Israel’s bombing of Iran aims to pull U.S. into all-out war

Donald Trump did not want Israel to bomb Iran, at least not yet. Benjamin Netanyahu ordered airstrikes anyway, and now the U.S. has been pulled closer to an all-out war in the Middle East—which is exactly what the Israeli prime minister wanted.

Hundreds of Israeli warplanes struck targets across Iran Friday morning local time, carrying out hits on nuclear facilities, demolishing command-and-control centers, and assassinating scientists and military leaders. While the scale of the damage appears to be limited overall, most reports suggest this is only the opening salvo of a more extensive Israeli offensive. 

Retaliation from Iran was a given, of course, and drones are already hitting Tel Aviv at the moment this article is being published.

As late as Thursday, Trump was publicly opposing an Israeli attack on Iran, claiming his administration was “fairly close” to an agreement on halting Iran’s nuclear development efforts. It was Trump himself who killed the previous Iran nuclear deal in 2018 and imposed damaging sanctions on the country’s economy, and then ordered the killing of a top Iranian general two years later.

Just hours before Israel’s bombers hit Tehran, the U.S. president was telling the press he didn’t want Israel “going in because that would blow it,” referring to a scheduled Sunday meeting between U.S. and Iranian negotiators in Oman. Waffling though, he also said an attack “might help” pressure Iran’s leaders to give in to U.S. demands. Axios reports that two Israeli officials say Trump was only pretending to oppose the strikes in front of the media while privately giving a green light. 

Regardless, by Friday morning, Trump was fully on board with Netanyahu’s newest war, posting on his Truth social media platform: “I gave Iran a chance to make a deal. I told them, in the strongest of words, to ‘just do it’…They are all DEAD now, and it will only get worse.”

Trump said there was still time to stop Israel’s “slaughter” of Iran, but that absent an Iranian capitulation, there will be “nothing left.” He boasted that the U.S. “makes the best and most lethal military equipment” and that “Israel has a lot of it, with much more to come, and they know how to use it.”

The president’s remarks surely prompted glee in Tel Aviv, as Netanyahu has been angling for years to entangle the U.S. in a full-scale war against Iran. The same goes for certain circles in Washington, where the neoconservative faction of the Republican Party has been pushing for a joint U.S.-Israel war on Iran as well. Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., for instance, was giddy over Israel’s attacks, tweeting late Thursday night, “Game on.”

Netanyahu saves himself

Netanyahu’s maneuvers to prod the U.S. toward war escalated in recent days—not due to any fresh fears of Iranian nuclear weapons development, but rather because his government is teetering on the brink of collapse. 

Ultra-Orthodox Jewish and Zionist parties have been threatening to resign from his government, a development which would cause the dissolution of the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, and trigger an immediate election—an election Netanyahu would be almost guaranteed to lose. 

The parties said they would pull their support unless ultra-Orthodox Jews continue to enjoy exemptions from conscription. Netanyahu apparently caved on the draft issue, but took a further step to shore up his coalition and keep himself in office—bombing Iran. 

“Now there is no doubt that Netanyahu’s main bargaining chip in convincing the ultra-Orthodox parties was to immediately launch an attack on Iran,” David Margalit, an analyst with the Communist Party of Israel, said on Friday. 

The claims by the prime minister and his allies in Washington that strikes on Iran were necessary because of a threat to Israel’s security, Margalit argued, are bogus.

“Netanyahu needed a war with Iran to save himself and his regime, and the Iranian threat was the last trick he could pull out of his sleeve,” according to Margalit. Recent trends in Israeli domestic politics suggest he’s right. 

Public opinion polls reveal growing numbers of Israelis see the war of annihilation in Gaza as unjust, and many people do not believe the government is earnestly trying to secure the release of the remaining Israeli captives held by Hamas. Calls for army reservists to refuse service have also been increasing, while inflation, economic uncertainty, and cuts to the public sector have all further tested voters’ patience.

Margalit says the attacks on Iran are an attempt to manipulate the Israeli people. “Netanyahu knows that the public will forget the criticism and hatred towards him and his government and will rally behind the army if the war machine delivers a major attack and significant escalation.”

Harrison Mann, a former U.S. Army major and Defense Intelligence Agency officer, agrees. In an interview with Drop Site Friday, he said that it’s common knowledge within the intelligence community that, unless it uses one of its own nuclear weapons, Israel’s ability to destroy or meaningfully set back Iran’s nuclear program is limited. The country’s nuclear facilities are well fortified and impossible to destroy by conventional military means.

“Both the Israeli and U.S. governments…are fully aware that Israeli airstrikes on Iran are not going to successfully destroy the Iranian nuclear program,” Mann, who resigned his DIA position in 2024 in protest of U.S. support for Israel’s war in Gaza, said. “We are dealing with underground facilities dispersed over a large country and human capital that knows how to rebuild things.”

That’s why he and other experts conclude that Netanyahu’s actual goal is to spark an open-ended war. “The only thing you can really achieve by trying to bomb Iranian nuclear sites is to provoke a reprisal by Iran that helps escalate the situation into a larger war and draws in the United States,” Mann argued. “That’s what any purported effort to bomb away the Iranian nuclear program is actually aiming at.”

Trump’s on board

A report published Friday in Al-Ittihad, the Middle East’s only Arabic-language Marxist newspaper, said that the decision to launch an attack was finalized Monday at a secret meeting of the Israeli cabinet. An insider within the Israeli government leaked to the press that Netanyahu notified Trump of the intended strikes on Tuesday in a phone call.

The president asked Netanyahu to remove the strike option from the agenda for the time being, telling the Israeli leader he still hoped to conclude a deal with Iran. Netanyahu responded that “a military threat” is the only thing that will work against Iran. Trump supposedly pushed back but did not outright forbid an attack, saying, “For now, a strike must be put on the back burner.” 

The Israeli prime minister decided otherwise.

Over the next three days, efforts were made to give the illusion of business as usual. The Israeli government said that prisoner negotiations with Hamas were ongoing, that the prime minister would be attending his son’s wedding this week, that preparations were ongoing for the Tel Aviv Pride parade, and that officials would be meeting with Trump envoy Steve Witkoff ahead of the U.S.-Iran negotiations on Sunday.

It was all a camouflage campaign, according to Al-Ittihad, to disguise preparations for the bombardment. With an Israeli attack now a certainty, Trump, however, sent signals that something was coming. On Wednesday, he ordered the evacuation of U.S. embassies across the Middle East. 

Then, on Thursday, when asked if he was trying to deter Israel from attacking Iran, Trump responded, “It seems like there’s a real possibility something will happen.” By midday Friday, after the bombs had already fallen, Trump admitted, “We knew everything.”

Is this Trump’s war now?

So, if it’s true that the U.S. was reluctant about Israeli strikes on Iran at this moment, why is the Trump administration now throwing its full weight behind the war? There are a number of reasons.

To start, the U.S. also does not want elections in Israel. Netanyahu may be a troublesome ally at times, and Trump certainly shows signs of losing confidence in him, but plunging U.S. imperialism’s most steadfast client state into further political instability would upset Washington’s ability to pursue its own agenda in the Middle East.

Trump dispatched Ambassador Mike Huckabee to meet with the ultra-Orthodox parties last week in an effort to prop up Netanyahu’s government. The Evangelical preacher’s message was clear: “Early elections would be a mistake,” and “Washington will have difficulty supporting Israel during an election period.”

Huckabee’s lobbying may not have been enough to bring them around, though, hence Netanyahu’s launching of attacks.

Even though air strikes might not have been the Trump administration’s preferred next step, there is also evidence suggesting that its talks with Iran had stalled. While Trump signalled earlier in the year that the U.S. would agree to a civilian nuclear program in Iran if it swore off weapons development, the goal posts have now been evolving.

Witkoff and pro-war neoconservative foreign policy figures have switched to demanding a Libya-style complete demolition of Iran’s nuclear research program—something Iran would never agree to. The country’s leaders well remember what happened after Libya agreed to such a deal: a U.S.-backed color revolution and the assassination of the country’s leadership.

If the U.S.’s goals are shifting, the administration will, of course, be happy enough to use the Israeli bombing campaign as leverage in its efforts to force Iran to bend to Trump’s will. But if history is any guide, Iran is unlikely to cave. When Trump dumped the previous nuclear deal in 2018, he thought Tehran’s leaders would do whatever it took to avoid sanctions. He was wrong then, and he’s probably wrong now.

So, depending on how the cycle of Israeli attacks and Iranian retaliations unfolds and how the nuclear negotiations go, preparations for a U.S. war against Iran could become a defining feature of the second Trump term’s foreign policy. In that case, this would no longer just be Netanyahu’s war, but Trump’s as well.

Stopping the war

In Israel, the only voice in the parliament speaking out against the bombing of Iran is Hadash—the Democratic Front for Peace and Equality, a coalition of the Communist Party and other progressive forces. 

In a joint statement Friday morning, Hadash and the CPI called the attack “part of the attempt by Netanyahu’s government, with support from the parliamentary opposition, to drag the region into an even broader escalation.” They also warned that the government could “exploit the situation it has created to implement even more dangerous plans in the Gaza Strip and the occupied West Bank.”

In the U.S., Republican officials were uniform in their support for Netanyahu’s actions. Following the lead given by warhawks like Lindsey Graham, House Speaker Mike Johnson said, “Israel decided it needed to take action to defend itself” and was “clearly within their rights” to bomb Iran.

Many Democrats joined in to cheer for war and death. Sen. John Fetterman, D-Penn., posted on X: “I absolutely support this attack. Keep wiping out Iranian leadership and the nuclear personnel. We must provide whatever is necessary—military, intelligence, weaponry—to fully back Israel in striking Iran.” 

Rep. Ritchie Torres, D-N.Y., agreed, writing on X: “Israel is not the aggressor. It is defending itself against an existential threat…. The true aggressor is the Islamic Republic of Iran and its empire of terror.”

Some steadfast voices against war could be heard in the Democratic caucus, however. Rep. Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich., called the bombing a dangerous escalation. “War Criminal Netanyahu will do anything to stay in power,” she wrote on X. “We cannot let him drag our country into a war with Iran.” 

Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., declared, “This is a disaster of Trump and Netanyahu’s own making.” He said, “A war between Israel and Iran may be good for Netanyahu’s domestic politics, but it will likely be disastrous” for security in the region. He said that the U.S. has “no obligation” to follow Israel to war.

When millions of Americans take to the streets for No Kings Day protests on June 14 to stop Trump’s drive toward fascism, his anti-immigrant raids, and his shredding of the Constitution, they’ll now have another demand to add to their list: No war on Iran.

As with all news-analysis articles published by People’s World, the views reflected here are those of the author.

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