Netanyahu in limbo

Dr. Evangelos Venetis

Islam and the Middle East Expert

evenetis.worpress.com

The recent unprecedented terrorist pagers attack by the Netanyahu government against civilians and Hezbollah fighters in Lebanon and Syria is one of a series of murderous attacks and provocations by Tel Aviv against the Palestine Alliance that began last April with the attack against the Iranian consulate in Damascus and continued, among others, with the assassination of Ismail Haniyeh.

Netanyahu’s actions in question are aimed at regionalizing the war in the Gaza Strip in the wider Middle East by drawing the Palestinian Alliance into heightened acts of retaliation so that the US is also involved in a regional war. This was evident after the assassination of Haniyeh in Tehran. The U.S. military was then deployed aeronautically within 48 hours, indicating that the U.S. was aware of the plan to assassinate Haniyeh and likely cooperated on an advisory and operational level by preparing and deploying forces to key locations in the Middle East to actively counter  any response from the Alliance for Palestine.

Netanyahu is attempting to generalize the war to extricate himself from the impasse into which he and Israel have fallen due to the strategic failure of the technologically superior Israeli occupation forces to defeat Hamas and Islamic Jihad in the Gaza Strip. Regardless of the razing of the Palestinian above-ground housing infrastructure in the Strip, such a failure is tantamount to defeat for Netanyahu as it pins down and forces Tel Aviv to coexist with the successful, strengthened and entrenched Islamic Palestinian resistance. This is the bitter cup of compromise that Netanyahu stubbornly avoids drinking. But for how much longer?

Turning a blind eye to the apparent shift in favor of the Palestinians in the geopolitical balance of power – as evidenced by the fact that for the first time since 1948 Israel is forced to fight for a consecutive year, Israel is powerless to fight two and three adversaries alone and also that it has partially lost control of the northern territories due to the internal displacement of its inhabitants – Netanyahu is trying to stay in power by narcissistically and metaphysically identifying his political interest with the fortunes of Israel, systematically ignoring the fate of Israeli prisoners and the high security risk Israel runs by continuing to fight endlessly without a plan and tangible results.

By involving the Israeli forces with Hezbollah the risk for Israel is great. Yes, it has air superiority, but Hezbollah’s ground forces and artillery proved superior to the Israelis in the 2006 war in the semi-mountainous terrain of southern Lebanon. Israel’s purported security zone in southern Lebanon is futile because Hezbollah has medium-range missiles whose range is capable of hitting all of Israel from central and northern Lebanon. What is Netanyahu seeking then?

Two possibilities: a) the collective punishment of the Lebanese for their support or tolerance towards Hezbollah by repeating the aerial leveling of residential infrastructure according to the Gaza model, and b) with a possible land invasion of Lebanon, the attempt to involve Iran and the USA in war to increase theaters of operations across the Middle East to mitigate Israel’s failure in Gaza and attempt to shift the balance of power by weakening Hamas’ sources of supply.

The second possibility is groundless, because it involves the risk of undermining global security. At the same time, if Hezbollah prevails and repulses the Israeli operation in Lebanon, then the war will be transferred by air and land inside Israel with all that this entails for the fate of the northern territories already abandoned by the Israeli residents. And all this without calculating the initial consequences of Hezbollah’s ballistic attack on Israel.

Such a development makes the Israeli operation in Lebanon uncertain and would annul further Netanyahu’s contributions in the political history of Israel.