Israelis Can Afford to Give Up on the Iranian Front. We Still Have All the Others
Mr. America's threat to destroy another civilization has been averted for now; let's hope that this will last for more than a fortnight. But Israel is cleverer than U.S. President Donald Trump; it has been conducting annihilation and destruction in Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon and Syria without the world rearing up to stop it.
Means that resound with reason – intelligible words, syntax that puts ideas in order and sentences that come together to form meaningful paragraphs – have been employed to describe and analyze Tuesday's off-the-cuff remark by the U.S. president, and to urgently discuss ways to avert it.
True: That remark, too, was composed of words and syntax that are understandable to everybody. But it was not its linguistic competency that indicated the lack of wisdom, to put it mildly, in that threat. It was the global shock waves in its wake.
Iran and the U.S. will now compete over the narrative. Since Iran is the junior player, in term of its military capabilities, and since Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu have failed to achieve their stated goals – we are realizing that, in terms of "letting the young men play before us" (to paraphrase the verse), the Islamic Republic is the one emerging victorious.
Trump will have his advocates, who will glorify the genius of his genocidal threat. They will be right about one thing: This cup of madness was too full, even for this mad war for which Israel was pushing so hard. The publicly incriminating words, stating Trump's intention to commit genocide, have caused enough international and American players (including the Republican Party) to jump out of the boiling water.
The arrogant, sickening remarks by the naked emperor from the White House are informative not only about himself, but also about the world-endangering nature of any decision to carry out relations between nations and peoples by weapons.
The childlike quarreling mentality of "he started it" does not change the fact: Everybody is paying, and will go on paying, a price. We tend to forget about casualties on the other side, and a few, and much too powerful, people profit from the financial blows, so that the terrible economic impression of the war fades away on stock exchange monitors.
But the immense "contribution" of war to global environmental pollution has a longer memory. We will all pay for it, mainly through our children and our grandchildren and their grandchildren.
Meanwhile, us Israelis are succeeding where America has failed: We are continuing to wage the war. Therefore, it isn't so bad if we give up on the Iranian front. All other fronts are still here.
Israel, which, according to foreign sources, possesses nuclear weapons, has been and is still allowing its senior officials to make such threatening off-the-cuff remarks of the type made by Trump. Among those remarks, we are continuing to attack and normalize our onslaughts: against Palestinians in Gaza, the West Bank and inside the Green Line, and against everybody in Lebanon.
Civilizations are civilizations – even when they are small, not ancient, and have already been crushed several times before. Each attack comes with its own excuses, weapons, soldiers and muttered biblical verses. The point is that, together, they all earn wide support in Israel.
It is our misfortune that the rational language we have been using has failed, and is still failing, to challenge the Israeli infatuation with war.
Words of reason fail to penetrate the madness we have constructed, consumed and passed on to the next generation for 80 years: a state the size of a needle's point between the Mediterranean and East Iran, with seven and a half million Jews vs. hundreds of millions of Muslims, convinced that it will forever be able to use force of arms to make that region accept its hostile, displacing, expelling, and annihilating presence.