(LifeSiteNews) — With the world’s attention focused on the brink of World War Three, attention has shifted from the domestic crisis and escalating violence in Israel itself.
Few are aware that on the day Israel launched its strikes on Iran, Benjamin Netanyahu faced a crucial vote in the Israeli Parliament which could have dissolved his government.
With Israelis now shockingly banned from fleeing the country, the pressure on the Netanyahu government will continue to build from within a nation whose leading figures have warned for months is verging on disintegration.
Holding the media line
Israeli police are now directed to investigate anyone posting video footage or photographs of the damage done to Israeli air defense and strategic sites by Iranian missile retaliation.
All appearances today are that the Israeli attack on Iran has backfired. The Israeli government does not want the world, and especially Americans, whom they are dependent upon to join their war against Iran, to see the devastation from Iran’s totally unexpected rapid response.
A report from the UK-based Channel Four news says that the response from Iran is exceptional.
“Israel has never seen anything like this,” said another report from Fox News on June 15, saying that Iran’s attacks not only showed the limits of Israeli air defenses, but also placed Israel’s survival in question.
On Judge Napolitano’s program today, an unusually disgusted veteran UK diplomat and former MI6 member, Alastair Crooke, gave a powerful, succinct overview of the astonishing developments to date in the war:
Crooke blames Israel for all that has happened over the past few days and presents evidence that President Trump personally participated in the immoral and illegal deception of the U.S. and Israel negotiating with Iran while at the same time having planned for some time to start a regime war against Iran that very same day.
Crooke warns that this duplicity by Trump and Netanyahu will be crippling for American credibility, resulting in Iran, Russia, China and other nations no longer trusting anything that Trump and the U.S. says. It will be seen by them, said Crooke, to be a rehearsal for similar attacks from the U.S. on them in the future with heavy input from the Israeli Mossad, UK’s MI6 and the CIA.
Veteran Israeli journalist Yossi Melman now reports that Israel has made a strategic mistake. In launching attacks its unprovoked attacks on Iran, he says, Israel hoped to draw the United States in to support a war. Melman said, “I urge Trump to stop this madness.”
Without U.S. support Israel cannot win, says Melman, who has long reported on issues of Israeli national security.
President Trump has twice refused requests from Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, for the U.S. to enter the war directly.
Warnings of wider war
Media speculation is rife with suggestions the U.S. is preparing to do so, with some saying the USS Nimitz sailing west is a sign of an incoming false flag operation. In this scenario, the Nimitz will be sunk in a “USS Liberty” style Israeli attack, Iran will be blamed and the U.S. dragged into Israel’s war.
The Nimitz has just sailed past Singapore.
Fears that President Trump himself may be killed in order to spark U.S. intervention are combined with concerns over the mobilization of U.S. refueling aircraft over the Atlantic. Yet a long-planned NATO exercise, Defender 2025, is taking place between the June 9 and 24 in Eastern Europe.
These moves do not indicate imminent U.S. intervention. So how could Israel secure a change of heart – and draw America into its final phase of the Forever Wars it has planned since 1979?
READ: Israel’s attacks on Iran show how the Zionist state has transformed the US
Acting unilaterally
Israel has bombed nuclear facilities without informing the U.S. before, notably in launching airstrikes on the Iraqi Osirak reactor in 1981. Then-President Reagan feared the reckless attacks would spark Armageddon.
It was over 20 years later that the U.S. was persuaded to attack Iraq and launch a war which cost trillions of dollars, killed a million historic Christians, and expanded the regional influence of Iran.
Why would the U.S. want to repeat this disaster in another Middle Eastern war? Since then, attitudes have turned sharply against Israel, with public opinion in the U.S. and across Europe turning dramatically against the Zionist state.
The realization that the Netanyahu government is now preventing its own citizens from fleeing the destruction its policies have caused is unlikely to increase public approval of its actions.
Netanyahu’s media calculus appears to be that images of suffering Israelis may turn public opinion in favor of his war.
Yet again, news of his violent lockdown in the West Bank will likely undermine any sympathy this may generate. As will the fact that Netanyahu appears to have started this assault on Iran in the belief that he could compel the United States to finish what he started.
He is gambling with the lives of his own people now, and even with that of the State of Israel itself.
West Bank repression
In recent days Israel has “effectively legalized the annexation of 60 percent of the West Bank,” as Mondoweiss reported, “but no one is talking about it.”
Israelis wishing to flee Israel will have to travel through the territories, nominally set aside for a future Palestinian state, which have been “locked down” since Israel’s assault on Iran.
Following a message of support for Iran by the Chinese government, the China Daily newspaper reports that intensified Israeli military measures have “paralyzed daily life” for residents of the Occupied West Bank.
“There’s an overwhelming military presence,” a mother from Hebron told the Xinhua news agency, saying, “We’re used to restrictions, but this level of closure is something new.”
Reporting from the Occupied Territories is severely restricted. On June 13, Haaretz reported how one Palestinian photographer was “brutally beaten” by settlers – for the crime of having recorded Israel’s illegal occupation.
Yet some residents have taken to social media to tell the world about their situation.
As the Israeli military repression makes life impossible, armed settlers are burning the crops of West Bank Palestinians around Nablus.
With homes and cars also set alight by violent Israeli settlers, European nations now warn of the forced transfer of tens of thousands of people from the West Bank – a modest term for ethnic cleansing.
Netanyahu “hit fast forward” on “West Bank annexation,” said Haaretz on June 1st, “with the world’s eyes on Gaza.”
Now the world awaits news of the U.S. joining a war against Iran. Though this is certainly Netanyahu’s hope, and an outcome he has personally planned for almost 50 years, even a “war with Iran will not erase Israel’s crimes in Gaza,” as Haaretz said on June 16.
The Israeli outlet also published a strange fact about Netanyahu’s home, recently struck by an Iranian missile. The Israeli prime minister appears to be a “settler” himself, as his home once belonged to a Palestinian doctor called Tawfiq Canaan – whose family was displaced by Israeli strikes on their home in 1948.
The Israeli leader lives in “stolen property” himself and is helping to set the West Bank on fire so his supporters can steal more.
Trump’s decisive role?
Israel is on the cusp of civil war, said Israel Hayom on June 6. We have heard this before, but never from the founder of the Israel Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS).
“The only way to prevent a civil war in Israel is to acknowledge its impending outbreak, so that steps can be taken to forestall it,” said Martin Sherman, warning of “tectonic fault lines, threatening to split the nation’s societal fabric asunder,” centered on “Benjamin Netanyahu’s tenacious hold on power.”
Israel has seen world opinion turn sharply against it. Whether Netanyahu succeeds in making these problems a problem for the world, it is clear that people within and outside Israel agree these are problems of Netanyahu’s own making.
What happens now relies on what President Trump does next – according to Amos Harel, military analyst for Haaretz.
“Right now, it seems (though this could well be wrong) that Trump is trying to keep his administration at a distance from the Israeli attacks,” Harel said, adding, “Netanyahu, clearly, wants to drag in the Americans, in part because he needs them to attack sites that Israel cannot hit on its own.”
Trump is attending the G7 today in Canada and is expected to comment on the Israeli-Iran war. Having urged peace on social media, and agreed with Putin that a ceasefire is needed, Trump reportedly told the Russian president that he “will not restrain Israel.”
The Russian leader then told the Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei that “his regime is in danger.” Iran had requested the call, with the Iranian President Pereshkian warning today that if the U.S. does not restrain Israel, its responses will escalate.
Today, Israel Hayom reports Iran has offered nuclear concessions if the U.S. refuses to join the Israeli attacks. As Responsible Statecraft pointed out on June 13, it is Israel that has long been the lone rogue nuclear state in the Middle East.
The Iranians see the attacks as an attempt at forcing regime change in Iran, as the Russian outlet TASS relates. That is, it has never really been about Iran obtaining a nuclear weapon which Iran has repeatedly insisted it does not want. However, it does need nuclear power for its industries, businesses and homes.
READ: Israel ‘desperately needs’ US to wage war on Iran to rescue Netanyahu, ex-diplomat warns
Whether this five-decade project to remake the Middle East in the image of Greater Israel succeeds depends on whose interests Trump decides to put first – those of Americans, or Netanyahu’s Israel.
