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Dam Press:
Iran’s direct response to “Israel” with parades and missiles on the night of April 13, 2014 in response to the Zionist aggression against the Iranian Embassy in Damascus represents a change in the rules of engagement that the components of the US, Israeli and Arab official “Central Command” system cannot accept or coexist.
This attack, launched against the backdrop of Operation Al-Aqsa Flood 2.0 by the Support Front of Lebanon, Yemen and Iraq, represents a fundamental shift in the balance of power, shifting the axis of resistance from a defensive position to a strategic balance, beginning to establish a new deterrent base and paralyzing the ability of the occupation forces to strike at their will in the region, while the full-scale aggression of the Zionist military machine has plunged Gaza into chaos.
Therefore, I wrote on April 22, 2024 under the title “Will the Israeli response be limited to 3 small marches in Isfahan?” that after the call for a major strike against Iran, the archives were not closed, but only postponed. Instead of launching two major campaigns at the same time, Western and Arab official support for “Israel” prevailed.
But this does not mean that in the long run the US administration will ignore direct Iranian attacks on the Zionist entity, whose three marches against the Revolutionary Guard base in Isfahan sent a message… “The meaning is: the rest will always come, and the axis must be ready.”
I also wrote on May 3, 2024 in an article titled “What is strategic patience? Has Iran really gotten rid of its shackles?” that the American Zionist side will not easily accept changes in the rules of engagement and changes in the strategic balance of power, and that “the Iranian strike archive against the Zionist entity is not over for him, so he must try to subvert this development with strikes that will shake Iran’s image quickly or far.”
If we assume that the helicopter crash that took off former Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi and Foreign Minister Hossein Abdollahian and their companions on May 19, 2024 was not premeditated or intentional, then the public assassination of the martyred leader Ismail Haniyeh in the daytime in Tehran, against the background of the inauguration of President Masoud Pezeshkian, can only be understood as an attempt to shake the image of Iran internally and externally, to restore the rules of engagement with Iran to the state they were before the night of April 13. 14, to undermine the deterrence principle established by Iran that night and to turn back the clock.
The attack on Hezbollah’s senior leader, the martyr Fouad Shukr, in the southern suburbs of Beirut was also not intended to destabilize Hezbollah’s image by crossing the red line established after October 8 and entering the line of support for Gaza and the rules of engagement that have been established since then.
Why did things escalate after Netanyahu’s visit to the US?
In Washington, Netanyahu heard from President Biden and Vice President Harris, as he had heard from former President Trump in Florida, who expressed in different terms the need for a ceasefire in Gaza. Nevertheless, he received a warm welcome in the US Congress, where he unexpectedly holds a quarter of the seats. He also received strong bipartisan support in the US for the Zionist entity and its security.
Most importantly, in my view, Netanyahu is sensing a leadership vacuum in Washington due to deep divisions within the Democratic Party, and his term is coming to an end with President Biden becoming a lame duck after he withdrew from the race. Being away from or no longer at the helm of the country is likely to encourage Netanyahu to continue to push forward with his plans to escalate the situation in the region, fully aware that Republicans, with rare exceptions such as Republican Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky, are leaning toward moving forward with his plans to work with him, and their candidates will not openly attack him.
Therefore, ahead of the election of a new US government on November 5, Netanyahu’s chances of blowing up the situation increase, especially after the Democratic Party chooses Kamala Harris as the alternative presidential candidate to Trump.
Of course, there is a dispute among the “allies” over whether a regional strike should be launched in multiple directions while the Gaza war is still going on, which is embarrassing for the Democrats electorally and embarrassing for the “Arab” allies of the Zionist entity among the public.
Escalation is thus the restoration of the prestige of “Israel” and its “right” to unbridled aggression in the region through a series of strikes “out of the box”, or the provocation of a reaction to these strikes, thereby activating the mechanisms of the US Central Command “Central Command”, which is responsible for the defense of “Israel” in cooperation with the Arab regimes.
The goal of the escalation is clear: to establish an “Abrahamic alliance” in the Middle East to counter the “growing Iranian threat,” similar to NATO, which Netanyahu called for in a speech to the U.S. Congress, which he said was formed in Europe after World War II to counter the Soviet Union.
As Netanyahu put it, the stakes here are “allies”: “We saw a glimpse of this potential alliance on April 14, when more than half a dozen countries, led by the United States, worked side by side with Israel to help eliminate hundreds of missiles as well as drones launched by Iran.”
Unfortunately, these countries will once again fall for Netanyahu’s tricks, promising to defend “Israel” as one of their rights as part of the “Central Command” system, when the resistance axis parties call on them not to do so. Do not fall for Netanyahu’s tricks under the pretext of responding to Israeli strikes! But this only means handing over the region to the Zionist entity to do whatever it wants and expanding the aggression against Gaza to other fronts.
Middle East scenarios by 2026
The famous American Stimson Center held a seminar on July 5, 2024, before the martyrdom of Haniyeh and Shukur, and the results were published on its website under the title “Middle East Scenarios Until 2026: For Worse, They Get Better.”
The “Middle East experts” who attended the seminar proposed three options for the future of the colonial so-called “Middle East” in the next 18 months:
A – The war in Gaza and elsewhere continues at its current low level.
B-A large-scale regional war breaks out, causing a major impact on the international economy.
C – Achieve a long-term ceasefire in Gaza and begin its “physical and political” reconstruction.
Stimson Center experts began to favor option A over the other two, ruling out option C and considering option B, an open regional war, as a more likely and convincing option than C, since they believed that the “solution” option depended on increasing Israel’s war fatigue on the one hand and “eliminating a large part of Hamas” on the other, in order to provide an opportunity for a “limited bargain” with Palestinian and Arab players backed by the United States.
These experts also believe that Tel Aviv’s cooperation with the Palestinian Authority to reach a “solution” in Gaza would require a replacement of Netanyahu’s government, which they believe is impossible in the short term, while Netanyahu is betting that time will pass until Trump takes office as president, whom they believe is more responsive to his Democratic leanings.
They also believe that many senior officials are opposed to opening two major fronts at the same time, given the continued stagnation in Gaza and the internal divisions in Israel, which is the main obstacle to expanding the regional war. But they believe that the escalation of fighting on the northern front, even if it does not lead to open war, will lead to a new (possible) uprising in the West Bank and a wave of “international terrorism” in Gaza and Palestinian support, which may increase the possibility of open war, while the annexation of the West Bank and Israeli control of Gaza may threaten the “peace treaty” with Egypt and Jordan and increase the possibility of the outbreak of open war.
According to another report published on August 1, 2024 by the International Political Research Institute (ISPI) on its website, titled “Are we on the brink of a full-scale war?”, the report summarizes the views of a group of “Middle East” experts who believe that the killings of Haniyeh and Shuk threaten to “expand the scope of the conflict to the entire region, but the response of Hezbollah, Hamas, and especially Iran — which has suffered a major setback in its ability to defend its own land — will determine whether the conflict will escalate”, and perhaps this means “the nature of the response”, because the response is certain and definite.
An expert from the internationally renowned Italian institute believes that the assassination of Ismail Haniyeh excludes the possibility of a ceasefire in the short term, no matter how realistic this possibility may have been before, while the unprecedented attack on Iranian territory demonstrates Netanyahu’s willingness to take major escalatory steps in the regional confrontation with Iran’s opponents, which will require a harsher response from Iran’s security services, and Haniyeh’s death may increase the political influence of the military wing of the Hamas movement, which, as Haniyeh said, planned and carried out the October attack without the significant participation of the exiled political leaders represented by Haniyeh.
Another expert on the institute’s staff said that although the killing of Fuad Shukr was different, it represented a continuation of the strategy that “Israel” has been following for months: strike after strike, weakening Hezbollah’s military and operational capabilities.
The blow to Iran is the most serious. The assassination of Haniyeh not only exposed all the weaknesses of Iran’s security services, but also distorted the country’s image internationally, because such an important figure was killed in a few hours in Tehran. According to the second expert, the situation after the new president was sworn in is something we have never seen before.
Another researcher associated with the center added that Hezbollah is not interested in an all-out war with “Israel” and will not strike “Israel” harder unless the latter targets Lebanon and its institutions and citizens more harshly (which, of course, did happen).
In a report titled “Risk of all-out war rises dramatically” on July 31, 2024, the Financial Times of the United Kingdom confirmed that the attacks in Beirut and Tehran could push “Israel” and Iran deeper into a dangerous cycle of escalation in the “Middle East”.
On the other hand, the Netherlands Institute for International Relations (Clingendael) published a paper on its website on July 17, 2024, in which it proposed four options:
A – Strive to maintain the status quo, which is the most likely scenario if the main parties involved (from the United States, “Israel” to Iran) exercise restraint.
B – The red line changes, which is the most likely scenario if both Iran and “Israel” exercise restraint and the United States fully supports Israel’s steps. The change of the red line is manifested in the increasing depth of strikes on both sides, as well as their increasing impact on civilians and infrastructure, such as we have seen on the northern front.
C – Limited war, which is the most likely scenario if Iran and “Israel” do not exercise restraint, but if the United States does not fully support Israel’s steps.
D – All-out war, which is the most likely scenario if all parties do not exercise restraint, but if the United States fully supports “Israel’s” steps.
Apparently the author of the paper considers the entire axis of resistance to be Iran. He is not talking about the axis of resistance, he is only talking about Iran’s decision.
As we have pointed out, the most important point in the analysis of the Netherlands Institute paper is that the four options it proposes are not independent of each other, which means that the course of events and their interaction within the scope of one of these options could lead to another option that expresses a higher stage of the conflict, such as the incident against the Iranian Embassy in Damascus, which briefly shifted the conflict from option B to option C, or pressure from hard-line elements in the Netanyahu government to launch a full-scale war on Lebanon, which could shift the scenario from option B to option D. That is, full-scale war.
In my humble opinion, we are now at a critical juncture between changing the red lines and a limited war, and Hezbollah and Iran are looking for a goal that can achieve both deterrence and not fall into a full-scale war, if they can succeed in doing this. In order to consolidate themselves in the future and deter the Zionist entity, the latter will feel threatened in a more strategic way, which will prompt him to either change the guard, that is, the Netanyahu government, or go to war. If they fail, this will consolidate the Netanyahu government and push it to go to war. If they succeed, the threat of war can be avoided by 50%, if they fail, the danger of war will expand.
Is our problem just the Netanyahu government?
Anyone who thinks that a significant portion of the Israeli Jewish public supports an all-out war on Lebanon in line with Netanyahu’s personal desires simply to save his government, or to avoid prosecution, is mistaken.
It is noteworthy that 62% of the audience supports war against Lebanon, according to the Jerusalem Post on June 17, 2024. Although Haaretz argued on July 4, 2024 that the Israeli public is divided on this issue, we must remember that the Netanyahu government relies on a bloc of 65 deputies that has persisted to this day.
The matter therefore goes beyond Netanyahu’s personal calculations and has to do at a deeper level with the Zionist mentality, which believes it has a “right” to oppress the Gentiles and a duty to inform the nations that it rules with a “rod of iron” according to the Bible, and a “persecution complex”, a mentality whose history has led it to constantly search for sources of real and imagined dangers and to constantly strive to proactively eradicate them, but the divisions among Zionists revolve only around the methods of dealing with them…
Therefore, to attribute the problems of “Israel” to Netanyahu himself, or to an “extremist” movement alone, means to get rid of the central link in the Zionist entity that governs “society”, “state” and “army” and all its tendencies: the Zionist mentality. This mentality is not limited to Netanyahu or rabid Zionists, but it is what they express most.
Writer and University Professor – Occupied Palestine
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