Israel's Iran attack is designed to stop the world turning its attention to Gaza

Invoking a bogus "Iran threat" is Netanyahu's time-honored tactic for changing the subject from his war crimes against Palestinians. But now he's plunging the U.S. into a new forever war

1.

Another round of Israeli war crimes should surprise no one. Israel’s creation involved the epic war crime of the ethnic cleansing of 70% of the Palestinian population in 1948; it has shaped itself as a society via the crime of apartheid for decades; it is currently in a wave of renewed ethnic cleansing and genocide. So, a wanted international war criminal extends his rampage to Iran? And anyone is surprised?

2.

“Preemptive” is a laughable term here, because there’s no basis for that adjective for this strike in international law — though, hey, what do Israel or the U.S. care about international law? “Preemption” was the same narrative, swallowed whole by the Bush Administration in 2003, to launch its own baseless criminal aggression in Iraq.

3.

In fact, it’s important to recognize that this aggression has nothing to do with anything actually happening in Iran’s nuclear program. Has Iran built a nuclear weapon, or is it building one? Nope, at least not according to U.S. intelligence assessments. Netanyahu’s arrogance, and his assumption of unconditional impunity from the West, is clear when the Israeli leader paints a picture of Iran’s “intolerable” missile threat to Israel, saying “imagine 10,000 tons of TNT landing on a country the size of New Jersey”. This from a man wanted for war crimes trial at the ICC precisely because his country has dropped ten times that amount of TNT on a territory the size of 1.6% of New Jersey. Netanyahu has always hyped an “Iran threat” primarily as a red herring to distract attention from Israel’s crimes against Palestinians, and enlisting Western consent for its aggression. And here we go again. Even the most gingerly Western moves to restrain Israel’s criminality in the West Bank and Gaza will once again be put on hold. There really is no bottom to the depths of cynicism and depravity of Israel’s leadership.

4.

Iran’s strategy had long been to demonstrate that it has mustered the capability to build a nuclear weapon by mastering the full civilian nuclear fuel cycle (permissible under the NPT) – achieving what experts call “nuclear latency”, leveraging its capacity to weaponize nuclear material (without actually doing so) to force other powers to engage in the way that they do with previously second-tier countries that have earned a place at the top table by testing a nuclear device. Quoting myself from the Nation some years back,

Iran achieved a diplomatic innovation: It never actually began to build a nuclear weapon, but it demonstrated sufficient proof of its ability to do that it was able to accrue many of the gains that other regimes had won only once they had built and tested atomic bombs. Iran’s capacity to produce bomb materiel compelled the key international powers to recognize a regime that many would have preferred to shun.

That latent capacity produced the JCPOA, which had been working perfectly well with Iran in full compliance with the deal’s reinforced limits on the extent to which Iran can enrich uranium — until it was trashed without cause by President Trump in 2017.

5.

Since then, Iran has ramped up its enrichment levels, not to weapons grade but a lot closer in terms of how long it would take to produce the material to fill a warhead should they break out of the NPT – again, apparently as leverage to pressure the U.S. to make a new deal that would involve the desperately needed sanctions relief. Trump sent his man Steve Witkoff to the table, and some progress seemed to be on the cards – though when Trump was convinced to stick on the failed Bush Administration line that Iran could not be allowed to exercise the rights that it enjoys under the NPT on enrichment, the talks effectively hit a wall. But to believe the claim that Israel acted in self-defense here is like believing it that “self-defense” is what has driven Israel to kill 55,000 Palestinians and impose mass starvation and daily mass slaughter in Gaza.

6.

This unprovoked strike on Iran is based on Israel knowing it can, with U.S. help, manage any retaliation possible within Iran’s current capabilities. So, if you were an Iranian leader, would you be more inclined to entrust your long-term security to a deal with the Americans (who trashed the last one despite your full compliance with it, and are behind what you see as a proxy attack by Israel now) or would you race to weaponize your current nuclear stocks? If Iran’s leaders choose to build nuclear weapons, like most other countries that have or will, it will be because the major powers have made nuclear deterrence the trump card against any external threat to their regime.

7.

Needless to say, of course, that the Trump Administration’s efforts to distance the U.S. from this catastrophic action won’t be taken seriously by anyone who matters. The U.S. supplies the weapons Israel used to attack Iran; it supplies the missile defenses that shield Israel from Iranian counterstrikes; and the U.S. had literally brandished the threat of an Israeli strike in recent weeks in hope of pressuring Iran to abandon its civilian uranium enrichment program. Whether or not Trump gave the green light, he clearly enabled it. Any Israeli strike was always going to draw in the U.S., and if Trump imagined otherwise, he has been very poorly briefed. Being the guarantor of the security of a genocidal berserker regime means the U.S. is effectively committed to another “forever war” in the Middle East.

8.

Whatever happens in Tehran and Tel Aviv on Friday, dozens more Palestinians in Gaza will likely die, quickly or slowly through starvation, at the hands of the war criminals who bombed Iran overnight. But everyone else in the region will be a lot less safe than they had been on Thursday.