The Question is Called: Waiting for Iran to Answer

So, it looks like we’re heading into a major war. With its assassination in Tehran of Ismail Haniyeh, Hamas’s chief “ceasefire/hostage release” negotiator, topping off its incessant, deliberate slaughter of Palestinian children in Gaza and its accelerated evictions and home demolitions in the West Bank, Israel has erased any scintilla of pretense that it is doing anything else but trying to “finish ’48”—achieve the total ethnic cleansing of Palestine via extermination and expulsion.

Israel has crossed all and everybody’s red lines. Israel is telling the world it will kill anyone and any number of people, anywhere, at any time of its choosing, and it does not give a damn about what anyone in the world thinks of it. It is acting with complete, insouciant, contemptuous disregard of international law, conventions, and common morality, certainly of the people and nations it considers its adversaries and of the countries on whose support it depends.

Israel is acting with particular contemptuous disregard for the country on whom it most depends, the United States. Israel has only slightly less contempt for Americans than it does for Palestinians. Israel considers Palestinians needless, expendable subhumans. Israel considers Americans unfortunately necessary fools who don't, and don't want to, understand the core of the Zionist colonial project and its necessarily eliminationist policy toward the Palestinians, about whose essential savagery equality-obsessed Americans are hopelessly naive.

Israel thinks of Americans the way a supercilious avant-garde artist thinks of his/her vulgar wealthy patrons. It has to keep its indispensable supporters believing it shares their appreciation of the purely decorative prettiness of things like human rights, peace, living side by side in mutual respect with other peoples, etc., so that they will continue to subsidize the truly important and transgressive Zionist artistry, whose beauty they will never understand.

Israel has been confident of its ability to play its patron in that way, because,  as Netanyahu and other Israeli leaders have said many times: “America is a thing that can be easily moved, moved in the right direction” and  “We have the Senate,  the Congress, and a strong Jewish lobby on our side.” And he is right.  (And don’t forget the Zionist-committed media.) It’s hard to find a ward more contemptuous of its patron than Israel, or a patron more submissive to its ward than the United States.

In fact, Israel is so confident of its ability to get the American government to go along with anything it wants that it has completely dispensed with any effort at prettifying its grotesqueries:

 “Look, we are, as we announced, committing genocidal ethnic cleansing with no limits, deliberately slaughtering and starving children every day, carrying out airstrikes and destructive assassinations in foreign capitals, etc. If you want to continue pretending to yourselves and your citizens that there’s such a thing as fundamentally humanitarian ‘liberal Zionism,’ that we’re interested in ‘ceasefires’ and ‘two-state solutions’ and such—anything other than getting rid of the Palestinians and consolidating Jewish supremacy throughout our promised land—while we blatantly kill the primary negotiator you want us to talk to, you go right ahead. Keep writing your thoughtful op-eds and expressing your ‘frustration’ and ‘tension’ with us.  Just understand that we are going to continue killing anyone and any number of people, anywhere, at any time of our choosing, until we’ve put down all potential enemies of our colonial project, and we don’t give a damn about what you think about that.  Your job is to keep sending us the weapons we need and bring your soldiers and armies into a major war to protect us from the inevitable blowback from the countries we attack. Capisce?”

To which the Blue and Red bitches—Biden, Harris, Trump, Vance, RFK, Jr.—leading the American and Western political pack, bark, “Yes, sir. Your war is our war. We will do anything to protect the Zionist project!” Has anyone ever seen a more pathetically obsequious, self-demeaning political leadership?

So, the American polity—its dog-trained leadership and its starting-to-yap-back but still too dog-trained populace—is walking into war. Being walked into war on the Zionist leash. There will be a lot of yelping once their noses are rubbed in it.

One wants to hope it can be avoided, but as I argued last October, right after the Al-Aqsa Flood operation, Israel’s solution to Gaza is war on Iran, a war it's been planning with the US for 15 years. Since October 7^th, Israel has concluded, once and for all, that the Palestinian Arab population—the majority from the river to the sea—will never be “negotiated” into accepting submission to the Jewish-supremacist regime, so it’s time for a final culling of that population. For Israel (and it is not wrong), the question has been called—the question of the future of Zionism.  Ensuring Zionism’s future requires a decisive defeat—right now, before it gets any stronger—of the entire Axis of Resistance, which, in Israel’s mind (and it is not wrong), requires shattering Iran, the remaining supportive military backbone of that Axis. For that, Israel will need and will get the help of its American attack dog, which has already torn up Iraq, Libya, and Syria to render them incapable of seriously supporting Palestinian resistance.

The U.S. political and military establishment has no problem with—indeed, is already engaged in—another undeclared war on behalf of Israel, a country we have no defense treaty authorizing, let alone requiring, us to fight, kill, die, and start a world war for. (Worry not. The Congress will obediently supply an AUMF.) The Biden-Harris administration is already sending an aircraft carrier, cruisers, destroyers, fighter jets, and an amphibious force of 4,000 troops to fight Iran on behalf of the Zionist project. To make that palatable to the American populace, Israel would normally want to put itself in the ostensible position of being attacked by Iran. “Self-defense,” and all. Thus, with a series of actions culminating in the assassination in Tehran of a diplomatic guest of Iran’s president, Israel has deliberately created a situation where Iran must respond forcefully.

In this case, not giving a damn about appearances, Israel is going further, considering “launching a preemptive strike...if it uncovered airtight evidence that Tehran was preparing to mount an attack”—which, of course, there is ample “uncovered” evidence, including Iran’s public statements, that it is. Israel has created, and is owning, a perfect circle of aggression—a preemptive strike for an inevitable response to a previous preemptive strike—otherwise known as “war.” Israel is all-in. Iran better be.

Iran, along with its chief ally in the Axis of Resistance, Hezbollah, has done its best to avoid a direct, all-out war with Israel. They have a lot of fighting power, and they also know there are no guarantees in a war against such forces. But the question has been called. Everything—October 7^th, the ongoing Gaza slaughter, battles with Hezbollah and the Houthis, multiple assassinations—calls the question. If Iran does not hit Israel hard, does not hurt Israel badly, in response to the Haniyeh assassination in Tehran, Israel will continue to kill any resistance leader, anywhere, at any time of its choosing. Indeed, today Israel assassinated the Economics Minister of Gaza. Unless Israel is made to hurt for doing these things, it will continue to slaughter the people of Gaza, eliminate the Palestinians in the West Bank, and bomb Syria, Lebanon, and any other country it wants, at will.

The problem, of course, is that any Iranian attack that puts a hurt on Israel will be met by an all-out attack by Israel and the U.S., in which Israel will use nuclear weapons. And Iran (I hope) knows this. Anybody who doesn’t is kidding themselves. I repeat what I’ve said many times before: Because Israel knows Iran’s strength, and knows it will be badly hurt by Iran and Hezbollah, and knows no one is going to occupy Iran, it is not going into this battle to achieve anything less than a level of defeat and deterrence that will take Iran out of the anti-Zionist resistance for at least ten years. And the only way it can think it can achieve that is by using nuclear weapons.

The only people who don’t know, or pretend they don’t know, this are the self-deceived American and Western “liberal Zionist” political, media, and maybe military elite. They will say to Israel: “OK, we’ll help you attack Iran. But you have to promise not to use your nukes.” Israel, in contemptuous disregard of these fools, will so promise, and once the war starts, use its nukes, knowing full well that the “frustrated” but obsequious Americans will not dare to abandon the war they’re already engaged in. Israel is convinced that American support and its own nuclear weapons will ensure Iran’s defeat.

For its part, Iran seems to have decided upon heavy action. It has refused to take the calls of US and Western leaders urging restraint, and is essentially saying: “We’re going to hit Israel. If that leads to all-out war, so be it. If you wanted to avoid that, you should have been restraining Israel.”  As much as everyone hates to admit it, some conflicts can only be settled by force, and sometimes you need a war to stop a runaway train of criminal aggression.

As a result of this fight, both sides will certainly suffer massive damage, but one side or the other will suffer a defeat. If the fight ends with Iran forced to continue accepting Israel’s prerogative to kill and bomb any target it likes, Iran is defeated; if it ends with Israel forced to constrain its attacks within limits it does not set, Israel is defeated. Given the costs of this battle to both, it is unlikely that either party would stop fighting without, at a minimum, inflicting such a defeat on the other. Given the combatants and the stakes, it’s both hard to imagine the force it will take to inflict a more comprehensive strategic defeat on either party and hard to imagine either party withdrawing unless it suffers a more comprehensive defeat. It is incredibly dangerous.

So, if when Iran attacks, it must be prepared to initiate a full-scale offensive of the entire Axis of Resistance—Iran, Hezbollah, all the Palestinian resistance groups in all the territories, the Houthis, Iraqi and Syrian militias, etc.—attacking Israel and American targets everywhere they can, with as much surprise as possible. It will quickly become at least a massive regional war, and will threaten to engulf the world. This will be a decisive battle in which every party—Zionism, the Palestinian resistance, the U.S. empire—is at existential risk. Everyone will come out badly hurt, but it’s the fate of Zionism/Palestine that will be changed most dramatically. If I were careful, I’d say this is as serious a moment as 1967 or 1973, but, really, I think it’s as serious as 1948—which it will “finish” one way or the other.

Will other major military powers—Russia, China, Turkey—step in to take over the situation and impose a peace, ready to fight Israel and the United States to do so, as they would have to?  A group of such world powers could have stopped this runaway train at some time during the past ten months if they had insisted on bringing humanitarian and reconstruction aid into Gaza, consistent with ICJ rulings, daring Israel and the U.S. to try to stop such an intervention. They didn’t. Will they now intervene, at the risk being the target of nuclear attack themselves, rather than be content to watch the U.S., Israel, Iran, the Palestinians, and maybe Lebanon be devasted, waiting to come in and pick up the pieces?

Do you think Israel wouldn’t use nuclear weapons against any country that intervened to stop its aggression? Do you think it has those weapons to use against Gaza or the West Bank? They are to use against anyone—especially any powerful country—who might think of imposing limits on the Zionist project. Per the Samson Option, as described by Israeli military historian Martin van Creveld twenty years ago: “We possess several hundred atomic warheads and rockets and can launch them at targets in all directions, perhaps even at Rome. Most European capitals are targets for our air force. Let me quote General Moshe Dayan: ‘Israel must be like a mad dog, too dangerous to bother’….We have the capability to take the world down with us. And I can assure you that that will happen before Israel goes under.”

This is a a more dangerous moment than the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, because we’re in the midst of an ongoing slaughter of world-historical criminality, and because we are burdened with leadership of nuclear states that is much more pathological and stupid. I have no idea how this is going to end up, but the dog days are upon us.

Hamas, PIJ, and PFLP may not have realized it on October 7^th, but Israel has made it so since: The question has been called.

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