Is Netanyahu exporting his internal crises to Iran?

At a time when Israeli channels are mobilizing the Israeli public, whose brainwashing needs only two preemptive bomb bulletins for a preemptive strike on Tehran, the Israeli public discusses with fear the percentage of Iran that has reached the completion of its nuclear bomb.

China has emerged as a red bird of peace in the skies of the Middle East, and Chinese mediation ended a 7-year dispute between Saudi Arabia and Iran, and Saudi Arabia and Iran announced the resumption of diplomatic relations severed since 2016, in a move that could involve major regional diplomatic changes.

How will the Iranian-Saudi rapprochement reflect on Israel at a time when crises are gathering against Benjamin Netanyahu? Despite attempts by the Aqaba and Sharm el-Sheikh summits to curb the escalation of the scene, the Palestinian street in the West Bank is on fire with successive Israeli incursions.

• Jerusalem is on a hot plate, this is how National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir wants it in Ramadan.
• Security breach in the northern border.
• Mass demonstrations against the policies of Netanyahu's sixth government are beginning to intensify among liberals and ultra-Orthodox.
• A fall in the price of the shekel against the dollar.
• The White House has not invited Netanyahu to visit Washington more than two-and-a-half months after forming his far-right government.
• Iran is close to building its own nuclear bomb.

These issues were plaguing the Israeli prime minister to varying degrees when he stood at his press conference with his Italian counterpart in Rome hours before China announced its diplomatic move.

Netanyahu spoke of the imminent normalization of relations with Saudi Arabia and even shared economic details, giving the impression that the move was imminent, saying that he would reopen the Hejaz railway line from Saudi Arabia to the port of Haifa, reducing the distance between Gulf energy resources and consumers in Europe.

Netanyahu saw Saudi Arabia and Iran as cornerstones on which to lean in the near future, through a sudden announcement of normalization of relations with the former that saves him from his internal crises for a while, distracts the media and lowers the voice of economic concerns slightly, or through the threat of a limited military strike against Iran that does not lead to war, as the first Chinese mediation is postponed and observers believe that it may accelerate the second.

Normalization with Saudi Arabia would have been a magic solution for Netanyahu to get out, even temporarily, from a series of exceptional crises; the Israeli street is divided against itself for the first time in such depth, extremist government ministers, whose statement or action may destroy everything that Israeli diplomacy has built for years, and a western bank that draws inspiration from the Jenin Brigades and Areen al-Aswad, and each issue separately would blow up the scene and take it to the path of no return.

Therefore, China's pre-emptive strike has demolished Netanyahu's great havens, with a narrow horizon for a solution in domestic files. Israel has long viewed the normalization of its relations with Saudi Arabia as the jewel in the crown of normalization with the Arab world, and since Saudi Arabia has its historical requirements since the Arab Peace Initiative, which its diplomats phrase by saying "giving the Palestinians a state" as a condition for peace with Israel, the latter decided to knock on the door from an aspect it thought was more exciting for the Saudis, which was anti-Iran without reading the broader geopolitical scene in the Middle East. This is reminiscent of a comment by Haaretz military affairs analyst Amos Harel: "Israel is convinced that it is the center of the Middle East, if not the whole world."

The deployment of the Israeli deterrence system in a number of Arab countries in the region under the pretext of combating Iranian threats, with the aim of building a new strategic alliance in the Middle East with American blessing to confront the threat of Iran and limit its activity, was the entrance on which Israel relies confidently to normalize its relations with the Gulf countries, which competed in the rivals of prime ministers in Israel after the start of the Abraham Accords train, who today throw accusations at each other about what was described as the strategic failure of the Saudi-Iranian rapprochement.

While he was talking only weeks ago about Tehran's danger to the region and the world, Netanyahu chose his words well in his recent visit to Germany, when he said "Israel will do whatever it takes to protect itself from those who want to eliminate the Jewish state," today the man is well aware that his ways of persuading the world to launch a military strike on Tehran have been exhausted, just like the speech he gave at the General Assembly in 2018 reviewing the archives that the Mossad seized and smuggled from Tehran, in an attempt To convince the world that Iran's scarecrow has become global, not just Israel and the region.

"Netanyahu is exploiting the Iranian threat to distract Israelis with an exaggerated external threat," Uzi Elam, former director general of Israel's Atomic Energy Commission, said in a 2014 interview with Yedioth Ahronoth.

Netanyahu has long used Iran as a scarecrow to distract Israelis with an external threat. I don't agree that the times when Netanyahu leaned on Iran as a scarecrow were only when other scarecrows – such as the West Bank, Hamas, or the northern front (Hezbollah) – became less threatening.

The last phase under Netanyahu's sixth government proved that despite the flare-up of fronts with the Palestinians and on the Israeli street, this did not prevent him from inflating Iran's scarecrow by seriously talking about a military strike and putting it on the table, among the options discussed by the Israeli Ministerial Security Council, and demanding an increase in the budget of the Israeli Ministry of Defense for the same goal.

In light of a tense situation internally and externally, Netanyahu is described as the absent present in Israeli circles. The man is used to talking about an expected achievement in international files in conjunction with the complexity of the scene in internal crises, and he is used to hitting one issue with another within his management of conflicts. His strategy no longer works, especially since an operation in Jerusalem or West Bank settlements only stops the flow of demonstrations against his government for a minute of silence.

Security has always been a traditional solution to any internal problem: a strike on the Gaza Strip ahead of elections, a limited military operation in the West Bank, but the complex scene before Netanyahu has led many to believe that an Israeli military strike on Iran is the only solution to get out of successive internal crises, and to postpone the fall of a hard-fought government in which Smotrich and Ben Gvir sit on the key to both the problem and the solution.

On the one hand, they have contributed to the Biden administration's disregard for Netanyahu, and their constant incitement makes it difficult to defend them before the international community, which adheres to agreements and parameters that the far-nationalist right does not recognize. While Smotrich wants to burn Huwara, Ben Gvir gives orders to demolish houses in Jerusalem and demands that Al-Aqsa squares be opened for storming in the last ten days of Ramadan considering the opposite a submission to terrorism. If Netanyahu does not go along with Ben Gvir's extremism, the latter will find himself faced with two options: increasing the dose of extremism to satisfy those who brought him to power, or withdrawing from Netanyahu's government and thus dissolving it due to his inability to implement his bloody plans.

The story of the shepherd and the wolf for Iran and its danger to Israel and the region no longer bear fruit, Netanyahu fully realized this, and talk about "other Israeli solutions" and the emphasis on the enrichment rate reached by Iran to complete its nuclear bomb became the words of security leaders in Israel, in addition to an actual strike on a military factory in Isfahan province at the end of last January, which Iran said Israel was behind, which was confirmed by the Wall Street Journal quoting US officials.

It is true that the United States has major files such as China and filling the voids, the Russian war on Ukraine and supplying its allies with energy, but talk of a unilateral Israeli step towards Iran prompted American military officials - such as the Chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff General Mark Milley and US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin - to visit Israel and hold discussions with its security leaders who hold the key to a possible Iranian strike, while military analyst Ron Ben-Yishai quoted an official in the Israeli security establishment as saying that officials In the White House and the Pentagon they fear that "the current Israeli government will surprise the United States and drag it into a military confrontation in the Middle East."