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<h1 class="gmail-single_title">As a genocidal maniac, what is Netanyahu’s ultimate goal in the Middle East?</h1>
<div class="gmail-article-author"><h3>By <a href="https://english.palinfo.com/?p=250012"> Ramzy Baroud </a></h3></div>
<p class="gmail-single_date">Friday 5-January-2024 -<font size="1"> <a href="https://english.palinfo.com/opinion_articles/as-a-genocidal-maniac-what-is-netanyahus-ultimate-goal-in-the-middle-east/">https://english.palinfo.com/opinion_articles/as-a-genocidal-maniac-what-is-netanyahus-ultimate-goal-in-the-middle-east/</a></font></p>
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<p><em>This article was written shortly before Israel assassinated the
Deputy Head of the Hamas Political Bureau, Saleh Al-Arouri, in Beirut on
2 January. The assassination is a further illustration of the Israeli
government’s desire to escape the consequences of its disastrous war in
Gaza, by igniting a regional conflict.</em></p>
<p>The current clashes between Hezbollah and Israel are the closest to
an actual war that the Lebanon-Israel border has seen since the war of
2006, which resulted in a rushed Israeli retreat, if not outright
defeat. We often refer to the ongoing conflict between Lebanon and
Israel as “controlled” clashes, simply because both sides are keen not
to instigate or engage in an all-out war.</p>
<p>Obviously, Hezbollah wants to preserve Lebanese lives and civilian
infrastructure, which would surely be seriously damaged, if not
destroyed, should Israel decide to launch a war. But Israel, too,
understands that this is a different Hezbollah than that of the 1980s,
2000 and even 2006.</p>
<p>Compared with Israel’s behavior in the 2006 war, its response to
Hezbollah’s military action in solidarity with the Palestinian
Resistance in Gaza, is muted; tame, even. For example, the 2006 war was
presumably provoked by a Hezbollah attack on Israeli soldiers, which
killed three of them. Hezbollah insists that the soldiers violated
Lebanese sovereignty, as the Israeli army has done on numerous occasions
both before and since that incident.</p>
<p>While that single event led to a major war that wreaked havoc on
Lebanon, it also resulted in the retreat and defeat of the Israeli army.
Imagine what Israel would have done by the standards of the 2006 war if
Hezbollah had killed and wounded hundreds of Israeli soldiers, bombed
scores of military bases, installations and even settlements, as it has
done, on a daily basis, since early October.</p>
<p>Despite numerous threats, Israel is yet to go to war with the main
objective of pushing Hezbollah forces north of the River Litani, thus
supposedly securing the border Jewish settlements. Why the hesitation?</p>
<p>Hezbollah fighters are much stronger than before.</p>
<p>The movement has been fighting for years in traditional warfare
settings, namely in Syria, thus producing a generation of
battle-hardened fighters and commanders, who are no longer bound to the
rules and tactics of guerrilla warfare, as was the case in the past.</p>
<p>On top of that, Hezbollah’s missile capabilities have grown
exponentially since 2006, not only in terms of numbers — up to 150,000
according to some estimates — but also in terms of precision, explosive
capabilities and range. Moreover, Hezbollah has excelled in the
development of its own rockets and missiles, which include the powerful
Burkan, a short-range rocket which can carry a heavy warhead of between
100 to 500 kilograms. This makes Hezbollah, in some ways,
self-sufficient in terms of weapons, if not munitions.</p>
<p>Furthermore, Hezbollah’s sophisticated Radwan Elite Units and an
elaborate tunnel system that goes deep inside northern Israel, would
force Israel to contend with a whole different military reality compared
with that of the last war, should a major military conflict break out.</p>
<p>To cap it all, the Israeli army itself is in disarray, demoralized,
exhausted and weakened by ongoing daily losses on the Gaza front. It is
hardly prepared to fight a long and more difficult war against a better
prepared enemy on its northern border.</p>
<p>With that in mind, we shouldn’t take comments like that of Israel’s
Defense Minister Yoav Gallant too seriously when he says that his
country is fighting a war on seven different fronts. In reality, the
Israeli army is still fighting a single war in Gaza, a difficult war
that it is not winning.</p>
<p>To divert attention from its losses in Gaza and its inability to
launch a major war against Lebanon, the occupation government in Israel
wants to drag Iran into it all. Why, though, would Israel escalate
against the strongest of its regional enemies if it is not able to beat
its smaller foes? The short answer is that, by engaging Iran directly,
Israel would force the US into a major regional war.</p>
<p>Remember the seemingly odd decision by US President Joe Biden to
dispatch an aircraft carrier battle group to the Eastern Mediterranean
immediately after the start of the Gaza war on 7 October? The USS Gerald
R. Ford was eventually withdrawn on 31 December, but Washington wanted
to send a message to Iran that an attack on Israel would be considered
an attack on the United States. When it became clear that Iran had no
interest in an actual war, though, Washington must have realized that
the threat of a regional war does not stem from Tehran, but from Tel
Aviv.</p>
<p>That is when official US intelligence and political analysts began
telling us, repeatedly, that Iran had nothing to do with the Hamas
military operation on 7 October, and that Iran was not interested in
war. The target audience for that message was Israel and its US-western
allies who have been angling for a US-Iran war for years. Biden’s lack
of interest in war, of course, has little to do with his propensity for
peace, and everything to do with the lack of any serious geostrategic
objectives in the Middle East now; his administration’s disastrous
failure in Ukraine; and the rapid depletion of arms and ammunition
available to the US armed forces.</p>
<p>Israel persisted, however. It continued to accuse Iran of being the
orchestrator of the Hamas attack, and the main “existential threat” to
the “Jewish state”. In Israel’s understanding, the collective action of
Hamas and other Palestinian Resistance groups, Hezbollah in Lebanon,
Ansar Allah (the Houthis) in Yemen and the Islamic Resistance of Iraq,
are all fragments of a larger Iranian scheme to destroy the apartheid
state.</p>
<p>To defeat that imaginary threat, Israel carried out numerous
provocative acts against Iran, focused mostly on the bombing of Iran’s
military positions in Syria, leading to the assassination of a top
Iranian commander, General Sayyed Ravi Mousavi, near Damascus on 25
December.</p>
<p>For Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, a US-Iran war would be
a lifeline for a desperate politician who fully, and rightly,
understands that a no-victory in Gaza would equal a defeat for the
Israeli army. Such a defeat would not only be a disgraceful end for
Netanyahu’s political career, but also the end of a long-sustained myth
that Israel, and the US, can impose their political will on the Middle
East through military superiority and firepower.</p>
<p>The Biden administration must be fully aware of Netanyahu’s intention
to drag the region into the abyss of what would possibly be one of the
most devastating wars in recent memory. Reported disagreements and a
rift between Biden and Netanyahu are not related to any US moral
objection to the Israeli genocide in Gaza, of course, but to a real
American fear that another Middle East war could precipitate the
breakdown of US power in the energy-rich region and beyond.</p>
<p>Thus, the current impasse, which sees Washington’s inability to free
itself from its blind commitment to Israel and its violent ideology,
Zionism, and Netanyahu’s inability to distinguish between the goal of
sustaining his own political career and that of destroying the whole of
the Middle East.</p>
<p>Unable to place US interests above those of Israel, Biden continues
to feed the Israeli military machine, which is mostly used to kill
Palestinian civilians in Gaza. This is allowing Netanyahu to champion a
perpetual war in Gaza, while working to expand the conflict so that it
reaches Beirut, Tehran and other regional capitals.</p>
<p>Needless to say, Netanyahu, described by US Congresswoman Rashida
Tlaib as a “genocidal maniac”, must be restrained. If not, the Israeli
genocide in Gaza will multiply into other genocides throughout the
Middle East.</p>
<p><em>-Ramzy Baroud is a journalist and the Editor of the Palestine
Chronicle. He is the author of five books. His latest is ‘These Chains
Will Be Broken: Palestinian Stories of Struggle and Defiance in Israeli
Prisons’. Baroud is a Non-resident Senior Research Fellow at the Center
for Islam and Global Affairs (CIGA) and also at the Afro-Middle East
Center (AMEC).</em></p></div>
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