Iran Claims Zionists are Afraid of the ‘Axis of Resistance’

Iran claims Israel is fearful of the “Axis of Resistance” that Tehran has built. Those proxies and allies that include the Houthis in Yemen, the Kataib Hezbollah militia in Iraq, the Syrian army, Hezbollah in Lebanon, and even non-Shia Hamas in Gaza. But there are no visible signs of that fear. Israel destroyed Hamas’ weapons caches, its hideouts, its command-and-control centers, 67 miles of its network of tunnels, and killed more than 200 Hamas fighters, including 25 senior commanders, during the 11 days of Operation Guardian of the Walls this May. Israel has discovered, and destroyed, all of the very long and very deep, “kidnap” tunnels that Hezbollah built, that snaked from Lebanon well into Israel. Israel is not intimidated in the slightest by either Hamas or Hezbollah.

The Houthis never fail in their marches to chant “curse the Jews” and “death to Israel.” They now have some long-range missiles and drones. They claim to have joined the “anti-Israel alliance” headed by Iran. They reportedly have made threats to attack Eilat. But nothing has come of any of this. Not a single rocket or drone has been launched by the Houthis at Israel. They are not scared of the Saudis they are fighting in Yemen, but they are petrified of what the IDF might do to them if they dared to attack the Jewish state. So they utter threats, followed by — nothing. The Israelis don’t even bother to reply.

Then there is Syria, which the Iran report describes as an ally and member of Iran’s “Axis of Resistance.” But there are many signs that, having won his civil war, in which Iran was an important ally, Bashar Assad is now prepared to distance himself from Tehran in an attempt to be welcomed back into the Arab fold. His Foreign Minister, Faisal Mekdad, met in New York, on the margins of the U.N. General Assembly’s opening, with the Foreign Ministers of both the U.A.E. and Kuwait. Assad has talked on the phone with Jordan’s King Abdullah, and with the Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi. Now that he no longer needs Iran’s military support (almost all of Syria has been retaken by Assad’s troops), he can afford to make overtures to his “Arab brothers” and they to him. If he continues in this line, Iran will certainly not be able to count on Syria as its ally in the future. Assad needs enormous financial help in order to rebuild his country – the cost has been reported to be between $350 and $400 billion –and that kind of aid can only come from the Gulf Arabs. If he wants their money, he will have to decisively turn his back on Iran, the mortal enemy of the Gulf Arabs. Iran’s leaders have not been paying attention to this latest development – the wooing of Syria by the Arabs, and vice-versa — and labor under the delusion that Syria will remain a solid member of Iran’s “Axis of Resistance.”

And there is another reason why Bashar Assad will not allow himself to be roped in to another war with Israel. Syria has just emerged from a decade of war. His country has endured $350-$400 billion in infrastructure damage. Six hundred thousand Syrians are dead. Six million Syrians are internally displaced and five million have fled the country. Syria’s military has been greatly degraded; it has, for example, between one-half and one-third the number of combat-ready aircraft that it had just before the civil war started in 2011. 200,000 soldiers in Assad’s army have been killed. Doing Iran’s bidding would put a stop at once to Gulf Arab financial support. And Israel would be certain to clobber Syria, with its military already so weakened by a decade of war. Why would Syria want to risk both the loss of Arab money and a military defeat so great that it might bring down the regime? It won’t happen.

The military might of this “Axis of Resistance” is a figment of overheated Iranian minds.

This May Hamas was devastatingly defeated by Israel in Operation Guardian of the Walls and has been set back militarily, according to the Israelis, by ten years.

Hezbollah, too, is in poor shape. It has had all of its elaborate and expensive tunnels destroyed by the IDF. It has been unable to take delivery of more than a handful of precision-guided missiles from Iranian bases in Syria, which are under constant attack by the Israeli Air Force. Hezbollah has reached the nadir of its popularity in Lebanon, where every sect – save those among the Shia who support it – has become enraged at how Hezbollah fighters have suppressed those peacefully protesting against the mismanagement and corruption of Lebanon’s political elite. It is Hezbollah that protects this elite, which includes such non-Shia collaborators as the Maronite President Michel Aoun, and in return for this support they leave Hezbollah alone, and instead of trying to bring it to heel, accept its role as a state-within-a-state. And many are infuriated, too, by Hezbollah’s refusal to recognize its responsibility for the Beirut blast on Aug. 4, 2020 that killed 220, wounded 6,500, and caused $15 billion in damages. If Hezbollah, as a member of Iran’s “Axis of Resistance,” dares to drag Lebanon into a war with Israel that the Lebanese don’t want, there may well be “resistance” in Lebanon, directed not at Israel , but at Hezbollah: a popular uprising from which Hezbollah may not recover.

Meanwhile, in Iran the disaffection of the people undermines the regime. In Isfahan, Iran’s third largest city, tens of thousands of farmers and their supporters have been demonstrating against the incompetent government that has done nothing to deal with the historic drought, and continues to divert water from Isfahan to Yazd Province, all becaus former President Khatami wanted to favor his home town of Yazd. More people are turning out to demand a reordering of priorities, chanting “No to Gaza, No to Lebanon” by which they mean. “we’ve had enough of the ayatollahs’ foreign adventurism. We don’t want to finance wars elsewhere, we are uninterested in the “Palestinians,” we are indifferent to Hamas, and Hezbollah. Iran’s economy is faltering, and we want to keep our money for Iranians suffering here at home.” The Tehran regime may weather the current storm, just, but if Israel determines that it has no choice but to launch an attack to destroy Iran’s nuclear program, that will lead to destruction in the Islamic Republic on a scale which the Iranian leaders cannot possibly comprehend. It may well bring down the regime. And besides Israel, among the other beneficiaries of such an attack will be the oppressed people of Iran, free at last.

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