Iran’s retaliation against Israel has once again revealed the wonderful products of our conspiracy theory industry. I have no doubt that we will be in the top three in the world without having played a game, and if we are on form we will be playing either a Middle Eastern or Balkan country in the final. If conspiracy theories were an exportable product, we would certainly be in the top five in the world in terms of per capita income.
In fact, the tensions between Iran and Israel are literally a game of chicken. In reality, the Iranian regime is just one of Israel’s puppets. The government in Tehran pretends to be against Israel, but behind the scenes it is working with it. If it can mobilise hundreds of drones, why doesn’t it hit important Israeli targets? Or why has no one been killed in Israel?
Of course, I know that there is no point in trying to refute them; but it is impossible not to regret that these conspiracy theories can be voiced uncontrollably in a significant part of the media, as an indicator of the intellectual level of our country. Listening to them, I feel like saying: ‘Hitler was also a Soviet agent. Stalin recruited him early on. The Second World War was already a central piece. Hitler’s aim was to ensure Germany’s defeat and to take control of the Soviet Union’s vast Eastern European territories’. Incidentally, the fact that the Soviet Union alone suffered 27 million deaths (one and a half times the population of Turkey, which was eighteen million in 1945) is a minor detail. It is not likely to disprove my conspiracy theory. Besides, there is no one around to ask these questions.
Codes of Iranian retaliation
In essence, Iran responded to the Israeli attack on its embassy in Damascus with more than adequate retaliation. More than adequate because Iran could have hit some Israeli targets outside Israeli territory. In fact, in recent months it had hit some sites in northern Iraq allegedly used by Israeli intelligence. But this time it targeted Israeli territory directly. And it should be underlined immediately that this is the most comprehensive attack on the entire territory of Israel since its establishment, taking its place in military-political history.
As for the claim that Iran did not or could not use weapons that could have inflicted greater damage on Israel, the answer to the first question is directly related to Tehran’s aversion to a regional war. From the Iranian point of view, the clock is ticking in its favour because Iran’s influence has grown enormously in Iraq and Syria – supposed democracies that Washington, with not very clever calculations, destroyed simply because they were anti-Israeli. In these two countries, groups known to be pro-Iranian and calling themselves the Axis of Resistance have gained power, while the Hezbollah movement, which was born in Lebanon as a result of Israel’s policy of nothing but violence, has established full contact with Iran through Syria. Add to this the strengthening of the Ansarullah movement in Yemen and the gradual Hezbollahisation of Hamas, i.e. its transformation into an effective resistance organisation, and Iran seems to have placed Israel under a serious siege in the region.
As multipolarity irreversibly restructures the world balance, Israel’s main supporters, the US and Europe, calculate that they will suffer a serious loss of power and sphere of influence, and they are not wrong in their calculations. There is no doubt that the decline in the power of the US and the collective West will reduce Israel’s room for manoeuvre in the Middle East. Moreover, Iran, which is said to have reached the final stage in its efforts to build nuclear weapons, has no reason to want a regional war. On the contrary, it is Netanyahu and Israel that want a regional war and are trying to drag America into it, because the Tel Aviv government, having achieved nothing that could be considered a success (the rescue of hostages, the capture/killing of prominent Hamas leaders, etc.) in its genocidal ethnic cleansing operation in Gaza, which for the first time has been strongly criticised even by Western public opinion, sees its salvation in dragging Iran into the war. This is why he is carrying out his provocations against both Hezbollah and Iran.
Netanyahu is also using provocations against Iran in order to draw the American administration, which does not want a war with Iran, into the conflict. The recent bombing of the consulate in Damascus was designed to do just that. Iran has therefore had to build up its strike capability on nuances (an area in which conspiracy theorists are very poor). In other words, it had to respond, but it had to do so in coordination with the United States in a way that would not lead to a major war. That is exactly what Iran did over the weekend. Hundreds of drones and Hezbollah’s rapid fire, which began as they approached Israeli airspace, must have been designed to keep Israel’s so-called Iron Dome air defence system busy with more targets than it could handle. Taking advantage of the vacuum created by this saturation, ballistic missiles apparently caused serious damage to critical Israeli airfields (Nevatim and Ramon).
Moreover, it appears that Iran did not hit these airfields with hypersonic missiles, because if it had, the details of an important weapon in Tehran’s inventory would have been revealed and Israel, on the one hand, and the United States, the United Kingdom and their allies, on the other, would have begun a feverish study of what could be done against this weapon. In other words, Iran seems to have applied the most important rule of strategy and retaliated without showing all its cards. It has shown Tel Aviv that it can strike anywhere in Israel without using hypersonic missiles.
CNN ezzle
It is also clear that there is nothing serious in Iran’s claims that the attention of anti-Israel or Israel-critical public opinion or Western states, which was focused on Gaza, has suddenly turned to the Iran-Israel conflict and that Gaza has been forgotten. Such rhetoric is based on the assumption that Israel has stopped or will stop its operations in Gaza. But after this retaliation, in which Iran has shown Israel what it can do, eyes will turn back to Gaza. On the one hand, if the Israeli offensive in Gaza is suspended or stopped, this would be a serious point in Iran’s favour because it would put it in the position of being the country that protects/rescues the people of Gaza from Netanyahu’s genocide. On the other hand, if the Israeli offensive continues, all eyes will turn there again.
There is also a contradictory situation in Western countries between public opinion, which is increasingly critical of Israel, and the governments that support Israel, and this situation is likely to continue. In other words, we are talking about a Western world that will not/cannot stop supporting Israel, whether Iran retaliates or not. From this point of view, we can conclude that Iran has given a nuanced response when balancing this issue with the demands of its own public opinion for retaliation. The retaliation was both sufficient and did not lead to a regional war. So Netanyahu did not win.
The repercussions of Iran’s retaliation in regional politics showed once again that it has not received, and is unlikely to receive, political support from the Arab countries. While Jordan actively defended its airspace against Iran directly with Israel and the United States, the rest of the Arab countries, with the exception of Syria, did not allow the passage of Iranian drones and missiles. This shows that the Arab countries are in favour of treating the Palestinian issue as their own family problem. These Arab countries, which are negotiating and struggling with Israel and America on the Palestinian issue, consider the attempts of non-Arab Muslim states to take a central role in the Palestinian issue with political Islamist slogans and religious justifications such as Islamic brotherhood as an intrusion of others into their legitimate sphere, and there is no doubt that there are lessons to be learned from the Turkish government, which has shown its willingness to be active on this issue on every occasion.
For the time being, the possibility of a regional war seems to have been averted, but it is almost impossible to predict what provocations Netanyahu or any other Israeli government might resort to if it wants to launch an all-out war against Iran, dragging America into it. There is no Israeli political formation/government on the horizon that would internalise a two-state solution by taking serious steps backwards in Palestine, taking into account the possibility of diminishing American aid in a multipolar world. On the other hand, while those in Gaza are being subjected to genocidal ethnic cleansing, the Palestinians in the West Bank, whose homes and lands are being confiscated, who are constantly oppressed and persecuted, have no choice but to resist. The region is likely to remain a hot zone of conflict in a multipolar world until the US presidential election. If Trump is elected and translates his ideas into foreign policy, the regional equation could change significantly.
