The Middle East has, for some time, been a powder keg where degrees of violence are tolerated with ceremonial mania and a calculus of restraint.\u00a0 Assassinations can take place at a moment\u2019s notice.\u00a0 Revenge killings follow with dashing speed.\u00a0 Suicide bombings of immolating power are carried out.\u00a0 Drone strikes of devastating, collective punishment are ordered, all padded by the retarded notion that such killings are morally justified and confined.<\/p>\n
In all this viciousness, the conventional armed forces have been held in check, the arsenals contained, the generals busied by plans of contingency rather than reality.\u00a0 The rhetoric may be vengeful and spicily hysterical, but the states in the region keep their armies in reserve, and Armageddon at bay.\u00a0 Till, naturally, they don\u2019t.<\/p>\n
To date, Israel is doing much to test the threshold of what might be called the rule of tolerable violence.\u00a0 With Iran, for instance, it has adopted a \u201ccampaign between the wars\u201d, primarily in Syria.\u00a0 For over a decade, the Israeli strategy was to prevent the flow of Iranian weapons to Hezbollah, intercepting weapons shipments and targeting storage facilities. \u00a0\u201cImportantly,\u201d writes<\/a> Haid Haid, a consulting fellow for Chatham House\u2019s Middle East and North Africa Programme, \u201cIsrael appeared to avoid, whenever feasible, killing Hezbollah or Iranian operatives during these operations.\u201d<\/p>\n But the state of play has changed.\u00a0 The Gaza War, which has become more the Gaza Massacre Project, has moved into its seventh month, packing morgues, destroying families and stimulating the terror of famine.\u00a0 Despite calls from the Israeli military and various officials that Hamas\u2019s capabilities have been irreparably weakened (this claim, like all those battling an idea rather than just a corporeal foe, remains refutable and redundant) the killings and policy of starvation continues against the general Palestinian populace.\u00a0 The International Court of Justice interim orders continue to be ignored, even as the judges deliberate over the issue as to whether genocide is taking place in the Gaza Strip.\u00a0 The restraints, in other words, have been taken off.<\/p>\n The signs are ominous.\u00a0 Spilt blood is becoming hard currency.\u00a0 Daily skirmishes between the IDF and Hezbollah are taking place on the Israeli-Lebanon border.\u00a0 The Houthis are feverishly engaged with blocking and attacking international shipping in the Red Sea, hooting solidarity for the Palestinian cause.<\/p>\n On April 1, a blood crazed strike by Israel suggested that rules of tolerable violence had, if not been pushed, then altogether suspended.\u00a0 The attack on Iran\u2019s consular offices in Damascus by the Israeli Air Force was tantamount to striking Iranian soil.\u00a0 In the process, it killed Brigadier General Mohammad Reza Zahedi and other commanders of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), including Zahedi\u2019s deputy, General Haji Rahimi.\u00a0 Retaliation was accordingly promised, with Iran\u2019s ambassador to Syria, Hossein Akbari, vowing a response<\/a> \u201cat the same magnitude and harshness\u201d.<\/p>\n It came on April 13, involving<\/a> 185 drones, 110 ballistic missiles and 36 cruise missiles, all directed at Israel proper.\u00a0 Superficially, this looks anarchically quixotic, streakily disproportionate.\u00a0 But Tehran went for a spectacular theatrical show to terrify and magnify rather than opt for any broader infliction of damage.\u00a0 Israel\u2019s Iron Dome system, along with allied powers, could be counted upon to aid the shooting down of almost all the offensive devices.\u00a0 A statement had been made and the Iranians have so far drawn a line under any further military action.\u00a0 What was deemed by certain pundits a tactical failure can just as easily be read<\/a> as a strategic if provocative success.\u00a0 The question then is: what follows?<\/p>\n The Israeli approach varies depending on who is being asked.\u00a0 The IDF Chief of Staff, General Herzi Halevi, stated that \u201cIsrael is considering next steps\u201d declaring that \u201cthe launch of so many missiles and drones to Israeli territory will be answered with retaliation.\u201d<\/p>\n National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir was taloned in his hawkishness, demanding<\/a> that Israel launch a \u201ccrushing\u201d counterattack, \u201cgo crazy\u201d and abandon \u201crestraint and proportionality\u201d, \u201cconcepts that passed away on October 7.\u201d\u00a0 The \u201cresponse must not be a scarecrow, in the style of the dune bombings we saw in previous years in Gaza.\u201d<\/p>\n Cabinet minister Benny Gantz, who is a voting member of the war cabinet alongside Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defence Minister Yoav Gallant, is tilting<\/a> for a \u201cregional coalition\u201d to \u201cexact the price from Iran, in the way and at the time that suits us.\u00a0 And most importantly, in the face of the desire of our enemies to harm us, we will unite and become stronger.\u201d\u00a0 The immediate issues for resolution from Gantz\u2019s perspective was the return of Israeli hostages \u201cand the removal of the threat against the residents of the north and south.\u201d<\/p>\n Such thinking will also be prompted by the response<\/a> from the Biden administration that Netanyahu \u201cthink very carefully and strategically\u201d about the next measures.\u00a0 \u201cYou got a win,\u201d President Joe Biden is reported<\/a> to have told Netanyahu.\u00a0 \u201cTake the win.\u201d US Secretary of State Antony Blinken has also expressed<\/a> the view that, \u201cStrength and wisdom must be the two sides of the same coin.\u201d<\/p>\n For decades, Israel has struck targets in sovereign countries with impunity, using expansive doctrines of pre-emption and self-defence. In doing so, the state always hoped that the understanding of tolerable violence would prevail.\u00a0 Any retaliation, if any, would be modest, with \u201cdeterrence\u201d assured. With the war in Gaza and the fanning out of conflict, the equation has changed.\u00a0 To some degree, Ben Gvir is right that concepts of restraint and proportionality have been banished to the mortuary.\u00a0 But such banishment, to a preponderant degree, was initiated by Israel. \u00a0The Israel-Gaza War is now, effectively, a global conflict, waged in regional miniature.<\/p>The post Suspending the Rule of Tolerable Violence: Israel\u2019s Attack and Iran\u2019s Retaliation<\/a> first appeared on Dissident Voice<\/a>.\n This post was originally published on Dissident Voice<\/a>. <\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The Middle East has, for some time, been a powder keg where degrees of violence are tolerated with ceremonial mania and a calculus of restraint.\u00a0 Assassinations can take place at a moment\u2019s notice.\u00a0 Revenge killings follow with dashing speed.\u00a0 Suicide bombings of immolating power are carried out.\u00a0 Drone strikes of devastating, collective punishment are ordered, [\u2026]<\/p>\n The post Suspending the Rule of Tolerable Violence: Israel\u2019s Attack and Iran\u2019s Retaliation<\/a> first appeared on Dissident Voice<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":30,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[80,287,2018,25,82,72338,51,78443,196,36,166],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1612500"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/30"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1612500"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1612500\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1612501,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1612500\/revisions\/1612501"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1612500"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1612500"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1612500"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}