(Français)
Israel Has Taken Command of the United States
It should be noted that this is not merely a matter of lobbying. Netanyahu has always ruthlessly employed manipulation and fear to advance his own interests—and those of Israel, as he perceives them—and he has at his service in the United States the immensely powerful AIPAC (American Israel Public Affairs Committee), with “its billionaire donors such as Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison, casino magnate Miriam Adelson, financier Paul Singer, and cosmetics heir Ron Lauder”—a group of a dozen individuals, all with direct access to the Republican Party. “And all of them are essentially bribing Trump through our corrupt campaign finance system to enable Netanyahu to de facto annex the West Bank, commit genocide in Gaza, sanction the International Criminal Court for attempting to hold Israel’s military and political leaders accountable for these crimes, and everything else—right up to a war with Iran,” as reported by Max Blumenthal, an editor at The Grayzone, a prominent investigative political journalism site.
Alongside this political and financial instrument, the Israeli leader commands a global network of spies and assassins. Thus, as one commentator observes: “Imagine a U.S. president angering a figure as powerful as Netanyahu. What would go through your head? Bullets, probably.” And when the two assassination attempts on Trump occurred, “Netanyahu immediately linked them to Iran.” The methods of Israeli intelligence are as diverse as Stingray devices—surveillance tools that mimic GSM cell towers—placed in the vicinity of the White House, or a figure like Jeffrey Epstein, who “was not merely a social predator, but a broker of secrets, a blackmailer,” a purveyor of information amassed from his many high-level connections—including Trump—and who, in 2008, despite being in the midst of negotiating a plea bargain in Florida, was able to travel to Israel.
It is no wonder, then, that Max Blumenthal asserts that Trump fears Netanyahu, and that former Vice President Mike Pence “confirms that Trump was privately concerned about Netanyahu’s influence.” The latter has boasted that he “controlled Donald Trump,” and, in 2001, privately told settlers in the West Bank that “the United States is a thing you can move easily.”
Netanyahu: “the United States is a thing you can move easily”
Israel: Mowing the Lawn
What are Israel’s interests in its war against Iran? Judging by the air strikes, it is clear that Israel seeks to capitalize fully on the U.S. engagement and inflict as much destruction as possible upon Iran and Lebanon—just as it has done with Gaza and the West Bank. The goal is to sow chaos and annihilate any rival in this region of the globe. As Haaretz—Israel’s oldest daily newspaper—headlined: “Don’t Fall for the Regime Change Talk. Israel Is ‘Mowing the Lawn’ in Iran.” This is an Israeli idiom meaning: “Conducting short, sharp military operations to maintain a certain level of control over the area without committing to a long-term political solution, similar to how one would mow a lawn to keep it neat and tidy.”
They bombed desalination plants, oil fields, and educational institutions—such as the Shajareh Tayyebeh Girls’ Primary School in the city of Minab, situated right on the Strait of Hormuz—from the very first day of the war. The U.S. report stated that a U.S. Central Command had established the target coordinates for the strike using outdated data provided by the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency. It is easiest to attribute what has become a major scandal in the United States—potentially subject to prosecution as a crime against humanity—to a mere error.
One might, however, wonder whether this did not originate with Israeli intelligence services, which work side-by-side with their U.S. counterparts and possess a more intimate knowledge of the region—particularly the highly strategic Strait of Hormuz, through which oil tankers carry one-fifth of global production.
On the weekend of January 31/February 1, the Chief of Staff of the Israel “Defense” Forces (IDF), Eyal Zamir, came to Washington DC. He was accompanied by his leadership team, including future Air Force Commander Omer Tishler, “reflecting the central role air power is expected to play in any future confrontation with Iran.” They arrived in a non-military business jet, “used in recent months for sensitive travel by the Mossad and senior Israeli defense officials […] The choice of aircraft was intended to reduce visibility and complicate tracking of the unusual trip.” Zamir and his team met with his US counterpart, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Dan Caine, at the Pentagon, “behind closed doors, with details kept tightly controlled on both sides.” A week earlier, Admiral Brad Cooper, head of U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM), now leading the attack on Iran, visited Israel to meet with Eyal Zamir and other Israeli army commanders and discuss, among other things, military collaboration.
the attack on the Iranian girls’ school fits the pattern of the actions of the Israeli army in Gaza
In any case, the attack on the Iranian girls’ school fits the pattern of the actions of the Israeli army in Gaza. By mid-2024, the United Nations had already recorded “more than 200 Israeli attacks on schools in Gaza, with at least 53 schools totally destroyed. […] 19 Gaza universities had suffered severe damage with 80% of university buildings destroyed, 103 academics killed, and 90,000 students enrolled in higher education no longer able to pursue their studies […] 564, or 85%, of all schools in Gaza had been hit by Israeli attacks and the following year, 2025, an estimated 95% of school buildings had been damaged or destroyed.”…
“The IDF states it targets schools because Palestinian militants use them for military purposes. Researchers looking into IDF’s claims concluded the claims either lacked evidence, or the evidence presented was misleading. When the IDF destroyed the last university in the Gaza Strip, it destroyed it in a controlled explosion.”
Why re-attack Lebanon? Dixit Alastair Crooke: “they don’t want this to be a limited conflict. Their incentives are all in the direction of dragging as many countries into this thing as they possibly can. […] disinformation appears to be part of an effort to escalate the war further between Gulf and Iran.” And, once again, take advantage of the fact that the United States is now fully involved.
The rest serves to throw smoke and mirrors, above all to Europeans. Danny Citrinowitz, a senior fellow at the Institute for National Security Studies at Tel Aviv University, and a former commander in the IDF’s Israel Defense Intelligence, described Israel’s approach to Iran in an interview with the Financial Times: “If we can have a coup, great. If we can have people on the streets, great. If we can have a civil war, great. Israel couldn’t care less about the future…[or] the stability of Iran.”
Can we call the strikes against senior Iranian leaders a great success? With all the money that Israel receives from the United States, it is not difficult to recruit with millions of dollars secret agents in the country, especially underlings or bodyguards who know all the movements of the leaders. Iranians are highly materialistic, and in great need. I know them, I have been there more than ten times. This was confirmed by an Israeli military source who told Reuters: “We began striking security checkpoints based on intelligence from local informants in Iran.” And Commander Ahmadreza Radan of the Iranian police high command recently announced that he has arrested 500 people accused of sending information and photos of targets to the enemy.
And we have just learned that Israeli intelligence services have infiltrated the Iranian security system, in particular the tens of thousands of cameras installed in the streets of the capital to confront recent opposition demonstrations! This was confirmed by Mahmoud Nabavian, vice-president of the National Security Committee of the Iranian Parliament last September: “All the cameras at our intersections are in the hands of Israel […] Everything on the internet is in their hands … if we move, they will find out.” And this is how they were able to target Ayatollah Khameini. The Iranians knew it but they are poorly organized.
All the cameras at our intersections are in the hands of Israel
This spying goes back years. Cameras on the streets of Tehran are hacked and the information transferred to servers in Israel. This includes addresses, routes taken to work, who is protecting whom, etc. Colonel Amit Assa, a former official in the Shin Bet — Israel’s internal security service — said that “such operations are powered by many sources of intelligence, such as undercover agents and bugged conversations.”
“In 2019, security engineer Paul Marrapese discovered he could easily hack millions of cameras from the comfort of his home office in California. There are millions and millions and millions of these throughout the world. Many are trivially easy to hack: They’re just dumb little things.”…
On the other hand, explains French historian-demographer Emmanuel Todd, “killing a few soldiers or scientists will not destabilize Iran, because there is a modern state organization which is not based on personal ties. The dead are replaced. In other words, as tactically brilliant as it may be, the decapitation operation is strategically meaningless.”
Jon Alterman, of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, says that “the impact of targeted killings often fades over time. […] Iran’s government and military are made up of several overlapping institutions that have so far survived waves of punishing U.S. and Israeli strikes.” Another academic, Max Abrahms, a political scientist at Northeastern University, said that “Leadership decapitation is risky. When you take out a leader that prefers some degree of restraint and had influence over subordinates, then there’s a very good chance that, upon that person’s death, you’re going to see even more extreme tactics.”
Iranians are also highly nationalistic and proud. Destroying their country only brings the population closer to its leaders even if they are strongly hated, and in any case, the opposition has neither the means nor the organization to wrest power from the mullahs.
Solidarity in need
I would like to emphasize the importance of solidarity. When the Israelis bombed Gaza in 2014, Iranians went about their daily lives, shopping, vacations (it was summer), family reunions, indifferent to the nearby conflict, apart from a few government demonstrations of support. Says Ali Afshari, an Iranian researcher and former member of the Office for Consolidation of Unity, the main Iranian student organization: “The Israeli-Palestinian conflict does not seem to be a priority for Iranian public opinion, including various opposition groups, students and intellectuals.” Now, though, it is their turn to suffer.
Kissinger: “It is dangerous to be the enemy of the United States, but to be their friend is fatal”
The West too is indifferent. But the well-known economist and former Greek finance minister, Yannis Varoufakis, mentions the danger of stagflation, i.e. an increase in inflation and an increase in unemployment simultaneously. “An economic nightmare that touches every aspect of daily life. Families watch their grocery bills climb while worrying about layoffs. Businesses face rising costs but shrinking demand. And policymakers find themselves trapped, with traditional economic remedies making the crisis worse rather than better.” All this because “Trump fell into the trap that Netanyahu set for him.”
Indifferent too were the United Arab Emirates which, pushed by Trump, were the first with Bahrain to sign the Abraham Accords with Israel in 2020, and which believed that the US bases would be there to protect them. Now they discovered the truth of the quote attributed to Henry Kissinger: “It is dangerous to be the enemy of the United States, but to be their friend is fatal”. Fatiha Dazi-Héni, French researcher at the Ministry of Defense, speaks of “a punitive operation on the part of Iran of the Emirati choice of having chosen, if you will, the Israeli security order”. Remember that these agreements “aim to surround Iran with a Sunni alliance of family dictatorships”.
Khalaf Ahmad Al Habtoor, a billionaire and influential economic and political figure in the United Arab Emirates, sent a letter to Trump saying: “Who gave you the authority to drag our region into a war with Iran? Who gave you permission to turn our region into a battlefield?” And he adds: “True leadership is not measured by war decisions. It is measured by wisdom, respect for others, and pushing toward achieving peace.”
A note as humorous as it is tragic: Trump says he is very surprised by the Iranian response: “They weren’t supposed [!] to go after all these other countries in the Middle East. Those missiles were set to go after them. So they hit Qatar, Saudi Arabia, UAE, Bahrain, Kuwait. Nobody expected that. We were shocked! And they fought back. They could have yielded, but think of it, if we weren’t around. They had tremendous power.”
To those who invoke it, there won’t be any 3rd world war because China and Russia will not go further than minimum support for Iran, the former out of aversion to any military conflict that could distract from their enormous economic and technological progress, the latter because it is already too badly stuck in Ukraine. If the United States sends ground troops, it will cost them dearly because, without an air force or navy of any value, it is in combat on the ground that the Iranians are best and most determined with a million men. So, when Trump sees that the war is reaching the point of putting too much in danger the election of the Republicans in the legislative elections next November and/or that the price of fuel will increase too much, he will simply stop, pretending that the goal has been achieved, that he got “a beautiful victory” from his “unsurpassed army” or other of his usual fantasies-versus-reality, regardless of the goal for a public little versed and interested in the issue beyond its wallet. And unfortunately it is not the Democrats who are going to stop the conflict, as, when it comes to foreign policy, they are at least as aggressive as Trump’s party.
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