War on Gaza: Israel wants to finish the job Washington started after 9/11

Jonathan Cook

11 October 2024

https://www.middleeasteye.net/opinion/gaza-israel-war-wants-finish-job-washington-started-after-911

Nearly a decade ago, a leading Israeli human rights activist divulged to me a private conversation he’d had a short time earlier with one of Europe’s ambassadors to Israel. He had clearly been shaken by the exchange.

The ambassador’s country was then widely seen as one of the most sympathetic in the West to the Palestinian people. The Israeli activist had expressed concerns about Europe’s inaction in the face of relentless Israeli attacks on Palestinian rights and systematic violations of international law. 

At the time, Israel was enforcing a lengthy siege on Gaza that had deprived more than two million people there of the essentials of life, and it had repeatedly bombed urban areas, killing hundreds of civilians. 

In the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem, Israel had intensified its expansion of illegal Jewish settlements, leading to a surge in violence from settler militias and the Israeli army. Palestinians were being killed and driven off their land.

The activist asked the ambassador a simple question: What would Israel need to do for his government to act against it? Where was the red line?

The ambassador paused as he thought hard. And then, with a shrug of the shoulders, he responded: there was nothing Israel could do. There was no red line.

A decade ago, that comment might have been interpreted as evasive. A year into Israel’s erasure of Gaza, it sounds utterly prophetic.

There is no red line. And more importantly, there never has been. That conversation took place many years before 7 October 2023, when Hamas broke out of Gaza and killed more than 1,000 Israelis. 

That date is not quite the turning point, the rupture, that it is universally presented as. 

Hamas’s brief jail-break from Gaza certainly triggered an explosive desire for revenge among Israelis, who had grown used to being able to subjugate and dispossess the Palestinian people cost-free.

But more importantly, it offered a pretext for Israel’s leaders to erase Gaza - to carry out a plan they had long harboured. And similarly, it offered western states the pretext they needed to stand with Israel and excuse its savagery as Israel’s “right to defend itself”.

Horror show

Call the events unfolding over the past 12 months in Gaza what you will: self-defence, mass slaughter, or a “plausible genocide”, as the world’s highest court has termed it. What can’t be debated is that it has been a horror show.

In the first two months alone, Israel destroyed more of Gaza proportionally than the Allies managed in Germany during the entire Second World War. It carried out more air strikes on Gaza than the US and UK did against the Islamic State group over a period of three years in Iraq. 

The official figures are that Israel has so far killed more than 42,000 Palestinians in Gaza - more than half of them women and children - through relentless and indiscriminate bombing of the tiny, overcrowded enclave. 

According to human rights groups, more children were killed by Israel in the first four months of its bombing campaign in Gaza than were killed in four years of all other global conflicts combined. 

Oxfam reported last week that in the past two decades, no conflict anywhere else in the world has come close to killing so many children over a 12-month period. 

But the true death toll is far higher. Gaza, bombed into 42 million tonnes of rubble, lost the ability to count its dead and wounded many months ago. 

Last week, a group of nearly 100 American doctors and nurses who have volunteered in Gaza’s healthcare system as Israel has systematically eviscerated it wrote an open letter to US President Joe Biden. They estimated that the death toll was nearly three times higher than the official figure. 

They added: “With only marginal exceptions, everyone in Gaza is sick, injured, or both. This includes every national aid worker, every international volunteer, and probably every Israeli hostage: every man, woman, and child.”

Medieval-style blockade

Back in July, a letter published in the Lancet medical journal put the figure still higher. Using standard modelling techniques, drawing on data from previous wars in which densely populated urban areas were destroyed, a team of experts concluded that Gaza’s death toll would reach much closer to 200,000, based on conservative parameters. 

That would amount to nearly 10 percent of Gaza’s population killed outright by Israeli bombs, disappeared under rubble, dead from medical conditions that could not be treated, or dying from mass malnutrition after a year of an Israeli medieval-style blockade of food, water and fuel.

Israel appears certain that there are no red lines, and as a result, things have only gotten worse since the Lancet letter.

In September, deliveries of food and aid into Gaza sank to their lowest level in seven months, according to figures from the United Nations and Israel. 

In other words, Israel’s stranglehold on aid to Gaza’s starving population has actually intensified since May, when Karim Khan, the British chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC), requested arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defence Minister Yoav Gallant for crimes against humanity. 

One of the main charges was that the pair were using starvation as a weapon of war. 

Israeli leaders are so confident that the US and Europe are watching their backs that, according to a Reuters report last week, Israel’s military authorities have in recent days been blocking UN-chartered aid convoys from entering Gaza. 

Netanyahu clearly isn’t worried about being dragged to the dock of a war crimes tribunal at The Hague any time soon.

One-sided anniversary

If western politicians have no red lines when it comes to Israel, much the same can be said of the West’s establishment media. 

They barely report on conditions in Gaza anymore, apart from the occasional headline figure of deaths from Israel’s latest bombardment of a school shelter, refugee camp or mosque. 

Media outlets marked the anniversary of 7 October this week but, predictably, most did so from an exclusively Israeli perspective - as the day when 1,150 Israelis and foreigners were killed during Hamas’s attack, and a mix of some 250 captured soldiers and civilian hostages were taken into the enclave.

The BBC, for example, has been heavily promoting its documentary We Will Dance Again, recounting the experiences of Israelis who attended the Nova rave close to Gaza, which turned into a killing field. 

Similarly, Britain’s Channel 4 aired a documentary titled One Day in October, billed as “an intimate and shocking account of the Kibbutz Be’eri atrocity”. Some 100 kibbutz inhabitants were killed that day and 30 hostages seized. 

Notably, more than a dozen of those residents in Be’eri might have been killed not by Hamas, but by the Israeli army, after an Israeli tank was ordered to fire into one of the homes where Hamas was holed up with them. 

Israeli army commanders on 7 October invoked the highly controversial Hannibal directive, authorising soldiers to kill their comrades to stop them from being taken captive. On that day, Israel appears to have applied the directive to civilians too. One of the people who died after the Israeli tank fire in Be’eri was a 12-year-old girl, Liel Hetzroni. 

Western media outlets have so far almost completely avoided drawing attention to the role Israel’s Hannibal directive played that day.

This week, in a sign of how one-sided the media’s portrayal has become, the Guardian hurriedly removed from its website a review criticising the Ch4 film for failing to provide any context for the Hamas attack on October 7 - decades of military oppression and siege conditions on Gaza.

The review provoked a predictable storm of protest from leading Zionist journalists. 

No consequences

7 October was not only the day Hamas launched its surprise attack on Israel; it was also the day Israel began its slaughter of Palestinians in revenge. 

The day marks the start of what the International Court of Justice (ICJ) has concluded amounts to a “plausible genocide” - one that Israel has barred foreign correspondents from covering in person. Instead, the slaughter has been live-streamed for 12 months variously by the population under attack, and by the Israeli soldiers committing war crimes in plain view.

In a sign of how odiously anti-Palestinian western media coverage has become over the past year, the supposedly liberal Observer newspaper - the Sunday sister paper of the Guardian - chose to give space last weekend to British Jewish writer Howard Jacobson to equate the reporting of the thousands of young children killed and buried alive in Gaza with a medieval, antisemitic “blood libel”. 

The paper even chose to illustrate the column with a photo of a blood-smeared doll - presumably suggesting that the massive death toll reported by every human rights organisation was false. 

The only major broadcaster to try to honour the civilian victims in Gaza and the experiences of those who have survived - just barely - since last October was not a western outlet. It was the Qatari channel Al Jazeera. 

Its documentary, Investigating War Crimes in Gaza, uses footage shot by Israeli soldiers and posted to social media as they carried out horrifying atrocities against the civilian population.

The soldiers’ delight in broadcasting their war crimes - and the licence they received from Israel’s military authorities to do so - underscores the confidence in Israel that there will never be any consequences.

Unlike the western media, Al Jazeera humanises the Palestinian victims of Israeli atrocities, giving them a voice and a backstory that the western media has largely reserved for the Israeli victims of 7 October.

Courts dragging their feet

Similarly, there appear to be no meaningful red lines, at least so far, for the world’s two highest courts in responding to Israel’s destruction of Gaza.

The ICJ agreed to put Israel on trial for genocide back in January, after hearing the case made by lawyers representing South Africa, and Israel’s response. 

One might have assumed, given that genocide is the ultimate international crime, that the court would have fast-tracked a definitive ruling. After all, the people of Gaza do not have time on their side. But a year into the slaughter and imposed starvation, there is only silence.

The same court has in the meantime ruled belatedly that Israel’s 57-year military occupation of the Palestinian territories is illegal, that Palestinians have a right to resist, and that Israel must withdraw immediately from Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem. 

Western politicians and media have ignored the significance of that ruling, for obvious reasons. It provides the historical context for Hamas’s breakout from Gaza after its illegal siege by Israel for 17 years. Hamas is proscribed as a terrorist group in the UK and other countries.

The problem for the ICJ is twofold. It is under enormous pressure from the US global superpower not to declare a genocide in Gaza by Washington’s favourite client state. Such a verdict would tear off the veil, exposing western powers as fully complicit in that supreme crime. 

Secondly, the court has no enforcement mechanisms outside the UN Security Council, where Washington enjoys a veto that it routinely wields to protect Israel. 

On much the same grounds, the ICC is also dragging its feet. Khan says he has enough evidence to issue arrest warrants against Netanyahu and Gallant for crimes against humanity. European states are obligated to enforce any arrest warrants, so unlike an ICJ ruling, this one could be carried out. 

But for months, the judges of the ICC have delayed approving the warrants, despite the urgency, apparently because they, too, are fearful of incurring Washington’s wrath. 

Both courts can be in no doubt that taking on Washington in these circumstances is a suicide mission.

On the one hand, Israel has shown that it will not abide by any of the legal red lines once insisted upon by the West to avoid a repeat of the horrors of the Second World War. And western powers have demonstrated that not only do they have no intention of restraining Israel, but they will also assist in its violations. 

On the other hand, by hesitating month after month, the two international courts discredit the very rules of war they are there to uphold. They have returned the world to an era of jungle law, but now in a nuclear age.

International law is being shredded in the maw of a US-imposed, self-serving “international order”.

On the warpath

It is that utter lack of accountability from the centres of power - from western politicians, western media and world courts - that has paved Israel’s way to escalate its bloodletting to now encompass the occupied West Bank, Lebanon, Yemen and Syria.

Israel’s theatre of war is rapidly expanding to fully embrace Iran, too. The world is braced for an imminent Israeli attack. 

There is already an undeclared regional war, and the risk grows daily of this expanding into a world war - and with that, all the inherent risks of a nuclear confrontation. But why? 

For Israel’s apologists - a group that includes the entire western establishment, it seems - the narrative is a simple one, though rarely articulated clearly because its racist premises are so hard to miss.

To make Israelis feel safe again, Israel needs to reassert its military deterrence by crushing Hamas and its supporters in Gaza. To do so, Israel must also take on those in the wider region who refuse to submit to Israel’s - and by extension the West’s - civilisational superiority. 

The mantra of Israel and its apologists is “de-escalation through escalation”. In blunter language, the policy is an updated colonial one of “beat the savages into submission”. 

Israel’s critics - now mostly silenced as “antisemites” - argue that Israelis can never be made safe simply through military aggression rather than diplomatic solutions. Violence begets more violence. Indeed, Israel’s decades of structural violence against the entire Palestinian people led us to this point.

And they note, Israel hasn’t just ignored diplomatic options; it is actively tearing down any chance of them bearing fruit. It assassinated Hamas political chief Ismail Haniyeh, a relatively moderate figure, as he was leading negotiations towards a long-anticipated ceasefire in Gaza. 

And it now seems likely that Israel chose to kill Hassan Nasrallah, Hezbollah’s leader, shortly after he had agreed, along with the Lebanese government, to a 21-day ceasefire while the international community worked on a peace deal. 

'Clash of civilisations'

But this only gets halfway to understanding the problem.

True, Israel now appears determined to finish once and for all the job it began in 1948 of eradicating the Palestinian people - the native population its western-backed, settler-colonial project was predicated on removing. 

Israel has repeatedly failed to ethnically cleanse historic Palestine, while the fallback position - decades of apartheid rule - could never be more than a holding measure, as South Africa’s experience proved.

Now, armed with 7 October as the pretext, Israel has rolled out a genocidal programme instead; first in Gaza, and, if it gets away with it, soon in the occupied West Bank.

But Israel has long had a much grander ambition - one that it is getting a second bite of the cherry to achieve. 

More than 20 years ago, a group of extreme ideologues known as the neoconservatives seized the foreign policy initiative during the presidency of George W Bush. They have since become a permanent foreign policy elite in Washington, whichever administration is in power. 

What is distinctive about the neoconservatives is the centrality of Israel to their worldview. They regard Israel’s unapologetic Jewish supremacism and militarism as a model for the West - one in which it returns to an unashamed white supremacism and militarism in a revived spirit of colonialism. 

Like Israel, the neoconservatives see the world in terms of a never-ending clash of civilisations against the so-called Muslim world. In this context, international law becomes an obstacle to the West’s victory, rather than a guarantee of global order.

In addition, the neoconservatives view Israel as the battering ram to keep the US in charge of international affairs in the world’s main oil spigot, the Middle East. Israel lies at the heart of Washington’s policy of full-spectrum global dominance.

The neoconservatives have long been sold on Israel’s strategy for achieving such dominance in the Middle East: by Balkanising it. The aim has been to demand utter subservience to Israel, with any source of dissent not only punished, but the social structures that support it crushed into ruins.

In Gaza, that method has been on full show. In destroying government buildings, universities, mosques, churches, libraries, schools, hospitals and even bakeries, Israel has sought to reduce the Palestinian population to the barest of human existence. National identity, and the desire to resist, are luxuries no one can afford. Survival is all.

Israel is beginning to roll out the same scheme for the occupied West Bank, Lebanon and Iran.

Destabilising the Middle East

None of this is new. Just as Israel is currently grasping the pretext of 7 October to justify its rampage, the neoconservatives earlier seized on al-Qaeda’s destruction of New York’s Twin Towers on 9/11 as their opportunity to “remake the Middle East”. 

In 2007, former Nato commander Wesley Clark recounted a meeting at the Pentagon shortly after the US invasion of Afghanistan. An officer told him: “We are going to attack and destroy the governments in seven countries in five years. We’re going to start with Iraq, and then we’re going to move to Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Iran.” 

Clark added of the neoconservatives: “They wanted us to destabilise the Middle East, turn it upside down, make it under our control.”

As I documented in my 2008 book Israel and the Clash of Civilisations, Israel was supposed to carry out a central chunk of Washington’s post-Iraq plan, starting with its war on Lebanon in 2006. Israel’s attack there was supposed to drag in Syria and Iran, giving the US a pretext to expand the war.

This was what the US secretary of state of the time, Condoleezza Rice, meant when she spoke of the “birth pangs of a new Middle East”. 

The plan went awry largely because Israel got bogged down in phase one, in Lebanon. It blitzed cities like Beirut with US-supplied bombs, but its soldiers struggled against Hezbollah in a ground invasion of southern Lebanon.

The West subsequently found other ways to deal with Syria and Libya. 

To the bitter end

Now we are back where we started, nearly 20 years later. Israel, Hezbollah and Iran have all been preparing for this second round. 

The western-Israeli goal, as before, is to destroy Lebanon and Iran, just as Gaza has been destroyed. The aim is to smash the infrastructure of Lebanon and Iran, their governing institutions, and their social structures. It is to plunge the Lebanese and Iranian people into a primaeval state, where they can cohere only into simple, tribal units and fight among themselves for the bare essentials.

There is no evidence that this goal is any more realisable today than it was two decades ago. 

Even Israel’s top military spokesperson, Daniel Hagari, has had to admit: “Anyone who thinks we can eliminate Hamas is wrong.” 

The Israeli army is once again floundering in southern Lebanon against Hezbollah’s guerrilla fighters. And Iran’s very limited, sampler ballistic-missile attack on Israeli military sites last week showed that its arsenal can get past Israel’s US-supplied defence systems and hit its targets. 

But Israel has made clear that for it, and for the US military titan behind it, there is no going back. 

Last week, US State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller said the quiet part out loud: “We’ve never wanted to see a diplomatic resolution with Hamas.” 

According to "conservative" calculations from Brown University’s Costs of War project, the US has already spent more than $22.7bn on military assistance to Israel over the past year -equivalent to more than $10,000 for every Palestinian man, woman and child living in Gaza. Washington’s pockets appear to be bottomless. 

For Israel and the US, there are no red lines. The same holds true in European capitals. They all appear ready to continue this to the bitter end.

Mapping 1,400 Israeli settler attacks in the West Bank over the past year

There was an average of four incidents of settler violence per day in the occupied West Bank since October 7.

By Hanna Duggal and Marium Ali

Published on 10 Oct 2024

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/10/10/mapping-1400-settler-attacks-in-the-occupied-west-bank-over-the-past-year

While Israel continues its genocide against Palestinians in Gaza, in the occupied West Bank, Israeli settlers have ramped up their attacks on people, often under the protection of Israeli soldiers.

Over the past year, at least 1,423 incidents of settler violence in the occupied West Bank were recorded – an average of four a day, according to data from the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.

With 321 incidents, Ramallah and el-Bireh governorate saw the highest number of settler attacks, followed by 319 incidents in Nablus and 298 in Hebron.

The highest number of settler attacks in the past year occurred in October 2023 with 233 incidents leading to deaths and/or property damage.

After the Hamas-led attacks on Israel on October 7, 2023, far-right National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir distributed semiautomatic rifles and other weapons to settlers and far-right Israelis, which are now being used against Palestinians.

Since then, more than 120,000 firearms have been distributed among Israeli settlers, while tens of thousands more have received conditional approvals.

“We intend to continue arming Israel. That’s what we did, and that’s what we’ll continue to do!”, Ben-Gvir said on his X account.

Speaking about the unfolding violence in the West Bank, the United Nations said it “could worsen dramatically if [Israeli security forces] continue to systematically use unlawful lethal force and ignore violence perpetrated by settlers”.

Israeli settlement expansion

Israeli settlements are Jewish communities built on Palestinian land that has been taken by force from its owners.

Roughly 700,000 Israeli settlers are living in at least 250 settlements and outposts in the West Bank and occupied East Jerusalem.

After October 7, 2023, settlers were particularly roused by far-right members of the Israeli government, such as Ben-Gvir and Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, both of whom are settlers and have backed the expansion of settlements in the occupied West Bank.

In March, Israel approved the construction of about 3,500 new housing units, ​​adding to nearly 20,000 approved in the past year.

Thousands forced from their homes

In the past year, about 4,555 Palestinians have been displaced in the West Bank after Israeli forces demolished their homes.

Israeli forces demolished, seized or sealed at least 1,768 structures, including 390 in Tulkarem, 368 in Jerusalem and 242 in Jenin.

Number of dead in the West Bank: 744

Since Israel began its war on Gaza, which has killed more than 42,000 people, at least 744 Palestinians, including 164 children, have been killed in the West Bank.

Biden is letting Israel trap the US into war with Iran

One year after Hamas' Oct 7 attacks, regional conflict is raging with no end in sight

Paul R. Pillar

Oct 07, 2024

https://responsiblestatecraft.org/israel-war/

The Biden administration is not only endorsing but also on the verge of actively assisting a new Israeli armed attack on Iran. National security adviser Jake Sullivan says that the United States is working directly with Israel regarding such an attack. “The United States is fully, fully, fully supportive of Israel,” declares President Joe Biden.

The projected attack serves no U.S. interests. The attack perpetuates a broader pattern of escalating violence in the Middle East that also serves no U.S. interests. The Iranian missile salvo to which the coming Israeli attack is ostensible retaliation was itself retaliation for previous Israeli attacks. Retaliation for retaliation is a prescription for an unending cycle of violence.

The United States is facilitating an attack on a nation that does not want war and has been remarkably restrained in trying to avoid it, in the face of repeated Israeli provocations. A sustained Israeli bombing campaign against Iranian-related targets within Syria elicited a response only when it escalated to an attack on a diplomatic compound in Damascus, killing senior Iranian officials. Even then, the Iranian response, in the form of an earlier salvo of missiles and drones in April, was designed and telegraphed in a way to make a show of defiance but — with most of the projectiles certain to be shot down — to cause minimal damage and almost no casualties.

When Israel assassinated visiting Hamas political leader Ismail Haniyeh in a government guest house in Tehran in July — the sort of attack that would elicit a quick and forceful response by the U.S. or Israel if it happened in one of their capitals — Iran did nothing until last week. It finally acted only after yet another Israeli attack— this time an assault on residential buildings in a suburb of Beirut that killed a senior Iranian Revolutionary Guard officer along with Hezbollah secretary-general Hassan Nasrallah. Far from being motivated by any grandiose ambitions of regional dominance or desire to destabilize the region, Iranian leaders believed that they were getting killed by a thousand cuts from Israel and that they had to respond to the repeated Israeli attacks lest they lose the confidence not only of their own people but of regional allies. The missile firings that constituted Iran’s retaliation, like the ones in April, again caused minimal damage or casualties.

By cooperating with Israel in a new attack, the United States is assisting a state that has been responsible for most of the escalation and the vast majority of death and destruction in the Middle East for at least the past year. Although Hamas’ attack on southern Israel last October is commonly seen as the starting point of the subsequent mayhem in the Middle East, the question of who is responding to whom could go back farther than that. For example, the 1,200 deaths from that Hamas attack, horrible to be sure, were fewer than the number of Palestinians that Israel had killed in the occupied West Bank and the Gaza Strip just from the day-to-day operations of the occupying Israeli army, supplemented by settler violence in the West Bank, during the previous eight years.

Since the Hamas attack, the devastating Israeli operation in the Gaza Strip has gone far beyond anything that can be construed as defense, or even as a response to Hamas, and has brought suffering to innocent civilians that is orders of magnitude greater than anything Hamas or any other Palestinian group has ever done. The still-rising official death toll exceeds 41,000, with the actual number of Palestinian deaths probably much higher and likely into six figures. Much of the Strip has been reduced to rubble and rendered unlivable.

After Hezbollah fired rounds into Israel last October in a show of support for the Palestinians in Gaza, the story of conflict along the Israeli-Lebanese frontier has mainly been one of repeated Israeli escalations. Israeli attacks in Lebanon have far exceeded Hezbollah attacks on Israel, in number but especially in physical effects, with almost no casualties within Israel apart from a few military personnel at the border. The rapidly rising toll of deaths in Lebanon from Israeli attacks has now passed 2,000, with about 10,000 injured and about 1.2 million people displaced from their homes. As in the Gaza Strip, civilians constitute much and perhaps most of that toll, including as a result of Israeli airstrikes that have demolished residential buildings in densely populated neighborhoods.

As a growing Israeli ground assault in Lebanon accompanies the aerial bombardment, Israel has told people in almost the entire southern third of Lebanon to move north, even though Israel already has been conducting lethal aerial attacks throughout Lebanon, including as far north as Tripoli. This also is reminiscent of the pattern in Gaza, in which residents are told to move, only to be bombed again in their new location.

The offensive Israeli actions that figure into confrontation with Iran — including the aerial and clandestine assassination operations in Lebanon, Syria, and the heart of Tehran — also have each constituted escalation. Those operations appear designed at least in part to goad Iran into entering a wider war, preferably one that also involves the United States.

Other motives behind the Israeli escalation are multiple and vary with the specific target. The deadly assaults on the Palestinians — in the Gaza Strip and increasingly also in the West Bank— are part of a long-term effort to use force to somehow make Israel’s Palestinian problem go away, through a combination of outright killing, inducing exile by making a homeland unlivable, and intimidation of any who remain.

Israel’s officially declared objective for its attacks in Lebanon is to permit a return home of the 70,000 temporarily displaced residents of northern Israel — whose numbers constitute less than six percent of the Lebanese who have been driven from their homes so far by the Israel offensive. That objective is genuine, but an escalating war along Israel’s northern border only places the objective farther out of reach. The Israeli operations also clearly are designed to cripple Hezbollah as much as possible, although they sustain and heighten the sort of anger that led to Hezbollah’s establishment and growth in the first place.

An Israel that is the strongest military power in the Middle East and is throwing its armed might around in seemingly every direction but the Mediterranean Sea is a nation drunk on the use of force and stumbling into still more use of it with little or no apparent attention to any long-term strategy for achieving an end state, other than living forever by the sword. Each tactical success, including the killing of a prominent adversary such as Hezbollah’s Hassan Nasrallah, only seems to deepen the inebriation.

Beyond this, one gets into a mixture of motivations that are specific to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and ones shared with other Israeli policymakers. It is widely recognized, including by Netanyahu’s domestic opponents, that he has a personal stake in continuing and even escalating Israel’s wars. This is partly because of the usual rally-round-the-flag effect that attenuates the political problems of a wartime leader. It is also more specifically because Netanyahu is dependent on the support of the most extreme members of his right-wing ruling coalition to hold that coalition together, thereby keeping Netanyahu in power and delaying the day he has to confront fully the corruption charges against him.

An armed attack on Iran would extend the Israeli policy— not unique to Netanyahu, although he has been its most prominent exponent — of stoking maximum hostility toward, and isolation of, Iran. That policy serves to weaken a rival for regional influence, to place blame for everything wrong with the region on someone other than Israel, to inhibit any engagement with Iran by Israel’s patron the United States, and to divert international attention away from Israel’s own actions.

The diversion seems to work. The international attention to what may come next in the confrontation with Iran, in addition to the escalating operations in Lebanon, has meant less attention than would otherwise have been given in newspapers and the airwaves to the continued carnage in the Gaza Strip that claims civilian lives, such as Israeli attacks within the last few days on a girls’ school and an orphanage that several hundred displaced persons were using as shelter.

The U.S. presidential election provides another motivation for the Israeli government to escalate regional warfare. Netanyahu certainly would like to see a second term for Donald Trump, who gave Israel just about anything it wanted during his previous time in office, with nothing in return except political support for Trump. This relationship is part of a broader political alliance between the Republican Party and Netanyahu’s Likud Party. To the extent an escalatory mess in the Middle East causes problems for the Biden administration and thereby hurts the election chances of Vice President Kamala Harris, that is a bonus from Netanyahu’s point of view.

Netanyahu is more likely to enjoy that bonus and the other fruits of ramping up conflict with Iran to the extent that the United States gets directly involved in that conflict. Such involvement not only makes the politically costly mess for the Biden administration all the messier, but also enables Netanyahu to claim credibly that he has the United States fully at his side in his government’s lethal activities.

None of these Israeli objectives are in the interest of the United States. Several of the objectives, such as hamstringing any U.S. diplomacy that involves Iran, are directly and manifestly opposed to U.S. interests.

Israel’s regional warfare — and more specifically a U.S.-backed attack on Iran — would harm U.S. interests in several additional ways.

Closer association with Israel’s lethal operations increases the chance of reprisals, including terrorist reprisals. It also worsens U.S. isolation in international politics.

Supporting or participating in an Israeli attack on Iran would further undermine U.S. claims to be in favor of peace and observance of a rules-based international order. It would mean attacking the country that in this confrontation has exercised restraint in the interest of avoiding war and is firmly in support of ceasefires on each of the fronts seeing combat. It would mean aiding further attacks by the country that in the same confrontation has inflicted far more death and destruction, and done more to promote escalation of the violence, than any other in the region.

An attack on Iran would roil the oil market and cause economic dislocations that would reach the United States, especially but not solely if such an attack targeted Iranian oil facilities.

An attack would set back any chance for fruitful diplomacy involving Iran on matters such as security in the Persian Gulf region.

An attack would increase the chance that the Iranian regime would choose to develop a nuclear weapon. Nothing would be better designed to strengthen the arguments of those in Tehran willing to take that step than armed attacks demonstrating that Iran does not now have a sufficient deterrent.

Israel has already entrapped the United States to a large degree in its lethal ways in the Middle East, and the entrapment threatens to become deeper with the anticipated new attack on Iran. The entrapment would not have been possible without mismanagement of the U.S.-Israeli relationship on the Washington end. President Biden’s approach of holding Netanyahu close in the hope of influencing his policies has failed. It also has been counterproductive. In the absence of any willingness to employ the leverage that U.S. material aid to Israel represents, all the bear-hugging and expressions of support have only reassured Netanyahu that he can continue to prosecute his wars and ignore American calls for restraint without losing that aid.

It is refreshing to see reports that at least within the Department of Defense there is some recognition that the policy has been counterproductive by emboldening Israel to escalate. It is perhaps unsurprising that the department whose personnel would be on the front line of any expanded warfare involving the United States is more willing than others to recognize the nature and sources of the violence plaguing the Middle East and the need to deter or restrain Israel rather than embolden it. One can only hope that this willingness will spread more widely in policymaking circles.

They Lie. They Cheat. They Steal. They Bomb. and They Spin

Pepe Escobar • October 4, 2024

https://www.unz.com/pescobar/they-lie-they-cheat-they-steal-they-bomb-and-they-spin/

The Talmudic psychos not only obsessed on breathing fire against the Axis of Resistance but now also going after Russian national interests.

A case could be made that Iran’s Ballistic Retaliation Night, a measured response to Israel’s serial provocations, is less consequential when it comes to the efficacy of the Axis of Resistance than the decapitation of Hezbollah’s leadership.

Still, the message was enough to send the Talmudic psychopathologicals into a frenzy; for all their hysterical denials and massive spin, Iron Toilet Paper and the Arrow system were de facto rendered useless.

The IRGC made it known that the volley of missiles was inaugurated by a single hypersonic Fatteh 2 which took out the Arrow 3 air defense system’s radar – capable of intercepting missiles in the atmosphere.

And well-informed Iranian military sources stated that hackers went on heavy cyberattack mode to disrupt the Iron Dome system just before the start of the operation.

The IRGC finally confirmed that just about 90% of the intended targets were hit; the implication was that each target was supposed to be visited by several missiles, with some getting intercepted.

It’s open to wide speculation how many F-35s and F-15s were ultimately destroyed or damaged on two air bases, one of which, Nevatim, in the Negev, becoming literally inoperable.

The Iran-Russia military entente – part of their soon to be signed comprehensive strategic partnership – was in effect. The IRGC used the recently supplied Russian electromagnetic jammer to blind Israel-NATO GPS systems – including those of U.S. aircrafts. That explains the Iron Dome far off hitting the empty night skies.

Framing Iran’s retaliation as a casus belli

None of that substantially changed the deterrence equation. Israel continues to bomb southern Beirut. The pattern remains the same: whenever they’re hit, the genocidals cry out in pain or whine like annoying babies even as their killing machine keeps going – with unarmed civilians as privileged targets.

The bombing never stops – and it won’t, from Palestine to Lebanon and Syria, across West Asia, and leading to the “response” to Iran’s Ballistic Night.

Iran is in an extremely tough geopolitical and military position – not to mention geoeconomic, still under a tsunami of sanctions. Obviously the leadership in Tehran is fully aware of the trap being set by the Talmudic-American Zionist combo – which want to lure Iran into a major war.

Jake Sullivan, one of the stalwarts of the Biden combo which is really dictating U.S. policy (on behalf of their sponsors), considering the pathetic condition of the zombie in the White House, all but spelled it out:

“We have made clear that there will be consequences – severe consequences – for this attack, and we will work with Israel to make sure that’s the case.”

Translation: Retaliation Night is being spun as a casus belli. U.S.-Israel are already blaming Iran for the possibly incoming Mega-War in West Asia.

This war is the Holy of the Holies since at least the Cheney regime days – two decades ago. And yet Tehran, if it so decided, already has what it takes to raze Israel to the ground. They won’t do it because the price to pay would be unbearable.

Even if the Talmudic psychos and the Zio-cons finally got their wish, a remote possibility, this war, after a devastating bombing campaign, could only be won with massive U.S. boots on the ground. Whatever the spin rolling on Zio-con controlled Think Tankland/ media swamp, that won’t happen.

And still the March of Folly proceeds uninterrupted: the Zionist Project, a U.S./Israel deadly embrace, against Iran. But with a potent differential: the back up of Russia and, further behind, China. These three are the key BRICS triad. They are at the vanguard of trying to build a new, fair multinodal world. And not by accident they happen to be the top three existential “threats” to the Empire of Chaos, Lies and Plunder.

With Project Ukraine going down the drain of History, as well as burying for good the “rules-based international order” in the black soil of Novorossiya, the real major front of the One War, the new incarnation of Forever Wars, is Iran.

In parallel, Moscow and Beijing fully realize that the more Exceptionalistan gets bogged down in West Asia, the more room of maneuver they have to accelerate the draining of the wobbly Leviathan.

Gaza-on-the-Litani

Hezbollah has a seriously tough spell ahead. Resources – especially supply of weapons and military equipment, through Syria and by air from Iran to Lebanon – will become increasingly scarce. Compare it to Israel’s unlimited supply chain from Exceptionalistan – not to mention tons of money.

Israel intel is far from shabby – as commandos went deep, in secret, into Hezbollah territory collecting info on the fortification network. When – in fact if – they reach populated areas in Southern Lebanon, then it will be bombing dementia plus heavy artillery against residential areas.

That operation might well be called Gaza-on-the Litani. It will happen only if Hezbollah’s complex network in southern Lebanon is cracked – a major “if”.

Jeffrey Sachs, for all his good intentions, went as far as he could to characterize Israelis as judeo supremacist extremist terrorists. Virtually the whole Global Majority is now aware of it.

What comes next in Talmudic-Zio-con planning may include a ghastly false flag, possibly after the U.S. presidential election, for instance on a NATO vessel or on U.S. troops in the Persian Gulf, to lock up the new administration into the long-planned U.S. war on Iran. Dick Cheney will have an orgasm – and croak.

The BRICS summit in Kazan under the Russian presidency is less than three weeks away. In sharp contrast to genocide and serial wars in West Asia, Putin and Xi will be standing by the – open – door on behalf of BRICS+, welcoming scores of nations that are fleeing the collective West like the plague.

Russia is now fully behind Iran – and as much as in floundering Ukraine, that means Russia at war with the U.S./Israel; after all the Pentagon is directly shooting down Iranian missiles, while Israel is the U.S.’s de facto pre-eminent state, fully, fiscally supported by U.S. taxpayers.

It gets trickier by the minute. Immediately after a very important meeting between Alexander Lavrentiev, Putin’s special envoy to Syria, and Ali Akbar Ahmadian, the secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, Tel Aviv went Full Dementia – what else – and targeted warehouses of Russian forces in Syria.

There was a joint Russia-Syria air defense response. What that shows is the Talmudic psychos not only obsessed on breathing fire against the Axis of Resistance but now also going after Russian national interests. This can get very ugly for them in a flash – and is yet one more illustration that the name of the (new, deadly) game is U.S./Israel vs. Russia/Iran.

Support for Israel Has Cost US Taxpayers At Least $22.76 Billion in One Year

Brown University's Costs of War project released a report on US spending since October 7, 2023

by Dave DeCamp October 7, 2024

https://news.antiwar.com/2024/10/07/support-for-israel-has-cost-the-us-taxpayer-at-least-22-8-billion-in-one-year/#gsc.tab=0

Support for Israel’s onslaught in Gaza and other escalations in the Middle East has cost the US at least $22.76 billion since October 7, 2023, Brown University’s Costs of War project said in a paper published on Monday.

Costs of War reached the number, which is a very conservative estimate, by combining the cost of US military aid to Israel and the cost of related US military operations in the region, including the war against the Houthis in Yemen.

The report found that the US government has approved at least $17.9 billion in military aid to support Israeli military operations in Gaza and elsewhere in the region over the past year, significantly more than any other year since the US began providing military aid to Israel in 1959.

The paper notes the difficulty in tracking US military support for Israel due to the Biden administration’s lack of transparency. “For instance, the Biden administration has made at least 100 arms deals with Israel since October 2023 that fell below the value that would have triggered the requirement to notify Congress of the details,” the paper reads.

The $17.9 billion also does not include a major $20.3 arms deal that the State Department approved for Israel in August since the money will be spent in the coming years. It’s also unclear at this time how much of the $20.3 billion, which includes an $18.8 billion deal for F-15 fighter jets, will be covered by US military aid.

The paper details how the US has provided Israel with weapons for decades. “The US has been Israel’s top arms supplier for over five decades. Israel is the largest cumulative recipient of US aid in the world since World War II, and it is in the midst of a ten-year, $38 billion military aid agreement, which was negotiated under the Obama administration, covering the fiscal years 2019 to 2028,” the paper reads.

The report says the US has spent at least $4.8 billion on its own military operations in the Middle East, including $2.4 billion on intercepting Houthi missiles and drones and launching missile strikes on Yemen. Another $2.4 billion for spending on US operations in the region was included in the $95 billion foreign military aid bill President Biden signed into law in April. The paper adds another $50-$70 million in additional combat pay for US military personnel.

The costs for the US taxpayer will continue to rise as there’s no end in sight to Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza or its bombing campaign in Lebanon. The risk of a full-blown war with Iran is also extremely high as the US is coordinating with Israel on its plans to attack Iran in retaliation for the Iranian missile barrage that hit Israel last week, which was a response to several Israeli escalations. The US bombing campaign in Yemen has also failed to deter the Houthis, who have vowed they would only stop their attacks on shipping if there were a ceasefire in Gaza.

U.S. and Israel are Pushing the World to the Brink of WW III

Their Crimes Against Humanity Must Be Stopped Immediately!

Just short of one year since Israel’s criminal attack and invasion of the Gaza Strip and brutal bombardment and genocide of Palestine, the Zionist state committed yet another crime against humanity, on September 23, 2024.

Israel carpet bombed Lebanon and assassinated the top leaders of the Resistance Front, including Seyyed Hassan Nasrallah, the widely revered leader of Hezbollah, and brigadier general Abbas Nilforoushan, commander of Iran’s Quds Brigade in Lebanon, among others. Since the start of this criminal attack, Israel has continued to assassinate more leaders of the Hezbollah, including the organization’s communications chief, Mohammad Rashid Sakaf, on October 4.

Iran has exercised restraint in response to extreme Zionist provocation. In retaliation, and fully within its rights in accordance with Article 51 of the United Nations Charter, Iran launched close to 200 ballistic missiles into Israel. Iran targeted Israel’s military facilities and security installations in various parts of the country, while intentionally avoiding the population centers, unlike Israel. Iran has also warned that any military response by Israel, the United States, and any other country that helps in this response, will face more devastating consequences.

There is no doubt that Israel’s criminal violations of international law in Palestine, Lebanon, Iran, and other parts of West Asia, has increased the possibility of a full-fledged regional war, which can easily escalate into a global, possibly nuclear, confrontation. Such escalation must be avoided at any cost, first and foremost by stopping Israel’s blatant criminal actions.

We should have no illusions that the U.S. is in any way restraining the Zionist’s escalation of the war and the continuation of genocide. Whether the Israeli tail is wagging the Yankee dog is their problem. For the rest of humanity, it is all one beast. Washington is as much complicit as Tel Aviv.

The imperialist project and the Zionist project are one and the same. Without active U.S. diplomatic, financial, and military support, Zionist Israel would not have been able to commit such crimes. For many decades, every U.S. administration has vetoed every UN resolution to stop Israeli crimes. Even today, as we are witnessing the massacre of Palestinians and Lebanese by the Zionist state, the Biden administration is urgently allocating an additional $8.7 billion in military aid to Israel.

There are strong imperialistic reasons for this support. Israel is the largest and most powerful U.S. military base in West Asia. The U.S. needs this base for controlling the region and its resources, as well as for creating divisions among the Arab states of the region to weaken any resistance to U.S. domination.

In addition, the world is going through a fundamental transition, and the U.S. is increasingly losing its hegemonic control over it. This transition is on the verge of becoming — like the present climate crisis — irreversible. The U.S. ruling class does not care about the climate crisis, but it is super-sensitive about losing its imperialistic hegemony in every corner of the world. The ever-increasing U.S.-Israel military attacks on the regional resistance movement is based on the awareness of the fact that the defeat of Zionist Israel fundamentally threatens U.S. hegemony in the region and, through it, a shift in the global balance of forces against the empire itself.

As a result of the unconditional and unwavering U.S. support of the blatant crimes of Israel, they both have lost any semblance of moral and diplomatic credibility. The only weapon left for the imperialist-Zionist project is escalation of military conflict and instigation of a regional and, if necessary, a global war for maintaining hegemony. It is now at a stage where the U.S. and Israel may be ready to bring down the whole world with them as they fall. And all this at a time when the post-war institutions established and now controlled by the West have failed to defend international law and the functionality of the structures and institutions established through the UN process.

Today, a counter-hegemonic movement — internationally and here in the belly of the beast — is rising with the understanding that the Zionist enterprise exists because it is an integral part of the U.S. empire. The barbarism of the genocide has exposed the essential nature of US-led imperialism. We commend the peace and justice movement’s deepening consciousness of the fact that imperialism is the main enemy of humanity. From its sound moral foundation for peace, the anti-war movement is becoming more consciously anti-imperialist.

We specially salute the U.S. student movement for its brave and heroic protests on various university campuses against Israeli aggression and its genocidal policies. It is our hope that this movement, which has been rekindled for the first time since Vietnam War protests, will be able to overcome the effects of the recent suppression and resume its historical role as the vanguard of peace and social justice.

Global humanity cannot and should not allow this disaster to continue. We must all mobilize to stop the crime of war, destruction, and genocide that is being committed against humanity. We call upon all defenders of peace and human rights in the U.S. to:

• Organize broad mass demonstrations in every corner of the country against U.S. and Israel atrocities and demand an immediate end to Israel’s occupation of Palestine and a halt to its military actions in Gaza and against Lebanon and Iran.

• Organize public events to spark a public discussion of these crimes and inject the issue of U.S.-Israel war crimes into the ongoing process of the presidential election.

• Join hands to develop a common strategy to counter U.S. militarism and imperialist policies.

 

***

U.S. Peace Council • P.O. Box 3105, New Haven, CT 06515 • (203) 387-0370 • USPC@USPeaceCouncil.org
• https://uspeacecouncil.org • https://www.facebook.com/USPeaceCouncil/ • @USPeaceCouncil