by Martin Jay, Strategic Culture:
The word escalation is often over used when talking about the conflict Israel is at the centre of as it carries out a genocide on the Gazan people. But if there were ever a moment where Israel and Iran find themselves staring at the abyss it is now, given that the U.S. has shown its full support to Benjamin Netanyahu and that the Biden administration is being run on a caretaker basis by an inept Kamala Harris. Did Netanyahu leave the U.S. and while on the long Atlantic trip come to the conclusion that he will never have an opportunity again to take the U.S. to fever pitch, being pulled into a regional war with Iran?
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On the 30th and 31st of July Israel carried out two assassinations which have even shocked the usual suspects of regional experts who didn’t see them coming – in particular against the head of Hamas’s Political Bureau, Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran. While barely Iran’s leaders had a few hours to mourn the death of Hezbollah top official Fouad Shukr in Beirut who is believed to be buried under a mass of rubble, the strike inside Iran is both curious and alarming.
The timing is worth noting as the Iran strike in Tehran by Israel coincides with U.S. strikes in Iraq.
On the night of July 30, just after Israel’s strike against Shukr, U.S. aircraft bombed a Kataib Hezbollah base in Babil Governorate in Iraq, killing several members of the pro-Iran militia. Just a few days earlier Hezbollah’s bombardment of the occupied Golan Heights which killed a dozen children certainly raised the stakes in the war, which until now was reasonably contained between Hezbollah and Israel. But now this response from Israel takes everything to a new level.
Netanyahu is certainly trying to drag the U.S. into a war in the region, which is more or less what he has been dreaming about all his life. The strike against the Hamas leader in Iran is a provocation which was designed to draw the most wrath from Tehran. Its leaders will be seen as weak if they don’t react soon as politically the elite will draw fire from the masses that the fortunes it spends on a ballistic missile defence system is clearly wasted. And yet the Iranians know this trap so well. While it is true that they will look weak, especially after the last so-called retaliation against Israel was really a political ploy by the West to humour them and their madding crowds, now the game of escalation Tehran is playing with Israel is much more serious. We’re no longer firing blanks.
The pressure on Iran to retaliate will be gargantuan and yet it is unlikely that the Supreme Leader will launch such a strike, knowing full well how the trap has been laid for them. More likely they will carry out a number of mini strikes, which, on aggregate, will add up to the gesture that they need. And so, if Netanyahu’s aim – to provoke Iran into sending a sizeable missile to an Israeli city – is not to be met, then what can we expect next?
Almost inevitably, Netanyahu will be planning his next false flag attack, which should worry both the U.S. and the EU – raising the stakes and pressure for those two blocs together to force him to make a ceasefire in Gaza. For some sceptical pundits, the attacks of October 7th were in many ways a ‘false flag’ as there is a growing cabal of Middle East experts who risk losing their credibility by arguing that he already knew of the Hamas attack. Some even believe that he had been pushing Hamas over many years to do what it needed to do – to justify the response which we are seeing now which is most certainly an ethnic cleansing of Gaza. Period. Once he realises in the coming days and weeks that Harris is not up for a war with Iran, he will begin to look at the false flag options to push her into a corner which she can’t get out of. A direct attack on U.S. forces in the region is the only sure way of making Netanyahu’s sullied plan take effect. The Israeli leader has the sophisticated weaponry and he knows how to use it to look like Hezbollah in Lebanon were responsible for such a strike either against an aircraft carrier or U.S. troops in the region (they are sitting ducks all over the Middle East) that it beggars belief that he has taken so long to play this card.
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