The case for attacking Iran had all the elements of déjà vu. It seemed so much like 2003 all over again, except that the build-up to the invasion of Iraq that year in March was more prolonged as the US and the UK initially sought UN sanctions, even as massive demonstrations took place across the world. There was the infamous ‘sexed up’ and ‘dodgy dossier’ about the weapons of mass destruction (WMD) that was the big fat lie used to sell the war and which contained portions from an Oxford University PhD thesis plagiarised by the British government that Colin Powell, then US Secretary of State, speaking in the UN Security Council, referred to as ‘fine’ evidence.
All this happened well within living memory. One of the most famous quotes of Marx is about the repetition of history, the first time as ‘tragedy’ and the second time as ‘farce’. History now recurs with sickening frequency, each time ever more farcically. Back in 2003, when Iraqi WMD became the casus belli, one of the weapons inspectors from the 1990s who figured prominently was a man called Scott Ritter who dismissed claims of Iraqi WMD. In a 2006 book Target Iran, Ritter said that if there was going to be a war in Iran, it would be ‘made in Israel’.
Israel is not the typical client state doing the US’ bidding in the Middle East. Israel keeps proving to be the proverbial tail that wags the American dog. The cause for this twisted neurological inversion of the Israeli extremity prevailing over the US imperial central nervous system is the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and the larger Israeli lobby, comprehensively explained by John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt in their 2007 book The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy.
Israel under Benjamin Netanyahu now seems out of control. The genocide in Gaza has continued for over 20 months, with Israel attacking Lebanon, Syria, Yemen and now Iran. Israel’s recent unending wars have been attributed to Netanyahu’s careerism trumping Israel’s, to use that favourite and fetishised term of realist theorists of international relations, ‘national interest’. But the problem is deeper. It is to do with the very configuration of the Middle East created by borders drawn up in a secret agreement between an Englishman and a Frenchman, the famous Sykes-Picot agreement in 1916, followed the next year in 1917 by Britain’s insertion into the picture of a commitment to the creation of a Jewish homeland, contained in the Balfour declaration.
Israel, in tandem with the US and unimaginatively parroted by the European trio of the UK, France and Germany, keeps saying that Iran cannot have nuclear weapons. Why Iran and not Israel?
Israel, through its military actions, actualises the potentially genocidal element inside every nation-state, by weaponising sovereignty against the weakest. It refuses to declare its borders to indicate where its sovereignty ends and where those of its neighbours, most notably Palestinians, begin. Since 1993, Israeli leaders from Shimon Peres to Ariel Sharon, to Ehud Olmert to Benjamin Netanyahu, have kept invoking Iran as an ‘existential’ threat, exacerbated by the imminent acquisition of nuclear weapons. Israel, in tandem with the US and unimaginatively parroted by the European trio of the UK, France and Germany, keeps saying that Iran cannot have nuclear weapons. Why Iran and not Israel? Israel is not even a signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and its possession of nuclear weapons is an open secret. The racist assumption underlying this ‘Iran can’t have it’ line is the nod and wink to Israel.
What adds to the irony is that US actions over the last three decades have been to consistently shred diplomacy that then incentivises Iran to develop nuclear weapons. Recall, Trump pulled out of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) in 2017 and the recent attack on Iran happened as negotiations were about to be held in Oman. The logic is a stop and start one of pull-out-of-diplomacy; push-Iran-to-nuclearisation; pretext-for-war.
The June 2025 Twelve-day War
This round of fighting between Iran and Israel ended in 12 days with Trump’s sudden announcement of a ceasefire, soon after the US used B-2 Stealth fighter jets to drop bunker-buster bombs over Iran’s nuclear facility at Fordow with Tomahawk missiles launched from a submarine at the Natanz and Esfahan facilities.
Iran continued its barrage of missiles on Israel and notably targeted the al-Udeid US military base in Qatar. This precipitated the move towards the ceasefire with Qatari diplomacy kicking in, even as the Qataris expressed anger at the Iranian attack, suggesting it would ‘scar’ the relationship between them. The US bombing was meant to ‘obliterate’ Iran’s nuclear capabilities. The day after, a Pentagon intelligence account leaked to the US media suggested limited damage that may have set Iran’s nuclear ambitions back by ‘only a few months’. Trump responded to this angrily. Two days later, a CIA report suggested much more damage, almost as if to appease Trump.
What the sudden end to this 12-day war, as it is being billed, in historical reference to the 1967 six-day war, conveys is that when the Israelis are in the fighting arena, they need Big Daddy America from outside the ring to greenlight, cheer on and veto resolutions in the Security Council that call for ceasefires and an end to the fighting. At crucial moments, Big Daddy America may have to enter the ring and do the fighting on Israel’s behalf, when the going gets tough, as it did with Iran’s attacks which Trump himself seems to have acknowledged at the NATO Summit at the Hague a few days after the ceasefire.
Israel refuses to declare its borders to indicate where its sovereignty ends and where those of its neighbours, most notably Palestinians, begin.
Mark Rutte, the NATO secretary general, was at Trump’s side when he (Rutte) commented that ‘daddy’ had to step in and do the needful after Trump referred to Israel and Iran as two children fighting. The Iranians have been quick to celebrate the ceasefire as a major victory, especially in the light of the strategic depth lost in the last year with the fall of ally Bashar al-Assad in Syria and the weakening of Hezbollah in Lebanon when it lost its powerful leader Hassan Nasrallah. Iran has also suffered from a steady hemorrhaging of senior military personnel and nuclear scientists through targeted Israeli assassinations.
Israel’s Defense of its Actions
There is something else that emerges from Israel’s unstopping belligerence—its talking points to defend its actions that are amplified by sympathetic commentators in the Western media are now becoming repetitive and cliched. Whenever the number of civilians killed by Israel in Gaza has been brought up, Israel has wheeled out the excuse of Hamas hiding behind civilians it uses as human shields.
Back in July 2006, when Israel launched military actions on Southern Lebanon that lasted for 34 days, it used the same argument of Hezbollah using civilians as human shields. Any criticism of Israeli actions has been met with the anti-semitism and ‘blood libel’ accusation. The ‘Israel has the right to defend itself’ defense has been made ad nauseum to rationalise the opposite—Israeli offence.
The Western media has done its best to make the indefensible case for Israel. It has given significant airtime to Reza Pehlavi, son of the last Shah of Iran deposed in the 1979 Islamic Revolution, who speaks unruffled English. The smoothest English spoken and written on Western media platforms cannot cover Israeli atrocities. These tired talking points in the Western media have become depleted and are clearly not working as public opinion decisively moves against Israel.
Lessons from New York
The direction of politics can be discerned from the city of New York, one of the great homes of American Jewry, where 33-year-old socialist Zohran Mamdani has won the Democratic mayoral primary. In an earlier televised debate, as every single mayoral candidate expressed fealty to Israel by saying it would be the first country they would visit if they won, Mamdani stood his ground, saying he would stay in New York to serve New Yorkers.
The great British historian Eric Hobsbawm, himself a Jew, once commented that a Jew in Brooklyn was more interesting than a Jew in Tel Aviv, as living among gentiles is more of a creative stimulus. Hobsbawm’s point was about the great contributions of Jewish intellectualism from physics to filmmaking.
What emerges is that Israel is not necessarily a condition for the flourishing of Jews, intellectually or otherwise. Obsolete politicians like former President Joe Biden argued that Israel is a guarantee for the security of Jews across the world. In the lame duck last year of his presidency that was complicit in the Gaza genocide, Biden reiterated a point first made in 1986, when he said: “If there were not an Israel, we’d have to invent one”. The invention is an apartheid state that exacerbates anti-semitism through heinous acts such as the killing of 549 Gazans in the past month who were queuing up for aid from the dubious Gaza Humanitarian Foundation.
Israel is correct when it says Iran must not possess nuclear weapons. That only holds true if Israel does not possess any either.
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Amir Ali teaches at the Centre for Political Studies, JNU, New Delhi
