Since the 7th October attack by Hamas, virtually every Western power has granted Netanyahu a free hand in the region. The gut wrenching butchery of Gaza had, until recently, garnered nothing but a whisper of protest from European governments. The attacks on Yemen and Syria, the flagrant military actions on Iranian soil, and now the invasion of Lebanon give the impression of a rabid Israel that has slipped the leash of its sponsors. Britain announces a limited moratorium on some weapons it exports, and is castigated by their ungrateful recipients. Germany appeared to slow the flow of arms several days ago, and later denied it was doing so to avoid an establishment backlash. And while Western leaders did their love, love, peace, peace thing at the UN last week Netanyahu took to the stage and peddled the racist rubbish that Israel was waging a war for civilisation. He effectively announced that Iran was next.
The truth is, the West and above all the United States have not reluctantly gone along with but are actively aiding Israel. A fact that is obvious from even a cursory glance at mainstream media sources. Its war aims, the "neutralisation" of Gaza and destruction of Hamas, reducing and, if possible, defeating Hezbollah, and bombing targets in Syria are American war aims. They want Iran's regional influence pared back, and to see it punished for the assistance it has rendered Russia in its pointless Ukraine quagmire. And the State Department, loyally followed by Germany, France, and the UK, have gone about it in the most underhanded way.
The spectacle of a ranting, if not crazed Netanyahu has suited his sponsors very well. With every outrage committed, the Biden administration has cast themselves as the helpless observer from afar. The briefings are on "words exchanged" behind the scenes, of "warnings" and "concerns" that Israel's recklessness could provoke a wider conflagration. While this charade has gone on, Israel has been inundated with Western munitions, and there is ample evidence its intelligent assets and special forces have variously assisted the IDF in their operations. In other words, what we have seen this last year is a reversion to Israel's historic role in the region: as a proxy and as a meat shield for interests beyond its borders. The appearance of Netanyahu's autonomy hides Western complicity. Indeed, it gives every impression that the relation of force is the other way round. That Tel Aviv says jump and Washington and London ask "how high?" The utter cynicism of faux concern and studied helplessness feeds antisemitic conspiracy theories. It positions Netanyahu and/or Mossad as behind-the-scenes puppeteers. And American, German, and British governments are fine with this because they escape immediate responsibility for atrocities committed while seeing their interests served.
At any moment, Joe Biden could have stopped this. He could have picked up the phone to Netanyahu and said no and halted the slide to a generalised Middle Eastern war. Israel is militarily and economically dependent on the good will of the world's hegemon, and would have had a hard time carrying out their colonial campaign of ethnic cleansing and murder by itself. They have done so with American blessing, and it's at America's behest that Israeli bodies will now start piling up.
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Spot on! Well said!
ReplyDeleteToo much of the useful idiot in this post, you're usually better than this. Iran is a regional Imperialist power, it is happy to direct its proxies like the Houthis, Hamas, Hezbollah and others against Israel because it needs an enemy to prop-up support for it's decrepit and degenerate 'Islamic revolution'. As a repressive, authoritarian theocracy the regime is deeply unpopular domestically, so its Imperialist activities provide a distraction narrative. Fortunately, you're at a distance to preserve you from the fate of the useful idiots who sided with the theocrats at the outset of the revolution; they were liquidated when they were no longer useful and became just ordinary idiots.
ReplyDeleteThe anti Western-Imperialist but tacitly sympathetic to specific Eastern-Imperialist activities stance is utterly ridiculous. Calling out 'Western complicity' conveniently skips over the equal complicity of all the Arab/Islamic state actors in the region who are also aligned against Iranian Imperialist activities. Hamas threw Gaza under the bus because the non-Iranian aligned Arabs had normalised relations with Israel. This whole thing was a gamble by Iran's Imperial proxies to destabilise regional events slowly moving against them, the only question is to what level the tail was wagging the dog. But surely we can't ascribe such calculated agency to noble savages can we?
The region is full of bloody conflicts, but the ones which don't involve Jews are seemingly of little interest. Why is that? Is it moral relativism or something more sinister? Bodies have been piling up in various parts of the Middle East forever but when there's no anti-Semitic angle nobody cares. Muslims massacring other Muslims in Yemen, Sudan, Syria etc... same old, same old, you won't get hundreds of thousands marching through Central London for that.
By all means, scream your whataboutery until you're blue in the face, or until Phil has finally had enough of entertaining your presence.
DeleteThis particular fragment of your squeaky tirade might be worth a cursory glance, however:
"The region is full of bloody conflicts, but the ones which don't involve Jews are seemingly of little interest. Why is that?"
Hypothetically assuming that your allegation has any truth to it, I expect that very near the top of the list of reasons, we should find this one: that it is the ones specifically involving Israeli and Israel-aligned Jews (I'd be surprised to see your sort even acknowledging the existence of any others, never mind springing up to defend them!) which are being prosecuted with the aid of our weapons and military resources (and therefore some of our taxes), which are being bankrolled by our allies using considerably more of their taxes, and which are conspicuously sending lobbyists from a foreign power to interfere with our governance.
You seem to take great exception to the possibility that Israel, the USA, UK, Germany and France be held to a higher standard than the Saudi monarchy, the RSF (formerly the Janjaweed) and Bashar Al Assad.
DeleteIt's not whataboutery when the situation in Israel is just one part of a wider, much longer running, pattern of conflict in this region. This conflict does not exist in a vacuum from the power rivalries of hostile actors surrounding Israel. Criticising Israel is cheap, citing 'Western complicity' is simplistic, the highly selective focus betrays long standing prejudices about the relative moral capacities of Jews and Muslims.
DeleteIf Phil wants to ban me for pointing out all the inconvenient shit that doesn't fit with trendy pro-Palestinan sentiments that's up to him. If Israel disappeared tomorrow it still wouldn't end the wider context of violence.
I'm not sure I understand your point about lobbying, is this one of those illuminati style tropes? Jews worldwide lobby support for the world's only majority Jewish state. Muslims worldwide lobby for the Palestinian cause, although strangely not so much against the related Muslim on Muslim violence.
Today I Learned: opposing genocide, and examining the circumstances of its enactment is simply about being trendy.
DeleteJay, absolutely everything which appears to be genuinely believed by somebody else, and which conflicts unresolvably with ones' own emotional instinct, is always "virtue signalling"!
DeleteThat's because the semantic line which separates moral, human "virtue", from brutally Darwinian, mechanical, monstrous "virtue signalling", always falls along the border of ones' own cultural in-group membership. Any superficially human-sounding noises from outside that domain must be regarded as shibboleths; the coordinating signals of rival cultures who are manoevering to overwhelm and destroy us. Long and vicious experience of inter-cultural relations, and even longer experience of inter-species relations, have taught us that.
To apply any genuine rationality to this tangle, you need the services of full-time moral philosophers - and even their efforts will inevitably run aground on interpretation differences within the language(s) that they must have their discussions within.
I'll personally tend to err on the side of whoever seems to approach these questions in a more self-aware manner. Today, right wing messaging sounds to me rather dumber and more confused across the board, so I don't expect it to be them. (They can perhaps claim to have been right about Russia and China, though. Gotta remember that those stopped clock moments always come along eventually.)
The post isn't about Iran. It's about Israel and the position it occupies, so you're fulminating against something that wasn't actually written.
ReplyDeleteI notice that today the BBC published a price list for Israel's various interceptor rockets.
ReplyDeleteIsrael at war is great business for somebody.
Saying the post is about Israel not Iran is to avoid looking too closely at what is actually going on. I am no cheerleader for Israel, I find a lot of it's behaviour abhorrent. My Grandfather served in the mandate after WW2 and came away with a revulsion to both sides. But, modish anti-Israeli comment ignores that it's a relatively small, democratic, state surrounded by hostile actors pursuing their own violent and repressive agendas, who are quite happy to sacrifice far more Muslims lives on a ongoing basis than anything Israel will do. Whether it is the rivalries between Iran and Saudi, or Sunnis versus Shi'a, or Persians vs Arabs, or the various extreme Ialamist movements running amok, these are the things that really keep the region unstable and deliver the majority of death and destruction. Putting the focus of criticism on the Jewish state or 'Western complicity' is a smokescreen to obscure where most of the problems have always been and probably always will be.
ReplyDeleteIranian proxies deliberately provoked a conflict with Israel because they don't really care what the human costs are as long as people say how terrible it is when Israel does things absolutely nobody is bothered about when Muslims do them to other Muslims. The people who espouse these anti-Israeli views generally don't care about the human costs either when Muslims do them to Jews or other Muslims.
Maybe Israel has gone too far, but it's still some way off matching the interneicne violence nobody is too fussed about. Even if the proxies fulfilled their explicit wish and exterminated the Jewish state, there would be no reason for them to give up massacaring other Muslims, but then without the Jews presumably it would just be same old, same old?
Roll out the reactionary rubbish, Kamo is back in town! Here he manages to not so subtley imply everyone (other than him, obv) commenting on these pages is ...whispers...anti-semitic. The slur that has become weapon of first resort for pro-Zionists. Well, it worked for Starmer!
ReplyDeleteTwo can play at that game. Kamo, you are a racist. You tell us that Arabs and Iraninans are busy running amok and delivering death and destruction and fighting among themselves and they don't really care what the human costs are. According to you even if Israel were not there they would be busy slaughtering each other like the..subtext...uncivilised, psychotic barbarians they are.
Your colonial arrogance and belief that they (the non-white races)are less than us and need our supervision and control shines through every word you write.
Phil, I think you make the mistake of thinking that relations between countries are entriely defined by power. America is vastly more powerful than Israel, but the relationship is much more complex than you suggest. Even if Biden wanted to force Israel to stop, there are many forces at work that would impede or prevent him from acting on this wish. Not least, the election is only a month away. Netanyahu knows this, and he knows that Biden cannot afford to stop supplying him arms if he wants Harris to win.
ReplyDeleteYes Israel is a colonial outpost and very useful proxy for America, ensuring that instability which keeps the region from sorting out its issues, and potentially uniting against the hegemon. But, their current rampage is pushing instability into something much more dangerous. Yet still the Americans are unable to restrain their 'ally'. This makes America seem either weak, or approving. It is now seen as weaker by many in the world, and so the Israelis calculate that the US needs them more than they need it. While apparently nonsensical, because without US support, Israel would be doomed, it is also sort of true. Because if Israel were to fail, the ramifications for those in power in Washington would be dramatic. What are the lives of millions of Arabs (or Iranians) against the political careers of American politicians?
It is all built on a fundamentally racist idea - that the lives of 'westerners' (and Israelis count as that) are worth far more than those of the rest of humanity. Israel has a 'right to exist' even where that existence is at the expense of the indigenous inhabitants - and even if it requires the expulsion or annhilation of those people. Israel also has the 'right' to be an ethno-religious state built on the practice of Apartheid and discrimination against non-Jews. Since the USA was built on genocide and the appropriation of others land, and operates a two tier citizenship, and since we too felt it our right to seize occupy and exploit many other people and lands, it is hardly surprising that we go along with it.
But the underlying racism upon which Israel is built is the driver of what is happening, and of the failure to even look for a genuine solution to the two peoples, one land issue. As they are the chosen people, everything is justified in the pursuit of a land for the righteous (i.e. them). No crime, no outrage, no amount of violence or death matters so long as they acheive their aims. The rest of us are irrelevant except in so far as how we help or hinder. The only way I can see this ending in the long run, is with nuclear war. The question is, will it be Israel dropping the bomb on Iran, or will Iran manage to deveop one before that happens? Either way, the outlook for the region is bleak.
Now there's an elephant in the room which has somehow escaped much mention until now.
DeleteThe Democrats' prospects in November would be vastly improved by cessation of Neyanyahu's rampage. But Israel's power in Washington is such that their chances would be torpedoed by actually taking any significant action to stop him. Of course he knows this, and knows also that his own remaining political career is only as long as this war, which is why he has rebuffed all attempts by the Biden admin to learn on him.
So whatever their true feelings on the manner, Biden/Harris have to grin and bear it and hope to scrape home. If and when they win another four years, only then can they begin enacting any of the serious pushback which they must have threatened Bibi with in private.
Even if they are actually quite happy about the slaughtering of Arabs, they can't be anything but furious about the timing and how his actions have impacted their political situation. Of course, their vengeance (if they get the chance to enact it) wouldn't need to actually seriously restrain Israel, beyond ending the current hot conflict - the rest can be directed more specifically against Netanyahu and his allies in person. (Nobody going to the Hague unfortunately, since that would count as restraining both Israel and the US, something which they will never willingly allow.)