There are reports that in the aftermath of the International Court of Justice telling him to stop the Gazacaust, the Israeli Prime Minister is not only going to reject their demands, but order the IDF to invade Lebanon:
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is prepared to start a full-blown war against the pro-Palestinian armed group Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Lebanese broadcaster LBCI reported on Saturday. Hezbollah has been firing rockets and mortar shells at Israeli positions since the start of the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza. The barrages have prompted retaliatory strikes from the Israeli army.
According to LBCI, an intelligence report on Israel’s plans has been provided to Hezbollah by an unnamed Arab country. The potential IDF campaign would be aimed at compelling the militants to abide by UN Security Resolution 1701, which was adopted after the end of the last Israel-Lebanon war in 2006, the TV channel said. The UN document facilitated the creation of a demilitarized zone along the Israeli-Lebanese border.
I understand the political pressures driving Netanyahu to try to find a military success somewhere as Israel comes under increasing international and economic pressure even as the internal political pressure on him reaches a boiling point. But this would be a pretty serious roll of the dice, and one that would indicate something akin to desperation on Netanyahu’s part.
The problem is that mainstream opinion in Israel is becoming literally genocidal as the fear there grows, which tends to confirm the very worst opinions of Israel’s enemies in the Arab world as well as in what were previously less hostile BRICS countries. While China has limited itself to simply telling the US it will not lift a finger to help prevent the Yemenis from preventing US, UK, and Israeli cargo ships from transiting the Red Sea, Russia is prepared to start shooting down Israeli warplanes attacking Syria, and presumably, Lebanon. And even in Clown World, people are openly rejecting the neoclown narrative about the moral sanctity of mass-murdering civilians with a side of ethnic cleansing.
When even the most loyal of Israelis, like the great historian Martin van Creveld, are troubled by the obvious falsity of the Israeli rhetoric, it’s probably not very effective on anyone else.
One thing, and by no means not the least important thing, war always produces a tsunami of kitsch. The kind that seeks to show how utterly wicked, utterly cruel and utterly depraved, the enemy is. The kind that claims to weep for, and commiserate with, the losses on one’s own side. The kind that contrasts our heroes’ indomitable courage and commitment to the sacred cause with the dastardly cowardice and treachery so characteristic of, so inherent in, the other side. The kind that, by its very nature, stokes the flames and undermines any kind of rational thought. If, indeed, it does not prohibit such thought altogether. Needless to say, Israel—my Israel—is not exempt. Some of the stuff that has been drowning us since the 7th of October is the product of genuine emotion. But much of it—especially that pronounced by, or commissioned by, politicians—is patently false. At times, so obvious is the fakery as to make one want to puke.
And if you’re losing an Israeli-born US Jew like Ilana Mercer, you’ve already lost pretty much everyone who hasn’t sold you their soul.
These days, Israel’s political discourse is marred by the likes of Eliyahu Yossian, a mainstream opinionator… “Hamas is not the enemy,” he vociferates, “Gaza is. You level the area, and you kill the largest possible numbers, because the woman there is an enemy, the baby there is an enemy and the first grader is an enemy …and the pregnant woman is the enemy.” Yossian goes on to explain that Israel must not entertain “Western values” because these “blur basic logic.”
And so the IDF has done. Should you want proof that this man’s views have gone mainstream in Israel; look at Gaza. It’s a moonscape…
It used to be that leaders like “Yoni” Netanyahu charged with their men into battle. Not anymore. Nowadays, celebrity, champagne-swilling generals give the order, after appearing on Fox News, to chubby men in front of AI consoles to bomb the anthills from above and afar. The broad and short of it is that, no reparations can fix an irreparable Gaza, although these are owed. The Israel of my formative years was no Eden before the Fall, but it was not a terrorist state. Jewish supremacism, like the American exceptionalism driving the United States’ foreign policy, breeds barbarism.
Jewish exceptionalism is every bit as stupid, evil, murderous, and false as the German exceptionalism that led to the horrors of the National Socialist imperialism and the American exceptionalism that led to the establishment of the imperial USA and subsequent downfall of the American nation. And, if the rumors about another invasion of Lebanon are true, I doubt it will end any better for the Israeli leaders than it did for their Nazi counterparts.
The leader postures.
Frightened people shout for war.
Will it never end?
UPDATE: It won’t end now, anyhow. It appears US soldiers are already dying in the Middle East again. Why are there US Army soldiers in Jordan?
Three US Army soldiers have been killed and many others wounded by an overnight drone attack in Jordan, President Joe Biden has announced. The strike on a US army outpost represents a significant escalation of simmering tensions in the Middle East.