No country is watching the protests in Iran with greater interest than Israel, which sees the Islamic Republic as a mortal enemy and an existential threat.
Iran has been the obsession of Netanyahu, who has portrayed the government in Tehran and its supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, as a global menace on the order of Nazi Germany.
Israelis would cheer if the Iranian regime were to fall.
Yet former officials and analysts say that the Israeli leadership is unlikely to do much to try to precipitate a regime change, seeing the Iranian government as far from the brink of collapse and the current protests as insufficient to push it to that point. Israel is unlikely to attack Iran unless it is invited into a U.S.-led operation, or unless Iran attacks Israel first.
And its caution about a U.S. attack on Iran is well justified. The risks of blowback against Israel — including a new war — are too great. And the chances that anything short of a major offensive could topple Iran’s authoritarian clerical rulers are too remote.
Israeli analysts predict that the current wave of demonstrations in Iran will be short-lived. The protesters lack leadership and the means to defend themselves, given reports this week that Iranian security forces had killed thousands of demonstrators.
“If there were millions of people on the street, it would be very difficult to stop them. You cannot kill everyone,” says Mossad. “But we don’t see millions. We see thousands. And this regime knows how to handle that. Their first tool is to kill people, and to make sure that everybody knows that they’re killing.”