The war about Israel and its right to exist is not really between Israel and the leading terrorist militias whose aim is to destroy Israel. It is now, more clearly than ever, between the US and Iran.
Until this is understood, no amount of thumping of chests and gnashing of teeth and blaming of Netanyahu will have much effect on the front-line combatants in the conflict; namely the Israelis, Hamas and Hezbollah. Ceasefires will continue to come and go as they have since the creation of Israel and the dispossession of the Palestinians.
The American plan is to expose and isolate Iran by way of its total support of Israel’s destruction of Hamas and Hezbollah. Too bad if even more masses of innocent Palestinians get in the way. And how convenient is it for the Americans that in the process it is the Israeli leadership, the Israeli people and Jews worldwide who have to take the brunt of the blame? Surely, as the Americans would like it to seem, the poor, well meaning, Americans are just stuck between a rock and a hard place.
Committed as much as they clearly are to the survival of Israel, the American plan is, though, just as strongly rooted in the bitterness of its memory about how it “lost” Iran and its riches back in the early 1970s, and its deep yearning to not only put Iran back in a suitably cowed place, but, in so doing, to warn others that the Americans are not done in the region. That they completely failed, only most recently, to convey such a message with their use of “overwhelming force” in Iraq and Afghanistan does not compute with the Americans.
The Iranian plan is to destroy Israel. For Iran’s present leadership, the incentive is at least as much theological as political: that Israel’s existence is an outrage imposed by the American-led West … whose own underlying theology scorns that of Iran and its region. And that the traditions and the culture of the region may eventually crumble if the scar of Israel is not removed and Iran’s role in achieving it is not suitably asserted.
The Iranian plan, much like the American plan, cares little about who gets in the way and what the cost to non-combatants may be. As long as, that is, the war is not fought on their territory and it is not their own people who have to suffer, directly, the consequences.
To date, a key difference between the success of the plans is how, in the perception not only of the Iranians, the view of the war, both regionally and internationally, has translated into hatred of the “heartless” attitude of Israelis and their leadership, and, by extension, a revival of antisemitism around the world, with much of the Western liberal media already being more or less complicit in these respects.
As the war rages on, neither the Americans nor the Iranians are, yet, about to give. For a time, Biden’s current visit may provide some cosmetic relief, but it will not last.
Both the Americans and the Iranians are now surely waiting to see what will be spewed out of the American political upheaval. Especially with their being clear enough signs that Trump may well adopt a pose akin to that of his pal, the supremo of WWE, Vince McMahon: a threat of some kind of “smackdown” of Iran, not excluding the possibility, to which Trump has already alluded, of neutralising its nuclear programs – with the aim of forcing Iran to curtail its direct support of whatever is left of Hamas and Hezbollah.
At this stage it appears that a separate state for Palestinians is still a long way off unless Iran can pull off an unlikely deal in which it would receive assurances of its own security in exchange for assuring the security of the sovereign states of Israel and Palestine. Preferably, but not likely, before Trump takes over.
In the meantime, the Israelis, who do assuredly believe they are in charge, will continue to press for what they see — after all the decades of fearful defence of their country, the inescapable militarisation of generations of their whole population, and the relentless build-up in the capacity and the furious dedication of their opponents — as being the only way to settle the matter.
Howard Debenham is a former diplomat with a long list of postings including as High Commissioner to Sri Lanka, Consul-General in Bangkok, Tokyo and Washington DC, and State Director for Queensland. He authored ‘Waiting ‘round the Bend – a life in Australia’s foreign service’.
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