Israel's real goal in the war against Iran is not regime change but state implosion and territorial fragmentation, former Israeli peace negotiator Daniel Levy has argued. According to Levy, the Israeli leadership does not seriously believe in a neat transition of power in Tehran - it wants chaos.
As reported by "Hvylya", Levy, president of the US/Middle East Project, outlined the distinction in an interview with the Clash Point program.
"Israel doesn't really buy its own stories of some kind of fairy tale regime change - maybe the son of the old Shah comes in," Levy said. "Israel's interest is in regime collapse, state implosion, and chaos." The objective, he argued, is to maximize the erosion of the Iranian state and the potential for disorder while the United States remains committed to the fight - because Israel sees prolonged instability as the path to unchallenged regional dominance.
Levy pointed to emerging reports of a more specific scenario being discussed in Israeli planning circles. With Israeli strikes potentially targeting Iranian border defenses, the idea involves encouraging armed groups in ethnically concentrated areas - particularly Kurdish regions - to seize territory, declare it a "liberated area," and potentially draw American boots on the ground. "That allows them to say: the beginning of the fragmentation of sovereign Iran has begun. We're going to divide, partition, collapse this central country," Levy explained. The model draws on the Kurdish region of Iraq and the now-collapsed experiment in northeast Syria.
Levy called the scenario "precisely the kind of irresponsible, as well as illegal of course, and dangerous overreach that you can expect from this Israeli leadership." He noted that the very strategy of supporting proxy forces to fragment a sovereign state had just failed definitively in Syria - and Israel was attempting to replicate it almost immediately after that collapse.
The ambitions, Levy warned, do not stop at Iran. "The narrative in Israel is already: next up is Turkey. It may take 10, 20 years - it's taken more than that with Iran." The underlying logic, he argued, is that under the current Israeli leadership, no country in the region can be tolerated as long as it poses any challenge to Israeli dominance.