Last week Israel bombed Iran, saying it destroyed over a hundred targets in the theocratic, Islamist state. Israel claimed that Iran was close to developing a nuclear weapon. U.S. intelligence claimed that was untrue, that Iran still remains years away from achieving that. U.S. intelligence surely knows what it is talking about.
Israel knows that too. Then, why did Israel really bomb Iran last week? There is a unanimous consent among western nations that Iran—which is a rogue state advocating the annihilation of Israel and disrupting peace in the Middle East with its terrorist surrogates—should never have a nuclear weapon.
Europe Has Been Preparing to Recognize a Palestinian State
Most of Europe is in the process of declaring recognition of a Palestinian state. This has been a subject of discussion for many decades. It likely has been put back on the foreign policy table by mostly western nations largely due to Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza. This war was prompted by Hamas doing the stupid act of attacking Israel by sending its fighters across the Israel-Gaza border on October 7, 2023, and killing about 1,200 civilians one day. Israel then responded by sending its Israel Defense Forces into Gaza to annihilate Hamas, a radical Islamist organization that governs the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip and also advocates the annihilation of the State of Israel.
But Hamas over the years has built an intricate tunnel system in Gaza that makes it difficult for Israel’s military to eradicate Hamas warriors from the tunnels. The result has been that IDF has killed rather indiscriminately over 50,000 Palestinians in the Gaza Strip. Most of them have been civilians, thus women and children. This slaughter has brought charges of Israel committing “genocide.” Of course, that depends on how genocide is defined, to which everyone does not agree. But many people have accused Israel of doing similarly what Nazis did to Jews. That is quite an unjust comparison, but it is a little fair.
International Community Has Failed to Solve the Palestinian Problem
The reason for this Israel-Hamas war, and much of the turmoil that goes on the Middle East, including Israel bombing Iran in the past few days, has been due to the international community’s failure to solve the ongoing, seemingly intractable, Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which has existed for over seventy years. In my opinion, and that of most western diplomats, that conflict will not be solved unless there is a Palestinian state. But also IMO, the traditional two-state solution—a Palestinian state in the separated territories of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, where most Palestinians have lived—has always been a non-starter. That’s what I say in my book, Palestine Is Coming: The Revival of Ancient Philistia, published 35 years ago and thus in 1990. This book, especially its thesis of how to solve this conflict, is more relevant than it ever has been. No other book has ever been published with my thesis. See also ten update articles about it at my website kermitzarley.com by clicking in the menu “Theology/On Palestine.”
In December 2014, the European Union voted to recognize a Palestinian state, which was only a formality though an important symbolic gesture. But it would be more significant for leading European nations, such as UK, France, and Germany to do so individually. For the first time, on May 8, 2024, three European nations did declare their recognition of a Palestinian state. These nations were Spain, Norway, and Ireland, with Spain leading this effort. Slovenia then did likewise on June 4th.
Europe Was Scheduled at the UN to Recognize a Palestinian State
A United Nations conference at UN headquarters in New York City to be hosted by France and Saudi Arabia was scheduled for July 17-20 to recognize a Palestinian state. France and UK had indicated they were going to recognize the state, and others had indicated they might do so as well. This is something that the State of Israel, led by the Netanyahu administration, desperately does not want to happen. Prime Minister Netanyahu has always been against the creation of a Palestinian state. And his very conservative, right-wing coalition government is even more determined to prevent that from happening.
In conclusion, I think it is quite likely that the Netanyahu administration made the decision to bomb Iran at this time, against U.S. intelligence and apparently against the wishes of the Trump administration. Israel hoped that it would lead to the canceling of next month’s scheduled conference at the UN to recognize a Palestinian state. Last Friday, the conference was postponed, but not canceled.
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