In an unprecedented and unprovoked military attack, Israel kills several top leaders of the Iranian military, targets the country’s nuclear facilities and commits yet another blatant crime.
By Pascal Lottaz
Overnight, the terrorist regime in Tel Aviv added another crime of aggression to its nearly endless list of the worst of all international crimes. This time, by attacking Iran in a massive bombing campaign, which Netanyahu says will continue until he judges that what he calls a “threat” from Iran’s non-existent nuclear weapons has subsided.
This is, of course, utter rubbish and reminiscent of the United States’ excuse in 2003 to commit the same crime against Iraq under the pretext of Saddam’s WMDs posing an “imminent threat” to the USA and the whole world. Netanyahu is conjuring up exactly the same phantom—even using the terminology of this being a “preemptive” strike—but with even less reason. Not only is it a verified and accepted truth, even by Israel and the USA, that the Iranians currently have no nuclear weapons, but the Americans were in active negotiations with them and scheduled to hold another meeting on Sunday, when Israel decided to commit this blatant act of war.
The Excuse
That the nuclear issue is nothing but a flimsy excuse to start an all-out war with Iran (and ultimately commit the United States to it) is shown clearly by the choice of targets. Israel didn’t only go after the nuclear facilities and the missile system of the Iranians, but also targeted top military generals, killing the Chief of Staff of Iran’s Armed Forces, Mohammad Bagheri, and General Hossein Salami, the commander-in-chief of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard (IRG). Besides the civilian casualties, these strikes on the sleeping population of Theran caused the targeted assassinations of the leadership fit neatly into Israel’s military playbook, in which they go for “decapitation” strikes against nations they choose they must eradicate. They did so with Hamas in Gaza, with Hizbollah in Lebanon, and now they are going after the leadership of Iran, and, in the process, are terrorising the entire civilian population of the country.
Netanyahu even had the audacity in his press announcement to say that Israel was not targeting ordinary Iranians but only the “dictatorship” and that Israel wants nothing but peace and happiness in its neighborhood. Really, you can’t go much more Hitler than with this unhinged framing of what clearly and utterly is a crime under all UN statutes. This is a direct infringement of the UN Charter’s prohibition on the use of force and utterly inexcusable. Of course, no European country will dare to oppose this and just exclaim that they urge “all sides” to stand down and “avoid a war”. I’m so certain we will hear this from every capital in the EU, pretending that the war had not already been started by Tel Aviv.
The Real Reason: Losing Narrative Control
The real reason why Israel is attacking Iran at this moment is that they are losing the propaganda war. The mood has changed decisively, especially in Europe, where large pro-Palestine protests are now a daily occurrence. The tremendous PR success of the Freedom Flotilla, together with the change in the press coverage of Israel’s genocide in Gaza, must have come as a great shock to the Tel Aviv regime. They know that the only thing that enables their genocidal military extermination campaigns is the unwavering support of the Collective West. That this support is eroding in front of their eyes is probably the largest threat to the Zionist project in 100 years.
Israel is losing the victim card; nobody believes its “we are just defending ourselves” BS anymore. And it wants the card back, desperately. Hence, this attack is geared to make it certain that Iran must strike back. And once the first Israeli gets killed in the counter-strike, Tel Aviv will cry at the top of its lungs that Iran is committing another holocaust, and that the Jews are being targeted by a new Nazi regime (he actually already made that connection in the above cited press briefing). Israel needs the media support of the West back; it also needs to drag the US (and maybe also the UK) into this new Middle Eastern War with Iran and commit as many foreign resources as it can to fighting the entire region, all at once.
Israel is desperate, and it needs an all-out war with an all-out war narrative of the type and kind the Ukrainians have had for the past 3 years. It needs to somehow win back narrative control in the West. The terrorists in Tel Aviv know exactly that once they lose Europe and the USA, it’s game over for their genocidal apartheid state.
I can only pray that at least the Europeans won’t fall for it again. But my hopes are slim.
Pascal Lottaz a (Swiss) academic in Japan, working at Kyoto University as an Associate Professor of the Graduate School of Law and the Hakubi Center on questions of neutrality in international relations. I also run a YouTube show called “Neutrality Studies”.
Transnational Foundation for Peace and Future Research
