Will Bibi (or Iran) deliver Trump's October surprise?

Things are going well for Kamala Harris and the Democratic ticket these days. While she and prospective running mate Tim Walz open up a lead over Donald Trump in both national and swing-state polls heading into the Democratic convention, the twice-impeached, multiply-convicted former president is floundering — holding pointless events in Montana and Mar-a-Lago; sitting for a toothless, glitchy interview with fellow con artist Elon Musk; and flying around the country on Jeffrey Epstein’s plane. If the election were held today, it seems likely that Harris would romp her way across West Executive Avenue and into the White House.

But if there is one constant in American politics this year, it’s that trends that seem unstoppable one week are laughably out of date the next. (Remember the “election clinching” assassination attempt by a Republican mass shooter in Butler County, PA? That was exactly one month ago today.) There is a lot of clock to burn before November 5 (not to mention before Trump’s team attempts whatever post-election chicanery they have planned in case of a loss at the polls). And there is a big world of potential curveballs out there, from fallout over the surprise Ukrainian incursion into southwestern Russia to an ongoing supercharged hurricane season. No region looms larger at the moment than the molten cauldron of the Middle East, where one of Trump’s most desperate allies, Benjamin Netanyahu, is a major driver of events.

Two weeks after Israel’s twin assassinations of Hezbollah commander Fouad Shukur in Beirut and Hamas political chief Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran¹ , everyone is waiting for the other shoe to drop. Both the Israeli and U.S. militaries are on alert for significant retaliation from either Iran or one of its “proxies,” possibly on the scale of, or greater than, Iran’s massive missile-and-drone attack in April. (I put “proxies” in quotes here because, as Peter Beinart ably explained yesterday, the term is an overused relic of Cold War thinking. To put it another way, if the various autonomous regional militias are mere proxies of Iran, then Israel would be a mere proxy of the United States.)

This is yet another pass at the ratcheting war between Israel and Iran that has been accelerating on the sidelines of the Gaza genocide. It is a war that President Biden, and now his would-be successor, have been trying to keep from exploding into regional conflagration — a conflagration that would draw in the U.S. military at a scale and with a potential death toll that would be impossible for even blither sectors of the U.S. electorate to miss.

Iranian officials have made it absolutely clear that the one thing that could forestall further escalation would be the same thing that could have halted escalation at any point in the last ten months: a goddamn Gaza ceasefire. And wouldn’t you know it, today the New York Times reports (albeit in the trademark inscrutable passive voice the paper uses when Israel is at fault for something) that the deal is being scuttled, once again, by none other than Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu:

Not noted in that piece was the main piece of recent evidence that Netanyahu will do everything he can to stop a ceasefire: the fact that his adjutants killed Ismail Haniyeh, the main political mandarin of his supposed negotiating partner, ceding Hamas even further to Yahya Sinwar and the Gaza-based militant wing.

Meanwhile, Haaretz reports that the Israeli government is eating itself from the inside. Defense minister Yoav Gallant is talking in terms formerly reserved for watermelon emoji TikTokers, calling rightist fantasies of “total victory” in Gaza — and, now, Lebanon! — kishkushim, “nonsense.” Netanyahu responded by calling his defense minister — one of the principal architects of the Gaza war, facing his own potential arrest warrant from the International Criminal Court — “anti-Israel,” and reminding him that “eliminating Hamas’ military and governmental capabilities and freeing our hostages” remains “the clear directive from Prime Minister Netanyahu” and “is binding for everyone — including Gallant.” In other words, the capo has spoken.

At the same time, Netanyahu is fighting a rhetorical war to his right, being forced to denounce his Jewish Power Party deputy Itamar Ben-Gvir, who this week led a delegation of his own fascist Kahanist supplicants to the flashpoint Al-Aqsa Mosque in the lead-up to Tisha B’Av, the Jewish fast day (today) that commemorates the destruction of the First and Second Temples by the Neo-Babylonian and Roman Empires respectively² . Ben-Gvir used the intentionally provocative visit both to unilaterally declare as National Security Minister that the “status quo” governing worship on the sensitive Temple Mount/Haram al-Sharif since the 1967 war is over, and to inveigh against ceasefire negotiations tout court, saying, “We shouldn’t be going to a summit in Doha or Cairo. But to win and to bring [Hamas] to its knees.”

Fresh off playing hawk to his defense minister, in other words, Netanyahu had to pretend he was a dove beside his national security minister, insisting for the benefit of his American and European sponsors, as well as the less extreme sectors of his population, that Israeli policy had not changed, and thus, by implication, that the ceasefire talks were still on — even as he worked furiously behind the scenes to scuttle them.

What all this boils down to is the same time loop that has been going on for ten months: Netanyahu not only doesn’t have an end game for the war in Gaza, but an end game is a political anathema to him. The day the active killing ends is the day he has to account for his career-defining intelligence failure on Oct. 7, the resumption of full-on political street battles and a melting-down cabinet demanding his ouster, and a return to the postponed corruption, bribery, and fraud trial that could see him end his life in an Israeli prison (if not, now, a cell block in the Hague).

Which may bring us to a non-discardable possibility: that Netanyahu is holding out against hope for a Trump ex machina, a return to the White House of his favorite U.S. president of all time — one who not only ignores but celebrates personal corruption and despotism in his friends, whose idea of an optimal settlement in Israel and Palestine is giving the Israelis everything they want, and who publicly states that Israel should be allowed and fully empowered “finish the job,” whatever and wherever that may mean. Trump today restated that a core part of his platform remains not only the “largest deportation operation in American history” but one that will include the deportation of “pro-Hamas radicals” from “college campuses,” signaling an end to not only First Amendment protection but citizenship for those who study and talk publicly about Israel’s crimes in the academy.

This would dovetail, in theory at least, with the fact that the Gaza slaughter³ and U.S. support for Israel in general remain one of the principal fault lines within Kamala Harris’ coalition — one that could easily explode and cleave off a critical piece of her would-be electoral base in the critical weeks that follow. It seems that Harris, and her advisers, have managed to tamp the issue down somewhat — belatedly making up for a misstep at a rally in Michigan by emphasizing her demand for an immediate ceasefire in Arizona, passing on a vice presidential hopeful in Josh Shapiro who likened campus protesters to the KKK, and naming a proponent of sanctions against Religious Zionist extremists in the West Bank as her outreach director to American Jews, while refusing calls for an outright arms embargo against Israel.

An escalated war in which the U.S. was a direct belligerent would scramble those careful calculations. Netanyahu may be thinking that if he can force an all-out regional war with Iran — perhaps on the eve of a Democratic Chicago convention — he can reverse both his and his preferred U.S. presidential candidate’s current trajectories.

The problem with that gambit goes back to the point I made in the beginning: that the one rule these days has been that the next event is impossible to predict. All of the players — Netanyahu, Haniyeh, Khamenei, Biden, Harris — have in their respective ways been forced to deal with the fact that while they have had a disproportionate say in events, they cannot control the consequences of their actions — whether from a spiraling Middle Eastern war or amid the rise of a Christian Nationalist faction in the Jewish state’s indispensable imperial sponsor. The only winning move is still to stop the war, as quickly and decisively as possible.

1  Israel hasn’t formally taken credit for the Haniyeh assassination, but, tellingly, no one else has either.

2  There’s no physical evidence that the First Temple existed, but let’s go with that for now. Also the Bible gives the dates of the First Temple’s destruction as either the 7th or the 10th day of Av, and the Roman-Jewish eyewitness Josephus gave the date of the destruction of the Herodian Temple in 70 C.E. as the 10th of Av as well. But who’s counting.

3  Almost everyone has become numb to it at this point, but the slaughter is still happening; three days ago, the Israeli military blew up a school and mosque complex in Gaza City that was being used as a shelter for 6,000 people, killing at least 90 people, including women and children, according to Gazan officials. Israel claims the school was being used as a Hamas “command center”; it was another in the over 85% of the 564 schools in Gaza that Israel has damaged in the war, according to the U.N. The official death toll in Gaza is nearing 40,000; medical researchers writing in The Lancet have proposed the true toll could be as much as five times that total.