Washington, DC – Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been warning of a grave Iranian threat to Israel and the world for more than 30 years.
United States President Donald Trump heeded those warnings in June and bombed Tehran’s nuclear facilities. But it appears that Netanyahu is still not satisfied and will be pushing for more military actions against Iran when he returns to the US on Sunday to visit Trump at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida.
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This time, the focus is on Iran’s missile programme.
Israeli officials and their US allies are beating the drums of war against Iran once again, arguing that Tehran’s missiles must be addressed urgently.
But analysts said another clash with Iran would stand in stark opposition to Trump’s stated foreign policy priorities.
Sina Toossi, a senior fellow at the Center for International Policy think tank, said that while Trump is pushing to deepen economic cooperation and forge diplomatic ties between Israel and Arab states, Netanyahu is seeking military domination over the region.
“This desire for perpetual US involvement, for perpetual wars against Iran to really break the Iranian state reflects Israel’s aim for unchallenged dominance, unchallenged hegemony and expansionism,” Toossi said.
“And so I think that’s at the root of Netanyahu’s goals and the direction he wants to push the US into supporting, but that’s going to come to a head with US interests going in another direction and wanting more stability in the region that doesn’t necessitate direct American military involvement.”
Since brokering a truce in Gaza, which Israel has been violating almost daily, Trump, who portrays himself as a peacemaker, has been claiming that he brought peace to the Middle East for the first time in 3,000 years.
And his administration’s recently released National Security Strategy says the region is “emerging as a place of partnership, friendship, and investment” that is no longer a priority for the US.
Shifting the goal posts
As the US promises to diminish its military and strategic footprint in the Middle East, Israel appears to be lobbying for a war that could drag Washington into conflict.
In past decades, Israel has drummed up Iran’s nuclear programme as the top threat to its security and the world.
But Trump has been insisting that the US strikes on three Iranian nuclear facilities in June wiped out the programme.
Regardless of the accuracy of Trump’s assessment, his proclamation has pushed Israel to find another boogeyman, analysts said, to avoid contradicting the US president publicly.
Trita Parsi, executive vice president at the Quincy Institute, a US think tank that promotes diplomacy, said that since Trump has declared “rightly or wrongly” the nuclear issue resolved, Israel is switching the focus to missiles to keep the pressure on Tehran.
“Netanyahu is pushing the United States to join Israel in yet another war with Iran, this time with a focus on the missiles, partly because Trump is not receptive to the idea of addressing the nuclear issue – since he has said that he fixed it, he ‘obliterated’ the programme,” Parsi told Al Jazeera.
“The Israelis will constantly shift the goal posts in order to make sure that they can make the confrontation with Iran an endless, forever war.”
Iran has always maintained that its nuclear programme is peaceful, unlike Israel, which is widely believed to possess an undeclared nuclear arsenal.
Tehran has also never launched missiles at Israel unprompted.
During the June war, Iran fired hundreds of missiles towards Israel, dozens of which penetrated the country’s multilayered air defences, but it was Israel that launched the war without apparent provocation.
Israel’s supporters focus on missiles
Still, Israel and its allies have been sounding the alarm about the Iranian missile programme, warning that Tehran is recovering and increasing its production capacity.
“While Israel’s Operation Rising Lion succeeded in destroying much of Iran’s ballistic missile capabilities, Israel estimates that some 1,500 missiles remain out of the 3,000 Iran had previously,” the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) said in an email to supporters this month.
“The ballistic missile threat from Iran will be on the agenda when Prime Minister Netanyahu travels to Florida on Sunday and meets with President Trump Monday at Mar-a-Lago.”
Senator Lindsey Graham, an Iran hawk who is close to Trump, visited Israel this month and repeated the talking points about the dangers of Iran’s long-range missiles, warning that Iran is producing them “in very high numbers”.
“We cannot allow Iran to produce ballistic missiles because they could overwhelm the Iron Dome,” he told The Jerusalem Post, referring to Israel’s air defence system. “I