Afew billion people across the world, especially in energy and food imports-dependent poor countries of the Global South, are hurriedly stocking up on food, fuel and medicines, as the entire world (again) braces for widening war in West Asia. Worsening war in oil-rich West Asia will not only block oil exports to the world but higher oil costs would immediately add to transport and processing costs, thereby making food less accessible and more expensive.
People in affluent societies, while not having to worry about malnutrition and food riots, still worry about scarcities and disruption of normal lives due to economic volatility and security risks. Specifically, war-related countries like Israel must enhance their military preparedness to meet threats that their own war-like actions provoke.
All this is the repercussions of latest, further set of military strikes by Israel inside other neighbouring state territories during the past week, causing deaths and considerable urban damage. Firstly, there was a direct Israeli bombing in south Lebanon in which a militia commander of the Lebanese Hezbollah movement was killed. Secondly, in the heart of Tehran, Iran’s crowded capital, Hamas’ political chief was killed by a mysteriously planted bomb.
Large poster hoardings in glossy Tel Aviv carried pictures of Hamas’ political chief Ismail Haniyeh and Hezbollah second tier military commander Fuad Shukr with labels “Assassinated” in Hebrew. While the Israeli Zionist regime openly boasts about the killing of Shukr in Lebanon, the Likud party-led regime dares not openly claim the killing of Haniyeh in Tehran, capital of Iran, the most powerful state in West Asia after Turkiye.
Neither the Government of Lebanon, nor the affected organisation, Hezbollah, has retaliated against Israel for its crudely blatant aggressive action to invade Lebanon (which is not at war with Israel). While the Hezbollah leadership has threatened “revenge” action, so far no action has been taken.
Instead, the open amassing of troops, airforce and naval assets are all being done by the United States in tandem with Israel. Within Israel, too, the public is now at an even higher level of tension as their leaders openly brace for possible attacks by Iran and Hezbollah. In actual effect, what we are seeing are deliberate actions by a desperate Israeli regime that wants to sustain the current extreme instability and war conditions in order that it can extend its regime. Netanyahu’s Likud wants to avoid elections and possible subsequent accountability for multiple wrongdoings both within and without their country.
Geopolitical project
The Western power bloc postures more aggressively in support of Israel because the colonial state of Israel is a key Western geopolitical project that the West has chosen to militarily and economically sustain for three quarters of a century.
Many have been the colonies forcibly imposed on distant foreign lands (usually with genocide of the inhabitants) by the European colonial powers which have then been sustained often at economic loss for long periods. Many have been the colonies that have subsequently been dismantled when found untenable. Israel is but the last such expensive colonial project.
Of course, the biggest costs of such colonisation are met, or suffered, by the indigenous populations. Nevertheless, it is a test of time and sustainability that decides when such colonial projects are given up by the invading power.
Very often, if the indigenous populations are wholly eradicated (like “vermin”, as many colonisers have explicitly stated – including Israeli ministers), then that region is permanently colonised and European-style colonies stabilise, only to later become European settler ‘republics’ or ‘dominions’.
The presence of non-European populations either as descendants of Black slaves or as remnants of native communities have subsequently resulted in further democratisation of those countries and later social inclusion of these non-European peoples. Brazil, Mexico, Bolivia, Peru and many other Latin American states are yet going through such post-colonial processes.
But the Euro-colonial enterprise retreated in all those regions in which the indigenous peoples and civilisations survived the colonisation and recovered to effectively render such ‘colonies’ too costly for the colonisers. The last such retreat was in South Africa where after decades of Western military backing for Apartheid, the local populations succeeded in winning back full freedom in 1994.
Israel remains, bloodily, a continuing Western colonial ‘outpost’ project. The very word as expressed by Israeli Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu in his speech to the US Congress. It is ironic that many descendants of African slaves now serving as American legislators were among the descendants of White settlers who gave standing ovations to imperialist arguments by their invitee speaker.
Thus, in West Asia, we have a series of actions of extreme belligerence by the Western power bloc, mainly through their proxy State of Israel – belligerence not only of genocide inside Israeli-occupied Palestine, but also in the continuing invasive bombing of neighbour states. These Western powers themselves have their own sustained invader presence in Syria and Iraq and, in the Red Sea.
Resistance actors
At the same time, Israel is also busy with targeted killings of various resistance actors residing inside neighbouring states. Just two months ago, a group of Iranian military officers resident as advisers to their Syrian allies in Damascus, were openly targeted and killed by Israel in an act that violated all kinds of international and criminal law including murder and diplomatic immunity.
Then, too, the world’s poor went on alert fearing that regional instability would heap more economic and social burdens. Then, too, those countries (Iran, Syria) that were invaded and attacked exercised mature restraint and, after limited actions (which Israel, again, aggressively countered), did not further destabilise the region. Now Israel has done it again. And, they have been doing such killings and bombings throughout the entire history of the Israeli colonial project.
In 1981, Israel bombed Iraq during the Saddam Hussein Baathist regime to destroy Iraq’s sole nuclear power station – yet under construction. Imagine if Saddam Hussein’s air force had done the same to Israel’s own single nuclear reactor. Today, Israel possesses hundreds of nuclear bombs built with fissionable material from that reactor.
In 2007, Operation ‘Outside the Box’ was an Israeli airstrike that fully destroyed a suspected nuclear reactor, referred to as the Al Kibar site, in eastern Syria. Despite persistent rumours of a joint US-Israeli operation, the Israeli and US Governments did not acknowledge the secret raids until months later.
The nature of the assassination of Hamas leader Haniyeh is yet unclear with the Iranian government refusing to divulge details. There is much speculation whether it was a joint US-Israeli operation.
As many analysts have pointed out during the recent 75th anniversary celebrations of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO), the world’s richest, militarily best equipped geopolitical force did not prosecute any war during the entirety of the Cold War, the global context for which that alliance was created. Why not?
The deterrent caused by the existence of a countervailing nuclear military alliance, the Warsaw Pact was enough for NATO to restrain itself. The powerful socialist bloc led by the Soviet Union created the Warsaw Pact in 1955 in direct response to the hostile capitalist bloc’s already amassed military alliance NATO founded in 1949.
NATO’s physically, socially and politically devastating military adventures across the world from Libya to Somalia to Syria and Afghanistan and other places in between, all began after the collapse of the Warsaw Pact. That is, with the ending of that ‘deterrent’ enforced by this geostrategic military-economic global balance of power.
In the interim, however, from within the Second (former socialist) World and Third World, there emerged several politico-economic regional and local powers: Brazil, Nigeria, South Africa, Tanzania, India, Iran, Indonesia, Vietnam and most recently Bangladesh. As they give leadership in various ways to the other states in their neighbourhoods, the overall combination of some 140 of the UN member-states today form the ‘Global South’. But the Global South has yet to develop any capacity for deterrent against the freely rampaging Western power bloc.
Right now, the Western news media is deliberately whipping up global war expectations in order to retain the psychological-geopolitical edge of the Western power bloc in the aftermath of Israel’s direct and highly aggressive military actions of invading neighbouring states and physically eliminating individual officials.
Western news media is quickly focusing on the potential for military retaliations by the affected neighbouring states (or entities within those states) and the wider politico-economic harm, as if to take attention away from the original provocative and illegal actions by Israel.
No Western Government has directly referred to the assassinations nor discussed the Israeli role. Instead, the West is cautioning against ‘escalation’ only after their protégé, Israel, has escalated the situation with these two targeted foreign invasions and assassinations. Indeed, Washington, even as it warns against anyone ‘escalating’, is itself actively, concretely, adding to the escalation by rushing additional American military assets to the region.
It will be up to Iran and Lebanon and other resisting entities to show the world what restraint and diplomatic maturity is possible in the face of provocations, even as the world must also see the exercise of sovereignty by affected states.
