If the risk of escalation and conflagration does indeed exist in the Middle East, it remains, hotly, fragilely contained. It is true that the Israeli bombing of the Iranian consulate in Damascus, carried out on 1er April, and the deluge of drones and missiles unleashed in response by Iran on Israel on Saturday evening are two events which bring the two capitals into unprecedented territory of direct military confrontation, which is truly worrying. Immediate question: what will the counter-retaliation announced by Israel be based on? If a spiral of outbidding sets in, the consequences could be incalculable regionally.
Neither, however, has any interest in shattering the sinister balance which until then characterized their confrontation. To telegraph its response, which was inevitable, Tehran reacted in a spectacular and risky manner, but at the same time with a certain precaution, as it can also count on precious armed relays in Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, Iraq. and, until proven otherwise, in Gaza. Here are two governments which find it useful to exploit their tensions and their mutual animosity for the purposes of political survival and national cohesion. The Western powers, starting with the United States, have clear reasons to urge Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to exercise restraint.Faced with the multiplication of wars in the world and taking into account the build-up military in the Indo-Pacific, their capabilities to supply Israel with offensive and defensive weapons are not, after all, unlimited.
Forces present: on the one hand, an Iranian theocracy more infiltrated than ever by the hardliners of the regime, drowning its lamentable socio-economic failure in the most blind repression that can be imagined, and dressing it up with anti-Western and anti-Zionist propaganda which we suspects that it no longer convinces a large part of the population. On the other, a faltering democracy and a torn society, whose government is taken hostage by a clique of Jewish supremacists who call for the annexation of the West Bank and all-out war against Iran, headed by a prime minister who is trying to save his skin by continuing a war of annihilation with genocidal overtones in Gaza. By supporting the massacres of October 7 in Israel, Tehran made itself the sponsor of an unspeakable state terror. Netanyahu is no less cynical and die-hard, provoking Iran by attacking its consulate in Damascus and pretending to pay attention to Gazan civilians. With variable geometry, the right to anti-government criticism is invalidated in the name of patriotic solidarity.
The world and the Middle East would (perhaps) not be here if the Vienna international agreement on Iranian nuclear power, concluded in 2015 under Barack Obama, had not been scuttled by Donald Trump three years later , to the great happiness, moreover, of Netanyahu. The agreement had the merit of preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons and, beyond that, opened the door to its reintegration into the international sphere by taking it out of the isolation in which it had been held ever since. the revolution of 1979. The scuttling of the agreement had the results that we know: hardening of the regime with the threat that its nuclear weapons program would be relaunched; reestablishment of the policy of containment and Western sanctions; redoubled repression against civil society, particularly against women; and catastrophic deterioration in the standard of living of Iranians.
We would probably not be here either if the international community, Canada included, had had the courage to demand loud and clear the application of a political settlement of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict rather than leaving it behind the scenes. the Israeli right, of which Netanyahu has been leader for 20 years, kill the project of creating an independent Palestinian state, Jewish settlement by Jewish settlement. The said West demonstrated a laissez-faire approach, the poisonous fruit of which we are now reaping in a region of the world where civilians of all sides are constantly thrown to the wolves. With the result that the United States, clinging to its hegemonic logic, arms with one hand and applies humanitarian bandages with the other. It should not have taken the violence of the last six months to put the Palestinian cause back on the agenda.
In a work in which he paints a portrait of the great international rivalries of the last 150 years, the writer Amin Maalouf “dreams of a humanity which would finally enter adulthood”. Understand: the dream of a differently collaborative world. We are far from it. Humanity took a step in the right direction in the aftermath of World War II. It is today stuck in its old failings, characterized by international relations reduced solely to the balance of power. Calling for de-escalation, without taking sustainable means to prevent the next escalation, is not enough.