For the past year Israel has been fighting a bloody war that has been different in magnitude, but not in kind, to the wars it has fought since 1973: one fought kinetically and covertly against non-state armed groups. The war was triggered by a terrorist act committed by a Palestinian group and spilled over, as others have done, into southern Lebanon. Its spark, and the subsequent relentless focus of Israel on Gaza, has so far meant this war has been about Palestine. Leaders, both in the region and outside, have sought to leverage the obvious focus of the war by urging progress, even irreversible progress, towards a lasting two-state solution. The echo of those diplomatic calls is now faint, not only because of the lack of negotiating will or partners, but because the war is becoming a conflict about something other than Palestine: it is now about Iran.

It has become customary for wars between nation states in the Middle East to include an international coalition that declares a shared objective, most notably on Iraq and Syria. While there is a defensive coalition around Israel, there is no declared coalition against Iran. There is, however, collusion of both states and circumstances, which may be hard to reverse. This creates a dangerous undertow to the conflict for the Palestinians, whose conditions and aspirations are already dropping from the narrative. They could lose heavily if resources and energy now go into solving the ‘Iran problem’ rather than the ‘Palestinian problem’, because many states in the region who have no reason to like Israel would find this convenient.

It is particularly difficult for Tehran, which must avoid accidentally setting the conditions for its own endgame. The Iranian Revolutionary leadership has worked systematically since the formative trauma of the eight-year war with Iraq to avoid being the focus of an international effort to remove it. The adoption of a ‘way of war’ fought through partners and within parameters, the avoidance of, until now, state-on-state military conflict, and skilful attempts to divide potential coalitions diplomatically were all intended to contain that risk. The most important calculation, which has so far held, was that the regime would make themselves integral, through Hizbollah and also Syria, to the fate of Palestine and thereby take the Palestinian issue hostage to their survival. That may finally be counting against them. They, not Palestine, have become the story. Khamenei’s Friday sermon on 4 October – in both Arabic and Farsi – repeatedly referred to the rights of the Palestinian people, which is telling.

Iran has now entered what was, up until now, Israel’s cage-fight with Iran’s militias. It tried not to, but now it is in, it cannot, as much as it would like to, simply step out. The cage may be closing behind it. Some have already begun to imagine a Middle East order without the Ayatollahs and the Vilayet Al Faqih. Netanyahu, who has a clear interest in shifting focus from Palestine to Iran, has addressed the Iranian people directly, in an attempt to de-legitimise the regime and dangle a vision of an ‘Abraham Accords plus’, in which Israel and a post-revolutionary Iran enjoy a peaceful and prosperous partnership. It is difficult from outside to gauge what chords if any strike among the opposition inside Iran, but it is a wolf-whistle to all those in the region and beyond who long for the regime to end, and may take the chance, if only through connivance, to help end it. In the heat of a complex conflict, where agendas and opportunities are evolving rapidly, making an objective imaginable may be more successful than declaring it. No one has called for regime change; no one may need to.

Tehran is camping on familiar rhetoric of legitimate interests and self- defence in an attempt once again to de-limit the consequences of its direct aggression against Israel. Behind that, they will be aware of what is at stake. Orchestrated demonstrations in Tehran in support of the missile attack are neither a surprise nor are they indicative of any wider support at home. Unlike Netanyahu in Israel, the regime in Tehran does not usually enjoy a bounce in popularity beyond its immediate base in return for its military aggression. A major plank of the Iranian opposition’s argument has been consistently that the regime’s foreign wars are wasteful and misguided. The challenge then becomes for the regime to preserve Hizbollah without allowing itself to slide into an endgame.

The danger for Tehran of Israel’s sustained escalation against Hizbollah is both material and moral. Responding pari passu will reduce Iran’s arsenal, but not responding damages its credibility. Worse, if it does not escalate to protect Hizbollah it risks losing its cat’s paw in the region, without which its regional influence plummets. The trap into which Tehran may fall is an egregious escalation to protect Hizbollah, which tips international opinion either into hostility or causes those who might have actively supported de-escalation with Iran to step away.

The regime has options to stave off an endgame. It could ration its support for Hizbollah, sacrificing a large part of its capability in the hope of saving the rest. But the upper hand in Tehran lies firmly with the IRGC establishment, to whom the survival of Hizbollah is an existential matter, not with President Masoud Pezeshkian, who has an eye on a rehabilitated regime. Second, Tehran could call in a favour from Russia in return for their ongoing and valuable military supplies to the Kremlin. But Russia has boxed clever with both Israel and Tehran (and Netanyahu has boxed clever with Russia and America). While Putin needs Iran’s UAVs and missiles, he doesn’t need the Ayatollahs. He was prepared to act to save Assad because Russia has a long-standing strategic interest in Syria. The extent to which he would mobilise to save the Iranian regime is debatable, not least because of the demands of the war in Ukraine. Other possible military allies for Iran are hard to find (but may, for example, include North Korea), showing the limitations of a policy built upon the principle of ‘my enemy’s enemy is my friend’.

The regime could modulate to a terrorist campaign. They and Hizbollah are well-equipped to do this but terrorism has high risks. States use terrorist groups as proxies because they enable a level of deniability. Although the threshold for proving that a state has directed a terrorist attack is normally very high, the circumstances since 7 October 2023 mean that, in the case of Iran, circumstantial evidence may suffice. The legacy of two decades of counter-terrorism operations overseas is that the US response to terror committed against US interests is now institutionally kinetic. A significant terrorist strike against its interests in or out of the region would oblige whichever president is in the White House to respond against the perpetrator, state-level or not.

Tehran could try to rally the Arab or wider Islamic world against Israel and the US. The Supreme Leader has called for Muslim nations to ‘tighten the belt of defence… from Afghanistan to Yemen, Iran to Gaza and Lebanon in all Islamic countries’. He is leveraging the same grievance narrative used by Sunni Islamist groups and by Putin: Israel and America are ‘seizing all the resources of this region’. While that message does resonate from Morocco to Indonesia, when the war in question is with Palestine, its resonance is fainter when it is for the defence of Tehran or Hizbollah. The Iranian regime has no significant support to leverage among the largely Sunni Arab World, to which it was nakedly aggressive until the recent Chinese-brokered deal with Saudi Arabia. Shi’a communities in Iraq and Lebanon will express varying degrees of support for Iran, but their governments are weak and desperate to avoid further embroilment. That may be hard in the case of Syria, which is too beholden to Tehran and borders Israel. More importantly, the most powerful leaders of the Arab world, in Saudi Arabia, UAE, Egypt and Jordan, are sworn enemies of Hizbollah. All have an interest in reducing regional tension, but none in the victory of Hizbollah.

The problem for Tehran is that Netanyahu has only limited political constraints on his war against Hizbollah. The Israeli government has portrayed it as a straightforward matter of national, territorial security, and has, in return, received broad domestic support. Netanyahu’s campaign constraints, which Hizbollah will be factoring into their strategy, are casualties, costs and, a horror he must avoid, kidnapping. But cost so far has not been a constraint, and the IDF shows signs of learning from its 2006 campaign how to minimise the risks to their troops. Tehran may not be able to rely on Israel tiring of Lebanon.

Tehran has a stark choice: to double down on its support for Hizbollah and its aggression to Israel, and thereby risk setting the conditions for its endgame; or to try to recover the old parameters for conflict by reducing its support and risk sacrificing Hizbollah and so the regime’s credibility. Whatever they decide, it is likely to surface differences within the leadership and to stimulate consideration of a Middle East without them. Were the ageing Supreme Leader, recently emerged from hiding, to pass away it would set another condition, not sufficient but graphic, for the revolution’s final chapter.