Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu must have persuaded Donald Trump that a war on Iran would unfold much like the pager attack in Lebanon 18 months ago.
The two militaries would jointly decapitate the leadership in Tehran, and it would crumble just as Hezbollah had collapsed – or so it then seemed – after Israel assassinated Hassan Nasrallah, the Lebanese group’s spiritual leader and military strategist.
If so, Trump bought deeply into this ruse. He assumed that he would be the US president to “remake the Middle East” – a mission his predecessors had baulked at since George W Bush’s dismal failure to achieve the same goal, alongside Israel, more than 20 years earlier.
Netanyahu directed Trump’s gaze to Israel’s supposed “audacious feat” in Lebanon. The US president should have been looking elsewhere: to Israel’s colossal moral and strategic failure in Gaza.
There, Israel spent two years pummeling the tiny coastal enclave into dust, starving the population, and destroying all civilian infrastructure, including schools and hospitals.
Netanyahu publicly declared that Israel was “eradicating Hamas”, Gaza’s civilian government and its armed resistance movement that had refused for two decades to submit to Israel’s illegal occupation and blockade of the territory.
In truth, as pretty much every legal and human rights expert long ago concluded, what Israel was actually doing was committing genocide – and, in the process, tearing up the rules of war that had governed the period following the Second World War.
But two and a half years into Israel’s destruction of Gaza, Hamas is not only still standing, it is in charge of the ruins.
Israel may have shrunk by some 60 per cent the size of the concentration camp the people of Gaza are locked into, but Hamas is far from vanquished.
Rather, Israel is the one that has retreated to a safe zone, from which it is resuming a war of attrition on Gaza’s survivors.
Hellbound and Down 