by Andrea Zhok
The evolution of the Israeli attack on Lebanon seems to describe a situation that is not unexpected, but perhaps more clear-cut than one might have anticipated. Israel is demonstrating two things: 1) that it is militarily far stronger than any other adversary in the area, exhibiting absolute technological superiority; 2) that it recognizes no moral limit in the exercise of violence and its own power.
On the first point, it seems that Israel destroyed Hezbollah’s internal communication capacity right from the start, on the very first day. In today’s warfare, effective communication and coordination are just as important as missiles. Hezbollah’s air defense seems non-existent, and Israel therefore has complete control of the skies. Israeli intelligence has evidently infiltrated Lebanon at every level for some time, allowing the identification of military headquarters, weapons depots, and so on. Hezbollah’s leadership appears to have been almost entirely wiped out in less than three weeks, as even the Lebanese themselves admit. Before putting a single IDF soldier in the line of fire, Israel has gutted Hezbollah. Moreover, this isn’t exactly an unexpected strategy, as it’s precisely what the U.S. always does: first flatten the enemy with bombs, leveraging air superiority, and then, when the enemy is pushed back to 19th-century warfare, only then do they put boots on the ground. I think it’s fair to say, without fear of contradiction, that Hezbollah’s military leadership has failed across the board. Perhaps failure was inevitable—it’s always easy to speak from the sidelines—but this is the outcome.
On the second point, Israel continues, ever more explicitly, with its rules of engagement devoid of any self-imposed restraint. For example, yesterday, in order to kill Nasrallah, Israel demolished ten apartment buildings with bombs of monstrous power. The immediate estimate of civilian deaths is at least 300 people. But this has been Israel’s modus operandi throughout the past year in Gaza. The rule Israel claims to follow is: anyone in proximity to a target that we deem to be of military interest is to be treated as a potential enemy, who can be legitimately eliminated. In practice, this means that virtually any civilian target becomes a legitimate target.
Israel’s approach is deliberately one of Old Testament brutality. The idea harks back to an archaic era when signals had to be as clear and loud as possible: in the absence of communication systems, extermination and cruelty were used to make the message resound: one must not challenge the victor.
Israel is a country in economic crisis (its credit rating has been downgraded from A2 to Baa1 with a negative outlook), politically fractured in a terminal way, and yet, thanks to the unlimited support of the U.S., it can present itself as the de facto master of the Middle East, able to engage in any act of international bullying without fearing serious repercussions.
My impression is that this historical phase—one that is stripping away many of the comforting veils from the reality of the Western world—is also stripping Israel of the last remnants of the justificatory veil it has carried since its birth, in the shadow of the Holocaust.
To put it in popular terms, Israel has been, throughout its history, the unrivaled world champion of the “crying while screwing” tactic.
It was born through terrorist (Deir Yassin, King David Hotel, etc.) and semi-legal methods, riding the emotional wave of the Holocaust, which allowed it to receive special international treatment (starting with the incredible partition plan for Palestine, which allocated 56.47% of the territory to Israel, including 500,000 Jews—mostly recent arrivals—and 325,000 Arabs, while 43.53% was given to Palestine, comprising 807,000 Arabs and 10,000 Jews). Israel then continued systematically to disregard anything that passed under the name of “international law” (from Mossad operations on the territory of sovereign states to numerous “preemptive wars”).
Yet all this has continued to be framed under the image of little David surrounded by multiple Arab Goliaths: the cheerful village of straightforward democrats, persecuted out of envy, surrounded by barbaric hordes. And anyone who disagrees with this hagiography is labeled an anti-Semite.
Today, Israel, while simultaneously conducting a form of ethnic cleansing in Palestine, bombing Syria on a whim, leveling neighborhoods in Lebanon, and killing diplomats in Iran, continues to try to play its victim card in various international forums. But it has become a victim of its own success.
In the eyes of the world (save for readers of the mainstream media trash), it is the image of a heavily armed country equipped with the most advanced weapons systems in the world, which feels perfectly entitled to use any means it deems subjectively appropriate to its goals, recognizing no other human or ethnic entity as having equal dignity.
My impression is that Israel will win all the battles but lose the war. Not this or that particular war, but the fundamental war: the war for the legitimacy of its own existence.
