Empowered by Biden’s grant of impunity
Netanyahu violates Vienna Convention, plays the victim
It was not only the strike on the Iranian embassy that set the stage for Iran’s barrage but also the six months of intensive Israeli bombing of the Palestinians of Gaza, in which the vast majority of those killed were innocent non-combatants, with 70% being women and children and many others noncombatant men. The death toll now stands at 33,686 Palestinians.
By Juan Cole
Expert on
Middle East affairs
Only a small clique of fighters committed the horrific October 7 attack on Israel, without telling anyone else what they were planning. There is no military or other justification for using an artificial intelligence program to identify all members of Hamas’s paramilitary (some of which is the equivalent of a neighborhood watch for local security) and to murder them from the skies along with their spouses, children, extended families, and neighbors.
Iran is pledged to defend the Palestinians, and Israeli atrocities have set the blood of the peoples in the Middle East to boiling and much raised the esteem in which they hold Iran. The embassy strike was the last straw. If Iran did not reply to it at least symbolically, its credibility, and any deterrence it was perceived to have, became a joke.
Netanyahu for his part was attempting to provoke Iran, in the hope that Tehran would take the bait. He knew that even Washington had come to see Israel as the aggressor in Gaza and that he was losing support in Congress. He knew that if the issue became an Iranian attack on Israel, the Western capitals would all rally around him and forgive him, at least for a while, for having brought the Israeli equivalent of Neo-Nazis into his cabinet and then gone Amalek on tens of thousands of innocent Palestinians.
Earlier on Saturday the naval section of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps boarded and confiscated a container ship in the Gulf of Oman that belongs to the company of one of Netanyahu’s billionaire backers. While this action violated the law of the sea and can’t be condoned, it hit Netanyahu where it hurts, and no one would have cared about it in the outside world.
Now, we have to suffer with Netanyahu proclaiming his victimhood (he started it) and suffering through statements of solidarity with his fascist cabinet.
As many observers are pointing out, this very dangerous situation was caused by President Joe Biden’s mishandling of the Gaza crisis. He should have cut Netanyahu off at the knees by January 1, once it became clear that the Israelis were implementing their notorious Amalek imperative, which implied genocide. By vetoing three United Nations Security Council resolutions demanding a cease-fire and by undercutting the only one he allowed to pass by branding it non-binding, Biden let the butchery continue apace. It continued the past week, during which Israel continued to bomb the bejesus out of Gaza, to kill hundreds of innocents, and to starve them (despite phony pledges to let more aid in, on which Netanyahu did not follow through).
Biden, UK PM Rishi Sunak, and other leaders could also have defused the deliberate provocation of Iran by Netanyahu by simply condemning the embassy attack of April 1 and defending the Vienna Convention. The Iranian mission to the UN said this plainly:
“Had the UN Security Council condemned the Zionist regime’s reprehensible act of aggression on our diplomatic premises in Damascus and subsequently brought to justice its perpetrators, the imperative for Iran to punish this rogue regime might have been obviated.”
Instead, Biden and his allies declined to condemn Netanyahu’s action, continuing the North Atlantic insouciance toward Israeli war crimes and continuing the implementation of their double standard whereby International Humanitarian Law applies only to white people. That is, there is not as much difference between Trumpian white nationalism and Biden’s foreign policy as it might seem on the surface, though the latter is, of course, worse.
The full article first appeared on Informed Comment.