Alarm rang throughout Israel’s corridors of power April 20. The deputy head of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps, Brig. Gen. Hossein Salami, threatened rocket attacks on strategic targets deep within Israel. He said, “You are surrounded on all sides and you have nowhere to run other than to fall into the sea.” The all-clear sounded two days later, when Iran’s Foreign Minister Mohammed Javad Zarif minimized the option of regional war in a CBS interview, reacting with moderation to the Israeli-attributed airstrike on an Iranian base in Syria earlier this month. However, he added that Israelis “should expect that if they continue to violate territorial integrity of other states, there'll be consequences.”
There are two ways to interpret the gap between the attitudes of senior Iranians. Zarif’s pragmatism could be intended to distract attention from Iran’s growing aggression toward Israel on the borders of Syria and Lebanon. If this reading is correct, Israel has no choice but to increase its military efforts to destroy Iranian bases in these neighboring states. It's also possible that the contradictory messages reflect a deepening domestic struggle between two camps: the zealous traditionalist camp of Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and the Revolutionary Guard versus the pragmatic Reformist camp led by President Hassan Rouhani.