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Some thoughts on today’s perilous situation in West Asia and the world
Back in October of last year, I was already writing that Israel, in its reactions to Hamas’s breakout of October 7, was acting in a distinctly unhinged manner. I suppose you could perhaps understand that, given that within just 2–3 hours on that Saturday morning, the Hamas fighters and their allies destroyed the Israeli military’s entire “Southern Command” along with the aura of deterrent invincibility that Israel has counted on since its founding- through acts of extreme violence and ethnic cleansing- back in 1947–48.
It is now clear, however, that (like, I believe many other people) I seriously underestimated the sheer depth of the derangement to which large numbers of Jewish Israelis succumbed on that day, and in which they have been mired ever since. I have only watched a portion of Al-Jazeera’s excellent 80-minute investigation into the extent of the Israeli war crimes in Gaza. But much of what their team pulled together so cogently there has already been widely known. Not just the deliberate blocking of food and other vital necessities to the beleaguered population 2.3 million Gazans, but also the use of massive (and US-supplied) 1,000-lb and 2,000-lb bombs against urban areas, the deliberate destruction of broad swathes of urban infrastructure, the widespread forcing of Palestinian civilians to act as human shields, the attacks on hospitals, the systematized use of torture in prisons and detention facilities- and also the gleeful self-glorification with which so many Israeli soldiers have share their images of these acts quite freely and proudly on global social media.
At least the Nazis seemed a bit embarrassed by what they were doing inside their concentration and extermination camps. They built high walls around them and worked hard to keep their actions well away from public view. Not so, the very large numbers of Israeli soldiers who seem happy to share the records of their inhumanity very widely… and then seem to suffer no reprimands or disciplining from their superiors. Those superiors, indeed, at many levels of the Israeli military and at some of the highest levels of the government, seem pretty happy to have those acts of brutality widely displayed. I think it is supposed to have a deterrent effect on Israel’s potential rivals or foes. But this blatant brutality…
