Opinion: Why hasn't Iran retaliated against Israel?
It is no longer possible to keep track of the murderous meanderings of Israel in Gaza, the occupied West Bank and now Lebanon, or its hit-and-runs in Syria, Iran, Yemen and God only knows where else.
The garrison state increasingly looks like one of the militarised Transformers in sci-fi action films, with deadly weapons sticking out of each limb. Before the world had a full grasp of its still-unfolding genocide in Gaza, it began yet another slaughter in Lebanon.
On behalf of its US and European benefactors and beneficiaries, the Israeli settler colony projects spectacular but vacuous power - and the world is left struggling to make sense of this campaign of terror.
Take, for example, the assassination of Ismail Haniyeh, who chaired the political bureau of Hamas, in Tehran this past July. This extrajudicial killing was among a series of subversive attacks carried out in recent years by Israel and the US against Iranians and other “enemies”.
In 2020, the Trump administration ordered the assassination of Qassem Soleimani, using methods perfected during the Obama presidency. Later that year, Israel killed top Iranian nuclear scientist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh.
The US and Israel are in an obvious military and intelligence alliance that aims to promote the colonial and imperial interests of both parties in hostile territory, as the native inhabitants, including Palestinians, resist their barefaced barbarism.
Soon after the assassination of Haniyeh, Iran vowed to retaliate, as the US swiftly announced that it would defend Israel - as if that were not the status quo - and deployed more military hardware to the region.
During its more recent war on Lebanon in late September, Israel also killed Hassan Nasrallah, Hezbollah's secretary-general and a number of senior commanders.
As a result, Iran is now in the spotlight as to what, if anything, it is willing to do to show the world it is anything but an opportunist benefactor and beneficiary of other nations’ resistance efforts.
Read more: Why hasn't Iran retaliated against Israel? by Hamid Dabashi
