> There's a lot of offensive security talent, but this has nothing to do with Palestinians. Israeli intelligence is very advanced and is why Israel has been able to eliminate the leaders of Hezbollah and Iran.
Not everything in Israel is about or related to Palestinians.
I would suggest to you that the focus on Iran is because Iran is perceived as being an obstacle to Israeli hegemony in the region and thus undisputed Israeli rule over Palestinian territory.
Iran also justifies its actions in terms of standing up for Palestinians.
Well that and the fact that Iran is (was) the other peer military adversary in the region, with forces deployed on Israel's border, and with a longstanding declared intent of eradicating Israel.
It turns out Hezbollah and Hamas are not Persian and don't speak Farsi. Hamas are Sunni.
Most importantly, both groups exist as a direct result of Israeli persecution of their civilian populations. They weren't created by Iran, they're a predictable result that happens when you occupy people's land and oppress them, you get resistance groups.
Over the last 10 years Hezbollah has spent more manpower fighting in Syria for Iran than it has confronting Israel. I don't know how to take seriously the idea that Hezbollah is anything but an appendage of the IRGC.
As a reminder: Shia are a minority in Lebanon; it's not even close.
Yeah, but Shia are a bigger percentage of the area that Israel is currently occupying and "turning into Gaza" in their own words. There are approximately 1.5 million homeless in the area now?
Hezbollah do see the Iranian supreme leader as the leader of Shia Islam, and they do see Iran as their key ally, but they didn't even exist before Israel occupied southern Lebanon in the 80s and abetted all sorts of massacres. They have a reason to exist besides being Iranian stooges, they're real people.
One more interesting narrative frame: Fighting in Syria for Iran? Not for Assad? Was Assad a thoughtless Iranian appendage also?
None of this explains why the Quds Force was able to command Hezbollah into Syria to besiege Sunni towns and suburbs of Damascus. It's very easy to find credible sources saying that Hezbollah is an Iranian asset, and the balance of clear evidence supports that. Like Iran itself, Hezbollah uses Israel as a political foil, but their real enemies are Sunni Arabs.
None of these observations make me a supporter of the Netanyahu government; my opinions of Likud have nothing to do with my opinions of Iran and their IRGC militias.
Yeah, I'm also not saying I'm some uncritical supporter of Hezbollah.
I'm just saying they have rational interests in addition to religious/sectarian, and we can see in the current situation that it would have been nice for them to have Assad still in charge of Syria right now. Calling them an IRGC militia isn't any more correct than calling UK/Israel a "USA militia".
It's fine that we disagree, it's fine for us to present different cases to the thread, we can do that respectfully, but just to be very clear: my case is that Hezbollah is (or was immediately prior to the "decapitation") an IRGC asset, commanded at least at a high level --- "which fights to pick, which fights to join" --- by the Quds Force commanders. Several QF elites were injured during the pager strike!
I'd be happy to see Netanyahu in prison. But the horrific death toll in Gaza is a small fraction of what the IRGC has wrought in Syria, Iraq, and especially Yemen. When the IRGC orchestrates starvation sieges, as they did at Madaya in Syria and Taiz in Yemen, they brag about it. They film videos for the besieged residents jokingly eating off banquets.
Winding back to the top of the thread, all this is just to say, Israel is not necessarily wrong about the adversaries they face outside of their borders. (They're definitely not wrong about Hamas and PIJ, but they're seemingly wrong about just about everything else that happens inside their borders.)
I think you're underrating how much you've bought the framing from US/neoliberal media, though. Try to put yourselves in Hezbollah or the Houthis' shoes, you wouldn't think of yourself as a pawn, you'd think of yourself as full-agency humans with interests and allies. Sunni power is against you so you ally with the Shia power.
For example, Iran never directly intervened in Yemen, they limited themselves to sending weapons, but the Saudis did a SHITLOAD[1], to the tune of 10k troops, hundreds of sorties and a "war crimes" section on the wiki page. Yet somehow the IRGC is the most salient group in this conflict to you, despite not doing any direct fighting?
The Houthis are literally Nazis. They run a race cult. They use child soldiers. As with Hezbollah in Lebanon, they're a religious minority that nonetheless exercises de facto control over security in their country. Iran trained and armed them; the Houthis are explicitly Khomeinists.
Now you're talking. They have agency, motivation and accept help where they can get it.
And I'm not saying they're good guys but the next step is weighting their atrocities on the same standard as those committed by the Saudis with our support.
Characterizing the Houthis as a race cult is bizarre. They are a Zaydi Shia group which Iran has cultivated over the years. But they were around before that relationship and would not disappear if that relationship was severed.
Also it's dishonest not to include the actions of the Saudis and the UAE when discussing the Yemen conflict. As well as the sustained U.S targeting support in bombing the hell out of that country.
I don't know what's complicated about this. Yemen is neither a religious nor an ethnic monoculture. Ansar Allah operates a caste system inside of it. Not all Zaydiyya align with Ansar Allah. More than half of Yemen is Sunni. There are ethnic underclasses in Yemen that are literally kept as chattel slaves.
You have never, ever seen me on this site stick up for Saudi Arabia. I feel like this is a big way people get themselves into trouble thinking about MENA. In most of these conflicts, there isn't a protagonist.
Why would we expect further discussion to be productive after you've handwaved away my last comment with a single "basically non-sequiturs" line? Justify that claim first. I'm not a slot machine you can keep pulling until you find the one argument you're prepared to rebut on the merits (after I flesh it out for you).
And while Arafat was responsible for many abominable actions and many, many casualties, let's not forget that one of the first supporters of Hamas was ... oh yes, Netanyahu. Because Arafat, for whatever reason or reasons in his final years softened and the PLO was increasingly being seen by the world as the one willing to negotiate while Israel didn't want to, which made for uncomfortable questions of "why is a terroristic organization willing to figure out how to get to peace while a supposedly peaceful nation is not".
Netanyahu and his ilk realized that rather than a rapidly moderating, rapidly gaining sympathy and support PLO was not the enemy they "needed" for their own agenda - "from the river to the sea", which, let's not forget, was actually Likud's official election slogan in the 70s and 80s (a "hilarious" irony when certain people try to point to Palestinian usage of this as a "gotcha" - "See, they want to exterminate us!"), and that IDF intelligence showed that Hamas was likely to be more extremist and thus garner more sympathy for Israel, so Israel started supporting Hamas' rise.
This could mean anything from a couple of ghettos to all of the modern state of Israel depending on what you think Palestinian territory is or should be.
If you take the approach that all of it is Palestinian territory and the state of Israel shouldn't exist, then yeah, sure? that's different from the assertion that all of the intelligence related businesses in Israel are founded because of direct experience in conflict with the Palestinian people.
Maybe I have a wrong read on the situation between Iran and Israel. But my impression is that Israel is more concerned with Iran as a general threat, moreso than they are concerned that Iran will intervene on behalf of Palestinians, current Palestinian territory, or Hamas.
If Iran didn't get involved directly after ~2 years of open warfare and inarguably genocide-shaped atrocities carried out on civilians, what are they waiting for? Meanwhile Netanyahu has been talking about the danger of Iran developing nuclear weapons for decades now.
Keep in mind I was responding to a post about an assertion that there are so many military startups in Israel because so many Israelis, in their IDF service, have hands-on experience fighting against and oppressing Palestinians. I responded to a post that seemed reductive and misleading in support of that perspective.
> my impression is that Israel is more concerned with Iran as a general threat
Iran has never attacked Israel unless attacked first. As for their 'proxies' they only really exist because Israel has invaded Lebanon long before Hezbollah existed and its creation was spearheaded primarily by Lebanon's local population as a response to the invasion, with Iranian support.
Iran supports these local 'proxies' because it sees itself as a leader of the Shia and more broadly as a leader of the Muslim world and the Palestinian cause as being the responsibility of every Muslim nation (incl theirs) to get involved with.
Israel is indeed concerned with Iran as a threat, but only because they see the other governments in the region as willing to overlook the Palestinian cause, in exchange for economic links with Israel.
In that sense Iran is very much connected to the Palestinians, this assertion that Iran is just super irrational and wants to see Israel go down because they want to laugh watching it or something is nothing more than cheap Israeli propaganda.
Of course Iran is not just looking for the Palestinians out of altruism, they want a leadership position in the Muslim world and this is their way of gaining legitimacy, but the reason why Israel sees them as a threat is very much because of Iran's interest in the Palestinians.
> Iran has never attacked Israel unless attacked first
Iran was involved in attacks against Israel and Israeli towns in the 1980s and 1990s by their mercenaries in Hezbollah and direct IRGC presence in Lebanon. This happened even when Israel supported Iran during the Iraq-Iran war, so this is strictly not true
Other incidents were the Iranian bombings of the Israeli embassy in Argentine or the Jewish center there, and attempts on the London and Bangkok embassies
Furthermore financing of Hamas during the 1990s suicide campaign with the direct goal of derailing the peace process.
This is part of a long line of Iranian aggressive actions that have led them to being isolated and in a string of wars that greatly destroyed their already diminished economic power
Except Israel invaded Lebanon before that. It also engaged in assassinations, espionage, terror and sabotage before that. In fact Israelis engaged in those even before the state of Israel was officially pronounced.
I'm not saying the Iranians or Lebanese etc. never play dirty, but this portrayal of them as just irrational and aggressive for no reason whatsoever against their peace loving Israeli neighbors is just dishonest.
For one, neither the Iranians, nor the Lebanese are occupying foreign territory. The same cannot be said for the Israelis.
Israelis will say they invaded Lebanon in the 70s/80s because of the PLO, (no Hezbollah yet) however the PLO was itself a consequence of Israeli occupation of Palestinian territory.
In conclusion; there's a fairly simple way to disarm the Iranians and strip them and their proxies of any perceived legitimacy they may hold with anyone; stop occupying Palestine.
> Except Israel invaded Lebanon before that. It also engaged in assassinations, espionage, terror and sabotage before that. In fact Israelis engaged in those even before the state of Israel was officially pronounced.
That is moving the goal posts, as these are not instances of attacking Iran, it's hard to claim Iran never attacked Israel first when it is either financing attacks against Israel or participating in them for the last 45+ years
> Israelis will say they invaded Lebanon in the 70s/80s because of the PLO, (no Hezbollah yet) however the PLO was itself a consequence of Israeli occupation of Palestinian territory.
Back when the PLO was founded there was no "foreign territory occupied by Israel", only internationally recognized Israeli borders and Gaza/West Bank which were under Egyptian/Jordanian occupation. Two countries that refused to create an independent Palestinian state
> it's hard to claim Iran never attacked Israel first when it is either financing attacks against Israel or participating in them for the last 45+ years
The Iranians supported the Palestinians Israel was attacking the same way the Soviets supported the Vietnamese. This was not the Soviets attacking the US, this was the Soviets supporting indigenous forces that the US was attacking. It's the same as the Israelis supporting Kurdish groups in Iran, Turkey etc.
These groups have their own motives and agency, the Lebanese opposed to Israel are not mere 'proxies' of Iran, neither are the Palestinians. They're opposed to Israel for their own reasons, namely Israel occupies their land.
If you're so concerned about Iran being able to come in and support them, then stop occupying foreign land and the whole reason Iran is able to make inroads with your neighbors disappears.
You won't do that of course, because Israel is the one who first conducted attacks on Iran directly. Therefore it does not get to play the card of being attacked. It invaded Syria too for no reason whatsoever, other than taking more land.
> Back when the PLO was founded there was no "foreign territory occupied by Israel", only internationally recognized Israeli borders and Gaza/West Bank which were under Egyptian/Jordanian occupation.
Which is why the PLO has a bloody conflict with Jordan, which you conveniently omit. It's almost as if they were opposed to being occupied, period.
When Israel invaded Lebanon back in the 70s/80s, it already took control of Gaza and the West Bank by that point.
> Two countries that refused to create an independent Palestinian state
I love this talking point. So because someone else was horrible to the Palestinians, that justifies Israel being horrible to them too?
> Which is why the PLO has a bloody conflict with Jordan, which you conveniently omit. It's almost as if they were opposed to being occupied, period.
The PLO tried to takeover Jordan after Jordan stopped occupying the West Bank, I don't see how that makes sense chronologically.
You could also point at Palestinian attempts at taking over Lebanon, but that doesn't really support your argument that Palestinians are aggressive due to being under occupation
Regarding the Iranians comparison with the Soviets, The Soviets were an aggressive actor and that's why the world was on the brink of nuclear war numerous times in the 20th century, causing both sides to regulate. Iran had never really toned down its aggressive behavior towards Israel, culminating in the October 7th massacre and ended eventually with Iran in complete ruins
You're doing the same thing you're accusing the other person of.
The PLO was not an inevitable force of nature, it was an organization that consisted of human beings, making conscious decisions.
The British took Palestine from the Ottomans and handed it to the state of Israel. Maybe morally it's an occupation, but if so then the USA is occupying Hawaii.
Yes that's why I brought it up. There's actually a substantially better argument for Hawaii because the USA just showed up and conquered the kingdom that was there. Whereas the Ottomans had Palestine for what, 500 years?
It's more complicated than that as the Palestinians are speaking the language of an earlier foreign colonizing empire that replaced another empire that ethnically cleansed the Jews and then colonized the area
> Iran has never attacked Israel unless attacked first
I mean, come on dude. You explaining away the actions of Iran's proxies as not the actions of Iran is just ahistorical nonsense at best. They funded them, trained them, and directed their actions.
> Israel is indeed concerned with Iran as a threat, but only because they see the other governments in the region as willing to overlook the Palestinian cause, in exchange for economic links with Israel
The complete lock down of the border between Egypt and the Gaza strip is because Egypt is beholden to Israel? Is that what you're saying here?
> the reason why Israel sees them as a threat is very much because of Iran's interest in the Palestinians
And by "interest" you're referring to backing the most violent terrorist groups in the region, who have the blood of thousands of Israeli citizens on their hands.
Iran is not strictly "an obstacle" to Israeli hegemony. Its ideology since the 1970s clearly states the destruction of Israel as its goal. It clashed with Israel over Iran's desire to set up a Shia vassal state in Lebanon and it killed Jews and Israelis all over the world through terror (e.g. AMIA bombing in Argentina)
The Palestinians are merely a tool for Iran to gain influence, Hezbollah and Shias in Iraq were far more important for them historically
> you say that as if israel doesn't have the exact same ideology against iran (it does)
What are the parallels in Israeli society for Iranian school systems morning chants of "Death to Israel" and a public countdown clock to the destruction of Israel?
Are you seriously going to bring up chants when Israel is a country where they chant 'Death to Arabs' casually, watch the Gaza genocide from a hilltop and have installed vending machines to make the massacres more fun to watch?
But to answer your question directly, the Iranians would say they equate Israel with ethno-supremacy, same as apartheid South Africa. Getting rid of apartheid in South Africa was not about getting rid of while South Africans as such, it was about getting rid of the ethno-supremacy underpinning apartheid.
Sorry, but none of your examples are related to Iran or are state mandated (and are awfully cherry-picked).
Iran ideological wishes of destroying Israel are pretty much in the open, no need to try to weasel around it. While there isn't any such ideology in Israel towards Iran
Sorry, but none of your personal restrictions on type and style of evidence are pertinent to the matter at hand (and are awfully cherry-picked).
israeli ideological wishes of destroying Palestine, Lebanon, Iran, etc are pretty much in the open, no need to try to weasel around it. Heck, israel doesn't even recognize Palestine's right to exist in the first place.
What would recognizing "Palestine's right to exist" look like? They proposed the creation of a Palestinian state several times; what more would you expect?
> israeli ideological wishes of destroying Palestine, Lebanon, Iran, etc are pretty much in the open
This is pretty ironic considering that Iran, Hamas and Hezbollah are all quite explicit about their ambitions of wiping out Israel, while the reverse isn't true at all. Israelis have no desire to kill Persians a thousand kilometers away, they just don't have much choice but to fight foreign armies who attack them.
> They proposed the creation of a Palestinian state several times; what more would you expect?
The Palestinian state already exists, so the least they could do is recognize its right to exist, which is equal in every way to israel's. That is to say: if israel has an unconditional right to exist, then Palestine's right to exist is equally unconditional. Likewise, if israel can place conditions on Palestine's existence, then Palestine has equal rights to place conditions on israel's existence.
> Iran, Hamas and Hezbollah are all quite explicit about their ambitions of wiping out Israel
This is pretty ironic considering that israel is pretty explicit about their ambitions of wiping out Palestinians and taking their land, as well as destroying Palestine, Lebanon, and Iran.
> Israelis have no desire to kill Persians a thousand kilometers away
This unsupported claim is immediately belied by their actions (they initiated a war in which they are killing persians a thousand kilometers away), and also ignores that they are also killing Palestinian and Lebanese people.
> The Palestinian state already exists, so the least they could do is recognize its right to exist
There exists a national identity, but the organization that claims to be its government does not enjoy popular support, and more importantly, has never really controlled the territory that it aspires to govern.
> This is pretty ironic considering that israel is pretty explicit about their ambitions of wiping out Palestinians and taking their land, as well as destroying Palestine, Lebanon, and Iran.
This is false; there's absolutely nothing resembling Iran's, Hamas' or Hezbollah's clear, explicit goals of destroying Israel.
> they initiated a war
This perspective only makes sense if we pretend that proxy warfare doesn't count. Once we acknowledge the fact that Iran funded, armed and trained multiple terrorist groups specifically to attack Israel for years, it becomes very clear who started the Israel-Iran conflict.
I would suggest to you that the focus on Iran is because Iran is perceived as being an obstacle to Israeli hegemony in the region and thus undisputed Israeli rule over Palestinian territory.
Iran also justifies its actions in terms of standing up for Palestinians.
So yes, it's very much related.