Tuesday briefing: What Israel really wants in Iran – and what might come next

The Guardian

2 days ago

Good morning. As the conflict between Iran and Israel has heated up in the days since Israel's surprise attack last week, a consensus has emerged that, while Tehran's nuclear ambitions have been severely compromised, it is all but impossible for Israel to extinguish them permanently without American support.
Nonetheless, Israel hopes that scuttling Iran's nuclear talks with the US and severely weakening the regime as a military threat will make its gambit worthwhile. And there is another goal that Benjamin Netanyahu appears to believe is possible: regime change.
That phrase, associated as it is with the US-led coalition's disastrous military adventure in Iraq, is something of a taboo in western capitals. But Netanyahu has been publicly bullish about the end of Ayatollah Khamenei's rule: 'I can tell you this, we have indications that senior leaders in Iran are already packing their bags,' he said on Saturday. 'They sense what's coming.'
In other statements, Netanyahu has been more ambiguous – and there are good reasons to think that Israel's attacks, extending yesterday to Iran's state broadcaster, may have the opposite effect. For today's newsletter, I spoke to Sanam Vakil, director of the Middle East and north Africa programme at Chatham House, about what Israel really wants, and why a sudden transformation in Tehran still looks very unlikely. Here are the headlines.
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In much of the discussion around the 'existential threat' that Israel says it faces from Iran, the focus has been on the risk of Tehran developing nuclear weapons. Benjamin Netanyahu said on Sunday that nuclear weapons and Iran's existing ballistic missiles were the primary targets of the Israeli operation.
But his comments have also left plenty of space to ask whether there is another goal: the removal of the Iranian regime. Israel acted 'to not only protect ourselves, but protect the world from this incendiary regime', he said. And after the first wave of attacks, he called for 'the Iranian people to unite around its flag and its historic legacy, by standing up for your freedom from the evil and oppressive regime'.
So is that a serious aim – and what might Iran's future look like if it happened?
Does Israel want regime change in Iran?
There is little doubt that it 'would be a dreamlike scenario for the Israeli political establishment', Sanam Vakil said. But there is a difference between a dream outcome and a realistic strategic goal. 'Since the 7 October attacks, there has been a consensus in Israel that Iran has to be cut down to size. But privately, military and intelligence officials tend to see regime change itself as very hard to achieve.'
What is less clear is what Netanyahu and his political allies really want, or believe to be feasible. 'Seeing Iran as the primary security threat and enemy of Israel is something he's spoken about for two decades,' Vakil said.
His foreign policy has generally focused on containment rather than direct confrontation – but that is partly because previous US presidents, and even Trump in his first term, have been less tolerant of Israeli aggression than the White House now appears. 'Since October 7, Israel's calculations have shifted, and it's unclear how serious he is about this now. At best, they can try to weaken the regime and let the dominoes fall.'
Some analysts have voiced the view that while it suits Israel to call for regime change now, as a way to destabilise Iran, it is less clear that it would be its preferred outcome in reality. In an X post that she acknowledged presented an 'increasingly unpopular opinion', Maryam Alemzadeh, a professor of Iranian politics at Oxford, argued that Israel 'wants a hardliner state who tries to retaliate and make Israel the victim, but fails to inflict much damage'. She said that regime change would ultimately mean that 'Iran as the straw man enemy that Israel relies on would disappear'.
Has Israel's attack changed the views of ordinary Iranians?
On its face, Netanyahu's appeal to the Iranian people would appear to suggest that he hopes the instability created by Israel's attacks will stoke the already significant discontent in Iran – and bring about a popular uprising.
In a country of more than 90 million people who have limited opportunities for public expression, it is obviously foolish to claim knowledge of what 'the Iranian people' want. 'I don't have a handle on the diversity of views in Iran, and I doubt that Israel does, either,' Vakil said. But it is perhaps more likely that the attacks will have the opposite effect.
The Iranian health ministry claims that 90% of casualties so far are civilians; the Israeli defence minister, Israel Katz, has threatened that 'the residents of Tehran will pay the price, and soon' for Iranian retaliation against Israeli residential areas.
'That doesn't play well in Iran,' Vakil said. 'There is, perhaps, an arrogance in asking people who have long been suppressed by their government to come out and topple the regime in response to an Israeli attack.' This piece by William Christou and Deepa Parent, reporting on emergency admissions to a Tehran hospital, gives a sense of how unconvincing a messenger Israel is now likely to appear to many Iranians.
In general, Iranians have not appeared supportive of their government's 'axis of resistance' anti-Israel strategy in recent years. But now there may well be a 'rebound effect', Vakil said: 'What Israel and Netanyahu are doing is creating more antipathy among a civilian population that wasn't very animated about Israel at all.'
Could Israel topple the regime without Iranian civilian support?
Set aside the slim prospects of a sudden popular uprising: Israel might also hope that its attacks will precipitate the regime's removal by other means. And, Vakil said, the Islamic republic has clearly been weakened by Israel's attack: 'This could certainly be the beginning of a transformation, and you can imagine a domino effect that leads to new people at the top.'
But while Israel's success in killing senior military leaders has shocked the Iranian establishment, there was little impact on civilian and clerical leadership. In any case, Vakil said, the Iranian state is not so shaky that the loss of individuals would be likely to precipitate a wholesale change. 'The symbolism of taking out the top echelon of the IRGC [Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps], which is enshrined in the Iranian constitution as the protector against external and internal threats, is not lost on people. It reveals a system that can not manage its own security.
'It is important and deeply traumatic and embarrassing for the Islamic republic, but it would be a little too triumphant to think that it means the regime is going to collapse as a result.'
There is another problem: the vector of the Israeli assault. The historic evidence of regime change brought about through war suggests that it is rarely the result of aerial attack alone, Vakil said. 'Unless the United States suddenly decides that it wants to roll in with boots on the ground, and that it is prepared to engage in a military operation like the one in Iraq, it is very hard to see the Islamic republic being toppled overnight.'
Would the death of Ayatollah Khamenei change that?
On Sunday, Reuters reported a remarkable claim from senior US administration officials: that Israel had a plan to kill the Iranian supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, but that it was vetoed by the White House. If such an operation had been successful – the same report said that Israel believed it had an opportunity to take Khamenei out – the rupture to Iran's political structures would clearly have been even more profound.
But, Vakil said, Iran is not like Iraq under Saddam Hussein or Libya under Muammar Gaddafi, where so much power was vested in a single person that their removal could be expected to bring about a fundamental change. 'Power in Iran is institutionalised, not personalised,' she said. 'It would be a massive blow, of course. But the regime would quickly convene and decide what to do.'
One good reason to be sceptical that Khamenei's removal would be transformative: Iran is already planning for a future without the 86-year-old. Under the pressure of international sanctions, there has been little public discussion of succession, Vakil said: 'Part of why the regime had agreed to negotiate with Trump is that they wanted to create the space for that process to play out in the public domain.'
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What might a new regime look like?
In this thread on X on Saturday, Vakil laid out some scenarios that might unfold, ranging from a sectarian civil war with a power vacuum at the centre to a coup by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. A pluralistic democracy does not make the list.
'It's not readily apparent that it's a possibility,' she said, as there is no organised opposition in Tehran, while the exiled opposition has few friends at home. 'Even among the diaspora, there are so many opinions about what a revolutionary regime change moment should look like. And within the country there is paralysis. You can confidently say that the majority of the country is deeply unhappy with the leadership of the Islamic republic – but I don't have a sense that Iranians can articulate a coherent view of what they want instead.'
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