Darkness in Bibiland

Israel's Highway to Hell

Many years ago, an American president told Israel to do something it didn’t want to do, and reinforced that order with genuine threats of sanctions, and Israel complied.

OK, pick yourself up now, because this really happened.

On 29 October 1956, Dwight Eisenhower’s government submitted a draft resolution to the UN Security Council calling on Israel ‘immediately to withdraw its armed forces behind the established armistice lines’ in Gaza and the Sinai, which Israel had invaded as part of the British-French-Israeli occupation of the Suez Canal.

In his memoir, The White House Years, Eisenhower revealed that he had prepared a subsequent UN resolution ‘calling on all United Nations members to suspend not just governmental but private assistance to Israel’ - sanctions that would have amounted to $40 million in tax-deductible donations from the US and $60 million bond purchases a year from the US alone.

Eisenhower also threatened to cut off all shipments of agricultural products, and munitions and military goods. In an address from the Oval Office on 20 February 1957, Eisenhower asked his countrymen: ‘Should a nation which attacks and occupies foreign territory in the face of United Nations disapproval be allowed to impose conditions on its withdrawal?’

Faced with these threats, Israel began the withdrawal of its forces from the Sinai the following month and completed it in April. From the perspective of 2024, it is easy to look back on this episode as something from geopolitical prehistory. It took place during the high Cold War, at a time when the United States was required to balance its support for Israel with the potential consequences of losing political influence in the Middle East to the Soviets.

Needless to say, this did not become a pattern. Israel’s many defenders often claim that Israel is unfairly singled out for criticism and protest - a claim often accompanied by the accusation that any such protests are antisemitic.

But demonstrations on the streets or on university campuses are one thing; at the governmental level, the attitude of the United States and Israel’s other western allies towards the Jewish state has been clear for a long time: Israel can make war on who it likes, whenever it likes, and how it likes. And whatever it does, it will get the green light and the carte blanche, and the weapons to fight its wars with, and the diplomatic support and the veto votes in the Security Council required to neutralise any political opposition to these wars.

And whenever the bombs and missiles fall, the governments supplying them or providing political support will reiterate the same stale formulae: Israel has the right to defend itself. Israel’s enemies want to wipe it off the map. Israel is fighting terrorists. You can’t negotiate with terrorists etc, etc

Despite occasional tensions - the sinking of the USS Liberty in 1967; Ronald Reagan’s angry condemnation of the Israeli siege of Beirut - it has been like this more or less continuously since the Six-Day War. With Israel there are no red lines, and the slaughter in Gaza is proof of their absence. 1,200 Israelis were killed on 7 October last year. So far 41,000 Palestinians - mostly women and children - have been killed in Gaza.

You can only describe this ratio as ‘proportional’, if you have lost all sense of proportion, and have effectively rejected the notion of proportionality in warfare as a means of limiting violence against civilians or civilian objects. Or if you accept the propaganda fiction that Hamas is the equivalent of Nazi Germany. Many of Israel’s supporters have clearly done all of this quite comfortably. Perhaps that way, you can accommodate yourself to a ‘war’ in which 10 children a day lose one or both legs to Israeli bombs.

Because, apart from a few weasel words, not a single western leader has had a thing to say about the staggering destruction that has been inflicted on Gaza, and which is now spiralling out across the Middle East. Whatever reservations they may have about the civilian ‘cost’, no government has exerted any significant pressure to make Israel stop doing what it is doing. Take US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin’s response to the assassination of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah on Friday:

I expressed my full support for Israel’s right to defend itself and its people against Iranian backed terrorist groups. I stressed that the United States is determined to prevent Iran and Iranian-backed partners and proxies from exploiting the situation or expanding the conflict.

Whatever you think of Hezbollah or Nasrallah, Israel is clearly ‘expanding the conflict’ by killing him, just as it was when it assassinated Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran, or killed seven Iranian officers with a missile strike on the Iranian consulate in Damascus.

Once again, you don’t have to support the Iranian regime or Bashir al-Assad to notice that no other state is able to behave like this. ‘Do not mess with Israel,’ crowed Bill Maher last week. ‘They took the fight from their river to their pants.’ In a searing piece in New Lines Magazine, Eveline Hitti, the chairperson of the Department of Emergency Medicine at the American University of Beirut Medical Center, compared the pager attacks to a mass casualty event:

“All of the first casualties that came in were all just carrying their hands wrapped with bloody towels,” she said. “Those were the walk-ins.” Then came the first ambulances “carrying the people who had eviscerated eyes who couldn’t self-transport.”

The mechanism of the explosions appears to have been designed to cause maximum damage. Most of those who were injured were men, along with a number of women and children. They tended to pick up the beeping pager and hold it toward their eyes to read the message. When it exploded, it caused damage to both hands and their face.

Well, Bill Maher found it funny anyway, and he is a comedian. And so did many Israelis on social media, whose gleeful amusement at all those eviscerated eyes caused the Times of Israel to suggest that ‘the mockery crosses a line and violates a traditional Jewish ethic that discourages undue rejoicing over the deaths of one’s enemy.’

No western government has criticized these attacks. When Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez suggested that the pager attack ‘clearly and unequivocally violates humanitarian law and undermines US efforts to prevent a wider conflict’, her office was vandalised, and tv host Chris Cuomo suggested that she would have supported al-Qaeda.

Democratic senators, on the other hand, praised Israel for what the Jewish Insider called ‘the stunning, targeted attacks against Hezbollah. ‘ One senator told the newspaper:

For those of us who care about regional stability we have to manage the risk of escalation, but for those of us who have been critical of the conduct of the war in terms of [there being] too high of a tolerance for civilian casualties, we should be a little cautious to criticize an operation this precise.

Yep, let’s all start using booby traps in order to be ‘precise’, because why the hell not? Once again, no other state gets this kind of treatment. And as for the ‘tolerance for civilian casualties’, Israel’s ‘counterinsurgency’ policy has for decades been based on the collective punishment of civilians, with the aim of turning them against whatever armed organisation they may or may not support.

This policy was most famously explained in the ‘Dahiya doctrine’ by General Gadi Eisenhot in 2008, who cited the bombing of Beirut’s Dahiya quarter in 2006 as a model for future operations against any village from which Israel was fired on:

We will apply disproportionate force on it [village] and cause great damage and destruction there. From our standpoint these are not civilian villages, they are military bases…This is not a recommendation. This is a plan. And it has been approved.

Eisenhot was to some extent merely reformulating what has been standard practice throughout Israel’s history, from cross-border operations in the 50s, and the bombing of Palestinian refugee camps in Jordan, to the invasions of Lebanon, and in all the Gaza wars. None of this has made Israel more secure. And it has certainly not made the populations at the receiving end of these wars feel safer.

Perpetual War for Perpetual War

If war is politics by other means, Israel’s wars are a substitute for politics, - or rather, the perpetual postponement of politics through military force, coupled with the vague belief that somehow, if Israel can inflict enough enough misery, death, and destruction, its enemies will be cowed into submission or compliance. As a strategy for obtaining ‘security’, this leaves much to be desired. Because Rome may have tried to make its enemies hate as long as they feared, but in the end it didn’t work out for Rome, and as 7 October demonstrated so brutally, it won’t work for Israel.

In response to these attacks, the most extremist government in Israel’s history has effectively destroyed Gaza, and it is now extending the destruction into Lebanon. As the Minister of Education Yoav Kisch gloated on Israeli tv last week: ‘There is no difference between Hezbollah and Lebanon. Lebanon will be annihilated. It will cease to exist.’

This is what you can say if you are a member of a supremacist government with a carte blanche. Essentially, you can say and do what you like, and your supporters will marvel at your capacity for inflicting death and destruction. Plastic explosives in pagers? Audacious! Or a ‘masterpiece’, as Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant has referred to the air strikes and pager attacks last week. Assassinate Hassan Nasrallah. Genius! Or rather a ‘measure of justice’ as Joe Biden put it.

There are those who would see the assassination of Netanyahu as a ‘measure of justice’, but those of us who don’t believe in assassinations, murder, destruction and ‘annihilation’ as a means of achieving ‘justice’ or peace in the ‘Israeli-Palestinian conflict’, should not be drawn into this vacant bloodlust and wild lawlessness.

General David Petraeus famously asked how the Iraq war ends. Increasingly, it is becoming clear that from Israel’s point of view, this war doesn’t end. In a speech in which he held up a map of the Middle East from which ‘Palestine’ was conspicuously absent, Netanyahu told the UN last week that ‘Israel yearns for peace.’

Some Israelis might, but Netanyahu is not one of them. His government is effectively waging perpetual war for perpetual war, based on tactical successes with no coherent overall strategy. And Israel’s western allies have allowed him to get away with it.

In the space of a few days, France and the US have been humiliated by Netanyahu, who seemed to accept their ceasefire proposal and then reneged on it, because his own ministers threatened to vote against him. Still, Tony Blinken is there to find reasons why this is acceptable, or at least tolerable, and insisting that ‘ all parties refrain from any actions that could escalate the conflict.’

After the events of the last week, that escalation ship has sailed. And in a week in which Biden has just secured an $8.7 billion aid package, the US will not be doing an Eisenhower. The US has said various times that it wanted a ceasefire, and Hezbollah had said that it would stop firing rockets if there was a ceasefire, and at one point Hamas wanted a ceasefire too.

But then Israel killed Haniyeh. Genius! And now it has killed Nasrallah. Awesome! And now, no one wants a ceasefire.

Many years ago, Netanyahu joked about his ability to get America to do whatever he wanted. He must be laughing now. Because, in effect, the mighty United States, the world’s only superpower, the global policeman, upholder of international law, and showcase of liberal democracy is being dragged into endless war by a morally-bankrupt Israeli government, led by an amoral and mendacious politician whose political survival is dependent on endless war.

And so Lebanon is being bombed once again. And refugees are fleeing once again. And bombs are falling on Beirut and the Bekaa once again, and now on Yemen, while rockets are still being fired into Israel and no one seems to know how this ends.

What will happen to the Gazan Palestinians if Gaza is destroyed? Does Israel really want to re-occupy what is left of the strip? If not, who will govern it? What if Lebanon becomes another Gaza? Suppose Israel invades Lebanon? Will it face another insurgency like the one that drove it out last time?

What happens if Iran intervenes on Hezbollah’s side, in an attempt to save ‘face’, and Israel retaliates? If a regional war breaks out, and Iranian missiles fall on Tel Aviv, will Israeli missiles also fall on Tehran? What happens when Iran and/or the Houthi block the Straits of Hormuz? Does the US go to war with Iran too? Will Saudi Arabia and the UAE join in? Will Israeli settlers use the cover of a regional war to drive the Palestinians from ‘Judea and Samaria’? Will Russia and/or China support Iran, either directly or indirectly?

Maybe the Messiah will return to Jerusalem, as some evangelicals contend, and bring about the Day of Judgement and the Rapture. But beyond such fantasies, this is incomprehensibly reckless mayhem that a fragile world and a fragile region don’t need.

And asking Petraeus’s question once again, what happens at the end of all this, assuming there is an end? Who will be at the peace conference? What will be discussed, when tens of thousands of people - maybe many more than this - have died, and their neighbourhoods and cities burn? Will Israel live happily ever after? Will there be ‘peace’?

The horrors that these questions imply are only matched by the failure of so many powerful people - who ought to know better - to even ask them.

Israel, or at least the current Israeli government, clearly has no interest in asking them. And to their eternal shame and disgrace, the governments that could exert pressure to force Israel to change its ways, are too cowardly or too complicit in Israel’s criminal madness to ask any questions at all.

And so this is a failure of leadership, and a failure of politics and diplomacy, of strategy, and morality, for which the Middle East, and the rest of the world may pay a very heavy price.