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That they're not completely insane. They have very different values than I do, and they are in many ways irrational, but their track record of staying in power for decades shows that they are clearly rational enough to understand that there are much better ways to use limited and expensive missiles (even US missiles are not infinite in number) than to blow up random apartment buildings. They'd love to kill Netanyahu, so I'm sure they would try to target him unless they were worried that this would trigger nuclear retaliation (a reasonable concern). After Netanyahu there are all sorts of other targets in Israel that make more sense to attack than random apartment buildings.
It's not that I think they wouldn't deliberately kill Israeli and Saudi civilians. Sure they would. But they could easily think of more impressive and consequential targets.
Well maybe I misunderstood you. What's a "soft target" to you?
Anything that is relatively easy to hit, whether because it does not require accurate weapons or because it is not well defended.
For Iran, Netanyahu is a very hard target. Civilian apartment buildings in a minor town in the UAE is a relatively soft target.
Would you say that an international airport, for example Ben Gurion airport is a soft target?
Same question about civilian passenger aircraft.
In theory, yes for any decent military. With Iran's limited military capabilities and its adversaries' elite military capabilities including in the field of air defense, probably not.
Ok, just to be clear, in your view, civilian airports such as TLV and DXB are NOT soft targets for Iran, but residential apartment buildings in Tel Aviv or Dubai are soft targets for Iran. Do I understand correctly?
Residential apartment buildings are probably a bit softer than airports since it makes sense to concentrate air defense capacity on airports (easier to protect a few airports than to spread the same air defense with uniform density over all residential areas).
I don't think Iran really has any soft targets in Israel at all, it's too far away and has too good of an air defense. Some targets in the UAE are maybe what I'd call soft, but even those are pretty well defended.
And yet Iran is still launching lots of missiles at Israel. So much for your theory.
So much for what theory?
For Iran there are no soft targets in Israel, but Iran still feels compelled to use some weapons against Israel in order to try to establish at least a bit of deterrence to prevent Israel from feeling like it can attack Iran completely without consequence. I'm not sure this strategy actually makes sense, since Israel is willing to absorb minor casualties and economic hits, but it can at least be argued for.
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