America’s Middle East Imperative: Contain Iran

Excerpt

When the warriors of Hamas broke out of their fiefdom in Gaza to kill and kidnap Israelis, a historic failure of imagination came painfully into view. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government—and many in the country’s security and intelligence agencies—had seen the Palestinians as a manageable problem. Israelis were certainly aware of the growing missile threat from Gaza. The Israeli army and air force had ripped into Gaza in 2014 to destroy, among other things, missile factories. They knew that Hamas’s relations with Iran, which has developed great skill in missilery, had deepened. And Jerusalem knew that the meetings in Beirut last spring between the leaders of Hamas and Hezbollah and Ismail Qaani—chief of Iran’s Quds Force, which directs covert action for Islamic Revolutionary Guard—portended combined operations.

Still, Jerusalem and Washington both believed that momentum in the Middle East was on their side. After an initial reluctance to engage Muhammad bin Salman, the Saudi crown prince and de facto ruler, the Biden administration went all in on diplomacy between the kingdom, Israel and the U.S., hoping to add the Saudis to the Abraham Accords. Not only could these negotiations (in theory) transform the Jewish state’s place in the Muslim world, they could also jump-start Israeli diplomacy with the Palestinian Authority on the West Bank and enhance America’s standing in the region.

Reuel Marc Gerecht, a former Iranian-targets officer in the Central Intelligence Agency, is a resident scholar at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. Ray Takeyh is a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.