By Adem Kılıç, political scientist
As the Middle East descends into chaos with Netanyahu’s uncontrollable moves, the question to be asked is who/who is responsible for the continued deaths of children and the use of hospitals, places of worship and technological equipment as weapons by turning them into booby traps.
As of today, Israel’s occupation and genocidal war in Gaza is over a year old, and not only Israel but also the United States is behind the deaths of more than 40,000 civilians, more than half of whom are women and children.
It would be inadequate, even foolish, to blame Netanyahu alone for what has been going on in Gaza, Lebanon and elsewhere in the region, which is now a year old and has entered the international literature as a war of genocide.
Considering the processes in Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria, no one can deny the role of the US as an accomplice in every destruction in the Middle East.
The Biden administration has supposedly been supporting a ceasefire in Gaza for a year, while in the background, according to official records, it has provided Israel with more than 20 billion dollars in military aid and blocked all UN Security Council resolutions to stop the war.
This time, the US has authorized a new “missile strike” against Iran, which has responded both to a so-called “limited” attack on Lebanon and to the assassination in the middle of Tehran.
The “limited” attack on Lebanon is reminiscent of Ariel Sharon’s 1982 claim that Israel would occupy only 65 kilometers of southern Lebanon and the eventual siege of Beirut.
A possible Iranian response is reminiscent of the US invasion of Iraq with the claim that “Iraq has weapons of mass destruction” and plunged the country into chaos, leading to partition.
Israel’s military moves are ostensibly an attempt to bring peace to northern Israel. But as President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan made clear last week, these attacks are only part of a “grand plan”.
Having pushed the Bush administration to eliminate Saddam Hussein on the trumped-up charge of “weapons of mass destruction” that never existed, and having convinced Donald Trump to withdraw from the international agreement restricting Iran’s nuclear development, Israel now wants more.
Israel is trying to implement a new phase of its “grand plan” with the creation of a so-called state in Syria to create a “shadow Israel” and a so-called “buffer zone” stretching from the Lebanese border to the Litani river, which will then allow it to expand.
At this point, Lebanon is facing an existential challenge far more serious than the civil war of the 1970s and the 1982 Israeli invasion.
This is because in the cases of Iraq and Syria, we have experienced that both of these countries have been divided into three. And in such a scenario, it would not be a prophecy to say that Lebanon will eventually be divided into multiple parts.
To achieve this goal, the Netanyahu administration wants a war with Iran, if necessary, and it knows that in such a situation, no matter who is in the US administration, Washington will have no choice but to defend Israel.
But the US has two major problems.
First, the US may have no choice but to send the boots of US troops to the region, both in the wake of Israel’s “buffer zone” in Lebanon, which will extend to the Litani River, and in the aftermath of its announced “missile attack” against Iran.
This understanding of the US, which has made Israel’s security and even its occupation policy and its goal of expansion in the region its unchanging foreign policy, will eventually have to act together with Israel on the ground.
Secondly, all international institutions such as the ICC and the UN, which were established after World War II and are under the hegemony of the US and the West, are losing their validity for the sake of protecting Israel, and the US is and will be forced to destroy the global order along with the credibility of these institutions.
There is only one thing Biden can do now. Support Israel’s wars while claiming to seek diplomatic solutions.
At this point, the steps taken by the Netanyahu mentality, which tries to turn theological heresies into realities with the so-called “promised land” delusion, and the steps taken by the US, which unconditionally supports it, will pave the way for a great change not only in the region but also in the whole world.
And Netanyahu is planting the last dynamite under the global order shaped after the Second World War, which is no longer sustainable.