July 29, 2022
Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett proclaimed a new policy shortly before he left office that he calls the “Octopus Doctrine” of attacking Iran’s anti-Israel programs by going after targets inside Iran and not just outside the country.
Israel, however, has been attacking targets inside Iran for at least a decade, so the only thing clear about the new announcement is the new and catchy name. However, it may also mean that Israel is now escalating its old campaign and striking even more targets inside Iran.
The Islamic Republic has tried to fly multiple drones into Israel going back at least four years—the first known flight was on February 10, 2018, when an Israeli helicopter shot down an Iranian drone just a few miles inside Isarel.
But it’s not clear the new Israeli retaliation policy is having any effect. Iran’s response has been to openly and repeatedly call for “revenge” and to strike back by attempting arbitrarily to kill anyone holding an Israeli passport, whether they are linked to the Israeli government or not—an unfocused campaign that amounts to nothing more than random murder.
Israel’s attacks, on the other hand, have always been very focused, such as assassinating people high up in Iran’s nuclear program and bombing targets in Syria that house Iranian operations and warehouses that stock Iranian weapons supplies.
Bennett laid out the “new” policy in a June statement to a parliamentary committee. “In the past year, the state of Israel has taken action against the head of the terrorist octopus and not just against the arms as was done in previous decades. The days of immunity, in which Iran attacks Israel and spreads terrorism via its regional proxies but remains unscathed, are over,” he said.
But Iran has not been exempt from Israeli attacks. They date back at least to January 12, 2010, when a motorcycle packed with explosives was parked next to a car owned by Masud Ali-Mohammadi, a quantum field theorist and professor of elementary particle physics at the University of Tehran’s Department of Physics who was understood to be part of Iran’s nuclear research program. The bomb was exploded remotely as Ali-Mohammadi got into his car to drive to his office.
Three other similar killings have been attributed to Israel in 2010, 2011 and 2012. However, the killing of Daryoush Rezainejad may not have been an Israeli job. Razainejad was a postgraduate electrical engineering student at Tehran’s K.N.Toosi University of Technology, who was preparing to defend his thesis and not a figure in Iran’s nuclear program. Furthermore, before Iran declared him a martyr, a police investigator told the media the shooting of Razainejad appeared to be the result of a personal dispute.
The Islamic Republic tried to respond to the string of assassinations by launching revenge attacks on Israelis in Thailand, India and Georgia, the result of which was to injure the wife of an Israeli military attache in Delhi and to blow off the legs of an Iranian bomber in Bangkok.
At any rate, the Israeli assassination campaign ended, reportedly as a result of pressure from the Obama Administration, which was in negotiations with Iran to restrict its nuclear program.
But near the end of the Trump Administration, on November 27, 2020, the most senior nuclear scientist in the Iranian government, Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, was machine-gunned to death on a road east of Tehran, an assassination widely attributed to Israel.
So, the idea of taking covert actions against Iran inside Iran was certainly not just initiated by Prime Minister Bennett in recent months.
However, Israel has stepped up the campaign in the past year, with strikes using quadcopter drones to hit the Karaj centrifuge assembly plant June 23, 2021, the main manufacturing plant for Iranian drones near Kermanshah on February 12 this year and a building on the Parchin military complex where Iran was believed to conduct drone research on May 25. Then Iran blamed Israel for the May 22 killing by gunmen riding a motorcycle of a Pasdar colonel whom the Israelis suspected of running overseas hit teams targeting Israelis.
The recent deaths over four weeks of seven more Iranians supposedly involved in Pasdar programs have also raised questions as to whether Israel was responsible. But Iran has called them all accidents or suicides and has not blamed Israel—perhaps because they were accidents and suicides, or perhaps because to blame Israel for so many deaths in so short a time would make the regime look inept and unable to protect its people.
According to Israeli officials, Israel’s campaign has fueled the long-running shadow war with Iran, which has responded to the attacks inside its country with a new push to target Israelis around the world.
Israel has recently been warning its civilians not to travel to Turkey, especially Istanbul, due to an immediate threat posed to them by Iranian units targeting ordinary Israelis.
Israeli concerns reached a fever pitch June 17 when Israeli officials advised Israeli tourists in Istanbul to stay in their hotel rooms and not answer the door to strangers amid a warning that Iran had given the go-ahead for deadly attacks in Turkey.
“The State of Israel is operating to thwart Iranian attempts to conduct terror attacks against Israeli citizens located in Turkey, and is prepared to respond decisively to any threat,” Defense Minister Benny Gantz tweeted June 18.
Ram Ben-Barak, chairman of the Israeli parliament’s Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee, told Israeli media June 19 that there are still Iranian cells in Istanbul that have as their “sole purpose to catch an Israeli and kill him.” Ben-Barak said Israel believes the suspected cells include local Turks working for Iran. The Turkish government has reportedly been working with Israel to thwart such attacks.
Then on June 23, Turkiye announced it had arrested eight people, both Turks and Iranians, working for an Iranian intelligence cell planning to attack Israeli tourists in Istanbul.
The Islamic Republic’s “revenge” campaign has been a clear failure, with the sole “success” it could lay claim to being the injury to the wife of the Israeli defense attache in India on February 13, 2012, when her car was bombed as she was going to pick up their child at school.
It is also a question whether Isarel’s more focused campaign is having real results.
“It is not having a strategic effect,” Danny Citrinowicz, who once served as head of the Iran branch for Israeli military intelligence and is now a nonresident fellow with the Atlantic Council’s Middle East Programs, told The Wall Street Journal. “We are very close to escalation with Iran. At the end of the day, the Iranians will have their revenge—and what will happen next?”