Since 1948, Israel has nurtured an ethos according to which its very existence is imperiled. Even before it was born, the country was in danger of extinction because Syria, Iraq, Egypt and Jordan rose up to annihilate it.  Since then, a new oppressor has risen periodically, threatening to “throw us into the sea.” Once upon a time it was ‘Abd al-Nasser, and when he disappeared, it was Saddam Hussein. After Saddam was defeated with American help, it has become the turn of the Iranian tyrant, who is developing nuclear weapons to eliminate us and proclaim a Shiite victory throughout the Middle East.

In the past, however, it turned out that things were not quite as they were mooted. The monarchical and backward Arab regimes which invaded in 1948 did not truly intend to conquer Palestine, and their armies mirrored the weakness and decay of their regimes. In 1967, ‘Abd al-Nasser entered the war in an ill-conceived way and was utterly defeated. The “existential threat” turned out to have been imaginary, while Israel expanded its territory threefold. The bluff of Saddam Hussein was revealed when the Americans invaded Iraq in 2003, claiming he had “weapons of mass destruction.” What he had, it turned out, was a factory for cap pistols. This adventure cost the Americans many billions, with thousands of soldiers killed and wounded, and it took away their desire to continue fighting in the name of an “existential danger” to Israel.

Yes, the world is fed up with Israel’s “existential danger,” so Barack Obama decided to reach an agreement with Iran and limit its ability to develop nuclear weapons. Israel stomped its feet in anger. Netanyahu went all the way to the US Congress to incite against Obama, but in vain. Nothing helped until Donald Trump came on the scene, and Israel breathed a sigh of relief. The agreement with Iran was rescinded, Trump imposed severe sanctions on the Iranians, and the Mossad did in Iran as it pleased, from the assassination of scientists, through cyberattacks, to the theft of the nuclear archive.

The end is known – Trump was defeated by Biden, in Iran an even more radical president was elected, the centrifuges work overtime, and all parties to the original nuclear deal have returned to the table in Vienna. Once again, Israel is alone, and once again it is trying to convince the world that an “existential danger” is at its door.

But the world has moved on, and Iran’s existential threat to Israel has given way to more tangible existential threats. The Biden administration has set new priorities for the world, with three existential threats that demand vigorous, global action. The first is the climate crisis, which threatens the existence of life on earth. The second is the pandemic. And the third is the threat to democracy from totalitarian regimes like China and Russia, not to mention the neo-fascist currents headed by Donald Trump.

Iran’s place in the range of threats is marginal, and the new Israeli government’s cries of “existential danger” fall on deaf ears. For Israel, climate change is an anecdote, the pandemic is something we can live with, and there is no concern about totalitarianism. Israel’s conciliatory attitude toward the Chinese, its warm relationship with Putin, its longing for Trump, and its alliances with Bin Salman, al-Sisi, Abdullah, and the Emirates show where its heart is.

In fact, the “Abraham Accords” with the Gulf States tell the whole story. While Iran is verbally threatening Israel, in practice its eyes are fixed on the Arab regimes, led by Saudi Arabia, for which Iran really does pose an “existential danger.” It was this threat that threw them into the arms of Israel, with the generous assistance of Trump and his son-in-law, Jared Kushner. Iran has managed to undermine Syria, Yemen, Iraq and Lebanon, all on the pretext of liberating Jerusalem. To judge from its actions on the ground, it poses an existential danger not to Israel, but to millions of Arab citizens who are forced to leave their countries and become refugees. Israel is not a target and never was. It is and was a pretext. Syria, Yemen, Iraq, and Lebanon are the real targets, and they are paying the price for Iran’s expansionist aspirations.

At the same time, while the Iranian regime is playing the Israeli card to make gains abroad and suppress domestic opposition, in Israel the word “Iran” has become a code to continue inflating the defense budget at the expense of the resource-hungry sectors that are needed to reduce social gaps. However, the world is no longer buying the security bluff, and many Israelis are fed up with it too.

In an opinion piece against raising the budgetary pension for members of the standing army (Haaretz, November 28), Iris Leal writes: “In a land beset by enemies, everyone gripes about the cost of living, the labor market, wage gaps and the housing market, yet time and time again we vote on one issue along: security. Existential dread drives most of Israel’s citizenry, and the people’s army is the apple of their eye.”

To this Leal adds, “The overwhelming rage at Defense Minister Benny Gantz’s decision to raise the budgetary pension of already retired standing-army personnel surprised even him. Gantz is still living in times when every word uttered by the Israel Defense Forces is accepted as true by definition, every demand met, and every hint of resistance quelled through emotional blackmail and unsubtle warnings of the military catastrophe on the horizon.”

And what would the Israeli army have done if the sanctions imposed by Trump on the Iranian regime had indeed achieved their goal? What would have happened if a new Iranian “green revolution,” like the one suppressed by the regime in 2009, had established democracy there? There is one answer: the Arab Spring would have returned in full force. And what would have happened if the second revolutionary wave had overthrown al-Sisi’s regime while eliminating Iranian militias in Iraq and Hezbollah’s control of Lebanon? The answer is clear:  all of Israel’s autocratic allies in the region would have fallen, one after the other, starting with the Saudis. Democracy is the real existential threat to the Saudis and the Emirates, who supported all the coups to quell the Arab Spring. In the end, it is not the Iranian regime that poses an existential danger, but the possibility of a democratic revolution, which will raise the Arab world from its ruins, the same ruins that Israel and its accomplices thrive on.

The overthrow of the Iranian regime is an existential interest first and foremost for the Iranian people themselves, who suffer from political and cultural oppression, as well as deep poverty. It is also in the interest of the Arab peoples whose countries were destroyed by Iranian intervention. It is in the interest of the Palestinian people, who are groaning and fighting against Israel’s denial of their basic rights. In contrast, the Israeli interest is to keep the Middle East devastated, backward, poor and oppressed, in order to continue maintaining its schizophrenic regime, which ranges from democracy for Jews to apartheid for Palestinians. The world has already moved on to another era while Israel continues to educate itself from faded pages written during the Cold War, which depict it as the bulwark of the democratic West in a totalitarian sea. The world is changing, but Israel and its partners in the region, and with them the Iranian regime, remain mired in the past.

The post “Wolf! Wolf! Iran! Iran!“ first appeared on Da'am Party: One state - Green Economy.

Political assessment for the Central Committee, Sept. 7, 2014

The war against the Gaza Strip lasted 52 days and ended as it had begun: the siege on the Strip continues, and both Israel and Hamas declared they had won, though in fact neither achieved victory. Like previous rounds in this destructive war, the people pay the price, particularly the Palestinian people who lost more than 2,000 lives, half of them civilians, as well as tens of thousands wounded and hundreds of thousands made homeless.

It is impossible to determine who won and who lost because the two sides cannot be compared. On one side, a developed country whose citizens enjoy a GDP of some $30,000 per capita, compared with $3,000 in Gaza; and an army using the most advanced technologies and a budget of $17 billion, compared with an organization armed with primitive weapons and a budget of just a few million dollars. Thus the battle is not between equals and the results are known in advance.

So the question is why Israel failed to bring down Hamas. The answer is simple: Israel had no intention of bringing down Hamas, because Israel has no alternative to the Hamas regime, and does not want to reoccupy the Gaza Strip.

Right from the beginning of the war, the Hamas regime was under no threat. This raises the question – why did Hamas continue to rain rockets onto Israel for so long, despite the terrible price Gazans paid in life, property and infrastructure? According to the Israeli defense minister, Israel poured $2 billion into the war effort and caused some $5 billion of damage.

The answer to this riddle can be found in the two sides’ conflicting aims. Hamas aimed to raise the siege on the Strip, just as it had aimed in the previous two wars. Israel, on the other hand, wanted to throttle the Strip and thus cause Hamas to lay down its weapons. The two sides had no choice but to wage a war of attrition – until one side succeeded in wearing down the other.

Gaza: between Qatar and Saudi Arabia

The war on Gaza cannot be understood without looking at events in the Arab world. For the first time, two clear axes have developed: one including Egypt and Saudi Arabia, the other including Qatar and Turkey. In the past, Hamas relied on the dissident bloc represented by Iran, Syria and the Hezbollah in Lebanon, but the Arab Spring reshuffled the deck and created a new reality. The old regimes collapsed, states became arenas of civil war and crumbled, and new axes arose in which the Gulf States play a central role. The Arab Spring caused a split between Saudi Arabia and Qatar within the Gulf Cooperation Council. This is a fundamental disagreement over how to address the Arab Spring, and all attempts to bridge their differences have failed. Saudi Arabia was adamantly opposed to the uprising of January 25 which brought down Mubarak’s regime in Egypt, but Qatar supported the Muslim Brotherhood which took over the regime in democratic elections. The disagreement is over the best way to douse the fires of revolution among the Arab peoples who are demanding democracy, bread and freedom.

Qatar believes the time of the old regimes embodied by dictatorships like Mubarak’s is over. But it does not seek Western-style democracy. It intends to halt the democratic uprising among the young revolutionaries who aim for a modern form of government, by assisting the Muslim Brotherhood in “democratically” taking over the revolution. Saudi Arabia, on the other hand, sees political Islam – particularly the version espoused by the Muslim Brotherhood – as a direct threat to its monarchist dictatorship, so much so that Egypt’s Salafi party Al-Nour (identified with Saudi Arabia) supported the military coup which brought down the Islamic president, Mohamed Morsi.

This is the background to the latest war on Gaza, in which Hamas was supported by Qatar and Turkey while Israel stood with Saudi Arabia and Egypt. This situation meant the sides could not reach any agreement and thus the war raged for such a long time despite all efforts to achieve a ceasefire. Egypt proposed a ceasefire followed immediately by talks towards an agreement between Israel and Hamas, while Qatar insisted any ceasefire would depend on the Gaza siege being lifted, the building of a sea port in the Strip, and the release of prisoners who had already been released in the Gilad Shalit deal and subsequently recaptured. The Egyptians also insisted that the Palestinians be represented by the Palestinian Authority (PA) and refused to talk with Khaled Mashal, head of Hamas’ politburo in Qatar.

The pretense of Palestinian unity

The war on Gaza also exposed the opportunistic

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