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 Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, who has portrayed the government in Tehran and its supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, as a global menace on the order of Nazi Germany. The two countries fought a 12-day war last June in which Israel, briefly joined by the United States, bombed Iranian military and nuclear sites while Iran bombarded Israel with ballistic missiles.
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, they say.
And its caution about a U.S. attack on Iran is well justified, experts said. 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.
