Regional War Feared as Biden Backs Israel’s Threat to Retaliate After Iranian Missile Attack

AMY GOODMAN: Israel has announced it’s sending more troops into southern Lebanon as the Middle East moves closer to a full-scale regional war. On Tuesday, Iran fired at least 180 ballistic missiles at Israel in an attack that Iran said targeted Israeli military and security sites. Video online shows some of the missiles striking at or near the Nevatim Airbase, which houses Israel’s U.S.-made F-35 fighter jets. Israel is vowing to retaliate. Israel says the only death from the attacks was a Palestinian man who was killed by falling debris in the occupied West Bank, in Jericho.

President Biden responded to the Iran attack by saying the United States will help Israel, quote, “exact severe consequences,” unquote. On Tuesday, the United States aided Israel in intercepting many of the Iranian missiles.

Iran’s attack came in response to Israel’s escalating attacks on Lebanon and Israel’s assassination of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah on Friday. There have been a number of other developments in the region.

In southern Lebanon, Hezbollah fighters are claiming they attacked Israeli troops near the town of Odaisseh. Two Israeli soldiers were killed, 18 others wounded. Earlier today, Hezbollah denounced Israel for bombing the offices of Al-Sirat, a television network based outside of Beirut.

In Gaza, Al Jazeera reports Israeli forces have killed at least 79 Palestinians over the past day alone. In Tel Aviv, Israeli police said seven people died in a shooting and stabbing attack on Tuesday. Police said the attack was carried out by two men from the occupied West Bank — one was shot dead, the other seriously wounded.

And at the United Nations here in New York, U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres issued a terse statement, saying, quote, “I condemn the broadening of the Middle East conflict, with escalation after escalation. This must stop. We absolutely need a ceasefire,” he said. Earlier today, Israeli Foreign Minister Israel Katz announced he’s banning the U.N. secretary-general from entering Israel, saying he’s, quote, “persona non grata due to his unwillingness to condemn Iran,” unquote.

We’re joined now by two guests. Akbar Shahid Ahmed is the senior diplomatic correspondent for HuffPost. He’s based in Washington, D.C. And in Tel Aviv, we’re joined by the Israeli political analyst Ori Goldberg, who’s written extensively on Iran and Israel. His recent piece for New Lines Magazine is titled “Why Israelis Do and Don’t Want War with Hezbollah.”

Ori, let’s begin with you in Tel Aviv. Can you talk about what yesterday was like in Tel Aviv with the 180 missiles, what happened to them, how many you understand were intercepted, and then what Israel is promising to do next?

ORI GOLDBERG: Yesterday was scary. I spent 40 or 45 minutes with my three children and our dog in a shelter. There were many explosions that we could hear. We had no idea what was happening. But reports began to come out almost immediately that there were no casualties, except for one unfortunate Palestinian.

From what I can gather, the Iranian assertion about targeting military and security facilities is correct. All over the country, including in the center near Tel Aviv and in the Tel Aviv suburbs, such facilities were the targets. There were some civilian homes that were hit by bomb blasts.

Once again, it was scary, but it was also compounded by the horrible attack in Jaffa and by a general sense that while things were supposedly in control while Israel was going from glory to glory killing its enemies and getting the bad guys, there was also a deep sense of insecurity and a lack of control right at home. The Jaffa attack was quite traumatic. It still hasn’t really been covered extensively in the Israeli press, except for providing the names of some of the casualties. But generally, the sense was that Israel was not in control. I think that was one of the reasons for Prime Minister Netanyahu’s various statements about Iran having committed a grave mistake and about how Israel will punish it and retaliate.

Generally, there’s this sense of a surreal reality, if you will, where, on the one hand, Israel, again, seems to be doing great things and going great guns and finally getting some closure and fighting terrorism, but, on the other hand, there is a sense of impending doom and an inevitability of this impending doom when it comes to Israel’s potential actions in the future.

AMY GOODMAN: An AJ+, Al Jazeera Plus, reporter, Mohammad Alsaafin, wrote in social media, quote, “Israeli journalists and most Western journalists in Israel are abiding by the Israeli military censor, so this is a very useful thread. It seems like Nevatim got hit very hard. It’s the base where US munitions are sent.” Ori Goldberg, your response?

ORI GOLDBERG: I would assume that’s true. Of course, as Israeli citizens, we’re not entitled to know the results and implications of the Iranian strike. These bits of information are heavily censored, as are, by the way, reports about what is happening to Israeli forces in Lebanon.

Again, the Iranians have shown, and they already showed in April, that they are quite aware of where Israel’s main security facilities are. And their use of ballistic missiles this time apparently made it easier for them to create further impact. Many of the missiles were intercepted, but certainly not all of them.

It also seems like the Iranians knew exactly what they were doing. This wasn’t an inaccurate attack or not an indication of Iranian weakness, as some official Israeli spokespersons have tried to suggest. This was actually quite an accurate attack. And in that sense, I don’t think it was a retaliation to the assassination of Nasrallah. I actually think of it more as a shot across the bow. I think the Iranians were concerned, profoundly. And I think one of the reasons that the IRGC and the generals in Tehran won the day and persuaded the supreme leader to retaliate, after having lost to the republicans, pragmatists, moderates — call them what you will — who had, since Ismail Haniyeh’s assassination, convinced the leader not to retaliate, the reason there was a retaliation this time is because I think they were genuinely concerned that Israel might strike in Iran after it was done with Lebanon. I think, again, this was meant as a shot across the bow, as a message to Israel, saying, “Calm yourselves.” Right? “Take a breather.”

Will Israel retaliate? Likely. I think this is being decided right now in strenuous dialogue between D.C. and Jerusalem. But in the Iranian case, I really think this was not meant as a declaration of war. I think the nature of the attack demonstrates that quite effectively. I think it was meant as a message to Israel. I don’t know if that message was received.

AMY GOODMAN: On Tuesday, President Biden said, quote, “Based on what we know now, the attack appears to have been defeated and ineffective.” He added, “The U.S. military actively supported Israel’s defense.” Biden added, “Make no mistake, the United States is fully, fully, fully supportive of Israel.” Can you talk about, Ori, the U.S. role in the region, from arming Israel’s assault on Gaza — last night, and there was almost no news of this in the mainstream U.S. corporate media, 79 people killed in the last, what, 24 hours in Gaza, so that assault continues — from what’s going on in Gaza to calling Israel’s assassination of the Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah “a measure of justice”? If you could comment?

ORI GOLDBERG: The U.S. role in enabling Israel’s campaign in Gaza and Israel’s rampage in Lebanon at the moment is undoubtedly crucial. The U.S. has allowed Israel to do this, just as it could have stopped Israel from doing it, and it decided not to do that. I think there are various reasons for America’s or the Biden administration’s support for Israel. I think a lot of them, again, have to do with historical baggage and with patterns seemingly set in stone after 76 years of Israel’s existence. I think it’s very, very hard to shake off old habits. I will assume that a Harris administration will not adopt the approach that the Biden administration adopted.

Having said that, I think there’s a real debate right now among the punditry about whether Gaza itself was a platform for initiating and generating a regional war with Iran at the behest of the United States in cooperation with Israel or whether this is the result of ongoing escalation, where there is less strategy and less forethought. I tend towards the second school. Looking at Israel’s behavior, I fail to discern any kind of plan, and perhaps even any rhyme or reason in the way Israel has been acting.

Israel has always adopted a very tactical mindset. We have never excelled at strategy. This time around, it seems like Israel approached what was happening in Lebanon as an attempt at redemption — that’s certainly true for the IDF — after the year of spectacular failures in Gaza. But also, I think Israel found itself in tactical heaven. Having managed to assassinate Nasrallah, suddenly a lot of other targets were surfacing. And it’s very important to understand that this is the way Israel approaches developing situations on the ground in the Middle East. Israel looks for targets. If these people surface, Israel hits them. Consequences, implications, midterm, definitely long-term considerations, these are usually almost completely irrelevant. Israel focuses on closure. I know that’s a little hard to accept. One thinks of Israel as a strategic powerhouse. But it really isn’t. And precedent, again, on the ground seems to suggest that that is true.

As for the United States, I think the United States has a very bad history with Hezbollah specifically, and the United States has a long memory, that goes back to the embassy suicide bombing attack in 1983. And that, I think, explains why the Biden administration spoke of Nasrallah’s assassination as a “measure of justice.” However, this strategy or this reasoning seems to be imploding, because for the first time Lebanon finds itself without a militia powerful enough to hold the country together. I think neither the United States nor Israel consider the implications of Israel’s rampage. I think they’re standing before a situation that could very rapidly devolve into war.

However, one last point, this war will likely not be a ground war. It won’t be that sort of offensive. It will be a projectile war based on missiles for some time yet. I don’t think the U.S. desires that kind of war. I think that’s true for both a Harris administration and a Trump administration. And again, I expect that in the conversations being held right now between Washington and Jerusalem, there is an attempt to find some sort of retaliatory measure for Israel that will not escalate this further.

AMY GOODMAN: During last night’s CBS News vice-presidential debate here in New York, Republican Senator JD Vance, Minnesota’s Democratic Governor Tim Walz both voiced support for Israel, but Walz criticized Donald Trump for pulling out of the Iran nuclear deal. This is what he said.

GOV. TIM WALZ: When Donald Trump was in office, it was Donald Trump who — we had a coalition of nations that had boxed Iran’s nuclear program in, the inability to advance it. Donald Trump pulled that program and put nothing else in its place. So Iran is closer to a nuclear weapon than they were before, because of Donald Trump’s fickle leadership. And when Iran shot down an American aircraft in international airspace, Donald Trump tweeted, because that’s the standard diplomacy of Donald Trump. And when Iranian missiles did fall near U.S. troops and they received traumatic brain injuries, Donald Trump wrote it off as headaches.

MARGARET BRENNAN: Senator Vance, the U.S. did have a diplomatic deal with Iran to temporarily pause parts of its nuclear program, and President Trump did exit that deal. He recently said, just five days ago, the U.S. must now make a diplomatic deal with Iran, because the consequences are impossible. Did he make a mistake? You have one minute.

SEN. JD VANCE: Well, first of all, Margaret, “diplomacy” is not a dirty word. But I think that something that Governor Walz just said is quite extraordinary. You yourself just said Iran is as close to a nuclear weapon today as they have ever been. And, Governor Walz, you blame Donald Trump. Who has been the vice president for the last three-and-a-half years? And the answer is your running mate, not mine. Donald Trump consistently made the world more secure.

AMY GOODMAN: That’s Senator Vance and, before him, Tim Walz. Akbar Shahid Ahmed also joins us, senior diplomatic correspondent for HuffPost. He’s in Washington, D.C. His recent piece headlined “Israel Is Preparing a Risky Incursion into Lebanon — as Biden Stands By.” And he’s working on a book on the Biden administration’s Gaza policy called Crossing the Red Line. Akbar, if you can respond to the U.S., President Biden, the Biden-Harris administration’s response to what’s happening in Israel, Gaza, Lebanon and with Iran right now?

AKBAR SHAHID AHMED: Thanks, Amy.

The Biden administration is in a place they definitely did not want to be a year ago at the start of this war, right? They thought they were going to prevent a regional war, demonstrate support for Israel and not pay a huge political cost. On all those fronts, they’ve largely failed, other than, arguably, the demonstrating support for Israel. Where they are now is they feel, “Look, we are five weeks from a presidential election. We don’t want to be seen as abandoning a U.S. partner.” So they’re really emphasizing this sense of we’re defending Israel.

But I think it gets to something Ori was talking about, which is: Is there a strategy here, or is this just tactics? Right? The administration can say, “Look, we’ve stopped Israelis from being killed. We’ve sent Israel defensive and huge offensive equipment.” But where are they actually going, and how are they deescalating tensions? That was something we didn’t see from Governor Walz. It’s not something we’ve heard from the Biden administration as Israel has begun its ground invasion of Lebanon. And I think when we’re at a point where there’s 40,000 and a growing number of U.S. troops in the region, and there is a sense that Israel’s actions are inextricably linked to a green light from the U.S., there’s a real responsibility for Washington here.

From their point of view, for Biden administration officials, there is an internal debate. Many are extremely cautious and are saying, “Look, this is the moment to try to use our leverage over Israel, which is overwhelming and unique, to rein them in.” But there is a small and very influential segment, Amy, of hawkish Biden administration advisers who say, “Look, Israel has decimated Hezbollah’s leadership to a large degree. We dislike Iran. We don’t want them to have so much influence in the region. Why not sort of keep escalating further?” The question is: Where does that lead us? And I think the administration hasn’t given us an answer yet.

AMY GOODMAN: What’s going on in the White House? Who are the parties around Biden? And what role does Kamala Harris play, the vice president?

AKBAR SHAHID AHMED: Yeah. I think the closest person to President Biden on these matters is someone called Brett McGurk. This is the White House Middle East coordinator. He’s not a well-known figure in the way that, say, Secretary of State Tony Blinken is, but he is someone who in many ways is emblematic of U.S. foreign policy thinking in the Middle East over the last 20 years — right? — which many folks would say is a pretty dubious record. This is someone who came up in the Bush administration administering Iraq. He’s very much pushing the “Let’s kneecap Iran right now. And this is our moment.” I think there’s folks at the Pentagon — Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, Secretary of State Blinken are, to a degree, more cautious, but this internal debate is so being fought in the room with the president personally. And what we know and what we’ve seen from the president publicly is he wants to yet again demonstrate support for Israel publicly, and it’s not clear, even privately, if he’s considering any route of using the influence he has — right? — of saying, “OK, we will not give you U.S. military equipment. We will pull back some of our troops from the region.”

Inside the White House, there’s also a lot of anxiety about Vice President Harris’s electoral prospects, as you can imagine. There’s a real sense that they’ve made a decision on the Gaza ceasefire question and the broader question in the Middle East, which is they’re not going to make a huge diplomatic push before the election. This idea they had that they were going to achieve a deal, bring home hostages, send aid to Palestinians, stop the bombing and the starvation, that’s all out the window at this point, right? The shiny new thing is a Lebanon incursion, opportunity and sort of hoping Gaza doesn’t reach the top headlines.

And I think that’s why you get to a point of risk where Senator Vance was able at the vice-presidential debate to say, “The world looks pretty chaotic right now, and it’s not former President Trump who’s in charge. It is President Biden.” And that’s an argument that the Trump campaign is very deliberately using to reach out to Americans in the middle and specific groups who feel alienated, whether it’s Arab Americans, Muslim Americans, younger voters. And polls do show us recently, Amy, that an increasing majority of Americans are worried about a growing war and want to see greater U.S. diplomacy. We’re not seeing a greater public demand for more weapons or more troops being sent to the region.

AMY GOODMAN: And what about the possibility, do you see, of Israel striking Iran, specifically perhaps nuclear sites?

AKBAR SHAHID AHMED: You know, I’ll think back to a pretty scary phrase I heard from a well-placed U.S. official, Korea, Korea bureaucrat working on Middle East policy. This person said to me at the beginning of this week — you know, he described how people inside government who track these issues are, quote, “stunned and shocked.” And then he said, “We feel we’re enabling a,” quote, “nihilistic regional murder spree.” Now, that’s very strong language, right? A murder spree. But what it tells you is that there’s a real sense within government that the U.S. is not going to provide a veto on Israeli actions. I think there is concern about: Does it strike nuclear sites, and does Iran lash back in a way that’s impossible to control? That the sense of a “no” from the U.S., I think, is — it’s very questionable. It’s not a guarantee.

What you could see the U.S. doing is urge Israel to strike something that looks strategic but is not necessarily a red line for the Iranians where they feel they have to respond to a huge degree. But that carries its own risks. We’ve seen the Iranians come out and say, “Not only would we, in response, target Israel; we would target U.S. partners across the region and potentially cripple the global economy.” Right? They’ve talked about targeting Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, other partners who are critical, to end global energy supplies. So, I think the U.S. doesn’t know where it’s going, but its commitment is very clear in that it wants to send a message to Iran that’s overwhelming and military.

AMY GOODMAN: Akbar Shahid Ahmed, I want to ask you to stay with us as we talk more about the debate, particularly the last response of JD Vance around the issue of January 6th and the insurrection and President Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election. We’ll also be talking about abortion and climate change and more. Akbar is the senior diplomatic correspondent for HuffPost, joining us from D.C. We’ll link to your pieces on Lebanon and Gaza.

And we want to thank Ori Goldberg for joining us. Ori Goldberg, Israeli political analyst and scholar who’s written extensively on Iran, Israel and the relationship between religion and politics in the Middle East. We’ll link to your piece in New Lines Magazine, “Why Israelis Do and Don’t Want War with Hezbollah.” Your recent piece for The Nation, “For Israeli Protesters, Palestine Might as Well Not Exist.”

This is Democracy Now! When we come back, the vice-presidential debate. Stay with us.