Is Netanyahu Escalating A Mid East Crisis To Help Trump Get Elected?

Israel assassinates two top Iranian proxy leaders right after Netanyahu’s visit to Mar-a-Lago.

In the midst of the stunning developments of July, 2024—one of the most dramatic and consequential months I can remember in my long life—one of the most consequential of them all may have slipped under the radar of a lot of Christians who ought to be paying more attention to “the signs of the times” Jesus warned us about (Lu 21:34,35). While Americans are preoccupied by our 2024 election, summer vacations and the Paris Olympics, multiple efforts to expand and escalate the war in Israel by Benjamin Netanyahu may now be calculated to throw that election in Trump’s favor, leaving Democrats and most of the world stuck in a lose/lose situation.
 
In this article, I want to use timelines to make a case for keeping our eyes on that possibility.
 
-June 27, 2024—Joe Biden suffers a disastrous, embarrassing debate performance, triggering over three weeks of panic and angst within the Democratic Party.
-July 13, the assassination attempt on Donald Trump’s life.
-July 16-19: the Republican National Convention and the surprising pick of the aptly-named J.D. Vance to be his Vice-President.[1]
-Sunday, July 21, Joe Biden announces he is dropping out of the race and endorses Vice-President Kamala Harris.
-Monday, July 22. Over the next 24 hours, a record $81 million dollars comes pouring into Harris’ campaign. Within days, she has the nomination sewed up as the party quickly coalesces behind her. $200 million is raised in her first week, two thirds from first time donors. 170,000 people volunteer to work on the campaign. All her campaign appearances are electrifying.
-Wednesday, July 24. Benjamin Netanyahu arrives in Washington to deliver a much-engineered, record fourth address to Congress, but this time things are a lot different. In late May, the ICC (International Criminal Court) ruled Benjamin Netanyahu, Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, and three Hamas leaders were all war criminals and issued warrants for their arrests. On July 19, two days before Biden drops out, the UN’s ICJ (International Court of Justice) finally after decades, rules that Israel must end its occupation of Palestinian land.
 
In other words, in the eyes of the broader global context, Israel’s unconscionable treatment of Gaza and seizing of West Bank land under cover of the war was wearing thin. Even though Netanyahu got 62 standing ovations from the Mexican jumping bean members of Congress the Israeli Lobby owns, half the Democratic delegation wasn’t there, including its top leadership. Kamala Harris likewise snubbed him, citing scheduling conflicts with her campaign, an unthinkable excuse in previous times, although she and Biden did meet with him on Thursday at the White House.

Getting’ Granular

At that meeting, Kamala Harris, acting more consciously-Presidential now, “conveyed a forcefulness” to Netanyahu, “to his face” if you will, expressing her “serious concern” that the war must end. She tells him she “will not be silent” on Gaza suffering, and that he must get the ceasefire deal done:
 
“The images of dead children and desperate hungry people fleeing for safety, sometimes displaced for the second, third or fourth time. We cannot look away in the face of these tragedies. We cannot allow ourselves to become numb to the suffering, and I will not be silent,” Harris said.“
 
Netanyahu later was dismissive, like he was swatting away a fly: “I think to the extent that Hamas understands there’s no daylight between Israel and the United States, that expedites the deal,” said Netanyahu to reporters at his meeting with Trump. “And I would hope that those comments don’t change that.”[2] Trump added his usual deep grasp of foreign affairs later that night: “She doesn’t like Jewish people. She doesn’t like Israel.” (Her husband is Jewish).
 
I can’t imagine the irritation and alarm this all left on Bibi who is used to being treated like royalty, and getting American officials to pretend they don’t understand all his smug Machiavellian schemes.
 
Following Harris’ remarks, Israeli media have been quoting a “senior Israeli official” as saying that pressure from the US vice president to reach a ceasefire and hostages deal in Gaza is counter-productive and may put at risk efforts to reach an agreement.

The reports appear to reflect worries among Netanyahu’s inner circle that the emergence of Harris as the presumptive Democrat presidential candidate might herald a tougher US line on the conduct of Israel’s war with Hamas.

Israeli Ambassador to the UN Gilad Erdan also told Israel Army Radio (GLZ) Friday that the tone used by Harris “is raising concerns” among Israeli officials.[3]
 
I’ll bet it is. Like I said, they are not used to be talked to that way, much less by a woman! Leave it to a woman to (finally!) say what’s been lacking the last 300 days of this cynical, male chauvinist beatdown of a powerless and helpless population, deliberately allowed as as a pretext to distract from Israel’s own internal dissensions and Netanyahu’s own legal problems. 

Antichrist and The False Prophet Kiss and Make Up

If you think the Trump campaign was panicking by now, how about Netanyahu? Was he sensing that his precious Lobby was losing control of America? Was the prospect of an uncooperative person like Harris in the White House starting to freak him out?
 
I know Netanyahu understands elections and the powerful role of momentum, which was on full display all week in the Harris camp. All this was the backdrop of his visit to Mar-a-Lago the next day, Friday July 26.
 
He and Trump hadn’t seen each other for almost four years at this point. They had a bromance breakup at the end of 2020 when Netanyahu called Biden and congratulated him for his election victory. Trump as usual, took this personally—“after all I did for him,” Bibi is “ungrateful.” (Which is true of course.) “Fuck him.”[4] But now things are different and they both need each other. Trump was beaming when waiting to greet Netanyahu.
 
I don’t know if the two of them had any private time together that day. The only photo I can find featured them at a table with Bibi’s wife and other personnel, although in the world of statecraft, such photos can serve to mislead the public as to what really went on.
 
Trump’s aides later said he pledged to Netanyahu to “’make every effort to bring peace to the Middle East’ and combat antisemitism on college campuses” [i.e., violently repress criticism of Israel], yada, yada, yada.[5] And later that evening, Trump addressed a packed house of Christian youth at a Turning Point USA “[True] Believers’ Summit” there in Palm Beach, where he made those cryptic yet bald-faced promises that they won’t ever have to vote again after this year. 

A Parallel Timeline

I want to emphasize that what follows from here is sheer circumstantial speculation on my part, but I think it’s something to keep our eyes on. Immediately after this momentous week, Israel began to implement very provocative moves which seemed designed to escalate tensions in the Middle East, putting the Democrats in a lose/lose situation. If they take his bait, their mouth pieces in the Republican eco-system can demagogue to death the line, “Biden/Harris dragged us into yet a third war around the world,” just in time for the election.

If they don’t respond, or if they hesitate to snap to it quickly enough, they can be demagogued with that perennial trope, “How weak they are! How they cower before terrorists! How much are they betraying our dearest ally Israel!” This is the rope-a-dope scam Israel has always played on America, especially when the Democrats are in power. It gives them some sort of perverse delight to push around a world power this way.
 
To paraphrase Robert Gates’ sarcasm about the Saudis, Israel is “prepared to fight the Iranians to the last American.” Legendary are the number of times Netanyahu has tried to drag the United States into a war with Iran to get us to take down his biggest obstacle to regional hegemony. The last such attempt was just this past April, when the United States and Iran made an extraordinary agreement behind the back of Israel, to virtually stage-manage a token retaliatory strike against Israel in response to the latter’s assassination of top Iranian intelligence officials in Beirut. Donald Trump isn’t the only enfant terrible the US has to constantly humor.
 
 Iran was indeed the big prize going all the way back to the original goal of 9-11:

So what are these recent provocations? It’s a story that started back in the spring. On Monday, May 20, Iranian President Erbrahim Raisi is found dead of a helicopter crash in the Iranian mountains near Azerbaijan. Iranian citizens indulge in a lot of speculation of an Israeli operation here, claiming that their own intelligence services “have been heavily infested with Israeli infiltrators and spies given the many operations that Jerusalem is believed to have conducted in Iran since 2010…“Tehran has practically become the stage for Israel’s operations!”[6] 
 
According to Iranian law, an election must be held within 50 days to determine a new President. The winner of that early July election was a reformist, liberal candidate Masoud Pezeshkian, a heart surgeon who defeated right-wing hardliner Saeed Jalili. The Inauguration ceremonies were just four days after Netanyahu’s Mar-a-Lago visit. For the ceremony, Iran invited a top representative from each of their four Axis of Resistance partners—Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas and Islamic Jihad in Gaza, and the Houthis of Yemen.
 
That very day, Israel assassinated by drone a top Hezbollah commander Fuad Shukr, in a densely-populated part of Beirut, far from any border fighting with Israel. Just hours later, early Wednesday morning, a bomb place in a heavily-guarded guest house assassinated Ismail Haniyeh, Hamas’ top political leader right in Tehran where he was visiting. It had all the marks of a typical Mossad operation. Haniyeh was considered a moderate within the Hamas organization and was in the middle of negotiating with Israel for the release of all the hostages! And if the taunt wasn’t clear enough, on Thursday, Israel announced that it had also assassinated another Hamas commander Mohammed Deif back on July 13, the same day of the attempt on Trump.
 
And what was that message? That Israel was doing these things to undermine any peace deal, any hostage release, any lessening of tensions in the region. It was Netanyahu keeping the conflict going so he doesn’t have to face trial and possible jail time. Sound familiar?
 
The attack upon Haniyeh in Tehran on a ceremonial visit was especially insulting and provocative to Iran. Unsurprisingly, it “cemented the resistance front in the region” as they now felt obligated to retaliate. But of course, that was the whole point—to harden their resolve, to get them to retaliate, to drag the United States into a Middle East war, and put the Biden/Harris administration through yet another ritual humiliation just as much as anyone else Israel is always picking a fight with.

Netanyahu—A Long Rap Sheet

This is a Netanyahu specialty—his pattern of snatching war and escalation out of the jaws of peace threatening to break out. That way, Israel can continue their aggression while pretending it’s always the other parties causing the trouble, and thus, “has the right to defend itself.” This is how he undermined the Oslo Peace Accords; obtained a Mossad phone tap sex tape between Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky;[7] how he kept the dying embers of American quagmire alive in the summer of 2014;[8] and how he stoked up anti-Arab rage with the kidnapping of three Israelis boys.[9] It’s the excuse to keep grabbing Palestinian land, and the pattern behind the October 7 attack, an attack he knew was coming for over a year. And now it’s how he’s going to help Trump get back in power and stay out of jail.
 
This is why 71% of the Israeli public want Netanyahu gone. I often picture Israel like a bus careening out of control on treacherous, mountainous territory at the hands of a crazy driver. The passengers like the results he gets and the delight of pushing a world super power around, but they hate his recklessness, and feel this dread that one of these days his luck and their’s—is going to run out.
 
I don’t blame them, for God is not mocked (Gal 6:7). And if Benjamin Netanyahu likes to play aggressor games with his neighbors and the world, God has a special way to fix his wagon (Job 5:13; I Cor 3:19). Both Trump and Netanyahu deserve each other. They’re both world-class pole cats, and we know how much the King of Retribution hates to be played for a fool.

This 2024 election ain’t over till it’s over. For the sake of the world, I hope I’m wrong.
 

Update, Aug. 7, 2024

Intrepid journalist Jeremy Scahill agrees with this assessment, that Netanyahu immediately returned from his “dark rock tour” of America to greenlight the assassinations to drag the US into a full-blown Middle East war.

 Notes:

[1] Some people believe the Trump camp was so confident of a landslide victory at that point, that he carelessly picked Vance, knowing he would only add even more extreme MAGA elements to the ticket.
[2] https://www.cnn.com/2024/07/26/politics/trump-netanyahu-meeting-mar-a-lago/index.html#:~:text=%E2%80%9CI%20think%20to%20the%20extent%20that%20Hamas%20understands%20there%E2%80%99s%20no%20daylight%20between%20Israel%20and%20the%20United%20States%2C%20that%20expedites%20the%20deal%2C%E2%80%9D%20said%C2%A0Netanyahu%C2%A0to%20reporters%20at%20his%20meeting%20with%20Trump.%20%E2%80%9CAnd%20I%20would%20hope%20that%20those%20comments%20don%E2%80%99t%20change%20that.%E2%80%9D
[3] https://www.cnn.com/2024/07/25/politics/harris-netanyahu-israel-hamas-ceasefire/index.html#:~:text=Following%20Harris%E2%80%99%20remarks,among%20Israeli%20officials.
[4] https://www.axios.com/2021/12/10/trump-netanyahu-disloyalty-fuck-him
[5] https://www.voanews.com/a/netanyahu-to-meet-trump-in-talks-seeking-to-ease-tensions-/7714266.html
[6] https://www.iranintl.com/en/202407315597#:~:text=Iranian%20netizens%20are,for%20Israel%E2%80%99s%20operations!
[7] Some people think Lewinsky was a “honeypot,” sent to trip him up. https://www.timesofisrael.com/netanyahu-said-to-have-offered-lewinsky-tapes-for-pollard/#:~:text=Halper%20noted%20that,listening%20and%20recording.%E2%80%9D
[8] https://donclasenseriousguy.com/and-the-oscar-goes-to-isis/
[9] https://donclasenseriousguy.com/blumenthal-adds-to-teen-kidnapping-update/