In this online talk, Peter Beinart breaks down some strategic considerations for Israel — which don't seem to be uppermost in Netanyahu's mind.
(This just in from Politico: "The White House says Iran is preparing to imminently launch a ballistic missile attack against Israel." It will fail as the first did, but who believes this will be the end of it, in other ways? Some, perhaps, directed at American assets in the Middle East.)
Photo: Another of Israel's "precision" strikes. Ramiz Dallah – Anadolu Agency.
I have heavily edited Beinart's talk, though not the final paragraph. If nothing else, read it. Also consider that it's not only America and Israel "creating this world" of international lawlessness; there's also the Triple Axis of Russia, China and North Korea. And the phrase of alliance I just used portends the exceptionally unpleasant.
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There’s a reason that Israel withdrew from its occupations of southern Lebanon, right? Because once your soldiers are in Lebanon, occupying southern Lebanon, sooner or later it seems very, very likely people are going to start shooting at them. And the Israelis are going to start taking casualties in southern Lebanon. You were going beyond just occupying the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza. Now you’re going be occupying parts of Lebanon as well, and you don’t think that that’s going to be the beginning of—sooner or later—of some kind of quagmire?...
How does Israel think Iran is going respond to this? Do they think they’re going to disband the regime? Do they think they’re going to cut their ties with Hezbollah and their other regional proxies, which are the things that give them some degree of deterrence? It seems much more likely that Iran will go even more aggressively to try to get a nuclear weapon....
In addition to that, while everyone was focusing on the news about Nasrallah, Moody’s, the credit rating agency, just downgraded Israel’s economy in a very significant way. And Israel is facing very, very serious economic challenges as a result of this war and the growing international economic isolation that it’s facing....
The last point is ultimately just that it’s not realistic—putting aside morality—it’s just not fundamentally realistic that you can perpetually operate in a world in which you give yourself the right to act with impunity and think that others are not going do the same thing to you....
This is the world that America helped to produce when we invaded Iraq in violation of international law in 2003. And this is the world that Israel is now creating with all of these attacks in foreign countries. And, you know, we in America say, you know, ‘what comes around goes around.’ In Hebrew, the phrase from Jewish texts is ‘middah k’neged middah,’ that you will suffer in the way that you have brought suffering onto other people. I dread that prospect. I really do dread that prospect. But this is the world, it seems to me, that these Israeli actions are taking us towards. They’re taking us to a world that is more savage, more dangerous, more lawless. And although the current victims are people in Lebanon who are suffering massively, ultimately, I believe that the victims of this environment that Israel is creating will be Israeli Jews themselves, in addition to people in the rest of the Middle East. And that’s why, I’m sorry, I can’t get on this nationalist, kind of jingoistic chest-thumping campaign. I’ve just seen too many times that this ends in tears.
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