On 30 September Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu addressed what he called “the noble people of Iran”. In a short speech, he promised that Iran would be “liberated sooner than people think”. That sentence was widely interpreted as the pre-announcement of an attack on Iran that Israeli leaders have been discussing with renewed fervour for several months.
The moment seemed favourable for Israel: Hassan Nasrallah, secretary general of Hezbollah, was assassinated on 27 September in an Israeli attack in Dahieh, a suburb of Beirut. The militant group seemed in disarray, with all of its top leadership eliminated. Without Hezbollah and its strength and proximity to Israel’s northern border, Iran was finally deprived of a serious deterrent against an Israeli attack.
The former Israeli prime minister Naftali Bennett made this connection even more explicit. In an interview with CNN on 2 October, Bennett, who retains considerable popularity in Israel, described Hamas and Hezbollah as the two arms used by Iran to “defend itself” against Israel. Now, the two arms were temporarily paralysed. So Iran is like a boxer, he explained to his American audience, “out in the ring without arms for the next few minutes”. Now is the time to attack “because Iran is fully vulnerable”.
As Bennett described the boxer in the ring, “temporarily paralysed”, one could almost imagine those arms slowly starting to twitch, regaining their strength. Israel should punch now, Bennett said, before it lose its chance. “This would be the gift of the Israeli people to the Iranian people,” he concluded. Iranians should breathe a sigh of relief: the feared regional war had given way to an exchange of protocol gifts. Iran was expected to reciprocate, perhaps with a Persian rug.
Neither Netanyahu’s message nor Bennett’s interview was meant for Iranian ears. Bennett was talking to CNN; Netanyahu spoke in English, in a video with English subtitles. The addresses were exercises in bringing the US on board with a bold new project. In 2002 Netanyahu promised the American public that invading Iraq would create a new Middle East. An invasion, he argued then, “will have, I guarantee you, enormous positive reverberations on the region”. The results were calamitous the first time around, but why not give it another go? In 2003, the set of ideas and policies behind the Iraq War was described as “neoconservatism”. For reasons that will soon become clear, I am going to call this second coming of the project “liquid conservatism”.
The lobbying effort has also taken place away from television cameras. In a social media post on 29 September, Jared Kushner made a much more brazen case for regime change in Iran. Kushner is married to Ivanka Trump, and used those credentials to become the point man for the Middle East during the first Trump administration. He remains close to Netanyahu and his coterie of advisers. After noting that he has spent countless hours studying Hezbollah – anyone else bragging about this might find himself on a no-fly list – the former Trump envoy said Iran had lost its deterrent: “The reason why their nuclear facilities have not been destroyed, despite weak air defence systems, is because Hezbollah has been a loaded gun pointed at Israel.” He called for Israel to dismantle the Iranian regime, starting with its nuclear facilities, and concluded on the same note that Netanyahu and Bennett made to the American public: “Moments like this come once in a generation, if they even come at all. The Middle East is too often a solid where little changes. Today, it is a liquid and the ability to reshape is unlimited. Do not squander this moment.”
European diplomats with whom I have discussed recent events point out Iran probably interpreted the repeated mention of regime change by Israeli officials or those speaking for them as an indication that an Israeli attack had already been approved. That likely contributed to pushing Iran’s timorous Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei, into authorising missile strikes against Israel on 1 October. A response from Israel now appears inevitable, at which point further predictions become distinctly more challenging.
There are two reasons Israel has shifted its attention to Iran. First, by turning Iran into its sole adversary, Israel can make the Palestinian cause disappear. A group like Hamas can be presented not as the twisted outcome of decades of oppression of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank, but as an Iranian proxy. In this view, the Palestinian people are an Iranian invention.
In reality, of course, Iran did not invent Palestinians. It has taken advantage of the Palestinian cause for its own geopolitical interests, but surely the smartest way for Israel to confront Iranian power is to reach a settlement recognising Palestinians’ rights to a state of their own. Both the former head of the Shin Bet, Israel’s secret service, Ami Ayalon and former prime minister Ehud Olmert defended this option for that reason in interviews with the NS earlier this year. But these are elder statesmen, now removed from the levers of power.
Second, a direct confrontation with Iran promises something that smaller conflicts will never deliver: “To clean up, once and for all, the mess in the Middle East.” I am borrowing this line from Amos Oz’s The Slopes of Lebanon, published almost 40 years ago. The book is about the 1982 Lebanon War but could just as well be about the looming war with Iran. In it, the Nobel Prize winner for literature describes a war of deceit whose true goals had been hidden from the Israeli nation. Then, the attempted assassination of the Israeli ambassador in London was the excuse for a war designed to create a new Middle East. The campaign started in triumph but soon engulfed Israel in the very waves of destruction it had unleashed on Lebanon. Oz writes the “standards” to which Israel held itself changed that year. What was sold as a war to root out terrorism became a plan to create a world where Israel faced no opposition, “once and for all”. The same temptations are felt today.
When “liquid conservatives”, whether it be Kushner or Netanyahu, tell you that our ability to reshape the world is unlimited, remember that we live in the world being reshaped, and can easily be caught up in the whirlpool. If anything has changed in recent weeks, it is the sense that the tragedy of Gaza is no longer contained inside its walls. A new wave of refugees originating in Lebanon, Syria and Iran could soon be on its way to Europe. Oil prices have already risen and if Israel goes ahead with significant strikes against Iran’s oil infrastructure, they will do so more rapidly, potentially deciding the November election in the US.
Over the past few days, multiple Iranian media outlets and Telegram channels have reported that Tehran has warned Washington that if Israel targets its refineries, the regime will set fire to the refineries and oil fields across the entire region, including those in Saudi Arabia, Azerbaijan, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain. Even short of this nightmare scenario, a war would make the Strait of Hormuz, which divides the Persian Gulf and the Gulf of Oman, impassable to oil tankers. A full closure of the strait might lead to oil prices of $150 a barrel or higher, triggering a new inflation spiral and sending Europe’s economy into a deep recession. Today, the Middle East is liquid, said Kushner. The point man may have a point.
[See also: Putin stares down the West]
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This article appears in the 09 Oct 2024 issue of the New Statesman, 100 days that shook Labour