Just quickly, here are some of my thoughts on the implosion of key Israeli institutions, and to some extent of Jewish-Israeli society itself, that has recently been unfolding at near-warp speed:
- On Monday we had the showdown at two military bases in Israel between Israel’s military police and rightwing protesters incensed that the MPs had detained some of the grunts who’d been guarding Israeli prisoners there, on grounds that the guards had committed gross acts of cruelty against the detainees, including rape. (The “right to rape” protesters, some of whom are shown above, were joined and egged on by their backers from within both the Netanyahu government and the serving military.)
- On the night of Tuesday/Wednesday, we had the Israeli military/spy services undertaking two highly provocative assassinations– of Hizbullah military chief Fuad Shukr in Beirut and of Hamas’s over-all political leader, Ismail Haniyeh, in Tehran.
- On Wednesday, we had the office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk publicly releasing the crucial report on the abuses Israel has been committing against the thousands of Palestinians it has detained– from Gaza, the West Bank, and from inside Israel– since October 7. (One can surmise that it had been an earlier briefing on those findings to the Israeli military chiefs that had led to them trying to rein in some of the worst abuses, through the actions they tried to undertake on Monday.)
- On Thursday and Friday, the U.S. Department of Defense announced that, in response to the tensions in West Asia that Israel’s assassinations had sparked, it would be sending large new naval and other forces to the region and the bodies of water abutting it…
Israel’s ever-wily PM Benjamin Netanyahu has been working overtime to try to direct attention away from the schisms that are visibly opening up between, for example, his country’s military leadership and its police, or between those same military leaders and himself as PM. This “Wag the Dog” motivation for him– working in close coordination, of course, with the military leadership that he still so deeply distrusts– to authorize the launching on Tuesday night of the two highly escalatory attacks against Arab leaders in distant capitals, is certainly one explanation for why he/they launched them. (Though perhaps not a complete explanation.)
By killing Hamas’s political leader Ismail Haniyeh in distant Tehran, Netanyahu not only brought the whole of West Asia perilously close to a major war with major global repercussions. (That may yet happen.) But Netanyahu also appeared to be torpedoing any hopes that the long-sought ceasefire/hostages agreement for Gaza might successfully be concluded any time soon.
Yesterday, the astute Haaretz writer Amos Harel wrote:
[I]t’s evident that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has his own agenda, and bringing the hostages home is not at the top of it. The prime minister is interested in continuing to pursue the war in Gaza without any change in the allocation of forces operating there against Hamas…
Last week in Washington, he hinted to the hostage families that there had been progress in talks on a deal for their loved ones’ release. At the same time, without blinking, he hardened his demands in the negotiations in a way that would ensure they became deadlocked. The army gets the same treatment: Senior officers feel more and more like errand boys whose opinion is of no importance to him.
(One might add that Netanyahu also treats the President of the United States in a similar way– as “an errand boy whose opinion is of no importance to him.”…)
But it seems to me that the degree of societal/institutional rot (or derangement) now evident within Israeli society runs considerably deeper than anything this little settler-colonial construction has ever witnessed before. Members of the government on whose goodwill and vote the Prime Minister relies have been joining and inciting the mobs rioting against the military police as they clamor for the “right to rape”?? Many of those same ministers, including Ben-Gvir and Smotrich, had earlier joined and incited the– apparently somewhat smaller –mobs that intervened to block the aid trucks into Gaza. (In support of the “right to starve others”, I guess.)
This is not a normal society; and today, it has a deeply abnormal, deeply dysfunctional leadership. Over recent months I have periodically argued, e.g. here, that I didn’t think PM Netanyahu and his government really wanted to take acts– against Hizbullah or others– that might ignite a region-wide war… but that they were happy to keep West Asia (and especially the U.S. government, which has military bases scattered throughout the whole region) sufficiently off-balance that Netanyahu, in a classic mob-style protection-racket move, could step in and say “Hey Americans! Nice little position you have there in that region! Wouldn’t want anything bad to happen to that, would you? So about that continued flow of U.S. arms to our military for our little war there in Gaza…”
But after the events of this past week and what they have revealed about the depth of the crisis in the heart of Israeli society, I think my bottom line is shifting. I think Netanyahu, ever seeking to placate the Ben-Gvirs and the Smotriches on whom he relies in order to hang onto his premiership, may now be willing to risk just about everything in the region.
So God help all of West Asia’s peoples and the USA-ians who are all– at the governmental level– now so deeply implicated in, and vulnerable to, whatever happens there.
A couple of quick footnotes here:
- Tuesday night’s killing by Israel of key leaders in both Hamas and Hizbullah was an outrage. But it will not cause any serious dent in the continued operations of either movement. Numerous earlier “decapitation” strikes over recent decades against both movements have never had that effect. Instead, they have served merely to build the growth, resilience, and hardiness of the movements.
- In the discussions that Rami Khouri and I had with key experts on Hams in the “Understanding Hamas And Why That Matters” webinar series that our org, Just World Educational presented back in May, several of them made the point (that I have also made for many months now) that the operational “success” of the Hamas-led breakout from Gaza on October 7 came as a surprise even to most of those who had planned it. Today, I would also say that the strategic fallout from that success has been much, much greater than most of us earlier thought, in terms of the role it has played over the months since October in spurring the serious, ongoing implosion of Israel’s society and institutions.
Altogether, this has been quite a week in the history of world affairs. Who knows what further developments we might see in the days and weeks ahead?