An emergency resolution at Britain’s TUC Congress warned that “Israel threatens a much wider war in the Middle East that will lead to far greater death, destruction and instability.” It vowed to back a Britain-wide workplace day of action to stop that. The “much wider war” is already beginning. The news gets more alarming each day. On Monday, Israel’s heavy bombing of the Lebanese capital, Beirut, moved beyond the southern suburbs dominated by Hezbollah and onto the central city, with hundreds dead. The killing of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah is an extreme provocation. It had one motive: to force massive retaliation, not just by Hezbollah but by its ally, Iran. Hezbollah’s tit-for-tat responses to Israeli fire were not enough for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. By killing its long-term leader, he hopes to provoke it to unleash its still considerable missile arsenal, providing an excuse for the land invasion of Lebanon his army chiefs are already publicising. But his eyes are really on provoking an Iranian response. Israel has pushed the United States to attack Iran for years: an Iranian attack on Israel, however provoked, would likely draw in the enormous US forces stationed in the Middle East.
Iran is desperate to avoid such a war. Small wonder. Israel has nuclear weapons and recent events show nobody can rely on its leaders exercising the kind of restraint that has prevented the use of these horrific bombs since 1945. Iran clearly fears that Israel will go still further to force its hand: Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has been “removed to a secure location,” it says, anticipating that Israel may try to assassinate him next. After the murder of Haniyeh, Iran called on the UN security council to do something to stop Israel. Its prediction that without decisive action from Israel’s own backers, the Middle East would spring into flame is being borne out. If war is forced with Iran — a war which would likely entail hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of deaths — the United States and Britain will bear a heavy responsibility. Yet the crisis throws into relief the political decline of the so-called “indispensable nation.”
The US cannot control the apartheid terror-state it has armed to the teeth. It is too weak to stop sending bombs though Israel brazenly ignores its own calls for de-escalation. Its enfeebled president cannot afford to look less pro-Israel than Donald Trump in an election year, a sign of the debilitating polarisation that threatens to collapse its whole public sector every annual budget, and the collapse of its ability to act strategically. That’s evident too in Joe Biden’s concessions to sending ever more lethal weapons to Ukraine, red lines against first tanks, then fighter jets, then medium-range missiles having all been crossed, and the US stand — opposed by Britain — against authorisation for direct use of those missiles against targets deep inside Russia now wobbling. Volodymyr Zelensky’s much-touted “victory plan” resembles Netanyahu’s in one key respect: it is about provoking a massive response. Firing missiles deep into Russia will not move the front line, but it might provoke retaliation against the Western providers of those missiles, triggering a direct Nato-Russia war. This would be a catastrophe, potentially on a global scale. The world has seldom felt closer to nuclear conflict than it does today. It is up to us to try to stop this.
