Despite its 45-year-old hostility towards the “Little Satan”, Iran had never fired a shot at Israel from its own territory. Instead, the road to Jerusalem went through Karbala, an Iraqi city holy to Shiites, said the Islamic Republic’s founder, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, so he went to war with Iraq.
Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s Supreme Leader since 1989, used its proxies—Hezbollah, the Shiite militia in Lebanon, and the Palestinian militant groups Hamas and Islamic Jihad—to strike Israeli targets and avoid direct confrontation. When Israel attacked Iran’s nuclear programme and its scientists in Tehran, the capital, in recent years, Mr Khamenei’s advisers called for “strategic patience”.
That has all changed. Iran’s salvo of over 300 drones, cruise and ballistic missiles launched at Israel on April 13 heralds “a paradigm shift”, according to Ahmad Dastmalchian, Iran’s former ambassador to Lebanon.
The firepower stunned many Iranians, far exceeding the volley that Iran sent in response to America’s assassination of its top general, Qasem Soleimani, in 2020. The head of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), Major General Hossein Salami, says the regime is now working with “a new equation.”
“The era of strategic patience is over,” said an adviser to the Iranian president on X (formerly Twitter) on April 14.
Foreign pressure partly explains the policy change. Israel has ratcheted up its attacks on Iranian targets throughout the Middle East since the start of the war in Gaza in October.
It has killed 18 IRGC commanders and about 250 Hezbollah fighters in attacks on Syria and Lebanon. The airstrike on April 1 on the Iranian diplomatic compound in Damascus, which Iran insists is sovereign territory under international law, proved that Iran’s proxies were no longer providing the deterrence on which it has relied for so long.
Read more: Iran's direct attack on Israel resets regional power balance
But domestic forces are also shaping decision-making. For most of his career, Mr Khamenei relied on gruff conservative pragmatists like himself. Many were commanders in the IRGC, the regime’s most powerful fighting force, and were ready to work with the West if they thought doing so bolstered the regime.
But more recently, a group of ideological diehards have risen to prominence, who are to Iran what the religious hard right are to Israel.
The Paydari Front, or Front of the Stability of the Islamic Revolution, are Shiite supremacists who oppose any kind of compromise with anyone inside or outside Iran. They deride their critics as atheists and counter-revolutionaries and want to turn Tehran’s parks into mosques.
They consider any kind of reconciliation with the West such anathema that some of their ilk burnt the text of the JCPOA, the deal Iran signed with six world powers in 2015 limiting its nuclear programme, in parliament. They liken “strategic patience” in the face of Israeli attacks to appeasement.
Their opponents speak of state capture. Ebrahim Raisi, the hardline cleric who was elected president in 2021, has given them prominent positions in his government.
His father-in-law is perhaps Iran’s most radical cleric; his sermons fire the Paydaris’ zeal. They tightened their grip on power in last month’s parliamentary elections after many people boycotted the vote.
Paydari Front candidates trounced Mohammaed Bagher Qalibaf, a pragmatic former mayor of Tehran, IRGC commander, and relative of Mr Khamenei.
They are now seeking to oust him as speaker of parliament. They have passed new chastity laws. Against the advice of IRGC old-timers, they are seeking to reimpose the mandatory hijab after its de-facto suspension following widespread protests in 2022. On the same day that Iran struck Israel, they sent the morality police back on the streets after a year-long hiatus.
Realists in Iran’s armed forces know that their military hardware is no match for that of Israel. Its air force projected regional power under the Shah but has not been upgraded since then.
Its 1960s F-4 American warplanes are no match for Israel’s F-35s, the world’s most advanced fighter jet. Many of its tanks date back to the Second World War. But the Paydari Front sees their earthly battle in divine terms.
“When you shot arrows at the enemies, you did not shoot; rather, God did,” said the zealots, quoting the Koran in a statement after Iran’s attack.
Its members speak of the sacrifice made in the seventh century at Karbala when Imam Hussein, the grandson of the Prophet Muhammad, was killed by a Muslim tyrant. He has been venerated by Shiites ever since.
They pray for a conflagration that could trigger the coming of Imam Zaman, a messianic leader who will inaugurate the end of days.
