~~ and also Spencer Ackerman on the escalation and what Harris needs to do
https://www.forever-wars.com/r/c3014ce6?m=b656041a-c61a-4a6b-910d-7d396ec2db1f
If Harris Will Be Different from Biden on Israel, This Is Her Chance to Show It
~~ recommended by newestbeginning ~~
 |
 |
“Israel's leaders killed three birds with one stone,” wrote Reuven Pedatzur, a senior military affairs analyst for the Israeli newspaper Haaretz. “They assassinated the man who had the power to make a deal with Israel; they took revenge on someone who had caused more than a few Israeli casualties; and they signaled to Hamas that communications with it will be conducted only through military force.”
Was Pedatzur referring to the Israeli assassination of senior Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh, the head of the group’s political bureau, in Tehran in the early hours of Wednesday morning?
No. Pedatzur died in a road traffic accident in 2014. His quote from Haaretz, above, was in response to the Israeli assassination of another senior Hamas commander, Ahmed Jabari, in November 2012, which kicked off the 2012 Gaza war.
As my former colleague at The Intercept, Jon Schwarz, documented in great detail last year, “Jabari had come to believe that it was in the best interest of Palestinians for Hamas to negotiate a long-term truce” and had been in communication with the respected Israeli peace activist Gershon Baskin. “Just before the assassination, [Baskin] gave Jabari a draft proposal for such a truce to review and approve. The draft was agreed to by Baskin and Hamas’s deputy foreign minister, and Baskin also said he had previously shown it to Ehud Barak, then the Israeli minister of defense.”
Would Jabari have signed off on a ‘hudna,’ or long-term truce, between Hamas and Israel? We’ll never know.
Israel, in fact, has a long and cynical history of killing Hamas leaders who are in the midst of ceasefire negotiations or, even, proposing long-term truces with the Jewish state.
Remember Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, the quadriplegic co-founder and spiritual leader of Hamas? He was assassinated less than three months after he proposed a long-term truce with Israel “if a Palestinian state is established in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.”
His successor, Abdel Aziz al-Rantisi, was assassinated less than three months after he made a similar truce offer to Israel.
Then there was the Netanyahu government’s 2012 assassination of Jabari, who, as mentioned, was reviewing a “long-term mutual cease-fire” deal just “hours before he was killed,” according to Baskin.
The parallels between 2012 and 2024, between the killings of Jabari and Haniyeh, are eery.
"He was in line to die, not an angel and not a righteous man of peace,” Baskin said of Jabari shortly after his killing, “but his assassination also killed the possibility of achieving a truce and also the Egyptian mediators’ ability to function.”
The same could be said of Haniyeh. Mainstream Western media outlets agree that the Hamas leader was – by Hamas standards – a “pragmatist”; a key figure in the ongoing negotiations to secure a ceasefire in Gaza and free the Israeli hostages.
From Reuters:
“For all the tough language in public, Arab diplomats and officials had viewed [Haniyeh] as relatively pragmatic compared with more hardline voices inside Gaza, where the military wing of Hamas planned the October 7 attack. While telling Israel's military they would find themselves ‘drowning in the sands of Gaza,’ he and his predecessor as Hamas leader, Khaled Meshaal, had shuttled around the region for talks over a Qatari-brokered cease-fire deal with Israel that would include exchanging hostages for Palestinians in Israeli jails as well as more aid for Gaza.”
From Sky News:
“Haniyeh was the pragmatic face of Hamas. He was less hard-line and militaristic than Yahya Sinwar, who is the head of Hamas inside Gaza and is leading the battle. Haniyeh was the public face of Hamas's diplomacy in Arab capitals. He was leading efforts to negotiate a ceasefire in Gaza.”
This was the person that the far-right Israeli government of Benjamin Netanyahu chose to assassinate on Iranian soil on Wednesday.
Why?
Put simply, Netanyahu and his coalition of fascists and bigots do not want a deal to release the hostages. They prefer to continue the war, no matter the cost to Gaza’s civilians or to their own citizens still held inside of the enclave. Despite Joe Biden’s ludicrous claims to the contrary, it is Netanyahu who has been the biggest obstacle to a deal to free Israel’s hostages in Gaza. The former spokesperson for the hostages’ families says Netanyahu rejected a deal. Benny Gantz, a former member of Israel’s war cabinet, says Netanyahu blocked a deal. Israeli defense officials tell Haaretz that “Netanyahu systematically foiled the negotiations to free the hostages.”
There is nothing new here. To misquote Winston Churchill, Israel has always preferred “war-war” over “jaw-jaw.” Israeli governments – especially those led by Netanyahu – have preferred having Hamas as the permanent enemy – or as an “asset,” to quote the current Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich – rather than trying to do a permanent deal with Hamas.
As the late Israeli journalist Pedatzur wrote, in his analysis of the disastrous Jabari assassination in 2012:
“Our decision makers, including the defense minister and perhaps also Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, knew about Jabari’s role in advancing a permanent cease-fire agreement. … Thus the decision to kill Jabari shows that our decision makers decided a cease-fire would be undesirable for Israel at this time, and that attacking Hamas would be preferable.”
Change the name ‘Jabari’ to ‘Haniyeh’ above, and those words could have been written today.
Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
| By Spencer Ackerman • |
| View in browser |
It's a regional war. Now that Israel has killed Hamas' leader on Iranian soil, it's set to get much worse. Deescalation is the only option. Will the VP choose it?
Edited by Sam Thielman
I'VE BEEN NAUSEOUS EVER SINCE WAKING UP to the news that Israel assassinated Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh in Iran. Not because Haniyeh is someone worth mourning. But because this is a fateful step that escalates the regional war that Israel's collective punishment of Gaza has yielded, and one that forces Iran’s hand.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken this morning denied the U.S. was "aware of or involved in" killing Haniyeh. But since Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu left Washington last week, following the lethal rocket attack on Majdal Shams in the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights, Israel has bombed targets in Beirut and now in Tehran itself. We'll learn more from subsequent reporting about messages conveyed or not conveyed by President Biden—and, indeed, Vice President Harris, who met with Netanyahu on Thursday. But clearly Netanyahu did not feel meaningfully constrained from conducting two assassination attempts on foreign soil in as many days, all while not letting up on Israel's military devastation of Gaza.
Harris has to decide if she's cool with this. She has to convey her decision as soon as today. Consider that by the time she steps into her nominating convention next month, a tidal wave of bloodshed – perhaps even the full-fledged conflagration across the entire Middle East that many have feared since Oct. 7 –– could be her backdrop. Only U.S. intervention can stop it. Within the administration, and out in the public, that intervention now falls to her.
Ever since late October 2003, FOREVER WARS has been writing, against the grain of mainstream coverage, that this is not a "coming" regional war. A regional war has been here. The question for U.S. diplomacy—not only for U.S. diplomacy, but that's what we're concerned with today—is whether the U.S. will actively deescalate it. Active deescalation means compelling Israel to get out of Gaza. No other measure can substitute for that, since the genocide in Gaza is what prompted the Hezbollah rocket attacks on northern Israel, the Houthi attacks on Red Sea shipping and now Tel Aviv, and Iranian-proxy militia attacks on U.S. positions in Iraq—which are starting back up again, after Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps ordered an operational pause that represented Iranian restraint against the United States.
Here is what that pause got the Iranians: an Israeli strike on its embassy in Damascus that killed a senior general, an assassination attempt against senior proxy Fuad Shakr in Beirut, and now an assassination of a Hamas potentate in Tehran where he was attending the inauguration of the new reform-bloc Iranian president. Remember that following the Israeli strike on the embassy, Iran in April fired a drone-and-missile barrage on Israel and said it would consider the matter "concluded." I warned at the time that without a ceasefire, the next Iranian strike will be worse, and we're about to see it. The Iranians are promising "a harsh punishment," and they say Washington bears responsibility for the assassination as well. Late on Tuesday, U.S. Central Command announced its first airstrike on militias in Iraq since February.
Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin says escalation is not "inevitable," although he maintains that regional war is not yet here. But Austin and the rest of the Biden administration are willfully avoiding what it takes to stop the escalation, let alone roll it back. If they truly do not seek to escalate, then what they are doing has failed, decisively. It has failed for ten entire agonizing months, all while the battlefield has expanded to Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Yemen (and, nebulously, maybe Egypt), the Red Sea and Iran itself. Anyone paying attention knows the missing piece for deescalation is an Israeli ceasefire in Gaza. Well, Haniyeh was a key figure negotiating that ceasefire, and now it's about to be as much of a mirage as a two-state solution. Austin is already talking about helping the Israelis defend themselves against Iranian reprisal.
Many people here in the United States who do not want Donald Trump to be president again and also do not want to be complicit in a combination genocide and regional war are looking to Kamala Harris to differentiate herself from Joe Biden. This is a matter not only of her political future but the lives of millions in Palestinians, Israelis, Druze, Lebanese, Yemenis, Syrians, Iraqis, Iranians and perhaps others in the Middle East. Harris is not a passive observer. She is the second most-senior elected official in the United States, and this is the situation she is looking to inherit. We know that Trump wants to let the Israelis "finish the job." Is that also Harris' position, with a sprinkling of rhetorical compassion for Palestinians acting as cover for policy continuity? Or will she demonstrate the leadership necessary to stop a coalescing, escalating regional war that the United States possesses the material leverage on Israel to end?
What is Harris asking us to vote for? U.S.-backed genocide and regional war? Or active deescalation? The choice is hers and hers alone.
ON TUESDAY, SHORTLY AFTER THE ISRAELI ATTACK IN BEIRUT, I spoke with Harrison Mann, the Army major and Mideast analyst for the Defense Intelligence Agency who resigned in protest of U.S. support for the Israeli genocide of Gaza. Harrison did an enlightening Q&A with FOREVER WARS about escalation in June. Now it seemed like his predictions were fearfully coming to pass. He shared with me some thoughts he posted on his LinkedIn and gave me permission to share it with you, the FOREVER WARS reader.
Since the day I left active duty, I have been warning that one underappreciated consequence of the Biden administration’s refusal to pressure Netanyahu into a Gaza ceasefire deal is the risk of a full-scale war between Israel and Hezbollah. That war would be a disaster for Israel and Lebanon alike, likely engulfing the region and dragging in the United States.
We are one step closer—one leap, really—to that war today now that Israel has bombed Hezbollah in Beirut for the first time since 2006 (Israel killed a Hamas deputy in Beirut with a drone strike earlier this year).
Hezbollah still seeks to avoid larger war, but it cannot ignore a strike in the heart of its territory in Lebanon’s capital and will inevitably respond with an attack deeper into Israel, possibly deliberately inflicting civilian casualties.
After that, to avoid a spiral into full-scale war, the Biden administration will need to show an unprecedented level of will to restrain Israel.
The administration is already attempting to persuade Israel to deescalate while simultaneously reiterating its promise to unconditionally support Israel against Hezbollah. This is an inherently contradictory position that has already failed in Gaza. We can back Israel for endless war, or demand peace, but not both.
The timing of the strike also worries me. Israel’s casus belli was allegedly a Hezbollah rocket that killed twelve Druze children in the occupied Golan Heights. I am skeptical that Netanyahu and his far-right coalition (whose MPs just broke into the base housing Israel’s infamous Sde Tieman prison to protest the arrest of soldiers who sexually assaulted Palestinian prisoners) is shedding tears for dead Syrian children. Hezbollah has been firing into Israel since October 8 and has killed actual Israeli civilians in the past.
What’s new this week is that Netanyahu has just returned from his visit to Congress, the White House, and Mar-a-Lago.
I warned in the Washington Post last month that Israel “will not launch the offensive [into Lebanon] until they are fully confident of America’s support. So I think the final trigger for a war of annihilation, in the form of a ground offensive, will be when Netanyahu perceives he has the green light from the U.S.”
I doubt anyone gave Netanyahu an explicit “green light” last week. But it also appears that he flew back to Tel Aviv with full confidence that nothing—not a genocide in Gaza, not reckless escalation—would shake Washington’s commitment to fueling his wars of choice.
WILLIAM CALLEY, the butcher of My Lai, died earlier this year. May his victims and their surviving kin know peace, since they will not know justice.
WALLER VS. WILDSTORM, the superhero spy thriller I co-wrote with my friend Evan Narcisse and which the masterful Jesús Merino illustrated, is available for purchase in a hardcover edition! If you don't have single issues of WVW and you want a four-issue set signed by me, they're going fast at Bulletproof Comics!
No one is prouder of WVW than her older sibling, REIGN OF TERROR: HOW THE 9/11 ERA DESTABILIZED AMERICA AND PRODUCED TRUMP, which is available now in hardcover, softcover, audiobook and Kindle edition. And on the way is a new addition to the family: THE TORTURE AND DELIVERANCE OF MAJID KHAN.
No comments:
Post a Comment