Israel's Unprovoked Bombing of Iran Violates International Law. Full Stop.

The government led by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Thursday launched a war on Iran, bombing sites related to the latter’s civilian nuclear refinement program at Natanz and Fordow but also targeting Tehran apartment buildings where senior regime military figures were present.

If Israeli fighter jets struck unenriched uranium stockpiles, they will have thrown radioactive dust into the air, which may cause lung cancer in the affected population. If they struck enriched uranium, that would be like a dirty bomb. Israel itself has several hundred atomic bombs and is the reason for the nuclear arms race in the Middle East, but Tel Aviv and Washington ignore this stockpile of warheads when they denounce Iran’s civilian nuclear enrichment program (and now try to destroy it), even though Iran does not have a bomb and no major Western intelligence agency thinks they have militarized their program.

Trump had signaled repeatedly that he did not want the Israelis to attack, but Netanyahu appears to hold to the TACO (Trump Always Chickens Out) theory of the president’s behavior.

Among those killed were the Chief of Staff of Iran’s conventional armed forces, Maj. Gen. Mohammad Hossein Baqeri. This would be like a hostile foreign nation bombing an apartment building in Washington, D.C., to kill (God forbid) Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Dan Caine. Then the Israeli bombers killed the head of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), Maj. Gen. Hossain Salami. We don’t have an exact equivalent of the IRGC in the US, but maybe it would be like a foreign country bombing Steve Nordhaus, the head of the National Guard Bureau. Another high ranking IRGC officer, Maj. Gen. Gholam Ali Rashid, was also killed. The Israelis rubbed out Fereydoun Abbasi, the chief of the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran, the counterpart of Chris Wright, Secretary of Energy.

Iran launched 100 drones at Israel in retaliation.

Netanyahu announced that it was only the beginning of a days-long campaign.

Iran is not assessed by U.S. intelligence to have a military nuclear weapons program, only a civilian uranium enrichment program. The country is allowed in international law to make fuel for its Bushehr reactor, built by Russia, with more planned. Thus, the Israeli attack violates international humanitarian law.

Israel is now waging war on people in Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, Iraq and Iran, in what appears to be an attempt to establish itself as a regional hegemon and to quash any regional opposition to its plans to ethnically cleanse the over 5 million Palestinians it militarily occupies.

Netanyahu launched the strikes to thwart the peace negotiations being conducted with Iran by President Donald J. Trump’s administration via Oman, striking a day before the next talks were scheduled to take place. Trump had signaled repeatedly that he did not want the Israelis to attack, but Netanyahu appears to hold to the TACO (Trump Always Chickens Out) theory of the president’s behavior. He pointedly thanked Trump in his address to the nation, clearly hoping that Iran might take some action against America in response and so draw Trump into a war he clearly does not want.

Ironically, Trump himself paved the way to this war by trashing the 2015 nuclear deal concluded by the UN Security Council with Iran, which effectively blocked Iran from ever militarizing its program. Iran faithfully adhered to its prescriptions until 2019, a year after Trump tore up the treaty and placed “maximum pressure” sanctions on Iran. Had the 2015 deal remained in place, it is difficult to imagine the Security Council putting up with Netanyahu’s military adventurism, which might have attracted serious sanctions.

Netanyahu was likely to some extent wagging the dog with this attack, since his governmental coalition is in danger of falling apart over the issue of the conscription of Ultra-Orthodox Jews, most of whom support Netanyahu. The latter, however, has been led to argue for conscription. The Ultra-Orthodox Jews are some 14% of the population now, but were only 2% when Israel was founded and the government of David Ben-Gurion pledged to allow them to study the Torah rather than serving in the military or getting a real job. Now this community is the ultimate welfare queens, and non-Orthodox Israelis deeply resent their refusal to serve in the military. Many Ultra-Orthodox are not Zionists and do not believe than an Israel can be established before the Messiah appears.

A war with Iran is therefore Netanyahu’s double attempt to thwart the outbreak of peace between Iran and the U.S. and to thwart attempts to bring his government down domestically through a vote of no confidence.

Netanyahu clearly assesses that Iran is a paper tiger, and cannot actually inflict much harm on Israel, since Tel Aviv and Washington can intercept most Iranian drones and missiles, and Iran does not have much of an air force. Israel has already reduced the power of Iran’s regional allies such as the Hezbollah of Lebanon. Although some Arab countries such as Saudi Arabia branded the attack illegal, nobody in Riyadh will shed any tears about Iran being taken down a notch.

It is, however, unlikely that Israeli attacks can do more than set back Iran’s uranium enrichment program, since the country has a big establishment by now of nuclear scientists and it has its own uranium, and the know-how it has built up cannot likely be extinguished. Netanyahu does not have a long-term vision for his relations with the Middle East, instead following the fascist prescriptions of the de facto founder of his Likud Party, Vladimir Jabotinsky, who urged that the Jewish settler-colonists in Palestine (he used such terminology) lash out hard at any opposition and crush it. This philosophy set in train the decades of whack-a-mole that the Israeli military plays with regional countries and peoples. It hasn’t made Israel secure, though it has made Netanyahu rich and powerful.