Australia / Israel Review

Masoud Pezeshkian was formally sworn in as Iran’s president on July 30. In the run-up to his inauguration, the question being asked in Israel was would this 69-year-old so-called “reformist” have any impact beyond the domestic arena. Specifically, would he be given a sufficiently long leash by Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei to seek a renewed nuclear accord, and would he oversee any changes to Iran’s extremely hostile actions against Israel through Iran’s network of proxies? 

However, those questions were soon pushed aside as two major events rocked the Middle East, leaving it perhaps on the brink of all-out war. A few hours after Pezeshkian’s inauguration, Fuad Shukr, the military leader of Iran’s Lebanese proxy, Hezbollah, was killed by an Israeli air strike in Beirut. That attack came in response to a rocket fired by Hezbollah which killed 12 children in the Druze village of Majdal Shams three days earlier. Another few hours passed and in Teheran an explosion in a guest house belonging to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) killed Ismail Haniyeh, the leader of Hamas’ political wing. Israel did not claim that hit – but neither did it deny responsibility. Either way, Teheran has promised revenge against Israel. 

After Haniyeh’s death, Pezeshkian said Iran would make Israel “regret its actions”. 

An earlier glimpse of where the “reformist” President might go regarding Iran’s war on Israel came shortly after his second-round run-off win against the hardliner Saeed Jalili, when he sent a letter to Hezbollah Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah pledging Iran’s continued support for its powerful Lebanese proxy, which has been engaged in a war of attrition with Israel since Oct. 8, 2023 and is now also threatening massive revenge for the killing of Shukr. “The Islamic Republic of Iran has always supported the resistance of the people in the region against the illegitimate Zionist regime,” Pezeshkian wrote, adding, “Supporting the resistance is rooted in the fundamental policies of the Islamic Republic of Iran and will continue with strength.”

As to whether Iran will seek a renewed nuclear accord under Pezeshkian, his appointment of former nuclear negotiator Abbas Araghchi as foreign minister suggests that he will at least seek to offer the Supreme Leader an option to return to some version of the 2015 JCPOA nuclear deal reached under the Obama Administration – for which Araghchi was a key Iranian negotiator.

Iran has been gradually abandoning all its commitments under the JCPOA in the years since then-US President Donald Trump unilaterally withdrew the United States from the deal in May 2018, shortly after Israeli PM Binyamin Netanyahu gave a press conference publicising information obtained from a Mossad heist of Iran’s nuclear archive revealing the extent of Iran’s deceptions and progress towards nuclear weapons.

In 2021, Araghchi served as Iran’s chief nuclear negotiator in backchannel talks between Teheran and Washington in Vienna aimed at reviving the 2015 deal. Those talks were complicated by the election in June 2021 of hardline president Ebrahim Raisi, who replaced Araghchi with JCPOA opponent Ali Bagheri-Kani. While the talks went on through early 2023, the Biden Administration eventually admitted they were hopeless. 

Following the death of Raisi and his Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian in a helicopter crash on May 19, Khamenei allowed the “reformist” Pezeshkian to run for election, after refusing to allow any reformist candidate to run during the 2021 elections when Raisi came to power. Khamenei was perhaps motivated by his country’s dire economic and social situation. Protests over issues such as enforcement of the hijab and the poor state of the economy have rocked Iran over recent years.

Pezeshkian, a cardiac surgeon and former health minister, has promised a number of reforms on the domestic front, including reining in the morality police – the death in 2022 of a Kurdish Iranian student Mahsa Amini at the hands of the morality police for improperly wearing a hijab triggered the country’s worst protests since 2009 – promoting women and members of the country’s ethnic minorities to management positions in the public service and reducing internet censorship.

Regarding the economy, he has acknowledged that Iran cannot prosper without sanctions being lifted, and for that to happen, he will need to return to some kind of nuclear deal with the US and the West. 

Yet that might not be so easy: After Pezeshkian’s election, State Department spokesperson Mathew Miller said the US had “no expectations that this will lead to a fundamental change in Iran’s direction or its policies.” 

Nevertheless, the Biden Administration is likely to be nowhere near as tough on a renewed Iran deal as Donald Trump would be should he return to power following the November elections in the US. Khamenei and Pezeshkian will now need to consider whether to gamble on a victory for Kamala Harris and the Democrats or take the risk that they will find themselves having to deal with Trump again. 

In his previous term in office, Trump deployed a policy of “maximum pressure” against Iran, applying crippling sanctions and assassinating IRGC commander Qassem Soleimani. Trump considers the Biden Administration far too lax on Iran and has criticised it for not sufficiently enforcing sanctions that are still ostensibly on the books, especially those limiting oil sales. Iranian oil sales to China during the years Biden was president have allowed Iran to make up for much of its lost revenues.

“The problem is Biden has done nothing with [the deal]. I ended it. But we would have had a deal… they were broke. They didn’t have any money for Hamas… they had no money for Hezbollah,” Trump recently told Bloomberg. 

Israel’s Netanyahu Government could only accept a deal if it includes Iran’s ballistic missile program – the means of delivering a nuclear weapon – and limitations on Iran’s regional proxies, but these were never included in the original JCPOA. Biden or Harris would almost certainly not demand to include these elements in a new deal, and Trump would have to bring the regime to its knees to achieve one including them. 

For Netanyahu, Pezeshkian is likely to recall former Iranian reformist president Hassan Rouhani who signed the JCPOA in 2015. Netanyahu called him a “wolf in sheep’s clothing,” as opposed to his hardline predecessor Mahmoud Ahmadinejad – called “a wolf in wolf’s clothing” – who would frequently issue threats to erase Israel from the map and engage in Holocaust denial.

Yet, Iran has become increasingly belligerent of late via its real ruler, the Supreme Leader: “The divine promise to eliminate the Zionist entity will be fulfilled, and we will see the day when Palestine will rise from the river to the sea,” Khamenei reportedly told a senior Hamas official at Raisi’s funeral in May.

Iran has made dramatic progress with its nuclear enrichment that has left it only weeks away from producing enough highly enriched uranium for several nuclear warheads. Meanwhile, several Iranian officials have made worrying claims that Iran has mastered all aspects of the nuclear weapons cycle and may be on the verge of changing its nuclear policy to openly build such weapons. 

I spoke to a former head of the Mossad’s intelligence division, Haim Tomer, to get a sense of how the Israeli intelligence community sees the situation in Iran. The conversation took place before the Shukr and Haniyeh killings, and do not make for easy reading. 

Tomer said that Israel does not know Pezeshkian “well enough” but that it makes little difference, as it is the Supreme Leader in consultation with his defence chiefs who makes decisions on security in Iran. 

He expects Teheran to wait to see where things go in the US elections before making any decision on nuclear talks and that Pezeshkian will serve the regime “as someone who the West can talk with” in the event that it faces real pressure. On the domestic front, he can serve as a “reformist president” that can be a card to “broadcast internal messaging to calm the population” if protests against the regime spread again. 

Tomer told me about a recent discussion at a closed forum on Iran in which there was a view held by many intelligence officials that, while there is no doubt that a majority of Iranians want to see real reform and moderation of the Islamic Republic, allowing Pezeshkian to win the elections was no more than a ploy to give the people in Iran the feeling that they are getting what they want.

As I pressed him on the nuclear issue, and in what direction Iran can be expected to head, Tomer took me back to current events, especially in the wake of the Majdal Shams rocket attack.

He said that while Hamas launched the October 7 attack, probably without Iran’s direct knowledge, the consensus among Israeli analysts is that from a few days after the start of the war, it has become clear that Iran is calling the shots, especially when it comes to Hezbollah in Lebanon and the Houthis in Yemen.

“Hezbollah does not fire a bullet at Israel without Iranian approval,” he says. “Hezbollah works under Iranian strategic dictates and, with the Houthis as well, Iranian officers are sitting in command rooms. One can say this is almost direct Iranian fire on Israel.”

He explained that Iran has changed the way it perceives Israel. In the past, the Iranian view was that Israel was stronger than its enemies and the only way to combat it was through asymmetric warfare. The second stage of evolution was that Iran and its proxies sought to deter Israel to prevent it from attacking them as they built their strength. But the analysis of Iran’s and Hezbollah’s latest statements shows they are developing a belief that they can now defeat Israel: “They are operating with a sense of confidence that stems from an evaluation that Israel is not so strong and that the US may not back Israel all the way.”

At the moment, he said, with Iran close to gaining nuclear breakout capability, it still needs Hezbollah as a deterrent and therefore will seek to avoid all-out war. However, an Israeli miscalculation in its response to the Majdal Shams rocket attack could tip the scales and lead Iran to decide that it is time to move from deterrence to victory.

The organisation has the means to hit back at Israel by causing major destruction in Haifa or even Tel Aviv. And then Iran could join in with a direct attack on Israel, as it did in mid-April.

“We could be entering a new stage of the fighting,” he says. “You know how it starts; you don’t know how it ends.”

With the region now even closer to all-out conflict, those words could well be prophetic.