Biden and Netanyahu’s endless war for US-Israeli supremacy

With escalating violence, the US and Israel impose a "new Middle East."

(Northern Gaza, Oct 12 2024. Photo by OMAR AL-QATTAA/AFP via Getty Images)

How Benjamin Netanyahu would respond to Hamas’ October 7^th, 2023 armed operation against Israel was previewed more than two decades earlier, on another day of geopolitical infamy.

Asked on September 11^th, 2001 how the attacks of that day would impact US-Israel relations, Netanyahu responded: “It’s very good.” He quickly corrected himself: “Well, not very good, but it will generate immediate sympathy.” 9/11, he explained, would “strengthen the bond between our two peoples, because we’ve experienced terror over so many decades, but the United States has now experienced a massive hemorrhaging of terror.” Years later, Netanyahu informed an Israeli audience that his prediction had borne out. “We are benefiting from one thing, and that is the attack on the Twin Towers and Pentagon, and the American struggle in Iraq,” he said.

Netanyahu understood that a one-day terror attack on the world’s top superpower would create the political space for an endless “war on terror” targeting every countervailing force to US-Israeli hegemony. His post-9/11 vision was confirmed when Gen. Wesley Clark disclosed that Donald Rumsfeld’s Pentagon had devised a list of seven Muslim states marked for regime change, beginning with Iraq and ending in Iran. “They wanted us to destabilize the Middle East, turn it upside down, make it under our control,” Clark said of the “war on terror’s” neoconservative architects.

For Netanyahu, the Oct. 7^th maelstrom created an equally opportune moment. The Biden administration offered its unconditional support for an Israeli plan to turn Gaza from an occupied, besieged concentration camp into a decimated, rubble-strewn death camp. Meanwhile, as my colleague Max Blumenthal has newly demonstrated in the documentary “Atrocity Inc.”, Western establishment media lined up to parrot Israeli atrocity propaganda to manufacture consent for mass murder – all while covering up that the Israeli military enacted the “Hannibal Directive” on Oct. 7^th and killed an unknown number of its own citizens to prevent them from being taken hostage.

As Avi Dichter, an Israeli cabinet member and former Shin Bet director, announced last November, Israel’s top goal in Gaza was to cause “Gaza Nakba 2023”, referencing the ethnic cleansing of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians during the period around Israel’s founding in May 1948. “That’s how it will end.”

Dichter was specifically referring to northern Gaza, where today, nearly one year later, Israel has ordered hundreds of thousands of people to flee, imposed a starvation siege by cutting off food, and is carrying out massacres against those who remain. According to Haaretz, senior Israeli defense officials believe that Israel is laying the groundwork for “the gradual annexation of large parts of the Gaza Strip.” In northern Gaza, that means putting “into effect the so-called surrender or starve plan of Maj. Gen. (ret.) Giora Eiland,” in which anyone “choosing to remain” is deemed to be a “legitimate military target” who “will face hunger” if they manage to survive Israeli fire.

Having left Gaza in ruins as part of the designed Nakba, the Israeli government and its US sponsor have expanded the aggression to their top regional deterrents, Hezbollah and Iran.  Repeating their playbook in Gaza, the White House has offered empty words about the need for a ceasefire in Lebanon all while facilitating an Israeli assault on civilian infrastructure.

As Israel ramped up its assault on Lebanon last month, US and Israeli officials informed Politico that senior White House aides had “privately told Israel that the U.S. would support its decision to ramp up military pressure against Hezbollah,”  — notwithstanding the fact that the administration was “publicly” urging Israel “to curtail its strikes.” After one year of mass murder, the Israelis certainly understand that the White House’s public calls for restraint can be duly ignored.

Two key US officials, the Israeli army veteran Amos Hochstein and veteran bureaucrat Brett McGurk, are said to be privately “describing Israel’s Lebanon operations as a history-defining moment — one that will reshape the Middle East for the better for years to come.” This includes in Lebanon, where the White House “is pushing to use Israel’s offensive against Hezbollah as an opening to end” Hezbollah’s “long-running dominance by electing a new Lebanese president,” the Wall Street Journal reports. According to the Journal, Hochstein has told Arab officials that “the weakening of Hezbollah by Israeli attacks should be viewed as an opportunity to potentially break a political impasse.”

In other words, the White House and Israel are using wanton violence as an “opportunity” to “weaken” a political movement that resists US-Israeli hegemony, thereby subverting millions of Lebanese voters who have inconveniently voted for Hezbollah and its allies in multiple parliamentary elections – even giving them a majority as recently as 2022.

In seizing this “moment,” McGurk and Hochstein are continuing along the path outlined by McGurk’s former colleague during the George W. Bush administration, Condoleezza Rice, who infamously described Israel’s 2006 assault on Lebanon – when it also terrorized civilians in a failed effort to wipe out Hezbollah – as “the birth pangs of a new Middle East.”

Determined to bring that “new Middle East” to life, the Biden administration has cast aside inconvenient warnings from two key regional states, Egypt and Qatar, who “view the American plan as unrealistic and even dangerous,” as it could “heighten the risk of internecine fighting” in a Lebanese society long ravaged by civil war, the Journal adds. As Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu made clear last week, the threat of dangerous violence is a welcome tactic. “You have an opportunity to save Lebanon before it falls into the abyss of a long war that will lead to destruction and suffering like we see in Gaza,” Netanyahu threatened the people of Lebanon, sounding identical to a Mafia don. “It doesn’t have to be that way.”

Not everyone is on board with this new phase of the post-9/11 project. According to Politico, the Biden-approved Israeli aggression in Lebanon has drawn “opposition from people inside the Pentagon, State Department and intelligence community who believed Israel’s move against” Hezbollah “could drag American forces into yet another Middle East conflict.”

Yet as their Bush administration predecessors made clear with two disastrous invasions, those ultimately deciding US policy in the Middle East today have no such qualms. In recent weeks, Biden has ordered the Pentagon to deploy “a bristling array of weaponry to the region” along with a “few thousand” more troops, resulting in a US military posture that has “essentially doubled its air power,” the New York Times reports. In a new sign that it is partnering with Israel’s planned strikes on Iran, the White House has ordered the deployment of an advanced US antimissile system to Israel along with about 100 American troops to operate it.

While the Pentagon insists that these forces are purely defensive, a former senior Biden official acknowledged their real purpose. “Right now, there’s enough posture in the region that if the Iranians step in, we can and would support Israel’s defense,” Dana Stroul, who stepped down last year as the Pentagon’s top official for Middle East policy, told the Times. “If you’re Israel and you’re a military planner, you want to do all that while things are in the region, not after it leaves.”

According to the Times, one current US official “said it was easier for Israel to go on offense when it knows that ‘Big Brother’ is nearby.” Or as Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin has reportedly described it, Israel is “playing with house money.” What Austin means, the Washington Post explains, is that Israel is “taking big shots at its adversaries, knowing that the United States, as Israel’s chief ally, would throw its military and diplomatic weight behind it.”

With endless “house money” from “Big Brother,” Israel sabotaged a recent opening for a Lebanon ceasefire. According to Lebanon’s foreign minister, Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah agreed to a 21-day fighting pause last month. But because Nasrallah refused to abandon his insistence on a permanent ceasefire in Gaza, Israel decided that he had to go. “What we found after over 11 months is that Nasrallah is persistent in tying himself — and the hijacked Lebanese state that he took over — to whatever’s going on in Gaza,” an Israeli official told NBC News. “...He declined messages to stop connecting himself to Gaza. ... This led us to understand that he cannot be part of the game anymore.”

In the new Middle East, those who disrupt the US-Israeli monopoly on violence simply cannot be part of the “game.”

Israel’s murder of Nasrallah, along with an unknown number of civilians in residential buildings above him, came right after the US and France publicly called for a ceasefire in Lebanon – and claimed that they had obtained Israel’s support. Yet as in Gaza, the Israeli leadership knows that Biden-endorsed ceasefires can be duly ignored. A senior Israeli official then dismissed the confusion as “an honest misunderstanding” between Israel and the US. Translated into the language of the new Middle East, this means that Israel and the US have a quiet understanding that Biden has no qualms with Netanyahu’s routine dishonesty and aggression, so long as it can advance joint US-Israeli supremacy.