Some of the most cogent early coverage of Israel’s war on Iran — killing its way to Greater Israel with warmaker partner, the United States, frames this conflict for what it is: a lawless, soulless, brainless killing of thousands upon thousands of Iranian children and adults and displacing millions. A long-lasting menace to the global economy, this unnecessary and illegal war also pushes the world toward more permanent environmental disaster. You will not read or hear this brutally honest coverage in any weak-kneed mainstream media or discourse.
Economist Jeffrey Sachs calls this conflict the beginning of World War III, driven by a “madman” and know-nothing president unrestrained by “hollowed out” politicians and surrounded by “sycophants.” Iran has closed the Strait of Hormuz, through which one-fifth of the world’s oil passes, causing oil markets to convulse and risking collapse of the global economy. There are two paths in this war, as Sachs sees it: “a collective global intervention, or a continued slide into a war that will reshape the century.” Where are the grown-ups in this government?
Bombing Iran for Greater Israel captures the intent of this war according to Palestinian American writer and publisher Michel Moushabeck. Two nuclear powers embarked on a war against a non-nuclear Iran, just as a peace deal between the US and Iran was “within reach.” It is a sequel to Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza carried out by apartheid Israel. Iranians, striving for and in need of freedom from their conservative, theocratic government (a consequence of the US and British overthrow in 1953 of democratically-elected Mohammed Mossadegh for nationalizing Iranian oil) will resist any US-Israeli domination.
This war has taken the spotlight off Palestine as Israel halts humanitarian aid to dying Gaza, and the West Bank is being taken over by right-wing settlers. Meanwhile, a mere 1 in 4 Americans support the US missile strikes in Iran costing American taxpayers $1 billion/day. (See cost of war below)
“Israel is a lie,” one the world has been convinced to believe. What does Palestinian writer Abu Alya, from Gaza and now in exile, mean by this? He explains that Israel called the land of Palestine a land without a people, a barren desert that they made bloom, when the truth is that Palestine was a land cultivated by farmers for thousands of years, a literate country of newspapers and cinemas, with a “developed civic and agricultural life.” Their tragedy was to be a “people written out of history.” And the greatest tragedy is that “the world has accepted the original lie.” This made possible the war in Iran.
Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has candidly admitted that he has wanted the war with Iran for 40 years lest Iran build a nuclear weapon. It took an American president “indifferent” to the chaos he is driving the world into to give Netanyahu his chance. Though Iranians live under a stifling regime, Donald Trump and Netanyahu will never be their saviors.
Building a Greater Israel is Netanyahu’s colonialist project in Palestine, now Iran, perhaps Lebanon next, Syria and the rest of the Middle East. “What the world allowed in Gaza, it is now allowing in Iran…and the killing it is now allowing in Iran, it will allow again,” asserts Abu Alya.
“Today we are watching Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu conduct a war that is evil,” contends former CIA analyst, national security analyst and author, Melvin Goodman. There is no banality to be observed in this war, as Hannah Arendt observed in the trial of Holocaust organizer Adolf Eichmann. He committed evil, but he was an ordinary man with an ‘“inability to think for himself.”’ This war that Netanjahu and Trump wage holds no banality. Nor are they ordinary people. They are evil and the war they wage is evil, contends Goodman.
Iran has retaliated by closing the Strait of Hormuz through which 20% of the world’s oil exports pass, along with medical goods, some of which are headed for health care facilities in Sudan for the war’s wounded there, and up to 30 percent of the world’s fertilizer threatening 300 million people with acute food security. Iran also has responded to the U.S. and Israel’s bombing of Iran’s oil and gas facilities with retaliatory attacks on natural gas complexes in Qatar and the United Arab Republics. By targeting fuel depots, the aggressors in this war — the US and Israel — and now Iran in retaliation have caused immense air pollution and release of hazardous substances which poison humans and Nature and accelerate climate disaster.
B’Tselem, a leading Israeli human rights organization, has warned that, in expanding its war for Greater Israel, the crime of genocide Israel commits in Gaza will expand to “additional areas where Palestinians live under Israeli occupation; and right-wing Israeli politicians are calling for the expulsion of Palestinians citizens of Israel.” In other words, with expanded war against Palestinians and incessant war in Iran and killings in Lebanon and who knows what next Middle Eastern country, the victims of Israel and the US face the prospect of normalized atrocity, while the world stands by.
Where is the United Nations?
For U.S. war costs in Iran, see: https://iran-cost-ticker.com/.
Pat Hynes and Anna Gyorgy are members of the Traprock Center for Peace and Justice.