Analysis: The spiral of conflict in the Middle East took another dangerous turn when Israel, seemingly unprovoked, attacked Iran last Friday on an unprecedented scale, taking the region to the brink of full-scale war as Iran retaliates.

The day before Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu launched the still ongoing war, he went to the Western Wall (or Wailing Wall) sacred to Jews and posted a note into a crack in the colossal stone blocks as per the ritual.

The note quoted the biblical Book of Numbers: “Behold, the people shall rise up as a great lion.” Hence the name Operation Rising Lion.

When I visited Jerusalem in 2023, I made it into the tunnels behind and beneath the Western Wall and saw long forgotten and faded notes scattered on the ground. My guess is that the current trajectory in the Middle East will see Netanyahu’s vision for Israeli power and security cast in the dirt also.

For most, the main question now is whether there is any justification or tangible reason for Israel’s pre-emptive attack against Iran’s suspected nuclear weapons programme.

My response would be that mutual perceptions of existential crisis in Israel and Iran is driving the region deeper into crisis. To understand this, one could adopt a lens of ontological security.

This means the very identity and essence of the political systems in Israel and Iran are intrinsically tied to ideologically conditioned language and behaviours without which the regimes would deflate and crash to earth like punctured hot air balloons.

According to this understanding, Israel and Iran have been on a collision course since the formerly close allies parted ways 45 years ago after the Iranian revolution.

Let me explain.

The raison d’être of the Israeli state is to protect its citizens above all – this is perhaps the one universal principle of an otherwise diverse and increasingly politically divided nation.

The more that Israelis feel threatened, the more the state’s identity becomes anchored to an inflexible security paradigm willing to compromise the lives and human security of others who are perceived as a ‘threat’, including Palestinians and those who support them.

On the Iranian side, the Islamic Republic emerged out of a popular revolution against the repressive western-aligned Pahlavi monarchy. Again, like the State of Israel the Islamic Republic immediately faced attack and isolation, which led to regression into a narrow, paranoid oligarchy with a theocratic veneer.

To offset flagging internal legitimacy, the regime exaggerated the Islamic character of the state by taking up the cause of Muslim justice abroad. The Palestinian issue and anti-Israel sentiment – manifested in the Axis of Resistance alliance – came to rest at the core of the Iranian regime’s identity.

A senior cleric of the ruling oligarchy expressed this reality perfectly in 2013 when he stated: “The destruction of Israel is the idea of the Islamic Revolution in Iran and is one of the pillars of the Iranian Islamic regime. We cannot claim that we have no intention of going to war with Israel.”

The two core paradigms of both states are mutually reinforcing – Iran props up its internal legitimacy by proclaiming a desire to destroy the Zionist state on behalf of Muslims, and Israel commits atrocities against Muslims in its search for security for Jews.

Since the 2000s, the spectre of a nuclear-armed Iranian state amplified this cycle immensely.

Israel has been planning to strike Iran’s nuclear programme since at least 2007. At that time Israel embarrassed the Syrian regime and its Iranian ally by effortlessly evading air defences to destroy a nuclear research facility in Northeast Syria. The Israeli Defence Force then made clear its intention and capacity to do the same in Iran.

What prevented Israel were Iran’s regional assets, located on Israel’s borders. If Israel were to attack Iran directly, they would have faced a barrage of missiles and rockets from resistance axis allies, Hamas and other militia in Gaza, and from Hezbollah in southern Lebanon. Syria also posed a possible threat from the Golan. This was the Iranian regime’s outer defence rim and insurance policy.

This changed after the October 7, 2023 attacks.

By the end of 2024, Hamas and Hezbollah were no longer able to threaten Israel as before, the Al-Assad regime was gone and the path to Tehran and the Furdow, Netanz and other nuclear facilities were wide open.

If US president Donald Trump had not restrained Netanyahu in the first months of 2025, the latter may have pulled the trigger on the attack even earlier.

Trump, in consultation with Gulf allies during his May visit to the Middle East, which tellingly did not include Israel, was persuaded to leverage the vulnerable Iranian state into a more favourable nuclear deal. Talks were being facilitated by the neutral Omanis in Muscat. Trump had scotched the 2013-15 deal negotiated by Barak Obama, also hosted by Oman, in 2018.

The latest round of talks were due to be held in Muscat on Sunday, June 15. The Iranians relaxed their security personal protocols put in place after the assassinations of top leaders via pinpoint strikes through 2024, believing that they were safe until at least after the talks.

Netanyahu sensed the opportunity and his war cabinet ordered Operation Rising Lion. (Apart from a spike in pizza deliveries to the Pentagon on the day before the attacks it remains unclear how much knowedge the US had of the operation.)

Where the current conflict will lead is not clear.

At this point, it seems neither the Israelis nor the Iranians can change the script. The Israeli regime will act according to an ingrained impulse to destroy anything and anyone they think poses an existential risk to the State of Israel. The Islamic Republic will continue to fire back as much as they can with missiles and inflammatory rhetoric about the final destruction of Israel.

It may be that only regime change in Tehran and Jerusalem via the Iranian and Israeli peoples can arrest the cycle.