Has the US ‘Lost Control’ of Israel?

When a bomb, allegedly smuggled by Israeli Mossad agents into the Teheran guest house frequented by Ismail Hamiyeh, exploded and killed the Hamas leader who was the head negotiator with Israel over terms of some kind of cease-fire in Gaza, it immediately destroyed hopes of any soon end to the slaughter in Gaza.

Worse, because the attack took place inside Iran where Hamiyeh was an official government guest, it raised the risk of a war between that country and Israel.

When the same week, an Israeli attack in the suburbs of Lebanon’s capital of Beirut killed a top military leader of Hezbollah, the armed force that operates in southern Lebanon and that Israel has fought several wars with, sometimes with significant losses and no outright wins, it also heightened the prospect of a second front in Isreal’s current war, one on the Lebanon border region and across Lebanon that again could drag in Iran, the main backer of Hezbollah and other in Gaza near Israel’s border with Egypt.

Writing about this looming crisis of a much wider war in the Middle East, the New York Times quoted the feckless Biden Secretary of State Antony Blinken as claiming the US “had not been involved in, or even informed of, the operation in Tehran.” Such blindsiding by a US ally should be shocking and grounds for at least a serious tongue-lashing, but no such thing has occurred.

The Times went on to quote Vali R. Nasr, a professor of international affairs at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, who said, “We thought it would be Vladimir Putin or Xi Jinping or Kim Jong-un who would take advantage of this [election period, and Biden’s surprise announcement of his decision not to seek re-election] in the US. ..Nobody counted on an American ally doing it.”

That analysis my conceivably be correct, Netanyahu has after all been brazenly dismissive of President Biden (at least before Trump’s once seemingly unstoppable win over Biden was upended why Biden’s dropping out), even accusing him of withholding bombs and other weapons from Israel, and ignoring White House calls to ‘kill fewer Palestinian civilians” in its targeting of Hamas leaders inside Gaza.

But the idea that the US has “lost control” of the Middle East situation, as the Times is claiming, is absurd. Israel’s military, the IDF, has been armed and supported for decades by $3.0- $3.8 billion in weapons and ammunition and is in fact the largest recipient of US military aid in the world. Moreover, Congress just passed a huge supplementary(!) $26-billion aid bill for Israel, including $14 billion in “no-strings-attached” military aid.

A country that is dependent on that huge a level of military aid cannot credibly be said to be “beyond the control” of the provider of such largesse (Israel’s entire annual military budget in 2022, a year before the start of the current war on Gaza, was $23.4 billion) . That is, unless that benefactor doesn’t really want (or dare) to exert control by threatening to withhold it.

Israeli’s theft of land from Palestinians on the West Bank with its now clearly illegal government-encouraged Jewish settler program of violent expropriations is not in the interest of the US. Clearly too, the genocidal attacks on Palestinian civilians trapped in the world’s largest concentration camp of Gaza are not in the interest of the US, especially when the slaughter is being conducted primarily with the use of US planes, rockets, tanks and howitzers, and clearly the legal apartheid conditions put on Palestinian residents in Israel are not in the interest of the US either. And yet, aside from one brief withholding for a few weeks by President Biden of one specific US-supplied weapon — the devastating 2-ton bombs provided by the US to Israel’s IDF to enable them to destroy entire multi-block areas in an effort to destroy underground tunnels — the US has not threatened to use the withholding of aid, or the threat of withholding aid to being Israel’s racist right-wing government to heel.

That is a ridiculous situation and one that makes a mockery of US propaganda declaring the US to be a “leader of free nations” or “the world’s most powerful country.”

At a minimum, the New York Times should be honest about that, and not blithely claim that US “seems not in control’ of its purported ‘“ally” Israel.

It’s way past time for the US to use the raw power it has to dictate to Israel what it needs to do if it wants to continue to receive military assistance of any kind from the US.

This article by Dave Lindorff appeared originally in ThisCantBeHappening! on its new Substack platform at https://thiscantbehappening.substack.com/. Please check out the new site and consider signing up for a cut-rate subscription that will be available until the end of the month.