THE anti-war movement has been warning of this for 12 months. Now, it is happening. Israel’s aggression is plunging the Middle East into a regional war. And Western leaders are waving it on.
 
Iran’s ballistic missile attack is being treated as a standalone provocation. It is as if the genocide in Gaza, the bombing of Lebanon, the assassination of Hamas leader Ismael Haniyeh in Tehran, Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah in Beirut and many others hadn’t happened. In the last few days, Israel has been bombing Yemen, Gaza, Syria and Lebanon. Over the last few months, it has attacked all its neighbours.
 
Its claim, dutifully repeated by news outlets across the Western world, that it is “targeting terrorists” is demonstrably, blatantly untrue.
 
Half of the population of Gaza, one million people, have lost their homes. The health and education systems have been destroyed; 45,000 people are confirmed dead, almost certainly badly underestimating the death toll.

Just a week of attacks on Lebanon have displaced one million people. Education has been suspended in schools as they are needed to shelter a terrified population.
 
These are punishment attacks. Punishment attacks are illegal in international law. There is a grim logic behind this kind of systemised killing. It is that Hamas and Hezbollah have widespread popular support. Israel is out to demoralise, terrorise, and, if necessary, decimate and disperse whole populations.
 
This barbarity is not simply a response to Hamas’s attacks one year ago. The commentators and experts, the politicians and the news anchors try to pretend otherwise, but they and everyone else knows this conflict didn’t begin on October 7 2023. Israel has attacked Gaza or Palestinian organisations in Gaza 15 times since 1947. In this century alone, it assaulted Gaza in 2008, 2009, 2012, 2014 and 2021.
 
Israel invaded Lebanon in 1978 when Iran was still under the murderous control of the US-backed Shah. They invaded and occupied again in 1982 before Hezbollah existed in pursuit of Palestinian freedom fighters and again in the 34-day war in 2006 when it was driven out.
 
This relentless aggression is the logic of a state based on the expulsion or repression of a whole people. The Israeli state has effectively been at war with the Palestinians and its supporters ever since it was established by the Nakba in 1947.
 
Since the so-called international community abandoned even the pretence of trying to find a diplomatic solution, Israel’s only real strategy has been a military one.

In 2004, during the brutal occupation of Iraq, US secretary of state Donald Rumsfeld accepted that the peace process was over, and green-lighted the settlement of the West Bank and the transformation of Gaza into an open prison.
 
Netanyahu’s current posture is the fruit of that decision. The Israeli cabinet is clearly intent on drawing the US into a massive military reorganisation of the Middle East, reflected in the shocking fact that its operation to kill Nasrallah was dubbed “new order.”