Did Netanyahu have an extremely rare moment of restraint this weekend?

Daniel Levy, Israel’s longtime Cassandra who for years has insisted on what a disaster Israeli policies toward Palestinians have been and how grimly destructive Israel’s military actions against them have been, cautiously gives Netanyahu and Biden credit for producing a rare moment of restraint in Israel’s weekend retaliatory attack on Iran.

As an experienced Cassandra, he is quick to point out, “It's possible that by the time these words are published, the situation will be upended.” During his probably short moment of optimism and relief, Levy writes:

If Israel doesn't wreck things and if Iran displays similar restraint, we were saved from another disaster on Saturday, possibly harsher than all the preceding ones. No war broke out between Iran and Israel. The incompetent U.S. administration managed, for the first time since the war erupted, to affect its course. Following a year in which the U.S. fulfilled all Israel's desires and needs, without any strings attached, a year in which Israel did not adhere to any advice, warnings or pleas by the Americans, Israel acceded to the superpower's request.

Contrary to all expectations and precedents, Netanyahu listened to President Joe Biden, who would have preferred it if Israel had not attacked at all, certainly not on the eve of the U.S. elections, but the administration can live with a limited attack. Perhaps it is thanks to the administration that a calamity was avoided. [my emphasis]

For anyone following the US Presidential elections – Netanyahu himself is following it closely and obviously attempting to affect the outcome – the next nine days will be a cliff-hanger. The only certainty at this point is that Trump will contest the results, even if he clearly wins. That was the case in 2016, in which he won the Electoral College vote but Hillary Clinton received more actual votes in total. To this day, the Orange Felon claims that he won the popular vote in 2016, as well.

Having followed Levy’s critiques closely for the last year, I would assume that when he calls Biden’s government “the incompetent U.S. administration,” he is referring to Biden’s unwillingness to impose any meaningful military restraint on Israel since October 2023. Which he should have done throughout. Most importantly, Biden has been unwilling to cut US military aid even after Netanyahu’s government time and time again has flipped him off when the US was (officially) calling for restraint and an end to genocidal actions by Israel – though of course the Biden Administration never ever called them genocidal.

Levy concludes:

Nothing was resolved on Saturday [by Israel’s attack on Iran]. The wars in Gaza and Lebanon are continuing full tilt, with no sign of abating. Iran is still a bitter enemy and so are its proxies. The solution for this will never be a military one. Blood continues to be shed on all sides, pointlessly, and with it the suffering and unimaginable terror of the hostages, their families, the evacuees in Israel as well as the three million evacuees in Gaza and Lebanon, moving back and forth with no present or future. The end to Gaza's suffering is not even on the horizon. There isn't a day there without dozens of fatalities, without war crimes committed by Israel, without dead or crippled children, terrified and orphaned.

But in the midst of all this despair, a faint glimmer of hope appeared on Saturday. Israel acted with reason and restraint. It's true, one can rely on it to return to its old ways, but in these black days, even a faint glimmer of hope is almost a formative event.

Biden, for all his astonishing deference to Israel’s war policies, may at least still be focused enough to realize that Democratic voters in key states like Pennsylvania and Michigan need to go to the polls next week thinking that maybe, just maybe, Kamala Harris convinced Biden to actually compel some military restraint on Israel this weekend. But this is going to be a long week.

The Guardian reports:

There were global calls for restraint, including one from the United Nations head António Guterres, who said he was “deeply alarmed” and called on all sides to step back from further military action. The European Union, Russia, Arab Gulf nations and G7 finance ministers and central Bank governors also warned against further escalation. But months of such demands have had little impact on the ground. Hawks in both Israel and Iran are pushing for a more aggressive approach and the risks of costly miscalculations are immeasurably higher than even a few months ago.

Some Israeli political and security figures describe this moment as a once in a generation chance to strike Iran when its allies are in disarray and its defences have been pounded by waves of airstrikes. National security minister Itamar Ben-Gvir said Saturday’s attack was “an opening blow” and strikes on the country’s strategic assets “must be the next step”, Haaretz reported. “We have a historic duty to remove the Iranian threat to destroy Israel,” he said in a statement.¹

The leading “realist” foreign policy scholars John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, who co-authored the groundbreaking 2007 book, The Israel Lobby, both provided their current analyses during the past week. Both of them are also longtime Cassandras like Gideon Levy on Israel’s situation and the US relationship to Israel.

Ironically, they recognize that Israel’s relationship to the US is a prime example in which their “realist” assumption that nations have national interests which they tend to pursue in a more-or-less rational (and therefore predictable) way doesn’t actually describe the situation. They see the longtime American support for Israel as actually damaging to US national interests. And therefore the persistent political support for Israel’s policies actually provides an example in which foreign-policy decisions taken for sentimental or financial reasons (or by misjudgment and miscalculation) can actually work against the national interest.

After all, even rational decision-making is done by human beings, who don’t always operate on a purely rational basis.

Walt²:

It's hard to see how the United States is more secure, more prosperous, or more respected around the world when it is actively supporting the actions that Israel is taking in Gaza and Lebanon and elsewhere. It's hard to- And it's interesting to note that the Biden Administration almost never tries to justify what we're doing on those grounds. You don't hear [Secretary of State Anthony] Blinken go in front of the cameras and explain why this is good for America. Right? He doesn't bother to make that argument because it's almost impossible to make. (13:46 ff.)

Mearsheimer³:

[T]he [Israel] lobby insists that the United States give Israel unconditional support. And this is certainly the case when you're dealing with the Palestinians. That means the Israelis are pretty much free to do anything they want, including commit genocide in Gaza, and we'll back them anyway. And this is what you see at play today. So when people talk about Israel's wars in the Middle East, you know, the war in Gaza against the Palestinians, the war in Lebanon against Hezbollah, and the war between Israel and Iran, you're really talking about a war that involves the United States and Israel joined together at the hip.

We're deeply involved in these conflicts. Fortunately, we don’t have soldiers on the ground who are dying. Of course. We now have some soldiers on the ground in Israel but not many. But the fact is that we are supplying the Israelis with all sorts of arms, all sorts of diplomatic support. and we allow them to do pretty much anything they want. And this has huge consequences for the region, certainly has huge consequences for the Palestinians, and has huge consequences for the United States. (1:58ff) [my emphasis]

For what it’s worth, I tend to find Walt’s “defensive realism” more attractive than Mearsheimer’s “offensive realism.” But both are very often accurate in their foreign policy analyses. Which is also very often depressing, because they concentrate on analysis of real events and relationships in foreign affairs. I think both of them would concur with Hegel’s famously gloomy comment: “The history of the world is not the ground of happiness, because the periods of happiness are blank pages in it.” He followed it with the observation, “the object of history is, at the least, change.”⁴ For better or worse …

1. Graham-Harrison, Emma (2024): Joe Biden says he hopes latest Israeli strike on Iran will end escalation. The Guardian 10/26/2024.  <https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/oct/26/joe-biden-says-he-hopes-latest-israeli-strike-on-iran-will-end-escalation> (Accessed: 2024-27-10).

2. Iran, Gaza, & Lebanon: How the pro-Israel lobby influences US policy | Stephen Walt  (Accessed: 2024-27-10). Middle East Eye YouTube channel 10/26/2024. (Accessed: 2024-27-10).

3. The Future of Israel’s Conflicts in the Middle East: What Lies Ahead, John J. Mearsheimer & Chris H. John J. Mearsheimer YouTube channel 10/26/2024.

4. Hegel, G.W.F. (2015): Gesammelte Werke 27:1, 54 (Nachschrift Hotho, 1822-23). Düsseldorf: Nordrhein-Westfälische Akademie der Wissenschaften und der Künste. My translation from the German.