With Israeli parliamentary elections coming up on October 27, it’s important to keep in mind that Benjamin Netanyahu’s policies toward the Palestinians are, unfortunately, very popular among his target constituencies: “Jewish Israelis are united in their support for perennial war, which effectively means charting an increasingly solitary regional and global path,” writes Ori Goldberg. (1)
And, as presumably most Israeli voters know, Israel is not observing the Gaza cease-fire it agreed to. More jaded observers talk about the concept of “a ceasefire with Israeli characteristics” - i.e.: you cease, we fire. The phrase is a play on the Chinese Communists’ concept of “socialism with Chinese characteristics.”
As Britain’s Channel 4 reports: (2)
Barry Malone recently reported:
How many people do you need to kill before you’ve violated a ceasefire? One, surely. But what about two? 10? 100? Or how about more than 1,200? That’s how many Palestinians Israel has killed in Gaza since agreeing to an ostensible ceasefire with Hamas in October.
Israel has also continued to pummel southern Lebanon, despite a “ceasefire” there. But the western media appears to see no violations at all. Instead, it sees ceasefires that are “fragile”, “tested”, “strained” or “shaky”.
Given that news reporting is supposed to rely on precision and accuracy, you’d imagine organisations such as the BBC, Reuters, the Associated Press and CNN have read the terms of the deal that was signed between Israel and Hamas in Egypt. It’s unequivocal, and there really isn’t much room for interpretation. There were conditions that needed to be fulfilled within the first 72 hours before the truce could take effect, including the withdrawal of Israeli forces to agreed lines within Gaza, and the return by Hamas of all remaining Israeli hostages, living or dead.
Once the prerequisites were met, which they were, the text said that “all military operations, including aerial and artillery bombardment and targeting operations will be suspended”. [emphasis added, paragraph breaks adjusted] (3)
Benjamin Netanyahu’s goal has been to have weak and/or failed states in his geographic neighborhood. And now the war which Trump initiated jointly with Netanyahu against Iran is doing an awful lot of damage to countries in the neighborhood.
Two Haaretz columnists, Yarden Michaeli and Nir Hasson, give a memorable description of an important aspect of authoritarian rule that Benjamin Netanyahu has put on display with his absurd denials of the extremely well-documented starvation campaign he’s been conducting against Palestinians in Gaza. A campaign that Netanyahu’s and Israel’s hasbara (in formation operations) flat-out deny is occurring. They describe what one has to pretend is believable in order to swallow the official claims,
The claim that there is no starvation in the Strip does not stand on its own. It rests on additional assertions. For example: After 22 months of bombings, Hamas has managed to recruit actors willing to pretend that they are desperately chasing food trucks, some even agreeing to be shot to death by the IDF in service of the campaign; children are pretending to be waiting for exhausting amounts of time for food to be distributed; parents are staging footage of themselves scrounging for crumbs in the sand; doctors are giving false testimony while nurses enter fake data from clinical examinations; countless residents are using AI to produce images showing they have lost weight; and, finally, journalists from around the world are in on the deception. It's all a performance. The entire world is acting in the service of Hamas. [my emphasis] (1)
Michaeli and Hasson do their job as journalists and cite the actual evidence, including referring to:
[A] document produced by the UN coalition of experts known as the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification, or IPC, considered to be the leading authority on identifying mass hunger. Two weeks ago, it determined that "the worst-case scenario of famine" is unfolding in Gaza and noted that one in three people there goes entire days without eating. Additional documentation has been disseminated by the World Health Organization, the World Food Programme, UNICEF, Doctors Without Borders, Oxfam (which works to end hunger and poverty worldwide),Save the Children and many other reputable sources. Most of these organizations have field staff in Gaza who directly monitor and also treat starving children.
The main argument that Israel clings to is that the emaciated youngsters are suffering from preexisting conditions. First, this claim is accurate only with respect to a very small number of them. Indeed, starvation first strikes the most vulnerable, those who require special nutrition or depend on a properly functioning healthcare system. But even in the case of a young person with preexisting conditions – severe malnutrition is generally not inevitable. [my emphasis]
They ask their Israeli readers to imagine themselves in the place of the Palestinians as a way of seeing what an absurd claim the Israeli government and its leaders are making.
But this is an example of what we still call an Orwellian situation, referring to George Orwell’s famous book 1984. Authoritarian rulers expect their populations to believe or at least pretend to believe even obviously false and absurd claims. It’s something that cult leaders also do. Cults have specific social and psychological dynamics, but they make particular use of the dynamics of mass psychology that also function in political and mainstream religious institutions.
Still, it’s important to understand the specifics of individual efforts to justify particular political action. And when it comes to genocide, it’s a critical element of understand it, much less trying to put a stop to it.
Michaeli and Hasson make this suggestion for how Israelis can attempt to gain a more realistic perspective on the situation than the huge fiction painted by Israeli hasbara:
Here's a thought experiment for anyone who still believes that there is no mass starvation in the Strip. Take the entire population of Jerusalem – including children, the elderly, the sick and the disabled – and now add everyone living in Tel Aviv and Haifa. Move them all to live in tents on beaches, or in the streets or in abandoned buildings, with no electricity, no running water, no cooking gas, no refrigerators or cupboards –and only one toilet for every 100 to 200 people. They will live intents that are gradually falling apart, while rivers of sewage flow between them. Around them will be swarms of mosquitoes, rats and wild dogs.
Freud made a famous and, for him, uncharacteristically optimistic Enlightenment observation about people’s ability to work their way to reality, even when there are strong social and psychological impediments to doing so:
We may stress as often as we like that the human intellect is powerless in comparison to the human instinctual life, and be correct about this. But there is something special about this weakness; the voice of the intellect is mild, but it does not rest until it has made itself heard. In the end, after countless repeated rejections, it makes its point. This is one of the few points on which one can be optimistic about the future of humanity, but its significance in itself is not small. (2)
That hopeful note is small comfort at the moment for the children and adults being deliberately starved to death by Benjamin Netanyahu’s government right now.
But it’s important for journalists like Yarden and Hasson and for activists against the genocide to insist on the reality and to refute the cultish propaganda on the Israeli government is currently insisting.
Here is a recent report from Kyle Kulinski on the situation. (Note: Kyle doesn’t always stick to safe-for-the-office language.) (3)
(2) Freud, Sigmund (1927): Die Zukunft einer Illusion. In: Sigmund Freud. Gesammelte Werke XIV (1948), 377. London: Imago Publishing Co. My translation to English.
The veteran journalist Terry Schwadron gives a good, brief summary of what Isarel’s current policy of war and genocide will produce:
Whatever else might be said, this escalation and the promise of occupation guarantees that all survivors of Gaza will be Israel-haters bent on revenge, echoed in the West Bank, Lebanon and beyond. In the West Bank, Israeli settlers continue to grab Palestinian homes and land in the name of Biblical ownership rights. Taken together, the military orders and the provocations spell out a future of constant war.
It is not even clear what the achievable goals are here. Some significant number of Hamas fighters have somehow survived everything the Israeli military has thrown at them, or Netanyahu would not be ordering more attacks. Netanyahu wants complete destruction of Hamas, who continue to be the ultimate villains here. (1)
When Schwadron writes that Hamas will “continue to be the ultimate villains here,” it’s not clear whether he is meaning to state his expectation of Israel’s continuing position or is expressing his own judgement, or maybe both.
It’s worthwhile giving credit at this stage to people like Raz Segal, a pro0fessor of Holocaust and genocide studies at Stockton University who wrote on October 13, 2023, not even a full week after the instantly-infamous October 7 attack by Hamas:
On Friday, Israel ordered the besieged population in the northern half of the Gaza Strip to evacuate to the south, warning that it would soon intensify its attack on the Strip’s upper half. The order has left more than a million people, half of whom are children, frantically attempting to flee amid continuing airstrikes, in a walled enclave where no destination is safe.
As Palestinian journalist Ruwaida Kamal Amer wrote today [Oct. 2023] from Gaza, “refugees from the north are already arriving in Khan Younis, where the missiles never stop and we’re running out of food, water, and power.” The UN has warned that the flight of people from the northern part of Gaza to the south will create “devastating humanitarian consequences” and will “transform what is already a tragedy into a calamitous situation.”
Over the past week, Israel’s violence against Gaza has killed more than 1,800 Palestinians, injured thousands, and displaced more than 400,000 within the strip. And yet Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu promised today that what we have seen is “only the beginning.” [my emphasis; paragraph breaks added] (1)
And over a year and a half later, during which Israel’s war on Gaza civilians that experts in field like Segal and Omer Bartov have been describing as genocide, Benjamin Netanyahu’s government is still escalating it further. And Israel’s message control isn’t working like it could for decades of recurring short wars. Naomi Beyth-Zoran writes:
Over the last two years studying in the U.S., I experienced the ongoing war from afar – following international media, speaking with people from around the world and watching Israeli coverage and public events. The gap between what the world sees and what Israelis are told is staggering. What passes for journalism in Israel often feels more like Hasbara: not meant to inform, but to reassure, explain and deflect. …
Concealing Gaza is a crime against the Israeli public, and it is a very slippery slope. Soon, our horrors will no longer be explained as they are. Young soldiers will be described as entering battle in jubilation, as imagined by some. Dead soldiers will no longer "fall" in battle; they "ascend" as one Knesset Member put it. And if they leave Gaza traumatized and take their own lives, discussions online explain that this is but a leftist media effort to undermine Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's government (the suicide itself is not the issue, only the report about it). This is how the public's right to know, think and decide is trampled upon.
This, of course, does not justify support for genocide by the Israeli public nor by the US and other government providing military aid to Israel during the ongoing horror.
The Israeli political analyst Dahlia Scheindlin provides a scathing description of Netanyahu’s latest war phase: no more negotiations “for the sake of Israeli lives” including those of the remaining living hostages; “to take land, because ‘Arabs understand land more than life’” (“the cabinet's new plan for Gaza City can reportedly pause if negotiations restart with Hamas, there's little sign Israel wants this to happen” [the latter a quote from far-right Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich]); and, finally: “Annex and settle.” [emphasis in original] (3)
Donald Trump wants to be awarded a Nobel Peace Prize. But he supports the new Netanyahu plan:
[T]he US, a veto-wielding permanent member of the [UN] security council, offered support for Israel and accused those nations who supported Sunday’s meeting of “actively prolonging the war by spreading lies about Israel”.
“Israel has a right to decide what is necessary for its security and what measure measures are appropriate to end the threat posed by Hamas,” said the US envoy to the UN, Dorothy Shea.
Israel’s military offensive has killed at least 61,000 Palestinians, according to Gaza’s health ministry, most of them civilians. The figure does not include the thousands believed to be buried under rubble or the thousands killed indirectly as a consequence of the war.
Israel’s deputy ambassador to the UN, Jonathan Miller, said: “Pressure should not be placed on Israel, who suffered the most horrific attack against the Jewish people since the Holocaust, but on Hamas.” (4)
Miller’s comment is an illustration of Israel’s hasbara narrative, which comes down to: Israel can and should do whatever we want, it’s all the fault of Hamas, and because millions of European Jews were killed in the Holocaust during the Second World War the State of Israel today is justified in doing anything they want to anybody and nobody should criticize us for it.
This English-language report from Deutsche Welle features an interview with a supporter of Netanyahu’s plan, Hans-Jakob Schindler of the Counter Extremism Project in Berlin: (5)
This is another interview with Israeli-American historian and specialist on the Holocaust and genocide Omer Bartov about the current genocide under way in Gaza with the full support of Peace President Trump’s government. (1)
No one can say whether the hastily announced end of the war in the Middle East was once again only a bluff or whether there soon could be a further escalation. Or whether there really will be a turning point because Iran has been successfully prevented from building nuclear weapons. Nothing is certain with Trump. (1)
This has been very little to indicate that the “nothing is certain” part of Trump’s diplomatic style has any notable conscious strategy of ambiguity behind it. He just changes his mind all the time, depending on what reality-TV impulse is striking him at the moment.
But it seems like wishful thinking to assume that “Iran has been successfully prevented from building nuclear weapons.” On the contrary, the “twelve-day war” in which Israel and the US attacked Iran has given the Iranian government maximum incentive to acquire nuclear weapons as quickly as possible. Dick Cheney and George W. Bush worked hard to do away with the international nuclear-arms-limitation arrangements. Obama partially reversed it, Trump 1.0 trashed it, Bide did little to restore it, and now Trump and Netanyahu have taken a big new step to wreck it further.
At this writing, we’re trying to see if Trump 2.0 can get Netanyahu to agree to a new ceasefire which Netanyahu himself will break in his usual pattern.
Sultan Barakat and former Israeli diplomat and current Haaretz columnist Alon Pinkas discuss the current precarious situation here: (2)
Pinkas served from 2000 to 2004 as the Israeli Consul General in New York and had positions as a senior foreign policy advisor to the Israeli government.
The Iranian historian and genocide scholar Omer Bartov in this interview discusses the ongoing genocide Israel is committing in Gaza: (3)
Bartov describes the current situation this way:
Q: The Israeli government says that it does its utmost to avoid civilian casualties while fighting an enemy which uses civilians as shields. Is that an argument that in your opinion is as valid today as it was 18 months ago?
Bartov: Absolutely not. It's absolutely not true. And not only that, to say that there is fighting, that there's a war going on in Gaza itself is a misnomer. There is no war. There are a few guerilla units that come out every once in a while and fire an RPG rocket or shoot some sniper fire, but there is no real fighting. And the IDF [Israeli Defense Forces] is saying it itself. It's admitting that, when you have, as your screen says, close to 58,000 people dead, of whom between 60 and 70% are civilians, half of them children, at least.
And some estimates bring it up 100,000 with an estimated 130,000 wounded, many of them severely mutilated. Then one cannot say that the IDF is doing everything it can to prevent such losses. The IDF is involved right now in completely flattening Gaza and the Minister of Defense just today, Minister Katz, said that the plan of of Israel with the IDF, of course, is to concentrate people in a so-called humanitarian town, which would look everything like a concentration camp over the ruins of the city of Rafa that has been entirely flattened. [starts at 4:30 in the video]
Drop Site News has a report of 07/08/2025 that discusses the military proficiency of the guerrilla fighters on the Palestinians side in Gaza in more detail than we often hear about them. (4)
And Israel’s leading Cassandra voice has a sobering take on the moment: (5)
(5) Trump gives Israel "carte blanche" for Gaza atrocities: Gideon Levy. Al Jazeera English YouTube channel 07/08/2025. <https://youtu.be/Xub5-1xLYpI?si=xAwdcdnWoqAwW0Ym> (Accessed: 2025-08-07).
Gideon Levy talks about the state of Israeli public opinion on the Gaza War: (1)
Dahlia Scheindlin recently analyzed the grim results of polling among Israelis toward the current war on Gaza civilians, referring in particular to a survey conducted by Tamir Sorek of Pennsylvania State University:
Every so often something forces Israelis to confront the terrible things their society has done. This can happen anywhere. The Israeli historian Elazar Barkan wrote a whole comparative study about how countries acknowledge their historic guilt. But it's ironic that in the midst of the most brutal action Israel has ever perpetrated, it was a public opinion survey that sparked such a reckoning. ...
Within days I began receiving anguished inquiries about the results. Friends, colleagues, peace activists, journalists and strangers wrote in from Australia to Uruguay to down the block, asking if it could possibly be true that 82 percent of Israeli Jews support "the transfer (expulsion) of residents of the Gaza Strip to other countries?" No less than 54 percent of Jewish respondents were "very" supportive.
Other findings were grim: A majority of 56 percent of Jews supported the "transfer (forced expulsion) of Arab citizens of Israel to other countries." And when asked directly whether they agreed with the position that the IDF, "when conquering an enemy city, should act in a manner similar to the way the Israelites acted when they conquered Jericho under the leadership of Joshua, namely, to kill all its inhabitants?" nearly half, 47 percent, agreed. (2)
These reports on Israeli attitudes toward the current genocidal war its government is waging against Palestinians are reminders that knowledge about the Holocaust as such does not necessarily make people more self-critical about the ideas and attitudes that can and do wind up supporting genocidal actions of crimes like forcible ethnic cleansing. The latter requires some substantive understanding of the historical situations in which actual genocides have occurred, and a basic sense of moral justice and historical responsibility. (3)
Notes:
(1) The international community must impose sanctions to end the war: Gideon Levy. The Hindu YouTube channel 06/02/2025. <https://youtu.be/a3aDIsRvj5E?si=R7SL85Oln6DVcQG0> (Accessed: 2025-04-06).
Trump’s merger of international diplomacy and Mafia business models keeps going forward.
Steve Witkoff may not know a whole lot about international affairs or diplomacy. But at least he himself may get some benefits from the Trump 2.0 grift:
“Only a FOOL would not accept this gift on behalf of our country,” Trump posted on social media.
But Trump and his golf buddy turned special negotiator Steve Witkoff landed a much bigger gift this month, likely to enrich them far more: a $2bn investment in their new cryptocurrency venture from the emirate of Abu Dhabi.
The investment by a firm controlled by Abu Dhabi’s sovereign wealth fund will go to World Liberty Financial, a cryptocurrency firm whose biggest beneficiaries are the Trump and Witkoff families.
Thanks to Abu Dhabi’s purchase of their “stablecoin”, the Trumps and Witkoffs will collect hefty fees and could reap hundreds of millions of dollars in interest payments. (1)
Now Trump and his special envoy have reached what might be called a non-deal deal in Iran’s nuclear program. Amos Harel reports:
What's now emerging is that Trump, via his envoy Steve Witkoff … isn't seeking a comprehensive deal with Iran but a kind of agreement on basic principles or even only an agenda for future talks. An arrangement like that would prevent a military clash now and lay the way for a permanent agreement down the line. (2).
Isn’t this a polite way of saying that Trump failed to get a deal and has given up for the moment on even trying? Harel continues:
Israel, especially Netanyahu, can expect more disappointments from the agreement that's in the works, though this isn't a surprising development. The United States won't demand clarifications on Iran's missile program, nor will it impose bans on Iran's support for agents of chaos in the region, from Hezbollah in Lebanon to Hamas and Islamic Jihad in the Palestinian territories and the Houthis in Yemen. After the latest round of talks in Rome, another meeting is likely, maybe in the Middle East.
Yeah, sounds like a failed attempt to me!
So the understandings that Trump agrees to won't be all that far from what Barack Obama achieved in the 2015 nuclear agreement, or from the informal understandings between the Iranians and Joe Biden in recent years. As the Americans say, Trump is kicking the can down the road.
Another way of describing giving up while also declaring victory.
But, despite the diplomatic fog around the whole thing, it does appear that Trump 2.0 really does not want Israel to strike Iran’s nuclear facilities. At least for right now. From whatever combination of reasons, the Trump 2.0 regime realizes that it would not be good for them to give Netanyahu the US war against Iran that he’s been demanding for more than two decades.
Netanyahu’s judgment on the issue isn’t the best. Vox in 2015 took a look back:
Indeed, Netanyahu was a rather aggressive Iraq hawk back in the early 2000s. “There is no question whatsoever that Saddam is seeking, is working, is advancing towards to the development of nuclear weapons,” Netanyahu said in 2002 testimony to Congress. “Once Saddam has nuclear weapons, the terror network will have nuclear weapons,”
Not only did Netanyahu get the nuclear issue wrong — Saddam was not building a nuclear program after all — but he incorrectly predicted that the war would inspire an Iranian democratic uprising that would topple the theocratic regime.
“If you take out Saddam, Saddam’s regime, I guarantee you that it will have enormous positive reverberations on the region,” Netanyahu claimed. “And I think that people sitting right next door in Iran, young people, and many others, will say the time of such regimes, of such despots is gone.” [my emphasis] (3)
On the other hand, Iran still doesn’t have a formal binding agreement in place on the nuclear program. A failure is a failure.
But Trump and Wikoff are able to make money on the back of their diplomacy. So there’s that.
Netanyahu was not entirely unpleased by developments in the Middle East in the Bush II and Obama years. As Joe Gill wrote last year:
As it turned out, following the disastrous invasion of Iraq and later Lebanon, there were “implosions” across the whole region in 2011. These were not without risks for Israel, but the counter-revolutions that ended the uprisings ensured that no destabilising force would threaten Netanyahu’s vision of a reconfigured Middle East.
In fact, the post-2011 order was more pro-Israel than the one that preceded it. This strategy culminated in the 2020 normalisation accords with four Arab states, implemented without any concessions on Palestinian demands for self-determination. (4)
But: “Then, things fell apart.“
And the falling apart is still in process.
“The international community [i.e., the US] must act now to stop Iran,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office says, adding that the level of uranium enrichment Iran had reached “exists only in countries actively pursuing nuclear weapons and has no civilian justification whatsoever.” (5)
And when it comes to alleged US pressure to get Israel to back off its current war on Gaza civilians: (6)
The southern England family singing group is famous for doing inspired political parody songs to the tune of well-known hits. This is a different variation on that, not a parody but a serious, moving protest song, “Gaza.”
(7) "Gaza" - adaptation by the Marsh Family of "Iris" by the Goo Goo Dolls, on the occupation of Gaza. Marsh Family YouTube channel 01/06/2025. <https://youtu.be/7OGcRQtorAM?si=TTRjd8kxUn6vRaeq> (Accessed: 2025-01-06).
Jeremy Scahill: “Everyone involved knows that the only person capable of ending this genocidal war is Donald Trump.” (2)
It's grim to think that ending a genocide depends on the Trump 2.0 kakistocracy (rule by the worst).
The Israeli historian also characterizes Benjamin Netanyahu’s increasingly authoritarian regime as a kakistocracy:
The kakistocratic character of Israel in 2023 has its roots in the long history of the shift to the right and the [Zionist-religious] fundamentalization of society, so it can only be "turned back" if the pressure of the [left and center anti-Netanyahu] protesters and the insight into the danger of this policy become stronger. This task is made more difficult by the fact that the systems of rule of the Palestinian neighbors have long been corrupt, kakistocratic or simply criminal in nature (as in the case of Gaza, which is ruled by Hamas). The kakistocratic tendency dominates the entire region, and is now spreading in political systems worldwide. Ex oriente Lux or the God-imposed task of being the "light of the nations" (Isaiah 49:6) thus takes on a new, currrent meaning. All this leaves little hope for an early end to the Middle East conflict. (3)
(2) Jeremy Scahill: Shadowy Israeli-U.S. Aid Plan Is Weapon in "Netanyahu's War of Annihilation" in Gaza. Democracy Now! YouTube channel 05/29/2025. <https://youtu.be/QuovUxF8OJk?si=qKBCIhlmk37QnFdE> (Accessed: 2025-30-05).
(3) Zimmermann, Moshe (2025): Niemals Frieden? Israel am Scheideweg, 146-147. Berlin: Ullstein. My translation to English.
Dramatic cover for the current English edition of Le Monde Diplomatique. (1)
All but these first two paragraphs are currently behind subscription:
The period since 7 October 2023 marks the worst chapter yet in the Palestinian people’s long ordeal. Worse even than the Nakba – ‘catastrophe’ in Arabic – of 1948, referring to events which have subsequently been called ‘ethnic cleansing’. The current catastrophe is characterised, among other things, by genocide. Thus, a stronger Arabic term is necessary to describe the misery being visited upon Palestine: karitha. Israel is slaughtering a part of the Gazan population without giving up ethnic cleansing, both in the West Bank and in the Gaza Strip. ‘Gaza will be totally destroyed,’ Israeli finance minister Bezalel Smotrich announced at a conference on 6 May this year in the West Bank settlement of Ofra. Civilians will be ‘concentrated’ in the south, from where they ‘will be looking for relocation to begin a new life in other places’.
Donald Trump sensed an opportunity in the threat. He may seek to win his Arab allies over to an updated version of the ‘deal of the century’, which they roundly rejected in 2020. The plan proposed a rump ‘state of Palestine’ and, compared with the prospect of ethnic cleansing, now looks like the lesser of two evils. Saudi Arabia would join the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, and Morocco – and before them Egypt and Jordan – in normalising relations with Israel. Trump and Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu would be handed a victory they could boast about, but fundamentally very little would be resolved. The future of the Middle East – and indeed international relations as a whole – seems bleak. [my emphasis]
That is a reminder that, however phony Trump 2.0’s public diplomacy on this may be, we still have to hope that somehow this ghastly war in Gaza will be stopped in a way that allows most of the Palestinians who will otherwise be killed in the horror over the next few months to survive.
But with all the diplomatic and political fog out there, it’s important to remember that the only practical and effective way to stop the Netanyahu’s government current war on Gaza civilians is to cut off US arms supplies and other military aid to Israel until it stops the war and commits itself in a real way to a substantive process of ending the occupation.
Today’s international order has been integral to the global projection of Western engagement and power for decades. Military interventions, such as in Iraq in 2003, or more recently defending Ukraine against Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022, were driven by realpolitik calculations but legitimized through a defence of human rights, democracy and international law.
After the attacks on 11 September 2001, at the peak of US unipolarity, President George W Bush infamously said ‘either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists.’ The world was thus divided into ‘good’ and ‘evil’ revealing the ideological edifice through which US military and economic prowess and expansion were justified. [my emphasis] (2)
In looking at foreign policy, I find it often to be an effort to remember that just because an idea or structure or political arrangement is made because of some hardheaded geopolitical consideration doesn’t mean it’s a bad idea in itself. A structure of international law, or a “rules-based international order” is an important concept, goal, and practice. But, as Über-Realist John Mearsheimer would presumably say here, the current world system is in fact anarchic, i.e., there is no central deciding world structure that can impose a particular kind of order comparable to that of a nation-state. The UN is a step in the right direction but not a real world government.
This is a report from the British Channel 4 on the present state of things: (3)
Notes:
(1) Achcar, Gilbert (2025): History’s crossroads: Gaza or the failure of the West. Le Monde Diplomatique English June 2025. <https://mondediplo.com/2025/06/02gaza> (Accessed : 2025-28-05).
Some of the people hoping for a more restrained and less war-oriented foreign policy continue to look for signs that Trump is actually doing that. There’s nothing wrong with optimism. And there’s always the thought, “Even a stopped clock is right twice a day.” Or, in former Texas Gov. Rick Perry famously put it, “Even a stopped clock is right once a day.”
When it comes to Israel’s latest escalation in direct war against Palestinian civilians in Gaza, he has the Trump 2.0 Administration’s full backing. Trump is trying to juggle the PR face of genocide. But he is supporting it.
Investigative journalist Jeremy Scahill has a report at Drop Site on the plan as it’s currently being implemented. (1) He speaks about it at length in this interview: (2)
As Scahill explains in his article:
Benjamin Netanyahu has made it clear: His decision to allow a minuscule amount of aid to enter Gaza is a tactical one aimed at quieting international condemnation of Israel’s forced starvation of Gaza and to clear the path of a final solution imposed on the Palestinians of Gaza.
"We're going to take control of all the Gaza Strip,” Netanyahu vowed Monday in a video released by his office announcing that Israel would begin delivering “minimal humanitarian aid: food and medicine only.” Netanyahu claimed that international pressure, including from pro-Israel Republican senators and the White House, required the appearance of humanitarian intervention. "Our best friends in the world—senators I know as strong supporters of Israel—have warned that they cannot support us if images of mass starvation emerge," he said. “They come to me and say, ‘We’ll give you all the help you need to win the war… but we can’t be receiving pictures of famine,’” Netanyahu added. To continue the war of annihilation, he asserted, “We need to do it in a way that they won't stop us.” [my emphasis]
Peace President Trump actually can stop Netanyahu’s war on Gaza Palestinians by cutting off US military aid. But that’s not the plan he’s currently implementing. Scahill:
Netanyahu’s coalitional ally Bezalel Smotrich—an extreme right-wing government minister and longtime advocate of starving, mass killing, and depopulating Gaza—endorsed Netanyahu’s move. Smotrich said the aid scheme would allow “our friends in the world to continue to provide us with an international umbrella of protection against the Security Council and the Hague Tribunal, and for us to continue to fight, God willing, until victory.” …
“Truth be told, until the last of the hostages returns, we should also not let water into the Gaza Strip. But the reality is that if we do that, the world will force us to halt the war immediately, and to lose. It would be winning the battle, and losing the war. I'm committed to winning the war,” Smotrich declared. “We are disassembling Gaza, and leaving it as piles of rubble, with total destruction [which has] no precedent globally. And the world isn't stopping us. There are pressures. There are those who attack [us]; they are trying to [make us] stop; they are not succeeding. You know why they aren't succeeding? Because we are navigating [the campaign] responsibly and wisely, and that's how we'll continue to do [it]."
Smotrich said that the Israeli forces are initiating a campaign to force Palestinians into the south of Gaza “and from there, God willing, to third countries, as part of President Trump's plan. This is a change of the course of history—nothing less.” [my emphasis]
Scahill also did another long interview with his Drop Site colleague Ryan Grim. (3)
Trumpista “restrainers”?
Alex Kane describes the (basically fake) “restrainer” rhetoric that Trump 2.0 has been projecting in the Peace President mode:
Experts say that Trump’s distance from Netanyahu has been visible since before the Middle East tour—in particular since March, when Israel ended the ceasefire with Hamas that Trump and his envoy Steve Witkoff had helped broker. According to Yousef Munayyer, head of the Palestine/Israel Program at the Arab Center Washington, DC, Israel’s renewed bombardment of Gaza dashed Trump’s hopes of using the ceasefire to build on the Abraham Accords—the normalization deals between Israel and Arab states that he facilitated during his first term—and especially his aspiration to bring Saudi Arabia into the agreements. “It became clear the Israelis were not going to help Trump advance the objectives that he wanted within the region, and that Netanyahu was putting his own domestic political interests ahead of his relationship with Trump,” said Munayyer. [my emphasis] (4)
Kane gives this description of the “restrainer” element in the Trumpista movement (paragraph breaks added):
More broadly, observers say, the Trump administration’s assertive position with Israel is part of a new “America First” brand of foreign policy that focuses on making deals with one-time enemies to reduce tensions and advance US economic interests in the Middle East, all while focusing attention on other rivals such as China, which Trump and his allies believe more acutely threaten American hegemony.
Multiple conservative commentators told Jewish Currents that the administration’s embrace of this position is responsive to a newly robust conservative “restraint” movement, which sees the War on Terror era of US intervention in the Middle East as an utter failure and instead demands a massive pullback of military assets from the Middle East. “There are dozens of people I would identify as restrainers in this administration,” said Justin Logan, the director of defense and foreign policy studies at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank.
At times, Trump himself has adopted the language of restraint: In his Saudi Arabia speech, he inveighed against “neocons” and accused Middle East “interventionalists” of “intervening in complex societies that they did not even understand themselves.“ Curt Mills, the executive director of the anti-interventionist conservative magazine The American Conservative, said that the newfound strength of the “restraint” strain has meant that the Israeli government—and in particular Netanyahu—has become more vulnerable to previously muted criticism from the right. “There’s always been this looming question within populist conservative foreign policy: Is it America First, with the exception of Israel?” he said. “This month would seem to indicate the answer to that is no.” [my emphasis]
Yes, Trump did use “restrainer” rhetoric in Saudi Arabia. But he’s continuing to provide the military aid necessary for Israel to continue the Gaza genocide. And the results so far are clear, as Dahlia Scheindlin explains in a column that also gives some first-hand insight into what Israeli protests there are against the war:
Cities, towns and camps have been eradicated; infrastructure, schools, hospitals, cultural and educational centers decimated. Bodies are rotting under crushed concrete, dogs are eating the bodies, children die of malnutrition. The living lack water, food, medicine, sewage, homes – not to mention safety from Israeli bombs, aimed even at their wretched tents. (5)
And so far, Peace President Trump has continued the military and economic aid and diplomatic aid that make all this possible. Except in the occasional rhetorical posture, that alleged Trumpista “restrainer” faction doesn’t seem to have much clout when it comes to actual policy.
The (mercenary-backed) Gaza Humanitarian Fund
In another ghastly development in the Peace President’s policy, the UN agency that has provided humanitarian support for Palestinian refugees since the Nakba of 1948 is no longer allowed by Israel and its Trumpista backers to do so. Responsibility for the trickle of aid that Natanyahu’s government is now allowing into Gaza belong to a new agency called the Gaza Humanitarian Fund (GHF). This headline to a column for Haaretz by Ben Samuels gives a glimpse of the vibe around this project: (6)
The minimal aid that the “humanitarian” fund will be providing will be reinforced by mercenaries. As Samuels comments:
Amid all the scrutiny and skepticism surrounding the Trump administration's plan to address Gaza's humanitarian crisis, one element has seemed particularly perplexing: the use of private military contractors to secure the planned aid.
Two little-known firms, the Safe Reach Solutions (SRS) logistics company and the UG Solutions private security company, will publicly assist the newly established Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) and deliver aid amid increasing global outrage surrounding Israel's failures to alleviate the crisis.
Blackwater mercs in Iraq caused major problems for the US-controlled interim Coalition Provisional Authority back during the Cheney-Bush Administration’s disastrous intervention there.
The use of mercenaries and soldiers of fortune dates back thousands of years, though their presence in conflict zones became particularly concerning over the past several decades amid the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
"We know from countless examples that contractors do not see themselves as bound by the same already-way-too-loose rules of engagement that the militaries operate under," Matt Duss, executive vice president at the Center for International Policy think tank, told Haaretz.
As Samuels reports, the SRS mercenary group’s CEP, Phil Reilly, served a senior manager for “special activities” for a company called Cosntellis, which was:
... a private military contractor formed after Academi merged with fellow private security company Triple Canopy. Academi was the rebranded Blackwater, which is perhaps the most notorious example of a private security company wantonly using force in a war zone – as it became a household name after a massacre committed by its employees in Iraq in 2007. [my emphasis]
And he includes a further statement from Matt Duss:
Humanitarian organizations already have the capacity to massively surge aid into Gaza if the Israeli government would stop blocking aid into Gaza. The scheme for delivering aid is simply a way to facilitate the policy of denying aid to some people, and using aid to corral Palestinians into a smaller piece of land.
I’m going to make an easy prediction here. This will not work out well. Not for the United States, and certainly not for Palestinian civilians in Gaza. I’m providing a link to the full Samuels column that does a good job of explaining what a dark plan this is.
Also worth noting: An article in Ynet News, the English outlet of the popular Israeli newspaper Jedi’ot Acharonot, looking at one of Netanyahu’s propaganda claims about the October 7, 2023 Hamas attack.
(7) Eyal, Nadav (2ß25): Mr. prime minister, the massacre was not carried out by a mob in flip-flops. Ynet News 05/22/2025. <https://www.ynetnews.com/article/ryz1rh2zgx> (Accessed: 2025-23-05).
Israel’s military assault on Gaza civilians is – horribly - likely to go on for a long time, at least if Netanyahu‘s government has its way. (1)
The EU and Britain are currently becoming more critical of Israel than they normally ever are. It’s not yet nearly enough. But moving in the right direction is always something worth applauding.
One of the distinctive features of the politics of the situation is that Netanyahu partisans work hard to equate criticism of Israel and its actions as anti-Semitic. It’s understandable, though morally indefensible, that partisans of Netanyahu’s policies of making war on Palestinian civilians are also anti-Semitic. It’s ridiculous. Yes, it’s true that antisemites can use criticism of Israel’s action as an attack on Jews more generally. It’s also true that far-right political parties and groups like the Alternative for Germany (AfD) party or the American Christian Zionist group Christians United For Israel (CUFI) who entertain or encourage actual antisemitic ideology are willing to cheer Israel’s violence against Muslims. They can then say, “Look, we’re cheering Israel’s war on Palestinians so we can’t possibly be antisemitic.”
But people watching what some commentators have called the world’s first “live-televised genocide” don’t have to approve of these horrors and certainly don’t have to silently or explicitly consent to their own governments being part of it. That description is probably not literally true, since television has been around since the 1940s and some horrible incidents have happened since, including ones in Bosnia and Rwanda, that were legally adjudicated to be genocides. (2)
Owen Jones gives an impassioned report on an incident that illustrates the social and official pressure that is being applied in various countries: (3)
Human Rights Watch reported recently:
In early May, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s security cabinet approved a plan dubbed “Gideon’s Chariots,” which it says could start as soon as US President Donald Trump’s visit to the region concludes on May 16. The plan involves forcibly displacing much of the Palestinian population of Gaza while seizing and occupying the territory. “There will be no in-and-out,” Netanyahu announced on May 5. Israel is “finally going to conquer the Gaza Strip,” said Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, who also serves as a minister in the Defense Ministry and sits on the security cabinet. Smotrich, who has said that Gaza will be “completely destroyed” and its Palestinian population will “leave in great numbers to third countries,” also suggests these plans should not be adjusted, even if hostages are released.
When coupled with the systematic destruction of homes, apartment buildings, orchards and fields, schools, hospitals, and water and sanitation facilities, as well as the use of starvation as a weapon of war—acts that amount to war crimes, crimes against humanity including extermination, and acts of genocide—these plans trigger the “duty to prevent” under the Genocide Convention. For the 153 states that are parties to it, the duty to prevent genocide arises as soon as a state learns, or should normally have learned, of a serious risk that genocide may be committed. A definitive determination that genocide is already underway is not required, as Human Rights Watch set out in an April 2025 intervention in a case currently before the UK courts challenging the UK government’s decision to continue to license military equipment used by Israeli forces in Gaza. (4) [internal links not included]
Is it reasonable to call this a genocide? Sondos Asem recently reported:
A growing number of the world’s leading genocide scholars believe that Israel’s actions in Gaza constitute genocide, according to an investigation by Dutch newspaper NRC.
The paper interviewed seven renowned genocide and Holocaust researchers* from six countries - including Israel - all of whom described the Israeli campaign in Gaza as genocidal. Many said their peers in the field share this assessment.
"Can I name someone whose work I respect who does not think it is genocide? No, there is no counterargument that takes into account all the evidence," Israeli researcher Raz Segal told NRC.
Professor Ugur Umit Ungor of the University of Amsterdam and NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies said that while there are certainly researchers who say it is not genocide, "I don't know them". (5)
The Dutch NRC report interviewed seven genocide scholars, all of whom concer with the “genocide” label: Shmuel Lederman, Dirk Moses, Melanie O'Brien, Raz Segal, Martin Shaw, Ugur Umit Ungor, and Iva Vukusic.
Haaretz columnist Gideon Levy, a longtime critic of Israel’s reckless wars and its criminal Palestinian policies, recently commented on the current grim situation: (6)
Meanwhile, Netanyahu continues his long obsession with attacking Iran’s nuclear program.
The US has obtained new intelligence suggesting that Israel is making preparations to strike Iranian nuclear facilities, even as the Trump administration has been pursuing a diplomatic deal with Tehran, multiple US officials familiar with the latest intelligence told CNN.
Such a strike would be a brazen break with President Donald Trump, US officials said. It could also risk tipping off a broader regional conflict in the Middle East — something the US has sought to avoid since the war in Gaza inflamed tensions beginning in 2023. (7)
The United States plays a critical role in this. Netanyahu is waging this genocidal military campaign with the massive military support being provided by the Trump 2.0 Administration. Anyone who is still trying to picture Trump as a Peace President will be quick to say that Biden did so, too. And they would be right. There is no legitimate excuse for either one of them.
Chaim Levinson describes Trump’s current choice bluntly:
In the next day or two U.S. President Donald Trump and his right hand man Steve Witkoff will have to make a strategic decision: whether to confront Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu openly and publicly and force on him a cease-fire and an end to the war, or to give in and let Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich carry out his plan to destroy Gaza. The diplomatic cauldron is on the verge of boiling over, and it looks as though there's no more time. ...
In talks with the hostages' families, in briefings to the senators and in dialogue with their counterparts in the Gulf, the White House staff members repeatedly declare their desire for an end to the war. However, Trump has yet to adopt the necessary steps for ending it, and is sitting on the fence in the hope that the sides will reach an understanding on their own. [my emphasis] (8)
Notes:
(1) Do Western states' condemnations of Israel's offensive in Gaza go beyond rhetoric? DW news YouTube channel 05/20/2025. <https://youtu.be/YSbz9jMjtdA?si=fshiok1qnUUGQXl4> (Accessed: 2025-21-05).
(2) See, for instance: Thompson, Allan, ed. (2007): The Media and the Rwanda Genocide. Kampala: Fountain Publishers. And: Clarke, John Nathaniel (2018): British Media and the Rwandan Genocide. New York: Routledge.
This is a 43-minutes news discussion from FRANCE 24 English on the current situation, in which the horror of the Gaza war continues, i.e., the Israeli war against Palestinians. Against all the Palestinians there. (1)
The FRANCE 24 discussion includes Haaretz columnist and excellent political analyst Dahlia Scheindlin who is also the author of The Crooked Timber of Democracy in Israel: Promise Unfulfilled (2023). It’s a history of Israel that provides a great background to internal political crisis prompted by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s efforts to turn Israel into an authoritarian regime, which has continued until today with no obvious end in sight. This program shows why she’s just a capable political analyst.
Scheindlin has been very critical of Israel’s military campaign against Gaza civilians since the October 7, 2023 Hamas attack and expresses that in this presentation. She is currently a cochair of the peace advocacy group A Land for All. The other panelists are the Palestinian law professor Omar Dajani (also a co-chair of A Land for All) and Gil Mihaely. who is editor in -chief of the right-leaning Causeur. The Iranian filmmaker Sepideh Farsi also presents a short segment at the start.
European nations and Canada are rousing themselves to put at least some pressure on Netanyahu’s government to pull back from its genocidal actions against Palestinians, as the report summarizes.
Mihaely in this interview ludicrously claims that Netanyahu wanted to avoid war at all costs. In this show, he is a Netanyahu apologist. Scheindlin’s expressions listening to him show that she thinks he’s talking nonsense. And she’s right. Mihaely even uses the cynical phrase “mow the lawn”, which is the euphemism that Israel has used for a long time for periodic military attacks on the Palestinian population. He clearly approves of the practice. And he makes hack propaganda arguments.
Scheindlin and Dajani both argue for a two-state solution. I understand why peace advocates would use this as a negotiating point, but it certainly seems like a utopian goal at this point. The Israeli government seems to have effectively destroyed that option. And the default remaining options are a democratic state including both Jews and Palestinians, an apartheid state including both, or a continuation of the kind of ethnic cleansing that Netanyahu’s government is currently pursuing.
All three panelists seem to agree that Donald Trump is a chaotic actor in this situation. But we’re currently facing a new escalation of the ongoing Israeli ethnic cleansing action.
The Israeli government’s genocide and attempted ethnic cleansing in Gaza continue in full swing. Along with continuing aggressive measures against Palestinians in the West Bank. (1)
Genocide is the most serious kind of crime. Ethnic cleansing, if it in itself doesn’t necessarily constitute genocide, is also an extreme serious crime. Israel should not be doing this. The United States should certainly not be funding and supporting. Neither should any other democratic government in the world.
CNN reports this week:
It has become a familiar refrain: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu says that he is “changing the face of the Middle East.”
It is, he says, “a war of rebirth.”
It is, in a sense, undoubtedly true.
Israel has troops in Lebanon, Syria and Gaza. It’s vowed to demilitarize huge swaths of all three – backed by an unquestioning ally in the White House. The war in Gaza, which Israel restarted earlier this month, looks increasingly like it will lead to occupation for months or even years to come. [my emphasis] (2)
This is not brand new. Netanyahu was praising Trump over a month ago for his ethnic-cleansing proposal, as the Times of Israel reported:
At the start of a cabinet meeting hours after his return from Washington, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declares that his meetings with US President Donald Trump, and his other US meetings, resulted in “tremendous achievements that can ensure Israel’s security for generations.” …
While he does not give specific details of the possibilities, Trump has spoken about his vision of the US taking over Gaza after the war, clearing it of its residents and turning it into the “Riviera of the Middle East.” Israeli and US officials have insisted that the displacement would be both voluntary and temporary, despite Trump initially saying that it would be a permanent measure. …
Referring to Trump’s plan for post-war Gaza, Netanyahu says that the president came up with a “revolutionary, creative vision” that will “open up many possibilities” for Israel.
While Israel had been constantly told that the PA is needed in post-war Gaza, Trump’s vision is “completely different, and much better for the State of Israel.” It is “revolutionary, creative and we are discussing it. He is very determined to carry it out. And it also opens up many possibilities for us.” (3)
Dahlia Scheindlin, author of the book The Crooked Timber of Democracy in Israel: Promise Unfulfilled (2023) about the country’s democratic institution, has been reporting on Netanyahu’s ongoing efforts to undermine the independent justice system in Israel in order to stay in power and out of jail:
Much has been made of Benjamin Netanyahu's capacity to lie. His precisely curated external image – his speeches, video statements and posts, plus his Knesset, government and court appearances – show something more complex.
What his outward image shows is a man who has constructed a parallel universe, rich with his values and convictions, adoring audiences, thunderous applause, his umbrage and victimization, triumph about fictional, fabricated successes. In his world, there is a great void where awful real-world events are happening which are his fault or responsibility or both. But before his eyes lie only open roads.
One could go back years or decades, but take a slice of the last week. At the start of a cabinet meeting on Sunday, Netanyahu declared somberly just how much he cares about the families of the hostages Hamas is holding in Gaza, in contrast to the "lies" that he does not care. [The families have very good reason to think he does not care.] …
In his universe, the [anti-Netanyahu Israeli] protestors are a subset of shadowy bureaucrats, the "deep state" hidden within the large majority of innocent civil servants. Yes – all those tens or hundreds of thousands of people are lawless, violent scofflaws in his mind, and members of the tiny clique of the nefarious deep state. (4)
Laura Rozen reports on the rumors and speculation on a possible cease-fire in the Gaza war/genocide:
President Biden, a week before he is due to hand over power, expressed optimism about prospects for at long last reaching a deal for the release of some of the 100 hostages held by Hamas in exchange for Palestinian prisoners held in Israeli prisons, and a phased ceasefire in Gaza. The basic structure of the three phase deal is one the administration has been pursuing for over eight months.
“On the war between Israel and Hamas, we are on the brink of a proposal that I laid out in detail months ago, finally coming to fruition,” Biden said in a valedictory foreign policy speech at the State Department today.
“We are pressing hard to close the deal we have structured that would free the hostages, halt the fighting, provide security to Israel, and allow us to significantly surge humanitarian assistance to the Palestinians, who have suffered terribly in this war that Hamas started,” Biden said. “They've been through hell. So many innocent people have been killed.
“The Palestinian people deserve peace, and the right to determine their own futures,” Biden said. “Israel deserves peace and real security. And the hostages and their families deserve to be reunited. And so we're working urgently to close this deal.”
“I have learned in many years of public service to never, never, never, ever give up,” Biden added. (1)
The BBC reports:
At this point, it’s likely any ceasefire during the next few days or immediately after Trump’s Inauguration will be mainly a stunt to make Benjamin Netanyahu’s preferred Presidential candidate Donald Trump look good.
In fact, at the moment, it looks suspiciously similar to Ronald Reagan’s Inauguration, when Iran released the hostages it had held since the previous year immediately after Reagan was sworn in as President. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if Benjamin Netanyahu is planning the same sort of thing.
Because of that, it’s not entirely clear why Hamas would agree to such a ceasefire if it gave back all the hostages. (Under international law, they should give back all the hostages, but neither Hamas nor Israel actually care about international law.)
Because Israel will just make up some pretext or seize on some particular incident to claim they had to immediately resume whatever kinds of military actions they actually stop. But why would Israel even adhere for a few days to whatever they agreed to do in the ceasefire? Neither Biden in his last hours in office nor Trump as President will impose any meaningful restraints on Israel’s military action in the absence of political pressures from inside and (mostly) outside for a real change in policy.
Rozen presentas about the only kind of very cautious optimism that it seems we can take from the present moment, which is that Trump and Biden have cooperated “at least on the issue of a Middle East peace deal managed to set aside their differences for the sake of trying to free the hostages and end the awful bloodshed in Gaza.”
Haaretz columnist Alan Pinkas definitely seems to think Netanyahu was stalling the previous hostage negotiations in order to time a solution to coincide with Trump’s hoped-for Presidential Inauguration:
If the 20th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution – ratified on January 23, 1933 – had determined that presidential inaugurations would be on January 10 and not January 20, the five Israeli soldiers who were killed in Gaza on Monday likely would have been alive, their families not destroyed, a hostage deal might have already begun and scores of Gazan lives would have been spared.
It's that simple, that appalling, that tragic and that cruel.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu may whine all he likes about how U.S. President-elect Donald Trump made him do it. He is already selling the "I had no choice, we managed to postpone this for months" message to his ultranationalist, messianic, warmongering ruling coalition partners. But the truth is very clear: he has agreed to a deal he could and should have signed many months ago. But ailing hostages rotting in oxygen-deprived tunnels for 15 months and over 120 Israeli soldiers killed since he declined a previous deal are the least of his concerns. This is who and what he is. ...
The deal that may – and still may not – be agreed and signed on Tuesday or Wednesday was on the table last May, again in July and practically ever since. But Mr. Netanyahu, in the name of "an existential war" that will produce a "total victory," waited for the U.S. election and then for the presidential inauguration before agreeing to a deal. …
This is an extraordinarily tenuous agreement given what Hamas is and Netanyahu's track record. It would come as no surprise to anyone if he is telling his reluctant and sulking ministers, "Don't worry, the cease-fire won't hold." (3)
The US and the Middle East are still dangerously at the mercy of rouge Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who apparently sees maximum incentive in expanding the war in the Middle East to pull the US directly into a war with Iran. That goal has been a priority for Netanyahu for decades.
Major factors in in this toxic situation include:
Netanyahu faces a serious corruption trial facing him once he is no longer Prime Minister.
He is almost certainly calculating that keeping the war going as long as possible is the best way to stay in office. expands. “In contrast to Iran and Hezbollah, Israel has not only the potential but an interest in expanding the ongoing war.” (1)
Netanyahu very much prefers Donald Trump to Kamala Harris as US President in 2025. His appearance before Congress last month was essentially a campaign speech for the convicted felon Trump.
Any major expansion of the war will create even more dissatisfaction in the Democratic Party with Biden’s policy.
The Biden Administration claims it’s actively trying to avoid a further major escalation. But as long as Joe Biden himself refuses to impose any reductions in military supplies or refuses to Israel in an even wider war, Netanyahu is likely to take that as open permission to expand the war.
This does not sound good. On Israel’s high-profile assassination in Teheran of Ismail Haniyeh, Hamas’ political bureau chief and the lead Hamas figure in the hostage negotiations:
Through Haniyeh’s assassination in Iran’s capital, Israel appears to have sought to drag the Islamic Republic into a regional war — one that Iran hoped to avoid — on the first day in office of the new, moderate president. The expectation is that Iran will have to respond, and more forcefully than its previous choreographed attack on Israel in April.
This continues a long and seemingly counterintuitive tradition of Israel preferring conservative, fervently anti-Israel presidents in Iran over reformists, whom it sees as detrimental to its strategic interests. After all, part of Israel’s support among American and European governments derives from the idea that it is a Western democratic outpost in a “dangerous neighborhood,” which can defeat bad actors in the Middle East before they reach Europe and the West. …
Haniyeh’s assassination in Tehran was intended to urge Iran to respond, and perhaps escalate hostilities, thus finally bringing about the full-blown regional war that Israel craves. ...
[R]ight now, Israel remains eager to pull Iran into a direct confrontation — with devastating consequences for civilians across the Middle East. [my emphasis] (2)
Nor does this: (3)
And … are you kidding me?
The U.S. approved the sale of a landmark $20 billion weapons package to Israel, including the hotly contested and long anticipated sale of F-15 fighter jets for over $18 billion.
According to the Pentagon, the U.S. also approved the sale of modified medium tactical vehicles, high-explosive mortar cartridges, 120mm tank cartridges and medium-range air-to-air missiles.
The announcement marks among the most significant arms sales to Israel in American history, coming months after Congress finally managed to pass the Biden administration's $14 billion in emergency military assistance to Israel. [my emphasis] (4)
From Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant: (5)
Did he say seven fronts? Yes, I believe he did.
Apparently those would be, in alphabetical order: Gaza, Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, West Bank, Yemen.
I don’t know if this is the good news or the bad news, but Gallant is considered more moderate than Netanyahu. He considers Gallant of “adopting the anti-Israel narrative” and of being a wimp. (6)
Again, Netanyahu’s top priorities:
Involving the US in a direct war with Iran.
Keeping the war going as long as possible.
Seeing Donald Trump elected President again. Or, alternatively, installed by Trumpista methods.
But the US and its allies are urging Iran to go easy on the whole retaliation thing:
Iran has rejected western calls not to retaliate against Israel for the killing in Tehran of Ismail Haniyeh, the political leader of Hamas, late last month. ...
“Such demands lack political logic, are entirely contrary to the principles and rules of international law, and represent an excessive request,” Iran’s foreign ministry spokesperson, Nasser Kanani, said. ...
The White House warned that a “significant set of attacks” by Iran and its allies was possible as soon as this week, and has sent fighter jets, anti-missile warships and a guided missile submarine to the region in support of Israel.
Analysts say Iran is almost certain to respond to the Israeli strikes but will seek to avoid starting an all-out war. (7)
Former Prime Minister Ehud Barak also has concerns, as he explains:
Under cover of the war, a governmental and constitutional putsch is now taking place in Israel without a shot being fired. If this putsch isn't stopped, it will turn Israel into a de facto dictatorship within weeks. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his government are assassinating democracy. ...
The only way to prevent a dictatorship at such a late stage is by shutting down the country through large-scale, nonviolent civil disobedience, 24/7, until this government falls. But ordinary people aren't democracy's first line of defense. That would be the leaders, gatekeepers and elected officials. (8)
