Hezbollah, it would seem, is the prototypical agent of Iranian influence, based predominantly on shared faith rather than citizenship. In 1990, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, in his second year as Iran’s supreme leader, said that the mission of the Quds Force is to “establish popular Hezbollah cells all over the world,” according to a 2013 article in The New Yorker.

Ya’alon, who has long argued that the focus of the nuclear negotiations with Iran is far too narrow, said last week on Army Radio, several days after the strike in Quneitra, that “We need to look at this through a wide framework.”

In his depiction, the Hezbollah-Iran axis, which was temporarily thwarted on the Syrian side of the Golan Heights, is part of a larger regional and global initiative, being played out in Syria, Yemen, Lebanon, and the Gulf. “Alongside the talks about the number of centrifuges,” the defense minister said, “is an Iranian effort to open terror fronts against Israeli and Western interests in the Middle East.”

Read the article in full at Times of Israel