Israel and the US can bomb us, assassinate our scientists, starve our children, imprison our leaders, change our governments… and Palestine will remain the issue.

Does anyone believe that bombing Iran is really about bringing peace to the Middle East? For more than 30 years, we have been told that “Iran is about to produce a nuclear bomb”. Iran was bombed because it has always supported the Palestinian cause and is the only remaining non-client state in the Middle East. Avigail Abarbanel writes Lies, Lies & More Lies : “Israel does fear Iran, but not because of its nuclear program. Iran has been the only significant player on the world stage that’s named Zionism for the settler-colonial program it is, and that’s repeatedly called Israel out on its plan to eliminate all Palestinian presence from historic Palestine.” She says, “Israel’s aggression toward Iran isn’t about security – it’s about maintaining the psychological scaffolding that allows genocide to be reframed as ‘self-defence’.”

I listen to an ABC journalist asking an “expert” about regime change in Iran because of the latter’s human rights record and I wonder whether she is ignorant or is feigning ignorance. Since when did the West bring us regime changes because they were concerned with our human rights? If they were, why haven’t they changed the regime in Saudi Arabia? Abarbanel writes in the article referenced before:

“There have been plenty of stories in the West about religious oppression in Iran and the status of women there. It would be interesting to see what Western media reports when, in the not-too-distant future, Israel itself turns into a religious state. I have not seen one story in our press about the fact that there are places in Israel where bus drivers still force women to sit at the back of buses so as not to offend religious men, despite Israel’s Supreme Court’s ban on the practice. Either way, the nature of the Iranian state is not the reason that it is now bombed indiscriminately by Israel with direct US assistance. That’s a lie too.”

Israel and the US attack Iran, a sovereign nation, in flagrant violation of international law, and politicians tell us Iran, that does not possess a nuclear bomb, poses a threat to Israel, a nuclear-armed state, and that Israel has a right to self-defence. As Greg Barnes says in Bombing Iran a clear breach of international law: “The neo-cons and liberal internationalists, to justify their war crimes in Iraq in the first decade of this century, invented the idea of anticipatory self-defence. It is intellectually untenable because it means any nation can decide another might be a threat and therefore invade it. But it’s a concept being trotted out again by the usual suspects to justify Israel’s conduct.” I watch politicians speak of Iran’s failure to engage in diplomacy and I wonder where they were when the 2015 Iran Nuclear Agreement, negotiated under Obama, was signed by the US, the UK, France, Russia, China and Germany. Where were they when Trump withdrew the US from the agreement in 2018? Where were they when Israel attacked Iran while the latter was in the midst of negotiating a new nuclear agreement with the US? And tonight I heard Andrew Hastie, acting Opposition foreign affairs spokesperson, declare on ABC News that “Anyone who talks about the rules-based global order is really being nostalgic”. Welcome to the brave new world.

A few days after Israel attacked Iran, Daniel Levy wrote in America First or Israel First? Will Trump Join Netanyahu's War on Iran? : “It surely comes as no surprise that in the context of Israel’s latest ‘war of no choice’ it has targeted and caused mayhem in civilian areas in Iran. In another unprovoked Israeli war of aggression, the starting point is that there is no such thing as international law or a distinction between combatant and civilian (that’s not to suggest that Israel’s adversaries adhere to such standards either, but they are sanctioned by the West, while Israel is enabled). Israel itself coined the term the ‘Dahiya doctrine’ (named after the Beirut suburb), to describe the crime of terrorising an urban civilian population. That doctrine is now being applied to Tehran.”

The expression in fashion these days seems to be “Peace through Strength”. Millions of Arabs and Iranians in the Middle East will hear it differently. Born in the cradle of civilisation but treated as uncivilised, their countries regarded as killing fields in which to test the latest military weapons, their land stolen, and their resources plundered, they’ll hear “Peace through Strength” as “Capitulation through Bombing”. And they will continue to seek “Freedom through Resistance”.

Suppose the US and Israel, together with their complicit Western allies, manage to bomb Iran into submission, change its regime and install their own puppet regime. What then? Will this bring security to Israel and peace to the Middle East? Of course not. Palestine will remain the issue. Israel may achieve hegemony and, together with the US, may seize the resources of the region, but as long as Palestinians are denied their human rights, it will be surrounded by 500 million people seething with the injustice of it all. Israel may normalise relations with every puppet regime in the Middle East but the Arab and Iranian streets will not forget the children slaughtered in Gaza, the Palestinians tortured in Israel’s Sde Teiman, the women giving birth at checkpoints and the Palestinian villages burnt down. The 1948 Nakba is still etched on the soul of every Palestinian. I am not Palestinian, and the Nakbas, both the old and the current one, are etched on my soul. And like the majority of the people from the region, I have nothing but utter contempt for the Arab regimes. Israeli donor Miriam Adelson paid Trump US$100 million. In return, he moved the US embassy to Jerusalem, withdrew from Iran’s nuclear deal, and gifted Israel the Golan Heights. The Gulf rulers paid him billions of dollars to protect them from their own people.

Decades ago, only historians, geopolitics specialists, and those of us who came from the region and had read Ilan Pappé and Robert Fisk, knew the full extent of Israel’s crimes against the Palestinians. Today, everyone with a mobile phone can see what Israel does. The salaried journalists can remain silent, reframe, distort or lie, but the world can see for itself the dehumanisation, the siege, the hunger and the carnage. The complicit politicians can recite their mantra “Israel has the right to defend itself” but the people have stopped listening. They are watching ethnic cleansing and extermination in real time.

Decades of internationally-backed impunity for Israel’s crimes against Palestinians, of America’s forever wars and regime changes in the Middle East, of Israel’s countless assassinations, have brought neither security to Israel nor peace to the region. It is a delusion to think that they can. Until the Palestinians have equal rights in their homeland, Palestine will remain the issue, and the region will remain ablaze.

The views expressed in this article may or may not reflect those of Pearls and Irritations.