Tag: middle east

Is conflict in the Middle East at an inflection point? It might seem so, given how international outrage over Israel’s lethal conduct in the Gaza Strip has become increasingly intense and widespread in recent weeks.

Several major Western countries that previously had declined to join most other members of the United Nations in formally recognizing a Palestinian state used the opening of the current session of the General Assembly as the occasion to take that step. Popular demonstrations in the West in support of the Palestinians have been as large and conspicuous as ever, and recent polls show a sharp decline in the American public’s support for Israel.

Such responses are the least that can be expected in the face of new lows in barbarous Israeli actions against the residents of the Gaza Strip. An Israeli military assault on Gaza City has added to the rubble to which most of the city had already been reduced. The assault has given remaining inhabitants the choice of suffering and perhaps dying in place or fleeing once again to someplace else in the Strip with still no assurance of safety. The armed attacks and imposed starvation have seen the death toll of Gazans increase to what is now probably several times the officially reported figure of about 65,000.

The international responses, including diplomatic recognition of Palestine by Western governments, fall short of eliciting a constructive Israeli response. The recognition of a Palestinian state has been the target of criticism from some Palestinians who rightly point out that it does nothing to alleviate the immediate misery on the ground. Diplomatic moves and street demonstrations do not speak the only language that Israel appears to understand, which is one of force and compulsion.

The Israeli response to the latest diplomatic moves has been one of defiance and threats to inflict still more depredations on the Palestinians. The Israeli national security minister, right-wing extremist Itamar Ben-Gvir, is pushing to make annexation of the West Bank the main Israeli response to Western recognition of Palestine.

Most Israelis, and not just their government or the extremists within it, see international pressure as just more evidence of bias against Israel and of the need for Israel to use force to protect itself, regardless of worldwide outrage. Survey research shows that most Israelis believe there are “no innocents” in Gaza and favor expulsion of residents from the Gaza Strip. An appeal to morality will not get a positive response from a government that has this population as its political base. Only the imposition on Israel of significant costs and consequences would lead it to change its policies.

Although we may not be at an inflection point regarding the Palestinian-Israeli tragedy, the thinking of Arab regimes in the region has reached an inflection point of sorts in recent weeks. The Israeli attack in early September on the territory of Qatar, in an unsuccessful attempt to kill Hamas leaders engaged in Gaza-related negotiations, shocked that thinking.

The attack in Qatar comes amid a fusillade of Israeli armed attacks against other regional states, including Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, and Iran, in addition to the carnage in Palestine. These and other regional states (such as Iraq and Egypt) have been the targets of Israeli attacks — both overt military and clandestine — for many years, but it is the near-simultaneity of some of the attacks over the past month that has added to the shock.

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Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu persistently declares his ambition to “change the face of the Middle East”. Yet, his repeated assertions seem to clash with the unfolding reality on the ground.

Netanyahu’s opportunistic relationship with language is now proving detrimental to his country. The Israeli leader undoubtedly grasps fundamental marketing principles, particularly the power of strong branding and consistent messaging. However, for any product to succeed over time, clever branding alone is insufficient; the product itself must live up to at least a minimum degree of expectation.

Netanyahu’s “product,” however, has proven utterly defective, yet the 75-year-old Israeli Prime Minister stubbornly refuses to abandon his outdated marketing techniques.

But what exactly is Netanyahu selling?

Long before assuming Israel’s leadership, Netanyahu mastered the art of repetition – a technique often employed by politicians to inundate public discourse with specific slogans. Over time, these slogans are intended to become “common sense”.

As a member of the Knesset in 1992, Netanyahu delivered what appeared to be a bombshell: Iran was “within three to five years” from obtaining a nuclear bomb. In 1996, he urged the US Congress to act, declaring that “time is running out.”

While the US pivoted its attention toward Iraq, following the September 2001 attacks, Netanyahu evidently hoped to eliminate two regional foes in one stroke. Following the fall of the Iraqi government in 2003, Netanyahu channeled all his energy into a new discourse: Iran as an existential threat.

Between then and now, Iran has remained his primary focus, even as regional alliances began to form around a discourse of stabilization and renewed diplomatic ties.

However, the Obama administration, especially during its second term, was clearly uninterested in another regional war. As soon as Obama left office, Netanyahu reverted to his old marketing strategy.

It was during Trump’s first term that Netanyahu brought all his marketing techniques to the forefront. He utilized what is known as comparative advertising, where his enemies’ “product” is denigrated with basic terms like ‘barbarism’, ‘dark age’, and so forth, while his own is promoted as representing ‘civilization’, ‘enlightenment’, and ‘progress’.

He also invested heavily in the FUD (Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt) marketing technique. This entailed spreading negative or misleading information about others while promoting his own as a far superior alternative.

This brings us to “solution framing.” For instance, the so-called “existential threats” faced by Israel can supposedly be resolved through the establishment of a “New Middle East.” For this new reality to materialize, the US, he argues, would have to take action, not only to save Israel but also the “civilized world” as well.

It must be noted that Netanyahu’s “New Middle East” is not his original framing. This notion can be traced to a paper published by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in March 2004. It followed the US war and invasion of Iraq and was part of the intellectual euphoria among US and other Western intellectuals seeking to reshape the Middle East in a way that suited US geopolitical needs.

The Carnegie article sought to expand the definition of the Middle East beyond the traditional Middle East and North Africa, reaching as far as the Caucasus and Central Asia.

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And all this time you thought Israel was fighting something called “Hamas”! Poor dears, what else could you think, what with all the U.S. news outlets and “experts” and talking heads telling you the same thing?

But they lied.

They told you that Israel was fighting a “war.” They lied. What Israel is doing in Gaza isn’t a “war.” It’s a genocide.

They told you the carnage was only intended to affect the Middle East. They lied. They didn’t tell you that you could be among the casualties. That’s right: while Israel is piling dead bodies all over Gaza (not to mention Lebanon, Yemen, Syria and Iran), its leaders are planning to make American corpses, too, after they’ve hoodwinked Uncle Sam into waging their next Mideast genocide for them.

They told you not to worry: that it’s all under control. Again, they lied. They didn’t tell you that they have no idea how this will end – if it will ever end.

And now, as Washington, obeying the ever-present Israel lobby, has begun adding its own brand of “shock and awe” to yet another criminal assault in the Mideast whose direction it cannot control, they’re lying to you yet again.

So if you don’t want Iran to be the graveyard of human civilization, it’s time to face some uncomfortable facts about Israel’s war against all of us. It’s time to understand, without any evasions or equivocations, the sort of nightmare Israel is planning for the world.

Here are a few of the most crucial points.

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For the past 20 months of genocide, the Israeli military has regularly carved the Star of David into Palestinian soil, spray painted them onto walls and buildings like on Jenin’s Freedom Theater and the Qatari Consulate, drawn them onto children’s books and Islamic texts, shaved them onto the heads of Palestinian political prisoners, and emblazoned them across military equipment. Several recently released Palestinian political prisoners were forced to wear shirts with the Star of David on their chests. In a November 2024 Mondoweiss essay, Anna Lipman wrote that she stopped wearing her Star of David necklace because “it has become a symbol of supremacy and fascism.”  

These spectacles of Jewish supremacy are not new. Even before this latest and accelerating chapter of Israel’s genocide of Palestinians began in October 2023, the Star of David was regularly weaponized by Israeli soldiers and settlers as a form of intimidation, land theft, and overt physical violence. When I was in East Jerusalem in the summer of 2018, I saw many Palestinian homes that had been stolen and occupied by Israeli settlers. The doors were spray-painted with the blue six-pointed star. In August 2023, a Palestinian man in East Jerusalem was beaten and branded with the Star of David. To avoid calling this Jewish Supremacy denies the motivations behind Israel’s genocide in Gaza, as well as the reality that Israel fails to be the inclusive democracy it claims to be. It is instead an occupying colonial force that operates as a theocratic Jewish ethnostate. 

In order to understand Israel as a Jewish supremacist state, we have to go back in time, more than 50 years before its founding. While Zionism as a cultural and ideological project is much older (and Ghassan Kanafani’s On Zionist Literature is an excellent cultural history), the creation of political Zionism can be traced back to the thinking of several late 19th-century Jewish thinkers, most notably Theodore Herzl, an Austro-Hungarian journalist. There has been much scholarship on Herzl’s life, writings, and ideology, and this essay tackles none of those things in depth. Instead, I focus on several excerpts of Herzl’s writings on Zionism and the Jewish State because they are both foundational Zionist texts and the blueprints of Jewish supremacy. 

Herzl began imagining a Jewish supremacist state around the time of the first Zionist Congress of 1897. Despite its mythology, Israel was not created because of the Holocaust. Even so, early European Zionists like Herzl were developing plans for a Jewish state against the backdrop of Europe’s “Jewish Question.” It’s important to note that, in the late 19^th century, things were very bad for Jews in Europe. But this “Jewish Question” was not Palestine’s problem until Zionists made it so.

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Israel’s government, which has undertaken, with prevaricative impunity the illegal occupation and theft of Palestinian water sources, farmland, homes, property, and energy resources through ethnic cleansing and the execrable crimes of mass starvation and genocide in Gaza, has further escalated a world crisis by the preemptive bombing attack on Iran, through a self-proclaimed “Operation Rising Lion.”

This deadly deceit is of monumental proportions that one must struggle with the horrific reality it presents.

Attempting to label such crimes as a defensive strikes does violence to reason. The historical record will show that Israel’s oft-repeated insistence on the Iranian nuclear weapon threat was a contrivance to justify an arms buildup funded almost entirely by the American taxpayer.

America’s so-called defense of Israel’s freedom has been turned into a protection racket of such dimensions as to make the mafia blush. That racket has its own devises. Democratic and Republican Administrations, alike, have been contemplating an attack on Iran for decades. President Trump’s assurances of avoiding war while working closely with Netanyahu damages the President’s credibility, either he was not telling the truth or he was misled by people in his own foreign policy establishment.

Israel’s government now defines freedom thusly: Freedom to commit genocide, freedom to starve a defenseless population, freedom to wage aggressive war, and freedom to posture and to lie about all of their inhuman actions before the entire world and to demand everyone agree or be smeared as “anti-semites.”

Demanding Iran remove its nuclear energy production was an intentional nonnegotiable demand, which all participants in the JCPOA understood. It was the first Trump Administration which cancelled the agreement to limit Uranium production to 3.6% enrichment, necessary for the production of electricity for Iran’s nearly 90 million people.

Once that agreement was terminated, Iran was continually subjected to charges they were seeking to enrich uranium for the purposes of building a nuclear weapon, which gave the US and Israeli hawks opportunities to conjure mad mullahs with nukes whose sole purpose was to destroy Israel. So, the attack on Iran would be a practiced deception of a morally depraved “Do unto others before they do unto you.”

There is a body of international law which forbids preemptive strikes, but when it comes to Israel, international law does not apply, which makes one wonder why in the world Israel would want to remain in the United Nations or, conversely, why the UN would want them in. But that is an issue for the General Assembly.

Imagine Iran’s predicament if it had acquiesced to Israel’s other non-negotiable demand that it remove its ballistic missile systems. It would not have been able to respond to the attack. Israel sought the unilateral disarming of Iran, in order to bring about its own version of “shock and awe,” heavy bombardment, then with U.S. help, invasion and regime change.

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