Pre-emptive attack is self-defence. Bombing for peace.

On Israel and America's unprovoked attacks on Iran

It’s alarming enough that Israel launched a series of unprovoked attacks on Iran, and that the violence was escalating with Tehran’s response. Under the guise of “pre-emptive self-defence” (not an accepted legal justification), Israel has attacked dozens of sites, including many that have nothing to do with Iran’s nuclear program. Israel has killed hundreds of civilians, including many children, and wounded thousands; according to UN experts, 90% of Iranian casualties have been civilians. Israel has assassinated Iran’s most senior generals, and openly discussed the prospect of “regime change” – that is, murdering Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Khamenei.

Now, without any domestic debate or congressional approval, Trump has ordered the US to join the assault, launching attacks on multiple Iranian nuclear sites. More bombings are inevitable, as is a response from Iran.

Benjamin Netanyahu presented his country’s first military strikes as a response to the notion that Iran was on the verge of producing nuclear weapons. The fact that Israel itself already has nuclear weapons would never excuse attacks on Israel – but what makes this justification particularly disturbing: neither US intelligence nor the International Atomic Energy Agency (the UN’s nuclear watchdog) back Netanyahu’s assertion. In recent months both have said there was no credible evidence or indication of an active, coordinated nuclear weapons program. Most rational observers believed any Iranian nuclear arms were at minimum a year off – that’s if they actually got working on weaponisation, and if they had sufficiently enriched uranium, which they don’t.

That fact that Netanyahu has been warning that Iranian nuclear arms are imminent since the 1990s has gone largely unremarked. Iran was “weeks away” from getting nuclear weapons in 2015, apparently. Netanyahu, without presenting any evidence for his latest assertions, said it was for Israel’s security, even though most analysts claim the attacks will likely convince Iran that acquiring nuclear arms is the only way to protect itself in the future.

Now the long, steady process of monitoring and negotiating with Iran over its weapons program has been shelved. Indeed, the timing of Israel’s first attacks, a few days before talks between Iran and the US over the nuclear program, was clearly intended to prevent serious negotiations. As LRB contributing editor Tom Stevenson wrote this week, “This is an attempt at regime change, or regime destruction, poorly disguised as a nuclear operation.”

In the past year or so, Netanyahu has also launched attacks on Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, Iraq and the West Bank. Israel’s oppression of Gaza is ongoing, and if anything its actions are becoming further removed from basic morality. This week, like last week and the one before, IDF forces deliberately shelled crowds of starving Gaza civilians who had gathered to beg for food aid. The distribution of all food aid is controlled by Israel, and Palestinian sources told the Guardian that, “Israeli forces have opened fire repeatedly on crowds trying to reach food distribution points run by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, a private organisation that recently began operating in Gaza with Israeli and US support.”

Another alarming aspect is how our media and political establishment have misrepresented Israel’s actions. Rather than “Israel launches unprovoked attack on Iran”, for example, the tenor of the coverage followed Netanyahu’s framing precisely: “Israel, fearing for its immediate safety, defends itself”. Instead of condemning Israel’s initial attack, the Australian political class called for restraint from both sides. On Friday, foreign affairs minister Penny Wong demanded that “Iran must return to the table”, as if it is Iran’s responsibility as the nation attacked to make peace. Israel’s attack prevented the arms negotiations that were actually scheduled. For the record, Iran has offered new talks if the bombing stops. Its offer has so been declined.

It’s irrefutable that Israel initiated this violence, illegally and without reasonable justification. Is that not worth saying? Iranian lives are real lives. Do they not count? Israel’s government and armed forces are seemingly beyond the scope of international law and moral norms. Our media has become so desensitised to the Netanyahu regime’s daily corruptions of humanity that outlets no longer try to judge it by common standards. Remember when Israeli forces first bombed a hospital in Gaza, soon after the terrible attack of October 7? The IDF initially denied it, calling it accidental, understanding it was illegal and immoral. Next time it happened, the IDF tried to justify it by blaming Hamas for using the hospital, without any evidence. Soon Israel was bombing all the hospitals, without justification. Then it was the universities, mosques, churches, bakeries, homes…

Every major human rights organisation, the vast majority of genocide scholars, even the International Criminal Court, describe Israel’s abuses in terms that Western media are still too cowed to use: genocide; war crimes; collective punishment. And lest there be any doubt, ask the members of Israel’s own cabinet. Several have been perfectly open about their genocidal aims of “entirely destroying” Gaza and achieving “complete victory” by driving out every Gazan.

While the majority of Israelis seem to support the ongoing actions perpetrated by its armed forces, in Gaza and elsewhere, former Israeli generals and centre-right politicians are alive to the damage this is causing. They too have been making the case, albeit with little success, that there is no future in mass violence, and that Palestinians and other victims will never forget and may never forgive.

For the hard right, though, and evidently for large numbers of Israelis, the belief that their enemies will never forgive or forget has become a tacit argument for the total destruction of all Israel’s enemies – whether in Gaza, Lebanon, Yemen, Syria or now Iran. (They will never forgive us, so…) This is the kind of totalitarian thinking that Hannah Arendt warned about.

The belief in compromise, negotiation and proportionality no longer exists among Israeli authorities. When there is no end game other than complete annihilation, Israel’s supporters might wonder what they’re fighting for. Or why they’re remaining silent while such atrocities are committed. And the rest of the world should consider why such a regime is excused and enabled.

Israel’s actions in the past two years can only have catastrophic impacts: the massacre of Israel’s opponents ensures generations of committed enemies, across the region. They can’t all be killed.

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It’s not for me to analyse how “never again” became secondary to “never again to us” in the Israeli national psyche, nor do I overlook the historical context, actions and instincts that have led to the tragedy of Israel today. However given the possibility of wider war in the Middle East, we must all understand by now that the ramifications of Israel’s actions will ripple across the world.

One can almost feel the excitement in Western media coverage of the latest developments on the war on Iran, with commentators opining earnestly about Trump’s “strategy”, about the “tactical strikes” backing Israel, or “regime change” in Iran. (Imagine if having a bad leader really was a legitimate justification to commence massive bombing raids, or assassinating this leader!)

Pretty soon we’ll be hearing from people who have never given a shit about either women or Iranians hand-wringing about Iranian women needing to be rescued from the Ayatollah’s regime. These people are ignoring the lessons of Afghanistan, Syria, Iraq – where civilians died by the hundreds of thousands – and justify more violence. We’ll hear experts describing how regime change could bring democracy, while they turn a blind eye to the desecration of their own democracies, and ignore that all regional regimes which fell as a result of Western aggression in recent decades spawned only civil wars.

US and Israeli bombing is not going to endear Iranians to a new pro-US, pro-Israeli Iranian government; it’s delusional to think otherwise. The Iranian regime won’t collapse, because opposition figures and reformists are weak and disorganised, and have already themselves condemned Israeli attacks. The protesters on the street this week in Tehran and all major Iranian cities were not welcoming their attackers. They were chanting “Death to America”, “Death to Israel”, and pleading to stop the bombing.

If anything, nationalist sentiment is firming, and the regime is more entrenched. Even if it did collapse, this wouldn’t bring rainbows and sunshine. It would destabilise the entire region, from Lebanon to Syria, Iraq to Yemen.

We didn’t claim to be supporters of Saddam in opposing the invasion of Iraq, and you don’t need to support the Ayatollah or Hamas to see that the consequence of Israeli and American violence is simply more death and destruction for civilians.

In coming weeks we’ll also hear more breathless coverage about high-precision (“bunker-busting”) weaponry taking out very specific Iranian military targets, while the same media skim over the low-tech massacres of people, homes, infrastructure, livelihoods. We’ll hear the stories of Israeli families who lose their love ones in bombing raids, but rarely hear such details about Iranian victims. (This week it was reported with outrage that an Iranian missile struck an Israeli military hospital; as if Israel hadn’t bombed every single civilian hospital in Gaza.) And very soon we’ll forget, if we haven’t already, that this war was started by an unprovoked attack.

For Australians, the prospect of our great ally rushing into a needless war raises the usual problems associated with our US client relationship: if we don’t stand against US and Israeli aggression, we will betray the principles that we pretend to stand for (universal human rights, international law, etc); if we lend direct support, as in Iraq, we will share responsibility when it goes wrong. We will demonstrate that not even fascism or genocidal violence will affect our relationships with the US and Israel. It’s an entirely hypothetical exercise to contemplate where our government would draw the line. They never would.

Our media and major political parties have lost the language of moral clarity, from lack of use. We no longer debate big principles, much less try to engage the public in decision-making. Should Australia join another illegal war? Is deliberately starving millions of people ever justified? Depends who’s asking, obviously.

Having failed to hold Israel accountable for its actions in Gaza, or Trump for his utter debasement of American democracy, our media and politicians look set to compound these failures in Iran. They’re repeating lines from the Iraq days without irony, despite the memory that they were disastrous lies, and cost hundreds of thousands of lives.

Regime change. Weapons of mass destruction. Pre-emptive strikes.

Have we learnt nothing? Trump and Netanyahu are actually good now, is that it?

When former Likud prime minister Ehud Olmert spoke to the New York Times’ Ezra Klein recently, he argued that Netanyahu was only interested in his own survival, that his actions were unconscionable and would cause permanent damage to Israel, and were inhumane and immoral, and that his government was committing war crimes and must be stopped. This is a centre-right Israeli (former) politician, saying things that are as plain as day.

If you make statements such as these in Australia you’ll be branded antisemitic and more likely punished than broadcast. If you’re an artist, writer or presenter railing against Israel’s war crimes, you will likely lose government funding or have your employment contract cancelled.

In a sane world, the people supporting war crimes are sanctioned.

It shouldn’t need saying that Palestinians and Iranians have human rights. It shouldn’t need saying that unprovoked mass violence will not lead to peace and security. And just because Israel and the US can inflict terrible damage and loss of life on enemies, doesn’t mean that they should. But obviously it does need to be said.