Israel’s Escalating War and US’s Powerlessness to not Help Escalate it
Israel is now at war with Lebanon. If we’re being technical, they’d say they’re at war with Hezbollah. But that doesn’t help the fact that the majority of the people being killed, like in Israel’s technical war on Hamas in Gaza, are civilians. It seems unavoidable for the Israeli military and government to fight relatively small armed factions without slaughtering many times as many innocents.
Speaking of Gaza. After being a top news item for the past year, with the livestreamed genocide proving too much for the world to ignore and turning the majority of global sentiment against Israel for perhaps the first time ever, the unfolding war in Lebanon seems to have recently supplanted it. Not that news of Gaza, or the West Bank, has stopped, and the assault on the civilian population in both areas has definitely not, but now that Israeli’s leadership has spread their bombing campaign over the border of a sovereign neighbor, rather than occupied and imprisoned Palestinians, attention has turned to this next, escalated stage of the war.
The speed with which hostile rhetoric from Netanyahu and those loyal to him and willing to parrot his bullshit turned from Hamas to Hezbollah indicates that this war was in the offing for a long time. As does the fact that Mossad, Israeli’s spy agency, laid the foundations for a terrorist bombing attack against Hezbollah members and the Lebanese general public presumably months in advance of its execution. Just as they were waiting and preparing to launch an extermination campaign internally against Gazans, it follows that they must also have been planning this attack on Lebanon for a long time as well.
Much as the US incessantly used the invocation of 9/11 to justify its ever-expanding and unending “War on Terror,” Israel is doing, and will continue to do, the same with 10/7. Not as catchy a number, but similarly evocative and rhetorically useful for cynical and bloodthirsty politicians who happily have others wage war for their benefit.
While he’s far from alone in this, Benjamin Netanyahu is central in this expanding war. From the start, his motivations have been far less driven by desire to protect his people and nation, but to remain in power and avoid the popular and legal challenges that will face him if he leaves office. That would explain why he so quickly pivoted in his vitriol from Hamas to Hezbollah. Hamas wasn’t a major threat to begin with. Fighting them meant causing suffering and death for a vastly disproportionate number of civilians. Not that he or those like him care about that, but it’s inconvenient from a global political perspective. There’s only so long that you can bomb many thousands of civilians and claim that it was justified because there were a handful of Hamas militants among them before people get skeptical. As the Gazan population drastically drops, there are only so many Hamas members that could even be left. The bombing becomes monotonous. It’s harder for politicians to find cover when war isn’t raging.
So, what’s a corrupt one-trick politician to do other than spread the war, make it bigger. If Hezbollah and Lebanon’s national military stop showing restraint and start responding with full-scale warfare, the conflict could go on for years. If crazy, evil, irrational Iran was to stop holding itself back and join the fray, that could grow the war into one which engulfs the whole region and sucks the rest of the world into the conflagration with it. That’s what Netanyahu wants. However self-centered his interests are, there are plenty whose ideology leads them to want the same. Without apparent rationality or remorse, these people want this catastrophic, potentially society-ending war to escalate and explode.
Meanwhile, all the US government does is talk, about how they’re “working tirelessly” and “around the clock” to end the conflict, to reach a deal, to prevent further escalation. But of course, they are doing more than talking, because for all their hollow rhetoric of de-escalation, they continue to provide the weapons and diplomatic cover that allows the war to escalate. They’re escalating it. They’re like overly permissive parents, who buy their children guns, knives, and gasoline, and half-heartedly tell them to “be careful,” then continue providing them destructive implements as the other neighborhood kids are maimed and killed, continuing to make empty platitudes to “play nice.”