by Tom Luongo, Tom Luongo:
The biggest stumbling block to analyzing what’s happening between Israel and the rest of the Middle East is dispensing with our biases and ignorance about pretty much the entire affair. I will be the first to admit to having profound ignorance about so much of the history between Israel and the Palestinians.
I really wish everyone else having opinions right now would at least admit that up front versus trying to sound like another incarnation of the Newly-Minted Subject Matter Expert of the Week thanks to having read a couple of articles in the New York Times.
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And that’s the thing I believe we are fighting more than anything else at this point: the profound amount of propaganda and outright bullshit being slung around about every event of any significance.
All it does is create confusion and cognitive dissonance. That confusion is, by the way, the goal of the propaganda, from all sides.
That said, what’s abundantly clear is that this conflict has unleashed pent-up frustrations and simmering anger from all of the major players, not just the obvious ones like Hamas, the Israeli hardliners led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his echo chamber on K-Street, Capitol Hill and GCHQ.
The latter have clearly dusted off “Plan R” and pulled it from the shelf and are now executing it. This Plan R looks like the one that Dick Cheney and company ran after 9/11; shift the focus away from the ones who did the deed onto the ones you need an excuse to go to war with.
So, 19 Saudis flew planes into the World Trade Center but we went to war with Iraq and Afghanistan.
Today “Hamas” slaughters a lot of jews and the first people threatened is Iran.
Even though there is good evidence that “Hamas” wasn’t the only one involved in this attack, have closer ties to Sunni organizations than Shia, and are financed out of Qatar and the UK.
I’m not saying Iran has no role to play here. It did, according to Theirry Meyssan at Voltairenet (linked above), it was Iran, earlier this year, that brought all of the Palestinian factions together to reconcile their differences.
In 2023, Iran hosted talks between the region’s various pro-independence forces, Hezbollah, Islamic Jihad and Hamas. They were held in Beirut (Lebanon) under the presidency of General Ismaïl Qaani, commander of the al-Quds brigades of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards. Their aim was to reconcile these actors who had fought a ferocious war in Gaza, then in Syria. These meetings were made public in May 2023. On this occasion the Lebanese press discussed the preparation of the unitary operation which was carried out on October 7. Iran is therefore responsible for reconciling the Palestinian factions.
So, let’s dispense with the fiction that Bibi and company in Tel Aviv didn’t know about this operation beforehand. It’s preparation was made public knowledge in May.
But, in Neocon-speak this meeting was the equivalent of having masterminded the entire attack. Again, I’m not naïve here. Of course the simple narrative of “whatever is bad for Israel is good for Iran” holds water, but that doesn’t immediately elevate to “Iran did it!” as the South Carolinian hyenas Lindsay Graham and Nimrata Haley want you to believe.
Benefitting from something is not masterminding it or funding it.
Meyssan also explains that the operational goal of the operation was the taking of hostages to effect a prisoner swap with Israel. Is he whitewashing some of this? Probably. But no more than anyone else is whitewashing what Israel and the US are doing in response, using what happened as a casus belli to go on an extermination campaign while demanding everyone around the world to pick the right side of this conflict and for everyone else to shut the fuck up.
I have vivid memories of how I was treated being anti-war post-9/11. The same post-event propaganda operation has been in full swing for a month. Thankfully, this time this issue is more of a wedge between Western powers than the GWOT that ensued twenty years ago.
Even I, early on, fell for this simplification of reducing this to Israel v. Iran trying to tease out the broader geopolitical moves on the chessboard.
I’m not here to discuss how this situation can go sideways. It already has. My goal today is to look at some of the supposedly secondary actors in this conflict to try to get a sense of what their moves may be now that the usual suspects in D.C., Tel Aviv and London have decided to up the stakes.
For the record, none of the potential outcomes here are good for the US, save everyone walking back from the brink of all-out war. I know there are a lot of anti-US empire folks hoping for a bad end to the US, but as I’ve tried to lay out for a few years now, the winners from that scenario are the very colonialists that fomented this crisis in the first place.
Mark Wauck over at Meaning in History had a great post from last week that went into one of the angles I’m going to discuss later, the British role in toppling the Ottoman Empire after World War I and setting up Israel to secure the Suez Canal.
Because, today, Turkey re-emerges as one of the pivotal players that will determine the outcome of this conflict.
But, that said I want to start in Egypt because what I can add to the story behind the violence is, as always, about money, debt and the collateral (or lack thereof) backing it.
Egypt’s Play
I want to stress that I’m not shocked one whit that war breaks out in Israel after the confluence of events from this past summer — the failed offensive in Ukraine and the BRICS gobbling up the trade routes of the Arabian Peninsula.
Earlier this year I wrote a piece for my patrons (now public) about Egypt’s debt situation and the pressure that China and Russia were placing on the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to negotiate some sort of write-down.
