Opinion Sur
In the Middle East, the impasse in which the main actors in the central conflict (Israel – Palestine) are immersed is widening, but it will remain with no way out. By disengaging from any serious political negotiation and abandoning diplomacy (or using it as a loincloth), both Israel and the US will only succeed in widening and extending the war sine die.
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Friends who read one of my recent articles asked me what I meant to write when I argued that in the war with Hamas and Hezbollah Israel had entered a dead end. The answer is in two parts. The first is that neither of the two declared objectives of the Netanyahu government, namely: the total destruction of these two terrorist organizations; and the final solution on the future of Palestine (the construction of “Greater Israel” from the Jordan River to the sea) have been achieved and will not be achieved. As an example, I give this observation: neither Hamas nor Hezbollah have disappeared and neither have the 5.5 million Palestinians. For its part, the Israeli military force is very fatigued because it was designed to win quick and punctual wars, not protracted or endless wars. The physical and moral wear and tear in Israel is significant.
If this is true, then it is worth asking what can Netanyahu’s Israel do in that alley? The (second) answer is: to provoke a major war, this time a direct war against Iran, and for two reasons: both Hamas and Hezbollah, which have acted as substitutes for Iran in its conflict with the Jewish state, are today rather weakened deterrents from a distance. For its part, Iran is on the verge of being able to arm nuclear bombs – its main remaining deterrent tool.
But the problem for Israel is this: it cannot by itself “defeat” Iran or destroy its covert nuclear factories in the mountains. The latter could only be achieved by the United States. Consequently, Israel will try to drag the U.S. into the U.S. to a war with Iran. The latter would be developed within a logic of escalation. First there would be a strong and indiscriminate Israeli attack, including on Iran’s civilian population, followed by an Iranian retaliation on Israel’s urban centers, and so on in an escalation that would have the U.S. enter the conflict, albeit reluctantly, and then carry out a joint U.S.-Israel attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities.
If the scenario is verified in the near future, it would not end in any way in a surrender of Iran. If there were to be a change of regime in that country, it would be by a regime even harsher and more furious than the previous one, which would resume the path of nuclear weapons, with all the consequences in the medium and long term, especially the proliferation of nuclear weapons throughout the region. In other words, we are facing the possibility that the main actors will seek a new balance of power in the region, this time nuclear.
The Netanyahu government’s interest in this scenario is clear: buying time for Israel; to continue the annexation of all Palestine; ensure the political survival of Netanyahu and his allies of extreme Zionism. The cost? An indeterminate occupation.
For the U.S., on the other hand, it would be a disaster of great magnitude: to enter into a great endless war in the Levant and derail its strategy in the Far East. In other words: greater distraction in a secondary scenario and strategic retreat in the main scenario. So far the result of the matches is: Israel 1, USA 0. The tail must have shaken the dog. Collateral damage: China 2, US 0. Russia will also celebrate the result. From his strategic point of view, it would be a new nail in the coffin of American hegemony.
All this means to me the alley in the Middle East. When I say “dead-end”, I mean no strategic, sustainable and lasting way out. The time to try to “get out” of the impasse for the Israeli government is this: not to get out of the narrow alley, because it cannot, but to widen it and deepen it by drawing the United States to it.
The time is now –hic et nunc– because Trump and Netanyahu share an exclusively bellicose-military vision to deal with fundamentally political problems. When the only tool is the hammer, any complex difficulty or problem resembles a nail. Sic transit gloria mundi: sinking into Armageddon? It is the price to pay for choosing opportunists and unscrupulous adventurers as leaders of the Western world. That’s where we’re going and if the worst happens we’ll all pay the price.
In my opinion, and despite my distaste for the Trump regime, the time has come to avoid such a blunder. Rather than obsessively worrying about containing Iran, it should be concerned with containing Israel as well. As the U.S. vice president would say, “there is a new sheriff in the region,” including in the bluster a warning to the Jewish state. However, that state has a powerful lobby within the United States.
But I’m afraid there’s no sheriff, because the “leaders” of the U.S. are agitators, not statesmen, and frankly they don’t know how to govern; they just know how to demolish and then “see what happens.” So the time may come when other parts of the world will resemble Gaza, precisely because of the absence or incompetence of the supposed sheriff. . As Tacitus would say: “Auferre, trucidare, rapere falsis, nominibus imperium, atque ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.(Rapine, murder, and robbery are called by false names to rule, and where they create a desert, they call it peace.) There will be an endless war in the Levant (hopefully limited) with periods of freezing that simulate peace.
The two-state “solution” is obsolete and today more than ever unattainable. It has become an empty phrase that the West uses to disguise its complicity in genocide. Trump’s proposal to transform Palestine into a post-pogrom wasteland without Palestinians, and then turn Gaza into a mini Dubai (something like a large shopping mall with a police state inside) is from a geopolitical point of view delusional and from a moral point of view, in the words of former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, “emetic.”
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