BEIRUT — Students storm the British Embassy residence compound in Tehran, ripping down the Union Jack and hoisting the Palestinian flag, while Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad proposes to try Israeli leaders in absentia.
An Iranian religious organization signs up volunteers for suicide operations in the Gaza Strip, and an Iranian general suggests an Islamic military response to the five-day Israeli offensive against Hamas.
With bellicose rhetoric, the Islamic Republic has taken the lead in opposing the Israeli military operation in Gaza. The vociferous public displays, analysts say, are aimed primarily at hard-core government supporters in Iran whom officials are seeking to energize before the June presidential election.
But the high-profile maneuvers are a double-edged sword, because they also reinforce perceptions in Israel, the U.S. and large parts of the Arab world about links between Iran and Hamas, the militant Palestinian group that took military control of Gaza in mid-2007.
Israeli leaders and their U.S. allies have framed the fight against Hamas as one against an Iranian proxy firing Iranian-supplied rockets landing ever deeper inside the Jewish state. Former Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, in an interview Tuesday with CBS, described Hamas as Iran's "terrorist base" next to Israel.
"Iran is one of Hamas' main funders, and it's been a supplier of arms and equipment and training over the years," John R. Bolton, the former Bush administration envoy to the United Nations, told Fox News on Monday. "This is a demonstration of the reach, the scope, the power that Iran has in the Arab world."
Iran's responses to the Gaza offensive have been theatrical rather than threatening, analysts say, meant mainly to bolster Tehran hard-liners' domestic strength rather than precede any kind of military confrontation with Israel. Already, Iran's main ally in the Levant, the Shiite Muslim militia Hezbollah based in Beirut, has all but ruled out military intervention in behalf of Hamas, and Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran's supreme leader, has carefully condoned "defending" Gazans without calling for killing Israelis.
Even the hair-raising idea of a military response was delivered not by a ranking officer in charge of Iran's land, sea or air forces, but by the general technically in charge of annual ceremonies commemorating those who fought and died in the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s.
