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These cruel objectives are delusional and will ultimately fail, but they are plain and clear for all the world to see.
Never in its history of war, and military occupation has Israel been so incapable of developing a coherent plan for its future, and the future of its victims.
Even a quick glance at headlines in international media reveals the depth of the Israeli dilemma. While Tel Aviv continues to carry out a genocidal war against the Palestinian people in Gaza, it seems to have no idea what to do beyond simply destroying the Strip and its people.
Even the country's Defense Minister, Yoav Gallant, who could soon be officially wanted by the International Criminal Court (ICC), indicated on multiple occasions that Israel has no post-war plan in Gaza.
"Since October, I have been raising this issue consistently in the Cabinet, and have received no response," Gallant said in the clearest possible language last May.
Others suggest that Netanyahu and his far-right government might have a plan but, in the language of the Washington Post, it is a 'no workable plan' or, according to Vox, "is no plan at all."
Netanyahu's 'not workable' plan, or ‘no plan’ at all, is inconsistent with the wishes of the U.S. administration.
True, both Israel and the U.S. are in full agreement regarding the war itself. Even after Washington had finally begun shifting its position from wanting the war to continue, to asking Netanyahu to conclude his bloody task, American weapons have continued to flow at the same rate.
The Americans, however, are not convinced that destroying Hamas, fully demilitarizing Gaza, taking control over the Gaza-Egypt border, shutting down the UNRWA refugees’ agency and the 'de-radicalization' of the besieged Palestinian population is the right approach.
But Netanyahu himself must have already known this, if not at the very start of the war, at least nearly a year into the genocide. His exhausted army kept moving from one phase to another, declaring 'tactical victories,' without achieving a single strategic goal in Gaza.
The most optimistic estimation of the Israeli army is that their war, which has practically destroyed all of Gaza, has resulted in a stalemate. A more sober reading of the war, according to former Israeli Prime Minister General Ehud Barak, is that Israel must end it before “sinking into its moral abyss.”
Yet, more delusional plans, pertaining to both the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, continue to be leaked to the media.
The first major leak was a taped recording of a speech by extremist and very influential Israeli minister in Netanyahu's cabinet, Bezalel Smotrich.
"I am telling, it is mega-dramatic. Such changes change a system's DNA," Smotrich told a group of Israeli Jewish settlers last June, according to the New York Times.
The minister's "carefully orchestrated program" hinges on transferring the authority of the West Bank from the occupation army to a group of civilians under the leadership of Smotrich himself. The goal is to seize more Palestinian land, expand the illegal settlements, and prevent any possible continuity of a viable Palestinian State.
In fact, the plan is already underway. On May 29, Israel appointed Hillel Roth, a close ally of Smotrich, as the deputy in the West Bank Civil Administration.
The plan for Gaza is another episode of cruelty, but also delusional. It was revealed in an article by the editor of the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, on September 9.
Aluf Benn wrote that Netanyahu's plan also consists of the hiring of an Israeli ‘governor of Gaza,’ Brigadier General Elad Goren, who became the ‘Head of Humanitarian-Civilian effort’ in the Strip on August 28.
Using a combination of tactics, including starvation, military pressure and the like, Netanyahu wants to drive the population of northern Gaza to the south in preparation of formally annexing the region and bringing back Jewish settlers.
These are not the only plans that have been leaked or, at times, communicated openly by Israeli officials.
At the start of the war, such ideas as ethnically cleansing the Gaza population into Sinai were advocated openly by Israeli officials, and were also the main topic of discussion in Israeli evening news programs.
Some Israeli officials spoke of fully occupying Gaza, while others, like Israel’s Heritage Minister Amichai Eliyahu, floated the idea of dropping a nuclear bomb.
The plan of totally evacuating Gaza did not work simply because Palestinians would not leave, and Egypt had rejected the very insinuation that ethnically cleansing Gazans was an option. Additionally, the total depopulation of northern Gaza also did not work, partly because Israel was massacring civilians in both north and south at comparable rates.
Israel’s new plans will not succeed in achieving what the original plans have failed to achieve, simply because Israel continues to face the same obstacle: the steadfastness of the Palestinian people.
However, much can still be learned from the nature of the Israeli schemes, old and new, mainly the fact that Israel regards the Palestinian people as the enemy.
This conclusion is not only gleaned through statements by top Israeli officials, including President Isaac Herzog himself, when he said that “an entire nation out there (..) is responsible.”
Almost every Israeli scheme seems to involve killing Palestinians in large numbers, starving them or displacing them en masse.
This means that the Israeli war has always been a war against the Palestinian people. The Palestinians themselves know it. Shouldn’t the rest of the world also know it by now?
The alliance of U.S. partners in the region with Israel against Iran that Washington has long worked for seems to be coming apart at the seams.
At least one thing is now obvious in the Middle East: The Biden administration has failed abjectly in its objectives there, leaving the region in dangerous disarray. Its primary stated foreign policy goal has been to rally its partners in the region to cooperate with the extremist Israeli government of Benjamin Netanyahu while upholding a “rules-based” international order and blocking Iran and its allies in their policies. Clearly, such goals have had all the coherence of a chimera and have failed for one obvious reason. President Biden’s Achilles heel has been his “bear hug” of Netanyahu, who allied himself with the Israeli equivalent of neo-Nazis, while launching a ruinous total war on the people of Gaza in the wake of the horrific October 7 Hamas terrorist attack on Israel.
Biden also signed on to the Abraham Accords, a project initiated in 2020 by Jared Kushner, the son-in-law and special Middle East envoy of then-President Donald Trump. Through them the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, and Morocco all agreed to recognize Israel in return for investment and trade opportunities there and access to American weaponry and a U.S. security umbrella. Not only did Washington, however, fail to incorporate Saudi Arabia into that framework, but it has also faced increasing difficulty keeping the accords themselves in place given increasing anger and revulsion in the region over the high (and still ongoing) civilian death toll in Gaza. Typically, just the docking of an Israeli ship at the Moroccan port of Tangier this summer set off popular protests that spread to dozens of cities in that country. And that was just a taste of what could be coming.
Washington’s efforts in the Middle East have been profoundly undermined by its breathtaking hypocrisy. After all, the Biden team has gone blue in the face decrying the Russian occupation of parts of Ukraine and its violations of international humanitarian law in killing so many innocent civilians there. In contrast, the administration let the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu completely disregard international law when it comes to its treatment of the Palestinians. This summer, the International Court of Justice ruled that the entire Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories is illegal in international law and, in response, the U.S. and Israel both thumbed their noses at the finding. In part as a response to Washington’s Israeli policy, no country in the Middle East and very few nations in the Global South have joined in its attempt to ostracize Vladimir Putin’s Russia.
Worse yet for the Biden administration, the most significant divide in the Arab world between secular nationalist governments and those that favor forms of political Islam has begun to heal in the face of the perceived Israeli threat. Turkey and Egypt, daggers long drawn over their differing views of the Muslim Brotherhood, the fundamentalist movement that briefly came to power in Cairo in 2012-2013, have begun repairing their relationship, specifically citing the menace posed by Israeli expansionism.
The persistence of Secretary of State Antony Blinken in pressing Saudi Arabia, a key U.S. security partner, to recognize Israel at a moment when the Arab public is boiling with anger over what they see as a campaign of genocide in Gaza, is the closest thing since the Trump administration to pure idiocracy. Washington’s pressure on Riyadh elicited from Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman the pitiful plea that he fears being assassinated were he to normalize relations with Tel Aviv now. And consider that ironic given his own past role in ordering the assassination of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi. In short, the ongoing inside-the-Beltway ambition to secure further Arab recognition of Israel amid the annihilation of Gaza has America’s security partners wondering if Washington is trying to get them killed—anything but a promising basis for a long-term alliance.
The science-fiction-style nature of U.S. policy in the Middle East is starkly revealed when you consider the position of Jordan, which has a peace treaty with Israel. In early September, its foreign minister, Ayman Safadi, warned that any attempt by the Israeli military or its squatter-settlers to expel Indigenous West Bank Palestinians to Jordan would be considered an “act of war.” While such anxieties might once have seemed overblown, the recent stunning (and stunningly destructive) Israeli military campaign on the Palestinian West Bank, including bombings of populated areas by fighter jets, has already begun to resemble the campaign in Gaza in its tactics. And keep in mind that, as August ended, Foreign Minister Israel Katz even urged the Israeli army to compel Palestinians to engage in a “voluntary evacuation” of the northern West Bank.
Not only is the expulsion of Palestinians from there now the stated policy of cabinet members like Jewish Power extremist Itamar Ben-Gvir; it’s the preference of 65% of Israelis polled. And mind you, when Israel and Jordan begin talking war you know something serious is going on, since the last time those two countries actively fought was in the 1973 October War during the administration of President Richard Nixon.
In short, Netanyahu and his extremist companions are in the process of undoing all the diplomatic progress their country achieved in the past half-century. Ronen Bar, the head of Israel’s domestic Shin Bet intelligence agency, warned in August that the brutal policies the extremists in the government were pursuing are “a stain on Judaism” and will lead to “global delegitimization, even among our greatest allies.”
The ligaments of American influence in the Middle East are now dissolving before our very eyes.
Turkey, a NATO ally with which the U.S. has mutual defense obligations, has become vociferous in its discontent with President Biden’s Middle Eastern policy. Although Turkey recognized Israel in 1949, under President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of the pro-Islam Justice and Development Party interactions had grown rocky even before the Gaza nightmare. Still, until then their trade and military ties had survived occasional shouting matches between their politicians. The Gaza genocide, however, has changed all that. Erdogan even compared Netanyahu to Hitler, and then went further still, claiming that, in the Rafah offensive in southern Gaza in May, “Netanyahu has reached a level with his genocidal methods that would make Hitler jealous.”
Worse yet, the Turkish president, referred to by friend and foe as the “sultan” because of his vast power, has now gone beyond angry words. Since last October, he’s used Turkey’s position in NATO to prohibit that organization from cooperating in any way with Israel on the grounds that it’s violating the NATO principle that harm to civilians in war must be carefully minimized. The Justice and Development Party leader also imposed an economic boycott on Israel, interrupting bilateral trade that had reached $7 billion a year and sending the price of fruits and vegetables in Israel soaring, while leading to a shortage of automobiles in the Israeli market.
Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party represents the country’s small towns and rural areas and its Muslim businesses and entrepreneurs, constituencies that care deeply about the fate of Muslim Palestinians in Gaza. And while Erdogan’s high dudgeon has undoubtedly been sincere, he’s also pleasing his party’s stalwarts in the face of an increasing domestic challenge from the secular Republican People’s Party. In addition, he’s long played to a larger Arab public, which is apoplectic over the unending carnage in Gaza.
Although it was undoubtedly mere bluster, Erdogan even threatened a direct intervention on behalf of the beleaguered Palestinians. In early August, he said, “Just as we intervened in Karabakh [disputed territory between Azerbaijan and Armenia], just as we intervened in Libya, we will do the same to them.” In early September, the Turkish president called for an Islamic alliance in the region to counter what he characterized as Israeli expansionism:
Yesterday, one of our own children, [Turkish-American human rights advocate] Ayşenur Ezgi Eygi, was vilely slaughtered [on the West Bank]. Israel will not stop in Gaza. After occupying Ramallah [the de facto capital of that territory], they will look around elsewhere. They’ll fix their eyes on our homeland. They openly proclaim it with a map. We say Hamas is resisting for the Muslims. Standing against Israel’s state terror is an issue of importance to the nation and the country. Islamic countries must wake up as soon as possible and increase their cooperation. The only step that can be taken against Israel’s genocide is the alliance of Muslim countries.
In fact, the present nightmare in Gaza and the West Bank may indeed be changing political relationships in the region. After all, the Turkish president pointed to his rapprochement with Egypt as a building block in a new security edifice he envisions. Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi made his first visit to Ankara on September 4 (following a February Erdogan trip to Cairo). And those visits represented the end of a more than decade-long cold war in the Sunni Muslim world over al-Sisi’s 2013 coup against elected Muslim Brotherhood Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi, whom Erdogan had backed.
Despite its apparent embrace of democratic norms in 2012-2013, some Middle Eastern rulers charged the Brotherhood with having covert autocratic ambitions throughout the region and sought to crush it. For the moment, the Muslim Brotherhood and other forms of Sunni political Islam have been roundly defeated in Egypt, Syria, Tunisia, and the Persian Gulf region. Erdogan, a pragmatist despite his support for the Brotherhood and its offshoot Hamas, had been in the process of getting his country the best possible deal, given such a regional defeat, even before the Israelis struck Gaza.
For his part, Egypt’s al-Sisi is eager for greater leverage against Netanyahu’s apparent plan for a forever war in Gaza. After all, the Gaza campaign has already inflicted substantial damage on Egypt’s economy, since Yemen’s Houthis have supported the Gazans with attacks on container ships and oil tankers in the Red Sea. That has, in turn, diverted traffic away from it and from the Suez Canal, whose tolls normally earn significant foreign exchange for Egypt. In the first half of 2024, however, it took in only half the canal receipts of the previous year. Although tourism has held up reasonably well, any widening of the war could devastate that industry, too.
Egyptians are also reportedly furious over Netanyahu’s occupation of the Philadelphi Corridor south of the city of Rafah in Gaza and his blithe disregard of Cairo’s prerogatives under the Camp David agreement to patrol that corridor. The al-Sisi government, which, along with Qatar’s rulers and the Biden administration, has been heavily involved in hosting (so far fruitless) peace negotiations between Hamas and Israel, seems at the end of its tether, increasingly angered at the way the Israeli prime minister has constantly tacked new conditions onto any agreements being discussed, causing the talks to fail.
That things have come to such a pass in the Middle East is distinctly the fault of the Biden administration and its position—or lack of one—on Israel’s nightmare in Gaza (and now the West Bank, too).
For months, Cairo has also been seething over Netanyahu’s charge that Egypt allowed tunnels to be built under that corridor to supply Hamas with weaponry, insisting that the Egyptian army had diligently destroyed 1,500 such tunnels. Egypt’s position was given support recently by Nadav Argaman, a former head of Shin Bet, who said, “There is no connection between the weaponry found in Gaza and the Philadelphi Corridor.” Of Netanyahu, he added, “He knows very well that no smuggling takes place over the Philadelphi Corridor. So, we are now relegated to living with this imaginary figment.”
In the Turkish capital, Ankara, Al-Sisi insisted that he wanted to work with Erdogan to address “the humanitarian tragedy that our Palestinian brothers in Gaza are facing in an unprecedented disaster that has been going on for nearly a year.” He underscored that there was no daylight between Egypt and Turkey “regarding the demand for an immediate cease-fire, the rejection of the current Israeli escalation in the West Bank, and the call to start down a path that achieves the aspirations of the Palestinian people to establish their independent state on the borders of June 4, 1967, with East Jerusalem as its capital.” He also pointed out that such positions are in accord with U.N. Security Council resolutions and pledged to work with Turkey to ensure that humanitarian aid was delivered to Gaza despite “the ongoing obstacles imposed by Israel.”
To sum up, the ligaments of American influence in the Middle East are now dissolving before our very eyes. Washington’s closest allies, like the Jordanian and Saudi royal families, are terrified that Biden’s bear hug of Netanyahu’s war crimes and the fury of their own people could, in the end, destabilize their rule. Countries that, not so long ago, had correct, if not warm, relations with Israel like Egypt and Turkey are increasingly denouncing that country and its policies. And the alliance of U.S. partners in the region with Israel against Iran that Washington has long worked for seems to be coming apart at the seams. Countries like Egypt and Turkey are instead exploring the possibility of forming a regional Sunni Muslim alliance against Netanyahu’s geopolitics of Jewish power that might, in the end, actually reduce tensions with Tehran.
That things have come to such a pass in the Middle East is distinctly the fault of the Biden administration and its position—or lack of one—on Israel’s nightmare in Gaza (and now the West Bank, too). Today, all too sadly, that administration is wearing the same kind of blinkers regarding the war in Gaza that President Lyndon B. Johnson and his top officials once sported when it came to the Vietnam War.
"Each explosion constitutes an indiscriminate attack," argued Heidi Matthews, an associate professor at the Osgoode Hall Law School of York University.
Several news outlets confirmed late Tuesday what was widely suspected: Israel's military and intelligence services were behind the explosions of pagers recently purchased by the Lebanese political party and militant group Hezbollah.
The explosions, reportedly set off earlier Tuesday by a message that appeared as if it was from Hezbollah's leadership, killed at least 11 people—including an 8-year-old girl—and wounded thousands more.
Citing both an unnamed former Israeli official with knowledge of the operation and an anonymous U.S. official, Axios reported that "Israeli intelligence services planned to use the booby-trapped pagers it managed to 'plant' in Hezbollah's ranks as a surprise opening blow in an all-out war to try to cripple Hezbollah."
"But in recent days, Israeli leaders became concerned that Hezbollah might discover the pagers," the outlet continued. "Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, his top ministers, and the heads of the Israel Defense Forces and the intelligence agencies decided to use the system now rather than take the risk of it being detected by Hezbollah, a U.S. official said."
A spokesperson for the U.S. State Department publicly denied that the Biden administration was involved in the attack or aware of the operation in advance.
Heidi Matthews, an associate professor at the Osgoode Hall Law School of York University, wrote Tuesday that "each explosion constitutes an indiscriminate attack," pointing to video footage of a pager detonating in a crowded market.
"Under these circumstances," Matthews added, "this is an act of terror."
בסופר ובחנות הירקות: תיעוד נוסף של מכשיר קשר מתפוצץ לפעילי חיזבאללה בכיס@anastasia___stu @OmerShahar123 pic.twitter.com/OcjQsGLhvv
— כאן חדשות (@kann_news) September 17, 2024
The New York Times reported Tuesday that Hezbollah ordered thousands of pagers from the Taiwanese manufacturer Gold Apollo, but the company denied making the devices. According to the Times, which cited unnamed officials, Israeli operatives "tampered with" the devices "before they reached Lebanon," planting in them "as little as one to two ounces" of explosive material and a switch "that could be triggered remotely to detonate the explosives."
Heightening fears of a broader conflict, Hezbollah pledged Tuesday to retaliate against Israel over the attack, which reportedly injured Iran's ambassador to Lebanon as well as Hezbollah fighters and medics.
The Guardian's Andrew Roth noted Tuesday that just "a day before the coordinated sabotage, Amos Hochstein, a senior adviser to [U.S. President] Joe Biden, was in Israel urging Benjamin Netanyahu and other senior Israeli officials against an escalation in Lebanon."
Netanyahu has repeatedly sabotaged cease-fire negotiations with hardline demands in recent weeks as the Israeli military—heavily armed by the U.S.—continues to assail the Gaza Strip.
"While U.S. officials have said that the basis for peace along Israel's northern boundary with Lebanon would come through a cease-fire in Gaza, that agreement has proven elusive and appears no closer to fruition," Roth wrote Tuesday. "The White House had hoped that a period of quiet around Israel would allow for cease-fire negotiators to achieve a breakthrough, as intermediaries shuttle between Hamas and Israel to thread the needle of both sides' complex demands regarding a hostage exchange and territorial claims."
"That period of quiet has now been shattered with a breathtaking act of subterfuge and Hezbollah has vowed to retaliate," Roth added.