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After Nasrallah’s Speech, US and Israel Escalate Gaza War
Hasan Illaik
Thirty days after Operation Al-Aqsa Flood destroyed Israel’s psychological deterrence, Washington and Tel Aviv continue to take dangerous steps toward expanding their Gaza war into a regional conflagration.
Two weeks ago, both the US and Israel had begun to walk back slightly from their initial goal of “eliminating Hamas entirely” – a target many felt was unrealistic and unachievable.
But now, Tel Aviv has reiterated its goal of eradicating the Palestinian resistance in its war on the Gaza Strip, and the US is providing complete cover for the brutal Israeli campaign.
The scale of Israel’s bombardment is akin to Washington’s air campaigns in Vietnam, Korea, and Cambodia, and in the early days of its Iraqi “Shock and Awe” invasion. This level of destructive bombardment is historically unprecedented over a geographical area of only 365 square kilometers.
To describe the situation more precisely, the bombs dropped by Israel on the Gaza Strip outweigh the nuclear bomb with which the United States struck the Japanese city of Hiroshima in World War II. In the past few weeks, Gaza has endured the pain of 25,000 tons of explosives – compared to the 15,000 tons of the Hiroshima bomb, according to the Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor.
Over 10,000 civilians – including 4,000 children – have been killed by indiscriminate Israeli firepower. An additional 2,200 Palestinians are missing under the rubble, half of whom are children.
Despite this, US officials publicly state that their allies in Tel Aviv have been careful not to cause civilian casualties, and that they continue to caution Israel not to inflict more civilian deaths in Gaza.
But actions speak louder than words, and Washington’s behaviors are thunderously in support of escalating the violence. To date, despite last weekend’s dazzling display of regional shuttle diplomacy by US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, the US refuses to strike a ceasefire agreement. Washington has also convinced its Arab allies to agree to continue the war – for now.
Arab regimes that have normalized relations with Israel – Egypt, Jordan, the UAE, Bahrain, Morocco – have not yet suffered the public wrath of their citizens who vehemently oppose Israel’s aggression on Gaza. Washington and Tel Aviv have thrown these Arab allies some crumbs to help them ward off mass domestic dissent. For instance, Blinken gave Jordan’s King Abdullah II a “hall pass” to airdrop aid supplies to the Jordanian hospital in Gaza on Sunday. This meaningless gesture followed last week’s recalling of Jordan’s ambassador from Tel Aviv: two actions in the span of one week suggests a lot of heat from the street in some Arab capitals.
But, in actuality, Jordanian air defenses are deeply involved Israeli and American systems in countering Yemeni and Iraqi missiles heading toward the occupied territories of Palestine.
During his whirlwind visit to key West Asian capitals, Blinken also carried with him more threats to the pro-Palestine regional Axis of Resistance, reiterating the warning that the US military, deployed in West Asia, the Red Sea, Persian Gulf, and the eastern Mediterranean, would counter any attempt to go to war.
This, while Washington is amassing even more land, air, and naval forces in the region to deter Israel’s enemies. The deployment of two aircraft carriers with a group of battleships each; four other naval groups; fighter and bomber aircraft; Patriot and THAAD air defense systems; and reinforcing all regional US military bases with more troops – and today, a US military announcement that a nuclear submarine has been dispatched to the “Middle East.”
All the Pentagon’s reinforcements to protect Israel’s unrestrained war on Gaza – which have not stopped since the Hamas-led resistance operation on 7 October – have apparently not been enough to deter the Axis of Resistance. And there is practical evidence of this:
First, Blinken visited the Iraqi capital wearing a bulletproof vest, where he went to convey his threats to the country’s myriad resistance factions. As soon as he departed from Baghdad airport, the Islamic Resistance in Iraq carried out more than one bombing of US bases in Iraq and Syria.
Second, rocket launches and drones continue from Yemen toward Israeli military bases in occupied Palestine, which are countered by US missile defense systems from Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and Egypt before Israeli missile defenses are. Despite the US threats to Yemen’s Ansarallah resistance leadership, the rocket barrages have not stopped and will continue “until their targets are hit,” as announced by Hezbollah Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah in his long-awaited speech last Friday.
‘Hamas should win,’ says Nasrallah
Nasrallah was speaking on behalf of the region’s Resistance Axis alliance to which he belongs. During his speech, he directly laid out his alliance’s two main goals in the current war: first, a ceasefire; second, “the resistance in Gaza should win, and Hamas should win.”
Many in the Arab world and beyond interpreted Nasrallah’s speech as cautious and deescalatory. But his second goal belied his calm tone, representing a very high bar in this war. While Israel and the United States have set as their mutual goal the total defeat of Hamas and its rule in Gaza, Hezbollah and its alliance have set as their goal the Palestinian resistance’s ultimate victory.
Nasrallah then threatened the United States, saying that the resistance had prepared “what is necessary” to confront its naval fleets. As Tel Aviv well knows from decades of analyzing his speeches, the Hezbollah leader never exaggerates his military capabilities. And this was as clear a message as possible that the US military mobilization did not deter the Axis.
The Israeli leadership has declared that its war on Gaza will be a long one, and that it has no intention of striking a ceasefire deal. By providing full cover for Israeli atrocities, the US has triggered an escalation of attacks by the Resistance Axis on various fronts, according to confirmation from Axis sources.
The possibility of the war expanding into other geographical fronts against US military bases and interests now increases exponentially. Washington’s military buildups in West Asia are an incentive to fuel the war, rather than the “deterrent” Americans believe will prevent the conflict from expanding.
These American deployments only serve to embolden the Israeli leadership, providing them with full license to expand and intensify their killing field in Gaza – not just in massacring civilians with impunity, but in destroying a swathe of infrastructure that will ensure much of the territory remains uninhabitable.
In the meantime, the Palestinian resistance has no plan to surrender, as this will make the unparalleled Israeli devastation wreaked on Gaza meaningless. The Axis of Resistance will do everything in its significant power to prevent an Israeli victory in this war, which means that the region is headed toward a state of major war, beyond any “low-paced escalation” scenario that Tel Aviv or Washington anticipates or thinks it can control.
‘Ground Operation’ has only just begun
In short, the only thing preventing a regional war today is an American-Israeli decision to stop the bombing of Gaza.
There are several ways in which to help speed up this decision – one is to ensure that the Israeli army pays a heavy and unbearable price during its ground operations in the Gaza Strip. So far, ten days into their ground war, the occupation forces have not yet entered Gaza’s most populated areas, where they will encounter heavy troop losses. The excuse from Tel Aviv is that northern Gaza – where its army has entered with a plan to sever it from the south – still contains 400,000 Palestinian residents. So, Israel’s military has increased the frequency and intensity of bombardments in the north to force the displacement of the area’s remaining residents.
Despite these Israeli precautions, Hama’s Al-Qassam Brigades has been confronting the invading forces, inflicting heavy losses on troops and armored vehicles alike. The closer the occupation army gets to populated areas, the easier the targets they become for the resistance.
To paint a clearer picture of this battlefield reality, a Fox News correspondent who accompanied Israeli soldiers to the front line revealed that, despite Israel’s carpet bombing campaign over Gaza, its army has only penetrated one mile into Palestinian territory. In other words, the ground operation is still in its infancy, and has barely scratched the surface of losses it can expect to incur.
Negotiation attempts
In the midst of this escalation, the US is now trying to buy time by proposing a “humanitarian truce” to allow the Israelis to organize their ranks, which are constantly exposed to attacks from the resistance. For this reason, Washington has re-intensified the Qatari mediation aimed at achieving a prisoner exchange between Hamas and Israel.
According to well-informed sources, the negotiations are currently limited to approving a truce for a period of 48 hours. During the proposed two-day period, the Egypt-Gaza Rafah border crossing will be opened for the entry of all humanitarian aid stuck in Egypt, and all Palestinian women and children prisoners in Israeli detention centers will be exchanged for the women and children captured by Hamas on 7 October, regardless of their nationality.
This mediation, if successful, is unlikely to pave the way for a protracted ceasefire – it will act as a break for the belligerents and allow Washington to organize a public relations “success” for the Biden administration.
Neither side will come up for air for too long. The US naval fleets and military aid transfers to the region are a guarantee that Israel’s war on Gaza will continue and preempt a major escalation in West Asia, from which the US and Israel will try to impose a new fait accompli that “integrates Israel into its surroundings” via normalization and other initiatives.
But West Asia is no longer exclusively the US or Israel’s playing field, and in recent decades, Washington has only ever been surprised by unforeseen circumstances in its myriad regional interventions. Today, those adversaries have never been stronger or more in lockstep.
(Hasan Illaik is a Lebanese journalist who has worked with various regional media outlets and platforms, including 15 years with leading daily Al Akhbar. Courtesy: The Cradle, an online news magazine covering the geopolitics of West Asia from within the region.)
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Arab-Iran Amity Is a Geopolitical Reality
M.K. Bhadrakumar
The forthcoming first visit by Iran’s President Ebrahim Raisi to Saudi Arabia on November 13 marks a milestone in the rapprochement between the two countries mediated by China in March. The relationship is fast acquiring a qualitatively new level of solidarity in the context of the Palestine-Israel conflict.
This marks a shift in the tectonic plates in regional politics, which has long been dominated by the United States but no longer so. The latest China-UAE initiative on Monday to promote a ceasefire in Gaza was rounded off with an extraordinary spectacle of diplomacy at the UN headquarters in New York as the two countries’ envoys read out together a joint statement to the media. The US was nowhere to be seen.
The events since October 7 make it abundantly clear that the US attempts to integrate Israel into its Muslim neighbourhood in its terms is a pipe dream — ie., unless and until Israel is willing to turn its sword into plowshares. The ferocity of the Israeli revenge attacks on the people of Gaza — “animals” — smacks of racism and genocide.
Iran knew all along the bestiality of the Zionist regime. Saudi Arabia too must be in a chastened mood following the wake-up call that it must first and foremost learn to live in its region.
Raisi is heading for Saudi Arabia against the backdrop of a historic shift in the power dynamic. King Salman invited Raisi to speak on Israel’s crimes against the Palestinians in Gaza at a special summit of Arab states, which he is hosting in Riyadh. This signifies a profound Saudi realisation that even its willingness to be involved in the Abraham Accords under American persuasion has alienated the Arab public.
There is a fallacy in the western discourse about a Russia-China-Iran axis in West Asia. This is a nonsensical misinterpretation. A consistent three-fold foreign policy principle that Iran pursued right from the Islamic Revolution in 1979 is that, one, its strategic autonomy is sacred; two, the countries of the region must take their destiny into their own hands and solve regional issues themselves without involving extra-regional powers, and, three, foster Muslim unity howsoever long and winding that road might seem.
This principle had severe limitations due to force of circumstances — principally, in the conditions engendered by the colonial policy of divide and rule pursued by the US. Circumstances were even deliberately engineered, such as the Iraq-Iran war, where the US encouraged the regional states to collaborate with Saddam Hussein to launch an aggression against Iran to stymie the Islamic revolution in its infancy.
Another painful episode was the Syrian conflict. There, again, the US actively canvassed among regional states for a regime change in Damascus with the ultimate objective of targeting Iran by using the terrorist groups that Washington incubated in Occupied Iraq.
In Syria, the US brilliantly succeeded in pitting the regional states against each other and the result is plain to see in the ruins of what used to be the throbbing heart of Islamic civilisation . At the peak of the conflict, several western intelligence agencies were freely operating in Syria assisting the terrorist groups to rampage the country whose cardinal sin was that, like Iran, it too consistently put primacy on its strategic autonomy and independent foreign policies through the cold war and post-cold war eras alike.
Suffice to say, the US and Israel met with great success in fragmenting Muslim Middle East by exaggerating the threat perceptions and convincing several Gulf Arab states that they faced direct threats or even attacks by Iranian proxies, as well as alleged Iranian support for dissident movements.
Of course, the US capitalised on it by selling huge volumes of weapons and more importantly, to finesse the petrodollar as a key pillar of the western banking system. As for Israel, it directly benefitted from demonising Iran in order to draw attention away from the Palestine issue, which has all along been the core issue in the Middle East crisis.
Suffice to say, the rollout of the Iran-Saudi-China agreement has reduced the hostility that existed between Riyadh and Tehran for the better part of the recent decades. Both countries sought to build on the momentum generated by the success of the secret Beijing talks with regard to their commitment to non-interference. It must be noted, however, that the relations between Gulf Arab countries and Iran had already improved significantly over the last two years.
What western analysts miss is that the wealthy Gulf states are fed up with their subaltern life as sidekicks of the US. They want to prioritise their national life in directions they choose and with partners who respect them, eschewing any zero-sum mindset, unlike in the Cold War era, for reasons of ideology or power dynamic.
That is why, the Biden Administration cannot accept that the Saudis today work with Russia on the OPEC+ platform to fulfil their commitment to extra voluntary oil supply cuts, while also negotiating with the US on nuclear technology, and at the same time moving on the diplomatic track with Beijing to douse the fire set ablaze in the Levant a month ago from spreading to the rest of the West Asian region.
Evidently, the Saudis are no longer rolling with pleasure at the prospect of a US-Iran confrontation. On the other hand, Saudis and Iranians have a shared concern that their new thinking with primacy on development will dissipate unless there is regional stability and security.
Thus, it is sheer naïveté on the part of Washington to bracket Hezbollah, Hamas and Iran as one grouping — as Blinken did during his latest visit to Tel Aviv on Monday — and juxtapose it with the rest of the region. The canard that Hezbollah and Hamas are “terrorist” movements is about to be exposed. Truth be told, how are they any different from Sinn Féin, which was historically associated with the IRA?
Such naïveté underlines the absurd US-Israeli-Indian venture to create a West Asian QUAD 2 (“I2U2”), which today looks laughable — or the quixotic plot hatched in New Delhi recently during the G20 summit to get the Saudis on board the India-Middle East-Europe Corridor project, with the fond hope that it “integrates” Israel and creates business for Haifa Port, isolates Iran and Turkey, rubbishes Russia-led International North-South Corridor and shows the middle finger to Beijing’s Belt and Road. Whereas, life is real.
Taking all things into account, it is the US Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s regional tour to Israel and his summit with a select group of Arab states in Amman over the last weekend that has turned into a defining moment in the Gaza crisis.
The Arab foreign ministers point blank refused to buy into any of the invidious proposals put forward by Blinken with malicious intentions to preserve Jewish interests — “humanitarian pause” instead of ceasefire; refugee camps for the people from Gaza escaping from Israel’s horrific, brutal attacks that would be funded with Arab money but would eventually lead to Jewish settlements in Gaza; contours of a post-war arrangement for Gaza that will leave the debris to be handled by the Palestinian Authority and reconstruction to be financed by the Gulf states while Israel continues to dominate it in the all-important security sphere; preventing Iran from going to the rescue of Hezbollah and Hamas as they are put into Israeli meat grinders of American make.
It was rank hypocrisy. The Arab foreign ministers spoke up in one voice to articulate their counter proposal to Blinken’s — immediate ceasefire. President Biden seems to see the writing on the wall, finally — although, intrinsically, he continues to be the world’s number one Zionist, as someone once called him, and his motivations are largely borne out of his own political survival as the 2024 election draws closer.
Be that as it may, the high probability is that it is now a matter of time before the global community insists on stopping the Israeli apartheid state on its tracks. For, when Muslim countries unite, they call the shots in the emerging multipolar world order. Their demand that a settlement of the Palestine problem brooks no further delay has gained resonance, including in the Western Hemisphere.
(Ambassador M.K. Bhadrakumar served the Indian Foreign Service for more than 29 years. Courtesy: Indian Punchline, the author’s blog.)
