Despite its strategic situation being worse than ever, Israeli society's narrative, the story it tells itself and its self-image, have changed deeply since the pagers attack, and still more so after the assassination of Hassan Nasrallah. It has completely ceased to listen to the West. The West is no longer its reference group. For the West, Israel is not the vanguard leading civilization in its war against the barbarians, but a pain in the ass.
That is why the West divests itself from Israel. Stops flying here. Stops investing money here. A state that finds the UN General Assembly emptied when its leader rises to speak is a pariah state, one that cannot be considered a regional or global leader. It is a pariah banana republic.
A leading Western credit rating firm, Moody's, points to a collapse of the Israeli economy, in part due to the judicial coup. But Israel cares nothing for its economic rating by the West. Neither is it interested in Western efforts to bring about a cease-fire.
Israel is closing its shutters, listening only to its own TV news broadcasts. And these tell it that it is winning. That there is cause for celebration. That the next phase of the celebration is a ground offensive in southern Lebanon, despite the ire of the West, headed by the U.S. Israel does not want diplomacy. The hostages and residents of the north can wait, too. Because Israel wants more war, and in this it stands united behind Benjamin Netanyahu.
The real upheaval in the wake of Nasrallah's assassination was not in Israel's standing in the world or in the region, but in the standing of Netanyahu within Israel. Netanyahu will manage to take the credit. He is good at that. Much better than Chief of Staff Herzl Halevi, Defense Minister Yoav Gallant or Mossad Director David Barnea.
He will take the credit for killing Nasrallah without accepting responsibility for the October 7 massacre. His only political opposition is in the West, outside of Israel, with Joe Biden, Emmanuel Macron and Keir Starmer, and Israelis do not care about it. He convinces them that the entire world is against them, like during the Holocaust, and he is their only salvation.
The cessation of flights to Ben-Gurion International Airport is symbolic of the country's severance from the world. Everybody is an antisemite: rating firms, airlines, you can't trust them. But Israelis' trust has definitely been restored in their deus ex machina, the Israel Air Force. It is omnipotent and omniscient again (thanks, too, to the intelligence community that is also being celebrated again as omniscient, like some divine being that can see into the enemy's vital organs).
It can go anywhere. There is nothing it cannot do. The air force always makes Israelis feel big. And so conditions have ripened in Israel for an attack on Iran. All roads lead there. The world, as we have said, can take a flying leap, as indeed Netanyahu made clear in his UN speech, for which he was applauded by a balcony filled with Bibi-ists. It's another aspect of the closing down of Israeli consciousness inside a reality that leaves out the global standpoint, which is silenced and mocked.
And now the air force, the representative of the elite that rebelled against Netanyahu over the judicial coup, is joining forces with Netanyahu himself behind a policy that will preserve both their hegemonies – first and foremost, within Israel.
Netanyahu and the 69th Squadron, the symbol of draft resistance for protesters, are uniting around a new common denominator. A shared fate, a shared future. The dictator and his long imperial arm. They have reached détente. Neither the dismantling of the squadron nor the removal of the dictator is required.
Netanyahu and the pilots are now brothers in arms. The killing of Nasrallah is a Pyrrhic assassination that strengthens Israel's forces of internal destruction. It would have been better to have Nasrallah in his bunker than Netanyahu in office for many years to come.