Netanyahu’s actions, driven by a reckless calculation, aim to prolong the Gaza conflict and possibly extend it to Lebanon, which he believes is a precursor to an inevitable world war involving the U.S. and Europe against Iran and Russia. Despite international condemnation and legal actions against Israel, Netanyahu remains undeterred, focusing on military superiority and destruction. His plans include targeting Hezbollah and Iran, banking on Trump’s potential return to power, and possibly realigning with Western nations against Russia. This vision underscores the structural fragility of the West and the decline of nationalisms, pushing towards a multipolar future that Israel must navigate before facing catastrophe.
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by Gad Lerner
Although it is frightening and intensifies the condemnation of Israel by the majority of Western public opinion, Netanyahu’s actions follow a reckless calculation that goes beyond his mere personal conveniences: the gamble that prolonging the Gaza war, and likely extending it to Lebanon, constitutes the prelude to an inevitable world conflict in which the United States and Europe would first reluctantly support him, only to find themselves implicated against Iran and Russia.
A mad, apocalyptic scenario? Yet this is the cruel historical trend Netanyahu is riding, eight months after the humiliation suffered on October 7, driven by the irresponsible belief that Israel’s survival depends solely on its military superiority and destructive capability. “History is impartial and unforgiving. It does not favor the virtuous, those with moral superiority. If we want to protect our values, our rights, our freedoms, we must be strong. The lesson from the past is that moral superiority does not guarantee the survival of our civilization.” This is what Netanyahu explicitly stated in an interview with Repubblica in March 2023. This is the only cynical lesson he has drawn, contradicting a millennia-old Jewish tradition, from the tragedy of the Holocaust.
Therefore, he cares little if even Spain joins South Africa in requesting the International Court of Justice to verify and possibly sanction Israel’s “genocidal intentions” against the Palestinians. Spain, a European country that only recently, as posthumous compensation, decided to grant passports to the descendants of Jews expelled from its territory in 1492. Even less does it matter to Netanyahu that the vast majority of United Nations member countries approve the recognition of the State of Palestine. By gifting the Islamist fundamentalists of Hamas a crucial political role following the war crimes he ordered in Gaza, he paradoxically believes he has marked a frontier on which the West as a whole will soon be called to fight, provided the precarious neutrality of Sunni Arab countries holds. The project he now announces is to strike at Hezbollah, Hamas’s Shiite ally, which is militarily much more formidable, and subsequently their great protector, Iran; for which he relies on the probable return of Trump to the White House. This plan involves a disruption of international balances, leading to a fusion of the ongoing war in Ukraine with the Middle Eastern one. Until recently, Netanyahu maintained a tacit understanding with Putin’s Russia, ignoring pleas for help from Kiev. Now he seems willing to support the warlike threats against Moscow from London and Warsaw, with Berlin and Paris seeming to follow suit, to escape the isolation into which he has dragged Israel. The rearmament plans and war preparations announced menacingly by European leaders like Scholz and Macron sound positive to his ears. He also considers the likely fractures in the Western front that may result. It is no coincidence that he has shifted his propaganda, claiming that pro-Palestinian protest movements are being orchestrated covertly in the West by “Russian agents.” This is to preach the inevitability, in the near future, of the reckoning that the American superpower and its NATO allies will be called to, urged into a final clash with their mortal enemies, Moscow and Tehran, before the Chinese giant is ready to support them. Gaza as the epicenter of a world war, then. The worse, the better. It may seem like a mad design; indeed, it certainly is, but it corresponds to the catastrophic worldview of a leader who deluded himself that security for Israel could be guaranteed by force alone and sees it jeopardized, yet still conceives no other way out of the dead end into which he has led his country.
The upheaval in international relations stems from structural changes, economic and technological as well as cultural, in which the evident fragility of the West is manifested. The very social, ethnic, and religious composition of what once liked to define itself as the Free World, the Front of liberal democracies, makes the decline of nationalisms and the advent of a multipolar balance inevitable: a future of coexistence in which Israel itself will have to rethink its nature if it has time, before plunging into catastrophe and dishonor.
Il Fatto Quotidiano, June 7, 2024
