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The assassination of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh, in Tehran two days ago, is a major escalation in the growing conflict in the Middle East. While Israel has not claimed responsibility for the killing there can be little doubt that the nature and precision of the operation has the fingerprints of Mossad all over it. That the killing took place just after the inauguration of a new Iranian president, Massoud Pezeshkian, and in the heart of Tehran itself will have been designed to cause maximum embarrassment to the Iranian regime.
The assassination also appears to be designed to torpedo the peace talks in relation to Gaza, as Haniyeh was the leading Hamas negotiator. As the Qatari Prime Minister, a key player in the peace mediation process pointed out, “Political assassinations and continued targeting of civilians in Gaza while talks continue leads us to ask, how can mediation succeed when one party assassinates the negotiator on the other side? Peace needs serious partners.”
Israel is the most well armed and efficient military state in the Middle East, massively supported by the United States and to a lesser extent by Britain. It has a clandestine nuclear weapons capability, rarely mentioned in the media but real all the same. It has a government propped up by right wing religious fundamentalists, every bit as zealous in their mistaken belief in their own supremacy as the theocrats who have been murdering their way across Iran for over forty years. That the response of the international community to assassination in a foreign capital has been little more than mild rebuke is nothing short of a scandal.
The killing of Haniyeh comes shortly after Israel claimed to have killed a senior military commander of Hezbollah in Beirut. There can be no doubt that this has exacerbated the crisis in the region, bringing it to the brink of an extremely dangerous and widespread military conflict.
The response from the theocratic dictatorship in Iran was predictable. Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, stated that Israel “by assassinating Ismail Haniyeh, has paved the way for a severe punishment” adding that “we consider it our duty to avenge his blood, shed in the territory of the Islamic Republic of Iran.”
The world awaits the consequences of the adventurist action of the Israelis. There can be little doubt however that Iran will galvanise it’s so called Axis of Resistance, through Hamas, Hezbollah and Houthis to strike back in some way shape or form. This is unlikely to be a mere symbolic action, as with the pre-warned missile strikes on Israel in April, responding to another Israeli act of international terror, when sixteen people were killed in the Iranian embassy in Damascus in Syria.
While hitting an embassy is technically still a strike on domestic territory it does not carry the symbolism of a strike in the heart of Tehran.
The US government has taken its usual line in defence of Israel expressing “ignorance” about the assassination and “not being involved” in it, yet at the same time warning that it would defend Israel if it were attacked. Suspicions have been raised that the attack, coming so close to the recent visit of Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu to the United States, will have been given the green light by the US. Any evidence to suggest that would certainly put the US back in the dock in the eyes of the international community as being complicit in acts of terror and actively escalating conflict in the region.
The corruption at the heart of the Iranian regime was further exposed recently in the report of the United Nations Special Rapporteur on atrocity crimes committed in Iran in the 1980’s, following the hijacking of the national democratic revolution by the Islamic theocracy.
In his analysis of the first decade of the Islamic Republic, following the 1979 revolution Special Rapporteur, Javaid Rehman, details the summary, arbitrary and extra-judicial executions of thousands of political opponents of the regime, amounting to the crimes against humanity of murder and extermination. Significantly for the current regime and its apologists Rehman concludes that,
“…those with criminal responsibility for these grave and most serious violations of human rights and crimes under international law remain in power and control; the international community has been unable or unwilling to hold these individuals accountable.”
The assassination of Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran has raised serious questions about the state of Iran’s security apparatus, this not being the first time that Israeli security forces have been able to easily carry out terrorist operations on Iranian soil. This assassination highlights the extensive infiltration of imperialist intelligence agencies into Iran’s security apparatus.
The corruption at the heart of the Iranian regime is only matched by the religious fundamentalist cabal currently running the Israeli government. Opposition in both countries is either actively suppressed or given little media exposure, though under both regimes there is significant internal opposition to their respective government’s actions.
For there to be any prospect of heading off the imperialist drive to war in the Middle East the peace movements in both Iran and Israel, as well as in the imperialist centres of the US, Britain and the EU need to grow stronger and voice their opposition to the growing conflict. The Labour government in Britain needs to be pressured to adopt an independent foreign policy, not dependent upon the diktats of the US, or the pressures of its military proxy NATO.
Labour needs to take a stand which puts peace before conflict escalation and the interests of the people of the Middle East before those of imperialism. That will only be possible through mass extra parliamentary action and through the peace and labour movements making those demands. Labour should not be allowed to settle for carrying on the foreign policy positions of the Tories, as has happened in the past. Given current developments the need for an independent peace oriented stand is greater than ever.
