Israel’s Attack on Iran Marks the Pinnacle of Netanyahu’s Long and Deranged Obsession with Seeking Israeli Security Through Endless War

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In the last week, Benjamin Netanyahu has opened up a fifth front in his claimed efforts to ensure the safety of Israel, launching an unprovoked attack on Iran on the basis of claims — which he has been making for the last 30 years — that Iran was close to establishing a viable nuclear weapons program.

No evidence exists to suggest that Netanyahu is correct. Just three months ago, in testimony to the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, Donald Trump’s Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, confirmed that the United States intelligence community “continues to assess that Iran is not building a nuclear weapon and Supreme Leader Khamenei has not authorized the nuclear weapons program he suspended in 2003.”

In addition, US negotiators were engaged in active discussions with the Iranians regarding their nuclear program when Israel launched its unprovoked attack. These had been taking place since April 12, with a sixth round of talks scheduled for Sunday June 15, but these talks were, of course, scuppered by Israel’s actions.

Alarmingly, Israel, while attacking a nuclear enrichment facility, a missile production site and a military complex, also attacked the headquarters of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, and specifically targeted and killed four military leaders and six nuclear scientists — many in their homes, with their families. In addition, around 200 civilians were also killed.

Also severely wounded, and losing a leg, was Ali Shamkhani, a senior adviser to Khameini, who had been leading the nuclear negotiations, and who had stated, just last week, that Iran was “ready to never have a nuclear weapon”, explaining, “We want better relations with the US.”

The shameful return of full spectrum western support for Israel

This unprovoked attack should have led to widespread condemnation in the west, but in the new world order established by Israel over the last 20 months, in which the west is now openly subservient to Israel, and has openly colluded in its blatant disregard for all of the established norms of conflict, western media obligingly described Israel’s attacks as “pre-emptive”, completely inverting reality by suggesting that they were an appropriate defensive tactic.

When Iran responded, attacking Israel with missiles and drones that pierced its much vaunted “Iron Dome” defense system, and inflicted damage on the strategically important Haifa oil terminal, and on residential areas, prominent Israeli figures began whingeing about the illegality of military strikes on civilians, revealing their complete self-righteous self-absorption through their inability to recognize that that this is exactly what Israel has been doing in Gaza for the last 20 months, killing at least 50,000 civilians and probably many more.

Along the way, what it also confirms is that, through the application of screamingly depraved generalizations, many, if not most Israelis regard every single one of those civilians killed as having been “terrorists.”

Other Israelis, responding to the attacks, and descending into bomb shelters with their families, whinged, after just one night, about how “No one deserves to live like this”, again failing to recognize that displacing almost an entire population of 2 million people to tents, and then relentlessly bombing those tents, might be a more appropriate definition of how “No one deserves to live like this” than his mild inconvenience.

On June 15, I posted what has become one of my most popular posts on Facebook, featuring a photo that I described as follows: “A haunted Netanyahu emerges briefly from his bunker to see the devastation wrought by his hubris in the suburbs of Tel Aviv, after Iranian missiles left parts of Tel Aviv looking like Gaza.”

I added, “Call it FAFO, call it karma, call it hubris; call it what you will, Israel is finding out that when you launch murderous and unjustifiable attacks on civilian targets (including scientists and academics) in a huge well-armed country, and that country responds with retaliatory attacks using sophisticated weaponry, you’re finally going to experience some blowback for the horrendous genocide you’ve been inflicting on the almost entirely civilian population of Gaza for the last 618 days.”

As I also stated, “No sympathy for this monster. May his days — and those of his genocidal regime — be numbered.”

The wide reach of my post obviously reflected a huge and widespread feeling that Israel was finally reaping its own whirlwind, although, even now, after several days of its “war”, it is managing to inflict much greater damage on Iran than its own suffering, killing around 20 times as many Iranians as its own losses.

This reflects its insistence, over the last 20 months, that every Israeli life is worth 20, 50, 100 or even 500 times the lives of those it regards as its enemies.

Despite all of the above, however, instead of calling out Israel’s hypocrisy, western leaders immediately returned to the deadly and profoundly lawless positions that they had taken 20 months before, right after the October 7 attacks on southern Israel by Palestinian militants, when they declared, yet again, that Israel has “the right to defend itself.”

This was a truly dispiriting moment, because the west’s open-ended support for Israel’s “right to defend itself” is what opened the floodgates to all of its barbaric actions over the previous 20 months — its unprecedented and still ongoing genocide in Gaza, its ongoing ethnic cleansing in the West Bank, its illegal seizure of land in Syria, its targeting and elimination last year of senior Hamas and Hezbollah leaders in Lebanon (and in Iran), its Gaza-style destruction of much of southern Lebanon, accompanied by attacks on Beirut and other urban centers, and its horrific pager attacks, in which thousands of handheld pagers and hundreds of walkie-talkies, covertly primed with explosives by Israeli operatives at the manufacturing stage, exploded, killing 42 people and wounding at least 3,500 others, most of them not the Hezbollah members that Israel claimed to be its targets.

The west’s volte-face was also profoundly dispiriting because, in recent weeks, western leaders had finally and belatedly begun to recognize that their undiluted support for Israel’s ceaseless erasure of Palestinian lives in Gaza was laying them open to entirely valid claims that they were complicit in Israel’s genocide, and had begun to openly condemn the increase in the suffering of the Palestinian people over the previous three months, after Israel broke a ceasefire agreement in place for six weeks, and began an intense siege, prohibiting the delivery of all food, water, medical supplies and fuel, which began on March 2, and following this up with renewed and increasingly fierce military attacks, beginning on March 18.

In recent weeks, the situation in Gaza has descended even further into previously undreamt-of horrors, as, in an attempt to prevent the UN and other international aid agencies from keeping Palestinians alive, Israel and the US came up with an alternative aid program, via a private organization, the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, which has turned out to be nothing more than a front for the random executions of desperate individuals seeking food. I wrote about the GHF when it was first set up three weeks ago, but it has since become an even more monstrous front in Israel’s now no longer even thinly-disguised plan to exterminate as many Palestinians as possible.

Just yesterday, as desperate civilians queued up in Khan Younis in the hope of securing flour, the Israeli military opened fire, killing at least 70 Palestinians and wounding hundreds more, “firing at them with tank shells, machine guns and drones”, as Al Jazeera reported, with many more deaths expected as doctors and staff at Nasser Hospital, the last functioning hospital in the whole of Gaza, struggle to cope with the scale of the injuries, in a facility that is desperately short of the necessary medical supplies and equipment.

Now, however, just as western action is needed to follow up on the condemnations of a month ago, and to reflect the monstrousness of the daily massacres of unarmed and starving civilians, all of this has been swept away, as country after country have begun queuing up again to pledge their obedience to Netanyahu as he launches yet another reckless and illegal war.

The critical role of the fundamentally incoherent Donald Trump

As the horrendous specter of a bloody conflagration throughout the Middle East looms every closer, the key player, as ever, is the US. For the conflict to move beyond a tit-for-tat exchange of military attacks between Israel and Iran, Israel needs explicit US support, and, specifically, the 3,000-pound bunker-busting bombs that, as AFP described it, are “the only weapon capable of destroying Iran’s deeply buried nuclear facilities, making it President Donald Trump’s weapon of choice if he chooses to militarily back Israel.”

With all eyes on the US, it is clear that Donald Trump is caught between two camps within the Republican Party that have very different ideas about the wisdom of officially becoming an active participant in Israel’s war.

On the one hand are the neo-con war hawks who have been salivating over the prospect of declaring war on Iran for 24 years, ever since, after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, they proposed taking out seven countries in five years  — Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and, finally, Iran.

On the other hand, Trump faces a revolt from much of his MAGA base, “America First” isolationists whose support was essential for his re-election in November, and who voted for him specifically because he promised to end the US’s ruinously expensive foreign wars. They include the influential former Fox News host Tucker Carlson, Steve Bannon and Marjorie Taylor Greene.

On another front, cross-party opponents of the war in Congress are insisting, correctly, that the legislative body must approve any US entry into war. As the Guardian explained today, “Republican congressman Thomas Massie, whose libertarian-tinged politics have often put him at odds with Trump, joined with several progressive Democrats to introduce in the House of Representatives a war powers resolution that would require a vote by Congress before Trump could attack Iran”, while “Democrat Tim Kaine has introduced companion legislation in the Senate.”

Trump, predictably, has been as incoherent as ever. No one knows whether, or to what extent he was blindsided by Netanyahu’s attack on Iran while the US was itself engaged in negotiations, or whether he had covertly given a green light to Netanyahu to literally torpedo the talks through his unprovoked attacks.

Three days ago, Reuters reported that Trump had intervened to stop Israel from assassinating Khameini, but in recent days he has muddied the waters still further, in a series of frankly deranged messages on his Truth Social media platform.

Yesterday, he wrote, “We know exactly where the so-called ‘Supreme Leader’ is hiding. He is an easy target, but is safe there — We are not going to take him out (kill!), at least not for now. But we don’t want missiles shot at civilians, or American soldiers. Our patience is wearing thin. Thank you for your attention to this matter!”

Later, he posted a two-word message, “UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER!”, without specifying what that would entail. As I asked on X, What does this even mean? Does Trump mean to suggest that the Iranian government should voluntarily remove themselves from power? Handing over power to whom? Does he even know what’s he’s blabbing on about?”

Trump also caused more chaos when he stated, “Everyone should immediately evacuate Tehran!”, although that comment, at least, seemed to be tied into the actions of Israel, which, on the day that it bombed the headquarters of the state TV channel IRIB during a live broadcast, also issued evacuation orders for parts of the capital.

Not only is the evacuation of a city the size of London or New York impossible to imagine, but Israel’s issuing of evacuation orders, as it has been doing throughout its genocidal destruction of Gaza, marks a new low in its disregard for international law, “expanding its depraved tactics to a sovereign country that it isn’t even illegally occupying”, as I stated on X.

On Air Force One, Trump’s derangement was further evident, when he told reporters that he didn’t agree with his own National Security Director’s assessment of Iran’s nuclear capabilities. Asked by a CNN reporter about Tulsi Gabbard testifying in March that Iran wasn’t building a nuclear weapon, Trump replied, “I don’t care what she said. They were very close to getting a nuke.” As I stated on X, “[The] Moron [in Chief] may start World War 3 for the most fashionable of reasons in the truly idiotic 3rd decade of the 21st century, where ‘feelings’ override facts.”

Alarmingly, everything about this perilous situation returns us explicitly to 2002 and 2003, and the cynical creation of a manufactured threat — about Iraq’s “weapons of mass destruction”, and how they could be launched at the west within 45 minutes — which was used to justify the illegal invasion and occupation of Iraq, a multi-billion dollar fiasco, lasting eight years, which led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, and over 4,000 US military personnel.

Admittedly, a key difference between Iraq and Iran may be that the US warmongers don’t envisage US troops becoming directly involved in a long program of regime change and occupation, but any noticeable increase in US involvement, as the International Institute for Strategic Studies explained last Friday, imperils “US assets in the region”, including “large bases in Bahrain and Qatar, as well as smaller holdings in Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Oman, Saudi Arabia, Syria and the United Arab Emirates, plus ships in the Gulf”, all within reach of Iranian weapons.

The changing face of warfare

What the last 20 months have shown, horrifically, is how the Israeli-led approach to its territorial expansion and its policy of exterminating its perceived enemies relies less on boots on the ground than in any previous phase of military conflict. Although the IDF has, at various times, engaged ground troops in Gaza, Lebanon and Syria, most of its horrific destruction and slaughter has been undertaken from the air, via planes and bombs, helicopters and missiles, warships and missiles, drones and armed quadcopters, diabolically assisted, in Gaza, through a deliberate policy of starvation, the destruction water supplies, the destruction of hospitals, and the deliberate withholding of medical supplies and medical equipment.

Israel’s military activities over the last 20 months mark a major shift in war tactics even from 20 years ago, when the US, while liberally bombing Afghanistan and Iraq, also committed ground troops in significant numbers. Today’s techno-wars, however, in which Israel is taking the lead, are only possible through an inexhaustible supply of heavy weaponry, and, very specifically, the horrendously powerful bombs and missiles that, thanks to its sponsors in the US, and, to a lesser extent in Germany and other western countries, have allowed it, in Gaza, to engage for 20 months in the most sickening display of military might ever inflicted on a trapped and unarmed civilian population.

If there is a weakness to this approach, it comes down to the reliance on technology, and, specifically, whether the production of bombs and missiles can keep up with demand, and whether the cost can be sustained. On June 16, Haaretz reported that “The cost of every series of interceptions, such as the one overnight on Monday, can reach a billion shekels ($287 million)”; in other words, a billion dollars every four days.

On the supply front, As the Times of Israel reported today, citing articles in the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post, a US official warned that “Israel could have to start rationing air defenses by later this week”, because “the system is already overwhelmed.” The official stated that “Israel is running low on defensive ‘Arrow’ missile interceptors”, which “has raised concerns about the country’s ability to continue to counter long-range ballistic missiles from Iran.”

As the Israeli Arab commentator Alon Mizrahi stated on June 15, “One of the most crucial elements of this war, and I don’t think it’s being discussed even remotely enough, is the question of munitions.” He added that, “to launch this war the way it did, and defend against Iranian missiles, Israel has had to make extensive, intensive use of the most costly and rare types of munitions currently in use by any Western military: first, the THAAD and Arrow 3 interceptors, and, second, the kind of air-to-ground missiles that you shoot from many hundreds of kilometers away, if not thousands.”

He added, “Both these kinds of weapons systems are extremely expensive to produce and also quite scarce. An Israeli source I’ve seen said that even the US doesn’t produce more than a few hundred ultra-sophisticated interceptors a year. Even if Israel is capable of producing a couple of hundred more itself, Israel cannot reasonably have more than 2,000-3,000 interceptors of this kind on site and ready for use, or in stock. These are huge missiles costing millions of dollars apiece.”

As he also stated, “The cutting-edge standoff missiles Israel is using, for instance, America’s AGM-158B, have only been procured in relatively small numbers: around 3,000 of those have been produced for the US military so far. Given an estimated stockpile of 3,000 air-to-ground missiles and 3,000 interceptors (both generous estimates), Israel may run out of suitable munitions in 10 days. With the Brits and French sending in everything they can spare, and the US resupplying Israel to the best of its ability, I would give Israel no more than 5-10 additional days tops with current use patterns.”

It remains to be seen if this assessment is correct, but it may well be, given the sophistication of the technology, and the fact that key equipment cannot be mass-produced at volume. No doubt the only real victors of the whole of the last 20 months of Israel’s unhinged multi-front military activity are working hard to replenish supplies, but to be honest they’re already winning in the only place they really care about — their profit margins.

While everyone else loses, the arms companies are making more money than ever, as can be discovered in a detailed report, “­C­o­m­p­a­n­i­e­s P­r­o­f­i­t­i­n­g f­r­o­m t­h­e G­a­z­a Genocide”, on the website of the American Friends Service Committee.

As we wait to see if the “America First” isolationists can prevail over the US’s warmongers, Israel itself continues to obstinately refuse to accept that it has become a monster. On June 15, Orly Noy, an Iranian-born Israeli citizen, wrote an article for +972 Magazine, ‘Israel’s greatest threat isn’t Iran or Hamas, but its own hubris’, in which she issued a desperate plea for Israel to wake up up from its genocidal self-destruction.

“We Israelis must understand”, she wrote, that “we are not immune. A people whose entire existence depends solely on military might is destined to end up in the darkest corners of destruction, and ultimately, in defeat. If we haven’t learned this most basic lesson from the past two years, let alone the past eighty, then we are truly lost. Not because of Iran’s nuclear program or Palestinian resistance, but because of the blind, arrogant hubris that has taken hold of an entire nation.”

Will anyone listen, or is Israel doomed to devote itself to nothing but killing until, eventually, it collapses under the bleak and haunting weight of its now almost inestimable crimes against the very notion of humanity?

* * * * *

Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer (of an ongoing photo-journalism project, ‘The State of London’), film-maker and singer-songwriter (the lead singer and main songwriter for the London-based band The Four Fathers, whose music is available via Bandcamp). He is the co-founder of the Close Guantánamo campaign (see the ongoing photo campaign here) and the successful We Stand With Shaker campaign of 2014-15, and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. He is also the co-director (with Polly Nash) of the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo”, which you can watch on YouTube here.

In 2017, Andy became very involved in housing issues. He is the narrator of the documentary film, ‘Concrete Soldiers UK’, about the destruction of council estates, and the inspiring resistance of residents, he wrote a song ‘Grenfell’, in the aftermath of the entirely preventable fire in June 2017 that killed over 70 people, and, in 2018, he was part of the occupation of the Old Tidemill Wildlife Garden in Deptford, to try to prevent its destruction — and that of 16 structurally sound council flats next door — by Lewisham Council and Peabody.

Since 2019, Andy has become increasingly involved in environmental activism, recognizing that climate change poses an unprecedented threat to life on earth, and that the window for change — requiring a severe reduction in the emission of all greenhouse gases, and the dismantling of our suicidal global capitalist system — is rapidly shrinking, as tipping points are reached that are occurring much quicker than even pessimistic climate scientists expected. You can read his articles about the climate crisis here. He has also, since, October 2023, been sickened and appalled by Israel’s genocide in Gaza, and you can read his detailed coverage here.

To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to Andy’s new Substack account, set up in November 2024, where he’ll be sending out a weekly newsletter, or his RSS feed — and he can also be found on Facebook (and here), Twitter and YouTube. Also see the six-part definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, The Complete Guantánamo Files, the definitive Guantánamo habeas list, and the full military commissions list.

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