Category Archives: Israel

Britain, Iran, Israel, Middle East, United States

Fears grow that Tehran is plotting revenge attacks

IRAN–ISRAEL

BENJAMIN Netanyahu has warned that Israel would “harm whoever harms us” as the country is braced for an armed confrontation with Iran.

Tensions are high after Iran has vowed revenge following the Israeli defence force’s strike on its embassy in Syria which killed a leading general.

American intelligence suggests that the regime in Tehran is planning a “significant attack” against Israel. There are fears that the Middle East crisis could trigger a global conflict.

Perspective

In January 2020, Iran’s military mastermind Qasem Soleimani was assassinated by missiles fired from an American drone as his escort convoy left Baghdad airport.

In response, Tehran made bloodcurdling threats of revenge.

Five days later, that retaliatory attack duly came. But it proved a pitiful embarrassment.

Dozens of missiles rained down on two U.S. airbases in Iraq. Collateral damage amounted to the destruction of only a gymnasium and canteen; no lives were lost. It seems to have been a moment of shame for the mullahs – and one whose pain still stings.

So, following the attack by Israel on an Iranian consulate earlier this month, killing 13 people including senior military officers, Tehran’s theocratic mullahs are once again thirsting for revenge.

President Joe Biden has warned that a significant attack is imminent. Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu has declared that his country is primed “offensively and defensively” in meeting all of the security needs of the State of Israel.

Tuesday was the last day of Ramadan: one of the most important dates in the Muslim calendar. It is thought that many Iranian generals will be arguing that the time is ripe to strike.

So, what could they do?

There are three main options. Most apocalyptically, Iran could risk all-out war by targeting specific locations in Israel itself.

Or it could launch deniable attacks via its proxy forces in Lebanon (Hezbollah), Syria and western Iraq (Shi’ite militias), or Yemen (Houthis). Third, it could carry out a tit-for-tat raid on an Israeli consulate.

Each one of these options has its own risks.

An attack on Israel would be a seminal moment in modern military history. For one thing, Iran’s sophisticated arsenal of ballistic missiles bears no resemblance to the primitive home-made delivery systems, fashioned from repurposed water pipes, used by Hamas in Gaza.

Its “Kheibar Shekan” missile alone has a warhead that can be packed with 1,100lb of high explosive. Its range of 900 miles means it could devastate or obliterate targets deep inside Israeli territory.

While Israel’s “Iron Dome” air-defence system has proved effective against Hamas’s periodic onslaughts, it has never faced such formidably fast and manoeuvrable firepower.

But the bigger the action, the bigger the consequences. Tehran is all too aware that Israel boasts equally powerful weapons itself and its own nuclear deterrent (which it has never admitted).

This means the mullahs are far more likely to opt for an attack via one of their proxies.

Hezbollah has traded fire with Israel across the latter’s northern border with Lebanon almost daily since Hamas launched its deadly attacks to the south on October 7. These exchanges have intensified in recent weeks.

With a vast stockpile of rockets and missiles at its disposal, Hezbollah can inflict significant damage at considerable cost. Its threat forces Netanyahu to keep large numbers of young Israelis in uniform – and thus out of work – with sharp consequences for the domestic economy.

Endemic conflict will inevitably play havoc with Tel-Aviv’s lucrative tourism industry. This year, the streets of Jerusalem have been noticeably deserted, even over the Easter holiday, as Christian visitors shunned the Holy Land.

The third retaliation could be simple payback: an attack on one of the Israeli embassies.

They would not be short of targets. Israel has long had consulates in Egypt and Jordan and, following the Abraham Accords in 2020, in Bahrain and the UAE, too.

The danger is that any such attack could carry the risk of a military response from the host country or the US – and from there, matters could swiftly spiral out of control.

While events in Gaza have dominated the headlines in recent months, the risk of a wider conflagration between Israel and Iran would make the conflict with Hamas look like a sideshow. A wider war has the potential to draw in all the Middle East powers.

The United States has promised Israel “ironclad” support in the event of Iranian reprisals, and Britain will stand squarely behind its American ally.

If oil exports are disrupted, with all that means for household energy bills, other Western actors surely will be drawn into the conflict.

The challenge facing our leaders is to avoid an escalation in hostilities which could have devastating consequences for the world.

Sunday, 14 April

It has commenced. Following Israel’s airstrike on key Iranian commanders in the Syrian capital of Damascus, the “phoney war” in which threats and counterthreats were exchanged, have now ended.

Unlike previous skirmishes in which Iran waged war from behind its proxies of Hamas, Hezbollah in Lebanon, and the Houthi rebels of Yemen, events overnight represent a significant escalation.

In a chilling development, the two dominant military powers in the Middle East have begun to trade punches directly, in a heavyweight contest that could wreak dire consequences on each other, but also the world economy.

The arteries of global trade in oil and natural gas run through the region, as do Europe’s imports of goods from China, Japan, and South Korea.

International shipping is imperilled like never before. Events yesterday also saw Iranian special forces seizing an Israeli-owned container ship in the Persian Gulf. This was not an act of piracy committed by Iran’s proxies in the Red Sea – this was Tehran itself, committing an act of bald aggression.

Israel’s next move is critical. If the country’s Iron Dome anti-missile defence system blunts this onslaught by shooting down most of Iran’s drones and missiles, then maybe an opportunity could present itself in which tensions might ease.

But if Israel feels confident that it can go further and neutralise Iranian attacks, it might decide to go on the front foot.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu could strike at Iran’s launch sites and nuclear facilities before Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi can retaliate. But it is a big and highly risky job.

Britain and the U.S. have been trying to silence Yemen’s much weaker Houthis for six months now – without success. Can either side back down?

The Iranian Revolutionary Guards, whose senior commanders were assassinated by Israel on April 1, are Tehran’s enforces – at home as well as abroad.

Amid the pressure that has forced the country’s mullahs to unleash their drones on Israel, they will find it difficult to step back from the brink.

The hardmen who keep them in power will push for the attacks to continue, not just on Israel directly but also on her allies, such as Britain and the U.S. – their shipping and embassies will become prime targets.

Backing off now is not an option for either side, nor for Britain. Rishi Sunak has committed UK support to its ally, and it will be seen whether he will waver now a wider war is inevitable.

Any chink in Western resolve will only encourage hostile states beyond the Middle East, like Russia and China – big power rivals who eagerly await a window of weakness in which to further their own territorial aims.

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Britain, Gaza, History, Israel, Middle East, Palestine, United States

Israel has been drawn into a trap by Hamas

MIDDLE EAST

Intro: Following the events of October 7, Israel’s enraged response has plunged the Gaza Strip into a humanitarian disaster. The southern city of Rafah has suffered the brunt of the crisis with a five-fold population increase, vital resources lacking, and no sign of the violence abating. What can be done? Analogies are being drawn with Nazi Germany

AT the southern end of the Gaza strip, lies the city of Rafah. It might be the most densely populated place on Earth right now.

Five months ago, before the bloody atrocities committed by Hamas terrorists on October 7, and then Israel’s enraged response since, the city was already overflowing with people.

Since then, its population of around 280,000 has increased five-fold to almost 1.5 million, crammed into 23 square miles. Refugees are living ten to a room, if they are lucky enough to have shelter at all. Most are on the streets.

Vital resources including medication, fuel, food, and water, are in desperately short supply, and what little exists is ruthlessly controlled by the Hamas criminal network.

Rafah is also a terrorist stronghold. If Israel remains intent to wipe out the leaders of this fanatical Islamist regime, Israel Defence Forces (IDF) will have to attack the city.

The cost of civilian lives will be heavy. And the cost to Israel could be catastrophic, too, if Western governments withdraw their increasingly equivocal support. It really is not clear just how much support Western nations are willing to give Israel.

Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s Prime Minister, is under intense pressure domestically to finish off Hamas. But, if he attacks Rafah, he will be falling into a trap.

Israel is facing a hate-filled enemy willing to use human shields. Hamas’s ringleaders are happy to see women and children slaughtered, because they think this will provoke an avalanche of Arab rage that will finally wipe Israel off the map. The Palestinian warlords only have one aim.

For those looking on in horror from around the world, events in Gaza have close and unsettling parallels to the destruction of Berlin or Dresden in Germany at the end of World War II: one Hitler’s capital, the other a military transport hub, with beautiful baroque architecture housing an incalculable number of refugees.

Stalin’s Red Army fought its way to Hitler’s bunker while the RAF razed much of Dresden to the ground in a series of firebomb raids, killing some 25,000 civilians. The Allies were deeply divided over this tactic, and historians still argue over its morality.

Nazism posed a dangerous global threat. By contrast, many perceive the war in Gaza as nasty but local. Israelis, however, living under the shadow of the Holocaust, recognise Hamas as a mortal threat, and one with strong regional support.

For most Israelis, then, debate of any kind is unnecessary. They know that if Hamas is not defeated and crushed, their country is doomed.

This is a war of survival. The October 7 massacre was so steeped in wickedness that Israelis are justified in believing the terrorists want to see every Jew perish in much the same way: raped, burned alive, dismembered. That’s the level of fear and evil that Israelis are faced with.

Prior to events in October, Netanyahu was widely seen by the electorate as a paranoid and corrupt politician clinging to power to avoid prison. But since the Hamas rampage, most in Israel now blame him for not being tough enough on Palestinian violence.

Hamas strategists assumed that their atrocities would draw Netanyahu into a trap. Israel would hit back hard, but its Western allies would forcibly shudder over civilian casualties. Our leaders held their nerve while the IDF invaded from the coast and the north of the Gaza strip, an area 25 miles long and as little as seven miles across at some points. Now, though, the West is losing its stomach for this campaign.

Many of the 29,000 killed so far have been non-combatants. In Gaza City to the north, every other building is reported to be destroyed. Bordered on one side by the Mediterranean, with all exit routes blocked and with residents unable to flee into neighbouring Israel, many had no choice but to trek south to Rafah.

Once in Rafah, they can migrate no further. Egypt has closed its narrow border, fearing a massive influx of Hamas fighters among displaced refugees, risking an Islamist insurrection in Egypt that would overthrow the regime of President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi.

TWO

SO, what is to be done?

In this international crisis, each country is thinking first of its own priorities.

In Washington, President Biden’s team are all-too conscious of the forthcoming election in November.

The pro-Israel lobby in America is traditionally very powerful and the Jewish electorate tends to back the Democrats – but the growing number of Muslim-American voters could turn crucial swing states against the incumbent.

In Britain, the Labour Party is undergoing its most serious internal crisis since Keir Starmer took over, with the hard-Left demanding its MPs endorse an immediate “ceasefire” – a euphemism for Israeli surrender.

On Britain’s streets, and across the West, hundreds of thousands of marchers have been shouting inflammatory and often vile anti-Semitic slogans for months. A radical sub-culture is definitely spreading, with race hate at its core.

The disgraced former Labour candidate in the Rochdale parliamentary by-election peddled obscene conspiracy theories that Israel encouraged the Hamas massacre, and that all the Islamic world is under attack by Jews.

An audience in a London theatre hounded out a Jewish man who refused to cheer the Palestinian flag. They were whipped up by the comedian on stage, shouting “Get out” and “Free Palestinian” with added expletives. That is a scene redolent of Berlin in the 1930s.

Netanyahu’s ferocious counter-response to the provocation in October has led to a humanitarian disaster in Gaza, but that has played into his enemy’s hands. International courts are considering charges of “genocide” against the Israeli government and military. A Dutch court has already blocked the export of spare parts for the Israeli air force.

Pressure has begun to mount on Jerusalem to accept an “immediate pause in the fighting”, a polite phrase for a ceasefire. British Foreign Secretary, Lord Cameron, is adamant one can be reached. He is seen as a friend of Israel.

Netanyahu, however, shows no signs of responding to such appeals. The Israeli PM and his generals appear determined to carry on at all costs. It does beg the question: what would constitute an Israeli victory?

After all, even if the IDF does succeed in capturing or killing the leader of Hamas, Yahya Sinwar, and his fighters, this would then leave them with the problem of what to do with the 1.5 million embittered Palestinians left to contemplate a miserable future in the devastated Gaza.

Faced with a similar quandary in the closing months of World War II, the Allies opted for a strategy of winning hearts and minds – distributing medicines and restoring water supplies in western Germany even before Berlin finally surrendered, and then funded a massive restructuring programme via the Marshall Plan.

In much the same way, the world’s best hope now might be a deeply counterintuitive one. If Netanyahu reverses his blockade of aid and lets humanitarian relief flow into Gaza – food, water, medicine, and fuel – he might just persuade Palestinians that Hamas is their mortal enemy, not Israel.

True, a rump of Hamas insurgents might seize many of the aid lorries. Those who need this precious cargo most, the women and children, would likely get very little.

But it would be an important gesture for Israel to say: “We do not hate all Palestinians – only our hate-filled enemies who want to kill us.” Such slim hopes are the best we have – and it will take the most dexterous statesmanship, as well as military planning, to avert a host of new catastrophes.

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Government, Iran, Israel, Middle East, Politics

The west must engage with Iran’s new president

MIDDLE EAST

IRAN has a new hard-line president. With an inexperienced government in Israel threatening military action against Tehran, a lethal shadow war is escalating in the Middle East. Iran’s ally and proxy, Hezbollah, is firing missiles into Israel from a dysfunctional and chaotic Lebanon. Hostage-taking has led to a bitter exchange of words from London. And US fears are growing that the Vienna nuclear talks have failed. With or without a deal, it is suggested that Iran may soon be able to build an atomic weapon.

The position in the Gulf is perilous, and a particularly portentous moment for the multifaceted conflict between Iran and the west. Ebrahim Raisi, who was sworn in as president last Thursday after a rigged election, offered very little for optimism. “Tyrannical sanctions” imposed by the Trump administration, which have ravaged the country since 2018, must be lifted, he said. But he offered no plan to achieve it and nothing in the way of concessions.

Raisi’s ascent to power marks a definitive triumph for the fiercely conservative, anti-western factions associated with Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Raisi’s predecessors – Hassan Rouhani and Mohammad Khatami – fought a long, losing internal battle for rapprochement with the US and Europe. Now, hardliners control all the Islamic republic’s main institutions: the military, judiciary and parliament.

Such a clean sweep poses ominous implications. Backed by the powerful and influential Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, Raisi, ironically, now has the political clout to cut a deal in Vienna that Rouhani lacked. He may well do so. Iran’s economy is in dire straights with inflation and shortages wreaking havoc. Official figures show the poverty rate doubled over two years, to 30% in 2019. That statistic could have deteriorated even more by now. A limited agreement on sanctions relief could ease the public’s pain.

Raisi and the ageing, hawkish Khamenei, however, remain ardent nationalists who believe strongly in the virtues of self-reliance, both on ideological and religious grounds. They passionately argue that, in the future, Iran’s centrally directed economy, increasingly dominated by IRGC interests, should not depend on private sector trade with a US-dominated west. They aim to eliminate forever the political leverage that sanctions have afforded Washington. They don’t want to be friends with America.

Raisi’s insistence on increased self-reliance also presages an expansion of Iran’s regional sway, not least by reinforcing the “axis of resistance” with allies in Syria, Iraq, Yemen and Lebanon. Similarly, closer strategic alliances with China and Russia are in prospect. Tehran recently signed a 25-year trade and military partnership with Beijing. Vladimir Putin has been quick in heartily congratulating Raisi on his election victory.

The Gulf drone attack on the Israel-linked tanker MV Mercer Street, which killed a Briton and Romanian last week, augers ill for the Raisi era. As always, Iran denies responsibility. Britain and the US say they can categorically prove otherwise. Tehran’s suspension of talks on an international prisoner swap is another blow, as is the shocking and unjust 10-year jail sentence given to a British-Iranian, Mehran Raoof. Richard Ratcliffe, husband of harshly imprisoned Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, is right to raise the alarm in urging the Foreign Secretary, Dominic Raab to do much more.

Alarming, too, is the sudden outbreak of hostilities across the Israel-Lebanon border and now with Hamas in Gaza. In an unusual statement, Hezbollah has admitted launching missiles against Israeli targets. Such an open declaration looks like a message for Naftali Bennett, Israel’s untested prime minister, sent with Iran’s approval. After the tanker attack, an incensed Tehran threatened direct military action. Such a contest between new leaders Raisi and Bennett is something the Middle East cannot afford.

Concerns are growing in Washington that smouldering tensions involving Tehran and other regional actors, fanned by the changes of leadership in Iran and Israel, could ignite. Earlier this year, there was talk of easing the tensions between Iran and its arch-rival, Saudi Arabia. Officials from either side met in Baghdad, but all that hope has now vanquished. The Saudis snubbed an invitation to Raisi’s inauguration. Back to square one.

The Biden administration also has worries of its own. It had hoped tensions with Iran could have been defused with the reviving of the 2015 nuclear pact that was petulantly abandoned by Trump. It’s chastening to reflect that his foolish decision did as much as anything to assure the ascent of Raisi and the hardliners. Even if there is a compromise and the pact is reinstated, many in the US now argue it’s already too late. Iran, it is suspected, has gained so much bomb-making know-how, it simply will not be interested in any revival of the agreement with the west.

Understandably, this thought alone is deeply troubling for Israel’s leaders. It should also worry the region and their not-so-distant European neighbours. But further sabre-rattling and proxy-war fighting is not the way to respond. The EU sent a representative to Raisi’s inauguration, which was the right thing to do. At this perilous juncture, the US and Britain, too, must urgently strive to keep the door open and advance dialogue with Tehran. For his part, Raisi should stop posturing and show some statesmanship by immediately releasing all western hostages.

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