The nuclear deal between Iran and the 5+1 countries has significantly curtailed the political crisis in the Eastern Mediterranean. It appears that the US and its Western partners have elected to follow the path of the Syrian chemical weapons deal rather than embroil themselves in a regional war without end that might have dragged the global political economy into the abyss. Both the Syrian and Iranian deals reflect, to a large extent, the achievements of Russian diplomacy as well as Syrian and Iranian strategic thinking. They also reflect the retreating global dominance of the US.
Israel wants Iran to be stripped from all nuclear technology, including its right, according to international law, in developing and maintaining a nuclear program for peaceful purposes. This Israeli demand may be construed as indirectly pulling the US into war with Iran. Israel has lost the most recent round. However, the Iranian nuclear deal is still subject to US congressional action and a final agreement is yet to be negotiated. Israel is banking on its support in the US congress to derail the deal. It is important to note that if the US congress bows to the Israeli/Zionist lobby, US international power and prestige would suffer dramatically and president Obama would emerge as one of the weakest presidents in US history. More importantly, in such a case, the only path for the West, thanks to Zionist machinations, would be war. Israel has been the main strategic ally to the US and would do anything to maintain that position. It would rather drag the entire region to war than allow a rapprochement between the US and Iran.
Since the Arab uprisings, Israel has confiscated more Palestinian land, evicted more Palestinians from their homes, uprooted more olive trees and jailed more Palestinians in the Palestinian occupied territories. A regional war would give it more cover to take over the West Bank and ethnically cleanse the Palestinians residing not only in the West Bank and Gaza, but also those in the Palestinian areas upon which it had established its settler-colonial state in 1948.
A war that the US would carry the brunt of would be beneficial for Israel in other ways, too. It would be able to expand its territories beyond geographic Palestine to include parts of Lebanon and perhaps beyond. Israel would then be able to guarantee its strategic relationship with the US and would have no rivals to speak of in the region.
Regional countries that might be thinking of striking or may have already struck a deal with Israel on this matter should think twice about the consequences of such an alliance. On the outside chance that the US would win the endless war, they themselves would not be spared Israeli machinations to keep them subservient in any arrangement that might transpire. In such a war, however, the outcome might be a defeat for the US, with adverse consequences for the entire region, including Israel and the non-Arab countries.
In all likelihood, the US decision to sign the Iranian nuclear deal has taken Israeli machinations into account and has devised ways to squelch them. Short of that, a prolonged fight between the Israeli/Zionist lobby, on one hand, and the US transnational corporate elite, that Obama represents, on the other, would ultimately weaken the power of that lobby in most matters relating to US strategy in the region, especially the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Current circumstances present an opportunity for the peoples across the region to devise a strategy to defeat imperialist attempts to maintain influence and regain whatever control the US and the West might have lost regionally. The task of such a strategy in the current stage of the revolutionary process would point out the line-of-march for the peoples’ movements. Mass mobilization against war and for independence from imperial domination is the immediate task of the peoples of the region.