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…
