A Strategic Failure? Why Israel's Attack On Damascus Was Such A Gamechanger

The large-scale attack by Iran on Israel may have passed with relatively little damage, but it marks a significant transformation in the conflict between the two enemies.

- Peter Beaumont , Emma Graham-Harrison

A war that has long been fought through proxies, assassinations and strikes away from Israeli soil has spilled into the open.

While senior Israeli officials have framed this weekend's Iranian attack as "revealing the true face" of Tehran, the reality is that the proximate cause was Israel's misjudgment in its strike on an Iranian diplomatic compound in Syria that killed two senior Iranian generals, among others.

After years in which both sides operated within the framework of a largely undeclared set of "rules", Israel - as analysts have pointed out-bulldozed through every red line to attack a location that Tehran maintains was tantamount to attacking Iranian soil.

"Israel went too far in assassinating the Iranian general, probably, in a diplomatic location," said Yagil Levy, professor of military sociology at the Open University of Israel. "Israel is led by the availability of its weapons systems. And whenever the country or the leadership feels that they have a good intelligence, a good opportunity and available weaponry systems that can do the job, Israel strikes," he added.

"Israel doesn't have a really strategic approach... The attempt to identify the [connections] between specific military actions and expected benefits is not in the repertoire of the Israeli leadership."

Israeli commentators have framed the failure of the Iranian attack to do much damage as a victory for Israel, suggesting retaliation is inevitable following the first declared attack on Israeli soil by a foreign state since 1991.