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Is Netanyahu hoping for a regional conflict?

Aug 07, 2024 Editorial

Kaieteur News – From all indications, Israel seems to be itching for a war, a wider one in the never less than tinderbox environment that is the Middle East.  With a leader like Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, there is a hard, calculating edge to the provocations delivered straight in the face of Israel’s enemies.  It is as though Netanyahu is pushing the envelope of unintended consequences, but with one vital qualifier.  What may appear to be unintended to the world is exactly where he is going.

He knows what he is unleashing, what escalations he seeks, and the result that is all but inevitable should those happen.  Netanyahu may give the impression of being reckless, throwing caution to the winds, but there is also a possible trap that he is carefully baiting.

He did not go to Harvard for nothing, nor has he been such a successful survivor for so long in the screamingly argumentative world of Israel’s whipsawing politics due to his kindness and compassion.  Mr. Netanyahu is as coldly and calculatingly ruthless as they come, and this is what he is manifesting with Israel’s neighbours, Israel’s lifelong foes.

Netanyahu comes from an ultra-right conditioning, a man of bloodied hands and steely nerve, one who is giving that late war hawk, Ariel Sharon, some competition for his record of taking no prisoners, risking it all.  The clinically targeted killing of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh in Teheran is tantamount to an act of extreme provocation, if not of war.  Reasonable men would think that the one-sided War in Gaza, a holocaust and genocide theater by any standards, was enough to satisfy Israel’s (Netanyahu’s) thirst for revenge fiftyfold to a hundredfold.  Yet, there is the daring execution of Haniyeh that has the world bracing for the unknowns that are sure to come.  They are just as sure to create a deepening of the conflict in the Middle East.  From the point of view of the Iranian High Command, the execution right under their noses is more than daring.  It is insulting and clamours for a suitable response.  The problem is that tit for tat is usually not equal in scale nor proportion.  The pressures for vengeance run too raw in Iran and, truth be told, throughout most of the Middle East.  Limited response has been the word, but what is limited to one party could be interpreted as the opening for another round of retaliatory actions.  Such have been the never-ending circular circumstances on the ground in that chokepoint and flashpoint region.

But Netanyahu is going for broke in that Israel executed a drone strike that killed the most senior Hezbollah military commander, Fuad Shukr, in Beirut.  The specter of a widening war rings the entire area.  Heavily armed combatants are arrayed against each other at close quarters, with all parties seething, and poised on a knife’s edge.  Combining these developments at the hand of Israel as a whole, they can only lead to more violence, more vengeful actions, and more loss of control in a tension-filled space.  The probability for all out conflict is overwhelming, and the issue is whether this is what Netanyahu has in mind.  He knows that other than the pro forma words of concern (and largely muted) coming out of the US and Europe, mean nothing.  They do not serve as any check on his aggressive and costly visions.  He has the backing of arms and other resources, which have never slowed for too long, and which proves to him that he is on the stronger side that will prevail.  Other men in other situations have made the same miscalculations.  There is the risk that Mr. Netanyahu, Israel, and the West may get more than they all expected.

What has become increasingly is that there are two hardline blocks lined up against each other, and positioning for ascendancy in different parts of the world.  There is an axis that includes China, Iran, and Russia.  They all have a bone to pick with America and, to some extent, Europe.  We notice the angles that have come to light in the aftermath of the Venezuelan election.  Netanyahu needs to be reined in, with America doing the job before matters become uncontrollable.

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