Iran's leaders seek the advantage over Israel as they line up the dominoes (Photo: AFP IMAGEBANK)

I ran is taking the war to Israel’s home front.

For years American war planners wrung their hands over a possible IDF strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities a possibility President Obama sought to kibosh by cozying up to Tehran and offering the mullahs a sweetheart deal known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action. The deal handcuffed Israel from mounting an attack on Iranian territory.

Now Iran has taken the logic one step further. Why merely defend its own turf from Israel when it can surround the Jewish state with proxies and bring the fight to the enemy?

Since the early 1980s Hezbollah has posed a threat from the north. But now as the Syrian civil war winds down it’s clear that Iran intends to establish its own permanent military presence in Syria. At the same time top Hamas officials made a rather public visit to Tehran in recent weeks to reestablish relations. Soon after that meeting the terror group’s leader in Gaza told reporters that he was training his army — with Iran’s help — “to liberate Palestine.”

In other words Israel is now facing Iran on three fronts: Hezbollah to the north; Iran (in the form of its Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and its allied Shiite militias) to the northeast in Syria; and Hamas to the west.

Israel’s predicament is not lost on the Netanyahu government which made urgent calls to Washington D.C. and Russia in recent weeks. In the first meeting in Washington attended by top brass from all the major US intelligence agencies Israel met a receptive audience according to Beltway insider and Bloomberg columnist Eli Lake. One national security staffer told Lake that the plan was to make it “less pleasant for Iran to stay than to leave.”

Just days later a similarly senior Israeli delegation met the Mideast’s real kingmaker Vladimir Putin in Sochi. There Netanyahu reportedly threw down the gauntlet telling the Russian president that an Iranian presence in postwar Syria was unacceptable. “I made it clear that regarding Syria… we strongly oppose the possibility that Iran and its proxies will be left with a military presence ” Netanyahu said in an official statement. “The victory over the terrorism of ISIS cannot lead to an upsurge in terrorism by Iran and its proxies. We will not exchange terrorism for terrorism.”

The only problem is Israel may have no choice. (Excerpted from The Current Issue 676)