The changing of presidents in Iran shouldn’t make much of a difference for Israel. Whether it’s Hassan Rouhani, who has been president since 2013, or Ebrahim Raisi, who will enter office on Thursday, they’re not really making the decisions that matter to Israel.
When it comes to the things that matter to Israel – Iran’s nuclear program, its development of other advanced weaponry, its proxies around the Middle East and more – the person calling the shots is Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. “Hardliner” or “reformer,” as many commentators call the different sides of the narrow political field Khamenei permits, no president truly has a say in the Supreme Leader’s calls for genocide against Israel and steps toward the bomb.
However, with the Iranian attack on an Israeli-managed ship near Oman on Friday, killing the vessel’s Romanian captain and a British crew member, Raisi is entering office with a bang – literally – and Israel is using its full diplomatic weight, and more, in response.
Plus, Khamenei is using Raisi’s presidency as a reason to delay, and perhaps even withdraw entirely from, negotiations with the US to rejoin the 2015 nuclear deal.
Raisi, known as the “Butcher of Tehran,” is Iran’s former chief justice responsible for thousands of executions in 1988 and the violent suppression of demonstrations in 2009. As a result, the US put him under sanctions for human rights violations in 2019, and Sweden has a pending war crimes trial against him. Raisi was elected president in a vote in which Khamenei pruned and approved the candidates, and in which turnout was under 50%.
A top Israeli official pointed fingers at Raisi in the immediate aftermath of the Mercer Street bombing by a UAV: “The Iranian attack took place days before the swearing-in of the new president Raisi, a confidant of Iran’s Supreme Leader, who was responsible for the mass executions of dissidents. The masks are coming off, and no one can pretend that they don’t know the nature of the Iranian regime.”
Prime Minister Naftali Bennett and Foreign Minister Yair Lapid publicly said Iran is behind the attack, and Bennett said Israel has the intelligence to prove it.
Bennett said he expects the world to put a stop to Iran’s aggression, but that Israel knows “how to send a message to Iran in our own way,” hinting at covert Israeli action against the Islamic Republic.
Israel views Iran killing British and European nationals in the attack as a costly mistake by the regime that could bring other countries to Israel’s side, at least when it comes to responding to this specific incident.
Lapid has been pulling out all the stops, telling his counterparts in the US, UK and Romania that Israel has assessed the attack to be from Iran. Ambassadors in London, Washington and New York have already begun relaying to relevant leaders in the capitals and the UN that Iran is threatening international trade with its repeated attacks on ships.
Israel has also begun to push for a UN Security Council condemnation of Iran’s attack. The UNSC, like the rest of the UN, is not a very friendly forum for Israel, and while it is possible that such a resolution could happen, its chances are not great. Still, Raisi could begin his time in office with drama in Turtle Bay, requiring Iranian Ambassador to the UN Majid Takht-Ravanchi to try to fend off international pressure.
Even before this weekend, Raisi’s impending presidency already had an impact on nuclear talks.
He has long been a skeptic about the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, the 2015 nuclear deal between Iran and world powers that the US left in 2018 and to which it now seeks to return. Raisi was Khamenei’s favored candidate, which already told us something about how the supreme leader sees the agreement.
The incoming Iranian president tempered his former total opposition to the JCPOA ahead of the election, but called for far greater concessions from the US, including a guarantee that future US administrations will not leave the deal. This is something the US cannot legally offer Iran.
In July, nearly a month after Raisi was elected president and a month after the end of the sixth round of indirect negotiations between the US and Iran to return to the JCPOA, his reservations about the deal were turned into action from Iran. Tehran’s chief nuclear negotiator and Deputy Foreign Minister Seyed Abbas Araghchi announced that the month-long pause in the talks would continue until Raisi entered office. Abbas Araghchi cynically said the break would allow for a “democratic transfer of power.”
In recent weeks, Israel has expressed alarm to its allies in the JCPOA process – the US, UK, France and Germany – that Iran was using its time away from the negotiating table to advance its nuclear program dangerously close to producing weapon-grade uranium.
Diplomatic sources have said Iran could use the “state of limbo” to reduce its breakout time for a weapon from about seven to two or three months, while the International Atomic Energy Agency is in an “uncomfortable position,” as Director-General Rafael Grossi called it, of being unable to properly inspect the situation.
And what we do know is not reassuring: Iran told the IAEA in July that it has taken steps to produce uranium metal enriched to 20% for use as reactor fuel, bringing it to a more advanced state than any country without nuclear weapons.
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said the JCPOA negotiations “cannot go on indefinitely,” and a return to the deal will be impossible if Iran’s nuclear advances continue. But Israel is urging the US to draw a firm line on the matter of when it will be willing to go back to talks.
Meanwhile, it looks like Iran is leaning toward letting US patience run out. Last week Khamenei publicly advised Raisi to learn from Rouhani, during whose tenure “it became clear that trusting the West is not helpful... Administrations should utterly avoid tying their plans for negotiations with the West, for they’ll certainly fail.” The Americans have taken an “obstinate stance” in recent talks, the Supreme Leader added.
Israel continues to oppose the JCPOA, as it did when Benjamin Netanyahu was prime minister, pointing out that the constraints on Iran’s nuclear program – which it is currently violating – expire in 2030, and that the deal does not address Iranian malign behavior, like proxy warfare and sponsoring terrorist groups across the region, or its ballistic missile program.
Unlike Netanyahu, the “change government” has chosen to work with the US to mitigate the deal’s damage as long as Washington insists on trying to return to it.
However, if Khamenei and Raisi get their way and kill the JCPOA for good, US-Israel talks on Iran will have to shift from how to make the Iran deal “longer and stronger” to more dramatic ways to try to stop the Islamic Republic’s nuclear program.