Extract from ABC News
Analysis
Benjamin Netanyahu's real agenda is regime change in several parts of the region. (AP: Ronen Zvulun)
There are many things happening in the Middle East at the moment but beneath them lies one single through line: Israel is attempting to reshape the political map of the region.
Israel's real agenda is regime change in several parts of the Middle East — particularly Gaza, Lebanon and Iran.
Rarely does a country admit that it wants regime change in another jurisdiction, but Israel is making its intentions clear.
And the real agenda for the US is that it wants plausible deniability for the attempt to re-make the Middle East. Shortly after Israel's strikes on Friday, US President Donald Trump said: "The US had nothing to do with the attack on Iran."
Nothing, that is, except it was forewarned, and that central to Israel's military capability is US funding, US hardware, US intelligence and US technology.
Israel's bombing of Iran is stunning in its audacity — bombing Iran's nuclear facilities is something the US has always been reluctant to do, and assassinating Iran's nuclear scientists is something that Israel has done in the past but has dramatically escalated in recent days.
Iran was preparing for another round of talks with US officials. It is unlikely to have expected an Israeli attack while those talks were about to occur. Trump's senior national security adviser, Steve Witkoff, was due to sit down with Iranian leaders on Sunday, to try to work out an end to Iran's nuclear program to ensure it did not move to the level of gaining a nuclear bomb. Trump had said the US was "fairly close" to a deal.
Regime change in Tehran is an ultimate goal of the Israelis. (West Asia News Agency: Majid Asgaripour, via Reuters)
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's action led to the abandonment of those talks.
There are serious questions about whether Israel's bomb-first-then-regime-change-later policy is achievable. Rather than pave the way for regime change in Gaza, Israel has left in its wake a slice of land so heavily bombed that it is now unliveable. And yet its 2.1 million inhabitants are still trapped inside the enclave as Israel continues to bomb it.
Israel's shattered goodwill
Rarely has a leader set upon such a radical course across the Middle East as Netanyahu. Over the past 18 months, Israel has bombed, or continues to bomb, Gaza, the West Bank, southern Lebanon, Beirut, the Bekaa Valley, Syria, Yemen and now Iran.
While some Israelis are uncomfortable with the extent of Israel's destruction in Gaza, there is broader support for the policy of targeting Iran and its proxy groups through the region, particularly Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon and the Houthis in Yemen.
But Netanyahu's critics, and many leaders in the West, wonder whether Israel can bomb its way to a good neighbourhood — where will all this end? And what and who will be left when Israel's regional bombing campaign is over?
Israel has lost the goodwill of many countries that have previously considered themselves friends and allies — the UK, France and Canada being foremost.
Immediately after Hamas's October 7 attacks, many of these same allies expressed sympathy for Israel and supported its right to respond in the interest of self-defence.
But these key allies are now asking: how is self-defence preventing food, water or medicines going into Gaza for more than 70 days?
How is the most powerful military in the Middle East not able to avoid tens of thousands of children and women being killed?
There were scenes of damage on the streets of Tehran following Israeli strikes. (Reuters: Hamid Amlashi/WANA)
Israel argues that this civilian toll is unavoidable because Hamas embeds itself in civilian targets. But Israel is the master of targeted assassinations.
If Israel had wanted to, it could have picked off one Hamas commander after another. It killed Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran in a targeted assassination. It killed Hezbollah's Hassan Nasrallah in a targeted assassination.
And in the latest attacks on Iran, it has killed several Revolutionary Guard commanders and nuclear scientists in targeted assassinations, even though they were in residential neighbourhoods.
Israel has done this without mass civilian casualties. Why has it needed to kill more than 50,000 Palestinians in Gaza for a relatively small number of Hamas fighters?
Why are the Palestinians different?
Israel's conduct of the war in Gaza means when it decides upon a course to attack Iran — to achieve its stated aim of disabling any nuclear program that could be quickly turned into a nuclear weapons capability — it does not have many credits in the bank of international goodwill.
The daily pictures of dead and injured babies and children from Gaza have reduced Israel to probably its lowest-ever level of goodwill around the world.
Plausible deniability
In terms of Iran, beneath the new bombing campaign lies an extraordinary dynamic between an Israeli prime minister and a US president.
Traditionally, that relationship has been clear and unquestioned — traditionally, Israeli leaders have closely engaged and coordinated their security imperatives with the occupant of the White House.
A drone view shows damage from an Iranian missile strike to homes in Bat Yam, Israel. (Reuters: Chen Kalifa)
But the current dynamic appears to be different. On the basis of publicly available material, Netanyahu and Trump appear to be acting in concert, while at the same time allowing the US to have plausible deniability.
For example, it was Trump who first flagged the idea of clearing Gaza of Palestinians and turning it into "a Riviera of the Middle East". Trump faced a huge backlash from the Arab world and key European countries and then appeared to drop the idea.
But Israel has taken up the idea with enthusiasm, and made it policy. Netanyahu has even gone so far as to make it a condition for any ceasefire. As The Times of Israel reported on June 14:
"During his first press conference in five months, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Wednesday named the implementation of US President Donald Trump's 'revolutionary' plan to relocate Gaza's civilians as a condition for ending the conflict, the first time he has made such a demand. He called Trump's plan 'brilliant'," and said it had the potential to change the face of the Middle East."
This allows Trump to say he only raised the idea and that it is not official US policy — while at the same time allowing Israel to try to turn the plan into reality.
This gives the US plausible deniability for a plan that is widely seen across the Arab world as ethnic cleansing. It's a claim Israel denies, but the plan is driven by Israel's Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, a man who is openly racist about Palestinians and who once declared that the founder of Israel, David Ben-Gurion, should have "finished the job" when it came to ridding Palestinians from Israel upon its foundation in 1948.
A similar pattern of plausible deniability has emerged with the new attacks on Iran. Once news of Israel's attacks emerged, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio was quick to state that Israel had taken "unilateral action" and that the US was not involved — as not involved, that is, as it's possible to be when your hardware, technology and intelligence are a key part of any such attack.
Yet again, there appears to be a covert double act between Netanyahu and Trump. Only two weeks ago, Trump said he advised Netanyahu against any such attack. Trump said that he wanted diplomacy to run its course. More recently, he also warned that any attack by Israel could lead to "a massive conflict".
So the Israeli prime minister went ahead despite the US president's warning of a massive conflict. Or was this all part of a smoke and mirrors double act?
When Israel went ahead with the attack there was no condemnation from the White House.
Wouldn't a US president be angry that an Israeli prime minister had risked a massive conflict?
Instead, all Trump had was praise. He described the attacks as "excellent" and told ABC America: "We gave them [Iran] a chance and they didn't take it. They got hit hard, very hard. They got hit about as hard as you're going to get hit. And there's more to come, a lot more."
It seems Trump is supportive of Israel's general strategy — to destroy Iran's ability to develop nuclear weapons — but trying to have a restraining influence on Netanyahu behind the scenes. Reuters reported that Trump had blocked a plan by Israel to assassinate the Supreme Leader of Iran, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Fox News — a media outlet close to the Trump administration — said it had confirmed the report. Netanyahu, asked about the report, would not address the claim.
As with most aspects of Trump's second presidency, Washington is not necessarily honouring traditional alliances or past understandings.
Out of all this uncertainty, Netanyahu is driven by what he and many in Israel see as an historic window — a green light from the Trump White House to undertake an audacious use of its military might to target long-held enemies.
A huge risk
For the US, bombing Iran has always been considered the single most risky thing that anyone could do in the Middle East.
As the leader of the Shia Muslim world, Iran has influence and military capability well beyond its own borders.
But it's this very influence that is the reason Israel has systematically targeted and degraded its enemies.
Following Hamas's October 7 attack, Israel has seriously weakened Hamas in Gaza. It has killed Hamas's two most senior commanders in Gaza — Yahya Sinwar, a key architect behind the October 7, 2023, attack, and recently his brother Mohammed, who assumed the leadership after the death of Yahya.
With the killing of other Hamas commanders, including Marwan Issa, Israel has killed the entirety of what Hamas called its "War Council", which drove the October 7 attack.
Outside Gaza, Israel targeted and killed Hamas's political leader, Ismail Haniyeh. This was a particularly audacious killing as it was in the heart of Tehran and, in retrospect, it foreshadowed the Netanyahu government's preparedness to tread where Washington had feared to — the streets of Iran's capital.
During his campaign for re-election, Trump portrayed himself as someone who would be ruggedly independent and not daunted by hard men such as Russian President Vladimir Putin. He famously said, of course, that he could end the war in Ukraine within 24 hours.
His rhetoric, as is so often the case, was full of muscularity and machismo. The war would never have even begun under him.
Had he been president instead of "sleepy Joe Biden", Putin would not have dared to invade, he argues. And when it came to Hamas's October 7 attack on Israel, this, too, would not have happened because, like Russia, Hamas would have been in fear of him.
Rather than fear Trump, Putin is in fact escalating his attacks on Ukraine. We've all heard the expression that someone can be "a wolf in sheep's clothing". But when it comes to Putin, is Trump in fact a sheep in wolf's clothing? Does he talk tough but is, in fact, intimidated by Putin?
And in Gaza, rather than bringing an end to the war, Netanyahu — like Putin — has, if anything, ramped up the attacks. The humanitarian catastrophe is almost beyond description.
Elusive peace
It's still not clear what the region will look like after Israel's attacks against many of its neighbours.
The US has shown its inability to achieve successful regime change in the Middle East, and there's no reason to think that Israel will be any more successful.
Two key questions for Israel are: What will its neighbourhood look like when it's finished bombing? And, what place will Israel have in the international community?
Former adviser to the Pentagon Sanam Vakil says Israel's continuing occupation of the West Bank continues to feed instability in the Middle East.
In relation to the Israeli occupation, she last year told Four Corners:
"It's not the only problem, certainly. The challenge is that when there is a security vacuum or regional chaos and crises, it presents an opportunity for disruptors, be it states like the Islamic Republic [of Iran] or non-state actors to take advantage of these chaotic places, to advance their own purposes … and Israel's imposition of a one-state solution or one-state reality on Palestinians has not only damaged Israel's security but it has created a security crisis across the Middle East that requires urgent attention."
While Israel is now escalating its attacks in its neighbourhood, it seems that the one conflict that remains a lightning rod is much closer to home — the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Few people understand the reality of that conflict better than Ami Ayalon, who ran Shin Bet, Israel's security service. In Israel last year he told me for Four Corners:
"You cannot deter a person or group of people if they believe that they have nothing to lose. We, Israelis, we shall have security only when they will have hope."
On that logic — from someone who knows more about Israel's security situation than most people — while Israel begins a war with one of its further neighbours, Iran, peace with its immediate neighbours is further away than ever.
Last year, Four Corners travelled to Iran, Lebanon and Israel to examine the prospects of a new regional war.
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