It was on 7 October 2023 that Netanyahu understood that Hamas represented the same existential threat to Israel that the clerical regime in Iran did.
Benjamin Netanyahu, the Prime Minister of the only Jewish majority state in the world, has his faults, but is aware of the fact that the struggle against those individuals and entities denying the right of the Jewish people to exist is existential. In 1979, exiles such as Abol Hassan Bani Sadr, who had tended to Ayatollah Khomeini in Paris, brought him back to Iran once the Shah was deposed. The exiles did not take seriously the written and spoken words of Ayatollah Khomeini that Iran should be ruled by a hierarchy of clerics led by himself. They saw such ideas as the harmless prattling of an ageing cleric rather than take them as his long-held conviction. Bani Sadr was made the first President of post-Shah Iran, but was swiftly removed by the Ayatollah once he sought to establish not a theocracy but a democracy in Iran. Ayatollah Khomeini had the courage to publicly abuse the Shah, and he did so frequently. Rather than get him tortured and executed as was standard practice during the reign of Reza Pahlavi, the Shah made the mistake (for himself) of allowing the cleric to go into exile in Paris. His rants were ignored by the French authorities, who joined Bani Sadr in not taking the Ayatollah seriously.
The Ayatollah seldom moved out of his room, but spent his time making tape recordings and writing poisonous tracts against the “wretched Shah” (his description) which were laboriously cyclostyled and smuggled to Iran, where he built up an immense following. The crowds that welcomed him back to Iran at Mehrabad International Airport were delirious with joy. Had they known the future that was in store for the country, they would not have been. The Ayatollah took to himself all the despotic powers of the deposed Shah, and soon after his return, welcomed rather than condemned a pile of students who stormed the US embassy in Tehran and took the US citizens within, including diplomats, as hostages. They would not be freed to return to their homeland until President Carter had lost the Presidential elections to a former movie star, Ronald Reagan in 1980, as a consequence of the imprisonment within the Embassy compound of the diplomats and the inability of Carter to get them out.
The embargo on trade with Iran sent the economy into further free fall. Since then, Iran has, despite its oil wealth, suffered high inflation and joblessness. Corruption is the norm, and the currency has slipped in comparison to the euro ever since. For a price, there are Iranian citizens willing to do and to risk anything, including spying for Israel, the country described as the “Zionist entity” in Iran. Posters calling for “Death to the Little Satan (Israel) and the Big Satan (the US)” are ubiquitous, as are identical chants by demonstrators in the streets of towns in Iran. Few actually believe in such twaddle, not even several clerics, and many of the citizens would wish for nothing better than to get exile in Europe. The Iranian emigre population in Europe is overall educated and prosperous, in contrast to those they left behind in Iran. It is the dire condition of the Iranian economy that is giving hope to Netanyahu of a second revolution paralleling that in 1979, this time against the clerical regime. After all, he has been able to eliminate several security pillars of the regime through information supplied by disgruntled citizens of Iran. They have informed him that the time when seething anti-cleric mobs will fill the streets in urban areas in the country will soon arrive
A false story has been going the rounds, including in the US, that President Trump was panicked into pressing Iran and Israel for an immediate ceasefire after US military bases in Qatar were attacked by Iranian missiles. The fact is that the missiles were intercepted, as information about their trajectory was shared by the Iranians with the Qatarese authorities. Qatar is a country that has unconventional friendships, and is close to both Iran as well as the US, not to mention President Erdogan, who is a misfit in NATO. Given its tiny sliver of land in Europe as compared to Asia, it was obvious that the EU would balk at giving membership to that club. Not that Erdogan wants it any more, as the rigorous conditions set by the EU as necessary for its membership are not constraints that Erdogan has accepted or is ever willing to. Coming back to Israel, the October 7, 2023 attack by the military wing of Hamas was when Netanyahu understood the true nature of Hamas, an organisation largely ignored by him until then, despite its explicitly calling for the elimination of the Jews as a people, and not just as a country with a Jewish majority. It was then that Netanyahu understood that Hamas represented the same existential threat to Israel that the clerical regime in Iran did. Since then, he has systematically gone about eliminating that threat. An error he continues to make is that Palestinians as a whole represent such a threat, even though the Palestinian Authority has accepted the right of Israel to exist.
The offer of an immediate ceasefire that President Trump asked Netanyahu for was accepted. The reason is that Israel needs a window of time within which the country can restock its arsenal and repair damaged logistical support. Within the time he estimates that Iran can once again restart its battered nuclear facilities, he will once again attack. If Peacemaker President Trump is reluctant to once again do the job himself, Israel can be supplied with the munitions needed to ensure that the nuclear capability of Iran is close to zero. Not an easy task, given that the Russian engineers who built the centrifuges which comprise the enrichment facility have left, with China needing to step in. Such a development illustrates the correctness of the Trump stand of the wisdom of NATO re-aligning its sights on Beijing and not Moscow. The Russia obsession of European powers such as the UK and Germany owes its origin to the residue left by Cold War 1.0 between the USSR and the US and its allies. It fails to recognize that the era of Cold War 2.0 between China and the democracies has arrived. That such a mistaken obsession continues is testimony to the disinformation disseminated by China-controlled Algo Warriors against Russia as Ukraine collapses under the overload of the war against Russia, Russophobe elements in the EU will not have Ukraine to carry the load on itself of the war. As for clerical Iran, the pause by Israel and most likely the US as well is only tactical, and that the strategic objective of reducing the nuclear capability of Iran to a level safe for the democracies. Which is why both President Trump and Prime Minister Netanyahu are clear that such a strategic objective will be met. As Prime Minister Modi said about the abrupt stoppage of kinetic operations against GHQ Rawalpindi, this is only a pause and not the close.
