By John Pickard
The Iranian missile and drone attack on Israel over the weekend has changed nothing fundamental in the political and military balance in the Middle East, but it has increased by a notch the possiblity of a generalised war in the region. The growing splits within Israeli politics and the divide between Biden and Netanyahu will both be intensified by the Iranian attack and Israeli efforts to drag the US into a war with Iran will almost certainly fail.
The Iranian assault, involving hundreds of missiles and drones, was really a statement, a gesture carefully calibrated to satisfy militants at home and in the region, but not so damaging to Israel that it would provoke a reaction from the USA. Indeed, the USA was warned of the attack in advance, and Iran would have known that there would be little damage done to Israel, given the latter’s formidable air defence system. The drones took hours to travel the hundreds of miles across Iraq and Jordan to reach their targets and would have been tracked for hours before they were shot down. The Iranian attack is an escalation of the conflict with Israel, but it is a measured one.
Despite its failure to make much impact in Israel – apparently the only casuality was a young Bedouin woman injured by shrapnel – Iran will count the exercise as a political and military victory. Militarily, it has allowed its forces to scope out the capabilities of Israel’s air defence system, gaining knowledge that might have some future value. Future missile attacks from Iran or from its proxy, Hezbollah in Lebanon, would use swarms of missiles with the aim of overwhelming Israel’s defences and the weekend for them would constitute a test run.
Jordan exposed as a military ally of Israel
But it has also been a useful political exercise for Tehran, in so far as it has exposed the Kingdom of Jordan, as not only a political ally of Israel, but in helping to shoot down Iranian missiles, a military ally. The Jordanian government has been pushed by Iran’s action into treading a fine line, supporting Israel and the West, but dreading the half of its population who are Palestinian. Also, according to the Israeli news website ynetnews, the cost of Israeli’s deployment of its multi-layered air defence system was staggering – more than $1bn – over one night, a figure far higher than the cost to Iran of its missiles and drones.
The Western press are apoplectic with rage over the Iranian missile attack and politicians are falling over themselves to condemn the assault on Israel’s “sovereign territory”. There was no such rage, of course, when Israel attacked a wing of the Iranian embassy in Damascus on April 1, killing seven people, including an Iranian general.
The international diplomatic protocol, accepted by all governments including the USA and UK, is that embassies are deemed to be the “sovereign territory” of the state whose embassy it is. Iran used the attack by Israel in Damascus to justify its own assault, but the Israeli assault on “Iranian territory” has been quietly forgotten by Western politicians, who, we know, apply double standards whenever and wherever it suits them.
But despite loud and vociferous political and diplomatic backing by Western politicians, there is also a generalised clamour among the same leaders for restraint by Israel. The Financial Times reports that the French President Emmanuel Macron advised the international community to do “everything we can to avoid flare-ups” and to “try to convince Israel that we shouldn’t respond by escalating, but rather by isolating Iran”.
David Cameron, British Foreign Secretary, made a similar comment: “We’re saying very strongly that we don’t support a retaliatory strike. We don’t think they should make one.” Biden called on Israel to “take the win”, assuming Netanyahu will dress up the downing of so many drones and missiles as a victory.
Armed Jewish settlers running amok in the West Bank
The last thing these leaders want is a generalised war in the Middle East, tipping an unstable region over the edge. After the murder of a teenage youth from one of the Jewish settlements, armed settlers have gone on the rampage in the West Bank. At least ten Arab villages have been attacked.
There is a low-level civil war developing in the West Bank, as the October 7 Hamas attack and the war in Gaza have unleashed a wave of pogroms and assults against Arabs in the occupied areas. There is a possibility, notwithstanding the huge imbalance in terms of arms – the Israeli settlers and the IDF are far more heavily armed than Palestinians – of a major conflict developing. Then there is the war in the North between the IDF and Hezbollah, at present a slowly accelerating war of attrition, but it is another major conflict waiting to happen.
Even without the pogroms and ongoing ethnic cleansing in the West Bank, Israel’s relentless and bloody collective punishment of Gaza for the attack by Hamas has shifted global politics. Latest figures show over 34,000 deaths in Gaza, overwhelmingly non-combatants. Gaza has been bombed back to the Stone-Age. A humanitarian crisis has been deliberately created by Israel’s refusal of access to food, water and medical supplies.
Gaza is a war of genocidal proportions and it is unprecedented in its one-sided ferocity in modern times. But more than any other similar conflict in history, it is one beamed live into televisions sets around the world and particularly in the Arab Middle East. It is as a result of this that the political world has turned upside down.
There is overwhelming sympathy among workers and youth around the world for the Palestinian people. No issue in recent times has provoked such large numbers of participants in rallies, protests and demonstrations, as over the merciless bombing of Gaza. Politicians in the West – who in reaility care nothing for Palestinian rights, and never have done – have been forced by popular pressure to call for an end to the Israeli onslaught. Even as they continue to arm Israel, European and American leaders are squirming over the actions of the Israeli government and are calling for a ceasefire.
Huge shift in globabl opinion
Israel is now a pariah state, if not among political leaders, then certainly in the Global South and among workers and youth in Europe and the USA. There has been such a shift in global opinion that is has had an inevitable effect even in Israel, where there is growing opposition to Prime Minister Netanyahu.
There is still widespread popular support for the war in Israel, but that should not be misinterpreted. It is a sentiment that reflects a public perception, fed by the likes of Netanyahu, that Israel – and by definition its population – faces an ‘existential’ threat. That is particularly true over the missile attack, given that Iran is a reactionary theocratic regime with not a shred of political appeal for Jewish workers. But even if the majority in Israel support the actions of the army, there is growing opposition to the conduct of the war and the actions of this government.
Israelis can see that even after more than six months, Hamas has not been defeated and the hostages have not been freed. Netanyahu’s strategy of fighting to the end, to “completely” destroy Hamas, is running out of road. Increasingly, it is looking to Israelis like Netanyahu is prolonging the war – with the support of the extreme right of his Cabinet – only to stay in power. Gideon Levy, columnist in the liberal Haarezt newspaper, blunted wrote on Sunday that if Iran attacks Israel, the blame lies with the Israeli government. That is a profound level of domestic opposition.
It looks like it is Netanyahu’s aim to drag the USA into a war with Iran. Having pulverised the population of Gaza, without succeeding in his war aims, he has in the process pulverised Israeli support across the globe. So he has turned instead to Iran. The bombing of the Iranian embassy in Damascus was an escalation by Netanyahu that was not sanctioned by the White House, and nor would it have been.
Why the USA does not want to be dragged into a war with Iran
While the USA, supported by the UK and Jordan, helped Israel destroy the swarm of Iranian missiles and drones over the weekend, none of these states want to be dragged into a war with Iran. The right wing of Netanyahu’s cabinet will be demanding some kind of tit-for-tat response, possibly through a direct attack by Israel on Iran. But if that were to occur, it would more than likely happen without US logistical support, like comms and satellite guidance.
Why does the US not want to be dragged into a war with Iran? It is not that the USA could not do significant damage to Iran and its military infrastructure with its huge arsenal of weapons and large number of bases in the region. It is because even in defeat, Iran would exact a huge and punishing cost to the USA and its allies.
There are something like 57,000 US military personnel in the region. There is a US base of 900 in Syria, nearly 3,000 in Iraq, a huge naval base in Bahrain (300 km from the Iranian coast), other US bases in Egypt, Jordan and in the Gulf. All of these would be targeted by Iran or its proxies in a regional war and the most sophisticated air defence systems would not prevent large numbers of casualties.
Even with the huge preponderance of US arms in the region, a war with Iran would create a huge loss of life of US military personnel and the last thing Biden wants in an election year is a succession of aircraft bringing home body bags – what’s more, in an unnecessary war provoked by a ‘rogue’ leader in Jerusalem.
That is leaving aside the economic cost of a war involving Iran. The Houthis at the Southern end of the Red Sea have been able to make enough impact that many ships are now being forced to avoid the Suez Canal and are taking a longer (and more expensive) journey from East to West via Southern Africa. A war with Iran would mean the blocking of the Hormuz Straits through which a quarter of the world’s tankers carry their oil. A deep economic recession would follow.
A war between the USA and Iran is not likely
On the balance of probabilities, therefore, a wider war in the Middle East, certainly one involving the USA and Western states, looks unlikely. The USA doesn’t want war with Iran and Iran doesn’t want war with the USA. The Iranian embassador to the UN tweeted after the missile attack, that the matter was now “concluded”.
But on the other hand, the possibility of war has gone up a notch. What will also have increased a notch, will be the determination of Biden to engineer a change of government in Jerusalem. Assuming Netanyahu can even last that long – there are still widespread demands for immediate elections in Israel – and assuming Biden is elected, regime change will be at the top of the ‘to do’ list in the White House at the end of the year.
What has been absent from all of the conflicts and near-conflicts in the Middle East has been any intervention by the organised working class. Around the world workers are expressing their outrage at the Israeli savagery in Gaza, and sometimes this has been expressed in trade union boycotts of arms exports bound for Israel. But where the labour movement is bound by state repression, such as in Egypt and the other Arab states, or where it is blinded by the ‘security’ Klaxon of the right-wing, such as in Israel, the organised working class is largely absent from the picture.
In the longer run, however, the lessons of this conflict will begin to sink in among millions of workers. In Arab countries, particularly Egypt, where there is a potentially powerful working class, many workers and youth will digest the events they have witnessed on Al Jazeera and will have taken note of the inactivity of their governments in the face of the destruction of lives and all Palestinian identity in Gaza and the occupied West Bank.
And in Israel itself, the war and all the events around it will exacerbate the divisions that already exist, between those whose entire political modus operandi is based on racism and apartheid – and ‘security’ to guarantee it – and the rest, who pay for this fake ‘security’ in money and blood. The Middle East world has shifted on its axis and although we can as yet only see outlines of change today, they will be as nothing to the profound and permanent changes we will see in coming years.
Top picture: artist representation of a Shahed armed drone, from Wikimedia Commons.
