After hours of denial, and media games from both sides, it has finally become clear that at 5 a.m. on Friday, April 19, Israel targeted at least one airbase near the city of Isfahan with four air-to-ground missiles fired by fighter jets.
The recent confrontation between the fascist and criminal regime of Israel and the reactionary and anti-people regime of the Islamic Republic, although not yet escalated into a full-scale war, still, as the famous Persian saying goes, “as long as the bell is in the cat’s hand,” the risk of the entire region becoming engulfed in war is not eliminated. The possibility of such a war could serve as a tool for the Islamic Republic to prolong its existence for a few more mornings. Netanyahu, the Prime Minister of Israel, who did everything in his power to kill defenseless people in Gaza, men and women, young and old, but failed to achieve his goals and has become more disgraced in the eyes of the world, finds himself in a precarious position of power, with his financial corruption case under investigation in Israeli courts. Engaging with the Islamic Republic could temporarily free him from the impasse he finds himself in.
How the Iranian regime employs regional tensions as a tool against the people and in the service of its own survival domestically can be seen in parallel with the intensification of pressure against free-thinking women inside the country. The Islamic Republic has increased pressure on Iranian women through a deliberate campaign to impose compulsory hijab, precisely at the same time as the missile attack on Israel. While even the draft legislation they have prepared in this regard has not been approved in the Islamic Consultative Assembly, the regime’s executive agents have once again emerged on the streets and squares of Tehran and other major cities in Iran, threatening to arrest anyone who questions the “importance and power” of the Islamic Republic’s missile attack on Israel.
The reality is that the Islamic Republic, to cover up the major crises it is facing, to control the surge of freedom and equality demands of “women, life, freedom” demonstrated in the “Election Boycott Movement” and the “Nowruz Celebration Movement,” and to restore its passive image among its domestic and foreign supporters, needs a controlled confrontation and limited war. The simultaneity of the war against free women in Iran to reclaim the cultural and social achievements of the Jina revolutionary movement and the drone and missile attacks on Israel have a clear message: the risk of the Jina revolutionary movement for the Islamic Republic is greater than the threat from Israel. The main goal of this regime’s action is to prepare comprehensive measures to suppress the people’s revolutionary movement and prevent the progress of protesting people. The alignment of the Islamic Republic’s actions with the goals of expanding war by Netanyahu and Israeli right-wing forces is precisely because of their synchronization with the results and impacts of this destructive war on suppressing the civil and revolutionary movement of the Iranian people.
However, now that the discussion is about the possibility of escalation of conflicts and the danger of turning it into a full-fledged destructive war in the region, considering that the smoke of such a war is seen before anyone else by the majority of people and is against their lives and properties, and in the service of imposing more injustice on the people of Iran, public consciousness in Iran and Israel can act as a deterrent against regression in both countries and not allow the fate of the people in this region to fall prey to the power-hungry and reactionary. In the absence of a real regional and global deterrent force, both ruling regimes in Iran and Israel have the capacity and the need to take adventurous actions for their survival. As far as the role and policy of the Islamic Republic are concerned, this regime has been serving the goals of the fascist Netanyahu regime for the past four decades. While public attention worldwide was focused on the plight of the Palestinian people and the tragic conditions of Gaza refugees in Rafah, the Israeli government, for the time being, managed to reduce international pressure, turn attention to its confrontation with the Islamic Republic, and sideline this humanitarian disaster.
