One of my ironclad rules for reporting on the Middle East is that sometimes you need to re-report a story to see things more clearly than before.
I am living that experience with the war between IIran, Israel, Hamas and Hezbollah, which could soon involve the United States.
It could not be clearer now that while Hamas’s surprise attack on Israel on October 7 was partly provoked by the reckless expansion of Israeli settlementsthe brutal treatment of Palestinian prisoners and the invasions of Muslim religious sites in Jerusalem, the terrorist attack was also part of a broader Iranian campaign to drive the United States out of the Middle East and corner its Arab and Israeli allies, before they could corner Iran.
Therefore, if the current tit-for-tat conflict between Israel and Iran and Iran’s allies (Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis) escalates into a full-scale war (which Israel could not wage alone for long), President Joe Biden could face the most fateful decision of his presidency:
if we go to war with Iran, together with Israel, and Eliminate Tehran’s nuclear programwhich is the cornerstone of Iran’s strategic network in the region.
Iran has been building that network to supplant the United States as the most powerful force in the Middle East and bleed Israel to death with a thousand cuts inflicted by their allies.
But the United States must always be cautious about what the Israeli prime minister is up to, Benjamin Netanyahu.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu speaks during his meeting with President Joe Biden in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, Thursday, July 25, 2024. (AP Photo/Susan Walsh)
As he noted on Thursday in Haaretz a former Israeli diplomat, Alon PinkasOne has to wonder why Netanyahu now chose to assassinate Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran amid sensitive hostage talks.
Was it just because he could (God knows Haniyeh had a lot of Israeli blood on his hands), or was Israel “deliberately provoking an escalation in the hope that a conflagration with Iran would draw the United States into the conflict, further alienating the Prime Minister”? Benjamin Netanyahu of the debacle of October 7, a calamity for which he has not yet been held accountable”?
In Netanyahu’s nearly 17 years in power, Bibi has helped and undermined US interests in the region.
I would not trust Netanyahu for one second to put American interests ahead of his own political survival needs, just as he would not even put Israel’s interests ahead of them.
But honesty also requires me to acknowledge that some things are true even if Netanyahu believes them.
And one of those things is that Iran is the largest indigenous imperial power in the Middle East and through its proxies it has been dominating the politics of millions of Arabs living in Lebanon, Syria, the Gaza Strip, Iraq and Yemendragging its citizens into wars with Israel in which few of them have any interest.
No leader of any of these Arab states can today make decisions hostile to Iran’s interests without fear of being assassinated.
Destinations
Lebanon has been unable to appoint a president since October 30, 2022, largely because Tehran does not allow an independent Lebanese patriot to be in charge there.
Lebanon and Syria had to observe three days of mourning after Iran’s president died in a helicopter crash.
Yes, three days of mourning for the president of another country.
There’s a name for that: Iranian imperialism.
Some things are also true even if Iran believes them too.
And one of them is that Biden, the Secretary of State Antony Blinken and the national security adviser, Jake Sullivanhave been quietly and effectively building a network of broad alliances over the past few years to contain China and isolate Iran.
One is the new economic group called I2-U2which includes India, Israel, the United Arab Emirates and the US.
And the other, even more important, is the India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor, known as IMEC.
IMEC was designed to foster closer trade and energy supply ties between the European Union and India, via US allies in the Persian Gulf.
The goal: to help India escape China’s efforts to encircle New Delhi through its infrastructure initiative Belt and Road and create a vast pro-US geo-economic alliance stretching from the EU through Saudi Arabia and the UAE to India, which would also isolate Iran.
The founding partners of IMEC are United States, EU, Saudi Arabia, India, United Arab Emirates, France, Germany and Italy.
Plan
The American plan was to give military weight to these interconnected alliances by forging, at their core, a mutual defense treaty with Saudi Arabia that would also entail Saudi Arabia normalizing relations with Israel, provided Israel agreed to move toward a two-state solution with the Palestinians.
Once forged, this would mean that all of America’s allies in the Middle East would be operating as one. anti-Iranian team:
Jordan, Egypt, the United Arab Emirates, Israel, Saudi Arabia and Bahrain in particular.
Iran knew it had to prevent this agreement between Saudi Arabia, the United States and Israel or be strategically isolated.
Hamas I knew I had to prevent this deal because it could allow Israel’s integration into the Muslim world, in partnership with Hamas’s main Palestinian rival, the APalestinian Authority in Ramallah, and with Saudi Arabia.
How do we know Iran believed it?
Because Iran’s supreme leader told us so four days before Hamas invaded Israel.
It is enough chilling Read this story today in The Times of Israel October 3, 2023:
Iran’s supreme leader, Ali Khameneisaid Muslim countries normalizing relations with Israel are “betting on a losing horse,” state media reported Tuesday, as regional rival Saudi Arabia moves toward establishing ties with Jerusalem.
Khamenei also predicted that Israel would soon be eradicated, in a speech to government officials and ambassadors from Muslim countries.
… “The Islamic Republic’s definitive position is that governments that prioritize the gamble of normalization with the Zionist regime will suffer losses,” he said.
“Today, the situation of the Zionist regime is not one that should motivate proximity to it; they should not make this mistake.”
Whether or not Iran knew the precise timing in advance, it surely saw Hamas’s invasion of Gaza as a way to isolate Israel and its American patron, by forcing Israel to inflict thousands of civilian casualties to defeat Hamas’s underground network and undermine any normalization of relations between Saudi Arabia, Palestine and Israel.
That’s the bigger story here.
Outcome
Last month, Israel assassinated senior Hezbollah commander Fuad Shukr in Beirut; Hamas political leader Haniyeh; and Muhammad Deif, Hamas’s military commander, in Gaza.
They were all obsessed with dragging their people into an endless war to destroy the Jewish State.
But Israel has already assassinated Hamas’ number one and number two leaders before.
The problem is that Hamas and Hezbollah They are networksand as network strategist John Arquilla, author of “Bitskrieg: The New Challenge of Cyberwarfare,” once taught me, “in a network, everyone is number 2”.
Successors always emerge, often worse than their predecessors.
The only way to truly marginalize Hamas politically and isolate Iran regionally is for Israel to help strengthen the obvious, more moderate alternative: Palestinian Authority, which has embraced the Oslo Accords and cooperates with Israel on a daily basis to try to keep violence in the West Bank at bay, something Netanyahu knows all too well but does not acknowledge because he wants to delegitimize any credible Palestinian alternative to Hamas so he can tell the world and Israelis that Israel has no partner for a two-state solution.
With that one chess move – embracing the Palestinian Authority – Netanyahu could cement the US-Israeli-Arab alliance, establish a Palestinian governing structure in Gaza that would not threaten Israel, and isolate Iran and its allies militarily and politically, turning his gamble on Hamas’s war into an utter waste of lives and money.
But Bibi would have to risk his governing coalition to do so, because his far-right messianic partners They oppose any agreement with any credible Palestinian.
In short: from the beginning of the war between Israel and Hamas I believed that what was at stake was what was really at stake, but now it is crystal clear.
What is not at all clear is what Bibi will do.
Who will it serve?
To yours, to Israel’s, to the United States’ or to Iran’s?
Choice
If Netanyahu were to make the right move now, it would leave Iran politically exposed.
Iran could no longer disguise its goal of controlling the entire Arab world by hiding itself and its proxies behind the Palestinian cause.
Iran has long been happy to let Palestinians, Lebanese, Yemenis, Iraqis and Syrians die “for Palestine,” but it would never risk the Iranians if it could avoid it.
The crocodile tears shed by Iran’s clerical leaders for the Palestinians are all a fraud, only a cover for Tehran’s regional imperialist adventure.
Netanyahu can now pull back the curtain on the whole cynical game.
But that would require him to put Israel’s interests ahead of his own political survival.
c.2024 The New York Times Company
