Israel's Haaretz: 'Netanyahu's Gamble on War Escalation'

Israel's Haaretz: 'Netanyahu's Gamble on War Escalation'

The Israeli daily newspaper Haaretz published a commentary on Prime Minister Netanyahu's 'Gamble on War Escalation' through assassination politics.
Haaretz evaluated on the 1st that the choice of Tehran to assassinate Hamas leader Haniyeh, who could have been assassinated anywhere, was connected to 'Prime Minister Netanyahu, who has a vested interest in an expanded war.'
In the analysis article <Isn't Israel deliberately provoking an escalation that could draw the United States into the conflict?>, Haaretz asked, <The targeted killings that occurred in Beirut and Tehran this week raise three fundamental questions. The biggest question is 'Who has a vested interest in an expanded local war?'> The subtitle is <Who has a vested interest in an expanded war? Prime Minister Netanyahu. So for the past 36 hours, the conventional wisdom in Washington has been that Israel deliberately and deliberately assassinated Haniyeh in Iran that day.

US President Biden spoke with Netanyahu on the 1st, the day after the assassination, and the White House announced that "along with his commitment to Israel's defense, President Biden also emphasized the importance of efforts to avoid escalation in the Middle East."
The New York Times reported that US power in the Middle East is declining, saying, “Secretary of State Blinken said on the 31st that the United States was not involved in the operation in Tehran and was not even informed of it,” and this statement confirmed the power vacuum in the Middle East.
Haaretz said, “Israel is risking a local war to confuse Iran and its puppets,” and “However, the assassination of Haniyeh in Tehran after the inauguration of the new Iranian president, widely believed to be the work of Israel, is a completely different story. This is not about justice, retribution or a settlement. This is about the temptation for a major escalation.”
Three reporters analyzed the reason. First, why didn’t Israel use this before the hostage deal was negotiated, instead of launching a full-scale invasion of Gaza months ago, dropping 2,000-pound bombs and razing its neighbors to the ground? If Israel could conduct an accurate, flawless, intelligence-based operation from 2,000 kilometers (1,240 miles) away, why bomb Gaza for 10 months?

Second, given that Israel had no plan or political framework for Gaza, what did it accomplish in terms of changing the equation and dynamics?

Third, was escalation considered inevitable, and was Israel prepared for it, or could it benefit from it?

Regarding the assassination of the terrorist, the paper described it as “an assassination sideshow, rather than an Israel-Hamas hostage deal,” saying, “Israel’s long-standing policy of assassination only serves to embolden Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran.” A commentary cited in Ronen Bergman's 2018 book Rise and Kill First: The Secret History of Israel's Targeted Assassinations, a representative book on Israel's assassination policy, states, "We should not be discussing the value of assassination, the meticulous intelligence, the precision of execution, the impressive fireworks, the necessity of the target and the possibility of replacement, but the problem of escalation." "Assassinating Deif in Gaza during a war is a separate issue. Assassination is not a strategy or a policy and hardly changes the fundamentals, parameters, or dynamics of the conflict." Haaretz said, "Israel could have killed Haniyeh anywhere in the Middle East, but it deliberately decided to do so in Iran during the inauguration. “It is not bold, it is provocative,” he said. If the intention was to expose Iran’s vulnerabilities and the depth of its infiltration of its intelligence agencies and humiliate the Islamic regime, then the mission was accomplished. But for 36 hours, the conventional wisdom in Washington was that Israel had deliberately carried out the assassination of Haniyeh in Iran, and that day, deliberately.”

The paper continued, “How this all plays out is pure speculation at this point, but one thing is clear: however justified the idea of ​​assassinating Haniyeh may be, the word ‘escalation’ is written all over it.”

The assassination coincided with the inauguration of Iran’s new moderate President, Masoud Fezeshkian, and Ali Akbar Behmanesh, a prominent Iranian politician from his party, told the New York Times on the 31st, “This attack was a huge blow to Iran’s standing in the region. It humiliated our country, undermined our entire security apparatus, and showed that there were serious vulnerabilities in our intelligence.”

The New York Times said in a commentary on the 1st, “The problem with assassination is that Hamas and Hezbollah are networks, and John Arquilla, a network strategist and author of Bitskrieg: The New Challenge of Cyberwarfare, taught us that ‘everyone is second in the network.’ Successors always emerge, and they are often worse than their predecessors.” The New York Times continued, “The only way to truly marginalize Hamas politically and isolate Iran regionally is for Israel to give strength to a clear and more moderate alternative.” “The Palestinian Authority accepts the Oslo Accords and works with Israel every day to stop violence in the West Bank, and Prime Minister Netanyahu knows this very well, but refuses to acknowledge it.”