Killings by Israel in Lebanon and Iran risk dragging the US and the Middle East into a regional war
The United States and the Middle East are now enduring a crisis that can in part be traced to the failed foreign policies of President Joe Biden, who will be in office, barring unforeseen events, for six more months. The core issue has been Biden’s inability to understand the recklessness and depravity of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, whose hatred of Palestinians has now brought the Middle East and America to the brink of a war that is neither desired nor necessary. Biden also has failed to seek a negotiated settlement to the war Russia, led by Vladimir Putin, is now in the process of winning against Ukraine.
Biden’s failures will soon fall to Vice President Kamala Harris, who now has a clear path to be nominated by acclaim at the Democratic convention later this month. She has yet to indicate any disagreement with the peril the Biden policies have created, although if ever there was a time for her speaking out this is it.
The fault is not only Biden’s. The majority of Democrats and Republicans in Congress routinely vote to send billions of dollars to support a corrupt and failing government in Ukraine and similarly approve the bombs and tank shells supplied to Israel for use in Gaza. Hamas, which was financed for years by Qatar, at Netanyahu’s behest, is far from defeated and it is now clear that Netanyahu has been the one resisting a ceasefire there, despite pressure—or rather, pleading—from the Biden White House.
There were signs of Netanyahu’s irrationality from the beginning, and they were ignored. After the horror of the Hamas attack last October 7, the Israeli leadership was cautioned by a senior American who had been rushed to Israel not to retaliate with a massive bombing attack. Instead, the Israelis were advised to announce that a response was coming but would be withheld if Hamas immediately returned the 240 hostages, many of them in the Israeli Defense Forces, who had been seized. Even if the proposal failed, the anticipated failure of the Hamas leadership to respond was seen, optimistically, as a possible mitigating factor for the White House and its allies, given the violent bombing response that all knew was coming. Consider it a doomed Hail Mary-pass effort to massage the world’s anger as Gaza was torn apart. There was a further suggestion by another informed American official that Israel should consider the slim possibility that the leadership of Hamas could initiate a series of criminal trials for those in the Hamas leadership who planned the attack, to be held in Gaza. That, too, went nowhere.
The enraged Israeli leadership instead chose collective punishment, a decision that has led to tens of thousands of deaths—the numbers are impossible to measure amid the societal collapse—and growing worldwide condemnation of Israel. In America that has meant a political backlash among college students and the young against the Democratic Party, whose candidates are at peril in the November elections.
Netanyahu, invited by the Republicans to speak on July 24 before a joint session of Congress—many Democrats stayed away—had the temerity to take on American protesters in his speech, declaring that “they stand with Hamas” when they protest the killing and maiming of Gazans. “They stand with rapists and murderers,” Bibi said, to Republican applause. “They stand with people who came . . . into a home” and murdered parents and children. “They should be ashamed of themselves. . . . For all we know, Iran is funding the anti-Israel protests that are going on right now.” He presented no evidence for the last claim.
Netanyahu raised the specter of nuclear arms—Israel has hundreds of them, and Iran has none—by coyly noting that America and Israel have “jointly developed some of the most sophisticated weapons on Earth . . . I choose my words carefully . . . that help protect both our countries. . . . We also help keep American boots off the ground while protecting our shared interests in the Middle East.”
I published a book on the Israeli nuclear arsenal in 1991, and my reporting was abetted by many covert Israeli sources. I am convinced that our “shared interests” do not include the assassination last week in Iran of Ismail Haniyeh. He was the Hamas point man who was involved in the talks with Israel and America over a proposed ceasefire—one that it is now clear Netanyahu never wanted, something Biden and his foreign policy staff never seemed to have figured out. There were, however, many in the American intelligence community who understood that Netanyahu had become completely beholden to the far right in Israel—represented most alarmingly by Itamar Ben-Gvir, who has been Israel’s minister of security since 2022. Ben-Gvir has emerged as a leader of the Otzma Yehudit party that holds six seats that give the party control in the bitterly divided Israeli Knesset. He is an acknowledged racist who does not hesitate to say he wants to drive all Palestinians from their land. Ben-Gvir and his party keep Netanyahu in office and away from a prison sentence stemming from a series of corruption indictments. It is a lethal combination.
The current spate of Netanyahu-ordered assassinations began last week when a missile destroyed a vehicle carrying Fuad Shukr, a Hezbollah commander, in a heavily populated suburb of Beirut. Two women and three children were also killed and more than a dozen injured. I am one of the few Westerners to have interviewed Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah in Beirut, and had five meetings with him for the New Yorker after the Bush administration invaded Iraq in the spring of 2003. Then and now he has been viewed as the most important leader in the Shiite world.
In a series of telephone interviews with those close to Nasrallah after the assassination of Shukr, I was told that an immediate retaliation would not happen. Nasrallah has concluded that Netanyahu needs to create a constant crisis to stay in power. Since the attack was in a suburb and not in Beirut proper—and not in Tehran—there was no need for an immediate response.
The Israeli assassination of Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran—seven others were killed by what has been variously reported to be a bomb or a missile attack—was a clear message that there will be no ceasefire in Gaza, as long as Netanyahu is in power. It also could turn out to be what no one, except perhaps Netanyahu and his political colleagues in Israel, wants: a very deadly international game changer.
Speaking during an elaborately staged funeral in south Beirut for Fuad Shukr, Nasrallah was cryptic about his future plans (as translated from Arabic): “We are paying the price”—a reference to Shukr’s assassination—“of opening our support front for Gaza. . . . We entered this battle based on our firm belief in the nobility of this cause and its fight and its importance. The enemy’s attacks on Lebanon and Yemen are evidence that we are no longer merely in the position of support fronts. This is an open battle with the enemy. . . .
“Does the enemy think killing Ismail Haniyeh on Iranian soil will pass without a response?”
Nasrallah asked. “Iran considers this an attack not only on its sovereignty but on its honor.” The Shiite leader, who studied in Iran, then issued this warning on behalf of Shiite dominated Iran: “To the Israeli enemy. ‘You may have rejoiced in the killing, but you will cry very soon, as you are not aware of the red lines you have crossed.’”
I was told Nasrallah would not see me, but one of his close associates, a former member of the Lebanese government, told me in a later interview that, with the funeral for Shukr finished, “an attack could take place at any time.” Nasrallah’s missiles can reach “possible American and Israeli targets” throughout the Mideast. “All of the major military American ports and Navy bases in the Mediterranean are within range. He has the weapons and people trained to handle the weapons.” He further claimed that Russia was currently resupplying Iran with thousands of advanced anti-aircraft missiles “along with the experts to handle them.”
“Nobody but a madman,” he said of Netanyahu, “would have done what he did in these last days,” referring to the assassinations near Beirut and in Tehran. “He killed the negotiator to ceasefire talks while he was an official visitor to the swearing in of a new President in Tehran. He discredited all of the negotiators.”
The Pentagon got the message. A statement issued late last week said Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, responding to a request from Biden, had ordered an additional fighter jet squadron to the Middle East, along with a new aircraft carrier, to increase support for Israel and insure the protection of American assets there. Other American warships were deployed, in case of a spreading war, to protect American military assets in Europe and the Middle East.
The White House also issued a statement late last week summarizing a telephone call Biden and Kamala Harris had with Netanhayu. There was no talk in the statement of reassuring the leaders of Iran and Hezbollah that America was committed to immediate negotiations in an effort to avoid bloodshed. Instead, there was bellicosity.
“President Biden,” the statement said, “spoke today with Prime Minister Netanahayu of Israel. The President reaffirmed his commitment to Israel’s security against all threats from Iran, including its proxy terrorist groups Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis. The President discussed efforts to support Israel’s defense against threats, including against ballistic missiles and drones, to include new defensive US military deployments. Together with this commitment to Israel’s defense, the President stressed the importance of ongoing efforts to de-escalate broader tensions in the region. Vice President Harris also joined the call.”
Sending aircraft carriers and more combat ships to the Middle East cannot be defined as an effort to de-escalate tension. Harris must separate herself as quickly as politically feasible from the jingoism of a president who has lost his way.
The New York Times reported Sunday that Biden insisted, to a group of journalists waiting with him Thursday night for the return of American prisoners from Russia, that there was still a path to a ceasefire in Gaza. He said that he’d had a conversation with Netanyahu and told him that there still was a “basis for a cease fire” and that he “should move on it and they should move on it now.” Asked if the Haniyeh killing made it harder to reach a deal, the president said, according to the Times, “It’s not helped. That’s all I’m going to say now.”
An Israeli who spent his career in the military advising and dealing with the most serious threats his government was facing expressed his despair in a recent email to me. “There is no longer a war cabinet, only Bibi” in Israel, he wrote. The prime minister, he added, until his legal defeats and the most recent elections “was very wary of military adventures and major domestic confrontations. He is a different man since two, three years ago. He is mad with rage and hate.
“We need a Churchill, but we will accept a Harry S Truman.”
Instead, we and they have a Biden.
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