The price of Israeli weapons

 How friendship between Iran and Israel turned into 'blood feud'

Tensions are rising in the Middle East. Iran launched 200 ballistic missiles into Israel on Tuesday night, following a series of missile and drone strikes in April.

The Revolutionary Guards said the strikes were in retaliation for the Israeli strikes that targeted Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran, Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah in Lebanon and its commanders.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called the strikes a "big mistake" by Iran, saying it would be retaliated against and that Iran would face consequences.

This is the latest in a long-running feud between Iran and Israel.

Israel and Iran have been at loggerheads for years, and their intensity fluctuates depending on geopolitical factors. Their feuds are a major source of instability in the Middle East.

How did the hostility between Israel and Iran begin?

Relations between Israel and Iran were quite cordial until 1979, when Ayatollah Khomeini's so-called Islamic Revolution seized power in Tehran.

Although Iran opposed the partition plan for Palestine that led to the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948, Iran was the second Islamic country, after Egypt, to recognize it.

At that time, Iran was a monarchy ruled by the Pahlavi dynasty, which was one of America's main allies in the Middle East.

For this reason, the government of Israel's founder and first leader, David Ben-Gurion, sought and gained friendship with Iran to counter the rejection of the new Jewish state by its Arab neighbors.

But in 1979, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini's revolution overthrew the Shah and established an Islamic republic, presenting itself as the protector of the oppressed. A key symbol of the new regime’s identity was its opposition to the United States and its rejection of the “imperialism” of its ally Israel.

The new ayatollah regime severed ties with Israel, stopped recognizing the passports of its citizens, and seized the Israeli embassy in Tehran and handed it over to the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). The PLO was then leading a Palestinian state against the Israeli government.

Ali Vaez, director of the Iran program at the International Crisis Group, an independent NGO that seeks to prevent and resolve global conflicts, told the BBC that “hostility towards Israel was a pillar of the new Iranian regime because many of its leaders had trained with the Palestinians and had participated in guerrilla warfare with the Palestinians in places like Lebanon and had a lot of sympathy for them.” Vaez also said that “the new Iran wanted to present itself as an Islamic power and take up the Palestinian issue against Israel, which had been abandoned by Arab Muslim countries.” Thus, large pro-Palestinian demonstrations with official support became common in Tehran.

Hamas's attack on Israel

The Israeli military launched a military operation against Gaza on October 7 last year in response to Hamas' attacks on Israel.

After the intense military operation, analysts and governments around the world have expressed concern that the conflict could trigger a chain reaction in the region and lead to an open and direct confrontation between Iran and Israel.

Clashes between Israeli forces and militias allegedly linked to Hezbollah on the Lebanese border have increased in recent months, as have clashes with Palestinian protesters in the occupied West Bank.

Until Saturday, both Iran and Israel had largely avoided taking their hostility to war, but that changed with Tehran's drone and missile attacks.

Israeli tanks advancing towards Gaza, Image source: Menahem Kahana / Getty

, Image captionIsraeli attack on Gaza escalates hostilities between Iran and Israel

“The irony is that no one wants a full-scale conflict,” the preacher said. “It has been six months since Israel entered a devastating war against Hamas in Gaza, and the war has had a huge negative impact on its international reputation and has left Israel more isolated than ever.”

The analyst warned that unlike Hamas, Iran “is a state and therefore much more powerful.”

But at the same time, “it faces many economic problems and its government is suffering from a crisis of internal legitimacy” as months of protests against religious restrictions on women have raged there.

Among the dead were prominent Iranian senior commander and Revolutionary Guard Brigadier General Mohammad Reza Zahedi and his deputy Brigadier General Mohammad Hadi Haji Rahimi.

Iran’s foreign ministry vowed to “punish the attackers” and its ambassador to Syria, Hossein Akbari, declared that the response would be “decisive.”

Iran launched drone and missile strikes on Israel in April, but the show of force apparently accelerated Israel’s response, which led to a symbolic attack in Isfahan and the killing of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh in a missile strike in Tehran in July.

Tuesday’s Iranian missile strikes came in response to the killing of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah and a top Iranian general in an Israeli airstrike near Beirut, and the developments were certainly not the last arrow in the long-running feud between the two countries.