05.09.2024

Gambling on all-out war?

In the current situation it is virtually impossible to predict how far Israel would be prepared to go in spreading the war, but its strategic aims are clear, argues Moshé Machover

Is Benjamin Netanyahu trying to provoke an all-out regional war? Even some mainstream media commentators venture to suggest this, a case in point being Simon Tisdall’s recent article in The Guardian. Referring to Israel’s war on Gaza, the escalation of its fighting with Hezbollah, and Jewish settler violence and land grabs in the West Bank, he says:

The fear today … is that all these bitter conflicts will merge together into one huge regional conflagration, drawing in other Iranian proxies in Yemen, Syria and Iraq, and forcing, in turn, a military response from the US and its allies, which have built up their military presence in recent weeks. The ultimate nightmare is that Iran itself will directly confront Israel (or the other way around) …

But there will also be suspicions that the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, purposely seized on an opportunity to escalate the border confrontation with Hezbollah that has simmered since October 7. Opponents and critics accuse Netanyahu, with some justice, of blocking a Gaza deal in his unrealistic pursuit of “total victory” - and deliberately stoking an expanded conflict to aid his political survival.¹

Israeli commentators put it more directly. They include former prime minister Ehud Olmert, whose article in Ha’aretz bears the title, ‘Netanyahu wants an all-out war in the north, south and centre’.² The title of an article by Ha’aretz columnist Rogel Alpher, referring to Netanyahu’s histrionic performance at the US Congress on July 24, is even more blunt, if a tad hyperbolic: ‘Netanyahu wants a world war’.³

There are indeed several clear indications that Netanyahu is aiming to extend and escalate existing armed conflicts and ignite a grand regional conflagration. Israel’s genocidal war on the Palestinians in Gaza goes on with no end in sight, while Netanyahu keeps torpedoing the ceasefire/hostages negotiations in Doha. As Olmert puts it, “Netanyahu does not want the hostages back … The talks are likely to continue indefinitely, or blow up at some stage and end with another round of military moves in the south, and perhaps in the north as well.”⁴

Provocation

On July 30, Israel escalated its hitherto controlled hostilities with the Lebanese Hezbollah by assassinating that organisation’s senior leader, Fuad Shukr. On the following day, an even more blatant provocation: the assassination of Hamas’s top leader, Ismail Haniyeh - who, as it happened, headed the team with which Israel was supposed to be negotiating a Gaza ceasefire and release of hostages. This assassination in Tehran, where Haniyeh was attending the swearing-in of Iran’s new president, Masoud Pezeshkian, was a Zionist state gauntlet thrown down to the Islamic Republic.

Meantime, in the occupied West Bank, there has been a rising tsunami of anti-Palestinian pogroms perpetrated by savage gangs of religious Zionist settlers, flanked by Israeli military personnel. And, since the early morning of August 28, there has been a massive offensive of the Israeli occupation forces against the major towns in the northern part of the West Bank, deploying hundreds of ground troops, as well as fighter aircraft, drones and bulldozers, and using war-criminal tactics - long practised against the population of Gaza - such as targeting hospitals, and ‘encouraging’ the population to dislocate to ‘safe’ areas.

An article in The Times of Israel refers to the foreign minister in the introduction: “Israel Katz calls for ‘temporary evacuation of Palestinian civilians’ from cities where IDF is engaged in anti-terror raid,” Katz is quoted as saying: “We need to deal with the threat exactly as we deal with terror infrastructure in Gaza, including the temporary evacuation of Palestinian civilians and any other step needed.” He referred to the latest IDF operation as part of “a war in every sense”.⁵

Motives

But why is Netanyahu keen to stoke the fires of regional war? The simplistic explanation favoured by the bourgeois media is his own self-interest. Here, for example, is The Guardian’s Simon Tisdall once again:

What is Netanyahu’s plan? Does he have one? Because his governing majority in the Knesset, and his own position as premier, depend on the support of a handful of extremist religious and Jewish nationalist ministers and deputies, and because he could face jail on corruption charges, once he is out of power, opponents say Netanyahu has no interest in peace on any front.⁶

This echoes Olmert:

Masses of [Israeli] people from the political right, left and centre see that the person responsible for their welfare and security wants to create and maintain a constant, indefinite state of emergency. He wants to use this state of emergency as cover under which he can go on fleeing from responsibility for the disaster of October 7 and even prolong his corruption trial endlessly. (Wait and see what other disaster he’s preparing for us ahead of his scheduled December 2 testimony.)⁷

It is clearly true that Netanyahu has personal reasons to favour war without end. But this falls far short of a satisfactory explanation. Suppose for a moment that self-interest compels Netanyahu to act, against his better judgement, as a tool of his more extremist coalition partners. Then this would only shift the question: Why are they pushing for an all-out war? What do they expect to gain from it?

In any case, the self-interest explanation fails because it suffers from short memory and lack of attention. In fact, Netanyahu has been trying to foment a regional conflagration long before he could be suspected of doing so for personal reasons. For many years he has not missed a chance, especially when speaking to an American audience, of inciting war against Iran, allegedly the root of all regional evil, including Palestinian resistance.

In this connection I would like to recall an article I published in the Weekly Worker in 2012, entitled ‘Netanyahu’s war wish’.⁸ The analysis offered in that old article remains substantially valid today. Here is a brief summary, with a few quotes. Netanyahu has two motives for fomenting a US-Israeli war against Iran. First:

… the real political threat [Iran] poses to Israel’s regional hegemony, not the imaginary threat of being attacked by the Islamic Republic. Possession of nuclear capability is certainly a component of this political threat, inasmuch as it would contribute to Iran’s diplomatic muscle in its dealings with other Middle Eastern states and with the US. But it is only a component. Even without the nuclear issue, the Zionist state has a clear interest in replacing the present Iranian regime by one compliant with global US hegemony.

But there is a second motive, no less important. And it explains why Netanyahu would prefer the Iranian regime to be overthrown by the risky means of war rather than by subversion. As I wrote in that article,

To explain Netanyahu’s reckless calculation we need to turn our attention to Zionism’s nightmare: the Palestinian ‘demographic peril’ … By now most people are aware that the present Israeli government has done all in its power to torpedo a so-called ‘two-state solution’.

Many observers have been puzzled by Israel’s adamant rejection of any Palestinian sovereign state, however small, west of the Jordan river. This seems terribly short-sighted. For, if the whole of pre-1948 Palestine is to remain under Israeli sovereignty, that would mean that Israel would have to rule over a hostile Palestinian Arab people. In effect, the whole of that territory will be one state. Right now there is a rough numerical parity between the two national groups. Since no large-scale Jewish immigration is expected, and since the natural rate of increase of the Palestinian population is higher than that of the Hebrew population, the former will considerably outnumber the latter within a few decades. Surely, the Palestinian majority cannot indefinitely be denied equal rights; but equal rights would lead to the demise of the Jewish state. For Zionism this ‘demographic peril’ is worse even than a sovereign Palestinian mini-state. So it would seem that by sabotaging the creation of such a state, Israel is heading for what its own ruling ideology regards as the abyss.

This apparent contradiction disregards a third option: neither a two-state solution, nor a single state with an Arab majority, but ‘population transfer’. Large-scale ethnic cleansing of Palestinian Arabs would result in a single state in the entire territory, with a large Jewish majority, which is the ultimate aim of all mainstream Zionist parties.

But implementing ethnic cleansing on a sufficiently large scale … is politically very tricky. It cannot be done in normal, politically tranquil circumstances. It requires what in Zionist parlance is called she’at kosher: an opportune moment of major political, and preferably military, crisis …

A war with Iran would present a golden opportunity for large-scale expulsion of Palestinians, precisely because … fighting would not be over too soon, and major protests and disturbances are likely to occur among the masses throughout the region, including the Palestinian Arabs under Israeli rule. What better way to pacify such disturbances than to “expel many people”?

Of course, a decision to ignite a war against Iran is not one that any Israeli leader would take lightly. There is a non-negligible risk that Israel would suffer many casualties. This is not a price that even the most adventurous prime minister would consider paying, unless the expected prize is extremely high. But in this case the prize is the highest possible one from a Zionist point of view: eliminating the demographic threat to the future of Israel as a Jewish ethnocracy. So Netanyahu will be sorely tempted to make a sacrifice of his own people for the greater national good.

Strategy

A long-standing Israeli plan for ethnic cleansing, hatched by Ariel Sharon (Israel’s prime minister from 2001‑06), and revealed by an eminent Israeli military theorist, involved the West Bank.⁹ The Gaza Strip was to be dealt with at some later stage. One of Sharon’s last actions was withdrawal of Israeli settlements and troops from Gaza, which was turned into a huge concentration camp, subject to ever harsher siege and to repeated brutal military offensives. Under Netanyahu, Israel also bolstered Hamas rule of the Strip in a Machiavellian stratagem that included transmitting large subventions from Qatar. Netanyahu deluded himself that this carrot-and-stick scheme would keep Gaza safely under control. Israel’s top political and military leaders kept ignoring contrary warning signs.

Hamas’s onslaught on October 7 2023, which traumatised Israel, caught the self-deluded Israeli leadership by surprise. But Netanyahu - ever a chancer - soon made a strategic adjustment, turning a disaster into an opportunity to launch a genocidal war against the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip. By now, Gaza has been utterly devastated; it will take years to make it inhabitable. But the war has so far failed to bring its object - ethnic cleansing - to conclusion: the Palestinian population is still there. Reduced and ravaged by mega-massacre, but still there.

The Sharon plan for ethnically cleansing the West Bank had envisaged a scheme for disposing of the Palestinians, who would be stampeded across the River Jordan: they would settle on the East Bank. The Hashemite regime of Jordan would be overthrown and replaced by an Israeli-controlled ‘new Palestine’. No comparable scheme existed for the people of the Gaza Strip, hemmed in by Egypt’s Sinai desert and the sea.

Getting rid of them now poses a problem for Netanyahu’s genocide. He may possibly hope that by prolonging the war on Gaza, conditions inside it would become so unbearable that the people would somehow try, or be helped, to escape to the desert or the sea; but this would take a very long war.

Meantime, Israel’s provocations on other fronts, especially against Iran, have encountered the same obstacle as in the past: US reluctance to be dragged into a new major regional war. But without US direct involvement Israel alone would be too vulnerable to retaliation by Iran and, even more so, by Hezbollah. On top of this, Israel is undergoing an unprecedented internal crisis, that could cause it to implode under the pressure of a difficult war.

In this turbulent situation, prediction is pure speculation. All bets are off.