Mirth Also why pretend like the solution to this wasn't already brokered in 2015 with the Iran deal?
To me this last few years has been Israel accepting a declining cost to its reputation in the crumbling United States led "rules based order" by using force to settle scores and set the conditions of a new order.
United States involvement is on the grounds of a perceived long-run strategic necessity to incrementally disengage from the region and reorient its speculative force to the "western hemisphere", and of course the Pacific and China. It's this pending disengagement that gives the extremely haphazard US-Israel joint venture on Iranian regime change its "last ride of the neocons" feeling.
Meanwhile a phantom of a new order is there in the incipient Abraham Accords. This US-mediated initiative on the behalf of Israel is often described as "driven by the shared threat of Iran". However for the other parties in the GCC, the other stakes include speculation on peak oil: the Gulf monarchies seek economic progress and diversification in forms broadly incompatible with running a nation as the extractive project of a joint-stock company. Like, say, buying the sport of football. And of course every party would love to wreck or control Iranian oil production on this basis, even if that's not achievable.
The Israeli wager is there's no powerful mechanism of the old order (UN, ICJ, etcetera) to stop Israel, but also that Israel eventually stops its own expansionary militarism on the terms of a regional security agreement in which it hopes to play a leading role, with conditional United States support.
So the Israeli strategy is to urgently force a game of national advantage on the conditions of this speculative new inter-imperial internationalism that, if it appeared, would retroactively determine the motives Israel currently doesn't talk about: something like becoming the (or an) incumbent capital of some loose-knit, strategic supra-state of a historically inconceivable peacetime settlement.
The problem for Iran is that it's already aware of this by way of the lines of its diplomatic isolation. Its retaliation throughout the region is even tending to confirm Israel's upper hand on these terms.
If any strategic force doesn't like the thought of an Israeli Jerusalem nominating itself to some post-accord Middle East in the role Berlin has obtained within the EU, it will have to overturn the whole trajectory and the emergent structure over the next couple of decades.
