Israel faces a Shakespearean dilemma – to retaliate or not to retaliate, that is the question

After Iran’s unprecedented missile attack on Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu must consider his next move dispassionately, says Israel’s leading foreign affairs adviser Alon Pinkas. To return fire would lead almost inevitably to a region-wide conflict – but the shocks would also be felt around the world, from the US to China

Prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu after the Iranian missile attacks on Israel (Israeli prime minister’s Spokesperson)

Israel’s current Iran policy conundrum can be concisely summed up by paraphrasing Prince Hamlet: “To retaliate or not to retaliate, that is the question. Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, or to take arms against a sea of troubles and by opposing end them.”

Two significant paradigm shifts occurred in the last two weeks in the semi-belligerent Israeli-Iranian relationship. The first was Israel’s 1 April strike against Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps generals in an annexe of the Iranian embassy in Damascus, Syria, killing four. It was an expression of “strategic proportionality”, meaning that Israel hit Iran directly, rather than its proxies throughout the Middle East, as it has done before. Israel has operated against Iran inside Iranian territory before – but that was part of a decades-long covert war. That war had rules of the game and rules of engagement. That mould was broken in Damascus.

The second was Iran’s audacious retaliation last weekend. In the small hours of Sunday morning, Iran launched almost 200 armed drones, 36 cruise missiles and approximately 110 surface-to-surface missiles. Although it was a retaliation that Tehran pledged would be coming, the massive attack represented a potential game changer in that it struck Israeli territory directly. The fact that the vast majority of the missiles and drones were intercepted and destroyed in mid-air by Israel, the US, Britain, France and, most notably, Jordan, and the fact that the damage was minimal, the scale and scope of the attack, again, broke the mould.