War between Iran and Israel | Now anything seems possible

When a head of government wanted on an international arrest warrant claims to want to liberate the people of another country from a dictatorial regime, it inevitably leaves a bitter aftertaste. A week ago, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu ordered the attack on Iran, had fighter jets bomb nuclear facilities and missile sites, and shortly after the war began, followed it up with a call for Iranians to rise up against the Islamic regime.

"We are clearing the way so that you can achieve your goal: freedom," Netanyahu told the Iranians in a video message. The Israeli government is thus also concerned with the overthrow of the Iranian regime, driven by the Israeli Air Force and completed by the Iranians themselves. Is there a detailed plan behind this with concrete steps for implementation? When asked on Thursday by the French news channel France24, Israel's ambassador to France, Joshua Zarka, explained that "the overthrow of the Iranian regime is not an official goal of this operation." In that case, the collapse of the Islamic Republic under the bombings, which can no longer be ruled out, would simply be a deadweight effect of the attackers, a side effect of treating pain with bombs.

The "evil and repressive regime" in Iran has never been weaker than at this moment, Netanyahu continued. "This is your opportunity to rise up. Let your voices be heard: Woman, Life, Freedom – Zan, Zendegi, Azadi." The people of Israel, he said, stand with the Iranians , as does he. Netanyahu's pathetic words are unlikely to have much effect on the majority of the Iranian population and will drive only a few into the streets in the hail of bombs to protest against the government.

The loud and boastful threats of annihilation against Israel since the so-called Islamic Revolution of 1979 and the opaque nuclear program, whose supposedly purely civilian purposes are doubted by many sides, have ultimately led to Iran finding itself in a single combat with a powerful opponent, a battle that can only lose: Israel's army is battle-tested and technologically far superior to that of Iran.

For the right-wing Israeli government of Benjamin Netanyahu, anything now seems possible. After the brutal massacre of Israeli civilians and soldiers by Hamas and the Islamic State on October 7, 2023, Israel appeared severely damaged, its myth of invincibility damaged. The response to the errors of the Israeli security authorities that made the Hamas attack possible is well known: a merciless, genocidal war with over 55,000 documented deaths in the Gaza Strip , to destroy the terrorist militia Hamas and its allies and free the hostages.

The latter has long been a secondary war aim. During the now 20-month-long war, the Israeli government has proceeded step by step, testing how far military force can go. The army and intelligence services can point to numerous successes: In mid-September 2024, they eliminated numerous fighters of the Iran-backed Shiite Hezbollah militia in Lebanon by detonating thousands of bomb-rigged radio pagers. Just ten days later, the Israeli army killed Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah in an airstrike on Beirut. At the end of July 2024, Ismail Haniyeh, head of the Hamas political bureau, was killed in the heart of Tehran; in mid-October, Haniyeh's successor, Yahya Sinwar, was next in line. Finally, at the end of the year, the regime of Bashar al-Assad in Syria, Iran's most important state ally in the region, collapsed completely unexpectedly.

Iran's auxiliary forces of the so-called Axis of Resistance, such as Hamas and Hezbollah, which were intended to keep conflicts away from Iranian territory as key elements of the forward defense strategy, have since been significantly weakened, and with it Iran's position in the region. In an article for the Israeli daily Haaretz, author Jack Khoury even goes so far as to say that an Axis of Resistance and an alliance never existed. "The whole thing looks more like a geopolitical fiction that all parties have exploited."

"This is your opportunity to speak up. Let your voices be heard."

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to the Iranian people

From both the Israeli and the American perspectives , the reordering of the Middle East seems within reach; it is more than just a thought experiment in a think tank drawer. Reordering the strategic landscape of the Middle East by force is an old idea of ​​Israel and the USA, which has been revived at regular intervals as a simulation for at least half a century, sometimes openly, more often implicitly through the development of events. In an analytical article in the French daily newspaper "Le Monde" from October 2024, the authors recall that Ariel Sharon, as Israeli Defense Minister, ordered his troops to invade Lebanon in 1982—not only to destroy Yasser Arafat's fighters, who were carrying out attacks in Israel from southern Lebanon.

Sharon also sought to bring his Lebanese ally, Bashir Jamael, leader of the para-fascist Christian Maronite Kataib (Phalanges) party, to power in Beirut and expel the Syrian armed forces from the Lebanese territory they had occupied since 1976. Israel's long-held dream, which emerged in the 1950s, was to dismember Lebanon and establish a Christian mini-state, essentially a satellite of the Jewish state. But no sooner had Bashir Jamael been elected president than he was assassinated.

Fantasies of a reshaping of the Middle East resurfaced in 2003, in the wake of the US invasion of Iraq, which was justified by fabricated "evidence." After the fall of Saddam Hussein's dictatorship, President George W. Bush and the neoconservative hardliners around him advocated externally imposed democratization—with the goal of creating a "Greater Middle East" more conciliatory toward Israel and the United States. However, the overthrow of Saddam Hussein's Baathist regime brought Iraq into Iran's sphere of influence, and Israel's offensive against Lebanon ended in partial failure.

Israel does not intend to shift borders comprehensively, at most to make minimal use of the territory of neighboring countries such as Lebanon, Syria, and Jordan . Thus, the Israeli army continues to bomb "terror targets" in southern Lebanon and Beirut. In Syria, after the fall of the Assad regime, the Israeli army destroyed Syrian naval vessels and army installations, occupied a buffer zone in the Golan Heights in violation of international law, and presents itself as the protector of the Druze and Kurds, thus playing these minorities off against the new central government – ​​fatal for reconstruction in Syria.

Israel senses its opportunity to exploit the weakness of its neighboring countries for its own strategic goals. "The State of Israel is establishing itself as a center of power in our region, something not seen for decades," Netanyahu said. Israel strives to surround itself with friendly governments – even by force – in order to ward off real or perceived threats. Everything in foreign policy has been and continues to be subordinated to this security doctrine. To this end, Israeli governments wage wars, regularly violate international law almost routinely, and care little for the people living in the region. In the Gaza Strip, hostile conditions are being created in preparation for the expulsion of the surviving Palestinians, while the expansion of illegal Jewish settlements in the West Bank is paving the way for annexation.

The war against Iran is likely Netanyahu's last hope of scoring points with his people. The Israeli public supports the attack on Iran . This is shown by a poll published Thursday by the Israel Democracy Institute and reported on by the Israeli daily newspaper Haaretz: According to the poll, 82 percent of Israeli Jews support the war and its timing. Another 10 percent said they support the move but believe the timing is wrong. Even among left-leaning Jews, a majority of 57 percent supports the attack on Iran.

The US and Europe have adopted Israel's agenda. Since the early 1990s, Netanyahu has regularly warned that Iran would have a nuclear bomb in a few years. "We had no evidence of systematic efforts to develop nuclear weapons," said the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), Rafael Grossi, in a recent CNN interview. The false accusations that Iran is on the verge of having a bomb are being accepted uncritically in the West, and a blatant violation of international law is being tolerated without challenge. The "dirty work" that the Israeli government, in the words of German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, is also doing for "us," says a lot about the convergence of interests between Israel on the one hand and Europe and the US on the other: Israel acts as the advocate for the "civilized West" in the Wild Middle East, and thus for the region's former colonial powers. And a reorganization of the balance of power is obviously also in their interest – for good business and the free flow of fossil fuels.