By James E. Jennings*
ATLANTA, USA | 21 June 2025 (IDN) — Israel’s blatant aggression against Iran in the current “Star Wars” conflict between Tel Aviv and Tehran was designed not to ensure peace, but to prevent it. Diplomatic talks over Iran’s nuclear program were scheduled to begin within a few days, so a new war had to be launched to stop peace from happening.
Negotiations that might have prevented the current campaign of slinging missiles at hapless citizens in Tel Aviv and Tehran were deliberately torpedoed by Prime Minister Netanyahu, clearly in cahoots with US President Trump. However, wars of aggression are forbidden by the UN Charter. To ignore that could be the start of WW III.
Netanyahu believed that Israel’s long-restrained desire to destroy Iran’s Islamist government of Iran and its nuclear capabilities could wait no longer. That’s because if a key component of Middle East peace might somehow be implemented, Israel would lose. Its plan to dominate the entire region with US-supplied money, aeroplanes, and bombs would fail.
He had to start a new war with Iran to prevent peace from breaking out, which makes sense in an inhumane sort of way. For the same reason, Israel’s genocidal campaign in Gaza continues even after twenty months of one-sided slaughter of civilians with no peace in sight.
Stopping the bombing campaign in Gaza and allowing a ceasefire would mean that peace talks would start and Israel would lose. The Israeli War Cabinet continues the war in Gaza to keep peace with the Palestinians from even being discussed, much less actually happening.
By this upside-down logic, peace is a greater threat to Israel than war. The Likud Party cannot accept the idea of making peace with the Palestinians, so their thuggish government makes sure there is not even a humanitarian pause in Gaza. Yet it makes no sense, because the IDF’s military objectives were reached long ago. And few voices in Western media have been raised amid the daily bloodshed in Gaza to show that it’s not a war but a massacre.
With over 54,000 people killed, two-thirds of them women and children, and any real opposition crushed, still a ceasefire is not even being considered by Mr. Netanyahu. Why? He knows that the war must continue so peace can be avoided. Jerusalem’s genocidal campaign in Gaza is continuing day after bloody day, with the sole purpose of killing peace.
Critics will rightly point out that the war in Gaza, with its insane slaughter and capture of Israeli civilians, was launched by Hamas on October 7, 2023, for the very same reason—to stop the peace talks. That hopelessly mad raid was triggered, analysts say, primarily to block the high-level “Abraham Accords,” a regional agreement soon to be enacted that would have sidelined Palestinian national rights forever.
The same principle applies to the Russo-Ukrainian War in Eastern Europe. Putin doggedly continues his bloody war of aggression in Ukraine, knowing that if there were peace negotiations, he would lose his goal of controlling Ukraine.
If missiles could deliver peace, the Ukraine War would be over by now. Missiles don’t solve problems, people do. Modern weapons cannot untangle the root problems driving the wars in Eastern Europe, Israel, Palestine, and Iran.
Eventually, people must sit around a table and make agreements before wars can end. As today’s tit-for-tat lobbing of drones and missiles continues to escalate between Kiev and Moscow, adding another bloody exchange of death weapons between Tel Aviv and Tehran only makes a broader war in the Middle East more likely.
Iran also has the right of self-defence, but continuing the bombing raids, drones, and ballistic missile exchanges between Israel and Iran simply fuel the already boiling war fever in the Middle East.
Somehow, the people’s interests in both countries must trump the narrow, egotistical interests of the war criminals now in charge in Washington and Jerusalem. [IDN-InDepthNews]
*James E. Jennings is President of the aid organisation Conscience International.
Image: GMA News Online
