By Mona Hojat Ansari
TEHRAN- Nothing could be more telling of Israel's growing fear, anger, and helplessness than an op-ed by former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett asking the U.S. to “take Iran on directly.”
The op-ed published by the Wall Street Journal on Thursday asked for a direct confrontation with Iran under the pretext that Tehran is “sowing chaos” in West Asia.
"The Iranian regime is at the center of most of the Middle East’s problems and much of global terror," the former prime minister wrote. "Yet inexplicably, almost nobody is touching it."
Bennett pointed out how Lebanon’s Hezbollah movement has lobbed countless rockets at the occupied territories, making them inhabitable for Israelis, and how Yemen’s armed forces have been preventing ships from docking at the Port of Eilat in response to the regime’s complete siege of the Gaza Strip. He also pointed the finger of blame at Iran, for attacks on U.S. military bases in Iraq and Syria, which continue to occupy the two Arab countries despite repeated calls from the governments and locals to leave the region.
While Iran has repeatedly clarified that its ties with resistance groups in the region resemble an alliance and that it has no authority over the groups, the nature of the relations is not the point of discussion here. What should be discussed is how Israel’s almost three-month war on the Gaza Strip, after an egregious defeat against Hamas on October 7, has only caused the regime to sink deeper into the mud as it struggles to find a way out of the crisis.
Earlier this month Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar said that members of the group’s military wing, known as al-Qassam Brigades, have so far targeted at least 5,000 Israeli soldiers and officers. He underlined that one-third of Israeli forces, around 1,660, were killed, while the rest had been permanently disabled or seriously wounded.
The figures were announced after Israel was forced to withdraw one of its most highly decorated infantry units, the Golani Brigade, from Gaza. Several Israeli analysts and former officials have so far confirmed the high number of Israeli casualties, while the politicians in power continue to hide and even deny them.
While Israel’s invasion of Gaza and its attempts to “eradicate Hamas” has so far spelled disaster for the regime, its relentless killing of Palestinian civilians and the vast carnage it has left behind has also dealt a serious blow to its reputation after years of big-budget propaganda campaigns aiming to cast Israel as the victim.
So as Israel feels like it has been boxed into a corner, it has begun new attempts to collate Western forces in order to transform the war in Gaza into a regional one with international reverberations.
Israel has already attempted to rile Iran and whip it into a pro-war fervor by assassinating a top IRGC advisor on Syrian soil on Monday. The officer named Sayyed Razi Mousavi is said to have been one of the close companions of Lieutenant General Qassem Soleimani, an Iranian anti-terror icon that was killed during a U.S. terrorist attack thought to have been espoused by Benjamin Netanyahu, whom Bennett shares his warmongering policies with.
In its next move, Israel tried to alert the world about an eminent military conflict with Iran after reporting a “blast” near its embassy in New Delhi, India.
While some political analysts inside Iran did get carried away by Israel’s moves and asked for an immediate response to the assassination, the decision-makers in the country once again proved their astuteness by reserving the right to respond to the attack “at the right time and the right place”.
Bennet's declaration of his role in the assassination of IRGC member Colonel Hassan Sayyad Khodaei in 2022, along with his claim of ordering an attack on a UAV base inside Iran, should be viewed as yet another desperate effort to provoke Iran into an expansive regional conflict.
"After Iran launched two failed UAV attacks on Israel in February 2022, Israel destroyed a UAV base on Iranian soil. In March 2022, Iran’s terror unit attempted to kill Israeli tourists in Turkey and failed. Shortly thereafter, the commander of that very unit was assassinated in the center of Tehran,” Bennet claimed in the op-ed, suggesting that he has been able to pick up on some Iranian analysts’ and officials’ miscalculations.
But even if Tehran gives Israel the excuse to ask for a concerted Western attack on Iran, it remains unlikely that such a scenario would play out.
The U.S. is currently bogged down in Ukraine and with Joe Biden trying to get elected as America’s president for the second time in 2024, a full-scale war with Iran, which could potentially decimate the entirety of West Asia and disrupt global oil supplies for several years, is the last thing his administration would have on the agenda.
Furthermore, the notion of “toppling” the Iranian government through sanctions and riots has proven to be unattainable in recent years, and no longer appears to be a viable option.
Regrettably, for Bennett, it appears that Israel is now left to confront the repercussions of its harrowing crimes against humanity.
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