{"id":12867,"date":"2024-04-28T00:07:01","date_gmt":"2024-04-28T04:07:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.tempestmag.org\/v01_2020\/staging\/?p=12867"},"modified":"2024-05-07T00:21:28","modified_gmt":"2024-05-07T04:21:28","slug":"the-israel-iran-theater-show-a-distraction-from-gaza-genocide","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tempestmag.org\/test02\/2024\/04\/the-israel-iran-theater-show-a-distraction-from-gaza-genocide\/","title":{"rendered":"The Israel-Iran theater show–a distraction from Gaza genocide\u00a0"},"content":{"rendered":"

H<\/span>ow many Palestinians have Israel shot, bombed, and starved in the last week or so? Not a lot of it has been in the news, because we’ve been distractedby “bigger” theatre: a “regional” conflict may be brewing. Let’s observe and analyze this bigger picture, while remembering that the ongoing genocide in Gaza is the real issue here, not Israeli and Iranian fireworks.<\/p>\n

At least 43 more Palestinians were killed<\/a> and 62 others injured on April 13 in four Israeli massacres in Gaza. The next day another five Palestinians were killed \u201cwhen the Israeli army shelled hundreds of displaced Palestinians<\/a> trying to return to their homes in the northern Gaza Strip.\u201d Meanwhile, as Al-Jazeera<\/em> reported<\/a>, in the West Bank in the same period, while drones flew overhead, mobs of Israeli settlers, backed by troops,<\/p>\n

spearheaded a large-scale attack on the village of al-Mughayyir, where they killed one Palestinian man and injured 25 others. Since then, settlers have attacked more towns and villages<\/a> near Ramallah including Bukra, Deir Dubwan, and Kfar Malik.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This is the ongoing reality behind the theatrical scenes we have witnessed over the last week. While the world witnessed the performative deployment of great military hardware on both sides, as both proclaimed self-defense, there was no power to knock out Israeli planes bombing Palestinians; no discussion of Palestine\u2019s right to defend itself.<\/p>\n

The U.S. has been pleased that decades of Iranian-regime \u201canti-Zionist\u201d bluster (aimed at internal and regional homogenization rather than at being taken seriously) amounted to nothing at all as Israel committed genocide in Gaza for six months. Despite Iranian leaders initially promising to back Palestinian resistance \u201cuntil the liberation of Palestine<\/a> and Al-Quds,\u201d with one leader claiming an Israeli ground invasion of Gaza would \u201copen that gates of hell<\/a>,\u201d in reality \u201cthe chasm between Iran\u2019s bellicose rhetoric and relatively restrained action is even sharper in the current Gaza war<\/a>\u201d than in previous wars. Iranian supreme leader Ali Khamenei famously told Hamas chief Ismael Haniyeh in Tehran, that since Hamas \u201cgave us no warning, we will not enter the war on your behalf<\/a>,\u201d allegedly demanding that Haniyeh silence Palestinian voices calling on Iran or Hezbollah to join the battle. In November, the U.S. allowed Iraq to transfer $10 billion it owed Iran<\/a> in electricity payments in a sanctions waiver. According to The Economist<\/em>, this was a reward to Iran for holding back its proxies<\/a> after October 7.<\/p>\n

However, Israeli leaders were less pleased. They were probably pleased in the first month or two, allowing them time to get on with the genocide. Yoav Gallant, Israel\u2019s defense minister, boasted that \u201cno one has come to [Hamas\u2019s] aid \u2013 neither the Iranians nor Hizbullah<\/a>.\u201d But after that, Israeli leaders, or at least Netanyahu’s gang, appeared to want to escalate. For example, while the attacks and counter-attacks between Israel and Hezbollah on the Lebanese border were initially well-calibrated on both sides, restricted to a few kilometers, Israel soon upped the ante: While some twenty troops and civilians have been killed on the Israeli side, about 240 Hezbollah and other fighting cadre and forty Lebanese civilians<\/a> had been killed by increasingly violent and reckless Israeli bombing by March. By late in 2023, Israel was escalating with targeted killings<\/a> of leading Hezbollah cadre and Iranian Revolutionary Guards in Lebanon and Syria, which appeared to be aimed at getting a response.<\/p>\n

\"missiles
Iranian missiles above Israel. Photo: Wikimedia Commons<\/a>.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

For years, Israel has bombed Iranian and Hezbollah targets in Syria, but mostly they targeted weapons shipments, warehouses, and the like where Iran was transferring missiles to Hezbollah. These Israeli bombings were carried out with the facilitation of Syria\u2019s Russian-controlled air defenses, an arrangement made through countless high-level meetings between then-best-friends Putin and Netanyahu, who over a decade met together more than any other two world leaders. Israel supported the Assad regime remaining in power, but without Iranian backing, and therefore welcomed Russia\u2019s intervention on Assad\u2019s behalf as an alternative. Russia and Iran jointly saved Assad, but then became rivals over domination of the Assadist corpse.<\/p>\n

Yet over all these years of attacks, none of them were ever carried out in response to any imaginary Iranian or Hezbollah attacks on \u201cIsrael\u201d (i.e., the Israeli-occupied Syrian Golan); the Israeli and Western propaganda that Israel attacks Iranian forces because they pose a \u201cthreat\u201d to Israel was very theoretical indeed. In fact, only twice, in my close reading, was there even retaliation (once by Iran, in May 2018, once by Hezbollah, in January 2015), as against hundreds of Israeli attacks.<\/p>\n

But only in the last six months has Israel progressed to these targeted killings of significant numbers of important Iranian or Hezbollah figures, but no matter how many were killed, even leading Revolutionary Guards, still<\/em> there was zero<\/em> retaliation from Iran. Following a series of suspiciously precise<\/a> Israeli strikes killing around a dozen leading Iranian Revolutionary Guards <\/em>in Syria in December and January, Iran\u2019s response was to pull back the Guards from Syria<\/a> to avoid getting pulled into the conflict.<\/p>\n

How is Israel supposed to maintain a 30-year propaganda campaign, that it faces not just the brutally oppressed Palestinians, but behind them a large evil power bent on wiping out Israel and Jews (sometimes referred to as \u201cthe Fourth Reich<\/a>\u201d) allegedly dedicated to Israel’s destruction, when, for years, that power never does anything, not even as a response? And continues the same, no matter how much Israel has turned up the dial in recent months. Israel cultivates this propaganda not because it fears Iran \u2013 a laughable proposition for a nuclear-armed military and economic superpower \u2013 but because of its utility as a key ideological prop for the Zionist enterprise. In the same way, Iran plays the same propaganda game in relation to Israel. Just as Israel used this propaganda to justify the brutal oppression of Palestine, Iran used the same to mobilize supporters and death squads against opponents \u2013 mostly Sunni Muslims \u2013 in Iraq and Syria as it built its sub-imperial arc from Iran to the Mediterranean Sea.<\/p>\n