By its bombing of the Beirut headquarters of Hezbollah, and the killing of Hezb chief Hassan Nasrallah, Israel may have demonstrated its military prowess, but it has not brought itself closer to peace. Instead, it has brought the world closer to war. Its escalation of the conflict has been bad enough, but the death of the deputy commander of the Iran Revolutionary Guards Corps has added a further, more dangerous, dimension to a situation that shows every sign of spiralling out of control. At present, the conflict is still local. Israel is pounding Palestinians in Gaza. The USA and Iran are at daggers drawn, circling around each other like two knife-fighters, Israel has also begun pounding Hezbollah in Lebanon. The Houthis in Yemen are occasionally active, and have made the Red Sea unsafe. However, Hassan Nasrallah’s killing has changed the equation.
It has brought the threat closer to Iran than before. With the killing of Hamas chief Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran, Israel had upped the ante, showing that its reach was up to Tehran, and that it was ready to kill the heads of its opponents. This is meant to scare opponents, but if they were scared easily, they would probably not have engaged in activities directed at Palestinian liberation. The Red Sea and the Straits of Hormuz constitute global chokepoints, and any war involving them can be expected to have a massive impact on the rest of the world. Another factor, which means global disruption, is that this is an oil-producing area, which means the price of oil is going to go up, which is bad news for the poor countries which import oil, such as Pakistan.
The hands-off attitude of the USA has done much to allow the Israeli government to engage in such murderous behaviour. There is an international groundswell of support against the Israeli slaughter of Palestinians, now over 42,000, but the USA continues to use kid gloves in its treatment of Israel. This groundswell is likelier to grow, because the attacks on Lebanon seem so unprovoked. No one wants the situation to get any further out of control, but then, it is not likely that anyone, even the Israelis, had realized that matters would get this much out of control. The problem is that there are no voices of sanity which can pull back the world from the brink, being heard. Those with the power to do something, are in slavish thrall to Israel.
