Israel Tries to Change the Subject from Genocide to Iran
Israel Tries to Change the Subject from Genocide to Iran
The Netanyahu Government Looks for a Means of Drawing Attention Away from Its Abundant Failures
Just as the genocide of the Palestinians was going on long before the events of Oct. 7, so the Iranian attack on Israel of April 13-14 has much history behind it. Iran’s projectile barrage on Israel came in response to many provocations, but especially to the Israeli bombing of the Iranian Embassy in Damascus on April 1. The attack killed 13 people including three Iranian Generals. The Israeli attack of April 1st was calculated to set a trap that would lead to a wider regional war that Netanyahu has long been seeking.
All signs point to the probability that the West’s most spoiled and coddled Chosenites, the people and government of Israel, are going to be allowed to get away with yet another travesty. The Netanyahu government is in the process of entrapping the Islamic Republic of Iran into a round of Russian roulette that is putting at risk the future of all life on Earth.
Iran currently tops the list of defamed and misrepresented countries consistently smeared by Zionist media that inundates the world with increasingly vile forms of Western propaganda.
By and large, both the most brazen as well as the closeted fans of Israel’s US-backed genocidal assault on Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank, are also supportive of the Zionist preoccupation with bringing about a war of mass annihilation targeting Iran. Iran is a country of 90 million people, many of them highly educated. Iran is the contemporary geopolitical expression of the Persian heritage that played a major role in the history of both Judaism and Western Civilization.
The government of Iran has gathered around it several Islamic polities devoted to the defence of the Palestinian population now facing genocidal extermination. The Israel-US genocide is being pressed forward with the willing backing of a large portion of Western leaders, Christian Zionists and Jewish Israelis.
The partners in the Iranian-led Resistance include Hezbollah, the Houthi leadership of Yemen, the elected government of Syria and many militia groups in Iraq. This mobilized coalition was the object of much cultivation of martial knowhow and organization.
Prominent among those that cultivated this Axis of Resistance was the Iranian Revolutionary Guard General, Qassem Soleimani. As Times’ interest in him suggests, General Soleimani’s appeal sometimes transcended geopolitical, ideological and religious boundaries. Some saw him as a kind of international icon of professional soldiering at its finest.
On the orders of US President Donald Trump, Qassem Soleimani was assassinated while on a diplomatic mission in Baghdad in early 2020. The US and Israeli governments regularly assassinate Iranian military figures and scientists, a pattern that was part of the process that led to the Islamic Republic’s strike aimed at Israel on the night of April 13-14.
For many years Benjamin Netanyahu has been seeking to persuade the US government to go to war with Iran, a country whose strength and viability presents an obstacle to the Likudnik vision of a more expansive Israel capable of dominating the Arab populations of the Middle East.
Iran’s internal coherence has prevented Israel from transforming the polity into the kind of rubble that has been inflicted by attacks directed at Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and now the Gaza Strip. I have visited Iran several times between 2014 and 2019. It is not a utopia but Iran has become a going concern as a regional superpower that provides fairly decent lives for most of its citizens.
One of Iran’s increasingly conspicuous means of defending itself from the hostility of of its main nemesis, nuclear-armed Israeli, is its technological mastery of the arts and sciences of making missiles. Iran has shared this means of expressing military muscle with its Axis of Resistance partners including prominently Hezbollah and the Houthis.
Since October 7 the Houthis used drone technology to effectively assert control over shipping in the Red Sea. The Houthis are engaged in a very clear attempt to enforce the terms of the UN’s Genocide Convention on Israel and its backers. The Houthis have gone beyond the war of words to actively oppose the actions of those engaged in imposing the death sentence of genocide on the people of Gaza.
As Simplicius explains in his Substack post in The Garden of Knowledge, the Iranian projectile attack on Israel was mounted according to the terms of the UN Charter. It allows for the expression of self-defence after, for instance, Israel bombed the Iranian Embassy in Damascus Syria on April 1st.
While Israel boasted it had stopped virtually all of the projectiles, Simplicius interprets the manoeuvre as primarily a test to see if the high speed ballistic missiles—potentially hypersonic missiles— could penetrate Israeli air space. It turns out they can!
In addressing that issue Simplicus writes,
while Israel and the U.S. claim they shot down 100% of everything, and while it’s possible that the drone and cruise missile lures were mostly shot down—though we have no strong evidence one way or the other—we do have evidence that the ballistic missiles largely went unopposed, slicing through what’s claimed to be the densest air defense in the world.
The main ballistic missiles strikes to hit Israel military targets took place at the Navatim Airbase in the Negev region. The Iranians gave ample warning to many parties in Israel and its neighbouring countries that a host of projectiles were on their way.
The report by Simplicius notes that the Iranian scientists engaged in this project took advantage of the events of April 13-14 to record and evaluate Israeli systems for stopping projectiles. If the projectile assault had been more aggressive, it might have resulted in Israeli deaths which would have given the Netanyahu government an excuse to answer militarily Iran’s justified response to the Iranian Embassy bombing.
It must be stressed once again that the unfolding sequence of Israel-Iran strikes, retaliations and possibly counterstrikes has its origins in the bombing of Iran’s Embassy in Damascus by the Netanyahu government. An attack on a national embassy is treated in international law as an assault on the sovereign territory of the violated country. Such an attack represents a very clear violation of the 1961 Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations. In a sense, Iran had no choice but to retaliate in order to maintain its credibility as a serious power capable of exercising “deterrence.”
The Israeli bombing of the Iranian Embassy was a strike not only against Iran and Syria but it was also an assault on the whole complex of diplomatic relations supporting the ethos of civility in international relations. The two-week IDF campaign at the Al-Shifa Hospital is illustrative of another plunge to the bottom, a violation undermining the norms of decent human behaviour together with the most basic principles of human rights and the rule of law.
British Diplomat Craig Murray, who played a significant role in the genesis of South Africa’s charge against Israel at the World Court, expresses his extreme alarm at the apparent collapse of international law epitomized by the ongoing Gaza genocide. A younger colleague picks up on Murray’s points, emphasizing the symbolic significance of a violent attack by one nation on the embassy of another nation.
This genocide just seems to become more and more grotesque as death by bombardment gives way to accelerating death by forced famine. This weaponization of forced starvation gained momentum with the attack by Israel and its backers against the UN’s Relief and Works Agency, UNRWA. In fact Israel’s goal remains the destruction of UNRWA, the most experienced and well equipped deliverer of humanitarian aid.
The Israeli massacre of Palestinians is being matched by the Israeli murder of international aid workers as well as many dozens of journalists. It has been matched by the notorious massacre of hundreds of medical practitioners and patients at the Al-Shifa Hospital and at all of Gaza’s other hospitals.
No doubt there are many parties that welcome a shift in the narrative from the day-to-day horrors of the Gaza massacre to the optics of Israel-Iran-US relations with the usual consternation about how Joe Biden has made himself into Benjamin Netanyahu’s chump. It is important not to lose focus on the genocidal assault fuelling this descent into madness.
It is important to maintain some focus on the Gaza genocide whose new stage is coming to be dominated by the mass starvation which could see Palestinian deaths increase very quickly from tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands.
There are a lot of Jewish Israelis who want to see all humanitarian supplies, but especially food, being cut off altogether to the Gazan inmates of the Israeli death camp. Film maker Jeffrey Loffredo gained the confidence of some Israeli citizens and was able to capture many of their candid remarks about their support for the genocide.
The people he filmed have been working closely with IDF soldiers to accelerate the genocidal kill off. The genocidal intent of the Israeli leadership seems to run wide and deep throughout larger body of Jewish citizens.
To round out this presentation I am ending it with a compelling discussion between a prominent Iranian academic, Mohammad Marandi, and Ali Abunimah, Director of the Electronic Intifada. Professor Maranda explains how, when the Ayatollah Ruhollah Musavi Khomeini first came to power in 1979, he broke off relations with the government of Israel and opened relations with Yasser Arafat of the Palestinian Liberation Organization. Moreover Ayatollah Khomeini broke off relations with the White Minority government of South Africa and opened relations with the African National Congress, Nelson Mandela’s group.
This history has come full circle since the present post-apartheid government of South Africa pressed charges at the International Court of Justice against the genocidal government of Israel.
Comments
Post a Comment