consequences and regional implications.

That brings us back to Israel’s Damascus strike. While the targeted individuals certainly deserved their fate, given their deep and long complicity in sponsoring, funding and inciting terrorism and providing arms shipments, the timing was reckless and myopic. In the context of the Gaza war still raging – with Hezbollah, Iran’s heavily armed proxy in Lebanon constantly launching rockets into Israel, and most importantly the US defining its paramount interest as preventing escalation, ever since the Hamas attack on Israel on 7 October – someone in Israel either forgot to conduct or recklessly ignored the cost-benefit and cost-effectiveness matrix.

An Israeli retaliation could almost inevitably lead to a broad escalation and a region-wide conflict. This may affect oil prices, commercial maritime routes from China to Europe, and even US and Nato policy on Ukraine, given Iran’s close ties and mutual support with Russia. Yet failure to respond would set in place a new paradigm, that Iran can attack Israel with impunity. With lessons learnt, the next round may not be as innocuous as this one turned out to be.

A decision to retaliate is not straightforward. It includes a menu of options pertaining to the scale, timing and type of targets, but the Iranian reaction may be an intangible that Israel cannot assess, clearly after failing to correctly assess the reaction to the Damascus operation.

As is always the case in Israel, there’s a political dimension. Benjamin Netanyahu has long ago defined the “Iranian threat” as his raison d’etre. He likens Iran to Nazi Germany, and often casts himself as Winston Churchill. However, his inept formulation of strategy and his Iran policy over the years has been a colossal failure.

It began with vociferously opposing the Iran nuclear deal (aka JCPOA) and continued with his encouragement of Donald Trump to unilaterally withdraw the US from the agreement. That strategic debacle resulted in an emboldened Iran, which progressed in its uranium enrichment capacity and is now a nuclear-threshold state.

Now, Netanyahu wants to broaden the Gaza war into an Israeli-Iranian confrontation that, conceivably, would drag in the United States. That is why the issue of whether or not to retaliate has become an equally American matter – and why the US is pressuring Israel to revert to the old paradigm.

Alon Pinkas is a former Israeli consul-general in the US and was political adviser to two former prime ministers, Shimon Peres and Ehud Barak