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“Donald, we have a job to finish… and we’ll finish it together. We’ll finish it, and no one else will do it,” said Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in a phone call thanking Donald Trump for endorsing him in the Israeli general election on 27 October. Trump responded: “You are a great warrior, and we will prove that.”
The job Netanyahu is talking about is clearly a resumption of the US/Israeli attack on Iran which began on 28 February and has so far failed to achieve any of its goals, murky though these were.
Israel’s PM had earlier pushed to restart large-scale air strikes on Iran beginning on 10 October, targeting civilian infrastructure such as oil refineries and power plants. This would have provoked Iranian retaliation further, driving up the price of oil and accelerating global inflation.
Trump turned Netanyahu down on that occasion, but a new and potentially even more catastrophic phase of the war may get the go-ahead after Israeli general election and US midterms on 3 November. Even if Netanyahu’s ruling coalition loses its majority in the Knesset, he will remain interim prime minister and able to resume military action.
The Republicans may be trounced in the midterm elections, losing control of the House and possibly the Senate, but, as a political gambler who hates to lose, Trump may double down on his original bet that Iran can be decisively defeated. He has come close seven times in recent months to ordering a new air campaign in alliance with Israel, so it seems likely that he will give the go-ahead at some point. Supposing Republican defeat at the polls, his best moment to strike might be before the new Congress is sworn in on 3 January.
In Israel, the outcome of the general election not only affects the war with Iran, but will determine the direction the country takes in the coming decades. This is not at first obvious, since Netanyahu and any alternative Israeli leader are all hawks to a greater or lesser degree. But the precise degree to which the next Israeli government wants to ethnically cleanse Palestinians from Gaza and the West Bank, and to engage in permanent war with the rest of the Middle East, is of vast significance.
No future US president, Democrat or Republican, is likely to go to war in alliance with Israel ever again, so Netanyahu must take full advantage of Trump’s remaining two years in office. Regardless of occasional differences, the political legacies of both of men will be determined by the outcome of their conflict with Iran.
Netanyahu “exploits the basic fears of Israel’s Jewish population, which were greatly intensified on October 7,” says Gadi Eisenkot, the former head of the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) and the opposition leader most likely to replace the incumbent as prime minister. In the interview with The Times of Israel, he added: “We must not allow him to perpetuate the culture of fear and lies that he has instilled.”
Eisenkot, personally, is ahead of Netanyahu in the polls, but only by a few points. He expresses an uneasy sense that Netanyahu – prime minister for 18 out of the last 30 years – might once again outmanoeuvre his opponents: “One cannot underestimate his experience, his political ability, and his extensive track record of manipulating the Israeli public.”
Eisenkot’s son and nephew were killed in the fighting in Gaza, which gives him moral standing in Israel. Nevertheless, the election slogan of Netanyahu’s Likud party is “Right or Palestine”. Neither the opposition leader nor the current PM has a clear path to a majority of 61 in the 120-seat Knesset, with polls indicating that Netanyahu’s bloc will win 51 seats and the opposition 52. Small parties will try to leverage their few seats or stand down to avoid splitting the vote. This is always a feature of Israeli elections, producing complicated intrigues and toxic promotions in pursuit of political power.
Israel long ago turned decisively to the right. “Over the past few decades, a hardline religious-right elite has prised the country further from its liberal democratic origins and towards an ethno-nationalist, illiberal vision,” writes Beth Oppenheim of the European Council on Foreign Relations. “They have embedded themselves in key institutions and are working to remake Israel in their image – a Greater Israel that spans the West Bank, Gaza and beyond, in which Jewish law trumps liberal democracy.”
A new opposition-led government will not reverse this illiberal tide, but it will be less committed to ethnic cleansing of Palestinians at home and aggressive forever wars abroad. Though Netanyahu did not create the Israeli-US alliance, he did persuade the US to join with Israel in seeking joint hegemony in the Middle East.
At first this seemed to be working in Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon and Syria, but it failed spectacularly against Iran. It turned out that Tehran had a strategy – control the Strait of Hormuz and hit US allies in the Gulf hard – while the US and Israel did not. Without anybody paying much attention, Iran had become a drone superpower. Then Iran’s Yemeni allies, the Houthis, surprised the world by accurately targeting Saudi oil facilities, showing they are a new power to be reckoned with on the Arabian Peninsula.
In the last few days, one of the world’s largest oil and chemical companies, Saudi Aramco, announced it was evacuating its staff from its missile-damaged headquarters on the Gulf. The US, for its part, says it has regained control of the Strait of Hormuz, with oil exports from the Gulf back at their pre-war level. But with Brent crude peaking at $116 a barrel on Friday the market does not believe this.
The problem for Israel – and by extension the US – is that Netanyahu and his coalition pursue an all-or-nothing policy which works well enough against weaker opponents such as Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon. Diplomacy and political compromises are rejected in favour of reliance on military force alone. But an iron law of Middle East politics holds that everybody at some point overplays their hand. Israel is particularly prone to this failing. What works against five million largely unarmed Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank does not work against 92 million Iranians with a well organised regime geared to war.
The fatal flaw of Israeli policy is giving opponents no alternative but to fight for their very existence. It presupposes the enemy is weaker, less popular and easier to defeat than is really the case. Israel has a genius for snatching political defeat from the jaws of military victory.
Speaking of unexpected developments in the war against Iran earlier this year, Danny Citrinowicz, an expert on Iran at Israel’s Institute for National Security Studies, said “the gap between what was planned for the campaign and the realities of the war, is the underestimation of Iran’s ability to recover, and the overestimation of air power and its ability to bring down regimes”.
Israel and the US now plan a bigger and more destructive version of the same strategy. But they may simply be preparing to repeat their past mistakes.
Further Thoughts
It was reported earlier this year that Russian army casualties in Ukraine were running at 35,000 dead and seriously wounded per month. The source for this huge figure was Ukrainian intelligence and it was confirmed by Western intelligence agencies, the suggestion being that the surge in Russian losses was because of Ukrainian drones. No number was put on Ukraine’s losses until 17 September, when Poland’s Prime Minister Donald Tusk told his parliament that he had been told by senior Ukrainian officials that Ukrainian dead and seriously wounded numbered 27,000 dead and wounded per month.
What I find striking is that this great number of human lives ended forever, with many more losing their eyes, legs and arms, horrifies very few in western Europe. Accounts of high Russian losses are greeted with relish by most, while news of staggering Ukrainian casualties has been suppressed or ignored by the Western and Ukrainian media.
What is ominous is the degree to which a state of permanent warfare has become normalised in the public mind, its cruelties and miseries cavalierly accepted as inevitable. Too much dwelling on them shows suspicious sympathy for the other side, a sign that the dehumanisation of war has triumphed. We are surely in a bad way when it is only Donald Trump who emphasises stopping the mass killings as a prime objective of any peace negotiations.
In the 1960s and 1970s we watched the film Oh What a Lovely War, satirising the cheery enthusiasm with which British generals, egged on by propagandists on the home front, sent their soldiers over the top to be butchered by German machine guns. Yet this is now happening again, drones replacing the machine guns, though the warmongers in Europe outside Ukraine and Russia pay no price in blood – prepared, as the old jibe has it, “to fight to the last Ukrainian and Russian”.
Yet historically, spectators who egged on the combatants from what they imagine was a safe distance usually end up being dragged into the bloodbath.
Beneath the Radar
Ever since the UK government proscribed Palestine Action as terrorists it has had to pretend that anybody supporting the group – pensioners, doctors, NHS workers, magazine editors, writers – are also terrorists. In Turkey and Egypt, the governments are happy to do just that, casting their net as wide as they can because their goal is to crush under the name of anti-terrorism all criticism and freedom of expression.
But in the UK, anti-terrorism legislation, by conflating legitimate protest with terror, has turned Palestine Action into a potent symbol of state repression, delegitimising those who banned it.
The UK government under Sir Keir Starmer never lost an opportunity to shoot itself in the foot. In a sense, Starmer’s whole career was a great moral U-turn from the human rights lawyer he once was to undiluted authoritarianism.
But even he cannot have expected the proscription of Palestine Action to be quite so counterproductive as it has proved to be, with bookshops purging their shelves of Irish novelist Sally Rooney’s Normal People. Her publisher Faber says it can no longer supply her work to bookshops because of the terrorism legislation. Rooney says she supports Palestine Action and would donate her earnings from her books to them, making her vulnerable to a 14-year-sentence.
The nastiness and stupidity of Starmer’s government was epitomised by its banning of Palestine Action, a measure Andy Burnham will surely hope the Supreme Court decides is illegal. If it does not, and Burnham’s government continues to arrest people, then the charge of hypocrisy will soon stick, giving substance as it will to the suspicion that Burnham is not so different from Starmer, aside from better PR.
Governments of all sorts tend to underestimate the degree to which the loss of the moral high ground does them damage in the eyes of the public. Rooney lives in Ireland, where Palestine Action is not proscribed, but I wonder what will happen if another best-selling writer resident in the UK does as she has done, and challenges the authorities to arrest them?
Cockburn’s Picks
European governments scrabble to raise money on the bond markets, but one ingenious method may have eluded them.
In 1922, the Greek government was so desperate for money to fight its war in Anatolia – the main land mass of what is now Turkey – that “its parliament agreed that all Greek bank notes in circulation would be cut in two halves – the left-hand half being legal tender, while the other half would constitute a government bond, bearing an interest rate of 6.5 per cent”.
The quote comes from David Tonge’s Imperial Predator: Britain and the Destruction of the Ottoman Empire. As I understand it, one half of the drachma note would be worth half its previous nominal value and the other half would be handed to the government in return for a bond. According to Tonge, this weird scheme worked surprisingly well and raised a much needed equivalent of £100m – though it did not save Greece from military defeat.
The book makes important points of current relevance: the prolonged British lunge to take over half of what had been the Ottoman Empire was a self-inflicted disaster for the UK, which conquered more than it could control and defend. It was a catastrophe for the region which turned into an ever-bubbling caldron of war. Trump and the US have likewise overextended themselves in their war with Iran with results that become ever more catastrophic for everybody.
A very smart British prime minister like David Lloyd George paid a price for his hubris and ignorance – just as a much less smart President Trump is doing a century later.