Addressing the UN in September, Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu held up a map of historic Palestine, in which the West Bank and Gaza Strip were not delineated; the whole territory, from the river to the sea, was labeled Israel. Other maps of Israel are even more ambitious and include parts of Lebanon and Syria as well. Israel sees the war with the Palestinians, and now with Lebanon, as an opportunity to change the map of the Arab world to make it more hospitable to Israeli expansionism and domination. The United States had the same impulse after September 2001, seizing the moment to embark on a global program of regime change, to make the world more amenable to U.S. hegemony.
As the genocidal war against Palestinians enters its second year, some things are very clear.
Israel’s wars in Palestine and now Lebanon are joint U.S.-Israeli wars. The U.S. could stop the carnage if it chose to, but it chooses instead to offer full military, tactical, financial and political support to Israel. European countries with colonial and genocidal histories assist Israel to the extent they can. The result is that the most industrial “advanced” countries in the world are supporting the destruction of the Gaza Strip, besieged for the past 17 years, and Lebanon, a country that has teetered on collapse for the past several years. Their goal is to demonstrate that resistance to U.S.-Israeli hegemony is futile. This single fact transforms the war into one with global implications.
Israelis and Palestinians are engaged in an existential battle throughout historic Palestine. If Palestinians lose, they most likely will be ethnically cleansed from the soil of Palestine in a repeat of the 1948 Nakba. (In fact, that process has already begun in the West Bank and in the northern Gaza Strip.) Israeli leaders have threatened this very explicitly, using the word “Nakba” to leave no doubt about their intentions. They have long lamented that the 1948 Nakba had not been more thorough. After Oct. 7, 2023, they saw an opportunity and seized it.
If Israel loses, its colonial experiment—as a Jewish ethnostate representing Western aims in the region and destabilizing the Arab world—comes to an end. Jews who live in Palestine will have to live like everyone else in a non-Zionist state yet to be created. Already tens of thousands of Israelis have decided that the country has no future, and they’ve used their second passports to emigrate.
Both parties know what is at stake. This understanding fuels the savagery of the Israeli army, fully supported by the Israeli people and the Biden administration, and the tenacious resistance of the Palestinian fighters. One year of carpet bombing and bloodletting, and Israel hasn’t managed to accomplish a single one of its stated military aims in Gaza. In fact, one of those goals—securing the release of the Israelis held in Gaza—no longer seems to factor into military considerations at all. It is waging a war of terror on civilians to prepare them for Israel’s Final Solution.
A high civilian death toll is precisely the point for the colonizer. In Gaza, the figure of 42,000 dead used by the health ministry includes only documented deaths; it is clear to everyone that in the massive mounds of rubble throughout the Gaza Strip, decomposing bodies are buried. Lebanon is getting similar treatment, with bombing of residential areas in which entire families are snuffed out.
The U.S. has denounced calls for a ceasefire as unacceptable. It prefers to give Israel time and space to kill civilians, in the hopes of improving Israel’s negotiating position and enabling it to dictate the terms of an end to hostilities. What Israel, the U.S. and other colonial backers have not yet figured out is that atrocities don’t cow people into accepting subjugation. Burying lots of children shot in the head has the uncanny effect of stiffening the backbone and fueling rage, which in turn produces fighters who understand that they cannot negotiate with a savage enemy bent on their destruction. When you’ve lived through the worst you can imagine—loved ones dismembered, relatives shuttled from place to place like sacks of potatoes and bombed anyway, the dead fed to roaming dogs, starvation—what is left for you to fear?
Israel has no red lines. Since its creation, Israel has been supported, armed and politically protected by Western countries. The result is the creation of a powerful, savage Frankenstein that ends Palestinian bloodlines; shoots children in the head; runs torture centers where Palestinian noncombatants are beaten, electrocuted, starved and gang raped; deliberately destroys hospitals and schools; targets U.N. agencies and personnel and makes geographies uninhabitable. The consequences of Western indulgence of Israel are explored in the recent Al Jazeera investigative study, (see p. x) which assembles social media postings from Israeli soldiers. The seeming unawareness by Israeli soldiers that their trophy moments are evidence of war crimes is deeply disturbing to the viewer. They actually believe that no human law applies to them.
Israel’s sabotaging of pagers and walkie-talkies delivered to Lebanon in September is a clear case of state-sponsored terrorism because the devices were remotely detonated as their users were in public spaces. At least 12 were killed and thousands injured; many were blinded. This is on a par with targeting hospitals and medical staff and turning commandeered hospitals into mass graves.
Israel’s assassination of political leaders demonstrates a need to deliver some red meat to the Israeli public in the absence of securing the release of Israelis from Gaza. Its assassination of Hamas political leader Ismail Haniyeh in July in Tehran, followed less than two months later by its assassination of Hezbollah leader Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah in Beirut, were grievous blows to both organizations, but not the knock-out punches that Israel and the U.S. might have hoped. Israel has a long and sordid history of assassinating Palestinian political figures. The Palestinian encyclopedia (<palquest.org>) lists 37 actual and attempted assassinations of Palestinian figures from 1970 to 2019. The resistance movement fighters know that they are marked men, and their organizations have found ways to continue functioning after they are gone. They are honored for their sacrifices.
U.S. officials who support Israel are becoming more freakish and disturbing with each passing month. What can be made of revelations that U.S. Secretary State Antony Blinken signed off on Israeli attacks on humanitarian convoys and buried internal reports concluding that Israel was blocking aid into Gaza. Or plastic-faced State Department spokesman Matthew Miller claiming that Israel is taking steps to allow humanitarian aid into Gaza even as a mountain of evidence shows that famine is widespread, a fact that World Food Program Executive Director Cindy McCain acknowledged?
Even people who don’t care about foreign policy have to be dismayed by the sight of a charlatan like Netanyahu being invited to address Congress and receiving no fewer than 58 standing ovations as he spewed lie after lie about the Israeli army’s conduct in Gaza. What good can come from legislators with such questionable morals and no self-respect, who see fit to give a gracious audience to a foreign war criminal?
This blind support for Israel even as it commits genocide explains at least some of the unease Americans feel when contemplating Gaza. Palestinians are being killed wholesale, but Americans feel threatened, too. U.S. institutions and state agencies have come down harshly on protesters on university campuses. White nationalists who shoot social justice protesters while the police stand by are not very different from Israeli settlers who shoot Palestinians while the army stands by to offer backup support. Whether in Palestine or the United States, dissent is crushed in ways designed to serve as a deterrence for others. State power is absolute and cannot be questioned. Can we live in such a world?
The Israeli army is an effective demolition battalion and mass killer of noncombatants, but it is psychologically defeated. It has destroyed every university in Gaza and most of the hospitals and killed noncombatants without restraint. But when Israeli soldiers come under fire, Palestinian fighters hear them curse their leaders, the same leaders who show no interest in securing the release of Israelis. When Palestinian fighters prepare for an ambush, they regard it as an honor and pay tribute to other brigades and to their fallen leaders—Haniyeh, Nasrallah and those who died years ago, whose names are given to the guns they use. They have a cause they believe in, and they are part of a history and tradition that they understand and honor and believe can liberate Palestine from the river to the sea. They fight for the future; the Israeli cause, incubated in the 19th century, seems increasingly preposterous, a racist setup long rejected by normal people.
The Palestinian resistance is aided by resistance movements in the Arab world. The current war demonstrates that Palestine is an Arab, not exclusively Palestinian, cause. Hezbollah knows that unless Israel is defanged, it will always pose a threat to Lebanon and to the Lebanese people, who are being wiped out like Gazans, entire families at one go. Groups in Iraq, Syria and Yemen, countries that have been ravaged by Western colonial actors, are coming to the aid of the Palestinians because they understand the need to end Western domination of the region.
That domination began more than a century ago, with the Sykes-Picot agreement of 1916, with which the French and British divided the Levant into states and spheres of influence that suited their wishes, indifferent to the histories and wishes of the people. The Balfour Declaration of 1917 generously promised the support of the British government for the creation of a Jewish national homeland in Palestine. The Bush administration (2001-2009) took upon itself the foolhardy mission of implementing regime change in countries it thought should be more malleable to U.S. (and Israeli) wishes, and its wish list included Iraq, Libya and Syria; these countries are now in shambles. Everywhere the U.S. and Israel impose their will, they leave wastelands behind.
The battle waged for the liberation of Palestine calls to mind the battles waged in the epic trilogy Lord of the Rings, where warriors band together to fight against the seemingly crushing evil forces of Sauron. The odds are against them, and they know they won’t all live to see the scourge expunged from the realm, but they must at least try, because to do less would be ignoble.
Palestinians and their allies too, understand what is at stake. As of this writing, Israel is expelling Palestinians from the northern Gaza Strip in the first stages of what it thinks of as a final solution for the matter of the Palestinians. It is laying claim to territories in southern Lebanon to afford itself more living space. The combined Israel-U.S.-Western forces against them are merciless, and they must not be allowed to prevail.
What Israel and the U.S. are doing in Palestine, and now Lebanon, will set precedents for future lawless regimes. Unless the international community sets some red lines and backs them with deterring force, no one will be safe anywhere in the world.
Ida Audeh is senior editor of the Washington Report. This article was first published on the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs website on October 16, 2024