Wednesday morning, July 31st, at 2 am Iranian time, Israel appears to have assassinated one of Hamas’ top three leaders, Ismail Haniyeh.
Apparently Israel nailed Haniyeh with an explosive that blew up a few rooms of the luxury government apartment building in which the leader of Hamas was staying.
Why was Haniyeh in Iran’s capital, Tehran? He was attending the swearing in of Masoud Pezeshkian, Iran’s new president.
Which means that Haniyeh was an honored guest of Iran’s rulers. And his death was a profound insult to the Iranian state. Now Iran says it will get revenge. It will exact “punishment.” On both Israel and America.
The United States is afraid that Haniyeh’s assassination will lead to a wider war in the Middle East. And that is a legitimate concern. None of us want to see Washington, New York, or LA hit by nuclear weapons from Iran or from one of its three nuclear allies.
But this is already a wider war. It has been a wider war ever since Hamas October 7th massacre of Israeli families. A war between Israel and Iran.
Iran’s proxy army in Lebanon, Hezbollah , for example, has rained 7,000 drones and missiles on Northern Israel in the last ten months. Yes, 7,000. That’s war.
And the Iran-backed Houthis in Yemen killed an Israeli civilian in Tel Aviv just two weeks ago. With a long-distance drone. That, too, is war.
Which means that the war Hamas began when it raped, tortured, and burned alive 1,200 Israeli parents, children, and babies on October 7th, 2023, has been a wider war ever since it began.
The roots of the current Gaza War go back to 2011, when the Arab Spring threatened to topple Syrian dictator Bashir al Assad.
Assad was a part of the Axis of Evil—the unspoken military alliance that includes China, Russia, North Korea, Syria, and Iran. So the Axis of Evil rushed to Syria to save Assad.
Iran sent in one of its proxy armies, Hezbollah, to wipe out Assad’s opponents. Russia sent in troops, Wagner mercenaries, and fighter planes. And Russia began systematically bombing Syrian hospitals and schools in the areas controlled by the rebels.
But the Arab states, led by Saudi Arabia, saw a chance to weaken their enemy, Iran, and jumped in on the side of Assad’s opponents. In the thirteen years since then, the Arab states in one way or another have been making war against Iran. Why?
Iran’s philosophy of Islamic Revolution calls for toppling the rulers of the Arab states. All of them. According to the Iranian Revolutionary doctrine, the Arab heads of state must be replaced by leaders obedient to Iranian Revolutionary thinking.
Remember something else: Iranians are Muslims, but they are not Arabs. That widens the gap between Iran and the Arab nations.
And there’s something else. The Arab states’ most natural ally against Iran would be Israel, a nation that Iran vows to exterminate. A nation with sophisticated weaponry and tactical plans to defeat Iran.
So five year ago, the Trump administration started piecing together the Abraham Accords, an agreement that would bring peace between the Arab nations and Israel.
The United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Morocco, and Sudan were already normalizing their relationship with Israel. Saudi Arabia was in on the deal but was holding out for an agreement on the establishment of a Palestinian state.
This growing anti-Iranian alliance of Jews and Arabs was intolerable to the Iranian leadership. They used Hamas to end it.
That end came with the October 11th, 2023, massacre of Israeli families. This kicked off a war between Israel and Iran’s proxy armies. And in the atmosphere of war, Arab peace agreements with Israel became impossible.
After the October 11th atrocity, Israel’s prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu swore that Israel’s war against Iran’s proxies would not end until every top leader of Hamas was dead. Now two of Hamas’ top three leaders, Mohammed Deif and Ismail Haniyah, have been killed. There is only one top tier Hamas leader left to go: Yahya Sinwar. Who is hiding out in the military caves of Gaza.
Meanwhile, Tuesday August 27th, Israel also killed one of the top leaders of another Iranian proxy army, Hezbollah.
When the leaders of what Iran calls its Axis Of Resistance are dead, Israel may finally be in a better position to go for a six-week ceasefire and the release of hostages. If Iran does not use the nuclear weapons it is ready to manufacture and if Israel does not use the nuclear weapons it has had for sixty years.
References:
Howard Bloom, The Muhammad Code: How a Desert Prophet Brought You ISIS, al Qaeda, and Boko Haram, Feral House, 2016.
https://www.iranintl.com/en/202407316759
https://www.presstv.ir/Detail/2024/08/01/730505/Nasrallah-Israel-Majdal-Shams
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/01/world/middleeast/how-hamas-leader-haniyeh-killed-iran-bomb.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/31/world/middleeast/iran-orders-attack-israel.html
The killing of a top Hamas leader brings new uncertainties about cease-fire talks
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Howard Bloom of the Howard Bloom Institute has been called the Einstein, Newton, Darwin, and Freud of the 21st century by Britain’s Channel 4 TV. One of his eight books–Global Brain—was the subject of a symposium thrown by the Office of the Secretary of Defense including representatives from the State Department, the Energy Department, DARPA, IBM, and MIT. His work has been published in The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Wired, Psychology Today, and the Scientific American. He does news commentary at 1:06 am Eastern Time every Wednesday night on 545 radio stations on Coast to Coast AM. For more, see http://howardbloom.net