The Israeli-Hamas War Is Really All About Iran

Readers are being bombarded with coverage of the Israeli-Hamas War resulting from the horrific Hamas attack on innocent men, women, and children in southern Israel on October 7. While the coverage rightly focuses on events on the battlefield and the fate of hostages, there is a deeper geopolitical drama playing out among Israel, Saudi Arabia, Iran, and the United States, with Russia and China watching closely from the sidelines.

This article from The Hill gives a lengthy explanation of these developments. When I use material from The Hill, it usually comes with a warning label that it’s a left-wing publication.

By the way, it’s necessary if unpleasant to read a lot of material from propaganda outlets like The New York Times and Washington Post. It’s not that their reporting is true (it’s not). It is the case that when you know what your opponents are lying about, you gain insights into what they’re really thinking and what they care about. Why lie if you don’t care in the first place?

That said, this article is relatively free of bias. It explains that the Hamas attack was totally planned, financed and green-lighted by Iran. Hamas has the killers and a base of operation, but it does not have the resources to conduct an attack like the recent invasion of Israel without complete support from Iran.

What is Iran’s motivation? Apart from hurting Israel, they wanted to derail pending reconciliation talks between Saudi Arabia and Israel as a continuation of the Abraham Accords launched under President Trump. They also want to prevent some of the assistance the U.S. was prepared to give Saudi Arabia in exchange for the reconciliation, including a mutual defense treaty and nuclear technology.

As expected, Saudi Arabia put the reconciliation talks with Israel on hold because they cannot be seen to be friendly with a country that is destroying the pro-Palestinian Hamas, even though that destruction is well-deserved and now necessary.

This three-way game among Israel, Saudi Arabia and Iran comes against a backdrop of substantial assistance given to Iran by the United States, including non-enforcement of oil export sanctions (that allowed Iran to accumulate tens of billions of dollars of hard currency oil revenue), release of $6 billion in fresh cash to Iran that was frozen in South Korean banks, and a course of appeasement by the U.S. in connection with the ongoing talks to limit Iran’s uranium enrichment programs.

No wonder Iran felt they had a free hand to attack Israel after the U.S. has done everything to facilitate terror by Iran. There’s more to the story, including the fact that the U.S. delegate to the Iran negotiations and liaison selected by both Obama and Biden is now under investigation as a spy for Iran. It’s a long article but a good backgrounder for much of the geopolitical jockeying to come.

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