By Josef Olmert

On April 1, a targeted Israeli strike killed two Iranian generals and five other personnel in Damascus. In response, on April 13, Iran attacked Israel directly, launching over 300 drones and missiles. Israel, with its Iron Dome air defense system, was reportedly able to intercept 99% of the incoming weapons and suffered no casualties. On April 19, Israel retaliated with a limited strike in Isfahan, in central Iran, also with no casualties.

Iran and Israel have not yet killed each other’s citizens on their own soil with these strikes, but they are coming dangerously close to war. How did we get here?

Conflicts do not just erupt out of the blue. There is always history involved, especially in the Middle East. The State of Israel and the Islamic Republic of Iran have a history of bad blood that dates back to the latter’s very inception in February 1979.

The Islamic Revolution changed everything in Iran, obliterating the legacy of the failed monarchy. The monarchy had followed a foreign policy rooted in Iranian nationalism. In this context, Israel was not an enemy, but rather a very helpful collaborator. Iran’s new leaders, the mullahs, however, adopted an Islamist foreign policy. In their picture of the Middle East Israel was the enemy, the Little Satan, and the regional sub-contractor of the Great Satan, the US.

The mullahs pursued the strategy of proxy war against Israel from the very beginning. The first area of this indirect collision was Lebanon, where already in 1979 the Shia movement called Islamic Amalbecame the nucleus of the........

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