OVER the course of this month, we have witnessed the obscene charade of “performative warfare” between Israel and Iran, following Israel’s flagrant and reckless bombing of the Iranian consulate in Damascus on April 1.
Iran’s retaliatory attack on Israel on April 13 was significant in scale, but, as intended, ineffectual as more than 99% of its munitions were brought down in mid-air. Israel’s response – including missile attacks on an Iranian air force base near Isfahan on April 19 – was another military fireworks display. In both cases the primary impact was in headlines, rather than damage to supposed targets.
This shadow boxing has been misrepresented by much of the Western media as, variously, “a chilling escalation” by Iran (Daily Mail), a situation that puts the Middle East “on the brink of an all-out war” (BBC), or (in the words of hard-right US cable channel Newsmax) “World War III in progress”.
In fact, the military exchanges between the regimes in Tel Aviv and Tehran have been carefully orchestrated to allow both sides to save face while avoiding a wider conflict that is in the interests of neither side.
From April 1 onwards, Israel’s primary purpose has been to get the US and other Western allies – who were becoming embarrassed by the sheer scale of Israel’s genocide in Gaza – back on side against their common enemy, Iran. The other purpose was to distract political and media attention, especially in the West, from the ongoing catastrophe in Gaza and the ever-increasing brutalisation (by both the Israeli state and armed far-right settlers) of Palestinians in the West Bank.
On Saturday, for instance, an Israeli air strike on a residential area in Rafah killed 22 people, including 18 children (most of whom belonged to the same family). Such war crimes provide a horrifying premonition of the massive civilian casualties that would result from Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s (below) threatened full-scale ground invasion of Rafah.
For both Israel and its Western allies, the tit-for-tat attacks serve as a useful distraction from the mass murder and famine in Gaza. However, they also provide a timely reminder of the dangers of a heavily militarised Middle East.
The recent conflagration may have been more show than substance, but it involved action by or against at least 10 nations (ranging from Syria and Jordan to the US, the UK and France) and a number of non-state actors allied to Iran, from Hezbollah in Lebanon to the Popular Mobilisation Forces in Iraq.
Action on this scale, no matter how cynically orchestrated, risks a mistake that could lead to a rapid and deadly escalation of conflict.
All of which underlines the importance of opposition to the arms trade for those who seek justice for Palestine and peace in the Middle East.
As was detailed in The National on Monday, the UK is the seventh-biggest arms exporter on the planet, and more than a third of those sales go to the Middle East.
READ MORE: Tories approved Israel arms exports two days after British aid workers killed
Foreign Secretary David Cameron has determined that Israel has not yet reached the threshold by which the British government should suspend arms sales – this despite more than 34,000 Palestinians being killed in Israel’s six-and-a-half month assault on Gaza, a manufactured famine in which more than two million Gazans face starvation, and the decision by the International Court of Justice (ICJ) to proceed with investigations into possible crimes of genocide by Israel in the Gaza Strip.
The cynicism of Cameron’s position extends beyond the obvious obscenity of the UK Government giving aid (albeit woefully insufficient) to Gaza with one hand, while facilitating the wholesale destruction of the Strip with the other. It also reflects a long-established contempt for international law on the part of the Western powers.
When nation-states such as the US and the UK talk of a “rules-based international order”, they mean one that will, when required, convict regional war criminals they don’t like (most notably former Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic).
There is, however, no question of international law being applied to Western leaders who commit war crimes, such as former US president George W Bush and former British prime minister Tony Blair (below).
Together, Bush and Blair bear the primary responsibility for the post-9/11 conflicts in Afghanistan, Iraq and other countries in south and central Asia, the Middle East and east Africa.
A report by Brown University in the US in May of last year estimated that the excess deaths (ie, deaths caused directly by violence or by the health and/or economic impacts of violence) caused by the “War on Terror” carried out by the US and its allies since 2001 stand somewhere between 4.5-4.6 million. Cameron’s lack of concern about continuing to arm an Israeli state that may soon be found guilty of crimes of genocide by the ICJ is as well-founded as it is contemptible.
If Bush and Blair have been allowed to live extremely comfortable lives as elder statesmen, unmolested by international justice, what are the chances, Cameron calculates, that he, a former UK prime minister and member of the House of Lords, will ever be arraigned by an international court?
READ MORE: Steph Paton: The idea that the truth will out is little comfort to Gazans
And so it goes on, with UK-based companies supplying all manner of weapons to the Israeli war machine (ranging from MLRS M270 rocket launchers to Paveway guided missiles made in Glenrothes). The Campaign Against the Arms Trade (CAAT) estimates that 15% of every F-35 fighter jet used by Israel in the destruction of Gaza has been made in the UK.
Western leaders may not be much concerned by international law but they are afraid of their own people. The global movement for Palestine, which has seen an exponential growth since October 2023, is now comparable to the historic movements against the Vietnam War in the 1960s and 70s, and the Iraq War of 2003-11.
It must be one of the central and most urgent tasks of that great Palestine solidarity movement to oppose weapons sales to Israel.
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