Israel’s Prime Minister Netanyahu, who is in a very tight spot because of the operations he is conducting both at home and in Gaza, which much of world opinion regards as genocide, seems determined to use every provocation in his power to extend the war to Iran. The shooting of the Iranian embassy in Damascus earlier this week was the most dangerous provocation he has yet made to draw Iran directly into the war. While it remains to be seen how Iran will react to this, the fact that American officials who asked not to be named said that Israel acted without informing them means that they do not approve of Netanyahu’s action and previous provocations, but it does not mean that they will be content to remain neutral and observe the situation in the event of an Israeli-Iranian war.
Netanyahu wants war with Iran
The war in Gaza, which began with the Hamas attack on 7 October, is not going well for Netanyahu and Israel. In this dirty operation, in which the people of Gaza have been ruthlessly and mercilessly slaughtered, Israel seems to have achieved no conceivable goal, such as rescuing hostages or expelling the people of Gaza en masse – Egypt’s Sinai peninsula, Jordan or any African country. Its claims that it has weakened Hamas are in need of confirmation. Meanwhile, there are growing suspicions that Israel is hiding its casualties. In recent days, the Israeli army’s attempt to conscript the Haredi group, who study Torah and refuse to pick up a gun, seems to have led to the fracturing of Netanyahu’s tenuous coalition government, as the Haredi party threatened to quit the coalition in response to the conscription of this group, which has always been exempt from military service since the founding of the State of Israel, and the cutting of state aid to their education system, while support for the ongoing war at home is clearly waning. It should be emphasised that such a protracted war is unsustainable for a state like Israel, whose capacity to absorb losses is very limited.
On the other hand, since its establishment in 1948, the broadcasting of images of Israeli atrocities to the world public through all media channels has led to serious criticism of Israel in American and European public opinion for the first time. Despite all the efforts of the powerful Jewish lobby in America, whose electoral profile is changing rapidly, the public opinion in favour of Israel is expected to change in a certain period of time, but the actions of the Netanyahu government in Gaza seem to have accelerated this trend extraordinarily. While there are still people in Congress and other influential circles who would support Israel if it used nuclear weapons against all Palestinians, it is noteworthy that there is a serious public opinion and elite that considers the Gaza operations unacceptable, especially in parallel with the rapid establishment of a multipolar world order. The fact that the US invited Israeli Defence Minister Benny Gantz to Washington for official talks independently and unbeknownst to Netanyahu, and that a part of the Jewish lobby openly talked about sacrificing Netanyahu to save Israel in a difficult situation, seems to have left Netanyahu, who is likely to be known as the Butcher of Gaza in the future, with limited choices.
From the beginning of the crisis, Netanyahu’s ideal choice was to extend the war to Iran together with America. At the very beginning of the Hamas attack, it was clear that he saw this as a great chance. As a result, Hamas, which Israel and the entire Western world regard as a terrorist organisation, launched a massive attack on Israel, inflicting the highest number of casualties in a single day in Israel’s history and taking hundreds of Israeli citizens hostage in Gaza. Since the perpetrators were members of the Hamas organisation, but since this organisation and all the other groups waging armed resistance against Israel were linked to Iran, targeting Tehran directly seemed to be Netanyahu’s ideal scenario.
Moreover, when a military operation against Iran was combined with Hamas attacks and Israeli casualties, it seemed possible to the Biden administration to involve the US directly in the matter. But for Netanyahu, the domestic calculation did not go as planned. From the outset, the American administration did not favour the option of using weapons against Iran because of the enormous risks involved. On the other hand, the Netanyahu government’s genocidal ethnic cleansing operation in Gaza and successive reports of civilian massacres have pushed the American administration further away from the option of war with Iran, leading to a series of options up to and including Netanyahu’s dismissal.
A desperate Netanyahu, together with his considerable voter base and fanatical supporters, is trying to drag Iran into the war while turning a deaf ear to criticism of Israel from the rest of the world outside the collective West. Attempts in recent weeks and months to draw Hezbollah into the war have failed because of the organisation’s tactic of standing by and responding in kind to every Israeli attack. In the same weeks and months, Netanyahu’s attempts to draw Tehran into a war with Israel by attacking Iranian targets in Syria and provoking Tehran to respond harshly have failed because of Iran’s determination to insist on a limited response. Now, the attacks on the Iranian embassy in Damascus and the assassination of General Zahedi, the alleged architect of Iran’s military strategies in Syria and Lebanon, show that the policy of escalation has been dangerous and is likely to continue.
Why is Iran avoiding war?
It is quite understandable why Tehran is avoiding war. First and foremost, Iran is aware that the clock is ticking in its favour. In an environment where the transition to a multipolar world has become unstoppable, Tehran must be convinced that balancing the power of the United States and the Collective West will make it easier for Iran to implement its anti-Western and anti-Israeli policies in the Middle East. It is understandable that Iran, which is thought to be very close to making a nuclear weapon and may even have enough enriched uranium to make a nuclear bomb, is trying to avoid initiatives that would complicate this process. In any case, Iran, which is the patron of all the groups resisting Israel’s brutal violence against the Palestinians in the American-ravaged Middle East, has established a large security network in the region and is confident that it will be further strengthened by the policies of the likes of Netanyahu, as well as remote outposts that, especially in the case of Hezbollah and now Hamas, show Israel what can happen to it if it is attacked. Therefore, he must be calculating that each passing day will be in Iran’s favour and against the US and Israel, and this analysis is not wrong at all. Moreover, it seems unlikely that Iran, which has normalised its relations with Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states thanks to China, will fall into Netanyahu’s trap in an environment where the withdrawal of American forces from Iraq – and perhaps even from Syria – is being negotiated by the Baghdad government. It is likely that Iran will respond to this attack, but not in such a way as to start a war with Iran on one side and the United States on the other. This is because Tehran knows very well that although the US does not favour a scenario of conflict with Iran, it cannot leave Israel alone in the event of such a war.
All these analyses lead us to the conclusion that Iran will not go beyond its current moderate stance. America is also aware that in the event of a war scenario with Iran, all its troops stationed in the Gulf countries, especially in Iraq, would become direct targets of Iran. Even Netanyahu must be aware that in such a war, Iran’s long-range missiles could hit Israel, which is squeezed into a very small piece of land, and/or Hezbollah’s missile stockpile could blow Israel to smithereens; but despite everything, he continues to provoke Tehran into war and probably will continue to do so. Wars are sometimes disasters in which the parties that do not want to go to war are forced to participate by dragging their feet. In such a case, Turkey should not act together with Washington on the assumption that Turkish-American relations are getting better and should maintain its balanced and cautious line. Because, even if the probability is low, there will probably be no winner in the event of such a war.
