The Necessity to Restore Deterrence Compels Israel to Escalate its Shadow War with Iran
Israel’s Supporters Should Praise It
From the beginning after October 7th, on this blog, I have urged Israel to “take the battle to the enemy” as I put it—the Islamic Republic of Iran, which is behind all of it, October 7th and everything that transpired since from PIJ to the Houthis, and, of course, Hezbollah.
So I was very pleased when Israel first took out a Hezbollah commander in Lebanon, cyberattacked Iran’s oil infrastructure, and lately assassinated a Quds force commander in Syria, instrumental like Qassem Suleimani to building Iran’s “axis of resistance.”
This will send a message to Iran that Israel is not afraid to acknowledge Iran’s sanction of the October 7th attack, let alone Tehran’s funding for it in consideration of the regime’s ambition to be the de facto regional hegemon and unsurpassed powerbroker of the Gulf and the Middle East in general, to the maximum extent.
Unless Israel wants a war with Hezbollah, and, not least because Israel can’t depend on America anymore, Israel has to do whatever it can to crank up the heat on Iran, which besides being the orchestrator of October 7th, is a burgeoning nuclear power with currently enough weapons-grade enriched uranium to build nuclear bombs in just a matter of days.
Under Joe Biden and the feckless liberal internationalist technocrat set—to say nothing of the gross power of the progressive base, the radical activists, and innumerable interest groups of which he is a prisoner— America is weaker than it ever was under the patently incompetent Barack Obama. And, alas, after October 7th if one may interpret it as the inexorable consequence of decades of failed if well-intentioned American-mediated peace processes, combined with a recalcitrant Iran, Israel finally seems to have arrived at the conclusion that its allyship with America might actually be antithetical to its interests; and at least under this administration the partnership may be judged to have run its course.
I don’t know if you watched Chuck Schumer’s insidious Senate speech, where he sought to draw a parallel if not to equate Netanyahu to Hamas, calling Netanyahu an “obstacle to peace.” One would be forgiven for thinking that Biden would sooner prefer regime change in Israel than Iran. Just observe how Biden is all but calling for Israel to surrender to Hamas, despicably touting Hamas’s civilian casualty numbers in his SOU, and now using the strike on the misidentified aid convoy (stupidly driving through a war zone with Hamas fighters as escorts, what do you expect?) as a pretext to condition further American arms deliveries on Israel’s regard for civilians to the Biden administration’s satisfaction. Nevertheless the legacy media would have you believe that only Donald Trump is the villain with his suggestion to convert aid to Ukraine into loans as they disseminate endless reams of photos of poor Gazans, the helpless victims of those heartless Jews. Never mind how the Palestinians dug hundreds of miles of tunnels for Hamas, planned, participated in and celebrated the October 7th attack, like the savages and sore losers they are, a vast swath of whom believe in a “right to return” to the land they lost in 1948, and that they lost in their genocidal campaigns against Israel over and over and over again. One has to understand religious extremists never know when to give up when they delude themselves that immolating themselves is a virtuous sacrifice that is rewarded in the afterlife, and terror groups like Hamas and psychopaths like Yahya Sinwar know they can exploit it to serve Palestinians up to the IDF on a silver platter, and they will still believe it’s all Israel’s fault. Note since October 7th Palestinian support for Hamas has skyrocketed even while Hamas stockpiles weapons in their schools and uses hospitals as operations-bases. If this isn’t proof of the sheer demented lunacy of faith and religious conviction, I don’t know what is.
Here’s another thing Hamas is exploiting— self-loathing Westerners’ entirely vain and self-absorbed narcissistic compassion for the Palestinians, imagining them to be saints and innocents, not actually believing a word of what they say and protest in their name. As a terrifying result of woke ideology or the “woke mind virus” seizing control of the Western mind, people have come to see right and wrong through the Marxist lens of oppressor and oppressed, powerful and powerless, David and Goliath. So, just because Israel is the richer and more militarily powerful party, the Palestinians are therefore bathed in virtue. Israel is also the land of the Jews—meaning capitalism, money—and it’s an ally of white supremacist America, so there’s that, and every racial group that is not white is blessed, the less white and the more dark the more good…
According to this morality of pure resentment, the virtue of the weak is defined by and increases in proportion to the perceived growth of the power of the strong and the allegedly unjust inequity the optic of the imbalance causes or just makes valorized parties feel like it causes. And it’s simply a given that the powerful cannot exist except at the expense of the powerless. Since they cannot coexist and only one identity group deserves to triumph over the other, the sooner the better because the demented woke conscience can’t bear the injustice.
Well as Putin seems less and less to have “miscalculated” with his invasion of Ukraine, so much have Kremlin talking points about “NATO expansion” taken over the Western populist right, so Hamas’s strategy to exploit the West’s crisis of confidence seems every day to be paying off as Biden draws a “redline” against an invasion of Rafah, abstains at the UN from voting down a resolution calling for an unconditional Israeli ceasefire, and seeks to pressure Israel to end the war one way or another as soon as possible.
Seeing as not even Biden’s opponent in the presidential election supports the Gaza war either—Trump saying recently that we can’t have this war when he’s in office, asking Israel to wrap it up like a game of golf—Israel knows it can’t depend on America for support, not least to deter Hezbollah and/or contain Iran. Besides the Iranian nuclear issue, after eradicating Hamas Israel’s next biggest threat is on its northern front in Lebanon, on whose border Israel evacuated whole communities of its people.
Hezbollah is a puppet of Iran. Only by stepping up pressure on Iran, can Israel deter Hezbollah from attack. Hezbollah has a hundred and fifty thousand some-odd precision missiles that could overwhelm Israel’s Iran Dome missile defense. Only if Iran feels confident enough in Israeli weakness, might the terror proxy be emboldened to use them. However the Iranians, despite their reputation for belligerence, have a long history of cowardice, and they just about always respond to shows of Israeli or US strength with retreat.
Because the US has the luxury of affecting to be more worried about Netanyahu than the mullahs, it’s incumbent on Israel to escalate the shadow war with Iran for its own sake.
— Jay