Translated from GegenStandpunt 3-2024
“Al-Aqsa Flood” and “Iron Swords” –
an interim balance sheetI. Dual state formations in action: terrorism and guerrilla warfare for Palestine’s future vs. air terror and a ground offensive for Israel’s existence
Hamas
calls its act of violence on October 7 a “flood.” It’s already clear from this that Hamas really wishes for something that it is incapable of achieving: flooding the Zionist enemy with a wave of violence and washing away its “entity” is a militant fantasy that ideologically reverses the real balance of power. Ultimately, the irreconcilable conflict of interests between Hamas and the State of Israel lies in the fact that the former wants to force the establishment and recognition of a sovereign Palestinian nation state, which the entrenched Jewish state defines as an attack on its still incomplete formation and fights uncompromisingly as a threat to its existence.
The rhetorically exaggerated practical aim of Hamas is not to break the will of the enemy state with its own military force by destroying its means of power. Its advance into the Israeli heartland, which is limited from the outset and planned to last only a few hours, does not aim to truly undermine Israel’s dominance – nor, by its own assessment, is it capable of doing so. However, within the limited reach of its terrorist attack, it is all the more determined to disgrace Israel’s claim to invulnerability, which the Zionist state elevates into its total dominance, which it effectively has over its Palestinian opponent and which, in the equation of Jewish life and military enforcement power, has long since become the Israeli state ethos.
Its bloody humiliation of Israel is intended to prove that the ethos of an autonomous Palestinian state, embodied and organized by Hamas, cannot be destroyed or even weakened by the fact that it lacks the means of violence that would be necessary to foist it on its state enemy, Israel. With the flood operation, Hamas demonstrates its ability to take a stand against the Israeli solution to the ‘question’ of autonomy – i.e., of violence; in a way that at least upends the normal functioning of Israel’s internal life in a few border towns for a few hours, costs more Israeli lives than any previous act of Palestinian terrorism, and also provides Hamas with the power of disposal over more than two hundred Israelis, whom it abducts to the Gaza Strip.
The response that this provokes from Israel is itself – as Hamas fiercely assures through its PR department – part of this strange aim which consists in proving its thuggish respectability, and Hamas acts accordingly in the course of the unfolding war with its clearly assigned roles: the merciless use of Israel’s predominance thus becomes proof of the Palestinians’ ability to wage war, which according to the logic of states, namely the equation they put into practice between force and law, is tantamount to Hamas being the legitimate representative of the Palestinian people in their claim to a state – located anywhere and everywhere between the river and the sea – that no one can ignore. Above all, the Israeli military’s re-entry into the Gaza Strip – the “ground offensive” – is celebrated accordingly by the Hamas leadership, and since then, both its own and Israeli casualties have served as proof that Israel needs this offensive, that it has failed in its claim to supremacy, and that it can therefore be defeated. The superior means either prove the enemy’s eliminatory cruelty – “genocide!” – or its cowardice – “a Merkava [the Israeli battle tank] is for pussies!” At the beginning of this costly conflict, Hamas’s aim is to credibly resist the Israeli counterattack for as long as possible. Every additional day of Israeli air strikes and ground operations is seen as an improvement in its track record, which simply has to impress the enemy, its allies, its own allies, and everyone else.[1]
For Hamas, the population remains, on the one hand, the basis and embodiment of its founding ethos – it wants to secure the innate and even divinely ordained right to a state that will liberate it from Zionist oppression; the civilian casualties that Hamas is prepared to accept in proportion to the number that Israel inflicts bears witness to this, dozens or hundreds of times a day. In practice, however, Hamas is less able than ever to make the civilian population a useful resource for itself. It becomes the object of emergency aid organized by Hamas within the framework of its dwindling resources, especially in terms of medical care and the distribution of food. But even as it meticulously records the ever-growing casualty figures, Hamas insists that these people are its people, that it is their legitimate political organization, so that both are to be viewed as a nation at war – with all the rights that arise from this according to the international community of nations.
After ten months, the interim balance sheet for Hamas looks like this: It has held its ground. It has proven that it is more than a band of isolated terrorists. The war it is forcing on Israel is also more than the drawn-out struggle of an urban guerrilla group. It has evidently integrated itself so perfectly into the Gaza Strip, amassed such massive quantities of weapons and equipment, and been so prepared for war in advance that it has even recently been able to launch rocket attacks on Israel beyond the borders of the Gaza Strip.
The fact that Israel has now almost completely destroyed the Gaza Strip as a basis and condition of life for the population, in whose name Hamas is waging its war, means for Hamas that the entire Gaza Strip, with its ruins, piles of rubble, and collapsed or intact tunnels, is now in principle a battlefield. Its skills, which have been appreciated by the unblinking professional judgement of the expert community and have obviously been trained for years, make it capable of sniper attacks, laying ambushes, and – as is mentioned again and again – converting the numerous unexploded ordnance from Israel’s artillery ammunition, which has been deployed on a gigantic scale, into Hamas’s own explosives. But all of this also means that its quasi-state status is now nothing more than a ruin; its population is and will continue to be decimated, and the survivors will have to struggle with the consequences of the violence for decades to come. Whether the success stories Hamas spreads about the extent to which it manages to replace killed fighters with new recruits are true remains to be seen – what is certain is that it now officially wants to bring an end to the war as quickly as possible. Its claim to recognition as the legitimate embodiment of Palestinian statehood has been reduced to being the negotiating partner to whom this end is formally assured, i.e. granted. Precisely because it knows that Israel plans to annihilate it, it links the demand for an end to the war with demands for certain guarantees of survival – and both with the fate of the still almost 100 hostages who, given the current situation, are becoming increasingly important and in principle the last resort for obtaining from Israel what Israel is by no means prepared to concede.
Israel
has, since the beginning of October, been pursuing a strategy of violence called “Iron Swords” whose ethos, aims, and methods mirror the madness of Hamas’s militant ultimatum while at the same time operating on a completely different level.
Israel’s military campaign also has nothing to do with conventional warfare and the corresponding aims of war: This state is not concerned with defeating another state, subjugating it, and imposing its will on it. Israel wants to destroy the quasi-state of Hamas, which it identifies as a terrorist organization. With the dual ethos of the immediate struggle for survival of a people whose existence is threatened and that of the absolutely superior avenger atoning for the crime of October 7, Israel has been attacking the Gaza Strip ever since. Israel rejects critical references to the disproportionate nature of its warfare – not by denying the disproportionate nature, but explicitly insisting on it. With its supremacy, Israel defines the course of the war completely by itself: Israel turns all Gaza into a battlefield; its warfare does not recognize any fronts, so the enemy has no civilian hinterland from which to reproduce its forces; the entire infrastructure is treated in practice as a terrorist infrastructure, i.e. destroyed or dried up.
Israel’s long maintained political definition of the Gaza population as a disruptive non-people is thus being updated and radicalized in terms of war: Tens of thousands of Gazans are falling victim to Israel’s firm determination to pursue its program of eradicating the will to a state represented by Hamas through the killing of all its supporters, without any regard for civilian casualties; these are not denied, they are just of no interest. Israel stubbornly responds to every complaint about the numerous collateral damages by pointing to the Hamas officials or fighters who were killed or were intended to be killed in the criticized attacks. Where civilian concentrations might hinder military interventions, they are ordered via social media and leaflets to go to meticulously defined zones that are “safe” according to Israel’s army leadership – until it decides to strike there because its intelligence has identified, or suspects with high probability, a “terrorist target” in this zone. For Israel, the Gazan population is thus completely reduced to the negative role of a merely disruptive mass of people who are sent in constant new waves from one refuge point to another and with whom Israel does not intend to do anything even after its total victory over Hamas. A bit of displacement thus becomes, as if by itself, a military administrative option which, for a segment of the Israeli nation, coincides in the most perfect way with the “solution” that its representatives have long been proclaiming in their radical interpretation of the exclusively Jewish Eretz Israel option – the complete de-Arabization from the river to the sea. These coalition partners of Netanyahu, who are called “right-wing extremists” in Germany, agree with the “moderate” representatives of Israeli state-founding fanaticism on the premise that they are not facing a people with a state, i.e., a nation, and that the rules for armed conflicts between such people therefore do not apply in any way.
Israel’s interim balance sheet of its campaign of final annihilation against Hamas is as follows: Israel has shown itself, its enemy, and everyone else that no one can afford to put up violent resistance against Israel because Israel is able and willing to destroy any positive calculation associated with it. Israel has left almost nothing of Hamas’s civilian infrastructure, economy, and other vital structures; it has reduced the population it claimed and used as the future basis of its state to a bunch of deprived wretches through bombings and forced evacuations; it has effectively decimated Hamas’s troops and equipment. But Hamas is far from gone; on the contrary: “total victory” is still a long way off. The announcement of an attack on the Gaza Strip “for as long as necessary” has now become a real conflict with no end in sight and one that, according to the will of Israel’s supreme leader, should not end as long as anything remains of Hamas or even the possibility of its survival. Netanyahu translates total superiority into the freedom of a seemingly endless war; the praxis of a vision of the irrevocable elimination of Hamas’s will to a state is connected with the announcement of “overriding control” over the territory for an indefinite period of time in the event that the war does come to some kind of official end, which Netanyahu under no circumstances wants to officially grant to his terrorist non-war opponent.
In contrast to Hamas, which can’t wage a genuine war, and in contrast to Israel, which does not want to grant its adversary the right to such a war, the ongoing orgy of violence is being treated by
the remaining states
and the responsible body, the UN, as precisely that: an armed conflict within the framework of the relevant rules of international law, and is being presented to the opposing parties as an obligation.
Foreign supporters of the Palestinian state-founding project see Hamas, at least in part, as the legitimate embodiment and activist of this project. They define its protracted resistance as a war of liberation against the Israeli occupying power. And even if they do not support Hamas or, in some cases, accuse it of illegitimately usurping sole representation of the Palestinian people and their right to a state, they nevertheless define Israel’s violence as a military operation to which the relevant rules apply and must be applied. The ongoing conflict has reduced their pro-Palestinian or anti-Israeli position to, on the one hand, accusing Israel of violating all the good morals of fair and just war and, on the other hand, demanding that Israel recognize Hamas as a partner in the diplomacy aimed at ending the war. And where they explicitly condemn Hamas for the methods it uses to wage its armed struggle, or where they respond positively to the complaints of the relevant international bodies, they adopt the logic of international law in that only a subject to be taken seriously under international law may violate the rules of international law and be held accountable for doing so. In contrast, Israel is obliged by its own claim and its assertion to punish this position with contempt or to brand it as support for terrorism; it periodically takes out the contradiction in its very real ceasefire and prisoner diplomacy on the mediating powers, which it deliberately and publicly dupes because it sees their mediating position and activities as a violation of its claim that Hamas does not deserve to continue to exist and that its destruction therefore justifies all means.
What weighs much more heavily on Israel is that even its allies are not toeing the line. They concede – this is “ironclad” or “inviolable” – that since October 7 Israel has been exercising its right to self-defense as enshrined in international statutes. But that is only one side of the coin; on the other, they claim the freedom to relativize these very statutes that Israel is exercising in defeating its enemy. Insofar as they see themselves – the USA in particular as the world power – as the truly powerful authorities that put the right to use force in the world under their reservation, which they assert by referring to the relevant legal provisions, they remind Israel in all friendliness that its war is also subject to this reservation. In this sense, they are by no means demanding recognition of Hamas, which rules the Gaza Strip, as a serious subject of international law, but compliance with a few restrictions and rules when destroying it. And they are even more unhappy with the escalation in regional warfare that has been going on for some time. For this reason and because they define the Middle East – the USA seriously, the European allies more superficially – as an object of their order, into which Israel’s war must be classified as a case and episode, and therefore must also find a controllable end, they urge restraint in escalation and diplomacy to stop the bloodshed, knowing full well what they are asking of their uncompromising partner.
A prominent subject in the “indirect” diplomacy between Israel and Hamas, mediated by Qatar, Egypt, and the USA, is the prisoners who are no more normal prisoners of war than the ongoing conflict is a normal war; the role these victims of war play on both sides in terms of purpose, methods, and outcome is correspondingly special.
II. The prisoners of the two sides: If they aren’t prisoners of war – what are they?
Hamas’s prisoners
are hostages; and taking them is part of the aim of the terrorist attack of October 7, 2023. The abduction of Israeli citizens is part of the shock and awe of this attack; the well-known images of Israelis being taken to the Gaza Strip in cars and on motorcycles are also part of the humiliation of the overwhelming enemy that Hamas is looking for. Their next purpose is to serve as bargaining chips to force Israel to release as many of the thousands of Palestinians held in Israeli prisons as possible.
In line with its dual initial purpose, Hamas initially placed great emphasis on demonstrating its careful treatment of the hostages. Sinwar, in his capacity as commander-in-chief, even greeted some of them personally and in a statesmanlike manner, assuring them that nothing would happen to them. After their return, some of the hostages were not above publicly confirming the propagandistically inflated ethos of Hamas, which did not go down well in Israel. Hamas is thus combining the need to provide the hostages with some degree of care in order to keep them as bargaining chips with the aim of presenting itself as a civilized war power.[2] Like a real state at war, it is prepared not to accuse the captured members of the enemy of being citizens of the wrong side, which underscores the right of its own side to a just victory. And indeed, in November, it achieves a first exchange, carried out in phases. But that’s as far as it goes.
And so there are still almost 100 hostages, most likely alive, in the hands of Hamas. Due to the progress of the war, the way they are treated and the demands for their release have of course changed a bit – as well as the Israeli leadership’s references to the citizens in its charge. The Israelis taken hostage may still be used propagandistically, pleading in front of Hamas’s cameras for their government to save their lives by making a deal and meeting the enemy’s demands for this purpose. Living and dead hostages serve Hamas as proof of the Israeli army’s ruthlessness against its own citizens; on the one hand, this is a reflex response to the fact that Hamas has received exactly the brutal response it wanted to provoke with its attack, and which has now left little of the Gaza Strip intact. On the other hand, it is now making demands for their release that are due to the purpose of the continued war that it has forced upon itself: it wants to see the war ended as a party to a peace about which it itself can have no illusions.
But it won’t get it – hostages or not. Israel is letting both Hamas and its hostages and their families feel the ugly truth of its state ethos as the predominant protector of Jewish life: protection depends on power, and in an emergency it merges with the latter. Precisely because Jews – as the Holocaust impressively teaches – have no other protection, the credibility of the state’s power of assertion, which can ultimately only be established through ruthless action in every direction, takes precedence over the human objects of protection in the event that they are damaged. That is why the Israeli leadership, entirely in line with the logic of Hamas, which it reviles as contemptuous of life and glorifying death, praises the already dead or still captive hostages as martyrs – and incorporates them into its program: as witnesses to the justice of all Israeli violence, which is a higher value than the physical lives of a few hundred or a thousand creatures, if the only way to save them would be for their state’s protective power to demean itself by giving in to blackmail, which it defines as absolutely impermissible.[3]
The people in Israel who are affected and those who stand in solidarity with them refuse to accept the declared priority given to the trade-off between the lives of the hostages,“who only want to live in peace,” and the ruthless assertion against an enemy that the Israeli state does not want to let live. Their protests – which are denounced as selfish by other factions of the people – only gain political weight, however, thanks to their own mature civic sensibilities, when they suspect that the Israeli leadership is not actually, seriously, or honestly prioritizing the good of state invulnerability to blackmail, which they do not doubt, over the survival of the hostages, after weighing both against each other. The head of government cannot shake off the reputation of acting out of selfish motives rather than for reasons of state, of continuing the war, i.e. of continually obstructing peace and hostage negotiations, simply because he wants to hold on to power, without which he would possibly be face legal prosecution.
In substance, they are faced here with the unchecked power with which democracy, for all its procedures and institutions, empowers the leading holders of legally organized power: the power of the Israeli prime minister cannot be separated from his personal assessment of how it should be used in the interests of the state – and, of course, every democratic politician always takes into account how he can ensure that he retains power. This is precisely what those affected do not want to accept – and in doing so, they come upon those who happen to think that Netanyahu is holding Israel, which he governs according to the rules of democracy there, hostage to his private struggles and is abusing his office for it. In doing so, these critics ignore the crucial point: that the incontestability of his power is also linked to Netanyahu’s desire to restore the incontestability of the power of the State of Israel after the bitter challenge of October 7, 2023.
Although larger in number by a double-digit factor, but not quite as prominent, are
Israel’s Palestinian prisoners
They are likewise not prisoners of war in the traditional sense – after all, from Israel’s own perspective, it is not waging a real war against a respectable enemy. For the prisoners, this means: these people are neither criminals who have been convicted in a court of law or who are waiting trial, who have to expect or serve a sentence that some professional legal intellect has deemed equivalent to their previous misconduct and after which they will be allowed to rejoin the nation’s civil society as honorable members. Nor are they enemy prisoners of war who have been captured by Israel’s army and are being held until the war is over, unless a transfer is agreed on beforehand with the enemy power, which is thus recognized as the legitimate sovereign over its living material. The Palestinians who are being held captive are none of these things, and that is precisely the legal status that is assigned to them: they are “unlawful combatants.” Israel enacted the relevant law back in 2002, so that now, in the circular fashion typical of proper constitutional states, it only needs to refer to its own laws in response to anyone who complains about it. In fact, this legal status, this purely negative definition of adversaries, has an honorable history that is about as old as the international conventions that states in exceptions override for themselves whenever they deem it necessary. But this is precisely where the difference lies between the practice and meaning of the category of “unlawful combatant” in the case of Israel’s actions against the Palestinians.
For Israel does not regard this status as an exception within the framework of an otherwise ‘regular’ war against a largely ‘regular’ enemy, but rather defines the declared enemy forces as a whole to be targets for ‘annihilation’. This objective therefore applies in principle to the detainees as well as to their ‘terrorist comrades’ still living in the Gaza Strip or the West Bank, whom Israel defines at its own discretion, taking the liberties it knows it can take. Israel’s mixture of punishment and destruction is directed at all of them, i.e. each and every one of them.
From the standpoint of revenge for 10/7 and the necessary extermination, it is therefore imperative for Israel to treat even those Hamas Palestinians who were captured long ago as if they were complicit in the crime; this applies in any case to all those captured since October 8. The Israeli security forces are acting accordingly: they are storming their own Palestinian prisons as if they were attacking enemy camps and have to first overpower their inmates. In a seemingly absurd but mercilessly consistent manner, Palestinians who have been imprisoned for a long time or recently detained are then treated as if any previous treatment had been a privilege they never deserved but definitely forfeited with the action on October 7. At the same time, the fundamental standpoint with which Israel is waging its war is being asserted against them: The programmatic equation that justifies all measures, fighting Hamas’s troops for the survival of its state and thus for the immediate physical survival of the entire Jewish people, is rehearsed on the prisoners as if they still posed a mortal danger to Israel from their camp blocks and prison cells.
These two together result in a mixture of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo, the details of which are gradually coming to light. The responsible minister in Israel – the ever-cheerful and pious Itamar Ben-Gvir – keeps making it clear that this is exactly how it should be, and that he has always advocated treating Palestinian terrorists in this way and no other way. In doing so, he draws attention to another peculiarity that characterizes Israel’s treatment of prisoners as well as its entire war.
At first glance, this concerns the sheer number of prisoners and the extent to which they are subjected to bad treatment. On closer inspection, it becomes clear that the large pool of imprisoned Palestinians to whom the definition of “unlawful combatant” is now being applied is mainly rooted in the fact that Israel was already cultivating a corresponding practical and legal approach to the Palestinians, long before October 7th, which now justifies everything. With regard to the prisoners, this has mainly consisted of the mass application of the legal institution of “administrative detention,” which represents something like an “unlawful combatant” practice for everyday Israeli use in the interwar period. This is how Israel completes its treatment of the Palestinians in the occupied territories, who are subject to Israeli control – or rather, to a sovereignty that can be enforced at any time through war – but are expressly not Israeli citizens. The practice of holding Palestinians in administrative detention without providing information about the reason for detention, any legal proceedings, etc., and which can in principle be extended ad infinitum after the expiration of the legal maximum period, is a way of making the Palestinian population, in practice and in every legal form, into a non-people who live inconveniently on the land which Israel claims for itself, or over which it at least excludes any other claim to sovereignty.
This political definition, imposed on these people through special legislation, of being a disruptive non-people, then almost automatically forms, in light of the national-Palestinian resistance that arises from this Arab population, the legal guideline for treating them entirely as a morass of resistance, which, from the Israeli perspective, is synonymous with terrorism. From there, it is a short step to the complete equation of the Palestinian people with anti-Israel terrorism; the radical Zionists around Ben-Gvir and Smotrich have certainly already achieved this, morally in any case and practically to the extent that their ministerial authority allows. Hence, the template and groundwork for the tightening of restrictions since October 7th were already in place. What has become increasingly acute since then is the question of how and to what extent the Palestinians, as a whole and each individual, should be punished for the fact that Israel sees in them the basis for a state will that it now seeks to eradicate once and for all.[4]
In this way, Israel once again encounters, with renewed urgency, the contradiction inherent in its statehood between its civic-egalitarian, human rights-ennobled reason and its exclusively Jewish, militantly unfinished founding purpose; and it is so free that it can settle this solely by itself in all democratic – and at times not so democratic – openness.
One reason for this is the revelation of individual excesses within the systematic excesses of violence against Palestinian prisoners in one of the notorious detention centers. There, soldiers have let themselves be convinced by the enemy image instilled in them: that all terrorists are “human animals” and all Palestinians are, at least in principle, terrorists. They gave free rein to the resulting grim moral sense of duty in a way that contradicted even the less than squeamish procedural rules. This is definitely not unique to Israel, because no war – ‘regular’ or not – can be waged without the consequence that the combat personnel make themselves fit for the systematic cruelty demanded of them by adopting a morality that inevitably goes above and beyond what is commanded, which regularly manifests itself in unsystematic acts of cruelty.
An Israeli particularity can be observed in the public treatment and processing of these incidents. Precisely because such steps from the moral internalization of state hostility to a morality that takes on a life of its own in practice, a morality which is no longer considered functional or is in fact dysfunctional, are a necessary part of every war, are forbidden, and every regular army has special bodies that investigate and punish any transgressions. This also exists in the IDF, and the military police promptly gets involved because the military prosecutor’s office wants to know what the allegations are all about. In every army, this kind of thing is met with an unofficial esprit de corps that sticks together against the official snoopers and troublemakers. But the Israeli military police and judiciary are confronted with violent riots in which even members of parliament and members of the current government – including the Minister of Cultural Heritage, who has become known for his nuclear fantasies – participate. and rumors circulate that the police, which is under the command of Security Minister Ben-Gvir, not only did not support the internal military order, but actually sabotaged it.
There is a logic to this too. It lies in the fact that here, in the middle of war, a detail as absurd as it is gruesome brings to a head the contradiction that fundamentally characterizes this nation: While the army leadership insists that the war of annihilation against Hamas, which it has ordered and organized, is and has to remain their matter and only theirs, i.e., a state matter, which certainly can’t exist without the morale of its subordinates, but is not determined by them, the representatives of the religious Zionists in particular insist on the exact opposite: In the war against Hamas, the army may be the spearhead, but it is thus just the spearhead of a fight that is, firstly, the cause and right of every single Israeli Jew and, secondly, not encompassed by the “limited” war goal of destroying Hamas. They insist that it is not ideology, but reality that pits every single Israeli Jew against every Arab living on the soil of the Holy Land. Following the same logic that led Ben-Gvir to distribute tens of thousands of weapons to Israeli citizens in the heartland and in the occupied West Bank so that the Jewish Israeli people as such could defend themselves against their Arab opponents inside and outside what is already officially Jewish “Eretz Israel,” they consider any violence by an armed Israeli against a Palestinian Arab to be fundamentally justified. And if this means someone violates any rules in doing so, then that speaks against the rules and brands those who even try to enforce them as traitors.
* Beyond this dispute, the strange war continues to escalate – far beyond the borders of the small coastal strip. The warning of a “conflagration” is the moral and diplomatic soundtrack to the fact that Israel has long been waging a regional war. This is in practice the superior deterrence power with which Israel gains the freedom to carry out its unending military action against the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip and, increasingly, in the West Bank. The leaders of the Jewish nuclear regional power makes the logic behind this clear in practice every day – even beyond their Old Testament-inspired rhetoric.
III. Three weeks of Middle Eastern escalation: Israel’s regional deterrence power in action
7/18/2024
The Israeli parliament passes a resolution stating that the establishment of a Palestinian state west of the Jordan River represents a security risk that Israel cannot accept under any circumstances
On the one hand, this is merely the formal – and not even the first – announcement of this long-standing component of the Israeli reason of state: its highest state purpose, formulated in light of the Holocaust, to guarantee a safe state home for the Jews of the world, requires that there be no equally sovereign, thus competing, and thus hostile, entity on the Holy Jewish Land. It’s true that Israeli politicians – namely, those in the Likud under Netanyahu’s leadership – have boasted for decades to their national constituencies and voter bases that they have done their best to successfully obstruct the “peace process,” the implementation of the UN partition plan for Palestine which was dumped in their laps. But on the side they always felt obliged to offer a few diplomatic justifications, especially to friendly foreign countries, for the fact that the process and plan seem to be going nowhere. Certainly, these were never meant seriously, and everyone knew that, so the news value of the latest resolution remains limited.
Its true significance does not consist in any revelation, but in the timing and in the one important and many unimportant addressees: Israel’s American protecting power, whose deterrence and military aid Israel depends on for its war against the Palestinians, is now pushing ever more insistently on Israel to transpose its war into a post-war solution for Gaza by means of a ceasefire agreement, which America stubbornly links to a long term, two-state solution – whatever a “state for the Palestinians” may mean. Israel openly rejects this announcement by America – not despite, but precisely because of the predicament it finds itself in, explicitly pointing out that “at the moment” any talk of a Palestinian state is tantamount to rewarding terrorism – which is treated in Israel as a small-scale Holocaust. According to this, Israel is fighting for its life in a campaign of revenge and annihilation waged with the means of a real war against the attempted destruction of its state and people. To do so, it needs the USA more than ever – and is therefore obliged to spell out to its protecting power who the object of protection is and what it demands: the permanent continuation and escalation of violence at the exact point that the USA defines as the enduring reason why Israel, which it protects in solidarity, still can’t live in peace.
The fact that this is a parliamentary resolution lends additional credibility to this total affront between friendly democracies. It also rejects the tendency in the USA and elsewhere in the West to attribute the difficulty of dealing with the allied state, which enjoys unwaveringly support and is shielded from growing international criticism, to certain idiosyncrasies of its current leader. The formula that is increasingly used, especially in bilateral diplomacy between the USA and Israel, that Netanyahu is doing his country and his people no favors with his policies, can now be democratically countered by the prime minister on the basis of the voting result of 68 yes votes to 9 no votes from 120 MPs: I represent the Israeli people, and within the scope of the authority of my office, I am the Israeli state, dear ally. Democratic imperialism can’t get any more democratic than this. And that is all the more fitting in light of what Israel is currently planning, because democratic rulers demand escalating democratic legitimacy for the escalating violence they are planning. And that is what’s coming: escalation.
7/20
Israel bombs the port city of Hodeidah in retaliation for a Yemeni drone attack
Shortly before the Yemeni Ansar Allah – the Houthis, who are allied with Hamas and also supported by Iran – succeeded in killing an Israeli and causing material damage with a drone in Tel Aviv, Israel decides that it is no longer sufficient to fend off the Houthis’ missiles and aircraft with its own almost perfect combined air and missile defense system. Given the limited success of their attack compared to other acts of violence in the region, it is important to effectively deter this enemy from further attacks. The next first in Israel’s use of violence is therefore imminent: for the first time in history, Israel attacks Yemen, which is located on the other side of Arabia. And it does so in a way that suits its purpose: without long public debates about the right timing and possible consequences, Israel strikes in Yemen. It thus proves what it is capable of without any additional announcements. And – this much is announced – without the help of the USA. This is the key message: the military alliances that have been developed over many years, the ever larger joint maneuvers, especially over the Mediterranean, with changing participants – most recently the Greek Air Force, with which Israel rehearsed precisely the scenario it is now putting into practice – have enabled Israel to strike autonomously and at a moment’s notice in an area that stretches as far south as the Indian Ocean. The second message is conveyed by the specific target and scope of its air strike: Israel does not even bother with a similar response – whatever that might mean – but strikes back with “disproportionate” force, or rather, with force that is increasingly proportionate to its deterrent purpose. It bombs the port facilities in the Yemeni city of Hudaida, thereby following its usual logic of not conceding to its opponents the distinction between military and civilian targets. From the outset, they should not be able to count on a limited war in which civilian life, spared for the time being, would continue to be available to them as a basis for their unwarranted opposition to Israel. The fact that Israel’s attack on Hudaida’s port is likely to further exacerbate the already rampant misery of the Yemeni population is of no concern to Israel.
The third message goes out to the esteemed Western allies. They are concerned that the Israeli escalation could further disrupt maritime shipping in the area around Yemen, which has already been affected. They are undertaking a maritime protection mission, which has now been expanded to several thousand men, specifically to protect it against attacks by Ansar Allah. They are now repelling Yemeni attacks quite effectively and are also responding with air strikes against Yemeni military bases in response to their attempts to disrupt the peace of capitalist maritime trade, as long as Israel continues to torment their Palestinian brothers in faith and ethnicity with Israel’s version of Armageddon. The fact that there is now a threat of increased retaliatory strikes in the Arabian and Red Seas is also of no concern to Israel; in its view, its allies’ naval and air warfare, limited in comparison with Israel’s strikes, has clearly proven ineffective – at least as far as protecting Israel is concerned. Although that is not the purpose of this particular ongoing military operation, it is precisely why Israel is demonstrating what happens when it does not set itself the task of completely shielding off its Gaza war and then successfully doing this.
A nice template for Netanyahu’s trip to the USA.
7/24
Netanyahu gives a speech to both houses of the American Congress
Netanyahu’s government considers the mere fact that the trip and speech takes place at all to be a success for the diplomacy that accompanies its military escalation in the Middle East. After all, the American partner has canceled such a visit several times, and has also made it clear how dissatisfied it is with Israel for not ending its war and ignoring all the advice and warnings from Washington about this, despite all the help it receives from America. A few clarifying words between friends are in order, and they turn out to be as special as the friendship has always been. Netanyahu, who lived in the USA long enough, knows how to address his ‘dear friends’ so that they understand him correctly. On the one hand, he is ready with the usual formulas of eternal partnership and solidarity, good versus evil, democracy – which he honors right at the beginning in its “greatest citadel” – versus barbarism, etc.
On the other hand, given the current situation, a few updates to the Israeli-American bond of solidarity are in order. To make clear to the American establishment, which is somewhat divided on Israel’s war, what its significance is for Israel – and therefore objectively – all it takes are two dates here, without any further explanation. By mentioning these dates, he will trigger the precise chain of associations in the patriotic brain of every American that suits his cause: December 7, 1941, and September 11, 2001.
On that December date – tough luck for the German reader – Japan inflicted on the USA the humiliation of a surprise attack on Pearl Harbor. As is well known, the most important consequence of this was that the USA entered the world war within a few days. Netanyahu is now conjuring up a similar situation for Israel; and his proud nation is already fully engaged in its greatest military confrontation since its founding war. He is therefore demanding the unconditional support of America, which must know that a temporary military disgrace can only mean one thing for a self-respecting nation: revenge at the highest level, after which nothing will ever be the same again. 9/11 also enjoys this reputation, which is why this date must not be left out when it comes to dispelling the noticeable doubts about the unconditional supportability of Israel’s actions and bringing the American ally back into line. 9/11 aptly represents the fact that an enemy that does not even deserve the honor of being considered a proper war opponent managed to strike a blow. Just as the world power America began its global war on terror after 9/11, which was directed indiscriminately against non-state actors and rogue states accused of supporting terrorism, the regional power Israel is now waging its regional anti-terror war, which also ignores any distinction between regular and irregular opponents and asserts its right to do it purely by superior force. It is therefore above being oriented by any rules, no matter how flimsy – and therefore does not have to be held responsible for violating them by its own allies, is that clear?
Of course, Netanyahu also knows that Americans are always having visions, so he has one to offer. He calls it the “Abraham Alliance,” alluding to the normalization agreements recently brokered under Trump with a few Arab states – the Abraham Accords. He paints a picture of a paradise of regional order in which all peace-loving Arab states, in harmony with – in plain Hebrew-American terms: deterred and therefore led by – Israel, bring about a peace that must please the supreme power, the USA, if only because this regional peace coalition is also one single regional front against Iran and its allies. In this way, Netanyahu positively echoes the American point of view, according to which – at least to part of the American establishment – the war in the Gaza Strip and beyond appears increasingly unproductive and problematic. He boldly declares ‘Let there be peace!’ – and at the same time makes it clear that such a peace, i.e. an order dominated by America and Israel, requires precisely the thing that the increasing doubts from America are about, namely the continuation of the slaughter in the Gaza Strip and the permanent escalation of the regional war. The beauty of the vision, which must also be appealing to America, can only be realized by a victory that is as total as the war Israel is waging for it, kapish?
Netanyahu, of course, even provides the final or primary, that is, most compelling reason why the Americans, who are well known to be at times somewhat simple-minded if honest, can and want to follow his dialectic, and he does so quite early in his remarks, just to be on the safe side: In the style of a rather superfluous reminder, he assures the assembled representatives of what is, after Israel, the most unique nation in world history, that the two nations just need to stick together unwaveringly so that “something very simple happens. We win. They lose.” This is “simple” in the best sense of the word, namely a very dialectical clarification in itself: the entire beauty and credibility of all moral incantations lies in the simple superiority in terms of violence, but above all in the success of the application of superior means by those who ultimately only invoke morality to justify their violence. He reminds the American representatives, who want to see this illustrated a bit, that “we’ve jointly developed some of the most sophisticated weapons on Earth” – something that must be entirely convincing to the allied nation, which has cultivated the identity of weapon-wielding destructive power and moral superiority as an imperialist national character since time immemorial.
By presenting himself as the avenger not only of all Israeli Jews, but of all the good “people from 41 countries” who were killed on October 7, Netanyahu emphasizes to his democratic ally that he nust not prematurely end his ongoing war as a fight for the common good. This is confirmed by the internationality of the dead as well as by the invoked multicultural identity of the Israeli citizen and soldier – Jews, Druze, honest-to-goodness Arab Israeli Bedouins – which is supposed to remind American patriots of their own melting pot ethos.
Netanyahu also uses the hostage issue in line with his determination not to let his American ally take the war in the Gaza Strip away from him prematurely and not to be dissuaded from the necessary escalation throughout the region. He counters the tactic employed by some American politicians of using the hostages, who they do not care about, to problematize the Israeli government’s stubbornness, which really annoys them, in a congenial way: He brings up former hostages, hostage families, etc., and conjures up the equation of hostage welfare and Israeli military superiority, which is absurdly unreal given the actual war situation, in order to deprive the Americans of their grounds to object to his uncompromisingness on war, just as he deprives his internal opponents of any references to American doubts.
Because Netanyahu is truly an arch-democratic politician, he also addresses his own people in his speech. He uses his appearance before America’s legislature to counter the growing suspicion in Israel that he is squandering the solidarity of its important patron. Proof: He invokes – in view of the growing dissatisfaction with him in the Washington political establishment – the bilateral common destiny, undisturbed by strife, and presents himself to his people from Washington as a leader who American politicians hear and whose friendly but stern admonitions about their overly lenient treatment of anti-Israeli protests – even at “my own alma mater” – they actually listen to; at least insofar as they do not boycott the meeting, which he generously ignores.
This speech, which aims at invoking and renewing the American alliance, clearly contains a rejection that is somewhat lost in the public debate but certainly received by its political addressees in the world of states: When it comes to its war, Israel negotiates with the USA – and only the USA. The rest of the world must listen to what the Israeli leader Netanyahu tells them to justify Israel’s escalation strategy and take note of what its military is doing in terms of escalation.
7/30
Israel kills Fuad Shukr, military chief of Hezbollah, in the capital of Lebanon
The pretext for this “surgical attack” is the death of twelve Druze children in the Golan Heights, which – depending on one’s political leanings – can be described as either Israel’s northern territory or as Syrian territory occupied by Israel. The fact that the majority of Druze from this area still reject Israeli citizenship, and that they otherwise face discrimination and suspicion in Israel (albeit only to a certain extent) is irrelevant: as victims of the other side, they are completely absorbed into their identity with Israel. And that is ultimately what matters, because what this identity, democratically and unequivocally defined by Netanyahu and his war cabinet, demands is practical escalation on the Israeli “northern front,” which makes obsolete any question about how exactly the occasion was actually provided. That, in any case, was not the reason for what Israel now considers to be necessary anyway.
Israel already defines at least the whole of southern Lebanon as its ‘northern front’, and the fact that a large part of its own northern heartland is now almost completely subject to this strategic role – including almost 100,000 internally displaced Israelis who have lost their economic livelihood – is included in the price of the war that the Israeli military is waging under the official objective of ensuring peace for its citizens up in Galilee. The attack on – or, opinions still differ, the rocket accident in – Majdal Shams offers Israel the opportunity to demonstrate that Hezbollah has more to fear from its own military might, its ability to attack Israeli territory, than Israel itself. Its ability to disrupt civilian life in northern Israel or in other areas claimed by the Israeli state not only fails to persuade Israel to limit its violence, but, on the contrary, demonstrates to its Lebanese enemy its willingness to expose ever larger parts of its sacred heartland to the risk of escalating war. Israel explicitly and, above all, practically denies that the deaths attributed to Hezbollah have the effect of forcing it to moderate its willingness to wage war. It insists that deterrence is a one-sided affair.
So the Israeli Air Force once again lets it rip – shattering windows with its air terror of periodic supersonic low-altitude flights is part of the program anyway – and kills an important Hezbollah military official in Beirut, in the Shiite district and Hezbollah headquarters of Dahiya. In this way, Israel makes it clear once again that “protecting Jewish life” consists of the Israeli military’s ability, which Israel’s political leadership can call upon at any time, to kill any enemy leader in the immediate and distant vicinity.
With its campaign of “targeted killings,” Israel is acting and presenting itself firstly as a military power that has the freedom to decide whether to respond to hits against it with targeted hits against the commanders of its opponents or with more widespread bombardments. It has been demonstrating the connection between the two to all its addressees for some time now, using the Gaza Strip as an example. With both, Israel is denying its opponents equal status, and in this context even negates the normal difference in war between combatants – who are exposed to destruction on both sides – and commanders with whom some form of negotiation must take place. With its strike in Beirut, Israel not only firstly steals an important commander from Hezbollah – once again – but secondly also sends the message that Israel alone defines how far it will escalate the war in terms of territory, choice of weapons, and casualties. Thirdly, and especially in the case of Hezbollah and Lebanon, this means that Israel is capable and determined – entirely at its own discretion – to wage total war on Lebanon, extending all the way up to Beirut, with the prospect of sending it “back to the Stone Age” (Israeli Minister of Defense Galant); “Dahiya” sends its regards.[5]
In this way, Israel provokes Hezbollah and makes it clear that it would be better not to carry out the retaliation it has always verbosely promised. This is hostage-taking on a somewhat higher level than that practiced by anti-Israeli terrorists: Israel is taking the whole of Lebanon, right up to Beirut – and not just Dahiya – hostage or using it as a ‘human shield’ which will be destroyed if Hezbollah pursues its militant hostility beyond a border defined solely by Israel.
Consequently, Lebanon is gripped by precisely the mixture of fatalism and agitation that Israel is aiming for. Parties are held by the wealthy, while the authorities prepare for a worst-case scenario which, tellingly, mainly involves setting up “points de triage” and accepting emergency medical donations from abroad. Hezbollah is therefore being confronted from all sides with the question of how much Gaza is worth to its own pro-Gaza resistance – especially given that Israel is quite credibly threatening it with one thing: the fact that it has a completely different state base than Hamas will only make its downfall even more colossal! As is well known from Israel’s past wars against Lebanon.
And it is clear to everyone that Israel is using Hezbollah and Lebanon to push forward its confrontation with Iran, which is the Shiite party and militia’s regional ally and most important supplier. Tehran reacts with outrage to the killing of the Lebanese commander and threatens retaliation. The consequences for Israel are made clear a day later.
7/31
In the capital of Iran, the head of Hamas’s political bureau, Ismail Haniyeh, who is there to attend the inauguration of the new Iranian president, is killed by a bomb or missile
The Tehran regime is now accustomed to seeing its generals being blown up in neighboring countries; it knows that Israel also ignores the otherwise sacred inviolability of diplomatic missions among states, as it demonstrated to the whole world at the beginning of April by bombing a building on the grounds of the Iranian embassy in Damascus, which wiped out the entire military leadership of the Iranian troops on Syrian territory. The successful allied defense against the swarms of missiles and drones, which Iran then sent directly from its own territory to Israel for the first time, is obviously reason enough for Israel’s leaders to go a step further.
They apply the logic of their anti-terrorist war against Hamas to Iran, Hamas’s state protector, demonstrating to Iran that even on Iran’s own soil no spheres of immunity from Israel’s weapons are honored and that Israel has the military and intelligence capabilities to treat Iran as a terrorist state in its state capitol, whose its entire inventory is within reach of Israel’s destructive capabilities; so that it is solely up to Israel to decide when to use which of these capabilities and how. The liquidation of Hamas’s political leader, Haniyeh, in a high-security residence in the middle of Tehran, who had come to attend the inauguration of the newly elected Iranian president, presents the Iranian military with the challenge of responding to Israel’s escalation with an attack of a different quality and effectiveness than the rocket salvo of April 13, in order to prove the credibility of its destructive potential and willingness, and thus to restore a part of its deterrent power, which Israel simply does not recognize. Tel Aviv promptly issues a warning about the anticipated Iranian retaliation, putting on the agenda the ‘risk’ of the next round of escalation which Israel is already planning. The Iranian leadership must still take into account that Israel continues to rely on its alliance with Western states and neighbors such as Jordan and can only rely on them according to their assurances. Thus, the assassination of the leader of its ally Hamas provokes Iran to counterattack and at the same time teaches it that it can’t afford to.
Israel is thus forcing its Western allies, particularly the USA once again, to weigh up how much they want to go along with the Israeli escalation. Allowing Iran to launch an effective strike against Israel is out of the question for the Americans, who once again agree with the Israeli calculations by pointing to the military deterrence capabilities they already have in the region and are now reinforcing with additional units. At the same time, they feel compelled to make it clear that the best way to avert the great Iranian threat that is being conjured up by Israel is by finally bringing the ceasefire and hostage negotiations to a productive conclusion. They ignore the fact that Israel has just liquidated the Palestinian negotiator, Haniyeh, with diplomatic and constructive intent, painting a picture of foreseeable success for peace diplomacy and thereby deliberately forcing Israel to ask itself whether it really wants to commit to its obstructionist strategy against its most important ally. The visits of the US Secretary of Defense and the head of CENTCOM to Israel thus send a double message: that Iran should not count on a rift between its two main enemies, but that Israel still has the deterrent solidarity of the world power, and that Israel must realize that, in taking its escalation steps, it needs the USA’s solidarity.
The next opportunity to continue the dispute between the two allies over the conditions of America’s unconditional solidarity with Israel’s Gaza war and the question of how this war should be linked to or separated from their shared mortal enmity against Iran comes shortly afterward in the personnel policy of Hamas.
8/8
Israel confirms that Haniyeh’s successor, Yahya Sinwar, is number one on its kill list
As far as Hamas is concerned, as the party affected and addressed, the killing of Haniyeh is the logical continuation of the Israeli program of definitively burying the Palestinians’ state-founding nationalism, which is defined as a mortal danger to Israel and all Jews, by eliminating all its supporters; at the same time, it is a constructive contribution to making sure that nothing comes of the peace diplomacy that America is demanding – by making a new reality of what Israel has always held: ‘We would like to, but we simply cannot find a partner for peace on the Palestinian side.’
The USA is ignoring the Israeli position, which is being exercised with bombs and rockets in Tehran, and is treating the death of the Hamas leader almost as an opportunity for a new beginning, that is, for negotiations that can now finally be brought to a successful conclusion. In any case, it is simply sticking to the idea that Israel must now come to terms with Haniyeh’s successor, Sinwar, the local military leader, and negotiate with him. Sinwar, in any case, has been tasked by the USA with diplomatically pursuing Hamas’s formal surrender – “US Secretary of State Antony Blinken has said it is up to Sinwar to help achieve a ceasefire, saying, ‘he has been and remains the primary decider’” (AFP, 8.7.24) – which, according to America’s will, Israel must also accept.
For Israel’s part, its leadership responds in the customary manner between these two allied powers, by diplomatically expressing its growing dissent by officially ignoring the political will of its counterpart:
“Army chief Herzi Halevi vowed to ‘find him [Sinwar], attack him’ and force Hamas to find someone to replace him.” (Ibid.)
For the time being, Israel remains determined not to be dissuaded from its anti-terrorist personnel policy, for which and with which it is escalating its regional war, even by America, with which it is linked in an asymmetrical mutual dependence.
[1] The article “‘Al-Aqsa Flood’ and the Gaza War: Hamas Against Israel” in GegenStandpunkt 4-23 deals extensively with Hamas’s political calculations. [not translated]
[2] It continues to maintain this position even at the beginning of August, when its war aims have long since shifted away from bringing about any end to the war that it itself will survive: On August 14, Hamas itself spreads the news that a hostage has been killed by the guard responsible for him, announces an “internal investigation” in the style of a proper army, and then publishes the result: that in this case, contrary to all regulations and morality, an armed official took revenge because members of his family had recently fallen victim to an Israeli attack. Even so, Hamas maintains its claim to be a party to the war acting on an equal footing, namely in accordance with the relevant rules.
[3] It remains a contradiction, of course, to be forced by terrorists to weigh up these two goods, especially since they are essentially identical in political terms. Israel has found ways – not only in this war – to deal with this contradiction, to minimize it and, where possible, to eliminate it: With regard to the price in the form of released Palestinians, Israel practically indemnifies itself by permanently replacing them with new prisoners – since October 2023, the number of Palestinians in Israeli prisons has roughly doubled – and in some cases recapturing or deliberately killing those who have been released if they are important enough.
If Hamas demands further concessions – a ceasefire or permanent truce plus troop withdrawal – Israel responds with stalling tactics, wrangling over the modalities of a step-by-step implementation, and so on. By not simply breaking off negotiations completely and definitively, Israel is keeping Hamas on board and thus ensuring that it sticks to its optimistically pragmatic position that it has a bargaining chip in the form of the hostages, which it would be better not to relinquish because, as Israel’s conduct of the war has shown, while it does not provide any real reassurance against the ultimate ruthlessness of elimination, it is the only potential one.
This gives Israel the operational freedom to deal with blackmail in a different way, which it cannot tolerate. With its superior technical and human resources, it attempts and succeeds time and again in freeing hostages by force. In June, such an action also serves to show Hamas and its Palestinians who ultimately holds whom hostage: In the course of the liberation of four Israelis, over 200 Palestinians are killed, which, without further diplomatic comment on the ratio of those rescued on one side to those killed on the other, makes it abundantly clear how costly it is to challenge Israel’s claim to invulnerability. This is in line with the statement by Israeli Minister Smotrich, who openly advocates and considers it morally acceptable to starve 2 million Palestinians by blocking all food supplies, if necessary until Hamas returns the remaining 120 hostages. This may shock some foreign observers, but ultimately it merely serves to illustrate and justify the military logic of total ruthlessness towards the Gaza population by downgrading the value of their lives as human beings.
[4] In the course of this, Israel is enriching the category of “human shield” – notoriously used to accuse Hamas – with a few practical variants that correspond quite closely to the literal meaning of the term: From the West Bank, where the IDF is confronted with a resurgence of urban insurgency, videos are being circulated showing injured Palestinians being placed on the hoods of armored vehicles driving through insurgent neighborhoods – in order to prevent attacks. Reports from the Gaza Strip indicate that the Israeli army is sending Palestinians into ruins and tunnels to trigger any booby traps or prevent ambushes. The verdict of a “morass of terrorism” against an entire population can thus be made true and even useful for one’s own warfare.
[5] In the summer of 2006, Israel had already razed this Hamas stronghold in Beirut to the ground, whereupon the then army chief Eizenkot announced in October of that year that the same fate awaited any enemy who, like Hezbollah, dared to take on Israel. However, with regard to this so-called “Dahiya Doctrine,” it now seems obvious to both participating and observing strategists that this logic of programmatic ‘disproportionality’ and non-distinction between military and civilian targets should rather be named after the Gaza Strip, which has just fallen completely victim to this ‘doctrine.’