Police in the Turkish city of Adana detained 11 suspects, five Israeli and two Syrian, on allegations of organ trafficking, the Daily Sabahreported on 5 May.
The Provincial Directorate of Security’s Anti-Smuggling and Border Gates Branch began investigating after examining the passports of seven individuals who arrived in Adana from Israel about a month ago by plane for the purpose of health tourism. The two Syrian nationals, ages 20 and 21, were found to have fake passports.
Further investigation revealed that Syrian nationals had each agreed to sell one of their own kidneys to two of the Israeli nationals, ages 68 and 28, for kidney transplants in Adana.
During searches at the suspects’ residences, $65,000 and numerous fake passports were seized.
Israel has long been at the center of what Bloombergdescribed in 2011 as a “sprawling global black market in organs where brokers use deception, violence, and coercion to buy kidneys from impoverished people, mainly in underdeveloped countries, and then sell them to critically ill patients in more-affluent nations.”
The financial newspaper added, “Many of the black-market kidneys harvested by these gangs are destined for people who live in Israel.”
The organ-trafficking network extends from former Soviet Republics such as Azerbaijan, Belarus, Ukraine, and Moldova to Brazil, the Philippines, South Africa, and beyond, the Bloomberg investigation showed.
Accusations of Israeli involvement in organ trafficking also apply to the occupied Palestinian territories.
In 2009, Sweden’s largest daily newspaper, Aftonbladet, reported testimony that the Israeli army was kidnapping and murdering Palestinians to harvest their organs.
The report quotes Palestinian claims that young men from the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip had been seized by the Israeli army, and their bodies returned to the families with missing organs.
“‘Our sons are used as involuntary organ donors,’ relatives of Khaled from Nablus said to me, as did the mother of Raed from Jenin as well as the uncles of Machmod and Nafes from Gaza, who all had disappeared for a few days and returned by night, dead and autopsied,” wrote Donald Bostrom, the author of the report.
Bostrom also cites an incident of alleged organ theft during the first Palestinian intifada in 1992. He says that the Israeli army abducted a young man known for throwing stones at Israeli troops in the Nablus area. The young man was shot in the chest, both legs, and the stomach before being taken to a military helicopter, which transported him to an unknown location.
Five nights later, Bostrom said, the young man’s body was returned, wrapped in green hospital sheets.
Israel’s Channel 2 TV reported that in the 1990s, specialists at Abu Kabir Forensic Medicine Institute harvested skin, corneas, heart valves, and bones from the bodies of Israeli soldiers, Israeli citizens, Palestinians, and foreign workers without permission from relatives.
The Israeli military confirmed that the practice took place but claimed, “This activity ended a decade ago and does not happen any longer.”
Israel’s assault on Gaza since 7 October has provided further opportunities for the theft and harvesting of Palestinians’ organs.
On 30 January, WAFA news agency reported that the Israeli army returned the bodies of 100 Palestinian civilians it had stolen from hospitals and cemeteries in various areas in Gaza.
According to medical sources, inspection of some of the bodies showed that organs were missing from some of them.
On 18 January, the Times of Israel reported that the Israeli army confirmed reports that its soldiers dug up graves in a Gaza cemetery, claiming its soldiers were trying to “confirm that the bodies of hostages were not buried there.”
It’s exactly what it sounds like: an entire news report about the feelings that some Israelis are feeling in their feely bits about protests in another country on the other side of the world. The Guardian’s Jason Burke asked some random people about their feelings outside a theater in Jerusalem, and then presented this weird nothing thing as relevant news reporting.
“We didn’t know so many people hated Israel,” some random security guard is quoted as saying.
“Such feelings appear widespread among the Jewish majority in Israel, seven months after war was triggered by surprise attacks launched by Hamas into the south of the country in which about 1,200 people, mostly civilians, were killed and 250 taken hostage,” writes Burke.
“Jewish Israelis interviewed by the Guardian this week blame outrage overseas on misinformation, ignorance, historical hostility from international institutions such as the UN, global ‘double standards’ and entrenched antisemitism,” Burke informs us.
If you’re just tuning in, it might seem odd to you that a major news outlet would publish a story about the emotions that some Israelis are feeling about foreign protests against an active genocide being committed by their country. After all, this is not a news story. A story about how some people’s feelings are feeling is not news, and is not journalism.
But that’s exactly what the last seven months have looked like in the imperial media: a nonstop fixation on feelings instead of facts. Israelis have upset feelings about anti-genocide protests. Western Jews have upset feelings at campus demonstrators. Biden has upset feelings at Netanyahu. Last October the imperial media suddenly got a lot less interested in reporting on the facts on the ground with Israel and Gaza, and a whole lot more interested in reporting on how some groups of people feel about it instead.
Western reporters, pundits, politicians and officials cannot stop talking about this. The feelings of Israelis and western Jews are not only given more importance than the feelings of Palestinians or any other group, they are given more importance than Palestinian lives. Some Zionist kid pretending to feel “threatened” on an Ivy League campus will get more coverage than the daily massacres that have been occurring in the densely-packed city of Rafah.
Watch Matt Orfalea’s latest video about the deluge of coddling, cooing media coverage that was given to a Zionist activist who falsely pretended to have been “stabbed in the eye” by a pro-Palestine activist for a good example of this behavior:
Israel is the only issue where the western political-media class treats people’s feelings as a matter of supreme importance.
If you’re a stressed-out single parent struggling to pay bills and keep a roof over your kids’ head, they don’t care about your feelings.
If you’re an American who’s been cast into destitution and homelessness by medical bills, they don’t care about your feelings.
If you’re a Palestinian whose apartment complex was bombed with your entire family inside, they definitely don’t care about your feelings.
But if you’re a western Zionist who doesn’t like the cognitive dissonance that comes with encountering anti-genocide protesters, or even if you’re an Israeli who’s upset about anti-genocide protests in whole other country on the other side of the planet, they’re very, very interested in your feelings.
This is of course because the west’s unconditional support for Israel cannot be defended through facts, so the narrative control needs to focus instead on one nonstop appeal to emotion fallacy. Their position is so gross and indefensible that all they have left is babbling about some select people having upset feelings and holding those feelings as more important than stopping an active genocide.
The propagandists and empire managers don’t have facts on their side and don’t have morality on their side, so they attempt to manipulate by pulling on the heart strings using sympathy and compassion. They appeal to some of the healthiest impulses within us in order to dupe us into supporting some of the most evil actions the world has ever seen.
Which is an absolutely disgusting thing to do, naturally. But, again, it’s all these freaks have left.
Anti-genocide groups are being targeted by media and government
• 2,600 WORDS •
Well friends, the verdict is in! If you are opposed to Israel’s slaughter of something like forty thousand Palestinians, mostly women and children, or the clearly enunciated plans by that nation’s government to ethnically cleanse the rest of historic Palestine, making the developing Eretz or Greater Israel a legally Jewish state, and are prepared to protest or speak up about it, then you are an antisemite Jew-hater and probably even a holocaust denier. If you are a student demonstrating against the slaughter you are increasingly being referred to by talking heads and the media as a pro-Hamas terrorist. That you must be condemned and sanctioned or even criminalized as a consequence of the labels is only fair in a country that apparently has come to believe that Jews and Israel, uniquely, cannot be criticized due to their cited ad nauseam victimhood and their anointment by God no matter what the First Amendment to the US Constitution relating to freedom of speech might say. After all, it’s just an old piece of paper though it might strike some as a bit odd that a group of people carrying out a genocide are being given a pass while those trying to stop it are being beaten, going to jail and, in some cases, being denied that degree they earned from four years at college.
That antisemites and even evil foreign governments like China are behind the recent student demonstrations over the atrocities in Gaza is gradually becoming part of the new Gospel, ritually endorsed by the cowering university administrators themselves as well as by a large majority in Congress, the White House and the mainstream media. Pro-Palestinian groups are being routinely shut down and their supporters clubbed, gassed and arrested while Jewish groups supporting Israel’s “right to defend itself” are being allowed to express their rage violently, as occurred at the University of California in Los Angeles on last Tuesday night with police standing by to let the pro-Israel attackers (who were mostly non-students) have access to beat on the pro-Palestinian campers. It was an alignment of hearts and minds that apparently serves both justice and God, who has declared Jews to be his “chosen.” The University of Southern California’s administration has labeled pro-Palestinian groups as “homegrown violent extremists” as an excuse to shut down graduation ceremonies later this month. Governors in Texas and Florida have declared war on those despicable antisemites, insisting that there will be no Jew haters in their states and expressing a willingness to use police and national guard to make sure that that is the case. Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida has vowed that any student who speaks up or demonstrates against Israel will be expelled from college. National Guard troops have also been called in to clear campuses in a number of other states, with more than a thousand demonstrators being arrested and removed on Tuesday alone.
Some jest how it is Israel that controls much of US foreign policy “wag the dog,” not to mention interfering in elections and dictating what must be taught about world i.e. Jewish history in public schools together with mandatory trips to taxpayer funded holocaust museums that are sprouting up like mushrooms throughout the land. The United States is pledging itself to become antisemitism free as quickly as possible, which is surely the right thing to do given all those holocaust survivors who are living down in Miami and apparently starving to death according to all those ads one sees on TV and hears over the radio featuring dispensationalist hucksters like Mike Huckabee, who should move to Israel immediately since he loves the place so much, taking those of a like mind in Congress with him when he goes.
America under Joe Biden and also undoubtedly under Donald Trump if re-elected is pledged to take the lead in protecting Jews worldwide and will sanction anyone who violates that trust. Who else, for example, is so uber sensitive to Jewish issues as to have a Special Envoy for Holocaust Issues and an Office of the Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Anti-Semitism entrenched with ambassador status and full staffs and budgets in their Foreign Ministry? Not even the cringing Krauts who routinely let Israel lie to them and intimidate them while still sending millions to the apparently endless series of so-called holocaust survivors in Israel as they also are shipping arms to Tel Aviv to assist in killing more Pals. That’s what true friends and allies are for! Britain has Conservative Friends of Israel and Labour Friends of Israel which together constitute a majority in Parliament. Both UK party leaders do their best to make love to Israel on a regular basis. And France, Canada and Australia? There is no space between them and Netanyahu. They are as “ironclad” on Israel as Joe Biden constantly professes himself to be!
Greater love hath no man nor no woman to compare to the love of American politicians for Israel! Look what Papa Joe Biden has done for Israel over the past four years out of appreciation for the more than $4 million in donations that he has received from the Israel Lobby in political donations in his career. The $26 billion in the pipeline for Netanyahu is certainly an appropriate reward for the great man who single handedly has prevented Iran from getting a nuclear arsenal, something he has been warning about for the past twenty-five years! Biden’s first rule in politics, which he has been observing for forty years, is always do what Israel wants no matter what the cost because the Jewish state and the Jewish US domestic lobby together with its media wing are crucial to getting nominated and elected!
Only American politicians have the gall to call in heads of major universities and berate or even call for their firing if they are not doing enough about antisemitism! During an April 17th House hearing on antisemitism US Congressman Rick Allen asked Columbia University President Minouche Shafik if she was concerned that God might “curse” the university. Allen had first quoted a passage from the Bible that says God will curse those who curse Israel and added that he personally views Jerusalem as the “center of the universe”. He also suggested the university should create a course teaching students about the Bible so they can learn about “the wrath of God” and how “indoctrinating” professors fail to tall students that don’t know how they “will be cursed by God”.
If Israel is truly America’s greatest friend in the world and best ally there should be some positive evidence of that in the interaction of the two countries. So let’s take a look in terms of reciprocity relating to what has been happening over the past couple of weeks! First of all, at the macro level, i.e. continuing the fighting, Biden has warned the Israelis that if they invade Rafah they will not be supported. Netanyahu has responded, “We will enter Rafah and obliterate all the Hamas battalions there — with or without a deal, to achieve total victory” lest there be any confusion about what he intends to do no matter whether a temporary ceasefire with a hostage exchange is arranged or not. Biden and his amazing talking horse Anthony Blinken did not respond apart from pushing even harder for a ceasefire on Israel’s terms, which would be bad for the Gazans in any event given the key word “temporary” in front of “ceasefire.” Israel will be free to resume killing even though more fighting will be bad for Biden’s electoral prospects in November and he knows it. So does Netanyahu.
Blinken has called for an impartial international investigation of the two mass graves recently discovered at the bombed hospital sites in Gaza, containing four hundred or more bodies, many of which were tortured and/or executed with their hands tied behind their backs or dragged out of hospital beds to be buried still alive in deep pits. Some bodies showed signs of hasty surgery indicating that their organs, a valuable commodity, were removed, a regular signature piece appearing on victims of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), the Most Moral Army in the World according to that strange looking Franco-Jewish so-called intellectual Bernard-Henri Levy. The Netanyahu and the IDF replied that Israel would do its own investigation saying “What is there to investigate?” Blinken did not object.
The International Criminal Court (ICC) is preparing to issue arrest warrants for Netanyahu and two other senior Israeli officials in connection with war crimes. Netanyahu is reportedly reaching wildly out to his many “friends” to prevent such a development. He tweeted that Israel “will never accept any attempt by the ICC to undermine its inherent right of self-defense. The threat to seize the soldiers and officials of the Middle East’s only democracy and the world’s only Jewish state is outrageous. We will not bow to it.” ICC deliberations are secret so it appears that an American or British jurist has leaked the story to enable Netanyahu to mount a campaign against it. The White House and Congress are already moving full speed ahead to make the warrants go away up to and including threats to directly take on and discredit the court if the Israelis are actually punished. Zionist Speaker Mike Johnson has pressured the White House and State Department to “use every available tool to prevent such an abomination.” The US has never before threatened the ICC and has nothing to gain and much to lose in so doing. Rule of Law anyone? There are reports that prosecutors from the ICC have interviewed medical staff at two of Gaza’s largest hospitals in their investigation of other possible war crimes committed by Israel in connection with the mass graves.
To be sure some pushback from inside the US government as well as from voters is developing. Fully 92% of Israelis fully support the slaughter of the Palestinians by Netanyahu and his psychopaths but 72% of Americans do not approve of what is taking place in Gaza, for which Biden will likely pay a heavy electoral price. A group of American lawyers, at least 20 of whom work in the Biden administration, are also calling on the US government to stop selling arms to Israel and are, of course, being ignored. There have also been other lawsuits as well as resignations of senior government officials who have been shocked by the US support of the genocide being conducted against the Palestinians.
Congress has just passed by an overwhelming vote pf 320 to 91 the Antisemitism Awareness Act, which will, inter alia, place antisemitism monitors in American colleges and universities. Criticism of Israel, defined ipso facto as antisemitism, will be part of their brief. It is being pushed by groups like the infamous Anti-Defamation League (ADL) whose leader Jonathan Greenblatt has called pro-Palestinian demonstrations “Jew haters” and has demanded criminal charges. Several congressmen have likewise called for all Palestinians to be killed, but there seems to be no demand for an Anti-Palestinian Act to protect the Pals. Benjamin Netanyahu has also called out the demonstrators saying “What’s happening on America’s college campuses is horrific. Antisemitic mobs have taken over leading universities. They call for the annihilation of Israel. They attack Jewish students, they attack Jewish faculty. This is reminiscent of what happened in German universities in the 1930s. The response of several university presidents was shameful.” By shameful Netanyahu means that the presidents did not crawl enough and beg forgiveness from himself, Israel, and all diaspora Jews as well as from a Zionist Congress and White House.
Joe Biden intends to sign the anti-antisemitism legislation in spite of its direct assault on the First and Fourth Amendments to the US Constitution. The new legislation will join the recently approved FISA renewal that will allow the US government to spy on citizens without a warrant. It should surprise no one to learn that the FISA bill was particularly pushed by Greenblatt and ADL to “protect Jews” by making it easier to spy on suspected antisemites. The US government ban on TikTok was also promoted by ADL due to the fact that the site includes too much information critical of Israeli behavior. Clearly, the US Congress does what Greenblatt wants.
Finally, a US pledge to determine responsibility and sanction perpetrators for the killing of American citizens in Israel, as well as the harassment and killing of Palestinian civilians on the West Bank, has not gone anywhere. The State Department investigation found that five IDF units had committed “individual incidents of gross violations of human rights” prior to October 7th, including the beating to death of an 80 year old Palestinian-American and the sniper execution of Palestinian-American journalist Shireen Abu-Akleh. The investigation determined that there was one particularly nasty extremist-fundamentalist Netzah Yehuda battalion which had killed the octogenarian and others whose capital offense consisted of walking in their town on the West Bank. They could have joined the roughly 10,000 Palestinian prisoners held in “preventive” detention without any charges by the Israeli government, but instead they were picked up on the street, were not charged with anything, and were then beaten and killed. The killing should surprise no one. On Monday Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich called for the death of Gaza saying “There are no half measures. Rafah, Deir al-Balah, Nuseirat – total annihilation. ‘You will blot out the remembrance of Amalek from under heaven’ – there’s no place under heaven.” The reference to “Amalek” was from a line in the Hebrew Bible where Amalek was a nation that the Israelites were commanded to destroy, God telling them to “slay both man and woman, infant and suckling.” Israel’s National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir came up with a similar genius solution to the country’s overcrowded prison problem – many of the Palestinians should be released and then killed to make more room.
Blinken, who has not commented on either the Smotrich or Ben-Gvir suggestions, has been sitting on the IDF report but was confronted with a challenge by House Speaker Mike Johnson who threatened to take steps to block any White House action directed against our best friend in the whole world Israel. As a result, the State Department will now neither restrict military aid nor in any way sanction the punishment of any of the units in question, even though it is actually illegal under US law to provide arms to governments committing human rights violations and war crimes. The US backdown also came after Netanyahu stated that the US would not be allowed to in any way punish or interfere with IDF units. Blinken then rolled over completely when confronted by the power of the Jewish state with a State Department spokesperson saying the units “have effectively remediated these violations,” whatever that is supposed to mean.
So killing Americans does not even merit a slap on the wrist if Israel is involved… That is where we Americans now find ourselves: fundamental rights are disappearing and our government and society are victims of Israel and its army of paid-up friends here in the US. Will Americans wake up in time to stop the rot? Not likely, as the mainstream party choices Biden and Trump will do whatever the Jewish state demands. That is our dilemma.
Many Europeans would opt for making Europe competitive again; making Europe a diplomatic actor, rather than as a military one.
Theodore Postol, Professor of Science, Technology and National Security Policy at MIT, has provided a forensic analysis of the videos and evidence emerging from Iran’s 13th April swarm drone and missile ‘demonstration’ attack into Israel: A ‘message’, rather than an ‘assault’.
The leading Israeli daily, Yediot Ahoronot, has estimated the cost of attempting to down this Iranian flotilla at between $2-3 billion dollars. The implications of this single number are substantial.
Professor Postol writes:
“This indicates that the cost of defending against waves of attacks of this type is very likely to be unsustainable against an adequately armed and determined adversary”.
“The videos show an extremely important fact: All of the targets, whether drones or not, are shot down by air-to-air missiles”, [fired from mostly U.S. aircraft. Some 154 aircraft reportedly were aloft at the time] likely firing AIM-9x Sidewinder air to air missiles. The cost of a single Sidewinder air-to-air missile is about $500,000”.
Furthermore:
“The fact that a very large number of unengaged ballistic missiles could be seen glowing as they reenter the atmosphere to lower altitudes [an indication of hyper-speed], indicates that whatever the effects of [Israel’s] David’s Sling and the Arrow missile defenses, they were not especially effective. Thus, the evidence at this point shows that essentially all or most of the arriving long-range ballistic missiles were not intercepted by any of the Israeli air and missile-defense systems”.
Postel adds,
“I have analyzed the situation, and have concluded that commercially available optical and computational technology is more than capable of being adapted to a cruise missile guidance system to give it very high precision homing capability … it is my conclusion that the Iranians have already developed precision guided cruise missiles and drones”.
“The implications of this are clear. The cost of shooting down cruise missiles and drones will be very high and might well be unsustainable unless extremely inexpensive and effective anti-air systems can be implemented. At this time, no one has demonstrated a cost-effective defense system that can intercept ballistic missiles with any reliability”.
Just to be clear, Postol is saying that neither the U.S. nor Israel has more than a partial defence to a potential attack of this nature – especially as Iran has dispersed and buried its ballistic missile silos across the entire terrain of Iran under the control of autonomous units which are capable of continuing a war, even were central command and communications to be completely lost.
This amounts to paradigm change – clearly for Israel, for one. The huge physical expenditure on air defence ordinance – 2-3 billion dollars worth – will not be repeated willy-nilly by the U.S. Netanyahu will not easily persuade the U.S. to engage with Israel in any joint venture against Iran, given these unsustainable air-defence costs.
But also, as a second important implication, these Air Defence assets are not just expensive in dollar terms, they simply are not there: i.e. the store cupboard is near empty! And the U.S. lacks the manufacturing capacity to replace these not particularly effective, high cost platforms speedily.
‘Yes, Ukraine’ … the Middle East paradigm interlinks directly with the Ukraine paradigm where Russia has succeeded in destroying so much of the western supplied, air-defence capabilities in Ukraine, giving Russia near complete air dominance over the skies.
Positioning scarce air defence ‘to save Israel’ therefore, exposes Ukraine (and slows the U.S. pivot to China, too). And given the recent passage of the funding Bill for Ukraine in Congress, clearly air defence assets are a priority for sending to Kiev – where the West looks increasingly trapped and rummaging for a way out that does not lead to humiliation.
But before leaving the Middle East paradigm shift, the implications for Netanyahu are already evident: He must therefore focus back to the ‘near enemy’ – the Palestinian sphere or to Lebanon – to provide Israel with the ‘Great Victory’ that his government craves.
In short, the ‘cost’ for Biden of saving Israel from the Iranian flotilla which had been pre-announced by Iran to be demonstrative and not destructive nor lethal is that the White House must put-up with the corollary – an attack on Rafah. But this implies a different form of cost – an electoral erosion through exacerbating domestic tensions arising from the on-going blatant slaughter of Palestinians.
It is not just Israel that bears the weight of the Iranian paradigm shift. Consider the Sunni Arab States that have been working in various forms of collaboration (normalisation) with Israel.
In the event of wider conflict embracing Iran, clearly Israel cannot protect them – as Professor Postol so clearly shows. And can they count on the U.S.? The U.S. faces competing demands for its scarce Air Defences and (for now) Ukraine, and the pivot to China, are higher on the White House priority ladder.
In September 2019, the Saudi Abqaiq oil facility was hit by cruise missiles, which Postol notes,
“had an effective accuracy of perhaps a few feet, much more precise than could be achieved with GPS guidance (suggesting an optical and computational guidance system, giving a very precise homing capability)”.
So, after the Iranian active deterrence paradigm shift, and the subsequent Air Defence depletion paradigm shock, the putative coming western paradigm shift (the Third Paradigm) is similarly interlinked with Ukraine.
For the western proxy war with Russia centred on Ukraine has made one thing abundantly clear: this is that the West’s off-shoring of its manufacturing base has left it uncompetitive, both in simple trade terms, and secondly, in limiting western defence manufacturing capacity. It finds (post-13 April) that it does not have the Air Defence assets to go round: ‘saving Israel’; ‘saving Ukraine’ and preparing for war with China.
The western maximalisation of shareholder returns model has not adapted readily to the logistical needs of the present ‘limited’ Ukraine/Russia war, let alone provided positioning for future wars – with Iran and China.
Put plainly, this ‘late stage’ global imperialism has been living a ‘false dawn’: With the economy shifting from manufacturing ‘things’, to the more lucrative sphere of imagining new financial products (such as derivatives) that make a lot of money quickly, but which destabilise society (through increasing disparities of wealth); and which ultimately, de-stabilise the global system itself (as the World Majority states recoil from the loss of sovereignty and autonomy that financialism entails).
More broadly, the global system is close to massive structural change. As the Financial Times warns,
“the U.S. and EU cannot embrace national-security “infant industry” arguments, seize key value chains to narrow inequality, and break the fiscal and monetary ‘rules’, while also using the IMF and World Bank – and the economics profession– to preach free-market best practice to EM ex-China. And China can’t expect others not to copy what it does”. As the FT concludes, “the shift to a new economic paradigm has begun. Where it will end is very much up for grabs.”
‘Up for grabs’: Well, for the FT the answer may be opaque, but for the Global Majority is plain enough – “We’re going back to basics”: A simpler, largely national economy, protected from foreign competition by customs barriers. Call it ‘old- fashioned’ (the concepts have been written about for the last 200 years); yet it is nothing extreme. The notions simply reflect the flip side of the coin to Adam Smith’s doctrines, and that which Friedrich List advanced in his critique of the laissez-faire individualist approach of the Anglo-Americans.
‘European leaders’, however, see the economic paradigm solution differently:
“The ECB’s Panetta gave a speech echoing Mario Draghi’s call for “radical change”: He stated for the EU to thrive it needs a de facto national-security focused POLITICAL economy centered around: reducing dependence on foreign demand; enhancing energy security (green protectionism); advancing production of technology (industrial policy); rethinking participation in global value chains (tariffs/subsidies); governing migration flows (so higher labour costs); enhancing external security (huge funds for defence); and joint investments in European public goods (via Eurobonds … to be bought by ECB QE)”.
The ‘false dawn’ boom in U.S. financial services began as its industrial base was rotting away, and as new wars began to be promoted.
It is easy to see that the U.S. economy now needs structural change. Its real economy has become globally uncompetitive – hence Yellen’s call on China to curb its over-capacity which is hurting western economies.
But is it realistic to think that Europe can manage a relaunch as a ‘defence and national security-led political economy’, as Draghi and Panetta advocate as a continuation of war with Russia? Launched from near ground zero?
Is it realistic to think that the American Security State will allow Europe to do this, having deliberately reduced Europe to economic vassalage through causing it to abandon its prior business model based on cheap energy and selling high-end engineering products to China?
This Draghi-ECB plan represents a huge structural change; one that would take a decade or two to implement and would cost trillions. It would occur too, at a time of inevitable European fiscal austerity. Is there evidence that ordinary Europeans support such radical structural change?
Why then is Europe pursuing a path that embraces huge risks – one that potentially could drag Europe into a whirlpool of tensions ending in war with Russia?
For one main reason: The EU leadership held hubristic ambitions to turn the EU into a ‘geo-political’ empire – a global actor with the heft to join the U.S. at Top Table. To this end, the EU unreservedly offered itself as the auxiliary of the White House Team for their Ukraine project, and acquiesced to the entry price of emptying their armouries and sanctioning the cheap energy on which the economy depended.
It was this decision that has been de-industrialising Europe; that has made what remains of a real economy uncompetitive and triggered the inflation that is undermining living standards. Falling into line with Washington’s failing Ukraine project has released a cascade of disastrous decisions by the EU.
Were this policy line to change, Europe could revert to what it was: a trading association formed of diverse sovereign states. Many Europeans would settle for that: Placing the focus on making Europe competitive again; making Europe a diplomatic actor, rather than as a military actor.
Do Europeans even want to be at the American ‘top table’?
(Boston, MA, Emerson College Student Released From Lock Up After Tent Protest Against The Israeli War Machine – 26 April 2024)
As more campuses join the protests against Israel’s continuing engagement in war crimes in Gaza, one common thread runs through the student demands – divest from supplying the Netanyahu government and the IDF with weapons of mass destruction. What compels many of these youthful demonstrators to occupy the public spaces and offices of their universities is the complicity of college portfolios with investments in US weapon manufacturers. They know that the products of defense contractors, like Lockheed Martin’s F-35 jet and General Dynamics MK 84 – 2000 pound bombs, are slaughtering tens of thousands of innocent civilians throughout Gaza.
They also understand that the US government, from President Biden to the Congress, is opposed to legislative efforts to hold Israel accountable to its violation of various on-the-books prohibitions for governments “engaged in gross human rights abuses” (Section 502 B of the US Foreign Assistance Act). Instead, they see the Biden Administration exploiting every loophole in any restrictions to supply Israel with unending transfers of bombs and military equipment. While countries, like Canada and numerous others, have stopped shipping weapons to Israel, the US seems oblivious to the suffering and devastation caused daily by the IDF in Gaza.
They are aware that Israeli state propaganda spreads constant disinformation about its war crimes in Gaza, from rationalizing its attacks on the staff and patients in hospitals to the murder of over 200 aid workers. They know that countless human rights agencies have condemned these kinds of war crimes in Gaza. (These same human rights agencies have also condemned the brutal killing of 1200 Israeli civilians and the taking of hostages on October 7). In order to justify the murder of so many innocent civilians, the Netanyahu government has insisted that they have actually killed 9000 Hamas militants. However, if they read one of the recent articles in the Israeli newspaper, Ha’aretz from March 31, they understand this figure is reflective of what the IDF calls “kill zones” (think “free-fire zones” in the US war on Vietnam) where anything in those zones, including women and children, were legitimate targets to then be counted as Hamas militants.
They are surely aware of what Netanyahu cabinet members have said about the Palestinians in Gaza and on the West Bank that they are just “human animals.” The Israeli Defense Minister, Yoav Gallant, has bragged about destroying the “electricity, food, and fuel” in Gaza. One of his advisers, a former IDF General, reflective of the targeting of aid workers, including those murdered seven from World Central Kitchen, acknowledged that “in order to make the siege effective, we have to prevent others from giving assistance to Gaza.” Such mass murder and wanton destruction of property in Gaza is part of a campaign of killing that one UN official has cited as “probably the highest kill ratio of any military killing anybody since the Rwandan genocide of 1994.”
When students see and hear about all of this, they are obviously motivated to express their moral outrage. On one hand, these expressions may not always comport with so-called civility. On the other hand, they are not prepared to remain silent and/or passive in the face of an unfolding genocide. In their adherence to Dr. King’s reference to the “fierce urgency of now,” they are committed, as Dr. King was, to disturbing the peace.
Indeed, we need to be reminded of another quote from Dr. King that was central to his famous Riverside Address (“A Time to Break Silence”) from April 4, 1967. He warned prophetically that “a nation that continues year after year to spend more on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.” Beyond the horrors in Gaza and the long tragic history of the oppression of Palestinians, these student protestors are trying to save their own nation from its bloated “defense” budget (now approaching almost one trillion dollars) and death-dealing spiral. What their protest ultimately signifies is their commitment to an authentic advocacy for peace and justice abroad and at home.
Fran Shor is a Michigan-based retired teacher, author, and political activist.
In striking at the Iranian consulate in Damascus on April 1 Bibi Netanyahu has made himself an April Fool. Israel has been bombing Syria for years with no provocation or retaliation by Syria. For years it has bombed its airports which disrupted humanitarian aid to Syria’s civilian population who were suffering in its long civil war. Iran responded to the Israeli strike on its Damascus consulate by asking its allies, the Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Houthis in Yemen and Hamas in Gaza, to refrain from their retaliatory strikes on Israel and let Iran make a military retaliation by itself. This was to ensure that Israel got the message. In the future, Iran will not rely on its proxies but will itself attack Israel. Israel and the US intercepted all but a few of the Iranian drones, and Israel trumpeted this as a victory for it and a defeat for Iran. But in fact the Iranian response was a political and strategic victory.
Netanyahu has been spoiling for a war with Iran for a long time, and since October 7 he has seeking ways to drag the US into another war in the Middle East. While Biden said the US would fully back Israel in its confrontation with Iran, he also cautioned Netanyahu. A CNN story said this:
Biden sought to frame Israel’s successful interception of the Iranian onslaught as a major victory: — with the suggestion that further Israeli response was unnecessary…Biden told Netanyahu to consider Saturday a win because the US assessed Iran’s attacks had been largely unsuccessful and demonstrated Israel’s superior military capability, Biden made clear that the US will not participate in any offensive operations against Iran in response, a senior administration official told CNN.
In the meantime, US Senator Tim Kaine who was Hillary Clinton’s vice-presidential candidate has spoken up about the US relationship with Netanyahu and his rightwing government. Kaine is a close ally and is a member of the Senate foreign relations and armed services committees. Kaine said, “Joe Biden now understands that Benjamin Netanyahu ‘played’ him during the early months of the war in Gaza but ‘that ain’t going to happen anymore.’[i] Netanyahu’s strategic blunders in the Gaza war and now the strike in Damascus have got him in quite a pickle. His major concern is to stay in office to avoid looming criminal prosecution. His quandary is not unlike that of his friend Trump. If they are friends—if either really has any friends. Each in psychiatric terminology is mentally ill with what is diagnosed as ‘malignant narcissism.’ Each is willing to sacrifice anything to save himself. Kaine said as much of Netanyahu in his interview:
“He’s going to end up being one of the most successful politicians and most destructive public servants to be on the world stage in the last quarter century, because he’s successful if you measure it by maintaining his own position but, in terms of what he has done … has made Israel less safe and less secure.”[ii]
Benny Gantz, the ‘moderate’ Israeli politician who joined the war cabinet after October 7 has spoken of how the reaction to Iran’s attack showed the unity of Israel and its western allies. He said, “Israel against Iran, the world against Iran. This is the result. That is a strategic achievement which we must leverage for Israel’s security.” Whether he actually believes this I do not know. But if he does he is deluding himself. The key event was not Iran’s retaliation but the Israel’s strike on the Iranian consulate. That event only reinforced the view of its western ‘allies’ and almost all the other nations of Israel as a rogue state, whose now increasingly reckless actions in Gaza and Syria threaten to bring a wider war to the Middle East—which no one wants, except it seems Netanyahu and his neo-fascist cabinet.
That means that if Israel goes to war against Iran it will go alone. If it continues to provoke the Hezbollah in south Lebanon, it will find itself fighting on two fronts which it doesn’t have the military capacity to do. The last time Israel confronted Hezbollah in 2006, it lost. Since then Hezbollah has acquired more advanced weaponry and, what is more, its soldiers are battle-hardened veterans from their combat in alliance with the Syrian army in the decade of civil war. The reservists Israel called up for the attack on Gaza would be no match for Hezbollah fighters. Netanyahu has painted himself into a corner with the Damascus strike. For a long time the EU—especially France—has tired of Israel’s aggressions in the Middle East. Now its last ally the US has apparently had enough too.
Israel was designed by its Zionist founders to be an aggressive state, a new Jewish ghetto really But an aggressive one. They saw it as a necessity. Israel needed to be at war lest the Jewish settlers be assimilated into the Arab people all around them.
The slogan ‘from the river to the sea’ now denounced by some people in the US as ‘anti-Semitic’ was actually also a part of the Likud Party’s original charter which Netanyahu helped write. It is rarely mentioned in the mainstream media that Israel helped start Hamas. It is well-documented that when Netanyahu became prime minister, he and others in Likud channeled money to it through Qatar in order to weaken Fatah with a fundamentalist party that wanted to obliterate Israel thus giving Netanyahu and his backers a way to claim that there was no one to negotiate with. This was simply a cynical delaying tactic while the Israeli settlements metastasized throughout the West Bank. But on October 7 the folly of Netanyahu’s connivance in the creation Hamas was apparent. How clever he was—until he wasn’t.
The foundation of Israel in 1948 was in a way the big bang of the post-war Middle East. The humiliating defeat of the states created out of colonial designs of Britain and France led to revolutions in the Arab world.
The two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has been a non-starter for some years. Israel has stolen too much land in the West Bank for a viable Palestinian state. It is still touted by the US and most of the EU. It does serve one purpose, however. It makes apparent that the real obstacle to a peaceful settlement of the conflict is solely Israel. The only possible solution is a single secular state of Palestine where Arabs and Jews are equal citizens. Hamas and the radical Jewish fundamentalists in Netanyahu’s administration will have to deal with it from the sidelines—the majority of Israelis and Palestinians are not religious fundamentalists. The Turkish foreign minister Hakan Fidan met with Hamas’s political leader Ismail Haniyeh in Qatar. Fidan said according to Turkish news media. “In our political talks with Hamas for years, they have accepted a Palestinian state to be established within the 1967 borders.”[iii]
While Netanyahu is the driver behind Israel’s latest gambles in Gaza and elsewhere, he’s simply explicitly mouthing Israeli aims—expansion and ethnic cleansing. He has espoused and worked purposefully against the two-state option. He has tolerated and even collaborated with Hamas. He is the most arrogant and duplicitous politician in the world. Biden should never call him again. He should call for his arrest and imprisonment not only for fraud breach of trust and bribery—the charges pending in Israel—but for crimes against humanity.
That said, the miserable theocratic imams of Iran have done the world a favor. They have put the US between a rock and a hard place, and forced Biden to say, Enough, we won’t support any further action of Israel against Iran. Which will also increase greater anxiety in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states and will expose them for the shits they are.[iv]
The strike on the Iranian consulate in Damascus was to distract the world press from the genocidal assault on Gaza. Israel responded with a missile attack on Iran itself. Iran’s retaliation to that attack that showed that Iran—is more cautious. It seems now not likely to retaliate to the Israeli strike.
On the other hand, Netanyahu has already drawn blunt criticism for the Israeli strike on Iran. Israel’s National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir—who was convicted by an Israeli court of supporting terrorism—said the Israeli attack on Iran was “lame.” after Tehran thwarted a small IDF drone strike early on Friday. Netanyahu is under attack even by members of his own cabinet. As they say down South, he’s up to his waist in alligators. Netanyahu is caught now in a vise of his own making between the assault on Gaza and the strike on Damascus. It was bound to happen ever since 1948. He is simply the catalyst who finally brought it on. With the US finally drawing a line, Israel’s last ally is saying enough is enough. AIPAC is now challenged by another Jewish lobby, J Street, and American politicians are taking note of AIPAC’s diminishing power. It’s power politics and Bibi is losing.
The American decision not to veto a UN Security Council resolution demanding an immediate ceasefire in Gaza was another shock to Netanyahu—it was a first for a US administration. Netanyahu’s response was to cancel a planned Israeli meeting with the Biden administration in Washington. Israel is now more isolated more isolated than ever in the international world. Hamas is outfoxing Israel at every step. Israel is learning the hard way that an empire will sacrifice the interests of a small piece of it to the greater interests of the empire.
Yair Lapid, who is the leader of the opposition Yesh Atid party, said the resolution was “dangerous, unfair, and Israel will not accept it.” Minister Hili Tropper, a close ally of Netanyahu’s rival Benny Gantz — who polls say would win handily if an election were held today —said, “The war must not stop.” These comments did not differ greatly from the angry reactions by extreme-right leaders such as Bezalel Smotrich or Itamar Ben Gvir.
More people in the Israeli security establishment are saying that eliminating Hamas is not an achievable goal. Former IDF spokesman Ronen Manelis was quoted recently saying. “To say that one day there will be a complete victory in Gaza — this is a complete lie. Israel cannot completely eliminate Hamas in an operation that lasts only a few months.”
The near-unanimous rejection of a ceasefire shows the cross-party support for an invasion of the Rafah, in the southern Gaza Strip. But Netanyahu is holding off after the US allowed the resolution. Also figuring in his calculations is the call by thirty members of Congress including Nancy Pelosi for a suspension of military aid to Israel.
Likewise in the UK, opposition parties and parliamentarians from the governing Conservative Party, and hundreds of lawyers and judges have called on Prime Minister Rishi Sunak to stop the sale of weaponry to Israel.
At the same time the families of the Israeli hostages are becoming more critical of Netanyahu’s failure to cut a deal with Hamas to free the hostages. The futility of continuing the war has become clear—the goals of eliminating Hamas and freeing the hostages are conflicting. Hamas has politically won the war.
Before October 6, most Israelis thought that a resolution of the Palestinian issue could be put off indefinitely. October 6 shattered that illusion.
There are only two responses to the collapse of the status quo after October 6. One is to recognize the presence of Palestinians and their right to a state. The other is a genocidal war. Israel had chosen the latter. Its slaughter of over thirty-four thousand people, almost all of them innocent civilians (the IDF counts all adult males in Gaza as members of Hamas) its denial of food, water and medicine—all these acts have increased the anger and disgust with it all around the world. The recent murderous assault on the World Kitchen Central—the WKC—is the latest outrage. Israeli’s claim that it was an accident is not believable. It was intentional. The death of an American aid worker simply brought it to the attention of the mass media in America. Israel has been killing aid workers of such organizations as the International Rescue Committee and Médecins Sans Frontières since the beginning of its assault on Gaza—in the case of the WKC it didn’t reckon on one of the victims being an American. If all of these actions are not genocidal then the term has no meaning.
“WCK [aka WFK] is not just any relief organization,” wrote Jack Mirkinson in TheNation magazine. He said of José Andrés, “Andrés is a global celebrity with ties to the international political establishment. WCK had been working closely with the Israeli government both in Gaza and in Israel proper. It would be difficult to think of a more mainstream, well-connected group.” It was as if Israel were showing off, Mirkinson added, “flaunting its ability to cross every known line of international humanitarian law and get away with it.”[v]
Were more evidence needed to support Mirkinson’s description of Israel’s actions, a recent story in the Washington Post confirms it.
The story describes how on January 29 a six-year-old girl, Hind Rajab, was calling for help on her cell phone—when she was intermittently conscious—from the backseat of a car near a Gaza City gas station. She told the emergency dispatchers that ID tanks were getting closer. Her cousin Layan took the phone and told a cousin that Israeli soldiers and were firing at it. Everyone in the car was dead except her and Rajab. They told her that paramedics were on their way. Hind Rajab and all the paramedics were killed. The paramedics notified an IDF agency COGAT that they were going to rescue wounded children and COGAT told them the safest route to take. The paramedics never made it to Hind Rajab. Their ambulance was destroyed Israeli tank fire—they probably would have been safer if they had not notified COGAT. It was twelve days later that family members could make their way to the scene. The car was riddled with bullets as were the bodies of Hind Rajab and her family members. Again despite the statement of the IDF that they would ‘look into it,’ the story in the Washington Post makes it clear with a mass of forensic evidence that the IDF murdered the paramedics and Hind Rajab and her family in cold blood.[vi]
A video posted recently on various news sites showed an endless line Palestinians walking on al-Rashid Road next to the sea, returning to the north of Gaza defying the Israeli warning that they should remain near Rafa. Their home are mostly rubble now but one Palestinian woman said, “If I have to die I want to die in my home.”
As I write Monday April 22, The US has imposed sanctions on the IDF’s Netzah Yehuda battalion, which has been accused of serious human rights violations against Palestinians in the West Bank. It’s now deployed in Gaza. What’s more, The Israeli paper Haaretz has reported that the US was also considering similar moves against other police and military units. What took so long?
When people mention Israel to me—“the Zionist Entity” as its Arab foes call it—I think of the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem founded by the Crusaders in 1099. It lasted until 129I when Saladin took Jerusalem. I want to say to them, ‘Where is the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem?’ The Palestinians will win simply by staying in Palestine while Israel atrophies as the apartheid state of South Africa did. It won’t take two centuries as Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem did.
October 7 was a war crime but a relatively minor one when set in the context of the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 2006 and the US invasion of Iraq—which caused the deaths of somewhere between half a million to a million Iraqis. But now Bibi’s blundering response to the Hamas assault has resulted in another Big Bang. Global condemnation of Israel.
Notes.
[i] “Tim Kaine: “Biden knows Netanyahu ‘played’ him in early months of Gaza war.” The Guardian, April 10, 2024.
[v] Ellen Cantorow: “Dead on Arrival.” AntiWar.com, April 17 2024. The Jack Mirkinson article, “The Ghoulish Ostentatiousness of Israel’s Latest War Crimes, cited by Ellen Cantorow appeared in The Nation on April 4, 2024.
[vi] Meg Kelly, Hajar Harb, Louise Loveluck, Miriam Berger and Cate Brown. “Palestinian paramedics said Israel gave them safe passage to save a 6-year-old girl in Gaza. They were all killed.” Washington Post, April 16, 2024.
EXCERPT FROM AN EMAIL WRITTEN IN RESPONSE TO A REQUEST FROM A FRIEND ASKING FOR HIS ASTUTE ANALYSIS OF IRAN’S DRONE AND MISSILE ATTACK ON ISRAEL.
Theodore Postol is Professor of Science, Technology and National Security Policy in the Program in Science, Technology, and Society at MIT.
I apologize for not getting back to you sooner with answers to your questions. I have been spending time trying to find any video data from the Iranian attacks on Israel that might be informative.
I have attached three video clips derived from some of the sources I found and have put them together in a way that will hopefully be helpful to you and your colleagues.
This clip shows two long-range Iranian missiles passing through the atmosphere, impacting, and exploding in Israel. The incoming missiles are bright spots in the video because they are traveling at a high enough speed (Mach 10 to 13) to be incandescent from atmospheric heating. For now, I will only give you several important highlights, but there is a lot more that can be derived from this particular video.
The video is cut into four sections.
The first section is simply the video as it appears in real time. The time-sequence is roughly 13 seconds long. The soundtrack has four sharp sounds like “gunfire,” which are simply the sounds from the ground-explosions delayed in time due to the speed of sound being much slower than the speed of light. Note that you can see only two ground-explosions, but the sound indicates there are two additional ground-explosions that occurred outside the field-of-view of the camera.
The second section is simply the first section repeated at one third speed, so you have a better chance of observing details.
The following two sections are simply a repeat of section 1 and section 2.
There are many other videos of unengaged ballistic missiles arriving, but all of them cut off before the warheads reach the ground. This is almost certainly due to Israeli classification rules that do not allow the press to publish videos of ground-explosions.
The second video clip titled:
Damage to Israeli Air Base In April 14, 2023 Iran Attack.
This clip shows some of the ground damage at one of the two Israeli airbases that were the direct targets of these ballistic missile attacks. The first sequence shows a crater that was probably from a 200 to 400 kilogram explosive warhead. There are also photographs of lower levels of damage and smaller craters that may possibly be from drones that were not intercepted. The drones are known to have 50 kg warheads and would thereby produce much lower levels of ground damage and smaller craters.
A very interesting section of the video shows the Israelis repairing a runway, which must have been hit by a munition, requiring that the airbase to quickly fill in the crater and cover it with fast-annealing concrete.
All military airports have this capability as it is expected that runways will be attacked so as to limit the ability for the airbase to handle combat aircraft for taking off and landing.
The last 10 seconds of the video shows a ballistic missile arriving, and no interceptors in the air attempting to engage it. If you look carefully at the dark sky immediately above the building the warhead passes behind, you should be able to see one or more faint flashes in the sky. These faint flashes are indications of intense light from a ground explosion that is being reflected by particles in the sky.
The third video titled:
Israeli Drone Shootdowns on April 14, 2024 (Normal and Slo Mo-P35)240.mp4 (1.1 MB)
This video shows aircraft “gun camera” images of drones and cruise missiles that are being shot down with air-to-air missiles.
The gun camera images show cruise missiles:
1.png 2.png and drones: 3.png The cruise missiles travel at a speed of roughly 500 to 600 km/h while the drones travel at a much slower speed, about 220 to 250 km/h.
The videos show an extremely important fact.
All of the targets, whether drones or not, are shot down by air-to-air missiles.
The workhorse air-to-air missile of the United States Air Force is a AIM-9x Sidewinder.
The cost of a single Sidewinder air-to-air missile is about $500,000.
The cost of a drone is perhaps 10,000 or $20,000, and the cost of an Iranian cruise missile is probably about $100,000.
An extremely important fact released by the Israeli government is that the cost of defending Israel from this particular Iranian attack was about $1.3 billion!
The implications of this single number are substantial.
This indicates that the cost of defending from waves of attacks of this type is very likely to be unsustainable against an adequately armed and determined adversary.
The actual scale of the attack is summarized according to CNN in the image below:
The clear and unambiguous evidence from all of the videos of ballistic missiles arriving over Israel show that Iron Dome interceptors were essentially not used in any attempts to engage the ballistic missiles.
The decision to not even try to engage the long-range Iranian ballistic missiles is completely sound.
The Iron Dome interceptor would have a good chance of intercepting either a cruise missile or a drone that had leaked through the very substantial aircraft implemented air-defense system.
This almost certainly means that the bulk of the $1.3 billion cost of the defense was almost certainly expended on shooting down drones and cruise missiles with fighter aircraft launching air-to-air missiles against targets.
Since there is essentially no evidence of long-range ballistic missiles being engaged by Iron Dome, it could only mean that they were not engaged at all, or there were attempts to engage them with the Arrow and David’s sling defense systems.
The fact that a very large number of unengaged ballistic missiles could be seen glowing as they reenter the atmosphere to lower altitudes, indicates that whatever the effects of David’s Sling and the Arrow missile defenses, they were not especially effective.
Thus, the evidence at this point shows that essentially all or most of the arriving long-range ballistic missiles were not intercepted by any of the Israeli air and missile-defense systems.
An additional observation that is relevant to the situation of Israel relative to South Korea is illustrated in the two maps below:
The maps indicate that the drones and cruise missiles had to travel distances of 1300 to 1500 km from Iran to Israel, and roughly 2000 km from Yemen to Israel.
This transit requires many hours allowing for fighter aircraft to engage drones and cruise missiles. There are now reports that the US Navy provided airborne warning and control systems (AWACS, specifically, Navy E-2 Hawkeyes)) which were extremely effective in vectoring fighter aircraft to targets that they could then quickly acquire and destroy.
Such an opportunity would be much more limited in the case of similar types of mass attacks from North Korea against South Korea. AWACS will certainly be tremendously helpful in the case of defending South Korea from this type of attack, but the engagement-rate limitations of combat aircraft against very large numbers of drones and cruise missiles would make the effectiveness of this kind of combat-air defense much lower than was the case for the Israeli defense against Iran.
Another very serious problem that analysts will need to consider is that commercially available technology is now good enough for constructing cruise missiles and drones that have limited but usefull capabilities to “recognize” their targets and home on them.
On September 14, 2019 Iranian produced cruise missiles were used to attack the Abqaiq Oil Facility in Saudi Arabia. The nature of the damage to the facility indicated that the cruise missiles had an effective accuracy of perhaps a few feet, much more precise than could be achieved with GPS guidance.
I have analyzed the situation, and have concluded that commercially available optical and computational technology is more than capable of being adapted to a cruise missile guidance system to give it very high precision homing capability. The proof of this conclusion is in the satellite photograph below:
as can be seen from this satellite image produced by the company Digital Globe and paid for and released by the US government. It shows that four cruise missiles struck four oil processing tanks at Abqaiq at essentially the same point on each of the tanks. Such precision could not possibly be achieved with GPS guidance alone.
In order to convince myself that my conclusion that the optical homing could be done with nothing more than satellite data, I stimulated the homing process by taking the satellite image of a single isolated oil processing tank,
I then performed a well-known procedure called “image cross-correlation” on the original satellite images of the tanks.
The correlation “functions” that were produced by this very simple computer experiment are shown below,
And the results are projected onto an actual satellite photograph of the tanks, showing that the correlation methodology provides very high precision in identifying the central location on a tank that is to be hit.
Since the optical and computational systems needed to perform these correlations in near-real-time on a homing missile are well within the capabilities of commercial cameras and computer chips (NVidia chips are well up to the job), it is my conclusion that the Iranians have already developed precision guided cruise missiles and drones.
The implications of this are clear.
The cost of shooting down cruise missiles and drones will be very high and might well be unsustainable unless extremely inexpensive and effective anti-air systems can be implemented.
It is certainly possible to shoot down drones and cruise missiles with antiaircraft guns, although these systems will be of limited range and will need to be relatively close to targets they are defending.
At this time, no one has demonstrated a cost-effective defense system that can intercept ballistic missiles with any reliability. So far, even Iron Dome has been a failure against artillery rockets, which are of quite short range and are of quite simple and inexpensive.
The Israelis claim an outrageous cost per Iron Dome interceptor of between $60,000 and $80,000 an interceptor. It seems that this claim must be untrue.
Similarly sophisticated interceptors, whether they are the Javelin antitank missile, which costs about $200,000 each or the AIM-9x air-to-air missile are tremendously more expensive.
The Israelis Iron Dome system has been to a very good first approximation completely funded by the US government. Any consideration for purchasing the system must be accompanied by proof it can work in combat and by accurate cost estimates of the different components.
Only then should any consideration be given to whether or not purchase Iron Dome.
I have a lot more I can say about these issues, but I fear I have probably already overwhelmed you with details that raise many more questions that I am not sure I can answer.
Those people who advocate buying these active defenses should be asked to provide data that shows what I have collected herein and elsewhere is not supported by the facts.
Anyone who advocates a defense approach for their country should be able to show that they have a fully reasoned argument, which includes information about the effectiveness of the strategy and its affordability.
Wishful thinking, like what has happened in Ukraine, will at best be a recipe for tremendous expenditures for little capability.
I would welcome to hear the arguments of those who want to make such purchases. I am open to learning and to obtaining data that could lead me to a different conclusion.
Iran’s unprecedented attack on Israeli military sites on April 13-14 signals a tectonic shift in the regional balance of power. While the media remains preoccupied with the number of outdated Iranian drones that were shot down during the onslaught, military analysts are far more focused on the way that Iran’s ballistic missiles cut through Israel’s vaunted air defense systems striking sites at the Nevatim and Negev Air Bases.
What the operation proved is that Israel’s “deterrents supremacy” is largely a fiction based on overly optimistic assumptions about the performance of their air defense capability. When put to the test, these systems failed to stop many of the larger and more destructive ballistic missiles from hitting their targets. This, in turn, revealed that Israel’s most heavily-defended and critically-important military sites remain overly-exposed to enemy attack.
More importantly, any future attack will not be announced days in advance nor will Iran attempt to avoid high-value targets or heavy casualties. Instead, they will use their most lethal and state-of-the-art hypersonic missiles to inflict as much death and destruction on Israel as is required to make sure that the Jewish state is unable to lift a hand against Iran in the future. In short, what Iran’s historic attack on Israel shows is that any future provocation by Israel will be met by an immediate and overwhelming response that will leave Israel battered, bloodied and broken. This is an excerpt from a recent article by former weapons inspector Scott Ritter:
Iran’s purpose in launching the attack was to establish a deterrence posture designed to put Israel and the United States on notice that any attack against Iran, whether on Iranian soil or on the territory of other nations, would trigger a retaliation which would inflict more damage on the attacker than the attacker could hope to inflict on Iran. To achieve this result, Iran had to prove itself capable of overcoming the ballistic missile defense systems of both Israel and the United States which were deployed in and around Israel at the time of the attack. This Iran was able to accomplish, with at least nine missiles striking two Israeli air bases that fell under the protective umbrella of the Israeli-US missile defense shield.
The Iranian deterrence posture has implications that reach far beyond the environs of Israel or the Middle East. By defeating the US-Israeli missile defense shield, Iran exposed the notion of US missile defense supremacy that serves as the heart of US force protection models used when projecting military power on a global scale. The US defensive posture vis-à-vis Russia, China, and North Korea hinges on assumptions made regarding the efficacy of US ballistic missile defense capabilities. By successfully attacking Israeli air bases which had the benefit of the full range of US anti-ballistic missile technology, Iran exposed the vulnerability of the US missile defense shield to modern missile technologies involving maneuverable warheads, decoys, and hypersonic speed. US bases in Europe, the Pacific and the Middle East once thought to be well-protected, have suddenly been revealed to be vulnerable to hostile attack. So, too, are US Navy ships operating at sea. Checkmate, Scott Ritter, Substack
Keep in mind, that the Iranian government has not officially confirmed that it used its most technologically-advanced hypersonic glide vehicles in the assault. Most weapons experts, like Ritter, believe they only used their older, less advanced missiles in order to conceal the dramatic improvements to their stockpile. Even so, Iran was able to put five ballistic missiles on their target at the Nevatim Air Base and another four at the Negev Air Base, arguably two of the most heavily-protected bases in the world today. In short, Iran was able to slip by Israel’s robust radar and air defense systems and deliver a blow at the heart of the Israeli war machine using second class munitions and technology. Imagine the damage they would inflict if they felt forced to use their unstoppable hypersonic missiles. This is why it is unlikely that Netanyahu will order a direct attack on Iranian territory. The consequences for Israel would be nothing short of catastrophic. Here’s more from Ritter:
“My understanding is that Iran used 3 types of ballistic missiles. One ballistic missile uses a warhead that separates and then burst-fires a number of decoys that are specifically designed to attract Iron Dome missiles. …so, Iron Dome will fire 25 interceptors…Meanwhile smaller more maneuverable warheads burst through those interceptors and hit the Israeli air defense systems… and that appears to be the case. So, they are telling the Israelis ‘How we are going to take you out’... The next thing we see, is missiles coming in that the warheads separate from the missile body and then there is a booster engine on the warhead that drives it down into the ground blowing away any ability for radar intercept hitting the target. And what this does is clear the space, clear all the air defense. and the final thing is these heavy warheads that come off the heavy missiles that hit the runways and blew the big craters in them. This was a three-layered ballistic missile attack that was specifically designed by the Iranians to destroy Israeli air defense to clear the way to show the Israelis that we can put the big warheads on the target anywhere in Israel we want to. This was successful, and the beauty of this is, they didn’t use their best missiles…. This was just a single strike-package. …Iran can repeat this process all day long and what they’ve showed Israel is that “This is what we can do.” And I guarantee you that their are intelligence officers like me writing reports right now telling Israel, “Stop all the nonsense. We can’t win this war. It’s over, guys. We have no defense here. If Iran wants to come in, we are powerless. Stop it now.” The Missiles of April, Scott Ritter, You Tube; 6:30 minute mark
Notice the difference between ‘weapons pro’ Ritter’s analysis and the nonsense in the western media. Here’s a short blurb from a piece at the Jerusalem Post which captures the flavor of most of the articles published in the MSM since the attack:
Iran’s weekend drone and missile attack on Israel was an “embarrassing failure,” the US said, stressing that it highlighted the IDF’s defensive prowess as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his war cabinet weighed reprisal actions.
“I’ve seen reporting that the Iranians meant to fail that this spectacular and embarrassing failure was all by design,” US National Security Communications Adviser John Kirby told reporters in Washington on Monday…
“Let’s be straight, given the scale of this attack, Iran’s intent was clearly to cause significant destruction and casualties,” Kirby said as he spoke of how a coalition of five armies — Israel, the US, Jordan, France, and Great Britain — repelled over 300 missiles and drone targeting the Jewish state. Iran’s attack is an ‘embarrassing failure,’ a success for Israel, says US, Jerusalem Post
If it was Iran’s intention to cause “significant destruction and casualties”, then why didn’t they bomb downtown Tel Aviv or Haifa? Wouldn’t that have made more sense? And why did Iran communicate their plans 72 hours in advance to everyone, including the United States via the Saudis? And, if the attack was such an “embarrassing failure”, then why is Israel still hesitating to strike back?
The fact is, the Israeli war cabinet has already met four times since the incident and has not yet decided how to respond. Why?
Because Iran’s deputy foreign minister Ali Bagheri has told Israel in no uncertain terms that if they launch another attack on Iran, they should expect to “get hit harder, faster, and with more immediacy.” So, the flexibility Israel has enjoyed for the last two decades, of bombing and assassinating its neighbors whenever it gets the urge, is over. Just like Israel’s long streak of impunity is over. Tehran has thrown down the gauntlet and let it be known that it if Israel crosses its red lines, there’s going to be a war.
Indeed, Iran will be better prepared and will do everything in their power to overwhelm the enemy and bring this decades-long confrontation to a swift and decisive end. We’ll let Ritter have the last word:
The failure of the combined US-Israeli defense systems in the face of a concerted Iranian missile attack exposed the short-comings of the US ballistic missile defense capabilities world-wide… This means that the US and NATO forces in Europe are vulnerable to attack from advanced Russian missile technologies which match or exceed those used by Iran to attack Israel. It also means that China would most likely be able to strike and sink US navy ships in the Pacific Ocean in the event of a conflict over Taiwan…. And that North Korea could do the same to US ships and forces ashore in the vicinity of Japan and South Korea… The global strategic implications of this stunning Iranian accomplishment are game-changing... Checkmate, Scott Ritter, Substack
It would be wise for the Israeli leadership to mull over what Ritter has to say before stumbling blindly into a war they will certainly lose.
The Second Round of Retaliation Between Israel and Iran Has Just Begun
Joe Biden is caught in a trap caused by his own weakness
• 2,200 WORDS •
Given the lying and fact twisting that have routinely been part and parcel of accounts of what is occurring in the Middle East, the past several weeks have nevertheless been shocking in terms of how an abysmally low standard of truth can be reduced even farther. Looking at developments objectively, one comes up with a series of facts. First of all, Israel was not at war with either Syria or Iran during the first weeks in April. Iran had never attacked Israel prior to that point and Syria last fought Israel in 1973, over fifty years ago. Israel, however, has regularly been assassinating Iranian officials and scientists and it has been frequently been bombing Syria since 2017, increasing the pace to weekly and sometimes even daily attacks over the past six months paralleling the Gaza fighting. A particularly devastating attack took place on March 29th when the Israeli military launched massive strikes against a weapons storage depot in Syria’s northern province of Aleppo which killed at least 40 people, most of them Syrian soldiers. The air strikes produced a series of explosions that also killed six Lebanese Hezbollah fighters.
But three days later on April 1st a very damaging and unprovoked attack was directed against the Iranian Embassy’s Consulate General, which was located in an upscale neighborhood in Damascus, Syria’s capital. The building was completely destroyed by missiles fired from F-35 fighter planes that had crossed over the Syrian border from Israel, killing Iranian diplomats as well as Brigadier General Mohammad Reza Zahedi and Zahedi’s deputy, General Haji Rahimi, and also Brigadier General Hossein Amirollah, the chief of general staff for the al-Quds force in Syria and Lebanon. Syria subsequently confirmed that a total of 13 people were killed in the attack, including six Syrians and a Lebanese Hezbollah militiaman. Both Iran and Hezbollah vowed revenge.
Attacking a diplomatic mission is considered a major war crime according to the Vienna Convention, but there was no condemnation of the incident coming from the US and the usual suspects in Western Europe. Instead of doing what was right by pressuring Israel to stop attacking its neighbors and thereby possibly preventing a major war in the Middle East, President Joe Biden repeated his pledge that the United States would regard as “ironclad” its commitment to guarantee Israel’s security if Iran were to strike back. This guaranteed to Israel that any action taken by it would be supported by Washington. The Biden Administration also predictably voted against a Russian and Chinese drafted UN Security Council resolution to condemn the Israeli attack on the Iranian Consulate, which was a clear violation of international law and an act of war committed by Israel. The US reportedly cast its veto vote “no” after “Diplomats said the US told council colleagues that many of the facts of what happened on Monday in Damascus remained unclear.” What was actually unclear was the fog that generally surrounds the Biden foreign policy and national security team since it was pretty transparent who was the aggressor in terms of means, motive and outcome.
When Iran did retaliate on April 13th, it carried out a carefully calibrated moderate strike against military targets intended to do damage but not cause a large number of casualties. It reportedly hit several airbases from which the Israeli fighter bombers had begun their attack on Damascus as well as an Israeli Air Force intelligence center in the formerly Syrian Golan Heights. No one was killed in spite of the 300 estimated drones and missiles that were launched, most being intercepted by Israel and its allies. But the attack nevertheless sent a message from Tehran that next time it could be much worse, both immediate in timing and “considerably more severe” than its response on Saturday night had been. Iran also claims that it attempted to prevent an escalation by warning the US about their plans, which would be passed on to Israel, that a “controlled” retaliation was coming. The Pentagon denied that it had been told anything, which may mean that Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin was asleep at his desk once again.
Not content with the outcome, Israel inevitably struck back on Friday, hitting a major airbase near Isfahan, and, to make sure no one was missed, targets in both Iraq and Syria. Iranian military sources advise however that the loud explosions heard by local residents were Iranian air defenses shooting at some flying objects, presumably drones. Per the New York Times and other accommodating media, the strike was a warning that Israel could penetrate Iranian airspace and not intended to do serious damage. The Pentagon was apparently informed shortly before the Israeli action. Iran’s counter-counter retaliation is now pending, but it is clear that Netanyahu will not be deterred by electoral considerations in the United States to stay his hand in his own counter-counter response.
And how does the United States fit into the story? The White House response to the Iranian attack on Israeli territory was inevitably completely unlike the previous uncritical response to Israel’s Consulate General attack, namely condemnation of Iran and the repetition of the usual tripe about “Israel has a right to defend itself” and the sanctity of the “ironclad” defense arrangement. Biden also attempted to cover himself against political blowback due to his licking Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s shoes in the upcoming November election by making it known that he had spoken with and advised Netanyahu, recommending not carrying out a reprisal of the reprisal, which Washington would be unable to support as it could/would lead to major escalation. Netanyahu, not fearing Biden’s displeasure, blew the advice off and he and his war cabinet made clear that they were working on a response as well as setting a timetable for invading Rafah in south Gaza, which Biden had also recommended against.
The White House completed its groveling to Netanyahu by vetoing a UN Security Council resolution on April 18th that would have advocated full UN membership status for the state of Palestine, demonstrating that kicking the Palestinians is always a good way to maintain Israeli favor! The vote was 12 (including France, Japan and South Korea) in favor, two abstentions (the shameless United Kingdom and, surprisingly, Switzerland) and an American veto. The US insisted that elevation of Palestine’s diplomatic status can only be obtained after negotiations between the Palestinian Authority and Israel. US Ambassador to the UN Linda Thomas-Greenfield absurdly raised another objection: “Right now, the Palestinians don’t have control over a significant portion of what is supposed to be their state. It’s being controlled by a terrorist organization.” She was referring to Hamas but the comment actually more correctly is applicable to Israel. In any event, a leaked White House memo had previously revealed that Biden opposes full UN membership and statehood for the Palestinians without Israel’s approval, which, of course, will not be forthcoming.
So we have Israel as the aggressor against two countries that were not declared enemies and had not attacked the Jewish state in any way in many, many years. But when Israel attacked them, committing a major war crime Joe Biden and company preferred to sit on their hands and mumble, saving their vituperation for when Iran staged a deliberately mild counter-attack as a warning. That is called hypocrisy, to turn things on their head to provide the answer that one wants to see and it applies equally to Biden accusing the Russians of “illegal occupation” in Ukraine while Israel’s theft of Syria’s Golan Heights and ongoing seizure of the West Bank goes unchallenged by Washington. And the pushback against Iran is unlikely to diminish very soon as the Jewish controlled US Congress also has the bit between its teeth to demonstrate how much it loves Israel. Congressman Steve Scalise, GOP House Majority Leader, has announced that “In light of Iran’s unjustified attack on Israel, the House will move from its previously announced legislative schedule next week to instead consider legislation that supports our ally Israel and holds Iran and its terrorist proxies accountable. The House of Representatives stands strongly with Israel, and there must be consequences for this unprovoked attack.” Over at the Senate Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas is advocating punishing Iran by beating on its possible friends in the US, physically attacking folks who are demonstrating in support of the Palestinians. Cotton said that the “pro-Hamas criminals” should be confronted by angry citizens who “take matters into [their] own hands” and confront the offenders, endorsing the use of force against peaceful demonstrators.
But there is also the back story behind why Israel likely attacked the Iranians in Syria in the first place. I and a number of other observers immediately after the Israeli attack assumed that the Jewish state had staged a deliberate over-the-top provocation to draw Washington into its wars. Just as in the case of the October 7th Gaza attack by Hamas, which Israel had full knowledge of and let happen, Netanyahu sought to create a situation in which it would goad Iran into being forced to retaliate to force an “ironclad” Biden to protect its “ally” by taking on Iran directly.
Why did Israel do it beyond the obvious desire to destroy Iran just like it is destroying the Palestinians? It was done because Israel has likely become aware that it is viewed as the world’s greatest pariah state due to its genocide in Gaza, to include the recent horrific killing of hundreds of Palestinians in the Al-Shifa hospital in Gaza as well as the targeted assassination of seven employees of a charity that was bringing in food to those starving due to Israel’s blocking the entry of relief supplies. And also because Israel is actually not winning its war against Hamas, it needed to shift the narrative to something different. That would be using its time-honored technique of making itself once again the “victim” in confronting a powerful new enemy, Iran, which would make the problem of bad public relations with the world over Gaza be in part mitigated.
A shift in the story would also presumably bring with it the expected help from the United States and its European allies to do the hard work in killing Iranians. And the trick seems to have worked, predictably. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak of Britain has been recently facing demands to cut off arms shipments to Israel because of the devastating death toll in Gaza, but on the following Monday, he was able to salute the British warplanes that had shot down some Iranian drones sent by Iran to attack Israel. It was a telling example of how Israel has been able to scramble the equation in the Middle East. Faced with a intensively publicized barrage of Iranian missiles, Britain, the United States, France and others rushed to help the Israelis who had in fact started the conflict. The United States is also currently planning on increasing the pressure on Iran through a series of tough new sanctions being prepared by Treasury Secretary Janice Yellen, saying “Treasury will not hesitate to work with our allies to use our sanctions authority to continue disrupting the Iranian regime’s malign and destabilizing activity.” Yellen notably did nothing when Israel committed a major war crime in its attack on the Iranian Consulate General in Damascus, nor has she supported sanctions over the Israeli Gaza genocide. She is, of course, Jewish. More aid for the Jewish state is also still waiting for a congressional vote to approve the $14 billion currently in the pipeline, with Washington Reportclaiming that this year’s total US aid to Netanyahu will likely exceed $25 billion “in direct costs related to its fervent support for Israel.”
Right now, the dilemma for the US government will be that it must pull out all the stops in supporting Israel or face inter alia retaliation by the Israel Lobby working through its donors and media resources to defeat Biden in November. And there hovers in the peripheries of one’s mind the worse grim possibility that Israel, if rebuffed by its “allies,” will use its secret nuclear arsenal to blow up the Middle East and presumably a large chunk of adjacent areas in Europe and Asia as well. There are stories already circulating suggesting that the Israeli nuclear reactor at Dimona might have been an Iranian target and that Israel is right now preparing to take out Iranian nuclear research sites. Netanyahu is calling the shots while a befuddled White House looks on. Israel has baited a trap and Joe Biden has stepped right into it.
A Holy of the Holies was shattered in the Holy Land as Iran staged a quite measured, heavily choreographed response to the Israeli terror attack against its consulate/ambassador residence in Damascus, a de facto evisceration of the Vienna Convention on diplomatic immunity.
This game-changer will directly interfere on how the Anglo-American system manages its simultaneous conflagration with Russia, China and Iran – three top BRICS members.
The key problem is escalations are already built in – and will be hard to remove. The Total Cancel War against Russia; the genocide in Gaza – with its explicit policy masterfully decoded by Prof. Michael Hudson; and the decoupling/shaping the terrain against China won’t simply vanish – as all communication bridges with the Global Majority keep being torched.
Yet the Iranian message indeed establishes a “New Equation” – as Tehran christened it, and prefigures many other surprises to come from West Asia.
Iran wanted to – and did send – a clear message. New equation: if the biblical psychopathic entity keeps attacking Iranian interests, from henceforth it will be counter-attacked inside Israel. All that in a matter of “seconds” – as the Security Council in Tehran has already cleared all the procedures.
Escalation though seems inevitable. Former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak: “Netanyahu is influenced by his [fundamentalist] political partners to go into an escalation so he can hold onto power and accelerate the coming of the Messiah.”
Compare it to Iranian President Raisi: “The smallest act against Tehran’s interests will be met with a massive, extensive, and painful response against all its operations.”
Goodbye to Your ‘Invincible’ Defense Maze
For Tehran, regulating the intensity of the clash in West Asia between Israel and the Axis of Resistance while simultaneously establishing strategic deterrence to replace “strategic patience” was a matter of launching a triple wave: a drone swarm opening the path for cruise missiles and ballistic missiles.
The performance of the much-vaunted Iron Dome, Arrow-3 and David’s Sling – aided by F-35 fighter jets and the US and the UK naval force – was not exactly stellar. There’s no video of the “outer-layer” Arrow-3 system shooting down anything in space.
At least 9 ballistic missiles penetrated the dense Israeli defense network and hit the Nevatim and Ramon bases. Israel is absolutely mum on the fate of its Golan Heights intel installation – hit by cruise missiles.
Amidst classic fog of war, it’s irrelevant whether Tehran launched hundreds or dozens of drones and missiles. Regardless of NATOstan media hype, what’s proven beyond the shadow of a doubt is that the supposedly “invincible” Israeli defense maze – ranging from US-made AD/ABM systems to Israeli knockoffs – is helpless in real war against a technologically advanced adversary.
What was accomplished by a single operation did raise quite a few professional eyebrows. Iran forced Israel to furiously deplete its stock of interceptors and spend at least $1.35 billion – while having its escalatory dominance and deterrence strategy completely shattered.
The psychological blow was even fiercer.
What if Iran had unleashed a series of strikes without a generous previous warning lasting several days? What if US, UK, France and – traitorous – Jordan were not ready for coordinated defense? (The – startling – fact they were all directly dispensing firepower on Tel Aviv’s behalf was not analyzed at all). What if Iran had hit serious industrial and infrastructural targets?
Establishing an Equation Without Disturbing a Pivot
Predictably, there has been less than zero debate across NATOstan about the sudden collapse of the Fortress Israel Myth – which underpins the larger myth of Zionism offering Impregnable Security for those living in Israel. No more. This narrative spin is D.O.A.
Iran, for its part, could not care less about what NATOstan spins. The shift towards the New Equation in fact was generous enough to offer Tel Aviv a de-escalation escape route – which will not be taken, at Israel’s peril.
For Tel Aviv, everything that happened so far spells out Strategic Defeat across the spectrum: in Gaza, in Lebanon, with the economy tanking, totally losing legitimacy around the world, and now with the added painful loss of deterrence.
Israeli Counterattack: decision made, but timing uncertain
The Israel Defense Forces have finalized their decision on how to respond to Iran’s attack, however, they have not yet determined the timing, as reported by The Jerusalem Post, citing sources.
All eyes are now on what may happen next: will it finally become clear whether the Hegemon prevails or whether Israel runs the “wag the dog” show?
It’s essential to consider the Russia-China strategic partnership view. The consensus among Chinese scholars is that the Hegemon prefers not to commit too many resources to West Asia, as this would affect the – already collapsing – Project Ukraine and the strategic planning to counter China in the Asia-Pacific.
Additionally, later this week Iranian Deputy Foreign Minister Ali Bagheri Kani – who said Iran will respond “within seconds” to any new Israeli attack – visits Moscow for the Conference on Nonproliferation and will also meet with the top echelons of the Russian Foreign Ministry.
It’s quite remarkable that Iran managed to establish the New Equation without disturbing its own pivot to Eurasia – after the collapse of the 2015 nuclear deal – while protecting the complex framework engaged in the defense of Palestine.
The Hegemon’s options are dire. They run from being eventually expelled from West Asia and the Persian Gulf to an unwinnable existential clash against three civilization-states – Russia, China, Iran.
What’s left as the number one feasible scenario is a carefully calculated retreat to an easily controlled backyard: Latin America, especially South America, manipulating new, convenient, sovereign-deprived asset Argentina.
That does not change the fact that US power projection on the wane, globally, is the way the wind is blowing. The Straussian neocon psycho-dementia is unsustainable. The question is whether they can be progressively purged from the US power structure before they attempt to plunge the Global Majority into their irrational depths of doom.
And Don’t Forget the New BRICS Equation
By contrast, on the Global Majority front, over 40 nations want to join BRICS – and counting, according to the head of the Russian Council Committee on International Affairs, Grigory Karasin.
After a meeting of the chairmen of the international affairs committees of BRICS Parliaments last week in Moscow, Karasin noted how many BRICS member-nations understand that they should not rush to create a rigid charter, “seeing how counterproductive and even provocative the European Union is acting.” The name of the game is flexibility.
Nigeria’s intent to join BRICS is in line with its interest in a more equitable global financial and development system, Ben Akabueze, the director general of the country’s Budget Office, told Sputnik.
Alastair Crooke has touched on a key theme that runs through my new book, Eurasia v. NATOstan: “Anything that was good and true about Western civilization is preserved and thriving in Russia. This is the unspoken insight that so infuriates the western elites. And it is also why, in part, BRICS states so evidently look to Russia for leadership.”
The New Equation established by Iran, a sovereign BRICS member, will do wonders to solidify this – multilateral, multicultural – state of cooperation as the Empire and its “aircraft carrier” in West Asia, except in the covert ops department, are increasingly reduced to the role of a paper tiger.
Israeli military expert Or Fialkov said on 17 April that authorities gave false information about the rate of interception of Iranian drones and missiles during Tehran’s operation against Israel over the weekend.
Israel had claimed on 14 April following Iran’s Operation True Promise that 99 percent of the projectiles fired during the operation were intercepted.
“The interception percentage of the missiles is about 84 percent, a very high percentage but not comparable to the numbers that the IDF provided, which gave the feeling that there had been an absolute interception of all Iranian threats,” Fialkov told Hebrew newspaper Maariv in an interview released Wednesday.
“When they publish crazy success rates (99 percent) and create a [false] state of perfection, it can cause complacency in the citizens as well as in the military,” the Israeli researcher added.
He also said that an Iranian attack on settlements would have resulted in “significantly higher casualties.”
Iran chose to target military sites instead. Following the Iranian operation, Tel Aviv admitted that the Nevatim airbase in southern Israel was damaged in the attack. Iran’s Armed Forces said the Nevatim base was the site from which Israeli jets took off to attack the Iranian consulate in Damascus.
Tehran also targeted intelligence sites in the Jabal al-Sheikh mountains between Syria and Israeli territory, which “provided the intelligence for the Israeli airstrike on Iran’s diplomatic mission in Damascus,” Iranian army chief Major General Mohammad Hossein Baqeri said on Sunday.
Authorities in Iran also said that their operation was purposefully limited and measured, and aimed to send a strong message that Tehran is capable of much more.
Several Iranian officials have vowed a much harsher attack if Israel escalates the situation with a response.
“This operation showed that our armed forces are ready,” Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi said in a speech on 17 April, adding that Operation True Promise “brought down the glory of the Zionist regime.”
“The slightest act of aggression” by Israel will lead to “a fierce and severe response,” he warned.
The Iranian defeat of the US-Israeli missile defense architecture has global security consequences.
The world’s attention has, rightfully so, been focused on the fallout from Iran’s retaliatory strike against Israel on April 13-14, 2024. Iran’s purpose in launching the attack was to establish a deterrence posture designed to put Israel and the United States on notice that any attack against Iran, whether on Iranian soil or on the territory of other nations, would trigger a retaliation which would inflict more damage on the attacker than the attacker could hope to inflict on Iran. To achieve this result, Iran had to prove itself capable of overcoming the ballistic missile defense systems of both Israel and the United States which were deployed in and around Israel at the time of the attack. This Iran was able to accomplish, with at least nine missiles striking two Israeli air bases that fell under the protective umbrella of the Israeli-US missile defense shield.Defending Dixieu2019s …Bishop, Isaac C.Buy New $16.49(as of 04:31 UTC – Details)
The Iranian deterrence posture has implications that reach far beyond the environs of Israel or the Middle East. By defeating the US-Israeli missile defense shield, Iran exposed the notion of US missile defense supremacy that serves as the heart of US force protection models used when projecting military power on a global scale. The US defensive posture vis-à-vis Russia, China, and North Korea hinges on assumptions made regarding the efficacy of US ballistic missile defense capabilities. By successfully attacking Israeli air bases which had the benefit of the full range of US anti-ballistic missile technology, Iran exposed the vulnerability of the US missile defense shield to modern missile technologies involving maneuverable warheads, decoys, and hypersonic speed. US bases in Europe, the Pacific and the Middle East once thought to be well-protected, have suddenly been revealed to be vulnerable to hostile attack. So, too, are US Navy ships operating at sea.
Israel’s ballistic missile defenses were given a supercharged boost by the deployment of an advanced AN/TPY-2 X band radar on Israeli soil. The radar, operated by the US Army’s 13th Missile Defense Battery, is located on Har Qeren, a height which rises out of the Negev Desert near the city of Be’er Sheva. The AN/TPY-2 is a missile defense radar that can detect, track and discriminate ballistic missiles, discriminating between threats and non-threats (i.e., incoming missiles and space debris).
The AN/TPY-2 operates in two different modes. The first, known as the “forward-based mode,” detects and tracks ballistic missiles as they are launched. The second—“terminal mode”—is used to guide interceptors toward a descending missile. The AN/TPY-2 is optimized to work with the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) ballistic missile defense system by guiding the THAAD missile to its target.
The US had deployed at least one, and possibly two, THAAD missile batteries to Israel at the time of the Iranian missile attack. In addition to assisting the THAAD missiles in shooting down incoming threats, the AN/TPY-2 radar data was integrated with Israeli radar data and other technical intelligence collected by the Ballistic Missile Defense Organization’s (BMDO) network of early warning satellites deployed for the sole purpose of monitoring and reporting Iranian ballistic missile launches. This integrated early warning/surveillance/tracking system was tied into a multi-layered missile defense architecture which included the US THAAD and Israeli Arrow 2, Arrow 3, advanced Patriot, and David’s Sling anti-ballistic missile interceptor systems.
Adding to the capability and lethality of the US-Israeli ballistic missile defense architecture was the presence of at least two US Navy ballistic missile defense (BMD) system-capable Aegis-class destroyers equipped with the SPY-1 S band radar and SM-3/SM-6 interceptor missiles. The Navy BMD-capable ships are configured to tie into the ground-based AN/TPY-2 X band radar as well as the broader BMD system through the Command and Control, Battle management, and Communications (C2BMC) system. The combination of ground-based radars and interceptors with the US Navy BMD system provides US military commanders with theater-wide protection from hostile ballistic missile threats. This integrated system is designed to detect, acquire, and track incoming threats and, using complex computer-drive algorithms, discriminate targets and destroy them using hit-to-kill kinetic warheads (i.e., a “bullet hitting a bullet”).The Kids’ Money …McGillian, Jamie KyleBest Price: $12.99Buy New $48.14(as of 04:45 UTC – Details)
On April 13-14, 2023, this system failed. In short, the combination of US and Israeli anti-ballistic missile defense capabilities deployed in and around the Negev desert made the Israeli air bases located there the most protected locations in the world from threats posed by ballistic missiles.
And yet Iran successfully struck both locations with multiple missiles.
The global strategic implications of this stunning Iranian accomplishment are game-changing—the US has long struggled conceptually with the notion of what is referred to as “A2/AD” (anti-access/area denial) threats posed by hostile ballistic missiles. However, the US had sought to mitigate against this AA/A2 threat by overlaying theater ballistic missile defense architecture like that that had been employed in Israel. The failure of the combined US-Israeli defense systems in the face of a concerted Iranian missile attack exposed the short-comings of the US ballistic missile defense capabilities world-wide.
In short, this means that the US and NATO forces in Europe are vulnerable to attack from advanced Russian missile technologies which match or exceed those used by Iran to attack Israel. It also means that China would most likely be able to strike and sink US navy ships in the Pacific Ocean in the event of a conflict over Taiwan. And that North Korea could do the same to US ships and forces ashore in the vicinity of Japan and South Korea.
Until which time the US can develop, produce and deploy missile defense systems capable of defeating the new missile technology being deployed by nations like Iran, Russia, China, and North Korea, US military power projection capabilities are in a state of checkmate by America’s potential adversaries.
Iran’s retaliatory strikes against Israel were not conducted alone. Strategic partners Russia and China have Tehran’s back, and their role in West Asia’s conflict will only grow if the US doesn’t keep Israel in check.
A little over 48 hours before Iran’s aerial message to Israel across the skies of West Asia, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Ryabkov confirmed, on the record, what so far had been, at best, hush-hush diplomatic talk:
The Russian side keeps in contact with Iranian partners on the situation in the Middle East after the Israeli strike on the Iranian consulate in Syria.
Ryabkov added, “We stay in constant touch [with Iran]. New in-depth discussions on the whole range of issues related to the Middle East are also expected in the near future in BRICS.”
He then sketched The Big Picture:
Connivance with Israeli actions in the Middle East, which are at the core of Washington’s policy, is in many ways becoming the root cause of new tragedies.
Here, concisely, we had Russia’s top diplomatic coordinator with BRICS – in the year of the multipolar organization’s Russian presidency – indirectly messaging that Russia has Iran’s back. Iran, it should be noted, just became a full-fledged BRICS+ member in January.
Iran’s aerial message this weekend confirmed this in practice: their missile guidance systems used the Chinese Beidou satellite navigation system as well as the Russian GLONASS system.
This is Russia–China intel leading from behind and a graphic example of BRICS+ on the move.
Ryabkov’s “we stay in constant touch” plus the satellite navigation intel confirms the deeply interlocked cooperation between the Russia–China strategic partnership and their mutual strategic partner Iran. Based on vast experience in Ukraine, Moscow knew that the biblical psychopathic genocidal entity would keep escalating if Iran only continued to exercise “strategic patience.”
The morphing of “strategic patience” into a new strategic balance had to take some time – including high-level exchanges with the Russian side. After all, the risk remained that the Israeli attack against the Iranian consulate/ambassador’s residence in Damascus could well prove to be the 2024 remix of the killing of Archduke Franz Ferdinand.
And don’t forget the Strait of Hormuz
Tehran did manage to upend the massive Western psychological operations aimed at pushing it into a strategic misstep.
Iran started with a misdirecting masterstroke. As US–Israeli fear porn went off the charts, fueled by dodgy western “intel,” the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) made a quick sideways move, seizing an Israeli-owned container ship near the Strait of Hormuz.
That was an eminently elegant manoeuvre – reminding the collective west of Tehran’s hold on the Strait of Hormuz, a fact immeasurably more dangerous to the whole western economic house of cards than any limited strike on their “aircraft carrier” in West Asia. That did happen anyway.
And once again, with a degree of elegance. Unlike that ‘moral’ army specialized in killing women, children, and the elderly and bombing hospitals, mosques, schools, universities, and humanitarian convoys, the Iranian attack targeted key Israeli military sites such as the Nevatim and Ramon airbases in the Negev and an intel center in the occupied Golan Heights – the three centers used by Tel Aviv in its strike on Iran’s Damascus consulate.
This was a highly choreographed show. Multiple early warning signs gifted Tel Aviv with plenty of time to profit from US intel and evacuate fighter jets and personnel, which was duly followed by a plethora of US military radars coordinating the defense strategy.
It was American firepower that smashed the bulk of what may have been a swarm of 185 Shahed-136 drones – using everything from ship-mounted air defense to fighter jets. The rest was shot down over Jordan by The Little King’s military – the Arab street will never forget his treachery – and then by dozens of Israeli jets.
Israel’s defenses were de facto saturated by the suicide drone-ballistic missile combo. On the ballistic missile front, several pierced the dense maze of Israel’s air defenses, with Israel officially claiming nine successful hits – interestingly enough, all of them hitting super relevant military targets.
The whole show had the budget of a mega blockbuster. For Israel – without even counting the price of US, UK, and Israeli jets – just the multi-layered interception system set it back at least $1.35 billion, according to an Israeli official. Iranian military sources tally the cost of their drone and missile salvos at only $35 million – 2.5 percent of Tel Aviv’s expenditure – made with full indigenous technology.
A new West Asian chessboard
It took only a few hours for Iran to finally metastasize strategic patience into serious deterrence, sending an extremely powerful and multi-layered message to its adversaries and masterfully changing the game across the whole West Asian chessboard.
Were the biblical psychopaths to engage in a real Hot War against Iran, there’s no chance in hell Tel Aviv can intercept hundreds of Iranian missiles – the state-of-the-art ones excluded from the current show – without an early warning mechanism spread over several days. Without the Pentagon’s umbrella of weaponry and funds, Israeli defense is unsustainable.
It will be fascinating to see what lessons Moscow will glean from this profusion of lights in the West Asian sky, its sly eyes taking in the frantic Israeli, political, and military scene as the heat continues to rise on the slowly boiling – and now screaming – frog.
As for the US, a West Asian war – one it hasn’t scripted itself – does not suit its immediate interests, as an old-school Deep State stalwart confirmed by email:
That could permanently end the area as an oil-producing region and astronomically raise the oil price to levels that will crash the world financial structure. It is conceivable that the United States banking system could similarly collapse if the oil price rises to $900 a barrel should Middle East oil be cut off or destroyed.
It’s no wonder that the Biden combo, days before the Iranian response, was frantically begging Beijing, Riyadh, and Ankara, among others, to hold Tehran back. The Iranians might have even agreed – had the UN Security Council imposed a permanent ceasefire in Gaza to calm the regional storm. Washington was mute.
The question now is whether it will remain mute. Mohammad Bagheri, chief of the General Staff of the Iranian Armed Forces, went straight to the point:
We have conveyed a message to America through the Swiss Embassy that American bases will become a military target if they are used in future aggressive actions of the Zionist regime. We will consider this as aggression and will act accordingly.
The US dilemma is confirmed by former Pentagon analyst Michael Maloof:
We have got some 35 bases that surround Iran, and they thereby become vulnerable. They were meant to be a deterrence. Clearly, deterrence is no longer on the table here. Now they become the American’ Achilles heel’ because of their vulnerabilities to attack.
All bets are off on how the US–Israel combo will adapt to the new Iranian-crafted deterrence reality. What remains, for the historic moment, is the pregnant-with-meaning aerial show of Muslim Iran singlehandedly unleashing hundreds of drones and missiles on Israel, a feat feted all across the lands of Islam. And especially by the battered Arab street, subjugated by decrepit monarchies that keep doing business with Israel over the dead bodies of the Palestinians of Gaza.
Most Western analysts were popping champagne corks today proclaiming Israel’s “massive” victory over Iran’s 14 April combined drone, cruise missile and ballistic missile attack on targets in Israel. I don’t know if they are really this blind to what happened or are willing participants in a psychological operation to persuade Israel that it had a victory and does not need to escalate. Regardless, let’s deal with the facts.
Iran told the United States and several neighboring countries exactly what it was going to do. We know this thanks to an article in the Financial Times published on April 12 — 36 hours before Iran launched.
Iran has signalled to allies and western nations that it will retaliate against a suspected Israeli air strike on its Damascus consulate in a “calibrated” manner to keep an all-out regional conflict at bay, according to officials briefed on the talks.
Tehran is unlikely to target Israeli diplomatic facilities in the region, said an official briefed on talks between Iran and Oman, the Gulf state that has often facilitated back-channel diplomacy between Tehran and Washington.
US intelligence on any impending attack appears to be detailed and specific, according to the officials briefed on the situation, giving Israel a window to prepare its defences. . . .
Even a direct attack in Israeli territory would probably be “calibrated” in a manner that would show a robust response, without triggering an Israeli retaliation that would lead to Iranian assets in Lebanon and Syria being decimated, the western official said, while warning that a miscalculation is possible.
Iran’s goal was to demonstrate it could hit Israel if it wanted to, but was providing advance warning to give the Israelis time to protect personnel in order to minimize casualties. Iran was not trying to cause mass casualties.
Turkish, Jordanian and Iraqi officials said on Sunday that Iran gave wide notice days before its drone and missile attack on Israel, but U.S. officials said Tehran did not warn Washington and that it was aiming to cause significant damage. . . .
Iranian Foreign Minister Hossein Amirabdollahian said on Sunday that Iran gave neighbouring countries and Israel’s ally the United States 72 hours’ notice it would launch the strikes.
Turkey’s Foreign Ministry said it had spoken to both Washington and Tehran before the attack, adding it had conveyed messages as an intermediary to be sure reactions were proportionate.
“Iran said the reaction would be a response to Israel’s attack on its embassy in Damascus and that it would not go beyond this. We were aware of the possibilities. The developments were not a surprise,” said a Turkish diplomatic source.
Not surprisingly, Biden officials are vehemently denying they had advanced warning according to the Reuters report:
“That is absolutely not true,” the official said. “They did not give a notification, nor did they give any sense of … ‘these will be the targets, so evacuate them.’”
Tehran sent the United States a message only after the strikes began and the intent was to be “highly destructive” said the official, adding that Iran’s claim of a widespread warning may be an attempt to compensate for the lack of any major damage from the attack.
“We received a message from the Iranians as this was ongoing, through the Swiss. This was basically suggesting that they were finished after this, but it was still an ongoing attack. So that was (their) message to us,” the U.S. official said.
Statements from U.S. officials can no longer be accepted as accurate given their established history of lying. This is a “cover-my-ass” denial. Can you imagine the political outrage that would ensue if the Biden team copped to the fact that they had forewarning from Iran? Do you think that the Turkish and Jordanian officials did not communicate to Washington what they had been told? Of course not.
Iran’s attack in the early morning hours of Sunday was symbolic retaliation. The mullahs and IRGC commanders put Israel on notice that any further attacks on Iran, especially Iranian territory, will be answered by Iranian attacks on Israel. Iran demonstrated a remarkably sophisticated attack using three different weapon systems — drones, cruise missiles and ballistic missiles. They did not use their most advanced, sophisticated weaponry.
The drones were used in the same way that pawns are employed in a chess match — draw out the opponent and create vulnerabilities. Israel used up over 700 Iron Dome missiles in countering Iran’s 300 plus drones. Why? You normally fire two Iron Dome missiles per target to ensure a hit. Ditto for the cruise missiles.
What we know for a fact is that most of the ballistic missiles hit their targets in Israel. Here is a video of one of the strikes. Iran demonstrated a remarkably sophisticated capabilitiy — i.e., a maneuverable warhead. Notice that the inbound Iranian missile evades the Israeli interceptor and strikes the target. Wow!!
Scott Ritter summed it up best with this Xwitter (pronounced Shitter):
The U.S. has an advanced AN/TPY-2 X-band radar stationed at Har Qeren, in the Negev desert. Its mission is to detect Iranian missile launches, and pass targeting data to Israeli Arrow and David’s Sling and U.S. THAAD ABM batteries deployed to protect sensitive Israeli sites, including Dimona and the Nevatim and Ramon air bases.
Iranian missiles struck both Nevatim and Ramon air bases. The best surveillance radar in the world, working in concert with the most sophisticated anti-missile defenses in the world, were impotent in the face of the Iranian attack.
For all those trying to spin yesterday’s events as an Israeli victory, chew on that fact: The best missile defense system in the world could not protect the sites they were tasked with protecting from attacks by Iranian missiles.
Who has deterrence supremacy? It ain’t Israel.
I agree with Scott. While Israel and its Western allies proved adept at shooting down slow moving drones, they failed when it came to defeating ballistic missiles armed with a conventional explosive warhead.
We are now in the wait-and-see mode. There are contradictory signals out of Israel. Some insist Israel’s retaliation is imminent. Others suggest there will be no retaliation. I believe Israel is under the control of some genuine crazies and will try to hit an Iranian oil facility or military installation in Iran. When they do that Iran will make good on its promise and will launch a much larger, more devastating attack on Israeli military and intelligence targets. This is a fight Israel cannot win. If it chooses to pursue this course of action it will lead to the unraveling of its military effort to defeat Hamas and rescue any hostages still alive.
I discussed the aftermath of Israel’s attack with the Judge during our regularly scheduled Monday morning chat.
Iran made history yesterday by launching “Operation True Promise”. In our usual style here, let’s cut through all the noise currently clogging up social networks and incisively demonstrate the facts as thoroughly as possible, while also pointing out how this was a game-changing and historic event which has brought Iran onto the world stage in a big way.
Firstly, as establishment, Iran’s stated goal for the operation was to strike back at the bases from which the Israeli consular attack was launched on April 1:
IRGC has listed its objectives for last nights missile attack: Ramon and Nevatim airbases (where attack on Iran Consulate was conducted from). Israeli Air Force intelligence HQ in Tel Aviv (where attack on Iran Consulate was planned) and degrading of Israeli air defence radars and assets.
The footage is of the Intelligence HQ getting hit. I have yet to see evidence of 99% interception. Ramon has been badly hit. Nevatim was hit by more than 7 missiles. Air Force Intelligence HQ completely leveled. Other strikes on air defence installations obviously not close to population centres and out of view but I’m sure sat intel will show extent of damage.
And another:
➖Nevatim Airbase in the south of occupied Palestine
➖Ramon Airbase in the south of occupied Palestine
➖The Israeli top-secret intelligence-spy base in Jabal al-Sheikh (Mount Hermon) in the north of the occupied Golan
It should be noted that the rest of the explosions or hits in other areas of the occupied territories are related to the confrontation of the Israeli air defense systems with the projectiles in the sky or the falling of the wreckage of the interceptor missiles or the wreckage of Iranian missiles.
Now, let’s get down to the nuts and bolts.
This strike was unprecedented for several important reasons. Firstly, it was of course the first Iranian strike on Israeli soil directly from Iranian soil itself, rather than utilizing proxies from Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Yemen, etc. This alone was a big watershed milestone that has opened up all sorts of potentials for escalation.
Secondly, it was one of the most advanced and longest range peer-to-peer style exchanges in history. Even in Russia, where I have noted we’ve seen the first ever truly modern near-peer conflict, with unprecedented scenes never before witnessed like when highly advanced NATO Storm Shadow missiles flew to Crimea while literally in the same moments, advanced Russian Kalibrs flew past them in the opposite direction—such an exchange has never been witnessed before, as we’ve become accustomed to watching NATO pound on weaker, unarmed opponents over the last few decades. But no, last night Iran upped the ante even more. Because even in Russia, such exchanges at least happen directly over the Russian border onto its neighbor, where logistics and ISR is for obvious reasons much simpler.
But Iran did something unprecedented. They conducted the first ever modern, potentially hypersonic, assault on an enemy with SRBMs and MRBMs across a vast multi-domain space covering several countries and timezones, and potentially as much as 1200-2000km.
Additionally, Iran did all this with potentially hypersonic weapons, which peeled back another layer of sophistication that included such things as possible endoatmospheric interception attempts with Israeli Arrow-3 ABM missiles.
But let’s step back for a moment to state that Iran’s operation in general was modeled after the sophisticated paradigm set by Russia in Ukraine: it began with the launch of various types of drones, which included some Shahed-136s (Geran-2 in Russia) as well as others. We can see that from the Israeli-released footage of some of the drone interceptions:
At the 0:49 mark you can see what looks like a Shahed, though it appears similar to the jet-engine-equippedShahed-238 variety.
After a certain pre-timed span, Iran then released cruise missiles so that they could strike roughly in a similar window as the drones. One video from last night confirmed the low-flying cruise missile presence:
It’s not known for certain, but it appears it could be the new Abu Mahdi missile which has the appropriate ~1000km range. Here’s some other possibilities:
Then, following the appropriate time interval, Iran launched the coup de grace, its vaunted ballistic missiles. Here’s Iran’s own released footage of the start of Operation True Promise, which includes the ballistic launches:
As stated, all three layers of the attack were timed to coincide, with the slowest (drones) going first, then next fastest (cruise missiles), followed by the fastest time-to-target, the ballistic missiles.
The U.S. scrambled a large coalition to shoot the threats down, which included the U.S. itself, UK flying from Cyprus, France, and, controversially, Jordan which allowed them all to also use its airspace and even partook in the shoot downs.
Dozens of images proclaimed the “successful” shoot downs of Iranian ballistic missiles, like the following:
The problem is, all of those are the ejected booster stages of two-stage rockets. There is no conclusive proof that any ballistic missiles were shot down, and in fact all the evidence points to the opposite: direct footage of the missiles penetrating the AD net and striking targets. But we’ll get to that.
Missile Types
First: what kinds of ballistic missiles did Iran use?
There are speculations and then there’s what can be dutifully confirmed.
As for the confirmed, with my own eyes from the actual longer released launch video we can see the following:
Which appears to match what is likely the Shahab-3 below:
Here’s another photo from a Shahab-3 test:
In the launch photo, the very top warhead nose cone does appear slightly shorter and may match the Sejjil rocket better. The Sejjil is in fact a much newer evolution of and upgrade to the Shahab that has both a two-stage and three-stage variety for an extremely long range of 2500km+. And some also claim it might be the Ghadr-110, but this is also an evolution and similar ‘upgrade’ of the Shahab-3 system, which likewise looks almost identical.
There are some other launch videos that appear to show possible Zolfagher or the updated Dezfulsystems as well.
Then there is the closest shot of the launch video, which gives us the most accurate confirmation of one of the missile types:
On the fuselage you can see what appears to be EMA written, and the same can be seen on this photo from today of a “downed missile” somewhere in Iraq:
This comes closest to confirming that missile to be an Emad from the chart above, which is one of Iran’s most advanced and can feature a MaRV (Maneuverable Re-entry Vehicle) warhead. This is where it starts getting interesting, because the hits we saw in Israel appeared to potentially utilize some form of MaRV or hypersonic glide vehicle, which would mean Iran could have made history even beyond what we thought.
So let’s get there by first mentioning the other controversial claimthat Iran possibly used its most advanced new hypersonic Fattah-2 system:
In none of the launch videos was this visible, but that doesn’t necessarily preclude Iran having secretly launched and tested some of the above. An Iranian academic stated the following:
“Iran has not fired its hypersonic missiles. In fact, most of the drones and missiles that were fired were older drones and missiles. They were very inexpensive and were used as decoys. So Iran spent a couple of million dollars to force the Israelis to spend $1.3 billion in anti-missile missiles, which was itself a big achievement by the Iranians. And then a number of other missiles that the Iranians fired…cut through and struck their targets,” the academic and geopolitical affairs commentator told Sputnik.
And lastly, there are some experts who believe Iran utilized its elusive hypersonic Kheybar Shekan missile, which also features a highly maneuverable MaRV.
These are two shots from last night’s launch video:
And here is a stock photo of the Kheybar nosecone and warhead:
This is where it gets most interesting, and why I’ve prefaced it so thoroughly.
In short: while Israel and the U.S. claim they shot down 100% of everything, and while it’s possible that the drone and cruise missile lures were mostly shot down—though we have no strong evidence one way or the other—we do have evidence that the ballistic missiles largely went unopposed, slicing through what’s claimed to be the densest air defense in the world. Not only Israel’s itself, comprised of a layered defense of David Slings, Arrow-3s, Patriots, and Iron Dome, but also the aforementioned allied airforces, as well as what’s now been reported to be a U.S. Arleigh Burke warship firing upwards of 70+ SM-3 missiles from the Mediterranean shore.
The hits that we saw were spectacular in one profound way: the terminal velocity of the Iranian ballistic missiles appeared stunningly fast. Let’s review some of the most exemplary videos.
Here’s by far the most revealing one, which totally refutes Israeli claims of 100% shoot downs. Note the massive swarm of air-defense missiles going up at the onset, then at the middle mark, watch as Iranian ballistics crash through the AD net totally unopposed at high speed, slamming into the ground:
As a quick aside, this next video was claimed by many to show Israeli Arrow-3 missiles shooting down Iranian ballistics in the exoatmosphere, i.e. in space:
But in reality, all it shows is the stage separation of the Arrow missiles as they climb toward the exoatmospheric zone. It does not show any actual successful interceptions, nor is there any evidence of a single ballistic missile being shot down.
But here’s where we get down to business. The next video is the most eye-opening in terms of the capabilities of these missiles. The two most important things to note are: 1) the terminal velocity right before impact and 2) note how some of the missiles strike very precisely onto the same location in groups.
First video, note the terminal speed here:
Here note the speed but also the grouping accuracy:
In particular at 0:31 above what looks like a runway on the rightside of the screen can be seen, which could indicate this to be the Nevatim airbase in the Negev desert—where Arabic speaking Bedouins live, which explains the Arabic in the video.
Not all the impacts exhibit the high speed of a potentially hypersonic re-entry vehicle. For instance, this video shows perhaps somewhat slower missiles that nevertheless are easily bypassing the joint Israeli-Western AD net:
But getting back to the hypersonic question. Here’s a video showing one of Iran’s missile tests, which appears to show one of the hypersonic glide vehicle style warheads from the Ghadr missile:
A new video of the moment one of the IRGC’s ballistic missiles was hit during last year’s solar exercise near Chabahar has been released with 60 frames per second, where you can clearly see the impact of the Ghadr missile warhead for the first time. This warhead also has a very good final speed around Mach 7 and will be very strategic. The three-cone body of this cap is completely and severely melted, and you can also see the burning marks on the small parts of this cap in the first frame of entering the frame.
Photo:
The speed appears to coincide with the videos of the faster strikes, and you can see the vehicle looks like it may be glowing white-hot, which could explain the somewhat odd fact that in all the strike videos, the Iranian missiles appear ‘red’ as if they are still burning their engines. But we know most ballistic missiles like the Iskander have a burn-out phase after which the engine stops burning. Thus the red-hot nature of the strikes could potentially indicate not a burning engine, but rather the heat of the vehicle’s outer skin from hypersonic re-entry.
Further, most ballistics strike on a pretty steep or straight down decline, while many of the Iranian hits are on a shallower trajectory which could indicate a glide-style vehicle, though in the above ‘test’ it clearly shows it coming down at a 90 degree angle, so it’s likely capable of both.
That being said, it may not be an unpowered glide vehicle but one of the thrust-capable re-entry vehicles like so:
Unfortunately, we just don’t know the exact details—like construction material for instance—that would allow us to fully confirm its terminal speed. However, based on visual eye-balling, some of the strikes appear to be landing at minimum Mach 3.5-5 if not higher, which according to some, is even higher than Iskander terminal velocity.
That being said, while the Iranian MRBMs feature very complex propulsion systems, given that they are two and even three stage for extra-long range, while Russia and the U.S. lacks these because of their previous adherence to the Intermediate Range Ballistic Missile Treaty, the guidance aspect of Iranian MRBMs remains a question mark. We don’t know how accurate they are, and in the end, how effective the strikes actually were in hitting their targets. That’s because beyond the general macro objective of “hitting Nevatim airbase”, for instance, we don’t know what precisely inside that giant airbase Iran may have targeted.
However, Israel did confirm the base was hit upwards of 7 times, but claims the damage was minor. In fact, they’ve now released footage showing them repairing one of the hit runways:
And some satellite photos have been released showing what appears to be possible strike damage throughout the base:
And another before and after timelapse, though unclear, shows possible damage to a hangar. Keep in mind this is the base which housed F-35s:
Could Israel be downplaying serious damage by releasing the video of a minor runway hole? For instance, they posted another video of an F-35 landing back at Nevatim base as a demonstration that the base is unharmed, but some have alleged that it is old footage:
That’s not to mention the official Israeli account tried to pass off old footage of Russian MLRS launches from Ukraine as Iranian ballistic launches last night:
Thus it’s clear that truth is no obstacle for Israel, which means we certainly cannot take their word on anything regarding last night’s operation.
Conclusion?
What can we conclude about last night? We don’t have any definitive ‘final words’ on how effective Iran’s strikes were because:
We don’t know Iran’s exact granular targets
We don’t know Iran’s exact intentions
For the second, what I mean is that many now believe Iran merely strove to provide a ‘demonstration en force’, as Will Schryver puts it. A show merely as a ‘warning’ to Israel, and to create deterrence from future Israeli escalations. In fact, Iranian officials have now warned that Iran will respond similarly to all future Israeli attacks:
They call this the New Equation. Anytime Israel attacks them, Iran now intends to strike them ‘head on’, i.e. directly from its soil as is their newly demonstrated capability.
Beyond this, Iran broke new ground in setting new milestones for missile technology and modern warfare, as stated in the outset. Iran demonstrated the capacity to bypass the most powerful and advanced anti-missile systems in the world—ones that have no built-in excuse as is the case in Ukraine. In Ukraine, the excuse is that the Patriots and other systems are manned by under-trained Ukrainians, and are not reinforced and integrated as wholly into layered Western systems as they would be in Western hands.
But last night, Iran penetrated every missile shield manned and operated by NATO itself, with all the trappings and advanced C4ISR and SIGINT capabilities inherent to the entire Western alliance; from THAAD, to Patriot, David’s Sling, Arrow-3, SM-3, Iron Dome, and even ‘C-Dome’ from Israeli corvettes—not to mention the entire complement of the West’s most advanced A2A defenses flown from F-35s, Typhoons, Eurofighters, and likely much more.
One must understand that ballistic missiles are precisely the apex predator that these most advanced Western AD systems were created to handle—and last night, they failed spectacularly in the same way the Patriots did in Desert Storm before them:
This sends a signal that Iran is now truly capable of striking any of the most high profile, high value targets of the West’s, in the entire sphere of the Middle East, within a radius of 2000-4000km. That is a significant capability that dwarfs even anything Russia or the U.S. itself is capable of in the same efficient way. Sure, Russia can send Avangards (very few, and highly expensive) and far slower long range cruise missiles, but due to the Treaty, no other country can match Iran’s cheap and immediate ballistic missile capability. The U.S. would have to send up a load of slow planes and do the traditional long range stand off attacks with slow munitions to hit targets at such distances.
As I said, the only question that remains is still of effectiveness by way of accuracy. It’s one thing to develop long range rockets via the luxury of a two-stage allowance, but there’s far more technology that goes into making such objects critically accurate—and I suspect here Iran may fall short of Russia and the U.S.’ capabilities, given that there’s a whole host of special electronics (signal boosting, EW reflecting, etc.) and guidance redundancies that are required for extreme accuracy. This is where Russia’s systems shine. Iran’s missiles have been shown to be quite accurate during tests in Iran under ideal conditions—but in highly contested EW environments, when the GPS/Beidou/Glonass signals are jammed, it could be a completely different story. Furthermore, the science behind signal retention in hypersonic plasma bubbles is quite extreme and no country has yet even proven the capability to consistently do this—but we won’t get into that for now, as I may cover that in an upcoming article focusing on the Russian Zircon.
The optics of seeing Iranian missiles flying over the Israeli Knesset surely sends chills down Israel’s spine because it states: we could have easily destroyed your Knesset, and much else, but we chose to be lenient, for now:
Who came out the winner?
There are now two chief competing ‘takes’ on the situation.
One says that Iran was ‘humiliated’ as Israel intercepted everything, and more importantly, that Iran has now blown its only advantage of surprise and strategic uncertainty/ambiguity by ‘showing its hand’ and not achieving much. They argue that Iran’s one true advantage over Israel was the threat that it could effect a mass launch of its feared ballistic missiles, wiping out huge swathes of Israel. But now that the perceived ‘damage’ from the attack was low, Iran has shown itself to be weaker than expected, which could imbue Israel with even more courage and motivation to continue striking and provoking Iran, as they might see they have nothing to fear from Iran’s long-touted missiles.
This is certainly a reasonable argument. I’m not saying it’s totally wrong—we simply don’t know for a fact because of the aforementioned reasons that:
We don’t actually know how much damage the strikes caused, due to Israel’s obvious lies of “100% interceptions” and disproved fakes.
We don’t know whether it was merely Iran’s goal to do a ‘light’ showing in the interest of ‘escalation management’. I.e. they may not have wanted to cause too much damage deliberately, simply to send a message but keep from provoking Israel to respond too aggressively.
Iran is said to have thousands of such missiles, so obviously having launched only 70+ or so is likely not indicative of a major attack tasked with actually causing serious destruction to Israeli infrastructure.
Then there’s the converse side: Iran came out the big winner by demonstrating all the previously-outlined abilities of bypassing the West’s densest AD shields.
Here’s why I think in some ways this conclusion to be the more correct in the long term.
Firstly, one of the common counterarguments is that Israel possesses nuclear weapons, which ultimately trumps anything Iran can throw at them. But in reality, now that Iran has proven the ability to penetrate Israel, Iran too can cause nuclear devastation by striking the Israeli Dimona nuclear power plant. Destroyed nuclear plants would produce far more radioactive chaos than the relatively ‘clean’ modern nuclear weapons. Furthermore, Israel is much smaller than the comparatively gigantic Iran. Iran can take many nuclear hits and survive; but a single mass nuclear event in Israel could irradiate the entire country, making it uninhabitable.
Secondly, recall the main fear of Iraqi Scarabs and Scuds back in the day: that they could contain chemical/biological warheads. Iran too could technically load its missiles with all kinds of nasty goodies of this sort: either chem-bio or even unenriched Uranium—which it has aplenty—to create a ‘dirty bomb’. Now that we know it can penetrate Israel easily, Iran could actually wipe the country out with a mass un-enriched nuclear, chemical, or biological attack with these now-proven hyper- or quasi-hypersonic ballistics. That threat alone now presents a psychological Damocles Sword that will act as asymmetrical deterrent or counter to any Israeli Samson Option threat.
Thirdly, this was Iran’s very first foray into such a direct strike. It can be argued that they gained critical data and metrics from the entire Western alliance’s defensive capabilities as well as Israeli defensive vulnerabilities. This means that there is an implied threat that any future attack of this scale could be far more effective, as Iran may now ‘calibrate’ said attack to maximize what it saw were any failings or weaknesses on its part last night. Russia has had two years of launching such strikes, and it has only been semi-recently that they’ve calibrated and finetuned the precise timings of the sophisticated multi-layered drone-ALCM-ballistic triple threat attack. Iran can improve with each iteration as well and maximize/streamline the effectiveness with each attempt.
Fourthly, there is the now-confirmed mass discrepancy of operational costs:
Israel’s defense of last night’s Iranian missile and drone attack is estimated to have costed over $1.3 billion in jet fuel, surface-to-air missile interceptors, air-to-air missiles, and other military equipment utilized by the Israeli air defense array; with an “Arrow 3” hypersonic anti-ballistic missile alone believed to cost between $5-20 million.
One unconfirmed source claimed Iran’s attack cost as little as $30M, while the number floated for the West’s interceptions is around $1B to $1.3B.
Given that the average interceptor missile is minimum from about $1M to upwards of $15-20M for the SM-6s, this total price is plausible. Given that Iran was said to have fired a total of ~350+ drones/missiles, and that the standard procedure is to fire 2 interceptors at each threat, one can clearly see the math: 350 x 2 = 700 x $1-15M.
The point is that, just as we’re in the midst of the Houthis having proven the West’s total inability to sustain defense against mass persistent drone swarms, here too Iran may have just proven an absolutely lethal inability of Israel and the West to sustain against a potential long drawn-out Iranian strike campaign; i.e. one prosecuted over the course of days or weeks, with consistent daily mass-barrages. Such a campaign would likely critically deplete the West’s ability to shoot down even the lowest scale Shahed drone threat. Just look at Ukraine—it is going through the same lesson as we speak.
Lastly, what does this mean?
One neglected consequence of this is that Iran now stands to field the ability to totally disrupt Israel’s economic way of life. If Iran were to engage in a committed campaign of mass strikes, it could totally paralyze the Israeli economy by making entire areas uninhabitable, causing mass migrations in the same way the Hamas attack led thousands of Israelis to flee.
Unlike Israel’s barbaric and savage genocide aimed primarily at civilians, last night’s Iranian attack exclusively targeted military sites. But if Iran wanted to, they could launch mass infrastructure attacks in the way Russia has now done to Ukraine’s energy grids, further compounding the economic damage. In short: Iran could mire Israel in months’ and years’ long economic malaise or outright devastation.
Don’t forget this attack was still relatively limited to Iran alone. Sure, the Houthis and even Kata’ib Hezbollah reportedly sent a few drones, but it was minor. That means in the future, should Israel choose to escalate, Iran still reserves several levels of its own escalatory advantage. If push came to shove, imagine Hezbollah, Ansar Allah, Hamas, Syria, and Iran all launching full-fledged attacks on Israel in all out war. Maybe that’s what Israel wants, some would argue. After all, there are echoes of the various Arab-Israeli wars where Israel ‘triumphed’ against such large Arab coalitions. But times have changed, the calculus is slightly different now. Short of using nuclear weapons, how would Israel survive a full-scale war against Hezbollah in the north while Iran rains daily barrages of hypersonic missiles, drones, and everything in between on Israel’s industries, crippling its economy?
Of course, at that point the question of the U.S. coming to help is brought up, but, clearly desperate for an off-ramp, Biden just stated:
An Important Overlooked Point
The final aspect for consideration is to remember that all of the preceding and ensuing events could very well be part of the Israeli plan. Recall, Israel didn’t choose to blow up the Iranian embassy—a huge, unprecedented maneuver—and slaughter Iranian generals just for its health. This appeared part of a clear strategy of escalation aimed at baiting Iran into an escalatory spiral, presumably with the end goal of drawing the U.S. into a large scale war to cut down Iran once and for all.
In light of that, some experts now speculate that Iran foolishly “fell into the trap”. However, as stated earlier, Iran can be said to have wisely ‘managed’ the escalation for precisely this reason: to show its strength while not going too far in a way that would invite a wider American response—or even an Israeli one for that matter.
But I simply mention this to temper any ‘celebratory’ touts from the resistance sphere. While Iran’s strikes may inspire some chest-beating chauvinism, in reality it may very well have played into Israel’s hand. However, the U.S.’ unwillingness to support Israel into further escalation could very well deflate Netanyahu’s goals and simply leave Israel with egg on its face with Iran coming out the winner in the exchange.
We’ll have to wait and see where it leads: as of this writing, the story has changed three separate times; the last two being that Israel decided not to respond, with news now claiming that Israel not only has chosen to retaliate, but will even do so as early as tonight, perhaps within minutes or hours of this publication’s release. If that turns out to be the case, then we’ll have to see if Israel chooses its own ‘face-saving’ off-ramp ‘light touch’ attack just for damage control’s sake, or whether it truly aims to keep climbing that escalatory ladder in force. Any major action without American backing is risky: not only because it could fail, and Israeli planes could be shot down, but also because Iran could make good on its word and unleash another far more devastating attack.
Final Thoughts
Why now? Why did Israel bait Iran into such an action at this precise moment?
The clue to the answer lies in the news from several days ago that Israel totally withdrew its forces from Khan Younis:
I suspect that Israel—or Netanyahu in particular—is facing failure, after not having accomplished any of the stated objectives, and thus is desperate to create a new distraction as a vector for continuing the war in some way that could keep the world, and Israelis, from reaching the conclusion that the war has been totally lost.
We’ve lost. Truth must be told. The inability to admit it encapsulates everything you need to know about Israel’s individual and mass psychology. There’s a clear, sharp, predictable reality that we should begin to fathom, to process, to understand and to draw conclusions from for the future. It’s no fun to admit that we’ve lost, so we lie to ourselves.
Some of us maliciously lie. Others innocently. It would be better to find solace in some airy carb with a total-victory crust. But it might just be a bagel. When the solace ends, the hole remains. There’s no way around it. The good guys don’t always win.
The astonishing article, which jibes with the sentiments of many Israelis, goes on:
After half a year, we could have been in a totally different place, but we’re being held hostage by the worst leadership in the country’s history – and a decent contender for the title of worst leadership anywhere, ever. Every military undertaking is supposed to have a diplomatic exit – the military action should lead to a better diplomatic reality. Israel has no diplomatic exit.
The article concludes that the calculus has changed, and that Israelis may now never be able to return to the northern border, given the situation with Hezbollah.
Another classic line:
No cabinet minister will restore our sense of personal security. Every Iranian threat will make us tremble. Our international standing was dealt a beating. Our leadership’s weakness was revealed to the outside. For years we managed to fool them into thinking we were a strong country, a wise people and a powerful army. In truth, we’re a shtetl with an air force, and that’s on the condition that its awakened in time.
The author then focuses his condemnation on the upcoming ‘Rafah operation’:
Rafah is the newest bluff that the mouthpieces are plying to fool us and make us think that victory is just moments away. By the time they enter Rafah, the actual event will have lost its significance. There may be an incursion, perhaps a tiny one, sometime – say in May. After that, they’ll peddle the next lie, that all we have to do is ________ (fill in the blank), and victory will be on its way. The reality is that the war’s aims will not be achieved. Hamas will not be eradicated. The hostages will not be returned through military pressure. Security will not be reestablished.
In short: this is why Netanyahu needed an escalation. It’s to divert attention from the ongoing catastrophe of Israel’s potential defeat to Hamas, the catastrophic loss of standing of Israel’s image in the world community, the complete turning against Israel by the entire world. Rather than admit defeat and face the end of his career, as well as the coming trials and tribunals that would put Bibi in jail, he chose to take the only remaining option: to continue escalating in the hopes that a wider-scale war could wash away his sins and undo the past mistakes. Unfortunately, just like the ill-fated Zelensky, Netanyahu’s doomed plan appears destined to coincide with the U.S.’ historic decline, reaching its zenith now in this pivotal year of 2024.
At the critical moment when Israel needed the strongest possible America, they got the weakest America in its history. That is Israel’s blunder, which may be its ultimate, calamitous undoing. But Bibi will likely have no choice but to continue escalating, or at least keep a strategy of tension a constant presence in order to survive.
Only last quick postscript note is to say that the ensuing events could affect the Ukrainian aid bill, as there is now talk of ramming through an emergency Israeli aid package, in light of events, which could have Ukrainian aid attached; but we’ll have to see what happens, as there is still strong opposition among some Republicans.
Does anyone in Washington care about Israel’s crimes?
• 2,400 WORDS •
One expects that anyone involved in politics will lie whenever they think they can get away with it to burnish one’s own image and while also distorting reality to promote policies that are being favored. Nevertheless, the record of high crimes committed by a series of presidents and their top aides since the so-called “war on terror” began has established a new low for government veracity. One would have thought that the fake intelligence fabricated by a group of Zionists in the Pentagon and White House to launch the misadventures in Afghanistan and Iraq would be as bad as it could possibly get, but the Joe Biden team has outdone even those unfortunately unindicted criminals by allowing itself to be maneuvered by friends in NATO and by Israel into situations that are one step short of nuclear war.
Listening to John Kirby, Lloyd Austin, and Linda Thomas-Greenfield speak suggests that a course of remedial English might be in order as they cannot articulate a sentence that is coherent, especially as they are frequently lying or being deliberately evasive. And then there is teleprompter Joe himself who can pout over the killing of 13,000 children in Palestine while also secretly sending weapons to the Israelis who are eager to slaughter still more based on the judgement that they will grow up to be “terrorists.” Joe’s idea of a exchange of views with the Israeli government is a threat to maybe do something unspecific followed by a strongly worded message from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu telling him to “Go to hell!”
Joe’s gang cannot confirm that the Israelis are committing war crimes linked to genocide even though the rest of the world, including a majority of Americans, watch it happening on television and are convinced regarding what is taking place. But hey, Israel is a wonderful little democracy and America’s best friend and ally in the whole wide world. Or at least that is what Congress and the White House as well as the Jewish dominated media want you to believe. In reality, Israel is a racist and sectarian state that has been a US liability since it was founded, something that Secretary of State George Marshall warned about, but Harry Truman wanted Jewish money so he could get reelected. Some things never change as we watch Biden and Trump battle for the shekels by pledging their loyalty to Israel.
The latest wrinkle on the consequences of loving Israel so much comes with what it going on with Iran, which had its Embassy Consulate General building in Damascus Syria attacked by Israeli fighter planes, killing two senior Iranian generals plus a number of other Iranians, Lebanese and Syrians. For what it’s worth, embassies and consulates are generally speaking regarded as untouchable military targets under the terms of the Vienna Convention, which sought to keep enemies talking to each other even under the most adverse circumstances. In fact, Syria last fought Israel in 1973, more than fifty years ago, and has not gone to war with the Israelis since that time while Israel has been bombing Syria regularly as well as killing Iranian officials and scientists for many years. Iran, like Syria of late, has never attacked Israel.
Iran has said it will retaliate and Israel has gone on high alert. So what does Biden do? He warned Iran to back off and ignores the fact that it was Israel that did the unprovoked attacking and started the whole business and pledges “ironclad” support for the Jewish state if Iran dares to do anything serious in response. There are also reports that Israel and the US are planning jointly their possible retaliation if Iran were to strike. General Erik Kurilla, commander of the US Central Command, is now on his way to Israel and is expected to meet Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant and senior Israel Defense Forces officials to coordinate possible US responses with those of Israel. Nota bene that President Biden has flipped the right or wrong of the entire affair over to do exactly what Israel wants, i.e. hopefully have the US go to war with the Iranians. This has been Netanyahu’s intention right from the beginning and there is also a bit of blackmail thrown in for good measure with Israel threatening to start using its secret nuclear arsenal if the United States stops supplying the Jewish state with weapons. Israeli Knesset member Nissim Vaturi, a representative in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s ruling Likud party, issued the threat in an unsubtle way while discussing the probability that Iran would retaliate against Israel for bombing its embassy. He said “In the event of a conflict with Iran, if we do not receive American ammunition … we will have to use everything we have.” In other words, Israel will have no choice but to start dropping nuclear weapons on its enemies and might also attack its friends who failed to support it, a reference to the Samson Option in which a beleaguered Israel would use its nukes to “take everyone down with them.”
The timing of the embassy attack suggests that Israel is acting as it does, i.e. taking steps to shift the narrative and restore its perpetual “victimhood,” because it definitely needs a public relations boost in a world where only the US and a few other nations aligned with Washington are not yet ready to give up on Bibi and his wild plans for regional domination. The horrific killing of hundreds of Palestinians in the Al-Shifa hospital in Gaza as well as the targeted assassination of seven employees of a charity that was bringing in food to those starving due to Israel’s blocking the entry of relief supplies have been the top stories all over the world, and rightly so. The Israeli disdain for any behavior that might show weakness in the drive to remove the Palestinians from Palestine has resulted in the Jewish state’s being condemned and boycotted by much of the world with more to come.
Nevertheless, even in those countries that have made illegal pro-Palestinian expressions, demonstrations calling for a ceasefire have attracted hundreds of thousands of protesters. The governments confronting elections later this year, including the US and Germany, are under considerable pressure to respond to the popular sentiment. Indeed, it is already being mooted that President Joe Biden might well fail to be re-elected due to his kid gloves handling of Netanyahu who has assessed Biden’s weakness and has heedlessly taken US support as a given while also ignoring the warnings that are now coming out of Washington and elsewhere over the genocide taking place.
Indeed, it would be useful to speculate that the conflict in Gaza is in part being used as a smokescreen for developments with Iran and other Israeli neighbors that may prove more dangerous in the long run. Even the well-informed might be surprised to learn that even though Israel is not actually at war legally with several of its neighbors, it is nevertheless de facto at war with three countries, Lebanon, Syria and Iran. It has been exchanging fire with the Lebanese Hezbollah militias on its northern border on an almost daily basis since fighting with Hamas began in October and has sought and apparently obtained US guarantees of direct support should Hezbollah escalate its activity. In Syria, which has not in any way attacked Israel, the Israeli air and missile forces have staged numerous attacks against targets that it invariably claims to be “Iranian” even though most of the casualties are Syrians. There have been missile and bombing attacks on Syria nearly weekly since 2017, including a number of recent incidents involving both Damascus and Aleppo international airports that endangered civilian passengers and air crews.
As reported above, the most recent and most damaging attack was directed against the Iranian Consulate General, which was attached to the Iranian Embassy located in an upscale neighborhood in Damascus, Syria’s capital. The building was completely destroyed by six missiles fired from F-35 fighter planes that had crossed over the Syrian border from Israel, killing several long-serving diplomats alongside Brigadier General Mohammad Reza Zahedi and Zahedi’s deputy, General Haji Rahimi. It was also reported that Brigadier General Hossein Amirollah, the chief of general staff for the al-Quds force in Syria and Lebanon, was among the victims as was at least one Hezbollah member. Sources in Syria confirmed that a total of 13 people were killed in the attack, including six Syrians. Iran’s foreign minister, Hossein Amir-Abdollahian, said afterwards that “We consider this aggression to have violated all diplomatic norms and international treaties. Benjamin Netanyahu has completely lost his mental balance due to the successive failures in Gaza and his failure to achieve his Zionist goals.” Both Iran and Hezbollah vowed revenge.
And just days before the attack on the Iranian consulate in Damascus, the Israeli military had launched massive strikes against a target in Syria’s northern province of Aleppo which killed at least 40 people, most of them soldiers. The air strikes hit a weapons depot, resulting in a series of explosions that also killed six Hezbollah fighters.
The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) subsequently revealed that it had strengthened air defenses and called up reservists in expectation of a response either from Lebanon or directly from Iran itself. Zahedi was an important Iranian official, reportedly responsible for the IRGC’s operations in Syria and Lebanon, for Iranian militias there, and for ties with Hezbollah, and was thus the most senior commander of Iranian forces in the two countries. His killing was the most significant death of a senior Iranian official since the murder in Baghdad of General Qassim Soleimani by the Trump Administration in January 2020. As the IRGC is a US-designated terrorist organization, Washington may have in advance approved of the Israeli action, though that was denied by the Pentagon.
Iran’s possible reprisal includes the capability to respond by directly launching missiles from its own territory rather than via any of its proxy groups, which include the militias it supports in Lebanon, Iraq and Yemen. Responding to that possibility, Israeli Minister of Foreign Affairs Israel Katz has warned on social media that if Tehran attacked from its territory, Israel would react and “attack in Iran.” Iran may therefore choose to respond indirectly or through a proxy, but any major reprisal would be giving Israel an excuse to elevate the conflict, which just might be the main reason for the attack on the Consulate General in the first place. It is, however, widely believed that the Iranian leadership is eager to avoid any escalation into a major or even a minor exchange that could be referred to as a war. Nevertheless, posters have gone up around Tehran in a sign of public pressure for an Iranian response. “The defeat of the Zionist regime in Gaza will continue and this regime will be close to decline and dissolution,” Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said in a speech to the country’s officials in Tehran. “Desperate efforts like the one they committed in Syria will not save them from defeat. Of course, they will also be slapped for that action,” he added.
Israeli Defense Minister Gallant responded to the Ayatollah, saying that Israel is “increasing preparedness” in the face of threats from all across the Middle East. Gallant said that the country’s defense establishment is “expanding our operations against Hezbollah, against other bodies that threaten us,” and reiterated that Israel “strikes our enemies all over the Middle East… We will know how to protect the citizens of Israel and we will know how to attack our enemies.”
Intelligence sources in Washington suggest that Iran will try to respond by possibly blowing up an Israeli Embassy or other building, or even by assassinating an Israeli official, but they will more likely do something indirectly through a proxy like Hezbollah or the Houthis. They could also send a more subtle message by accelerating their nuclear program, though there is a danger that that would definitely bring the US into the game, which is precisely what Israel would like to see. They want to cripple Iran but would much prefer that all the heavy lifting – and the casualties and costs – be endured by Washington. If a US intervention were to occur and there were a misstep, it could easily escalate into a regional war with Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and Iran all lined up against the US and Israel with China and Russia likely to be playing a supporting role aiding the Arabs and Iranians. And don’t forget that Israel is nuclear armed. If it gets in trouble it would see itself as a victim and would be tempted to do something very dangerous.
So it is easy to see that Israel has staged a deliberate provocation to draw Washington into its wars. It is playing with fire in an attempt to once and for all establish its dominance over all of its neighbors. Interestingly, the tone deaf Biden Administration appears to be falling into the trap set by the Israelis. Beyond the “ironclad” pledge, it also voted against a Russian and Chinese drafted UN Security Council resolution to condemn the Israeli attack on the Iranian Consulate General. The vote should have been a no brainer given the clear violation of international law and act of war committed by Israel in doing what it did, but the US was joined by Britain and France in casting the veto vote “no” reportedly after “Diplomats said the US told council colleagues that many of the facts of what happened on Monday in Damascus remained unclear.” It all means that Biden is stepping in it yet again in a situation where Netanyahu is in control and running circles around him.
ZURICH—“Technological change, while it helps humanity meet the challenges nature imposes upon us, leads to a paradigm shift: It leaves us less capable, not more, of using our intellectual capacities. It diminishes our minds in the long run. We strive to improve ourselves while risking a regression to the Stone Age if our ever more complex, ever more fragile technological infrastructure collapses.”
That is Hans Köchler, an eminent Viennese scholar and president of the International Progress Organization, a globally active think tank, addressing an audience here last Thursday evening, April 4. The date is significant: The day before Köchler spoke, +972 Magazine and Local Call, independent publications in Israel–Palestine, reported that as the Israel Defense Forces press their savage invasion of the Gaza Strip, they deploy an artificial intelligence program called Lavender that so far has marked some 37,000 Palestinians as kill targets. In the early weeks of the Israeli siege, according to the Israeli sources +972 cites, “the army gave sweeping approval for officers to adopt Lavender’s kill lists, with no requirement to thoroughly check why the machine made those choices or to examine the raw intelligence data on which they were based.”
Chilling it was to hear Köchler speak a couple of news cycles after +972 published these revelations, which are based on confidential interviews with six Israeli intelligence officers who have been directly involved in the use of AI to target Palestinians for assassination. “To use technologies to solve all our problems reduces our ability to make decisions,” Köchler asserted. “We’re no longer able to think through problems. They remove us from real life.”
Köchler titled his talk “The Trivialization of Public Space,” and his topic, broadly stated, was the impact of technologies such as digital communications and AI on our brains, our conduct, and altogether our humanity. It was sobering, to put the point mildly, to recognize that Israel’s siege of Gaza, bottomlessly depraved in itself, is an in-our-faces display of the dehumanizing effects these technologies have on all who depend on them.
Let us look on in horror, and let us see our future in it.
We see in the IDF, to make this point another way, a rupture in morality, human intelligence, and responsibility when human oversight is mediated by the algorithms that run AI systems. There is a break between causality and result, action and consequence. And this is exactly what advanced technologies have in store for the rest of humanity. Artificial intelligence, as Köchler put it, is not intelligence: “It is ‘simulated intelligence’ because it has no consciousness of itself.” It isn’t capable, he meant to say, of moral decision-making or ethical accountability.
In the Lavender case, the data it produced were accepted and treated as if they had been generated by a human being without any actual human oversight or independent verification. A second AI system, sadistically named “Where’s Daddy?”—and how sick is this?—was then used to track Hamas suspects to their homes. The IDF intentionally targeted suspected militants while they were with their families, using unguided missiles or “dumb” bombs. This strategy had the advantage of enabling Israel to preserve its more expensive precision-guided weapons, or “smart” bombs.
As one of +972’s sources told the magazine:
We were not interested in killing [Hamas] operatives only when they were in a military building or engaged in a military activity… . On the contrary, the IDF bombed them in homes without hesitation, as a first option. It’s much easier to bomb a family’s home. The system is built to look for them in these situations.
Once Lavender identified a potential suspect, IDF operatives had about 20 seconds to verify that the target was a male before making the decision to strike. There was no other human analysis of the “raw intelligence data.” The information generated by Lavender was treated as if it was “an order,” sources told +972—an official order to kill. Given the strategy of targeting suspects in their homes, the IDF assigned acceptable kill ratios for its bombing campaigns: 20 to 30 civilians for each junior-level Hamas operative. For Hamas leaders with the rank of battalion or brigade commander, +972’s sources said, “the army on several occasions authorized the killing of more than 100 civilians in the assassination of a single commander.”
In other words, Israeli policy, guided and assisted by AI technology, made it inevitable that thousands of civilians, many of them women and children, would be killed.
There appears to be no record of any other military deploying AI programs such as Lavender and Where’s Daddy? But it is sheer naïveté to assume this diabolic use of advanced technologies will not spread elsewhere. Israel is already the world’s leading exporter of surveillance and digital forensic tools. Anadolu, Turkey’s state-run news agency, reported as far back as February that Israel is using Gaza as a weapons-testing site so that it can market these tools as battle-tested. Antony Lowenstein, an author Anadolu quotes, calls this the marketing of “automated murder.”
And here we find ourselves: Haaretz, the Israeli daily, reported on April 5 that “intelligent” weapons proven effective in Gaza were major attractions when Israel marketed them last month at the Singapore Airshow, East Asia’s biggest arms bazaar.
Hans Köchler, who has studied the impact of digital technologies for many years, did not seem to have read the +972 Magazine report before he spoke here last week. This made his remarks all the more disturbing. He was not describing—not specifically—the murderers operating Lavender and other such technologies in Gaza. We will all live and die by these Faustian technologies: This, our common fate, was Köchler’s topic. Over the past six months, this is to say, Israel has announced the dehumanization that awaits all of us in that AI systems are technologies against which we have little defense. “Self-determination gives way to digital competence,” Köchler said. “We can’t distinguish between virtual reality and reality.”
Along with the +972 report on the use of AI came others in a week notable for its stomach-churning news of Israeli depravity. In its April 3 editions The Guardian revealed that the IDF intentionally deploys snipers and quadcopters—remotely controlled sniper drones—to target children. The evidence of this comes from U.S. and Canadian doctors who, while serving in Gaza, treat many children with wounds consistent with and easily identified as caused by snipers’ bullets. These are larger than the ammunition generally used in combat because they are intended to kill rather than wound.
The Biden regime never addresses these barbaric developments, and our corporate media, with rare exceptions such as The Guardian piece just cited, tell us almost nothing of them. Official and media accounts of events in Gaza, their “narratives,” are utterly at odds with these realities. How, we are left to ask, do they get away with these day-in, day-out dishonesties? This was the obvious question last week, given the extremes to which the IDF’s criminality now extends.
If you Google “Lavender” and “The New York Times,” you get “Lavender Oil Might Help You Sleep” and similarly frivolous headlines. Neither has The Times made any mention of the +972 investigation. If you read detailed accounts of the April 1 air attacks on the World Central Kitchen’s three food-delivery vehicles, which killed seven aid workers, it is inescapable that the Israeli military systematically targeted them, one truck to the next, until all three were destroyed—this after WCK had carefully coordinated its deployment of the vehicles with Israeli authorities. These killings are entirely in line with the directive Yoav Gallant, Israel’s repulsive defense minister, issued Oct. 9: “There will be no electricity, no food, no water, no fuel, everything will be closed.”
And what did we read of this incident in mainstream media?
Per usual, the Israeli military was authorized to investigate the Israeli military—an absurdity no U.S. official and no media account questioned. On April 5 the IDF announced that two officers were dismissed and three other reprimanded for “mishandling critical information.” President Biden declared he was “heartbroken.” The New York Times called the attack “a botched operation,” explaining that the IDF’s top officers “were forced to admit to a string of lethal mistakes and misjudgments.” Over and over we hear the refrain that Israel “is not doing enough to protect civilians.”
So it was a regrettable accident, we are led to conclude. Israel is doing its best. It has all along done its best. Put this against the raw statistic: The IDF has killed more than 220 humanitarian workers since it began its siege last October, to go by the U.N.’s count. How can one possibly believe that these were 220–plus accidents? “Let’s be very clear. This is not an anomaly,” an Oxfam official, Scott Paul, said after the WCK attack. “The killing of aid workers in Gaza has been systemic.”
There is reality and there is meta-reality, a term I have used previously in this space. How do the two stand side-by-side? How does the latter, the conjured “reality,” prove so efficacious? How do so many accept the 220–plus-accidents “narrative?” Why, more broadly, do so many accept propaganda and lies when they know, subliminally, they are constantly fed lies and propagandized?
I go back once again to Hans Köchler. In his speech and in various of his many books, he argues that electronic media—television chief among these—have conditioned people to rely for information on pictures and images instead of reading. “They lose the ability to analyze text, and so the ability to understand problems,” he said here. “People come to live in virtual worlds.”
We cannot think of a better description of the “narratives” advanced by the Biden regime and disseminated in corporate media: They present us with a virtual world—fully aware that, our minds habituated to pictures and images, most of us will mistake this virtual world for reality, just as Köchler warns. As a member of the audience here put it, “How is it possible to watch a genocide in real time and no one says anything? Knowledge no longer has any value. Anything goes, and if anything goes, nothing goes.”
The Biden regime supplies Israel with weaponry to prosecute its criminal siege of Gaza’s 2.3 million Palestinians. It gives the apartheid state diplomatic cover at the United Nations and legal cover at the International Court of Justice. It distorts and obscures the IDF’s “Stone Age” conduct. All of this requires us to speak now not of Israel’s genocide but of the Israeli–U.S. genocide.
But the Biden regime is culpable in inflicting these multiple wounds on humanity in one other dimension we must not miss. With its incessant attempts to suspend us in a virtual reality of its making, distant from what it is doing in our names, it leads us into the dehumanized, grotesquely technologized future Köchler describes just as surely as the Israelis do as they murder human beings wholesale with AI weapons and kill innocent children with remotely controlled sniper drones.
The isolation of Gaza is almost complete. The laws of war have been torn up and the enclave is now completely at Israel’s mercy
After six months – and many tens of thousands of dead and maimed Palestinian women and children later – western commentators are finally wondering whether something may be amiss with Israel’s actions in Gaza.
Three missiles, fired over several minutes, struck vehicles in a World Central Kitchen (WCK) aid convoy heading up Gaza’s coast on one of the few roads still passable after Israel turned the enclave’s homes and streets into rubble. All the vehicles were clearly marked. All were on an approved, safe passage. And the Israeli military had been given the coordinates to track the convoy’s location.
With precise missile holes through the vehicle roofs making it impossible to blame Hamas for the strike, Israel was forced to admit responsibility. Its spokespeople claimed an armed figure had been seen entering the storage area from which the aid convoy had departed.
But even that feeble, formulaic response could not explain why the Israeli military hit cars in which it was known there were aid workers. So Israel hurriedly promised to investigate what Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu described as a “tragic incident”.
Presumably, it was a “tragic incident” just like the 15,000-plus other “tragic incidents” – the ones we know about – that Israel has committed against Palestinian children day after day for six months.
In those cases, of course, western commentators always managed to produce some rationalisation for the slaughter.
Not this time.
‘This has to stop’
Half a year too late, with Gaza’s entire medical infrastructure wrecked by Israel and a population on the brink of starvation, Britain’s Independent newspaper suddenly found its voice to declare decisively on its front page: “Enough.”
Richard Madeley, host of Good Morning Britain, finally felt compelled to opine that Israel had carried out an “execution” of the foreign aid workers. Presumably, 15,000 Palestinian children were not executed, they simply “died”.
When it came to the killing of WCK staff, popular LBC talk-show host Nick Ferrari concluded that Israel’s actions were “indefensible”. Did he think it defensible for Israel to bomb and starve Gaza’s children month after month?
Like the Independent, he too proclaimed: “This has to stop.”
The attack on the WCK convoy briefly changed the equation for the western media. Seven dead aid workers were a wake-up call when many tens of thousands of dead, maimed and orphaned Palestinian children had not been.
A salutary equation indeed.
British politicians reassured the public that Israel would carry out an “independent investigation” into the killings. That is, the same Israel that never punishes its soldiers even when their atrocities are televised. The same Israel whose military courts find almost every Palestinian guilty of whatever crime Israel chooses to accuse them of, if it allows them a trial.
But at least the foreign aid workers merited an investigation, however much of a foregone conclusion the verdict. That is more than the dead children of Gaza will ever get.
Israel’s playbook
British commentators appeared startled by the thought that Israel had chosen to kill the foreigners working for World Central Kitchen – even if those same journalists still treat tens of thousands of dead Palestinians as unfortunate “collateral damage” in a “war” to “eradicate Hamas”.
But had they been paying closer attention, these pundits would understand that the murder of foreigners is not exceptional. It has been central to Israel’s occupation playbook for decades – and helps explain what Israel hopes to achieve with its current slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza.
Back in the early 2000s, Israel was on another of its rampages, wrecking Gaza and the West Bank supposedly in “retaliation” for Palestinians having had the temerity to rise up against decades of military occupation.
Shocked by the brutality, a group of foreign volunteers, a significant number of them Jewish, ventured into these areas to witness and document the Israeli military’s crimes and act as human shields to protect Palestinians from the violence.
They arrived under the mantle of the International Solidarity Movement (ISM), a Palestinian-led initiative. They were keen to use what were then new technologies such as digital cameras, email and blogs to focus attention on the Israeli military’s atrocities.
Some became a new breed of activist journalist, embedded in Palestinian communities to report the story western establishment journalists, embedded in Israel, never managed to cover.
Israel presented the ISM as a terrorist group and dismissed its filmed documentation as “Pallywood” – a supposedly fiction-producing industry equated to a Palestinian Hollywood.
Gaza isolated
But the ISM’s evidence increasingly exposed the “most moral army in the world” for what it really was: a criminal enterprise there to enforce land thefts and the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians.
Israel needed to take firmer action.
The evidence suggests soldiers received authorisation to execute foreigners in the occupied territories. That included young activists such as Rachel Corrie and Tom Hurndall; James Miller, an independent filmmaker who ventured into Gaza; and even a United Nations official, Iain Hook, based in the West Bank.
This rapid spate of killings – and the maiming of many other activists – had the intended effect. The ISM largely withdrew from the occupied territories to protect its volunteers. Meanwhile, Israel formally banned the ISM from accessing the occupied territories.
Meanwhile, Israel denied press credentials to any journalist not sponsored by a state or a billionaire-owned outlet, kicking them out of the region.
Al Jazeera, the one critical Arab channel whose coverage reached western audiences, found its journalists regularly banned or killed, and its offices bombed.
The battle to isolate the Palestinians, freeing Israel to commit atrocities unmonitored, culminated in Israel’s now 17-year blockade of Gaza. It was sealed off.
With the enclave completely besieged by land, human rights activists focused their efforts on breaking the blockade via the high seas. A series of “freedom flotillas” tried to reach Gaza’s coast from 2008 onwards. Israel soon managed to stop most of them.
The largest was led by the Mavi Marmara, a Turkish vessel laden with aid and medicine. Israeli naval commandos stormed the ship illegally in international waters in 2010, killing 10 foreign aid workers and human rights activists on board and injuring another 30.
That is the proper context for understanding the latest attack on the WCK aid convoy.
Israel has always had four prongs to its strategy towards the Palestinians. Taken together, they have allowed Israel to refine its apartheid-style rule, and are now allowing it to implement its genocidal policies undisturbed.
The first is to incrementally isolate the Palestinians from the international community.
The second is to make the Palestinians entirely dependent on the Israeli military’s goodwill, and create conditions that are so precarious and unpredictable that most Palestinians try to vacate their historic homeland, leaving it free to be “Judaised”.
Third, Israel has crushed any attempt by outsiders – especially the media and human rights monitors – to scrutinise its activities in real-time or hold it to account.
And fourth, to achieve all this, Israel has needed to erode piece by piece the humanitarian protections that were enshrined in international law to stop a repeat of the common-place atrocities against civilians during the Second World War.
This process, which had been taking place over years and decades, was rapidly accelerated after Hamas’ attack on 7 October. Israel had the pretext to transform apartheid into genocide.
Unrwa, the main United Nations refugee agency, which is mandated to supply aid to the Palestinians, had long been in Israel’s sights, especially in Gaza. It has allowed the international community to keep its foot in the door of the enclave, maintaining a lifeline to the population there independent of Israel, and creating an authoritative framework for judging Israel’s human rights abuses. Worse, for Israel, Unrwa has kept alive the right of return – enshrined in international law – of Palestinian refugees expelled from their original lands so a self-declared Jewish state could be built in their place.
Israel leapt at the chance to accuse Unrwa of being implicated in the 7 October attack, even though it produced zero evidence for the claim. Almost as enthusiastically, western states turned off the funding tap to the UN agency.
The Biden administration appears keen to end UN oversight of Gaza by hiving off its main aid role to private firms. It has been one of the key sponsors of WCK, led by a celebrity Spanish chef with ties to the US State Department.
WCK, which has also been building a pier off Gaza’s coast, was expected to be an adjunct to Washington’s plan to eventually ship in aid from Cyprus – to help those Palestinians who, over the next few weeks, do not starve to death.
Until, that is, Israel struck the aid convoy, killing its staff. WCK has pulled out of Gaza for the time being, and other private aid contractors are backing off, fearful for their workers’ safety.
Goal one has been achieved. The people of Gaza are on their own. The West, rather than their saviour, is now fully complicit not only in Israel’s blockade of Gaza but in its starvation too.
Life and death lottery
Next, Israel has demonstrated beyond doubt that it regards every Palestinian in Gaza, even its children, as an enemy.
The fact that most of the enclave’s homes are now rubble should serve as proof enough, as should the fact that many tens of thousands there have been violently killed. Only a fraction of the death toll is likely to have been recorded, given Israel’s destruction of the enclave’s health sector.
Israel’s levelling of hospitals, including al-Shifa – as well as the kidnapping and torture of medical staff – has left Palestinians in Gaza completely exposed. The eradication of meaningful healthcare means births, serious injuries and chronic and acute illnesses are quickly becoming a death sentence.
Israel has intentionally been turning life in Gaza into a lottery, with nowhere safe.
According to a new investigation, Israel’s bombing campaign has relied heavily on experimental AI systems that largely automate the killing of Palestinians. That means there is no need for human oversight – and the potential limitations imposed by a human conscience.
Israeli website 972 found that tens of thousands of Palestinians had been put on “kill lists” generated by a program called Lavender, using loose definitions of “terrorist” and with an error rate estimated even by the Israeli military at one in 10.
Another programme called “Where’s Daddy?” tracked many of these “targets” to their family homes, where they – and potentially dozens of other Palestinians unlucky enough to be inside – were killed by air strikes.
An Israeli intelligence official told 972: “The IDF bombed them in homes without hesitation, as a first option. It’s much easier to bomb a family’s home. The system is built to look for them in these situations.”
As so many of these targets were considered to be “junior” operatives, of little military value, Israel preferred to use unguided, imprecise munitions – “dumb bombs” – increasing dramatically the likelihood of large numbers of other Palestinians being killed too.
Or, as another Israeli intelligence official observed: “You don’t want to waste expensive bombs on unimportant people – it’s very expensive for the country and there’s a shortage [of smart bombs].”
That explains how entire extended families, comprising dozens of members, have been so regularly slaughtered.
Separately, Israel’s Haaretz newspaper reported on 31 March that the Israeli military has been operating unmarked “kill zones” in which anyone moving – man, woman or child – is in danger of being shot dead.
Or, as a reserve officer who has been serving in Gaza told the paper: “In practice, a terrorist is anyone the IDF has killed in the areas in which its forces operate.”
This, Haaretz reports, is the likely reason why soldiers gunned down three escaped Israeli hostages who were trying to surrender to them.
Palestinians, of course, rarely know where these kill zones are as they desperately scour ever larger areas in the hope of finding food.
If they are fortunate enough to avoid death from the skies or expiring from starvation, they risk being seized by Israeli soldiers and taken off to one of Israel’s black sites. There, as a whistleblowing Israeli doctor admitted last week, unspeakable, Abu Ghraib-style horrors are being inflicted on the inmates.
Goal two has been achieved, leaving Palestinians terrified of the Israeli military’s largely random violence and desperate to find an escape from the Russian roulette Israel is playing with their lives.
Reporting stifled
Long ago, Israel barred UN human rights monitors from accessing the occupied territories. That has left scrutiny of its crimes largely in the hands of the media.
Independent foreign reporters have been barred from the region for some 15 years, leaving the field to establishment journalists serving state and corporate media, where there are strong pressures to present Israel’s actions in the best possible light.
That is why the most important stories about 7 October and the Israeli military’s actions in Gaza and treatment of Palestinian prisoners in Israel have been broken by Israeli-based media – as well as small, independent western outlets that have highlighted its coverage.
Since 7 October, Israel has barred all foreign journalists from Gaza, and western reporters have meekly complied. None have been alerting their audience to this major assault on their supposed role as watchdogs.
Israeli spokespeople, well-practised in the dark arts of deception and misdirection, have been allowed to fill the void in London studios.
What on-the-ground information from Gaza has been reaching western publics – when it is not suppressed by media outlets either because it would be too distressing or because its inclusion would enrage Israel – comes via Palestinian journalists. They have been showing the genocide unfolding in real-time.
But for that reason, Israel has been picking them off one by one – just as it did earlier with Rachel Corrie and Tom Hurndall – as well as murdering their extended families as a warning to others.
The one international channel that has many journalists on the ground in Gaza and is in a position to present its reporting in high-quality English is Al Jazeera.
The list of its journalists killed by Israel has grown steadily longer since 7 October. Gaza bureau chief Wael al-Dahdouh has had most of his family executed, as well as being injured himself.
His counterpart in the West Bank, Shireen Abu Akhleh, was shot dead by an Israeli army sniper two years ago.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, Israel rushed a law through its parliament last week to ban Al Jazeera from broadcasting from the region. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called it a “terror channel”, claiming it participated in Hamas’ 7 October attack.
Al Jazeera had just aired a documentary revisiting the events of 7 October. It showed that Hamas did not commit the most barbaric crimes Israel accuses it of, and that, in fact, in some cases Israel was responsible for the most horrifying atrocities against its own citizens that it had attributed to Hamas.
Al Jazeera and human rights groups are understandably worried about what further actions Israel is likely to take against the channel’s journalists to snuff out its reporting.
Palestinians in Gaza, meanwhile, fear that they are about to lose the only channel that connects them to the outside world, both telling their stories and keeping them informed about what the watching world knows of their plight.
Goal three has been achieved. The lights are being turned off. Israel can carry out in the dark the potentially ugliest phase of its genocide, as Palestinian children emaciate and starve to death.
Rulebook torn up
And finally, Israel has torn up the rulebook on international humanitarian law intended to protect civilians from atrocities, as well as the infrastructure they rely on.
Israel has destroyed universities, government buildings, mosques, churches and bakeries, as well as, most critically, medical facilities.
Over the past six months, hospitals, once sacrosanct, have slowly become legitimate targets, as have the patients inside.
Collective punishment, absolutely prohibited as a war crime, has become the norm in Gaza since 2007, when the West stood mutely by as Israel besieged the enclave for 17 years.
Now, as Palestinians are starved to death, as children turn to skin and bones, and as aid convoys are bombed and aid seekers are shot dead, there is still apparently room for debate among the western media-political class about whether this all constitutes a violation of international law.
Even after six months of Israel bombing Gaza, treating its people as “human animals” and denying them food, water and power – the very definition of collective punishment – Britain’s deputy prime minister, Oliver Dowden, apparently believes Israel is, unfairly, being held to “incredibly high standards”. David Lammy, shadow foreign secretary for the supposedly opposition Labour party, still has no more than “serious concerns” that international law may have been breached.
Neither party yet proposes banning the sale of British arms to Israel, arms that are being used to commit precisely these violations of international law. Neither is referencing the International Court of Justice’s ruling that Israel is “plausibly” committing genocide.
Meanwhile, the main political conversation in the West is still mired in delusional talk about how to revive the fabled “two-state solution”, rather than how to stop an accelerating genocide.
The reality is that Israel has ripped up the most fundamental of the principles in international law: “distinction” – differentiating between combatants and civilians – and “proportionality” – using only the minimum amount of force needed to achieve legitimate military goals.
The rules of war are in tatters. The system of international humanitarian law is not under threat, it has collapsed.
Every Palestinian in Gaza now faces a death sentence. And with good reason, Israel assumes it is untouchable.
Despite the background noise of endlessly expressed “concerns” from the White House, and of rumours of growing “tensions” between allies, the US and Europe have indicated that the genocide can continue – but must be carried out more discreetly, more unobtrusively.
The killing of the World Central Kitchen staff is a setback. But the destruction of Gaza – Israel’s plan of nearly two decades’ duration – is far from over.
Norms, Conventions and Laws of Conduct Are Being Erased
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We stand on the cusp of what might be termed Chaotic War. Not the formula used by Israel often in the past to intimidate adversaries; this is different.
Israeli reporter Eddie Cohen said, in the wake of the attack on the Iranian Consulate: “We are very clear that we want to start a war with Iran and Hezbollah. Do you still not understand?”
“Israel wants to drag Iran into a full-scale war in order to be able to strike at Iran’s nuclear facilities”, though these facilities are beyond American and Israeli reach, buried beneath mountains.
Cohen, and of course, Israel’s military leadership, will know that; but Israel nonetheless is locking itself into a logic that can only lead to defeat. Iran’s nuclear facilities are safe from Israeli assault. The destruction of civilian Iranian infrastructure, which is out in the open, may kill many, but will not, per se, collapse the Iranian state.
Trita Parsi places Israel’s objective in attacking the Iranian Consulate in Damascus in a different context:
“An important aspect of Israel’s conduct – and Biden’s acquiescence to it – is that Israel is engaged in a deliberate and systematic effort to destroy existing laws and norms around warfare.
Even during wartime, embassies are off-limits [yet] Israel just bombed an Iranian diplomatic compound in Damascus.
Bombing hospitals is a war crime, [yet] Israel has bombed EVERY hospital in Gaza. It has even assassinated doctors and patients inside hospitals.
The ICJ obligated Israel to allow the delivery of humanitarian aid to Gaza. Israel actively prevents aid from coming in.
Starvation of civilians as a method of warfare is prohibited under international humanitarian law. Israel has deliberately created a famine in Gaza.
Indiscriminate bombings are illegal under international humanitarian law. Biden himself admits that Israel is bombing Gaza indiscriminately”.
The list goes on and on … However, Israel’s breach of Vienna Convention immunity accorded to diplomatic premises – plus the stature of those killed – is highly significant. It is a major signal: Israel wants war – but with U.S. support, of course.
Israel’s aim, firstly, is to destroy the norms, conventions and laws of warfare; to create geo-political anarchy in which anything goes, and by which, with the White House frustrated, yet acquiescing to each norm of conduct obtrusively trodden underfoot, allows Netanyahu to grip the U.S. bridle and lead the White House horse to water – towards his regional End of Times ‘Great Victory’; a necessarily brutal war – beyond existing red lines anddevoid of limits.
As symbolically significant as the Damascus attack is that the U.S., France and Britain – after a brief ‘hat tip’ to the Vienna Convention – refused to condemn the levelling of the Iranian Consulate, thus placing the shadow of doubt over the Vienna Convention’s immunity for diplomatic premises.
Implicitly, this refusal to condemn will be widely understood as a soft condoning of Israel’s first tentative step towards war with Hizbullah and Iran.
This Israeli chaotic ‘Biblical’ nihilism, however, bears no relationship in purely rational terms to Netanyahu’s aspiration for a ‘Great Victory’. The reality is that Israel has lost its deterrence. It won’t return; the deep anger across the Islamic world generated by Israel through its massacres in Gaza during the last six months precludes it.
Yet, there is a second, adjunct reason why Israel is set on deliberately flouting humanitarian law and norms: Israeli journalist, Yuval Abraham reports in +972 Magazine in great depth how Israel has developed a AI machine (called ‘Lavender’) to generate kill lists in Gaza – with almost no human verification; only a “rubber stamp” check of about “20 seconds” to make sure the AI target is male (as no females are known to belong to the Resistance’s military).
The blatant extra-legality behind the Gaza ‘kill list’ methodology, as reported by Abraham’s various sources, can only be immunised and sheltered through normalising them as but one amongst a general pattern of illegalities – and in effect, claiming sovereign exceptionalism:
“[T]he Israeli army systematically attacks the targeted individual whilst in their homes — usually at night whilst the whole family is present — rather than during the course of military activity … Additional automated systems, including one, [callously] called “Where’s Daddy?” were used – specifically to track targets when they had entered their family’s residences… However, when a home was struck, usually at night, the individual target was sometimes not inside at all”.
“The result is that thousands of Palestinians — most of them women and children or people who were not involved in the fighting — were wiped out by Israeli airstrikes, especially during the first weeks of the war, because of the AI program’s decisions”.
“”We were not interested in killing [Hamas] operatives when they were in a military building … or engaged in a military activity,” A., an intelligence officer, told +972 and Local Call. “On the contrary, the IDF bombed them in homes without hesitation – as a first option. It’s much easier to bomb a family’s home. The system is built to look for them in these situations”.
“In addition … when it came to targeting alleged junior militants marked by Lavender, the army preferred to only use unguided missiles, commonly known as “dumb” bombs (in contrast to “smart” precision bombs) which can destroy entire buildings on top of their occupants and cause significant casualties. “You don’t want to waste expensive bombs on unimportant people — it’s very expensive for the country and there’s a shortage [of those bombs]”.
“… The army also decided during the first weeks of the war that, for every junior Hamas operative that Lavender marked, it was permissible to kill up to 15 or 20 civilians … in the event that the target was a senior Hamas official with the rank of battalion or brigade commander – the army on several occasions authorized the killing of more than 100 civilians in the assassination of a single commander”.
“Lavender — which was developed to create human targets in the current war — has marked some 37,000 Palestinians as suspected “Hamas militants”, most of them junior, for assassination (the IDF Spokesperson denied the existence of such a kill list in a statement to +972 and Local Call)”.
So, there it is – no wonder Israel might seek to camouflage the details within a normalised general array of transgressions against humanitarian law: “They wanted to allow us to attack [the junior operatives] automatically. That’s the Holy Grail. Once you go automatic, target generation goes crazy”.
It is not difficult to speculate what the ICJ might determine …
Does anyone imagine that this flawed Lavender AI machine would not be asked to churn out its kill lists, were Israel to decide to surge into Lebanon? (Another reason for normalising the procedures first in Gaza).
The key point made in the +972 Magazine report (with multiple sourcing) is that the IDF were not focussed on pin-point elimination of Hamas’ Qassam Brigades (as claimed):
“It was very surprising for me that we were asked to bomb a house to kill a ground soldier, whose importance in the fighting was so low”, said one source about the use of AI to mark alleged low-ranking militants:
“I nicknamed those targets ‘garbage targets.’ Still, I found them more ethical than the targets that we bombed just for ‘deterrence’ — high-rises that are evacuated and toppled just to cause destruction”.
This report makes clear nonsense of Israel’s claims to have dismantled 19 out of 24 Hamas Battalions: One source, critical of Lavender’s inaccuracy, points out the obvious flaw: “It’s a vague boundary”; How to tell a Hamas fighter from any other Gazan civilian male?
“At its peak, the system managed to generate 37,000 people as potential human targets”, said B. “But the numbers changed all the time, because it depends on where you set the bar of what a Hamas operative is. There were times when a Hamas operative was defined more broadly, and then the machine started bringing us all kinds of civil defence personnel, police officers, on whom it would be a shame to waste bombs”.
Just last week, War Cabinet member and Minister Ron Dermer, was delegated to travel to Washington to plead that the IDF success in dismantling 19 Hamas battalions justified an incursion into Rafah to dismantle the 4 to 5 battalions that Israel claims still remain in Rafah.
What is clear is that AI was a key Israeli tool to its Gaza ‘Victory’. Israel was going to sell a ‘smoke and mirrors story’ based on ‘Lavender’.
By contrast, Palestinians, who are aware of their quantitative inferiority, have a very different outlook: they switched to a new way of thinking that gives the simple act of resisting a civilisational meaning – a path to metaphysical victory (and quite possibly a kind of military victory), if not in their lifetimes, then for the Palestinian People, thereafter. This constitutes the asymmetrical nature of the conflict that Israel has never managed to understand.
Israel wants to be feared, believing this will restore its deterrence. Amira Hass writes that regardless of any revulsion for this government and its members: “The vast majority [of Israelis] still believe that war is the solution”. And Mairav Zonszein writing in Foreign Policy, notes that “The Problem Isn’t Just Netanyahu, It’s Israeli Society”:
“The focus on Netanyahu is a convenient distraction from the fact that the war in Gaza is not Netanyahu’s war, it is Israel’s war—and the problem isn’t only Netanyahu; it’s the Israeli electorate … A large majority—88 percent—of Jewish Israelis polled in January believe the astounding number of Palestinian deaths, which had surpassed 25,000 at the time, is justified. A large majority of the Jewish public also thinks that the [IDF] is using adequate or even too little force in Gaza … Putting all the blame on the prime minister misses the point. It disregards the fact that Israelis have long advanced, enabled, or come to terms with their country’s system of military occupation and dehumanization of Palestinians”.
Yet neither Israel, nor the U.S., has a comprehensive strategy for this mooted war. Israel’s approach is all tactical – claiming to have degraded Hamas; turning Gaza into a humanitarian hellscape and setting the scene for the “decisive plan” devised by Bezalel Smotrich for the Palestinians. Amira Hass again:
“Either agree to an inferior status, emigrate and be uprooted ostensibly voluntarily, or face defeat and death in a war. This is the plan now being carried out in Gaza and the West Bank – with most Israelis serving as active and enthusiastic accomplices, or passively acquiescing in its realisation ”.
The U.S. ‘vision’ is also tactical (and far removed from reality) – Imagining the transformation of Gaza into a ‘Vichy collaborator’ statelet; imagining that political pressure by the French in Lebanon will force Hizbullah’s retreat from its ancestral lands in south Lebanon; and imagining that the Biden White House is able to achieve politically through pressure what Israel cannot do militarily.
The paradox is that, with Israel and the U.S. being dependent on an ‘image’ that has been confused with reality, this too works to Iran’s and the Resistance Front’s advantage. (As the old adage goes, ‘do not disturb an adversary who is making mistakes’).
Over 13,000 children have been killed in Gaza. Amr Abdallah was one of them.
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Amr Abdallah
On the morning Amr Abdallah was killed, he woke before dawn to say his Ramadan prayers with his father, mother, two younger brothers and aunt, in an open field in southern Gaza.
“It is You we worship and You we ask for help,” they prayed. “Guide us to the straight path — the path of those upon whom You have bestowed favor, not of those who have evoked Your anger or of those who are astray.”
It was dark. They made their way back to their tents. Their old life was gone — their village, Al-Qarara, their house — built with the money Amr’s father saved during the 30 years he worked in the Persian Gulf — their orchards, their school, the local mosque and the town’s cultural museum with artifacts dating from 4,000 B.C.
Amr, who was 17, would have graduated from high school this year. The schools were closed in November. He would have gone to college, perhaps to be an engineer like his father, who was a prominent community leader. Amr was a gifted student. Now he lived in a tent in a designated “safe area” that, as he and his family already knew, was not safe. It was shelled sporadically by the Israelis.
It was cold and rainy. The family huddled together to keep warm. Hunger wrapped itself around them like a coil.
“When you say ‘Amr’ it’s like you’re talking about the moon,” his uncle, Abdulbaset Abdallah, who lives in New Jersey, tells me. “He was the special one, handsome, brilliant, and kind.”
Amr in Gaza
The Israeli attacks began in northern Gaza. Then they spread south. On the morning of Friday, Dec. 1, Israeli drones dropped leaflets over Amr’s village.
“To the inhabitants of al-Qarara, Khirbet al-Khuza’a, Absan and Bani Soheila,” the leaflets read. “You must evacuate immediately and go to shelters in the Rafah area. The city of Khan Yunis is a dangerous combat zone. You have been warned. Signed by the Israeli Defense Army.”
One of the leaflets dropped over Amr’s village
Families in Gaza live together. Whole generations. This is why dozens of family members are killed in a single air strike. Amr grew up surrounded by uncles, aunts and cousins.
The villagers panicked. Some began to pack. Some refused to leave.
One of Amr’s uncles was adamant. He would stay behind while the family would go to the “safe area.” His son was a physician at Nasser Hospital. Amr’s cousin left the hospital to plead with his father to leave. Moments after he and his father fled, their street was bombed.
Amr and his family moved in with relatives in Khan Yunis. A few days later more leaflets were dropped. Everyone was told to go to Rafah.
Amr’s family, now joined by relatives from Khan Yunis, fled to Rafah.
Rafah was a nightmare. Desperate Palestinians were living in the open air and on streets. There was little food or water. The family slept in their car. It was cold and rainy. They did not have blankets. They looked desperately for a tent. There were no tents. They found an old sheet of plastic, which they attached to the back of the car to make a protected area. There were no bathrooms. People relieved themselves on the side of the road. The stench was overpowering.
They had been displaced twice in the span of a week.
Amr’s father, who has diabetes and high blood pressure, fell sick. The family took him to the European Hospital near Khan Yunis. The doctor told him he was ill because he was not eating enough.
“We can’t handle your case,” the doctor told him. “There are more critical cases.”
“He had a beautiful house,” Abdallah says of his older brother. “Now he is homeless. He knew everyone in his hometown. Now he lives on the street with crowds of strangers. No one has enough to eat. There is no clean water. There are no proper facilities or bathrooms.”
The family decided to move again to al-Mawasi, designated a “humanitarian area” by Israel. They would at least be in open land, some of which belonged to their family. The coastal area, filled with dunes, now holds some 380,000 displaced Palestinians. The Israelis promised the delivery of international humanitarian aid to al-Mawasi, little of which arrived. Water has to be trucked in. There is no electricity.
Israeli warplanes hit a residential compound in al-Mawasi in January where medical teams and their families from the International Rescue Committee and Medical Aid for Palestinians were housed. Several were injured. An Israeli tank fired on a house in al-Mawasi where staff from Médecins Sans Frontières and their families were sheltering in February, killing two and injuring six.
Amr’s family set up two makeshift tents with palm tree leaves and sheets of plastic. Israeli drones circled overhead night and day.
On the day before he was killed, Amr managed to get a phone connection — telecommunications are often cut — to speak to his sister in Canada.
“Please get us out of here,” he pleaded.
The Egyptian firm Hala, which means “Welcome” in Arabic, provided travel permits for Gazans to enter Egypt for $350, before the Israeli assault. Since the genocide began, the firm has raised the price to $5,000 for an adult and $2,500 for a child. It has sometimes charged as much as $10,000 for a travel permit.
Hala has offices in Cairo and Rafah. Once the money is paid — Hala only accepts U.S. dollars — the name of the applicant is submitted to Egyptian authorities. It can take weeks to get a permit. It would cost around $25,000 to get Amr’s family out of Gaza, double that if they included his widowed aunt and three cousins. This was not a sum Amr’s relatives abroad could raise quickly. They set up a GoFundMe page here. They are still trying to collect enough money.
Once Palestinians get to Egypt, the permits expire within a month. Most of the Palestinian refugees in Egypt survive on money sent to them from abroad.
Amr awoke in the dark. It was the first Friday of Ramadan. He joined his family in the morning prayer. The Fajr. It was 5 a.m.
Muslims fast in the day during the month of Ramadan. They eat and drink once the sun goes down and shortly before dawn. But food was now in very short supply. A little olive oil. The spice za’atar. It was not much.
They went back to their tents after prayers. Amr was in the tent with his aunt and three cousins. A shell exploded near the tent. Shrapnel tore apart his aunt’s leg and critically injured his cousins. Amr frantically tried to help them. A second shell exploded. Shrapnel ripped through Amr’s stomach and exited from his back.
Amr stood up. He walked out of the tent. He collapsed. Older cousins ran towards him. They had enough gas in their car — fuel is in very short supply — to drive Amr to Nasser Hospital, three miles away.
“Amr, are you okay?” his cousins asked.
“Yes,” he moaned.
“Amr, are you awake?” they asked after a few minutes
“Yes,” he whispered.
They lifted him from the car. They carried him into the overcrowded corridors of the hospital. They set him down.
He was dead.
Amr in death
They carried Amr’s body back to the car. They drove to the family’s encampment.
Amr’s uncle shows me a video of Amr’s mother keening over his corpse.
“My son, my son, my beloved son,” she laments in the video, her left hand tenderly stroking his face. “I don’t know what I will do without you.”
They buried Amr in a makeshift grave.
Amr’s Burial
Later that night the Israelis shelled again. Several Palestinians were wounded and killed.
The empty tent, occupied the day before by Amr’s family, was obliterated.
The Israeli army has marked tens of thousands of Gazans as suspects for assassination, using an AI targeting system with little human oversight and a permissive policy for casualties, +972 and Local Call reveal.
In 2021, a book titled “The Human-Machine Team: How to Create Synergy Between Human and Artificial Intelligence That Will Revolutionize Our World” was released in English under the pen name “Brigadier General Y.S.” In it, the author — a man who we confirmed to be the current commander of the elite Israeli intelligence unit 8200 — makes the case for designing a special machine that could rapidly process massive amounts of data to generate thousands of potential “targets” for military strikes in the heat of a war. Such technology, he writes, would resolve what he described as a “human bottleneck for both locating the new targets and decision-making to approve the targets.”
Such a machine, it turns out, actually exists. A new investigation by +972 Magazine and Local Call reveals that the Israeli army has developed an artificial intelligence-based program known as “Lavender,” unveiled here for the first time. According to six Israeli intelligence officers, who have all served in the army during the current war on the Gaza Strip and had first-hand involvement with the use of AI to generate targets for assassination, Lavender has played a central role in the unprecedented bombing of Palestinians, especially during the early stages of the war. In fact, according to the sources, its influence on the military’s operations was such that they essentially treated the outputs of the AI machine “as if it were a human decision.”
Formally, the Lavender system is designed to mark all suspected operatives in the military wings of Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), including low-ranking ones, as potential bombing targets. The sources told +972 and Local Call that, during the first weeks of the war, the army almost completely relied on Lavender, which clocked as many as 37,000 Palestinians as suspected militants — and their homes — for possible air strikes.
During the early stages of the war, the army gave sweeping approval for officers to adopt Lavender’s kill lists, with no requirement to thoroughly check why the machine made those choices or to examine the raw intelligence data on which they were based. One source stated that human personnel often served only as a “rubber stamp” for the machine’s decisions, adding that, normally, they would personally devote only about “20 seconds” to each target before authorizing a bombing — just to make sure the Lavender-marked target is male. This was despite knowing that the system makes what are regarded as “errors” in approximately 10 percent of cases, and is known to occasionally mark individuals who have merely a loose connection to militant groups, or no connection at all.
Moreover, the Israeli army systematically attacked the targeted individuals while they were in their homes — usually at night while their whole families were present — rather than during the course of military activity. According to the sources, this was because, from what they regarded as an intelligence standpoint, it was easier to locate the individuals in their private houses. Additional automated systems, including one called “Where’s Daddy?” also revealed here for the first time, were used specifically to track the targeted individuals and carry out bombings when they had entered their family’s residences.
The result, as the sources testified, is that thousands of Palestinians — most of them women and children or people who were not involved in the fighting — were wiped out by Israeli airstrikes, especially during the first weeks of the war, because of the AI program’s decisions.
“We were not interested in killing [Hamas] operatives only when they were in a military building or engaged in a military activity,” A., an intelligence officer, told +972 and Local Call. “On the contrary, the IDF bombed them in homes without hesitation, as a first option. It’s much easier to bomb a family’s home. The system is built to look for them in these situations.”
The Lavender machine joins another AI system, “The Gospel,” about which information was revealed in a previous investigation by +972 and Local Call in November 2023, as well as in the Israeli military’s own publications. A fundamental difference between the two systems is in the definition of the target: whereas The Gospel marks buildings and structures that the army claims militants operate from, Lavender marks people — and puts them on a kill list.
In addition, according to the sources, when it came to targeting alleged junior militants marked by Lavender, the army preferred to only use unguided missiles, commonly known as “dumb” bombs (in contrast to “smart” precision bombs), which can destroy entire buildings on top of their occupants and cause significant casualties. “You don’t want to waste expensive bombs on unimportant people — it’s very expensive for the country and there’s a shortage [of those bombs],” said C., one of the intelligence officers. Another source said that they had personally authorized the bombing of “hundreds” of private homes of alleged junior operatives marked by Lavender, with many of these attacks killing civilians and entire families as “collateral damage.”
In an unprecedented move, according to two of the sources, the army also decided during the first weeks of the war that, for every junior Hamas operative that Lavender marked, it was permissible to kill up to 15 or 20 civilians; in the past, the military did not authorize any “collateral damage” during assassinations of low-ranking militants. The sources added that, in the event that the target was a senior Hamas official with the rank of battalion or brigade commander, the army on several occasions authorized the killing of more than 100 civilians in the assassination of a single commander.
The following investigation is organized according to the six chronological stages of the Israeli army’s highly automated target production in the early weeks of the Gaza war. First, we explain the Lavender machine itself, which marked tens of thousands of Palestinians using AI. Second, we reveal the “Where’s Daddy?” system, which tracked these targets and signaled to the army when they entered their family homes. Third, we describe how “dumb” bombs were chosen to strike these homes.
Fourth, we explain how the army loosened the permitted number of civilians who could be killed during the bombing of a target. Fifth, we note how automated software inaccurately calculated the amount of non-combatants in each household. And sixth, we show how on several occasions, when a home was struck, usually at night, the individual target was sometimes not inside at all, because military officers did not verify the information in real time.
STEP 1: GENERATING TARGETS
‘Once you go automatic, target generation goes crazy’
In the Israeli army, the term “human target” referred in the past to a senior military operative who, according to the rules of the military’s International Law Department, can be killed in their private home even if there are civilians around. Intelligence sources told +972 and Local Call that during Israel’s previous wars, since this was an “especially brutal” way to kill someone — often by killing an entire family alongside the target — such human targets were marked very carefully and only senior military commanders were bombed in their homes, to maintain the principle of proportionality under international law.
But after October 7 — when Hamas-led militants launched a deadly assault on southern Israeli communities, killing around 1,200 people and abducting 240 — the army, the sources said, took a dramatically different approach. Under “Operation Iron Swords,” the army decided to designate all operatives of Hamas’ military wing as human targets, regardless of their rank or military importance. And that changed everything.
The new policy also posed a technical problem for Israeli intelligence. In previous wars, in order to authorize the assassination of a single human target, an officer had to go through a complex and lengthy “incrimination” process: cross-check evidence that the person was indeed a senior member of Hamas’ military wing, find out where he lived, his contact information, and finally know when he was home in real time. When the list of targets numbered only a few dozen senior operatives, intelligence personnel could individually handle the work involved in incriminating and locating them.
However, once the list was expanded to include tens of thousands of lower-ranking operatives, the Israeli army figured it had to rely on automated software and artificial intelligence. The result, the sources testify, was that the role of human personnel in incriminating Palestinians as military operatives was pushed aside, and AI did most of the work instead. According to four of the sources who spoke to +972 and Local Call, Lavender — which was developed to create human targets in the current war — has marked some 37,000 Palestinians as suspected “Hamas militants,” most of them junior, for assassination (the IDF Spokesperson denied the existence of such a kill list in a statement to +972 and Local Call).
“We didn’t know who the junior operatives were, because Israel didn’t track them routinely [before the war],” explained senior officer B. to +972 and Local Call, illuminating the reason behind the development of this particular target machine for the current war. “They wanted to allow us to attack [the junior operatives] automatically. That’s the Holy Grail. Once you go automatic, target generation goes crazy.”
The sources said that the approval to automatically adopt Lavender’s kill lists, which had previously been used only as an auxiliary tool, was granted about two weeks into the war, after intelligence personnel “manually” checked the accuracy of a random sample of several hundred targets selected by the AI system. When that sample found that Lavender’s results had reached 90 percent accuracy in identifying an individual’s affiliation with Hamas, the army authorized the sweeping use of the system. From that moment, sources said that if Lavender decided an individual was a militant in Hamas, they were essentially asked to treat that as an order, with no requirement to independently check why the machine made that choice or to examine the raw intelligence data on which it is based.
“At 5 a.m., [the air force] would come and bomb all the houses that we had marked,” B. said. “We took out thousands of people. We didn’t go through them one by one — we put everything into automated systems, and as soon as one of [the marked individuals] was at home, he immediately became a target. We bombed him and his house.”
“It was very surprising for me that we were asked to bomb a house to kill a ground soldier, whose importance in the fighting was so low,” said one source about the use of AI to mark alleged low-ranking militants. “I nicknamed those targets ‘garbage targets.’ Still, I found them more ethical than the targets that we bombed just for ‘deterrence’ — highrises that are evacuated and toppled just to cause destruction.”
The deadly results of this loosening of restrictions in the early stage of the war were staggering. According to data from the Palestinian Health Ministry in Gaza, on which the Israeli army has relied almost exclusively since the beginning of the war, Israel killed some 15,000 Palestinians — almost half of the death toll so far — in the first six weeks of the war, up until a week-long ceasefire was agreed on Nov. 24.
‘The more information and variety, the better’
The Lavender software analyzes information collected on most of the 2.3 million residents of the Gaza Strip through a system of mass surveillance, then assesses and ranks the likelihood that each particular person is active in the military wing of Hamas or PIJ. According to sources, the machine gives almost every single person in Gaza a rating from 1 to 100, expressing how likely it is that they are a militant.
Lavender learns to identify characteristics of known Hamas and PIJ operatives, whose information was fed to the machine as training data, and then to locate these same characteristics — also called “features” — among the general population, the sources explained. An individual found to have several different incriminating features will reach a high rating, and thus automatically becomes a potential target for assassination.
In “The Human-Machine Team,” the book referenced at the beginning of this article, the current commander of Unit 8200 advocates for such a system without referencing Lavender by name. (The commander himself also isn’t named, but five sources in 8200 confirmed that the commander is the author, as reported also by Haaretz.) Describing human personnel as a “bottleneck” that limits the army’s capacity during a military operation, the commander laments: “We [humans] cannot process so much information. It doesn’t matter how many people you have tasked to produce targets during the war — you still cannot produce enough targets per day.”
The solution to this problem, he says, is artificial intelligence. The book offers a short guide to building a “target machine,” similar in description to Lavender, based on AI and machine-learning algorithms. Included in this guide are several examples of the “hundreds and thousands” of features that can increase an individual’s rating, such as being in a Whatsapp group with a known militant, changing cell phone every few months, and changing addresses frequently.
“The more information, and the more variety, the better,” the commander writes. “Visual information, cellular information, social media connections, battlefield information, phone contacts, photos.” While humans select these features at first, the commander continues, over time the machine will come to identify features on its own. This, he says, can enable militaries to create “tens of thousands of targets,” while the actual decision as to whether or not to attack them will remain a human one.
The book isn’t the only time a senior Israeli commander hinted at the existence of human target machines like Lavender. +972 and Local Call have obtained footage of a private lecture given by the commander of Unit 8200’s secretive Data Science and AI center, “Col. Yoav,” at Tel Aviv University’s AI week in 2023, which was reported on at the time in the Israeli media.
In the lecture, the commander speaks about a new, sophisticated target machine used by the Israeli army that detects “dangerous people” based on their likeness to existing lists of known militants on which it was trained. “Using the system, we managed to identify Hamas missile squad commanders,” “Col. Yoav” said in the lecture, referring to Israel’s May 2021 military operation in Gaza, when the machine was used for the first time.
“We rank the results and determine the threshold [at which to attack a target],” “Col. Yoav” said in the lecture, emphasizing that “eventually, people of flesh and blood take the decisions. In the defense realm, ethically speaking, we put a lot of emphasis on this. These tools are meant to help [intelligence officers] break their barriers.”
In practice, however, sources who have used Lavender in recent months say human agency and precision were substituted for mass target creation and lethality.
‘There was no “zero-error” policy’
B., a senior officer who used Lavender, echoed to +972 and Local Call that in the current war, officers were not required to independently review the AI system’s assessments, in order to save time and enable the mass production of human targets without hindrances.
“Everything was statistical, everything was neat — it was very dry,” B. said. He noted that this lack of supervision was permitted despite internal checks showing that Lavender’s calculations were considered accurate only 90 percent of the time; in other words, it was known in advance that 10 percent of the human targets slated for assassination were not members of the Hamas military wing at all.
For example, sources explained that the Lavender machine sometimes mistakenly flagged individuals who had communication patterns similar to known Hamas or PIJ operatives — including police and civil defense workers, militants’ relatives, residents who happened to have a name and nickname identical to that of an operative, and Gazans who used a device that once belonged to a Hamas operative.
“How close does a person have to be to Hamas to be [considered by an AI machine to be] affiliated with the organization?” said one source critical of Lavender’s inaccuracy. “It’s a vague boundary. Is a person who doesn’t receive a salary from Hamas, but helps them with all sorts of things, a Hamas operative? Is someone who was in Hamas in the past, but is no longer there today, a Hamas operative? Each of these features — characteristics that a machine would flag as suspicious — is inaccurate.”
Similar problems exist with the ability of target machines to assess the phone used by an individual marked for assassination. “In war, Palestinians change phones all the time,” said the source. “People lose contact with their families, give their phone to a friend or a wife, maybe lose it. There is no way to rely 100 percent on the automatic mechanism that determines which [phone] number belongs to whom.”
According to the sources, the army knew that the minimal human supervision in place would not discover these faults. “There was no ‘zero-error’ policy. Mistakes were treated statistically,” said a source who used Lavender. “Because of the scope and magnitude, the protocol was that even if you don’t know for sure that the machine is right, you know that statistically it’s fine. So you go for it.”
“It has proven itself,” said B., the senior source. “There’s something about the statistical approach that sets you to a certain norm and standard. There has been an illogical amount of [bombings] in this operation. This is unparalleled, in my memory. And I have much more trust in a statistical mechanism than a soldier who lost a friend two days ago. Everyone there, including me, lost people on October 7. The machine did it coldly. And that made it easier.”
Another intelligence source, who defended the reliance on the Lavender-generated kill lists of Palestinian suspects, argued that it was worth investing an intelligence officer’s time only to verify the information if the target was a senior commander in Hamas. “But when it comes to a junior militant, you don’t want to invest manpower and time in it,” he said. “In war, there is no time to incriminate every target. So you’re willing to take the margin of error of using artificial intelligence, risking collateral damage and civilians dying, and risking attacking by mistake, and to live with it.”
B. said that the reason for this automation was a constant push to generate more targets for assassination. “In a day without targets [whose feature rating was sufficient to authorize a strike], we attacked at a lower threshold. We were constantly being pressured: ‘Bring us more targets.’ They really shouted at us. We finished [killing] our targets very quickly.”
He explained that when lowering the rating threshold of Lavender, it would mark more people as targets for strikes. “At its peak, the system managed to generate 37,000 people as potential human targets,” said B. “But the numbers changed all the time, because it depends on where you set the bar of what a Hamas operative is. There were times when a Hamas operative was defined more broadly, and then the machine started bringing us all kinds of civil defense personnel, police officers, on whom it would be a shame to waste bombs. They help the Hamas government, but they don’t really endanger soldiers.”
One source who worked with the military data science team that trained Lavender said that data collected from employees of the Hamas-run Internal Security Ministry, whom he does not consider to be militants, was also fed into the machine. “I was bothered by the fact that when Lavender was trained, they used the term ‘Hamas operative’ loosely, and included people who were civil defense workers in the training dataset,” he said.
The source added that even if one believes these people deserve to be killed, training the system based on their communication profiles made Lavender more likely to select civilians by mistake when its algorithms were applied to the general population. “Since it’s an automatic system that isn’t operated manually by humans, the meaning of this decision is dramatic: it means you’re including many people with a civilian communication profile as potential targets.”
‘We only checked that the target was a man’
The Israeli military flatly rejects these claims. In a statement to +972 and Local Call, the IDF Spokesperson denied using artificial intelligence to incriminate targets, saying these are merely “auxiliary tools that assist officers in the process of incrimination.” The statement went on: “In any case, an independent examination by an [intelligence] analyst is required, which verifies that the identified targets are legitimate targets for attack, in accordance with the conditions set forth in IDF directives and international law.”
However, sources said that the only human supervision protocol in place before bombing the houses of suspected “junior” militants marked by Lavender was to conduct a single check: ensuring that the AI-selected target is male rather than female. The assumption in the army was that if the target was a woman, the machine had likely made a mistake, because there are no women among the ranks of the military wings of Hamas and PIJ.
“A human being had to [verify the target] for just a few seconds,” B. said, explaining that this became the protocol after realizing the Lavender system was “getting it right” most of the time. “At first, we did checks to ensure that the machine didn’t get confused. But at some point we relied on the automatic system, and we only checked that [the target] was a man — that was enough. It doesn’t take a long time to tell if someone has a male or a female voice.”
To conduct the male/female check, B. claimed that in the current war, “I would invest 20 seconds for each target at this stage, and do dozens of them every day. I had zero added value as a human, apart from being a stamp of approval. It saved a lot of time. If [the operative] came up in the automated mechanism, and I checked that he was a man, there would be permission to bomb him, subject to an examination of collateral damage.”
In practice, sources said this meant that for civilian men marked in error by Lavender, there was no supervising mechanism in place to detect the mistake. According to B., a common error occurred “if the [Hamas] target gave [his phone] to his son, his older brother, or just a random man. That person will be bombed in his house with his family. This happened often. These were most of the mistakes caused by Lavender,” B. said.
STEP 2: LINKING TARGETS TO FAMILY HOMES
‘Most of the people you killed were women and children’
The next stage in the Israeli army’s assassination procedure is identifying where to attack the targets that Lavender generates.
In a statement to +972 and Local Call, the IDF Spokesperson claimed in response to this article that “Hamas places its operatives and military assets in the heart of the civilian population, systematically uses the civilian population as human shields, and conducts fighting from within civilian structures, including sensitive sites such as hospitals, mosques, schools and UN facilities. The IDF is bound by and acts according to international law, directing its attacks only at military targets and military operatives.”
The six sources we spoke to echoed this to some degree, saying that Hamas’ extensive tunnel system deliberately passes under hospitals and schools; that Hamas militants use ambulances to get around; and that countless military assets have been situated near civilian buildings. The sources argued that many Israeli strikes kill civilians as a result of these tactics by Hamas — a characterization that human rights groups warn evades Israel’s onus for inflicting the casualties.
However, in contrast to the Israeli army’s official statements, the sources explained that a major reason for the unprecedented death toll from Israel’s current bombardment is the fact that the army has systematically attacked targets in their private homes, alongside their families — in part because it was easier from an intelligence standpoint to mark family houses using automated systems.
Indeed, several sources emphasized that, as opposed to numerous cases of Hamas operatives engaging in military activity from civilian areas, in the case of systematic assassination strikes, the army routinely made the active choice to bomb suspected militants when inside civilian households from which no military activity took place. This choice, they said, was a reflection of the way Israel’s system of mass surveillance in Gaza is designed.
The sources told +972 and Local Call that since everyone in Gaza had a private house with which they could be associated, the army’s surveillance systems could easily and automatically “link” individuals to family houses. In order to identify the moment operatives enter their houses in real time, various additional automatic softwares have been developed. These programs track thousands of individuals simultaneously, identify when they are at home, and send an automatic alert to the targeting officer, who then marks the house for bombing. One of several of these tracking softwares, revealed here for the first time, is called “Where’s Daddy?”
“You put hundreds [of targets] into the system and wait to see who you can kill,” said one source with knowledge of the system. “It’s called broad hunting: you copy-paste from the lists that the target system produces.”
Evidence of this policy is also clear from the data: during the first month of the war, more than half of the fatalities — 6,120 people — belonged to 1,340 families, many of which were completely wiped out while inside their homes, according to UN figures. The proportion of entire families bombed in their houses in the current war is much higher than in the 2014 Israeli operation in Gaza (which was previously Israel’s deadliest war on the Strip), further suggesting the prominence of this policy.
Another source said that each time the pace of assassinations waned, more targets were added to systems like Where’s Daddy? to locate individuals that entered their homes and could therefore be bombed. He said that the decision of who to put into the tracking systems could be made by relatively low-ranking officers in the military hierarchy.
“One day, totally of my own accord, I added something like 1,200 new targets to the [tracking] system, because the number of attacks [we were conducting] decreased,” the source said. “That made sense to me. In retrospect, it seems like a serious decision I made. And such decisions were not made at high levels.”
The sources said that in the first two weeks of the war, “several thousand” targets were initially inputted into locating programs like Where’s Daddy?. These included all the members of Hamas’ elite special forces unit the Nukhba, all of Hamas’ anti-tank operatives, and anyone who entered Israel on October 7. But before long, the kill list was drastically expanded.
“In the end it was everyone [marked by Lavender],” one source explained. “Tens of thousands. This happened a few weeks later, when the [Israeli] brigades entered Gaza, and there were already fewer uninvolved people [i.e. civilians] in the northern areas.” According to this source, even some minors were marked by Lavender as targets for bombing. “Normally, operatives are over the age of 17, but that was not a condition.”
Lavender and systems like Where’s Daddy? were thus combined with deadly effect, killing entire families, sources said. By adding a name from the Lavender-generated lists to the Where’s Daddy? home tracking system, A. explained, the marked person would be placed under ongoing surveillance, and could be attacked as soon as they set foot in their home, collapsing the house on everyone inside.
“Let’s say you calculate [that there is one] Hamas [operative] plus 10 [civilians in the house],” A. said. “Usually, these 10 will be women and children. So absurdly, it turns out that most of the people you killed were women and children.”
STEP 3: CHOOSING A WEAPON
‘We usually carried out the attacks with “dumb bombs”’
Once Lavender has marked a target for assassination, army personnel have verified that they are male, and tracking software has located the target in their home, the next stage is picking the munition with which to bomb them.
In December 2023, CNN reported that according to U.S. intelligence estimates, about 45 percent of the munitions used by the Israeli air force in Gaza were “dumb” bombs, which are known to cause more collateral damage than guided bombs. In response to the CNN report, an army spokesperson quoted in the article said: “As a military committed to international law and a moral code of conduct, we are devoting vast resources to minimizing harm to the civilians that Hamas has forced into the role of human shields. Our war is against Hamas, not against the people of Gaza.”
Three intelligence sources, however, told +972 and Local Call that junior operatives marked by Lavender were assassinated only with dumb bombs, in the interest of saving more expensive armaments. The implication, one source explained, was that the army would not strike a junior target if they lived in a high-rise building, because the army did not want to spend a more precise and expensive “floor bomb” (with more limited collateral effect) to kill him. But if a junior target lived in a building with only a few floors, the army was authorized to kill him and everyone in the building with a dumb bomb.
“It was like that with all the junior targets,” testified C., who used various automated programs in the current war. “The only question was, is it possible to attack the building in terms of collateral damage? Because we usually carried out the attacks with dumb bombs, and that meant literally destroying the whole house on top of its occupants. But even if an attack is averted, you don’t care — you immediately move on to the next target. Because of the system, the targets never end. You have another 36,000 waiting.”
STEP 4: AUTHORIZING CIVILIAN CASUALTIES
‘We attacked almost without considering collateral damage’
One source said that when attacking junior operatives, including those marked by AI systems like Lavender, the number of civilians they were allowed to kill alongside each target was fixed during the initial weeks of the war at up to 20. Another source claimed the fixed number was up to 15. These “collateral damage degrees,” as the military calls them, were applied broadly to all suspected junior militants, the sources said, regardless of their rank, military importance, and age, and with no specific case-by-case examination to weigh the military advantage of assassinating them against the expected harm to civilians.
According to A., who was an officer in a target operation room in the current war, the army’s international law department has never before given such “sweeping approval” for such a high collateral damage degree. “It’s not just that you can kill any person who is a Hamas soldier, which is clearly permitted and legitimate in terms of international law,” A. said. “But they directly tell you: ‘You are allowed to kill them along with many civilians.’
“Every person who wore a Hamas uniform in the past year or two could be bombed with 20 [civilians killed as] collateral damage, even without special permission,” A. continued. “In practice, the principle of proportionality did not exist.”
According to A., this was the policy for most of the time that he served. Only later did the military lower the collateral damage degree. “In this calculation, it could also be 20 children for a junior operative … It really wasn’t like that in the past,” A. explained. Asked about the security rationale behind this policy, A. replied: “Lethality.”
The predetermined and fixed collateral damage degree helped accelerate the mass creation of targets using the Lavender machine, sources said, because it saved time. B. claimed that the number of civilians they were permitted to kill in the first week of the war per suspected junior militant marked by AI was fifteen, but that this number “went up and down” over time.
“At first we attacked almost without considering collateral damage,” B. said of the first week after October 7. “In practice, you didn’t really count people [in each house that is bombed], because you couldn’t really tell if they’re at home or not. After a week, restrictions on collateral damage began. The number dropped [from 15] to five, which made it really difficult for us to attack, because if the whole family was home, we couldn’t bomb it. Then they raised the number again.”
‘We knew we would kill over 100 civilians’
Sources told +972 and Local Call that now, partly due to American pressure, the Israeli army is no longer mass-generating junior human targets for bombing in civilian homes. The fact that most homes in the Gaza Strip were already destroyed or damaged, and almost the entire population has been displaced, also impaired the army’s ability to rely on intelligence databases and automated house-locating programs.
E. claimed that the massive bombardment of junior militants took place only in the first week or two of the war, and then was stopped mainly so as not to waste bombs. “There is a munitions economy,” E. said. “They were always afraid that there would be [a war] in the northern arena [with Hezbollah in Lebanon]. They don’t attack these kinds of [junior] people at all anymore.”
However, airstrikes against senior ranking Hamas commanders are still ongoing, and sources said that for these attacks, the military is authorizing the killing of “hundreds” of civilians per target — an official policy for which there is no historical precedent in Israel, or even in recent U.S. military operations.
“In the bombing of the commander of the Shuja’iya Battalion, we knew that we would kill over 100 civilians,” B. recalled of a Dec. 2 bombing that the IDF Spokesperson said was aimed at assassinating Wisam Farhat. “For me, psychologically, it was unusual. Over 100 civilians — it crosses some red line.”
Amjad Al-Sheikh, a young Palestinian from Gaza, said many of his family members were killed in that bombing. A resident of Shuja’iya, east of Gaza City, he was at a local supermarket that day when he heard five blasts that shattered the glass windows.
“I ran to my family’s house, but there were no buildings there anymore,” Al-Sheikh told +972 and Local Call. “The street was filled with screams and smoke. Entire residential blocks turned to mountains of rubble and deep pits. People began to search in the cement, using their hands, and so did I, looking for signs of my family’s house.”
Al-Sheikh’s wife and baby daughter survived — protected from the rubble by a closet that fell on top of them — but he found 11 other members of his family, among them his sisters, brothers, and their young children, dead under the rubble. According to the human rights group B’Tselem, the bombing that day destroyed dozens of buildings, killed dozens of people, and buried hundreds under the ruins of their homes.
‘Entire families were killed’
Intelligence sources told +972 and Local Call they took part in even deadlier strikes. In order to assassinate Ayman Nofal, the commander of Hamas’ Central Gaza Brigade, a source said the army authorized the killing of approximately 300 civilians, destroying several buildings in airstrikes on Al-Bureij refugee camp on Oct. 17, based on an imprecise pinpointing of Nofal. Satellite footage and videos from the scene show the destruction of several large multi-storey apartment buildings.
“Between 16 to 18 houses were wiped out in the attack,” Amro Al-Khatib, a resident of the camp, told +972 and Local Call. “We couldn’t tell one apartment from the other — they all got mixed up in the rubble, and we found human body parts everywhere.”
In the aftermath, Al-Khatib recalled around 50 dead bodies being pulled out of the rubble, and around 200 people wounded, many of them gravely. But that was just the first day. The camp’s residents spent five days pulling the dead and injured out, he said.
Nael Al-Bahisi, a paramedic, was one of the first on the scene. He counted between 50-70 casualties on that first day. “At a certain moment, we understood the target of the strike was Hamas commander Ayman Nofal,” he told +972 and Local Call. “They killed him, and also many people who didn’t know he was there. Entire families with children were killed.”
Another intelligence source told +972 and Local Call that the army destroyed a high-rise building in Rafah in mid-December, killing “dozens of civilians,” in order to try to kill Mohammed Shabaneh, the commander of Hamas’ Rafah Brigade (it is not clear whether or not he was killed in the attack). Often, the source said, the senior commanders hide in tunnels that pass under civilian buildings, and therefore the choice to assassinate them with an airstrike necessarily kills civilians.
“Most of those injured were children,” said Wael Al-Sir, 55, who witnessed the large-scale strike believed by some Gazans to have been the assassination attempt. He told +972 and Local Call that the bombing on Dec. 20 destroyed an “entire residential block” and killed at least 10 children.
“There was a completely permissive policy regarding the casualties of [bombing] operations — so permissive that in my opinion it had an element of revenge,” D., an intelligence source, claimed. “The core of this was the assassinations of senior [Hamas and PIJ commanders] for whom they were willing to kill hundreds of civilians. We had a calculation: how many for a brigade commander, how many for a battalion commander, and so on.”
“There were regulations, but they were just very lenient,” said E., another intelligence source. “We’ve killed people with collateral damage in the high double-digits, if not low triple-digits. These are things that haven’t happened before.”
Such a high rate of “collateral damage” is exceptional not only compared to what the Israeli army previously deemed acceptable, but also compared to the wars waged by the United States in Iraq, Syria, and Afghanistan.
General Peter Gersten, Deputy Commander for Operations and Intelligence in the operation to fight ISIS in Iraq and Syria, told a U.S. defense magazine in 2021 that an attack with collateral damage of 15 civilians deviated from procedure; to carry it out, he had to obtain special permission from the head of the U.S. Central Command, General Lloyd Austin, who is now Secretary of Defense.
“With Osama Bin Laden, you’d have an NCV [Non-combatant Casualty Value] of 30, but if you had a low-level commander, his NCV was typically zero,” Gersten said. “We ran zero for the longest time.”
‘We were told: “Whatever you can, bomb”’
All the sources interviewed for this investigation said that Hamas’ massacres on October 7 and kidnapping of hostages greatly influenced the army’s fire policy and collateral damage degrees. “At first, the atmosphere was painful and vindictive,” said B., who was drafted into the army immediately after October 7, and served in a target operation room. “The rules were very lenient. They took down four buildings when they knew the target was in one of them. It was crazy.
“There was a dissonance: on the one hand, people here were frustrated that we were not attacking enough,” B. continued. “On the other hand, you see at the end of the day that another thousand Gazans have died, most of them civilians.”
“There was hysteria in the professional ranks,” said D., who was also drafted immediately after October 7. “They had no idea how to react at all. The only thing they knew to do was to just start bombing like madmen to try to dismantle Hamas’ capabilities.”
D. stressed that they were not explicitly told that the army’s goal was “revenge,” but expressed that “as soon as every target connected to Hamas becomes legitimate, and with almost any collateral damage being approved, it is clear to you that thousands of people are going to be killed. Even if officially every target is connected to Hamas, when the policy is so permissive, it loses all meaning.”
A. also used the word “revenge” to describe the atmosphere inside the army after October 7. “No one thought about what to do afterward, when the war is over, or how it will be possible to live in Gaza and what they will do with it,” A. said. “We were told: now we have to fuck up Hamas, no matter what the cost. Whatever you can, you bomb.”
B., the senior intelligence source, said that in retrospect, he believes this “disproportionate” policy of killing Palestinians in Gaza also endangers Israelis, and that this was one of the reasons he decided to be interviewed.
“In the short term, we are safer, because we hurt Hamas. But I think we’re less secure in the long run. I see how all the bereaved families in Gaza — which is nearly everyone — will raise the motivation for [people to join] Hamas 10 years down the line. And it will be much easier for [Hamas] to recruit them.”
In a statement to +972 and Local Call, the Israeli army denied much of what the sources told us, claiming that “each target is examined individually, while an individual assessment is made of the military advantage and collateral damage expected from the attack … The IDF does not carry out attacks when the collateral damage expected from the attack is excessive in relation to the military advantage.”
STEP 5: CALCULATING COLLATERAL DAMAGE
‘The model was not connected to reality’
According to the intelligence sources, the Israeli army’s calculation of the number of civilians expected to be killed in each house alongside a target — a procedure examined in a previous investigation by +972 and Local Call — was conducted with the help of automatic and inaccurate tools. In previous wars, intelligence personnel would spend a lot of time verifying how many people were in a house that was set to be bombed, with the number of civilians liable to be killed listed as part of a “target file.” After October 7, however, this thorough verification was largely abandoned in favor of automation.
In October, The New York Times reported on a system operated from a special base in southern Israel, which collects information from mobile phones in the Gaza Strip and provided the military with a live estimate of the number of Palestinians who fled the northern Gaza Strip southward. Brig. General Udi Ben Muha told the Times that “It’s not a 100 percent perfect system — but it gives you the information you need to make a decision.” The system operates according to colors: red marks areas where there are many people, and green and yellow mark areas that have been relatively cleared of residents.
The sources who spoke to +972 and Local Call described a similar system for calculating collateral damage, which was used to decide whether to bomb a building in Gaza. They said that the software calculated the number of civilians residing in each home before the war — by assessing the size of the building and reviewing its list of residents — and then reduced those numbers by the proportion of residents who supposedly evacuated the neighborhood.
To illustrate, if the army estimated that half of a neighborhood’s residents had left, the program would count a house that usually had 10 residents as a house containing five people. To save time, the sources said, the army did not surveil the homes to check how many people were actually living there, as it did in previous operations, to find out if the program’s estimate was indeed accurate.
“This model was not connected to reality,” claimed one source. “There was no connection between those who were in the home now, during the war, and those who were listed as living there prior to the war. [On one occasion] we bombed a house without knowing that there were several families inside, hiding together.”
The source said that although the army knew that such errors could occur, this imprecise model was adopted nonetheless, because it was faster. As such, the source said, “the collateral damage calculation was completely automatic and statistical” — even producing figures that were not whole numbers.
STEP 6: BOMBING A FAMILY HOME
‘You killed a family for no reason’
The sources who spoke to +972 and Local Call explained that there was sometimes a substantial gap between the moment that tracking systems like Where’s Daddy? alerted an officer that a target had entered their house, and the bombing itself — leading to the killing of whole families even without hitting the army’s target. “It happened to me many times that we attacked a house, but the person wasn’t even home,” one source said. “The result is that you killed a family for no reason.”
Three intelligence sources told +972 and Local Call that they had witnessed an incident in which the Israeli army bombed a family’s private home, and it later turned out that the intended target of the assassination was not even inside the house, since no further verification was conducted in real time.
“Sometimes [the target] was at home earlier, and then at night he went to sleep somewhere else, say underground, and you didn’t know about it,” one of the sources said. “There are times when you double-check the location, and there are times when you just say, ‘Okay, he was in the house in the last few hours, so you can just bomb.’”
Another source described a similar incident that affected him and made him want to be interviewed for this investigation. “We understood that the target was home at 8 p.m. In the end, the air force bombed the house at 3 a.m. Then we found out [in that span of time] he had managed to move himself to another house with his family. There were two other families with children in the building we bombed.”
In previous wars in Gaza, after the assassination of human targets, Israeli intelligence would carry out bomb damage assessment (BDA) procedures — a routine post-strike check to see if the senior commander was killed and how many civilians were killed along with him. As revealed in a previous +972 and Local Call investigation, this involved listening in to phone calls of relatives who lost their loved ones. In the current war, however, at least in relation to junior militants marked using AI, sources say this procedure was abolished in order to save time. The sources said they did not know how many civilians were actually killed in each strike, and for the low-ranking suspected Hamas and PIJ operatives marked by AI, they did not even know whether the target himself was killed.
The genocide in Gaza is the final stage of a process begun by Israel decades ago. Anyone who did not see this coming blinded themselves to the character and ultimate goals of the apartheid state.
There are no surprises in Gaza. Every horrifying act of Israel’s genocide has been telegraphed in advance. It has been for decades. The dispossession of Palestinians of their land is the beating heart of Israel’s settler colonial project. This dispossession has had dramatic historical moments — 1948 and 1967 — when huge parts of historic Palestine were seized and hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were ethnically cleansed. Dispossession has also occurred in increments — the slow-motion theft of land and steady ethnic cleansing in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem.
The incursion on Oct. 7 into Israel by Hamas and other resistance groups, which left 1,154 Israelis, tourists and migrant workers dead and saw about 240 people taken hostage, gave Israel the pretext for what it has long craved — the total erasure of Palestinians.
Israel has razed 77 percent of healthcare facilities in Gaza, 68 percent of telecommunication infrastructure, nearly all municipal and governmental buildings, commercial, industrial and agricultural centers, almost half of all roads, over 60 percent of Gaza’s 439,000 homes, 68 percent of residential buildings — the bombing of the Al-Taj tower in Gaza City on Oct. 25, killed 101 people, including 44 children and 37 women, and injured hundreds — and obliterated refugee camps. The attack on the Jabalia refugee camp on Oct. 25 killed at least 126 civilians, including 69 children, and injured 280. Israel has damaged or destroyed Gaza’s universities, all of which are now closed, and 60 percent of other educational facilities, including 13 libraries. It has also destroyed at least 195 heritage sites, including 208 mosques, churches, and Gaza’s Central Archives that held 150 years of historical records and documents.
Israel’s warplanes, missiles, drones, tanks, artillery shells and naval guns daily pulverize Gaza — which is only 20 miles long and five miles wide — in a scorched earth campaign unlike anything seen since the war in Vietnam. It has dropped 25,000 tons of explosives — equivalent to two nuclear bombs — on Gaza, many targets selected by Artificial Intelligence. It drops unguided munitions (“dumb bombs”) and 2000-pound “bunker buster” bombs on refugee camps and densely packed urban centers as well as the so-called “safe zones” — 42 percent of Palestinians killed have been in these “safe zones” where they were instructed by Israel to flee. Over 1.7 million Palestinians have been displaced from their homes, forced to find refuge in overcrowded UNRWA shelters, hospital corridors and courtyards, schools, tents or the open air in south Gaza, often living next to fetid pools of raw sewage.
Israel has killed at least 32,705 Palestinians in Gaza, including 13,000 children and 9,000 women. This means Israel is slaughtering as many as 187 people a day including 75 children. It has killed 136 journalists, many, if not most of them deliberately targeted. It has killed 340 doctors, nurses and other health workers — four percent of Gaza’s healthcare personnel. These numbers do not begin to reflect the actual death toll since only those dead registered in morgues and hospitals, most of which no longer function, are counted. The death toll, when those who are missing are counted, is well over 40,000.
Doctors are forced to amputate limbs without anesthetic. Those with severe medical conditions — cancer, diabetes, heart disease, kidney disease — have died from lack of treatment or will die soon. Over a hundred women give birth every day, with little to no medical care. Miscarriages are up by 300 percent. Over 90 percent of the Palestinians in Gaza suffer from severe food insecurity with people eating animal feed and grass. Children are dying of starvation. Palestinian writers, academics, scientists and their family members have been tracked and assassinated. Over 75,000 Palestinians have been wounded, many of whom will be crippled for life.
“Seventy percent of recorded deaths have consistently been women and children,” writes Francesca Albanese, the Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian Territory occupied since 1967, in her report issued on March 25. “Israel failed to prove that the remaining 30 percent, i.e. adult males, were active Hamas combatants — a necessary condition for them to be lawfully targeted. By early-December, Israel’s security advisors claimed the killing of ‘7,000 terrorists’ in a stage of the campaign when less than 5,000 adult males in total had been identified among the casualties, thus implying that all adult males killed were ‘terrorists.’”
Israel plays linguistic tricks to deny anyone in Gaza the status of civilians and any building – including mosques, hospitals and schools – protected status. Palestinians are all branded as responsible for the attack on Oct. 7 or written off as human shields for Hamas. All structures are considered legitimate targets by Israel because they are allegedly Hamas command centers or said to harbor Hamas fighters.
These accusations, Albanese writes, are a “pretext” used to justify “the killing of civilians under a cloak of purported legality, whose all-enveloping pervasiveness admits only of genocidal intent.”
In scale we have not seen an assault on the Palestinians of this magnitude, but all these measures – the killing of civlians, dispossession of land, arbitrary detention, torture, disappearances, closures imposed on Palestinians towns and villages, house demolitions, revoking residence permits, deportation, destruction of the infrastructure that maintains civil society, military occupation, dehumanizing language, theft of natural resources, especially aquifers — have long defined Israel’s campaign to eradicate Palestinians.
The occupation and genocide would not be possible without the U.S. which gives Israel $3.8 billion in annual military assistance and is now sending another $2.5 billion in bombs, including 1,800 MK84 2,000-pound bombs, 500 MK82 500-pound bombs and fighter jets to Israel. This, too, is our genocide.
The genocide in Gaza is the culmination of a process. It is not an act. The genocide is the predictable denouement of Israel’s settler colonial project. It is coded within the DNA of the Israeli apartheid state. It is where Israel had to end up.
Zionist leaders are open about their goals.
Israeli Minister of Defense Yoav Gallant, after Oct. 7, announced that Gaza would receive “no electricity, no food, no water, no fuel.” Israeli Minister of Foreign Affairs Israel Katz said: “Humanitarian aid to Gaza? No electrical switch will be turned on, no water hydrant will be opened.” Avi Dichter, the Minister of Agriculture, referred to Israel’s military assault as “the Gaza Nakba,” referencing the Nakba, or “catastrophe”, which between 1947 and 1949, drove 750,000 Palestinians from their land and saw thousands massacred by Zionist militias. Likud member of the Israeli Knesset Revital Gottlieb posted on her social media account: “Bring down buildings!! Bomb without distinction!!…Flatten Gaza. Without mercy! This time, there is no room for mercy!” Not to be outdone, Minister of Heritage Amichai Eliyahu supported using nuclear weapons on Gaza as “one of the possibilities.”
The message from the Israeli leadership is unequivocal. Annihilate the Palestinians the same way we annihilated Native Americans, the Australians annihilated the First Nations peoples, the Germans annihilated the Herero in Namibia, the Turks annihilated Armenians and the Nazis annihilated the Jews.
The specifics are different. The process is the same.
We cannot plead ignorance. We know what happened to the Palestinians. We know what is happening to the Palestinians. We know what will happen to the Palestinians.
But it is easier to pretend. Pretend Israel will allow in humanitarian aid. Pretend there will be a ceasefire. Pretend Palestinians will return to their destroyed homes in Gaza. Pretend Gaza will be rebuilt. Pretend the Palestinian Authority will administer Gaza. Pretend there will be a two-state solution. Pretend there is no genocide.
The genocide, which the U.S. is funding and sustaining with weapons shipments, says something not only about Israel, but about us, about Western civilization, about who we are as a people, where we came from and what defines us. It says that all our vaunted morality and respect for human rights is a lie. It says that people of color, especially when they are poor and vulnerable, do not count. It says their hopes, dreams, dignity and aspirations for freedom are worthless. It says we will ensure global domination through racialized violence.
This lie — that Western civilization is predicated on “values” such as respect for human rights and the rule of law — is one the Palestinians, and all those in the Global South, as well as Native Americans and Black and Brown Americans have known for centuries. But, with the Gaza genocide live streamed, this lie is impossible to sustain.
We do not halt Israel’s genocide because we are Israel, infected with white supremacy and intoxicated by our domination of the globe’s wealth and the power to obliterate others with our industrial weapons. Remember The New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman telling Charlie Rose on the eve of the war in Iraq that American soldiers should go house to house from Basra to Baghdad and say to Iraqis “suck on this?” That is the real credo of the U.S. empire.
The world outside of the industrialized fortresses in the Global North is acutely aware that the fate of the Palestinians is their fate. As climate change imperils survival, as resources become scarce, as migration becomes an imperative for millions, as agricultural yields decline, as costal areas are flooded, as droughts and wild fires proliferate, as states fail, as armed resistance movements rise to battle their oppressors along with their proxies, genocide will not be an anomaly. It will be the norm. The earth’s vulnerable and poor, those Frantz Fanon called “the wretched of the earth,” will be the next Palestinians.
US support enables Netanyahu to ignore international pressure
Israel’s plan to expand into an Eretz or “Greater” state incorporating large chunks of its neighbors’ land starts with eliminating the pre-1948 inhabitants of a place once known as Palestine. That nearly all of those who think of themselves as Palestinians must be killed or otherwise removed is perhaps reduced to an aphorism, like “Israel has a right to defend itself,” to absolve the Israeli state and its rampaging army of any guilt in the process. Indeed, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s ability to avoid any serious consequences for his behavior is remarkable, and it generates further atrocities that might have been unimaginable when the fighting in Gaza started back in October. Al Jazeerahas reported how Netanyahu is now pushing ahead to formalize what has been referred to as the “colonial project,” whereby “the appropriation of all Palestinian Lands will follow on… the outright exclusion of the Palestinian people from their homeland.” Bibi said in a speech to supporters that “These are the basic lines of the national government headed by me: The Jewish people have an exclusive and unquestionable right to all areas of the Land of Israel. The government will promote and develop settlement in all parts of the Land of Israel — in the Galilee, the Negev, the Golan, Judea and Samaria.”
Journalist Patrick Lawrence, writing at Consortium News, recently described how “Israel’s savagery in its determination to exterminate the Palestinians of Gaza — and we had better brace for what is next on the West Bank of the Jordan — marks a turn for all of humanity. In its descent into depravity the Zionist state drags the West altogether down with it.” Indeed, and the United States of America is the foremost great power to be reduced to the status of a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Jewish state, unable to advance its own interests when confronted by the juggernaut of the so-called Israel Lobby and associated Jewish and Zionist-Christian organizations that have corrupted and controlled American foreign as well as select domestic policies.
Witness what has occurred in the last several weeks when the international community has rallied to end the slaughter and deliberate starvation of largely defenseless Gazan civilians. First came a United Nations Security Council move by the United States, which introduced a resolution calling for, but not demanding, an immediate though possibly temporary cease fire in Gaza. When the resolution came up for a vote it was vetoed by Russia and China. There were several problems with the text as it inevitably sought to give Israel considerable flexibility in managing the situation. It included an admonition that the effort to secure a ceasefire must be “in connection with the release of all remaining hostages,” which is an Israeli demand with the willingness of Israel to participate at all very much dependent on the hostage issue. The resolution allowed the fighting to continue and it put control of the entry and distribution of urgently needed relief supplies under the ”security” management of the Israeli army. Then came a Russian and Chinese resolution, approved by all members of the council but the US which “abstained.” The US immediately declared the resolution to be “non-binding” and while the document was meant to permit a ceasefire through the end of Ramadan, it has yet to be enacted by Israel which continues to block food and medicine relief shipments and has focused its latest attacks on the few remaining hospitals, killing hundreds more Gazans. Even though the resolution demanded action on the ceasefire and access to relief supplies Israel has ignored it and so has Washington. As only the United States can compel Israel to change course the fact that it continues to fund Israel and provide it with secret shipments of planeloads weapons, without which Netanyahu would be unable to continue his war, speaks for itself in terms of who is controlling whom.
And don’t be fooled by President Joe Biden’s alleged pressure on Netanyahu to “protect civilians” even as Bibi draws up plans with his war cabinet to invade Gaza’s southernmost Rafah Region, where 1.5 million Palestinians have sought refuge and are now confronted by imminent death with no way out. Biden is responding to opinion polls in the US that indicate that more than half of Americans are opposed to what Israel is doing in Gaza and the percentage is steadily growing, so he is pretending to have humanitarian impulses and a conscience, neither of which is true, in a cynical effort to support his possible reelection.
To be sure both the White House and Congress, supported by the Jewish dominated media, are totally in Netanyahu’s pocket, something which he has admitted to publicly more than once, saying that the United States is “easily moved” by someone like him. But if one really needed proof positive about who is in charge in the US-Israel relationship, one need only look at the recent omnibus federal government budget bill of $1.2 trillion. Activist Pascal Lottaz has taken the time to go through the complete 1,012 page document detailing where the money goes and discusses his findings in a 9 minute podcast on YouTube. Lottaz has confirmed both the immediate cash payment of $3.8 billion in “tribute money” to Israel plus the already reported blocking of any federal government funding of United Nation Relief and Works Agency for Gaza (UNRWA) for at least a year. As UNRWA is the key humanitarian aid agency, the latter is a prohibition completely inconsistent with Biden’s expressed desire to confront the “surging” humanitarian aid crisis for the Gazans who are facing starvation in the context of an active genocide. The prohibition is in spite of the continuing lack of evidence to substantiate Israel’s claims of “terrorism support” leveled against the UN agency and despite the famine conditions already present in Gaza. In his review of the document, Lottaz has also discovered those and other specific benefits that involve Israel in 10 sections of the bill.
The bill also seeks to protect Israel from accountability under existing or new international law and to limit Palestinian efforts to resist or defend themselves. It requires any organization receiving US funding to show that it is actively taking steps “to combat anti-Israel bias” and it prohibits any funding to support Palestinian statehood unless it is shown that a list of specified conditions are met including satisfactory “cooperation with Israeli security organizations.” It prohibits any funding to the Palestinian Authority if Palestine is granted statehood status by the UN or any UN agency without Israel’s consent. It oddly prohibits any security support to the West Bank or Gaza unless it is shown that satisfactory steps are being taken by the Palestinian Authority to “end torture and other cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment of detainees.” It should be noted that the Palestinians, not Israel, are required to end abuse of detainees even though it is Israel that routinely engages in those practices. The detailed sections of the bill expanding on what is blocked or prohibited are as follows:
The bill forbids any US funding of the UN International Commission of Inquiry investigation into Israel’s unlawful occupation of Palestinian territory: Sec. 7848(C)(2) None of the funds appropriated by this Act may be made available for the United Nations International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, and Israel.
The bill defunds the UN Human Rights Council unless the organization drops all inquiry into human rights violations by Israel: Sec. 7048(b)(2)(c) UNITED NATIONS HUMAN RIGHTS COUNCIL. (1) None of the funds appropriated by this Act may be made available in support of the United Nations Human Rights Council unless the Secretary of State determines and reports to the appropriate congressional committees that participation in the Council is important to the national interest of the United States and that such Council is taking significant steps to remove Israel as a permanent agenda item and ensure integrity in the election of members to such Council.
The bill requires any international organization, department, or agency receiving US funding to show that it is taking “credible steps to combat anti-Israel bias”: SEC. 7048. (a) TRANSPARENCY AND ACCOUNTABILITY. Not later than 120 days after the date of enactment of this Act, the Secretary of State shall report to the Committees on Appropriations whether each organization, department, or agency receiving a contribution from funds appropriated by this Act under the headings ‘‘Contributions to International Organizations’’ and ‘‘International Organizations and Programs’’:
The bill prohibits funding of any support to Palestinian Statehood except under US State Department confirmation that its government meets specified conditions including that is is “cooperating with appropriate Israeli and other appropriate security organizations.”
The bill prohibits any support to the Palestinian Broadcasting Corporation: SEC. 7038. None of the funds appropriated or otherwise made available by this Act may be used to provide equipment, technical support, consulting services, or any other form of assistance to the Palestinian Broadcasting Corporation.
The bill prohibits any funding to security assistance to the West Bank or Gaza unless the State Department reports on “the steps being taken by the Palestinian Authority to “end torture and other cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment of detainees”: 7039(C)(2) SECURITY ASSISTANCE AND REPORTING REQUIREMENT. Notwithstanding any other provision of law, none of the funds made available by this or prior appropriations Acts, including funds made available by transfer, may be made available for obligation for security assistance for the West Bank and Gaza until the Secretary of State reports to the Committees on Appropriations on the steps being taken by the Palestinian Authority to end torture and other cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment of detainees, including by bringing to justice members of Palestinian security forces who commit such crimes.
The bill prohibits any funding of the Palestinian Authority if Palestine achieves recognition of statehood by the UN or any UN agency without Israel’s agreement or if the Palestinians initiate an investigation of Israel in the International Criminal Court: Sec.7401(k)(2)(A)(i) None of the funds appropriated under the heading ‘‘Economic Support Fund’’ in this Act may be made available for assistance for the Palestinian Authority, if after the date of enactment of this Act the Palestinians obtain the same standing as member states or full membership as a state in the United Nations or any specialized agency thereof outside an agreement negotiated between Israel and the Palestinians or the Palestinians initiate an International Criminal Court (ICC) judicially authorized investigation, or actively support such an investigation, that subjects Israeli nationals to an investigation for alleged crimes against Palestinians.
The bill extends existing loan guarantees to Israel under the Emergency Wartime Supplemental Appropriations Act through September 30, 2029: SEC. 7034(k)(6).
The bill grants $3.3 billion in “Foreign Military Financing” to Israel, to be disbursed within 30 days: 7401(d) ISRAEL.—Of the funds appropriated by this Act under the heading ‘‘Foreign Military Financing Program’’, not less than $3,300,000,000 shall be available for grants only for Israel which shall be disbursed within 30 days of enactment of this Act: Provided, That to the extent that the Government of Israel requests that funds be used for such purposes, grants made available for Israel under this heading shall, as agreed by the United States and Israel, be available for advanced weapons systems, of which not less than $725,300,000 shall be available for the procurement in Israel of defense articles and defense services, including research and development.
The bill authorizes half a billion dollars in military aid to Israel for “Iron Dome” and other missile defense systems: SEC. 8072. Of the amounts appropriated in this Act under the headings ‘‘Procurement, Defense-Wide’’ and ‘‘Research, Development, Test and Evaluation, Defense-Wide, $500,000,000 shall be for the Israeli Cooperative Programs.
The bill has passed through Congress, is written into law, and is on its way for Joe Biden’s signature. In other words, the US is willingly complicit in thousands of deaths already plus the impending deaths of some tens of thousands more innocent people. It is funding Israel’s war of extermination against the Palestinians and is opposed to any attempts by the Palestinians to either defend themselves or their interests as a people. It is shameful and our government is behaving monstrously, controlled by a foreign power that has thoroughly corrupted it. And the rot is spreading throughout our political system to include the death of our own right to freedom of speech. Only last week Governor Greg Abbott of Texas boasted of new legislation to stamp out alleged antisemitism and as criticism of Israel or the behavior of Jews is defined as being antisemitic it is likely that students demonstrating against the Jewish state and in support of Gaza will be expelled from universities and even prosecuted. And it is also reported that the Israel Lobby in the US is busy assembling a war chest of $100 million to fund the removal of politicians and other public figures who are critical of Israel. This is serious stuff that will affect all of us.
It might come as a surprise but the answer to this question derives from influences many of which are beyond our control. For instance, most of us experience attitudinal changes along a spectrum from day to day or maybe even hour to hour. This has to do with our individualized reaction to all manner of hormonal and other secretions in your body. These, in turn, are influenced by epigenetic factors triggered by both internal and external environmental conditions.
A lot of these factors are inherited. You did not choose your genetic makeup or the parents who gave it to you and they did not choose their parents, and so on. This unchosen heritage sets your body up for all sorts of possibilities. Some might turn out to be good for you: nicely working immune system, relatively stable and positive mental disposition and acuity, etc. But it doesn’t have to go like that, and a propensity for illness and instability might be your inherited lot.
Nor did you choose the sort of environment in which you were born. I might tell you to avoid being born into poverty, but you can’t do that. Nonetheless, statistically, the chance for a “prosperous and productive” life is low if early poverty is your fate. I might suggest that you avoid parents who are neglectful or physically/emotionally abusive. Do not grow up next to a “super fund” contaminated site. Just so, you should avoid being born in the middle of a raging war. Despite the fact that all of these outcomes would certainly affect your behavior, none involve choices you can make. It is amazing how much of our history and condition is beyond our control.
What Do We Believe?
Just as we are arbitrarily centered in a body we did not choose, we are arbitrarily centered locally in time and space. That is, in a culture. And, here too, much is beyond our control.
It has been one of the frequent themes of these blog essays that there is something called “natural localism.”* That is, most people tend to settle down in a local community. It is within this locale that they work or go to school, live within a family and friendship network, and come to feel a community identity. That does not mean that people don’t travel (mostly to visit friends and family) or relocate within that same cultural realm for work or school. However, the natural inclination of most is find a place to settle down. There is even an evolutionary aspect to this. Natural localism provides a time and space that maximizes familiarity and predictability. That is why it usually provides a sense of security.
There is, of course, a downside. Natural localism ties one to a community worldview that mitigates against independent questioning and fact-checking. Over time established communities and groups socialize members into views supported by traditions, the interests of whatever passes for a ruling class, and often an ideology that idealizes the community’s raison d’être. Most who live within the range of such an aggregation will, almost habitually, see the world through the community’s lens.
That means, for most of us, our belief system encompassing our notion of what is right and wrong and who is friendly and who is unfriendly, is not something we have independently chosen. There are endless examples of this. Take the Cold War between the U.S. and its allies on one side and the Soviet Union, the Warsaw Pact countries and China on the other. If you are old enough to remember this time (roughly 1945 to 1991) you should recall that the majority of adults in the U.S. and Western Europe had a hostile outlook toward the USSR and its allies. Most had no direct contact or experience that would provoke this hostility. They got it in an osmotic way. The culturally negative messages in one’s external environment shaped their perceptions so that they conformed to a community-wide point of view.
Of course, just like bodies react differently to hormones and other secretions, individuals have varying reactions to the inherited belief systems of their cultures. A bell curve results—most people will be within an average range of cultural compliance. They will readily accept what they are taught at at home and in school, and hear from their teachers, leaders and media. There may be differences of opinion on the details, but most will buy into the overall message. At the edges of the curve will be found those who, for whatever experiential reasons, ignore or reject the message. The majority will see this minority as weird. At the extreme, they will be seen as a threat to social stability.
The Pathological Potential of Belief Systems
The negative feelings generated during the Cold War were felt by populations that were, for the most part, geographically separated. What happens when this inherited fear and negativity runs between populations sharing the same immediate landscape? What can your community point of view make you feel and do then?
Here are two examples:
The United States prior to the 1960s:
U.S. culture prior to the 1960s was characterized by an institutionally and legally sanctioned racial divide between White and Black Americans. Racism relegated Black Americans to an inferior status enforced by legal segregation and discrimination. This resulted in an impoverished economic and social environment. From the point of view of many Whites, Black disadvantage was an historically ratified “normal” situation. That is, it felt natural and orderly to the White population based on tradition and long practice.
Thus, White Americans had been acculturated to a system that periodically pushed Black Americans to rebellion—“race riots.” These uprisings frightened White citizens who then supported strong police action against Blacks in order to maintain social stability and security. Such a posture only made future uprisings more likely.
This situation did not begin to change until the 1954 Supreme Court decision in the case of Brown v Board of Education, followed by a Black political movement led by Martin Luther King Jr. The goal of this movement was to outlaw segregation and other egregious acts of discrimination in the public sphere. This effort was supported by a liberal sector of the White population who recognized the need for change based on a culturally idealized view of American socio-economic potential. King and his allies were successful in bringing change to the public sphere— essentially creating a new definition of normal based on a more egalitarian United States. However, changing individual laws is relatively easy compared to changing culture. Since the 1980s the country has experienced what is known as “culture wars.” That is, a political pushback by a sizable number of “conservatives” against progressive legislation.
Several things are to be noted here: (1) U.S. culture, since its beginning, has had a racist character that dehumanized its minority populations. It is in this sense that it was and, in some regards, still is pathological. (2) For most of its history this toxic environment was, and for some continue to be, invisible because most Whites were raised in family and/or local community surroundings that registered the toxicity as normal. Despite the change that eventually came in the 1950s and 60s, today some are so addicted to the older worldview that they are waging a political battle to return to a “sick normal.”
Contemporary Israel:
Israel’s story overlaps with that of the United States: (1) A sense of racially/religiously based superiority. While it is White Christians in the U.S., it is Jewish Zionists in Israel. (2) A claim that the country’s land is divinely deeded or blessed. (3) The existence of a largely segregated and disadvantaged class of “others.” In Israel, the “others” are the Palestinians.
Israeli and other Jews, and many who support them (i.e. Joe Biden), have learned about Israel through a biased narrative. The result is an attitude sustained by a customized pro-Zionist history. To maintain the narrative within Israel itself, education has been turned into a process of indoctrination. What is taught in this process? (1) God gave the land of Palestine to the Hebrew ancestors of contemporary Jews. (2) Jews need the State of Israel to be safe in a world where antisemitism is widespread. (3) The world owes it to the Jews to secure this Jewish state. (4) Palestinians are dangerous interlopers who hate Jews and seek to destroy the Jewish state. For Zionists, the Palestinians have replaced the Nazis as perpetrators of another potential Holocaust. The result has been the maintenance of Israel as a fortress nation—roughly resembling ancient Sparta where an elite population lived in fear of the serfs (helots) they had oppressed and driven by that fear, these elites trained constantly for war.
The national and local environment inherited by Israeli Jews is infused with this mindset. Defense against Palestinian and Arab “terrorists” is an important psychological theme of their culture. It is reinforced in the average family setting. It is detailed out for them in school. It provides a sense of camaraderie among friends and within the workplace. It is capped off by a program of near-universal conscription of Jewish Israelis. It is extraordinarily difficult to escape the pressures of such an overbearing cultural climate. Here too, the toxic nature of this environment is invisible to many of Israel’s Jewish citizens because of having been raised in local surroundings that registered their perceptions as normal. The predominant rationalization for the resulting Israeli aggressiveness has always been “national defense.” What can be more normal than that? Hence, the fact that “Israelis overwhelmingly are confident in the justice of the present Gaza war.” And this support of the wholesale destruction of Gaza** is the final confirming factor demonstrating the pathological nature of Israeli/Zionist culture.
Conclusion
The United States and Israel are not the only sick cultures on the planet. However, as noted, they stand together due to a historical symmetry. This connection allowed the Zionists in the U.S. to build a powerful special interest organization and easily convince most of the American population to accept the Israeli narrative that, among other things, claimed the two countries held similar values. This despite the fact that Israel does not even have the framework for an idealized just society. It lacks a constitution and, insisting on a culture of Jewish supremacy, guarantees the absence of equal justice for all.
The connection also sees both nations attempting to deny similar sins while claiming similar virtues: Israeli claim that it is “the only democracy in the Middle East” covers up the reality that it is an apartheid state and, in the case of the U.S., the claim of exceptionalism due to the practice of high ethical standards covers up a continuing national struggle against racism and a foreign policy that contradicts U.S. claims of spreading democracy.
On the other hand, over time the United States did create legislative and judicial ideals for itself based on a self-glorifying narrative—that the U.S. was a nation of superior moral-ethical potential. Thus, when the government fails the citizenry you can get civil rights movements and anti-war protests of historic importance.
Significantly, it is this lurking moral uneasiness with their nation’s hypocrisy, felt particularly by the youth, that is now eroding the American alliance with Israel. The ethnic cleansing and genocide, so acceptable to Israeli Jews, is a behavior that a number of Americans see as indefensible—particularly from an “ally” claiming to hold values similar to their own.
Thus is change possible even in an environment over which we have but nominal control. And, in this case, for the U.S. to get past its own hypocrisy—the sick elements of its own culture—it must finally leave Israel behind.
…………………
Notes.
*See Lawrence Davidson, Foreign Policy Inc. (University Press of Kentucky, 2009), chapter 1.
**The proper historical analogy to the destruction of Gaza is the Nazi destruction of the Warsaw Ghetto.
Lawrence Davidson is a retired professor of history at West Chester University in West Chester, PA.
Looking back to what I wrote in 2012, in the midst of the so-called Arab Spring and its aftermath, it is striking just how much the Region has shifted. It is now almost 180° re-orientated. Then, I argued,
“That the Arab Spring “Awakening” is taking a turn, very different to the excitement and promise with which it was hailed at the outset. Sired from an initial, broad popular impulse, it is becoming increasingly understood, and feared, as a nascent counter-revolutionary “cultural revolution” – a re-culturation of the region in the direction of a prescriptive canon that is emptying out those early high expectations …
“That popular impulse associated with the ‘awakening’ has now been subsumed and absorbed into three major political projects associated with this push to reassert [Sunni primacy]: a Muslim Brotherhood project, a Saudi-Qatari-Salafist project, and a [radical jihadi] project.
“No one really knows the nature of the [first project] the Brotherhood project – whether it is that of a sect; or if it is truly mainstream … What is clear, however, is that the Brotherhood tone everywhere is increasingly one of militant sectarian grievance. The joint Saudi-Salafist project was conceived as a direct counter to the Brotherhood project – and [the third] was the uncompromising Sunni radicalism [Wahhabism], funded and armed by Saudi Arabia and Qatar, that aims, not to contain, but rather, to displace traditional Sunnism with the culture of Salafism. i.e. It sought the ‘Salifisation’ of traditional Sunni Islam.
“All these projects, whilst they may overlap in some parts, are in a fundamental way competitors with each other. And [were] being fired-up in Yemen, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Egypt, north Africa, the Sahel, Nigeria, and the horn of Africa.
[Not surprisingly] …“Iranians increasingly interpret Saudi Arabia’s mood as a hungering for war, and Gulf statements do often have that edge of hysteria and aggression: a recent editorial in the Saudi-owned al-Hayat stated: “The climate in the GCC [Gulf Cooperation Council] indicates that matters are heading towards a GCC-Iranian-Russian confrontation on Syrian soil, similar to what took place in Afghanistan during the Cold War. To be sure, the decision has been taken to overthrow the Syrian regime, seeing as it is vital to the regional influence and hegemony of the Islamic Republic of Iran”.
Well, that was then. How different the landscape is today: The Muslim Brotherhood largely is a ‘broken reed’, compared to what it was; Saudi Arabia has effectively ‘switched off the lights’ on Salafist jihadism, and is focussed more on courting tourism, and the Kingdom now has a peace accord with Iran (brokered by China).
“The cultural shift toward re-imagining a wider Sunni Muslim polity”, as I wrote in 2012, always was an American dream, dating back to Richard Perle’s ‘Clean Break’ Policy Paper of 1996 (a report that had been commissioned by Israel’s then-PM, Netanyahu). Its roots lay with the British post-war II policy of transplanting the stalwart family notables of the Ottoman era into the Gulf as an Anglophile ruling strata catering to western oil interests.
But look what has happened —
A mini revolution: Iran has, in the interim, ‘come in from the cold’ and is firmly anchored as ‘a regional power’. It is now the strategic partner to Russia and China. And Gulf States today are more preoccupied with ‘business’ and Tech than Islamic jurisprudence. Syria, targeted by the West, and an outcast in the region, has been welcomed back into the Arab League’s Arab sphere with high ceremony, and Syria is on its way to assuming again its former standing within the Middle East.
What is interesting is that even then, hints of the coming conflict between Israel and the Palestinians were apparent; as I wrote in 2012:
“Over recent years we have heard the Israelis emphasise their demand for recognition of a specifically Jewish nation-state, rather than for an Israeli State, per se. A Jewish state that in principle, would remain open to any Jew seeking to return: the creation of a ‘Jewish umma’, as it were.
“Now, it seems we have, in the western half of the Middle East, at least, a mirror trend, asking for the reinstatement of a wider Sunni nation – representing the ‘undoing’ of the last remnants of the colonial era. Will we see the struggle increasing epitomised as a primordial struggle between Jewish and Islamic religious symbols – between al-Aqsa and the Temple Mount?
“It seems that both Israel and its surrounding terrain are marching in step toward language which takes them far away from the underlying, largely secular concepts by which this conflict traditionally has been conceptualised. What will be the consequence as the conflict, by its own logic, becomes a clash of religious poles?”
What has driven this 180° turn? One factor, assuredly, was Russia’s limited intervention into Syria to prevent a jihadi sweep. The second has been China’s appearance on the scene as a truly gargantuan business partner – and putative mediator too – precisely at a time when the U.S. had begun its withdrawal from the region (at least in terms of the attention it pays to it, if not (yet) reflected in any substantive physical departure).
The latter – U.S. military withdrawal (Iraq and Syria) – however, seems more a question of ‘when’, rather than if. All expect it.
Put plainly, we have experienced a Mackinder-style ‘pivot of history’: Russia and China – and Iran – are slowly taking control of the Asian heartland (both institutionally and economically), as the pendulum of the West swings away.
The Sunni world – ineluctably and warily – marches towards the BRICS. Effectively, the Gulf finds itself badly wrong-footed by the so-called ‘Abraham Accords’ that tied them to Israeli Tech (which, in turn, was channelling considerable Wall Street venture ‘free money’ their way). Israel’s ‘suspect genocide’ (ICJ language) in Gaza is slowly driving a stake into the heart of the Gulf ‘business model’.
But another key factor has been the smart diplomacy pursued by Iran. It is easy for western Iran-hawks to decry Iran’s politicking and influencing across the region – the Islamic Republic is after all, unrepentantly ‘non-compliant’ with the U.S. aims and pro-Israeli ambitions in the Region. What else, other than pushback, might you expect when all the encircling western ‘fire’ was so concentrated on the Islamic Republic?
Yet, Iran has pursued an astute path. It has NOT gone to war against Sunni Arab states in Syria, as was mooted in 2012. Rather, it quietly has pursued a strategy of diplomacy and joint Gulf security and trade with Gulf States. Iran too, has partly succeeded in shaking itself free from much of the effects of western sanctions. It has joined both BRICS and the SCO and has acquired a new economic and political ‘spatial depth’.
Whether the U.S. and Europe likes it or not, Iran is a major regional political player, and it sits atop, with others, the coalition of Resistance Movements and Fronts that have been woven together through shrewd diplomacy to work in close conjunction with each other.
This development has become a key strategic ‘project’: Sunni (Hamas) and Shi’i (Hizbullah) are joined with other ‘fronts’ in an anti-colonial struggle for liberation under the non-sectarian symbol of Al-Aqsa (which is neither Sunni, nor Shi’a, nor Muslim Brotherhood, nor Salafist or Wahhabi). It represents, rather, the storied tale of Islamic civilisation. Yes, it is, in its way, eschatological too.
This latter achievement has done much to limit the threat of all-out war from engulfing the region (fingers-crossed though …). The Iranian and Resistance Axis’ interest is twofold: First, to retain power to carefully calibrate the intensity of conflict – upping and lowering as appropriate; and secondly, to keep escalatory dominance as much as possible in their hands.
The second aspect encompasses strategic patience. The Resistance Movements well understand the Israeli psyche – therefore, NO Pavlovian reflexes to Israeli provocations are accepted. But rather, to wait and rely on Israel to provide the pretext to any further step up the escalatory ladder. Israel must be seen to be the instigator for escalation – and the resistance merely the responder. The ‘eye’ must be on the Washington political psyche.
Thirdly, Iran draws confidence to pursue its ‘forwardness’ by having innovated a tectonic shift in asymmetric warfare, and in deterrence against Israel and the West. The U.S. might huff and puff, but Iran felt assured throughout this period that the U.S. well knows the risks associated with trying ‘blow the house down’.
Realists in the West tend to believe that ‘power’ is a simple function of national population size and GDP. So that, given the disparity in air and firepower, no way, as an example, can Hizbullah expect to ‘come out quits’ against Israel – a much richer and more populated entity.
This blindspot is the Resistance’s silent ‘ally’. It prevents the West (mostly) from understanding this pivot in military thinking.
Iran and its allies take a different view: They regard a state’s power to rest on intangibles, rather than literal tangibles: strategic patience; ideology; discipline; innovation and the concept of military leadership defined as the ability to cast a ‘magic’ spell over men so that they would follow their commander, even unto death.
The West has (or had) airpower and unchallenged air superiority, but the Resistance Fronts have their two-stage solution. They manufacture their own AI-assisted swarm drones and smart earth-hugging missiles. This is their Air Force.
The second stage naturally would be to evolve a layered air defence system (Russian-style). Does the Resistance possess such? Like Brer Rabbit, they stay mum.
The Resistance’s underlying strategy is clear: the West is over-invested in its air dominance and in its overwhelming fire-power. It prioritises quick shock and awe thrusts, but usually quickly exhausts itself early in the encounter. They rarely can sustain such high-intensity assault for long.
In Lebanon in 2006, Hizbullah remained deep underground whilst the Israeli air assault swept overhead. The physical surface damage was huge, yet their forces were unaffected and emerged only afterwards. Then came the 33 days of Hizbullah’s missile barrage – until Israel called it quits. This patience represents the first pillar of strategy.
The second therefore, is that whereas the West has short endurance, the opposition is trained and prepared for long attritional conflict – missile and rocket barrage to the point that civil society can sustain the impact no longer. War’s aim not necessarily has killing the enemy soldiers as a prime objective; rather it is exhaustion and inculcating a sense of defeat.
And what of the opposing project?
In 2012, I wrote:
“It seems that both Israel and [the Islamic world] are marching in step toward [eschatological narratives] which is taking them far away from the underlying, largely secular concepts by which this conflict traditionally has been conceptualised. What will be the consequence as the conflict, by its own logic, becomes a clash of religious poles? ” [– Al-Aqsa versus the Temple Mount].
Well, the West remains stuck with trying to manage and contain the conflict, using precisely those ‘largely secular concepts’ by which this conflict has been conceptualised and managed (or non-managed, I would say). In so doing, and through the West’s (secular) support for one particular eschatological vision (which happens to overlap with its own) over another, it inadvertently fuels the conflict.
Too late to return to secular modes of management; the genie is out.
U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin addressing an AIPAC forum in Washington, D.C., Jan. 10, 2023. (DoD, Alexander Kubitza)
As was to be expected, considering the extreme complexity of the U.S.-Israel relationship, our recent article on “The Myth of Israel as ‘US Aircraft Carrier’ in Middle East,” far from settling this controversial issue, aroused numerous objections. We see these disagreements as an invitation to respond, in the hope that a friendly debate can contribute to clarifying the issues.
The Aircraft Carrier Image
A reader directly asks us “what individual or entity is the quotation ‘The Myth of Israel as “US Aircraft Carrier” in Middle East’ borrowed from or attributed to?”
There is no single answer, inasmuch as this image is used quite frequently, originally by advocates of the U.S.-Israel alliance, to justify it. That the Zionists make this claim is to be expected, and is no more credible than their other claims.
Our questioning of that expression is directed primarily at pro-Palestinian friends, usually on the left who accept and spread the belief that Israel is a U.S. “strategic asset,” usually meaning it contributes to U.S. control of Middle East oil.
This assumption is often based on the notion that a capitalist power must act in its own economic interest, and thus could not be fooled by ideology or bribery into acting against its own interests.
Not wanting to engage in ad hominem attacks on commentators with whom we largely agree on just about everything else, we have been reluctant to name names. But here goes: a perfect example is a recent interview with the excellent economist Michael Hudson by Ben Norton. Both identify as Marxist. Their interview is titled “Israel as a Landed Aircraft Carrier.”
Norton introduces his interview by citing Biden’s notorious declaration, “if there were not an Israel, we would have to invent one.”
Michael Hudson takes up the theme. He stresses that U.S. support to Israel, is “not altruistic” (no doubt), and provides his own explanation.
“Israel is a landed aircraft carrier in the Near East. Israel is the takeoff point for America to control the Near East…The United States has always viewed Israel as just our foreign military base…”
His initial justification for this statement is historic.
“When England first passed the act saying that there should be an Israel, the Balfour Declaration, it was because Britain wanted to control the Near East and its oil supplies…”
However, we maintain that the reasons for the Balfour Declaration (discussed at length in the book by Alison Weir that we cite) are long out of date and cannot explain current U.S. official devotion to Israel.
By the time Israel came into being, after World War II, the U.S. had effectively taken control of the region and its oil sources and had no particular interest in Israel.
Saudi King Ibn Saud converses with FDR (right) through an interpreter, Feb. 14, 1945, on board the USS Quincy, in the Suez Canal, during which U.S. secured Saudi oil flows in exchange for U.S. security guarantees. (U.S. Navy/Wikimedia Commons)
Hudson’s second justification is a generalization about U.S. imperialism:
“And that’s really the U.S. strategy all over the world; it’s trying to fuel other countries to fight wars for its own control.”
But in fact, the fighting and dying in the Middle East has been done by the United States itself and certain NATO allies, while the only people Israeli soldiers are actively fighting are the Palestinians, whose destruction provides no advantage to the United States.
Uzi Arad in 2011. (Harald Dettenborn, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 3.0 de)
Hudson’s third justification is an anecdote. From his work at the Hudson Institute, he became a close associate of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s main national security adviser, Uzi Arad. Once they were together at a party in San Francisco, and
“one of the U.S. generals came over and slapped Uzi on the back and said, ‘you’re our landed aircraft carrier over there. We love you.’ ”
So that is what a U.S. general said, and probably believed. It is certainly what the Israeli lobby has been telling the Americans for a long time, to justify all that money and military aid. But is it true?
Perhaps one can say that Israel is an aircraft carrier salesman who never delivers the aircraft carrier. Because Israel for a long time has had the rare privilege of NOT housing a U.S. military base, or at least not housing it openly.
Only in 2017, the U.S. and Israel revealed the inauguration of “the first American military base on Israeli soil,” which the U.S. military said was not an American base but merely living quarters for U.S. personnel working on a secret Israeli radar site in the Negev desert evidently spying on Iran. This facility serves Israeli defense interests. Some aircraft carrier!
And all through the Middle East, the U.S. has its own floating aircraft carriers, as well as great big genuine, non-floating military bases. The largest is Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar, and there are important military bases in Bahrain, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.
Netanyahu as Zelensky
However, Hudson’s argument does not in fact explain how Israel serves U.S. purposes as a military asset, as an “aircraft carrier” in the sense of an unsinkable military base which the U.S. can use to attack its enemies. Rather, Hudson sees Israel as an expendable pawn, a puppet used by Washington to trigger a war that the U.S. wants to wage against Iran, to the ruin of Israel itself.
Hudson sees Netanyahu as “the Israeli version of Zelensky in the Ukraine.” Just as the U.S. used Ukraine to provoke Russia, the United States pushes Netanyahu to escalate against Gaza so that he will provoke Hezbollah to come to the aid of the Palestinians, and since Hezbollah is described as an Iranian proxy, this will be the excuse for the U.S. to go to war against Iran.
March 21, 2019: Netanyahu on phone with U.S. President Donald Trump during a visit by U.S. Secretary of State Michael Pompeo to Jerusalem. (U.S. State Department/Ron Przysucha)
Hudson said:
“The whole world has noticed that the U.S. now has two aircraft carriers in the Mediterranean, right off the Near Eastern shore, and it has an atomic submarine near the Persian Gulf…. And it’s very clear that they’re there not to protect Israel, but to fight Iran. Again and again, every American newspaper, when it talks about Hamas, it says Hamas is acting on behalf of Iran….
America isn’t trying to fight to protect Ukraine. It’s fighting for the last Ukrainian to be exhausted in what they’d hoped would be depleting Russia’s military. …Well, the same thing in Israel. If the United States is pushing Israel and Netanyahu to escalate, escalate, escalate, to do something that at a point is going to lead [Hezbollah leader Hassan] Nasrallah to finally say, ‘okay, we can’t take it anymore.
We’re coming in and helping rescue the Gazans and especially rescue the West Bank, where just as much fighting is taking place. We’re going to come in.’ And that’s when the United States will then feel free to move not only against Lebanon, but all the way via Syria, Iraq, to Iran.”
So this implies that the U.S. military and civilian strategists are eager to find an excuse to go to war with Iran, after having failed to gain full control of Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan or Syria after attacking them militarily (with help from certain NATO allies, but not from Israel). And Iran is a much more formidable power than any of those.
Meanwhile, the U.S. Armed Forces are having difficulty in recruitment (although they may be counting on filling the ranks with some of the undocumented immigrants flooding across the southern borders). Bogged down in Ukraine, preparing for conflict with China, are U.S. leaders really eager to get into a major war with Iran?
This speculation raises the key question raised by a number of Consortium News readers: what is meant by the U.S. national interest?
The National Interest
As we anticipated, there are readers on the left who interpret our appeal to “the national interest” as proof that we are defenders of capitalism. One reader writes: “The defense of capitalism in this article is truly bewildering. The authors conflate U.S. interests with Corporate interests.” That conflation is being done by the reader who assumes that “national interest” cannot be diversely defined.
Our position is simple. We are not aware of any realistic prospect for abolishing the American capitalist system in the foreseeable future, even though there are many symptoms of its radical decline both domestically and in international relations. This decline is due largely to the way the “national interest” is currently defined and pursued.
“This assumption is often based on the notion that a capitalist power must act in its own economic interest, and thus could not be fooled by ideology or bribery into acting against its own interests.”
Our view is that even under capitalism, some policies are better or worse than others. When it comes to the urgency of the survival of the Palestinian people, or more broadly, of sparing humanity the devastation of nuclear war, prudent policies are worth the risk of benefiting some less harmful branches of capitalism in some way.
Although the political system is largely paralyzed, there exist contrary ways of defining the national interest, and some are more perilous for the future of humanity than others.
The current policies that define the official “national interest” in the United States did not spring forth from a unanimous understanding or scientific analysis of what is best for capitalist profit or for anything else. The current ruling foreign policy doctrine is the product of specific influences and individuals that can be named and identified.
To be precise, the “national interest” that is being pursued by the current administration both on the elected top and especially the deep state below is a theoretical construct that has been created by the convergence of two powers that have excluded their rivals from the process.
These two powers are the military-industrial complex and the intellectual branch of the Zionist lobby, known as the “neoconservatives.”
The Lobby as Policy Maker
Biden in Israel, July 2022. (U.S. Embassy Jerusalem, Flickr, CC BY 2.0)
U.S. foreign policy has encountered moments where positive change was possible: after withdrawal from Vietnam, and even more, after the collapse of the Soviet Union. At that point, all the interests linked to the military industrial complex were under threat from the prospect of a “peace dividend” involving substantial disarmament.
What was needed was a fresh ideological justification for the MIC, and this was provided by the growing influence of the privately-financed think tanks that began their takeover of foreign policy definition in the 1970s.
In the following decades, these institutions came under the decisive influence of Zionist donors such as Haim Saban, Sheldon Adelson and AIPAC itself, which founded the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. These think tanks provided echo chambers for pro-Israel neocon intellectuals to shape editorial policy of major liberal media as well as foreign policy itself.
Here is the point: current U.S. policy is not the natural expression of “capitalist corporate interests,” but rather is the product of that process, of the deliberate takeover of U.S. foreign policy by a highly motivated, coherent and talented group of intellectuals, some with dual U.S.-Israeli citizenship. This policy has a name: the Wolfowitz Doctrine.
The Wolfowitz Doctrine & PNAC
The text is available on internet and speaks for itself. It was written as the initial version of the Defense Planning Guidance for the 1994–1999 fiscal years in the office of Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, Paul Wolfowitz, an ardent Zionist.
The version leaked to The New York Times in March 1992 was officially toned down after it caused an uproar, but it has remained as the guidelines for aggressive U.S foreign policy ever since.
Basically, the doctrine announces that the main objective of the United States is to retain its status as the world’s only remaining superpower. No serious rival must be allowed to develop.
This amounts to decreeing that history has come to a stop, and denies the natural historical process whereby China, for instance, which in the past was a leading power, must not be allowed to resume that status.
Wolfowitz during a press conference at the Pentagon on March 1, 2001. (DoD photo by R. D. Ward)
In 1997, neocons William Kristol and Robert Kagan founded the “Project for the New American Century” with the clear purpose of defining U.S. foreign policy in line with the Wolfowitz Doctrine.
As the “world’s pre-eminent power,” the United States must “shape a new century favorable to American principles and interests.” This was to be done neither by virtuous example nor by diplomacy, but by military strength and the force of arms.
PNAC members including Vice President Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz took control of policy under President George W. Bush and have kept it ever since.
Inside one administration after another, Robert Kagan’s wife, former Cheney aide Victoria Nuland (who last week said she would be resigning her State Dept. position) has advanced the neocon agenda, notably by managing the Ukrainian disaster. PNAC dissolved itself in 2006, announcing that its job was done.
This job amounted to linking the powerful military industrial complex to the global extension of U.S. power that was turned first and foremost against Israel’s Arab neighbors, starting with Iraq.
This branch of the Lobby, inside the government itself and mainstream media, on the false claim that Iraq was a dangerous enemy of the U.S., got the U.S. to attack and destroy a regime that was in fact an enemy of Israel.
The U.S. was fighting on Israel’s behalf, not the other way around.
The neoconservatives have designed the policy which AIPAC pays members of Congress to support. Every senator has taken AIPAC money.
National Interests Can Be Redefined
The Wolfowitz doctrine is expressed in Nuland’s anti-Russian Ukrainian policy as well as in the American provocations surrounding Taiwan. These policies are not inevitable, even under capitalism.
The expansion of NATO, as an example, was firmly opposed by a generation of U.S. foreign policy experts who have been sidelined and expelled from the policy-making process by the triumphant neocons.
Some are still alive, and others can emerge. So it is neither far-fetched nor “pro-capitalist” to suggest that a more realistic, less arrogant and belligerent foreign policy might be possible.
Such a change cannot be easy, but may be favored precisely by growing recognition of the multiple failures of the reigning neoconservative foreign policy.
For this, a free debate is necessary, in which it is possible to challenge the role of the Lobby without being accused of plagiarizing the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
It is obvious that in the United States, where this debate is most significant, there are Zionists who are not Jewish, while a very large proportion of the Jewish population is highly critical of Israel and has nothing to do with the Lobby.
The government in Jerusalem proclaiming itself “the Jewish State” as it slaughters native Palestinians is responsible for any current rise in misguided anti-Jewish feelings, which that government blatantly exploits to attract Jewish immigrants from France and New Jersey, in particular.
A reader suggests: “Some folks may find it emotionally and psychologically comforting to blame The Lobby and Israel for the evil of U.S. foreign policy, and somehow the good ol USA is an unwitting victim.”
Can’t we more accurately suggest: “Some folks may find it emotionally and psychologically comforting to blame the U.S. foreign policy for everything rather than risk the inevitable furious reactions to any mention of the Lobby and Israel?”
“The U.S. was fighting on Israel’s behalf, not the other way around.”
Certainly U.S. foreign policy is responsible for everything it does, and that is a gigantic evil. But that does not mean that everyone else is totally innocent.
The Lobby is most certainly responsible for doing all it can to encourage the very worst tendencies in U.S. arrogant exceptionalism, the MIC, Islamophobia and Christian evangelical fantasies, when they can be used against Israel’s adversaries.
And we maintain that encouraging the worst tendencies is not in the American interest.
………………………..
Diana Johnstone was press secretary of the Green Group in the European Parliament from 1989 to 1996. In her latest book, Circle in the Darkness: Memoirs of a World Watcher (Clarity Press, 2020), she recounts key episodes in the transformation of the German Green Party from a peace to a war party. Her other books include Fools’ Crusade: Yugoslavia, NATO and Western Delusions (Pluto/Monthly Review) and in co-authorship with her father, Paul H. Johnstone, From MAD to Madness: Inside Pentagon Nuclear War Planning (Clarity Press). She can be reached at diana.johnstone@wanadoo.fr
‘We are the masters of the house’: Israeli channels air snuff videos featuring systematic torture of Palestinians
Israeli TV channels aired a number of reports showing the torture and humiliation of Palestinians in Israeli prisons. The videos are consumed by the Israeli public as entertainment, revealing the sadism of Israeli society.
Over the past month, mainstream Israeli television channels have aired what can only be described as snuff films. They depict the systematic torture of Palestinians from Gaza in Israeli jails. Such videos have aired on at least three occasions — twice on Channel 14, and once on the public broadcaster, Channel 13. While Channel 14 is considered right-wing, so is about two-thirds of the Israeli public, and the more “mainstream” Channel 13 has shown no qualms about airing similar footage.
The broadcasts follow prison officials into detention centers to document the mistreatment of prisoners, which seems to be something that the officials — and apparently the viewers — find satisfying rather than revolting. The airing of these snuff films is a demonstration of societal sadism.
As Yumna Patel has recently reported, several rights groups have sounded the alarm over the widespread and systemic abuse that Palestinian prisoners face at the hands of the Israeli authorities. These groups’ calls have been unintentionally buttressed by Israeli soldiers’ unapologetic videos of themselves torturing or demeaning Palestinian detainees, which they boastfully post on social media. Now, it seems that the phenomenon has expanded to mainstream Israeli television.
The two aforementioned reports on Channel 14 (threads with subtitles can be found here and here) contained footage of actual interrogation sessions during which torture was used. The Channel 13 report did not, but it exposed some of the worst prison conditions to be broadcast to the public. These conditions include forcing prisoners to live in inhumane conditions and subjecting them to torture and harassment. Here’s the 11-minute video with translated subtitles.
‘The feeling is one of pride’
“Here, we see the cells in which the Nukhba terrorists are held,” the narrator says.
The “Nukhba” refers to elite Hamas-led fighters who carried out the October 7 attack. In the cell, viewers notice metal bunkbeds without mattresses, and instead of a toilet, there is just a hole in the floor. The room is almost completely dark throughout the day, and prisoners have their hands and legs chained together.
We hear attack dogs barking constantly as prisoners are made to kneel while bound and blindfolded, their heads touching the floor.
“This is how it should be,” a guard says. “This is how a Nukhba prisoner should be…what happened on October 7 will never return.”
In another scene, a guard shouts at prisoners as dogs continue to bark incessantly. “Heads down! Heads on the floor!” he yells.
“There are many prisoners here that I personally saw at the [October 7] events,” a prison official says, taking pride in humiliating them. “The difference is that this time, he is afraid, shaking, with his head on the floor…no Allahu Akbar, nothing. You won’t hear a squeak from him.”
“They have no mattresses,” says a warden shift commander. “They have nothing…we control them 100% — their food, their shackling, their sleep…[we] show them we are the masters of the house.” Even without knowing the background to that phrase, to hear him say it is chilling.
“Masters of the house” was the election slogan of Itamar Ben-Gvir, the Jewish Power leader and current Minister of National Security. Ben-Gvir declared war on Palestinian prisoners long before October 7, and this has included shutting down bakeries that supply bread to prisoners — described by Ben-Gvir as an “indulgence” — and drastically limiting prisoners’ water use. So now it’s become much worse.
While one is tempted to believe that all prisoners here are “Nukhba” members, it turns out that many of them aren’t even suspected of that. Rather, they were rounded up in Gaza after October 7, during mass arrests in which hundreds of Gazan men were stripped and paraded in a most sadistic demonstration of power. The mass arrests also included hundreds of women, including pregnant women detained with their babies. Israeli security officials told Haaretz that by their own estimate, “only 10 to 15 percent of the hundreds of the semi-naked and bound Gazan men arrested in the Strip during the recent days are Hamas members or those who identified with the organization.”
Back to the Channel 13 coverage, viewers can hear the nonstop blasting of the Zionist anthem, Am Israel Hai (“the people of Israel live”).
“The prison authorities claim that it is meant to boost the morale of the staff,” the narrator declares. “But it is clear that this is another part of the psychological warfare against the prisoners.”
Torture, in other words.
It’s hard to imagine the depths to which Israeli society has sunk. The official tells the Channel 13 reporter that “the feeling is one of pride.”
The reason such sadism has become formalized as a matter of policy is because this is what the Israeli public demands. The Israeli Democracy Institute released a survey last week showing that two-thirds of Jewish Israelis oppose “the transfer of humanitarian aid to Gaza residents at this time,” even if “via international bodies that are not linked to Hamas or to UNRWA.” For right-wing voters, the opposition to aid jumps from 68% to 80%.
This is not Israel’s Abu Ghraib moment, because when Abu Ghraib was revealed, most Americans were revolted. Israeli society, on the other hand, is thirsting for genocide. No wonder they consume such videos as entertainment on mainstream TV.
The Grayzone has obtained slides from a confidential Israel lobby presentation based on data from Republican pollster Frank Luntz. They contain talking points for politicians and public figures seeking to justify Israel’s assault on the Gaza Strip.
Two prominent pro-Israel lobby groups are holding private briefings in New York City to coach elected officials and well-known figures on how to influence public opinion in favor of the Israeli military’s rampage in Gaza, The Grayzone can reveal. These PR sessions, convened by the UJA-Federation and Jewish Community Relations Council, rely on data collected by Frank Luntz, a veteran Republican pollster and pundit.
A source who was present during several meetings provided Luntz’s slides to The Grayzone. Participants were informed that the presentations and data contained in the slides were strictly confidential, the source said.
“This is NOT helpful,” Luntz stated in response to an email from The Grayzone requesting his comment on the private meetings.
The Luntz-tested presentations on the war in Gaza urge politicians to avoid trumpeting America’s supposedly shared democratic values with Israel, and focus instead on deploying “The Language of War with Hamas.” According to this framing, they must deploy incendiary language painting Hamas as a “brutal and savage…organization of hate” which has “raped women,” while insisting Israel is engaged in “a war for humanity.”
On his personal website, Luntz markets himself as “one of the most honored communications professionals in America today.” He has earned a small fortune crafting talking points for Republican Party heavyweights and scandal-stained corporate clients like Enron, the energy company which collapsed after engineering California’s energy crisis. Following the financial crash of 2008-09, Luntz advised the GOP on shielding the party’s big business donors from scrutiny. At around the same time, he furnished the Republican Governor’s Association with advice on undermining Occupy Wall Street, the movement demanding accountability for the banking industry’s malfeasance.
The celebrity GOP pollster has moonlighted as a consultant for the Israel lobby, producing a “Global Language Dictionary” for the now-defunct Israel Project in the aftermath of the brutal 2008-09 attack on Gaza known as Operation Cast Lead. In his propaganda handbook, Luntz counseled “leaders who are on the front lines of fighting the media war for Israel” to shy from debates related to the illegal occupation of Palestine.
“Avoid talking about borders in terms of pre- or post-1967,” he advised, “because it only serves to remind Americans of Israel’s military history. Particularly on the left, this does you harm.”
Luntz’s Gaza war presentation puts his poll-tested tactics back in the Israel lobby’s hands, urging pro-Israel public figures to stay on the attack with incendiary language and shocking allegations against their enemies.
In one focus group, Luntz asked participants to state which alleged act by Hamas on October 7 “bothers you more.” After being presented with a laundry list of alleged atrocities, a majority declared that they were most upset by the claim that Hamas “raped civilians” – 19 percent than those who expressed outrage that Hamas supposedly “exterminated civilians.”
Data like this apparently influenced the Israeli government to launch an obsessive but still unsuccessful campaign to prove that Hamas carried out sexual assault on a systematic basis on October 7. Initiated at Israel’s United Nations mission in December 2023 with speeches by neoliberal tech oligarch Sheryl Sandberg and former US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, a recipient of hundreds of thousands of dollars in donations and speaking fees from Israel lobby organizations, Tel Aviv’s propaganda blitz has yet to produce a single self-identified victim of sexual assault by Hamas. A March 5 report by UN Special Representative on Sexual Violence Pramila Patten did not contain one direct testimony of sexual assault on October 7. What’s more, Patten’s team said they found “no digital evidence specifically depicting acts of sexual violence.”
To further the demonization of Palestinians, the Luntz-crafted slides advise that “Israel’s best response is the brainwashed children of Hamas spewing hatred towards Jews (even more than condemning Israelis) with words they don’t know the meaning of and can’t even pronounce.”
The portrayal of the youth of Gaza as ignorant tools of Hamas is clearly intended to deflect from Israel’s industrial-scale slaughter of some 15,000 children in the Gaza Strip since October 7, as well as the wounding, orphaning and starving of countless more in the besieged territory.
To make their arguments stick, Luntz recommends pro-Israel forces avoid the exterminationist language favored by Israeli officials who have called, for example, to “erase” the population of Gaza, and to instead advocate for “an efficient, effective approach” to eliminating Hamas.
At the same time, veteran pollster acknowledges that Republican voters prefer phrases which imply maximalist violence, like “eradicate” and “obliterate,” while sanitized terms like “neutralize” appeal more to Democrats. Republican presidential candidates Nikki Haley and Donald Trump have showcased similar focus-grouped rhetoric with their calls to “finish them” and “finish the problem” in Gaza.
As in past Israel-lobby seminars, Luntz has urged pro-Israel forces to divert from arguments about Israel’s military occupation of Palestinian territory by deploying banal slogans like, “Israelis have a right to defend themselves.”
“This is about Israelis,” a Luntz-crafted slide declares, “not about territory.”
According to the pollster’s research, pro-Israel politicians should avoid references to “Israel” entirely and instead discuss “Israelis” when “setting the context” for a debate over the war in Gaza.
The recommended tweak hints at the PR crisis Israel lobby forces have encountered since Israel’s military invaded and besieged Gaza, leaving most of its residents homeless, placing its entire public health and sanitation system out of service, and exterminating over 2% of the overall population, according to conservative death toll estimates.
One slide demonstrates that only a small sliver of those polled by Luntz buy into the Israeli government’s mantra that “Hamas is ISIS.” The same visual aid counsels pro-Israel officials to shy from the phrases “genuine accuracy” and “hard evidence,” and allude more generally to “the truth” when discussing Israel’s actions.
Luntz acknowledges Israel’s mounting PR problems in a slide identifying the most powerful tactics employed by Palestine solidarity activists. “Israelis attacking Israel is the second most potent weapon against Israel,” the visual display reads beside a photo of a protest by Jewish Voices for Peace, a US-based Jewish organization dedicated to ending Israel’s occupation of Palestine.
“The most potent” tactic in mobilizing opposition to Israel’s assault on Gaza, according to Luntz, “is the visual destruction of Gaza and the human toll.” The slide inadvertently acknowledges the cruelty of Israel’s bombardment of Gaza, displaying a bombed out apartment building with clearly anguished women and children fleeing in the foreground.
But Luntz assures his audience, “It ‘looks like a genocide’ even though the damage has nothing to do with the definition.”
According to this logic, the American public can become more tolerant of copiously documented crimes against humanity if they are simply told not to believe their lying eyes.
A common thread through recent history is that ‘hellfire from above’ doesn’t really work
It was hard to know whether to laugh or cry in response to recent press reports suggesting that the Biden administration is gearing up for a “sustained bombing campaign” against the Houthis in Yemen. Unsurprisingly, the initial coalition strikes against the Houthis apparently did not destroy the Houthi arsenal being launched at commercial vessels in the Red Sea.
As was the case in the great jihadi hunt across Southwest Asia stretching over nearly a quarter century, the United States today finds itself at war in a conflict with no defined political objective and a clearly unachievable military objective against an enemy that is nested in a complex political and strategic circumstance that is completely unfamiliar to the United States. Sound familiar?
It is also a war with no apparent timeline in which the application of force is linked to ill-defined benchmarks, suggesting that we could launch our bombs and missiles indefinitely or until we run out of ammunition — to no strategic purpose.
Have we learned nothing from our follies of the last 25 years in which we proved incapable of clearly relating ends, ways, and means in making decisions on when and under what circumstances to use force?
For those states that can afford them, standoff weapons and bombs have become the preferred method of policing the international system. Yet it’s hard to remember any of these strikes having any sort of lasting positive impact once the headlines and videos faded. Strangely, these tools of war maintain a hold on government and the popular imagination as some sort of “decisive” action that curiously demonstrates strength, commitment, and resolve.
The reality is that strike warfare — long range strikes by planes and missiles — has rarely achieved its advertised political and strategic consequence. Yet it remains a dangerous, drug-like chimera to countries like the United States desperately searching for some sort of easy, low-cost way of maintaining global influence, control, and primacy in a chaotic world. Like all drugs, the initial rush feels great, but the long-range addiction is, in the end, far more destructive, dangerous, and difficult (if not impossible) to kick.
We tell ourselves that the state/bad guy on the receiving end (in this case the Houthis) will feel the wrath of our (duly proportionate) strikes and reconsider continuing their attacks.
Yet, of course, the Houthis in public pronouncements seem to have welcomed the chance to start shooting directly at the United States. Moreover, we have limited knowledge of the Houthi anti-ship weapon arsenal in its entirety, let alone the political motivations that surround their own use of force. The truth is we have no knowledge or understanding of whether and under what circumstances the Houthis will cease fire, but blithely assume that our missiles and bombs will make them behave.
The history of America’s fetish
Open-ended military strikes regrettably have become an ill-considered American fetish. We told ourselves the same thing in December 1998, in the three-day fusillade against Iraq known as Operation Desert Fox, when Washington wanted to stress its disapproval of Saddam Hussein’s recalcitrance toward UN weapons inspectors. And, of course, Desert Fox was really just the exclamation point on a campaign of long-range strikes during the 1990s that sought to control the Iraqi dictator’s non-existent WMD programs.
My favorite strike of the 1990s was the 1996 cruise missile strike to warn Saddam off attacking the Kurds in northern Iraq. He did not. But the strategic consequences of those strikes went unrecognized at the time, and they had little to do with Saddam. Following those strikes, the U.S. took on the role of protecting the Kurds and tacitly endorsed their dream of statehood — a decision that today continues to shape the region in ways that may or may not support our interests. In the end, the era of the 1990s culminating in Desert Fox proved to be little else but the bridge to the next phase of the U.S. war on Iraq.
We told ourselves the same thing in the opening phases of the shock and awe campaign of the invasion of Iraq in 2003 as we blasted away in our creative targeting against Saddam’s armies under the rubric of “shock and awe” and “effects-based operations.” Sure enough, Saddam’s armies indeed melted away from our initial bombing and our advancing armies, only to regroup and morph into something much more dangerous and deadly that is still shaping the landscape of the Middle East today.
We told ourselves that same thing in Afghanistan, as we unleashed a fusillade of strikes called in by CIA jawbreaker teams that sent the Taliban scurrying over the border into Pakistan in 2001 to rest and refit. Once they had done that, they slipped back across the border to resume the war — a conflict they would eventually win 20 years later — forcing the United States to retreat and leaving the Taliban in control of the country.
We told ourselves the same thing in Libya in 2011, when we believed that a few well-placed missiles and bombs would enable a peaceful transition of power from Qadafi to someone more amenable to, well, us. Of course, as was the case in Iraq, the strikes were only the opening round in an ongoing struggle for political power and authority that continues to this day.
As was the case in Iraq and Afghanistan, the second-order effects of the strikes in Libya ended up being of far greater strategic consequences than was anticipated at the time. The current Biden national security team, which engineered these strikes, obviously learned nothing from the experience.
We’ve told ourselves the same thing in the global war on terror, where we have sent our robots and special forces hunting for sought-after “high value targets” all over the Middle East, Africa, and South Asia. We have surely rained death and destruction on these enemies (and killed lots of innocent people who were at the wrong place at the wrong time) with our Hellfire missiles, but did we win any of these wars?
Yet we remain addicted
Despite these uncertain results and even colossal failures, we remain addicted to strike warfare, telling ourselves that we can police the politics on the ground by dropping bombs from on high. The reality is, of course, different. Targeting people and property with high explosives tends to make them angry and fight harder. Just ask the Houthis, who have endured years of U.S.-sponsored and supported airstrikes by the Saudis and others in the Yemeni civil war. Obviously, the Houthis were not bombed into submission.
Therein lies the strategic dilemma for the West, which has invested billions in the strike, information, surveillance, and reconnaissance capabilities designed to blow things up at long range with little advertised collateral damage. The revolution in military affairs (and billions of taxpayer dollars) indeed delivered the strike complex — much to the delight of political leaders, who saw in it a low-cost substitute for sending armies to the four corners of the globe to police local political disputes. As described above, this is largely a myth.
The Houthis have indicated they’ll stop shooting when the Gaza War ends. Perhaps Secretary Blinken should stop by Sana’a on his next trip to the region for consultations. Even more importantly, maybe the Biden Administration should listen to the Houthis and others and take decisive steps to end the war in Gaza instead of becoming enmeshed in the conflict’s wider fires to no strategic purpose.
Surrounded by the wreckage around the world wrought by strikes stretching back over half a century, you’d think that it was time for us to get into the rehab center and confront our addiction, yet this latest round of strikes tells us that our habit depressingly remains as strong as ever.
……………………………………
James A. Russell
James Russell is an associate professor in the Department of National Security Affairs at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, Calif. The views expressed here are his own.
When Logic and Proportion Have Fallen Sloppy Dead – by Matthew Hoh
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I was asked for my thoughts on what most concerned me about the expected US attacks on Iran following the death of three American soldiers over the weekend in Jordan. Some of those thoughts made it into Newsweek.
Below, I’ve provided an extended set of thoughts on what we could expect from US attacks against Iran. It’s divided into best and worst-case scenarios. Not surprisingly, the worst-case scenario is longer:
Most concerning would be an attack on Iran itself that would put the same types of domestic political pressure on Iran to respond that President Biden is facing. It’s hard to see the Iranians, or any nation, being overtly attacked by a foreign country and not responding in some equivalent manner. I think limited attacks on targets in Iran would see commensurate Iranian reprisals. So attacks on Iranian Republican Guard facilities or air and naval bases would see return attacks on US bases in Iraq and Syria.
BEST CASE:
The Iranian response to the assassination of General Qasem Soleimani by the US in January 2020 is a good example. Hopefully, that is where it would end. However, there is the danger of it not ending and an escalating tit-for-tat cycle taking hold – insisted upon by internal US and Iranian political pressures. There is also the danger that a US attack on Iran would see groups allied with Iran increase their attacks on US targets in response, including against targets such as the US Embassies in Baghdad and Beirut. Further, anti-Iran groups such as the Islamic State and Kurdish and Baluchi separatist groups could see an opportunity to attack Iranian targets, including civilian targets, as happened earlier this month in Iran. That’s what I see as the dangers of a “best case” from a US attack against Iranian territory; again, hopefully, it’s a replay of January 2020.
WORST CASE:
The worst case is the US decides to launch significant attacks on Iranian targets in Iran, including Iranian political and military leadership, and indicates that the attacks will be wide-ranging and lasting, i.e., a military campaign that seeks to destroy Iranian military capacity and presages regime change (whether or not that is the actual intent doesn’t matter, what matters is what the Iranians perceive). Such intensive attacks give the Iranians a political motivation and a practical reason to launch full-scale attacks in return.
Iran, with a “use it or lose it” mentality, could launch large-scale attacks on US bases, especially air and naval bases and command headquarters in Saudi Arabia, Qatar, UAE and Bahrain, damaging or destroying the US ability to conduct operations with US Air Force ground-based aircraft. Iranian attacks on US naval ships, focusing primarily on the US aircraft carrier in the region, the USS Eisenhower, using anti-ship missiles, drones and diesel submarines, could not just cause losses and casualties but could, along with the loss of airfields in the Gulf monarchies, prevent US airpower from defending US troops on the ground in Iraq and Syria. US forces in Iraq and Syria, with limited American air support (US ground-based air support would still come from Turkey, as well as long-range bombers from Europe, Diego Garcia and the US), might then be overrun by large numbers of Iranian-allied Iraqi and Syrian units (the same experienced and very competent troops that defeated the Islamic State in both Iraq and Syria). I don’t believe we would see long-range Iranian missile strikes on Israeli targets out of fear of an Israeli nuclear response, but that would not stop Hezbollah from launching tens of thousands of missiles against Israeli bases, ports, airfields, infrastructure and cities.
Cyberattacks are probable, as cyberattacks have already been conducted over the last two decades. So, despite the 7,000-mile distance to the Persian Gulf from the US East Coast, the US public would feel the war in some hard and costly ways if cyberattacks are not limited to government and military targets (if they can even be confined to specific targets).
It must be said that the Iranians are assumably well prepared for this war. Forty-five years of US regime change efforts, including the 1980s war, sanctions, assassinations, bullying, and threats, have left no doubt in most Iranian minds that they must be prepared for war with the US. No nation is immune from incompetence and corruption in its leadership, military, and industry, and the Iranians may be as bad off as the Americans are in that regard. Regardless, the expectation should be that the Iranians have taken the threat from the US seriously and are ready for it.
Questions then abound as to how other nations would respond. Likely, Hezbollah and Ansar Allah would enter the war. Syria and Russia would seemingly be eager to quietly help, or at least not get in the way of the destruction of US forces in Syria. What would the Kurds, in both Iraq and Syria, do watching US forces attacked and destroyed and the Kurdish positions in Iraq and Syria now dramatically affected? Saudi Arabia, Qatar, UAE and Bahrain would have difficult decisions to make as their populations would possibly see the attacks not against them but against the Americans (the Iranian attacks, though significant, would presumably be confined to the US bases). The entire region, minus Israel, along with much of the world, would see the Iranian actions, as they do the Yemenis and Iraqis, as being done in defense of the Palestinians.
At a minimum, within the week, we would then witness a prolonged US air, drone and missile campaign against Iran; a Hezbollah-Israel war that might spill into Syria; US prisoners in Syria and Iraq; and a plunging world economy. Turkey, China and Russia would see a great opportunity in an eventual reduced presence of the US in the Middle East, essentially the US in an isolated alliance with a Fortress Israel. Turkey, Russia and China would present themselves in juxtaposition as calm and reliable partners. Ukraine would need to sue for peace.
The political pressure on the US to “win” in the Middle East would be enormous, the ghost of John McCain would haunt the 2024 elections, and while I don’t think we would see American ground troops in large numbers like in the Iraq and Afghan wars, the idea of a US invasion and occupation of Iran is terrifyingly absurd, the resulting war would make those previous American wars in Afghanistan and Iraq seem like provincial affairs.
Matthew Hoh is the Associate Director of the Eisenhower Media Network. Matt is a former Marine Corps captain, Afghanistan State Department officer, a disabled Iraq War veteran and is a Senior Fellow Emeritus with the Center for International Policy. He writes at Substack.
The Hamas offensive of October 7 caught the Israel Defence Forces asleep at their posts. This weekend’s drone strike against Tower-22, a US troop base in northeastern Jordan, caught the US Army troops asleep.
The response, according to President Joseph Biden’s statement, is that “we will hold all those responsible to account at a time and in a manner our choosing….we know it was carried out by radical Iran-backed militant groups operating in Syria and Iraq.” General Lloyd Austin, the US Secretary of Defense, repeated: “Iran-backed militias are responsible for these continued attacks on U.S. forces, and we will respond at a time and place of our choosing.”
Donald Trump, campaigning to defeat Biden in the November election, declared in an election statement, reported in full by a Russian military blogger, “this brazen attack on the United States is yet another horrific and tragic consequence of Joe Biden’s weakness and surrender. Three years ago, Iran was weak, broke, and totally under control. Thanks to my Maximum Pressure policy…This attack would NEVER have happened if I was President, not even a chance. Just like the Iranian-backed Hamas attack on Israel would never have happened, the war in Ukraine would never have happened, and we would right now have peace throughout the World. Instead, we are on the brink of World War 3.”
This is how the psychopathic liar now fights the demented on behalf of the genocidalists to trigger all-fronts war in the Middle East.
The details of the Tower-22 attack, and Iran’s reinforcement at the Strait of Hormuz, reveal that the Arabs and the Iranians are ready and waiting. The Russians too.
The drone attack on the US troop base known as Tower-22, in the northeastern corner of Jordan, caught the US forces, reportedly reservists, asleep. The base reportedly holds 350 Army and Air Force personnel. At least three have been confirmed killed; eight have been evacuated with life threatening injuries, according to US Central Command (CENTCOM); about three dozen have been counted as wounded.
The distance between the two American bases is about 30 kilometres. The location of Tower-22 on Jordanian territory has been confirmed by CENTCOM. This flatly contradicts claims on Jordanian state television by a government spokesman; he announced that the base is outside Jordanian territory in Syria. This lie indicates how fearful Jordanian officials are of the majority Palestinian community in Jordan who are hostile to the Jordan king’s collaboration with the Israelis, as well as with the US and British forces. To date, the Palestinians in Jordan have organized crowd protests in Amman in support of the Gaza and West Bank fights, but they have not yet taken their protests to the foreign bases on Jordanian territory.
Satellite image of the Tower-22 base, including helicopter pads. Source: https://www.nytimes.com/
With a 350-man complement, Tower-22 is a bigger base than Al-Tanf, which has about 200 special forces.
The operational success of the strike for the attackers is strategic. Tower-22 is a logistics, supply, and rear guard post for the Al-Tanf base which US troops are operating thirty kilometres north across the border in Syria. The attack demonstrates that both Tower-22 and Al-Tanf, Jordan and Syria, are newly vulnerable to weapons which the US forces have failed to detect and neutralize. Just as significantly, the massive US airbase called Muwaffaq Salti, 230 kilometres west across Jordan, is also vulnerable now.
For analysis of how these bases, and other anti-Palestinian targets in Jordan, are connected and targeted by the Axis of Resistance, read this from October.
Biden’s statement said only “we are still gathering the facts of this attack”.
The aircraft visible in the satellite image of the base include USAF F-15Es, which were redeployed there in October from the RAF Lakenheath base in England; read more here.
Reporters of the New York Times were told by their official briefers that “the drone strike in Jordan on Sunday demonstrated that the Iran-backed militias — whether in Iran or Syria, or the Houthis in Yemen — remained capable of inflicting serious consequences on American troops despite the U.S. military’s efforts to weaken them and avoid tumbling into a wider conflict, possibly with Iran itself.”
The newspaper added a warning against escalation from the Joint Chiefs of Staff at the Pentagon: “ ‘We don’t want to go down a path of greater escalation that drives to a much broader conflict within the region,’ Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr., the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said on Sunday. Asked in a pre-recorded session on ABC News’s This Week whether he thought Iran wanted war with the United States, General Brown, echoing assessments from the U.S. intelligence agencies, said, ‘No, I don’t think so.’ ”
Brown is also believed to have been one of the prompters for public release of the Pentagon warnings against the Ukrainian “counteroffensive” in the so-called social media releases published by Jack Texeira in April of 2023.
The official line in Washington on Sunday evening, according to its New York platform, is that “the Americans killed on Sunday were the first known fatalities from hostile fire in the region since the Oct. 7 attacks by Hamas…It was unclear on Sunday why air defences at the outpost failed to intercept the drone, which former military commanders said appeared to be the first known assault on the location since attacks on U.S. forces began soon after the Oct. 7 incursion.”
Well-informed military sources are emphatic that the Tower-22 operation has strategic significance in quite another way. They believe Pentagon officials have already told the White House.
“This is a significant accomplishment,” one of the sources said. “Was the bypassing of the US air defence system at Tower-22 pulled off with Russian assistance? US bases generally rely on the C-RAM [Counter Rocket, Artillery and Mortar] system. It was sent to Ukraine last year where the Russians have been learning to defeat it. What now of American EW [electronic warfare]? They’ve been doing a fair job of knocking drones down up to now. It seems a ‘coincidence’ that, not a week after the meetings in Moscow with Arabs and Iranians, we see this success. It’s a success the circumstances of which, we can be sure, Biden and Austin are not keen to advertise.”
Confirmation that C-RAM units are the principal air defence systems operating at US bases in Syria and Iraq, including Al-Tanf and Tower-22, came last October from former Pentagon official, Stephen Bryen. Bryen claimed at the time “for years I have complained that vulnerable American bases in Iraq and Syria lacked adequate air defenses. Bottom line: they still do.” When Bryen was at the Pentagon, he was also unusually close to the Israeli government.
For details of the C-RAM system, its US Army development history and its allied counterparts, click to read this. The evidence that C-RAM was delivered to Kiev last October, test-fired, and then installed to become part of Kiev’s air defence supporting the Patriot missile units, can be viewed in this 10-minute video from Night Hawk Veterans.
Starting last May, there have been several effective Russian missile attacks against the Patriot batteries in Kiev. At the start of this month, there were fresh Russian missile and drone attacks across Kiev.
While there has been no announcement from the Russian Defense Ministry of a successful hit against C-RAM in Kiev, military sources believe Russia’s General Staff have acquired the technical capability to neutralize the American system, allowing drones through to hit their ground targets, including the C-RAM mounted truck unit.
The Iranians have been observing, as have the Arab forces planning and executing drone attacks against C-RAM defended US bases. How much of the Russian intelligence on C-RAM is being shared with them?
For details of last week’s detailed talks in Moscow with visiting delegations from the Yemen Ansarallah government (Houthis) and the Iranian Security Council, read this.
Left, Russian Security Council, headed by Nikolai Patrushev (ring), at plenary session, with Ali-Akbar Ahmadian, head of the counterpart Iranian Security Council.
Apart from US reports of the Tower-22 drone attack striking the troop living quarters, there is no information yet on how many drones detonated, and what equipment at the base may also have been hit.
The military source again: “If there’s no coincidence, and if this isn’t a lucky strike for the Arabs, then this may reflect a step-change up in Russian military assistance to the Iranians. Maybe Tower-22 was selected as a small target for demonstration effect, so as to send a message about the bigger targets, Al-Tanf and Muwaffaq Salti. Hitting them next makes ‘regional war’, and then US ground forces are going to be in the thick of it — the Biden Administration will have a new war on its hands — and bodybags, instead of votes, for Election Day. “
For the time being, Russian military bloggers – the only open-source reporters of Russian military operations in the Ukraine and worldwide – are not analyzing the implications of the Tower-22 operation.
However, Militarist has reported the deployment of the Iranian naval drone carrier and electronic warfare vessel, the Shah Mahdavi, in the Gulf of Oman. There is no open-source western vessel tracking source for this report and the map.
US Navy and other western media have been reporting for almost a year the conversion of the older container carrier into a warship by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC).
The current positioning of the Shah Mahdavi is a signal that if the Biden Administration, or the Trump election campaign, or their claques in the US Congress decide on making a direct, retaliatory strike against Iranian targets — military personnel, territorial units, or naval vessels — the IGRC will close the Strait of Hormuz. Iran will then be at war with the US, and so will the rest of the world which, until Israel started its war against the Palestinians, depended on the Suez Canal, Red Sea, Persian Gulf, and the Indian Ocean for its energy supply and trade lifelines.
Left, the angled-deck air-launch structure of the Shah Mahdavi. Right: deck cranes visible for launch of surface and submarine drones. Source: https://news.usni.org/
“This is a major embarrassment and a message for the US and its allies”, the military source concludes. “It should resonate with all of them. It’s the conclusion to be drawn from the fact that the systems they have relied on have been defeated on land [in the Ukraine] and are now defending their ships on the Red Sea, and being defeated there too. The implications of all of this are enormous. Now, even the smallest maritime country, at a relatively low cost, can project force and inflict harm on the traditionally dominant actors. No need for expensive fighter or strike aircraft, let alone the pilots to operate them, or technicians and facilities to maintain them. No need for specialized military ship-building facilities. Any bulk transport, cheaply got, will do.”
I’m a Zionist who often walks through the campus of Columbia University, which since October 7 means I feel like Dr. Evil in a frumpy sweater. The protest chant du jour is “Min el-maiyeh lel mayieh, Falasteen Arabiya” (“From water to water, Palestine will be Arab”); a recent sign of note expresses support for the Houthis, the terrorist group whose motto includes the phrase “Death to America, death to Israel, a curse upon the Jews.” I put myself through this because I write in the Columbia library and you court bad luck when you change a writing routine. But the slogans get to me. So recently I decided to boost my morale with Zionist works of art, preferably of the escapist variety. I thought about binge-watching Fauda, but the hairbreadth escapes from Hamas arch-villains are too stressful. As it happens, though, I was already reading a Zionist novel. It dates from 1876, and I was vaguely aware that it had a Zionist angle but hadn’t anticipated just how soaring its vision of Jewish ingathering would be. The novel had none of the ambivalence that hedges so many discussions about Israel today, even the friendly ones.
I belong to a book group that usually reads a novel a year. (I know.) One year we tried to get through all of Virginia Woolf, but that was cramming. We try not to read ahead, so that we all stay on the same page, as it were. This year we’re doing the Victorian novelist George Eliot’s last novel, Daniel Deronda. It’s her Jewish novel, also her problem novel—two novels in one that seem to jostle against each rather than cohere. One of the half novels offers a familiar, wryly satirical portrait of callow members of the British gentry. The second is a fond depiction of London’s lower-middle-class Jews—fond, that is, for its time. As the saying goes, a philo-Semite is an anti-Semite who likes Jews. Eliot’s genuine affection for the chosen people doesn’t preclude a certain obsession with their mercantile instincts or the length of their noses.
By the 1870s, Victorian England was no longer formally anti-Semitic; Jews could vote and hold office. Benjamin Disraeli, who was born Jewish, though he later converted to Anglicanism, was prime minister. But British people just didn’t like Jews very much. Daniel Deronda, Eliot’s hero, is an appealing young gentleman with an open mind and an instinctive affinity with the oppressed. When he finds himself drawn to a beautiful Jewish girl, Mirah, and undertakes to search for her family on her behalf, he realizes that his assumptions about Jews require some revision. Deronda, “like his neighbors,” Eliot writes, “had regarded Judaism as a sort of eccentric fossilized form.” As for Jews themselves, he found them repugnant: Either they dressed too conspicuously, or they lurked in grimy streets. He had heard about the better sort of Jew, the learned and accomplished ones, but always assumed they had sloughed off their Jewishness.
Eliot was considered the greatest English novelist of her day. She came from an evangelical-Christian family and was pious in childhood, though secular as an adult. That she would write a Jewish novel, or half a Jewish novel, surprised her readers, and none more than the Jewish ones. Jewish critics rhapsodized over the Jewish narrative—“a glorious exaltation,” said one. Daniel Deronda was quickly brought out in Hebrew, purged of most of the English chapters. The English critics, for their part, loved the English story but found the Jewish one preposterous. Many said it should be lopped off. Half a century later, the great English critic F. R. Leavis was still using the language of excision, so evocative of, well, castration. There was nothing to be done about the “astonishing badness of the bad half,” he wrote, except “cut it away.”
If Eliot’s philo-Semitism was unexpected, her Zionism came out of nowhere. I should say her proto-Zionism. Eliot never uses the term Zionism, because it wouldn’t be coined for another 14 years. The historic First Zionist Congress took place seven years after that, in 1897, and, in fact, though she had died in 1880, Eliot had something to do with making it happen. At the time she was writing, talk of a Jewish state in historical Judea was confined to Jewish elites—intellectuals, politicians, philanthropists. Eliot’s fame and reach spread the message throughout Europe. “The story presented, for the first time, the possibility of a return to Zion,” writes Paul Johnson in his History of the Jews. A Russian translation of Daniel Deronda inspired Eliezer Ben Yehuda, a linguist trying to revive Hebrew as a spoken language, to move to Ottoman-controlled Palestine, where he succeeded in his endeavor. Theodor Herzl credited the novel with encouraging him to write one of the foundational documents of Zionism, The Jewish State. (Recent scholarship suggests he may have exaggerated Eliot’s direct effect on that book, but she clearly made an impression on him.) Lord Balfour, the author of England’s famous 1917 Balfour Declaration, the first and most important statement of support for “a home for the Jewish people” in the land of their birth, visited Eliot a year after the novel came out, which may have instilled or deepened sympathy for the Zionist cause. She was there before the creation.
Eliot uses Deronda to give her readers an introduction to Jewish nationalism. When he begins his Jewish journey, he’s a soul adrift. Without quite realizing it, he seeks a cause, in part because he lacks an identity. He doesn’t know who his parents are; he does know that he’s not the legitimate son of his wealthy guardian. He may be the illegitimate one, or something worse. Deronda finds purpose, if not the secret of his ancestry, in a man he meets in the course of tracking down Mirah’s relatives: Mordecai, a fiery, possibly crazy Jewish scholar and poet and a radically original apostle of Jewish nationalism.
In one scene, Deronda joins Mordecai and a group of working-class intellectuals in a pub, the Hand and Banner, where they debate what they call “the law of progress.” This turns out to be a version of the “Jewish question,” a dispute, dating back to the French Revolution, over what to do about the Jews. The question addressed by the revolutionary government was the emancipation of the Jews. Should they be granted égalite–equality? Their chief advocate in the National Assembly vowed that if the Jews were emancipated, they’d have to give up their peculiar rites and clannishness and behave like other French citizens. (“We must refuse to give anything to the Jews as a people and grant everything to them as individuals,” he famously declared.) Now Jews had legal and political rights, but the question of assimilation remained. Should they in fact be integrated into the general population, or would their malign presence corrupt British society? Mordecai changes the terms. Jews should not assimilate, he says; instead, they should return to Zion and create a Jewish state, where they would regain a spiritual and moral greatness that had been crushed in their long exile.
Mordecai, I have to say, embodies everything Daniel Deronda’s critics hated about the novel. He sermonizes in a strange, orotund mix of biblical imagery and German syntax; Eliot borrows some of her nationalism from Hegel, whose writings on the awakening and development of national consciousness were almost as messianic as the prophets’. Mordecai packs all of the above into sentences that somehow wind up sounding Wordsworthian: “The soul of Judaism is not dead,” Mordecai declares. “The heritage of Israel is beating in the pulses of millions; it lives in their veins as a power without understanding, like the morning exultation of herds … Let the torch of visible community be lit!” Only gathered on their own land as citizens of their own polity would the dispersed people recover the “dignity of a national life.” And of course, a Jewish state would protect the Jews.
Mordecai’s adversaries are cheerful, friendly liberals, believers in the brotherhood of man. History bends toward universalism, they tell him. “The sentiment of nationality” is dying out, says one: “The whole current of progress is setting against it.” Religion is a superstition, explains another, who calls himself a “rational Jew,” and Jews should stop being so insular, exclusionary. “There’s no reason now why we shouldn’t melt gradually into the populations we live among,” he says. “That’s the order of the day in point of progress.”
The Hand and Banner scene lays out the poles of the “Jewish question” as it would be debated for the century and a half to come: cosmopolitanism versus nationalism, universalism versus particularism, tradition versus modernity, assimilation versus separatism. The “Jewish question” would mutate into the problem of Zionism, but the issues would remain the same. Today, transnationalists hold that globalization, migration, and mass communication have rendered the nation-state obsolete. Anti-nationalists feel that a state like Israel, predicated on ethnicity or religious tradition, reeks of a determined rejection of modernity, even blood-and-soil fascism. As for post-colonialism, in the foundational 1979 essay “Zionism From the Standpoint of Its Victims,” the Palestinian literary critic Edward Said—who, as it happens, taught at Columbia for four decades—avails himself of Daniel Deronda to expose what he deems the Orientalist and imperialist premises of early Zionism. Eliot, he says, romanticizes the exotic East and effaces its people, just as the actual Zionists would do in order to justify their land grab. She displays “a total absence of any thought about the actual inhabitants” of Arab lands, he writes, those of “Palestine in particular.”
Said has a point. Eliot doesn’t bother to imagine what Deronda will do when he gets to Palestine. The narrative ends when he boards ship, and the land of Israel never rises above the level of abstraction. That’s because Eliot wasn’t writing about colonization, exactly, or Palestine, either. She was making use of Jewish nationalism to make the case for nationalism itself. The novel channels her “liberal-conservative love for the national tradition,” as the historian Bernard Semmel puts it in his George Eliot and the Politics of National Inheritance. By “tradition,” he means what Benedict Anderson called “imagined community”—the reservoir of national memories, national heroes, a common past.
Eliot’s other foray into proto-Zionism is an essay titled “The Modern Hep! Hep! Hep!”( hep was the Crusaders’ hunting cry when they went looking for Jews), included in her very last book, a collection of essays written in the voice of an eccentric scholar, The Impressions of Theophrastus Such. In “The Modern Hep! Hep! Hep!,” Eliot makes clear what is at stake in the preservation of national identity: moral character. The “dignity or rectitude” of the individual citizens of a nation, she says, is a function of their “relationship with something great, admirable, pregnant with high possibilities, worthy of sacrifice.” Without ideals, their ambitions would be limited to “the securing of personal ease or prosperity.” In a neat trick, Eliot makes the case for Zionism both philo-Semitic and anti-Semitic at the same time. A Jewish state would preserve the Jews from cosmopolitan capitalism and save the world from the venality of cosmopolitan Jews.
The essay is a key to the novel, for better or worse. It helps explain why Eliot juxtaposed British swells and Jewish dreamers. Nicely inverting a common anti-Semitic trope, she turns the English half of the novel into a cautionary tale of rootless cosmopolitanism. The narrative revolves around Gwendolyn Harleth, a selfish, spoiled young beauty. The narrator is quite specific about the causes of the girl’s character flaws: She was raised without moral instruction or sense of place. Her mother shamelessly favors Gwendolyn, the eldest daughter, over her four half sisters, and drags all five of them “from one foreign watering-place or Parisian apartment to another.” The narrator disapproves: “A human life, I think, should be well rooted in some spot of a native land, where it may get the love of tender kinship for the face of the earth.” In that spot, a child gets to know her “kindly neighbors,” and they teach her the necessary principles of mutual affection. “At five years old,” Eliot concludes, “mortals are not prepared to be citizens of the world.” Gwendolyn reveals an innate potential for moral growth, but social circumstances preclude it. She marries a decadent aristocrat—not because she particularly wants to, but because her family needs the money. The marriage is horrific.
I’m afraid I’m making Eliot sound like a propagandist. She’s not. Eliot is a novelist, even when writing a preachy novel. She courts ambivalence, and Daniel Deronda is full of competing perspectives and voices. Cosmopolitanism gets its due. Eliot contrasts the deracinated Gwendolyn with the foreigner Herr Klesmer, who is, somehow unsurprisingly, at least part Jewish, “a felicitous combination of the German, the Sclav, and the Semite, with grand features, brown hair floating in artistic fashion and brown eyes in spectacles.” Herr Klesmer is an itinerant pianist who has been engaged by a wealthy family as a live-in tutor to their daughter. Gwendolyn’s lack of native ties damages her; Klesmer’s precarity is admirable because it is in service of his art. Besides, as he informs one poor philistine who has failed to show the proper respect for his talent, a great musician (which Klesmer will prove to be) is a citizen of a great nation, perhaps even of a supranational state, that of art. “A creative artist is no more a mere musician than a great statesman is a mere politician,” he says. “We help to rule the nations and make the age as much as any other public men. We count ourselves on level benches with legislators.” His pupil apologizes for Klesmer’s hectoring tone: “‘Herr Klesmer has cosmopolitan ideas,’ said Miss Arrowpoint, trying to make the best of the situation. ‘He looks forward to a fusion of races.’”
And when Deronda discovers that he is himself a Jew and devotes himself to bettering the lot of his people, he doesn’t blindly accept Mordecai’s nostalgic traditionalism. Judaism need not reject modernity, Deronda says: “I will not say that I shall profess to believe exactly as my fathers have believed. Our fathers themselves changed the horizon of their belief and learned of other races.” His ideal Jewish life would combine “separateness with communication”—particularism and universalism, the nation-state secure in its own identity but in dialogue with other nations, other stories, other cultures.
I can’t claim that soaking in the warm bath of Daniel Deronda’s nationalist uplift makes me less likely to shrivel in the face of the hatred I encounter on campus. When Eliot was writing, Israel had never exercised power for good or for bad, because it didn’t exist; Mordecai’s Zionist dreams seem very remote. Moreover, speaking purely as a reader, I prefer Gwendolyn—not what she represents, but her vitality as a character. The pro-English critics called her one of Eliot’s greatest creations, which is true, though they also called Deronda a dislikeable prig, which is unfair. I love them both, but I like her more. I think Eliot venerated the good Daniel and pitied poor Gwendolyn, which redounds to Gwendolyn’s advantage, from the literary point of view. Eliot turns Daniel into a moral cudgel to beat us up with. She leaves Gwendolyn to struggle like a creature in a trap.
What I find most poignant about Gwendolyn is that she mourns her plight in language clearly meant to echo Deronda’s Zionist aspirations. When she has to choose between getting married and going to work as a governess, she says she’d rather “emigrate” than be a governess. As a child, she says, she “used to fancy sailing away into a world where people were not forced to live with any one they did not like.” The similarity underscores their difference: He can sail away and she can’t. Just before Deronda leaves, he pays Gwendolyn a last visit and offers some anodyne words of comfort. She turns to him like “one athirst toward the sound of unseen waters,” and Deronda suddenly has an image of her “stretching her arms toward him from a forsaken shore.”
There was no homeland for women. There still isn’t. It is, admittedly, implausible. But I think Gwendolyn’s inexpressible longing for something like one imparts Daniel Deronda’s most Zionist lesson. With an actually existing Zion, the Jewish man need not suffer in exile. He has a place to call his own, however vague and utopian. But the Englishwoman has nowhere to go. Perhaps Gwendolyn’s spiritual homelessness is the more honest representation of the human condition. It’s certainly the more modern one. But she doesn’t make me eager to give up on Zionism.
The Arabic word Asabiyya, or ‘social solidarity,’ is a soundbite in the west, but taken very seriously by the globe’s new contenders China, Russia, and Iran. It is Yemen, however, that is mainstreaming the idea, by sacrificing everything for the world’s collective morality in a bid to end the genocide in Gaza.
Photo Credit: The Cradle
When there is a general change of conditions,
It is as if the entire creation had changed
and the whole world been altered,
as if it were a new and repeated creation,
a world brought into existence anew.
— Ibn Khaldun
Yemen’s Ansarallah resistance forces have made it very clear, right from the start, that they set up a blockade in the Bab el-Mandeb and the southern Red Sea only against Israeli-owned or destined shipping vessels. Their single objective was and remains to stop the Gaza genocide perpetrated by the Israeli biblical psychopathy.
As a response to a morally-based call to end a human genocide, the United States, masters of the Global War Of Terror (italics mine), predictably re-designated Yemen’s Houthis as a “terrorist organization,” launched a serial bombardment of underground Ansarallah military installations (assuming US intel know where they are), and cobbled together a mini-coalition of the willing that includes its UK, Canadian, Australian, Dutch, and Bahraini vassals.
Without missing a beat, Yemen’s Parliament declared the US and UK governments “Global Terrorist Networks.”
Now let’s talk strategy.
With a single move, the Yemeni resistance seized the strategic advantage by de facto controlling a key geoeconomic bottleneck: the Bab el-Mandeb. Hence, they can inflict serious trouble on sectors of global supply chains, trade, and finance.
And Ansarallah has the potential to double down — if need be. Persian Gulf traders, off the record, have confirmed insistent chatter that Yemen may consider imposing a so-called Al-Aqsa Triangle — aptly named after the 7 October Palestinian resistance operation aimed at destroying the Israeli military’s Gaza Division and taking captives as leverage in a sweeping prisoner swap deal.
Such a move would mean selectively blocking not only the Bab el-Mandeb and the Red Sea route to the Suez Canal, but also the Strait of Hormuz, cutting off oil and gas deliveries to Israel from Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE – although the top oil suppliers to Israel are in fact Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan.
These Yemenis are afraid of nothing. Were they able to impose the triangle – in this case only with direct Iranian involvement — that would represent the US-assassinated Quds Force General Qassem Soleimani’s Grand Design on cosmic steroids. This plan holds the realistic potential of finally bringing down the pyramid of hundreds of trillions of dollars in derivatives — and consequently, the whole western financial system.
And yet, even as Yemen controls the Red Sea and Iran controls the Strait of Hormuz, Al-Aqsa Triangle remains just a working hypothesis.
Welcome to the Hegemon’s blockade
With a simple, clear strategy, the Houthis perfectly understood that the deeper they draw the strategy-deprived Americans into the West Asian geopolitical swamp, in a sort of “undeclared war” mode, the more they’re able to inflict serious pain on the global economy, which the Global South will blame on the Hegemon.
Today, Red Sea shipping traffic has plunged in half, compared to the summer of 2023; supply chains are wobbly; ships carrying food are forced to circumnavigate Africa (and risk delivering cargo after its expiry date); predictably, inflation across the vast EU agricultural sphere (worth €70 billion) is rising fast.
Yet, never underestimate a cornered Empire.
Western-based insurance giants perfectly understood the rules of Ansarallah’s limited blockade: Russian and Chinese ships, for instance, have free passage in the Red Sea. Global insurers have only refused to cover US, UK, and Israeli ships — exactly as the Yemenis intended.
So the US, predictably, changed the narrative into a big, fat lie: ‘Ansarallah is attacking the whole global economy.’
Washington turbo-charged sanctions (not a big deal as the Yemeni resistance uses Islamic financing); increased the bombing, and in the name of sacrosanct “freedom of navigation” – always applied selectively — placed its bets on the “international community,” including leaders of the Global South, begging for mercy, as in please keep the shipping lanes open. The goal of the new, reframed American deceit is to elbow the Global South into ditching its support for Ansarallah’s strategy.
Pay attention to this crucial US sleight of hand: Because, from now on, in a new perverse twist of Operation Genocide Protection, it is Washington that will be blockading the Red Sea for the entire world. Washington itself, mind you, will be spared: US shipping depends on Pacific trade routes, not West Asian ones. This will ratchet up the pain on Asian customers and especially on Europe’s economy – which already took the heavies blows from Ukraine-associated Russian energy sanctions.
As Michael Hudson has interpreted it, there is a strong possibility that the neocons in charge of US foreign policy actually want (italics mine) to have Yemen and Iran implement the Al-Aqsa Triangle: “It will be the main energy buyers in Asia, China, and other countries that are going to be hurt. And that (…) will give the United States even more power to control the oil supply of the world as a bargaining chip in trying to renegotiate this new international order.”
That, in fact, is the classic Empire of Chaos modus operandi.
Calling attention to “our people in Gaza”
There is no solid evidence the Pentagon has the slightest clue about what its Tomahawks are hitting in Yemen. Even several hundred missiles won’t change a thing. Ansarallah, which has already endured eight years of nonstop US-UK-Saudi-Emirati firepower — and basically won — will not relent today over a few missile strikes.
Even the proverbial “unnamed officials” informed the New York Times that “locating the Houthi targets has proven more difficult than expected,” essentially because of lousy US intel on Yemeni “air defense, command centers, ammunition depots, and drone and missile storage and production facilities.”
It’s quite enlightening to listen to how Yemeni Prime Minister Abdulaziz bin Saleh Habtoor frames Ansarallah’s Israel-blockade initiative decision as “based on humanitarian, religious and moral aspects”. He refers, crucially, to “our people in Gaza.” And the overall vision, he reminds us, “stems from the vision of the Axis of Resistance.”
It is a reference smart onlookers will recognize as General Soleimani’s ever-lasting legacy.
With a keen historical sense — from the creation of Israel to the Suez crisis and the Vietnam war — the Yemeni prime minister recalls how “Alexander the Great reached the shores of Aden and Socotra island but was defeated (…) Invaders tried to occupy the capital of the historical state of Shebah and failed (…) How many countries throughout history have tried to occupy the west coast of Yemen and failed? Including Britain.”
It’s absolutely impossible for the west and even the Global Majority to understand the Yemeni mindset without learning a few facts from the Angel of History.
So let’s go back to the 14th century universal history master Ibn Khaldun — the author of The Muqaddimah.
Ibn Khaldun cracks the Ansarallah Code
Ibn Khaldun’s family was a contemporary to the rise of the Arab Empire, on the move alongside the first armies of Islam in the 7th century, from the austere beauty of the Hadramawti valleys in what is now southern Yemen all the way to the Euphrates.
Ibn Khaldun, crucially, was a precursor of Kant, who offered the brilliant insight that “geography lies at the basis of history.” And he read the 12th century Andalusian philosophy master Averroes – as well as other writers exposed to Plato’s works and understood how the latter referred to the moral strength of “the first people” in the Timaeus, in 360 B.C.
Yes, this boils down to “moral strength” — for the west, a mere soundbite; for the east, an essential philosophy. Ibn Khaldun grasped how civilization began and was constantly renewed by people with natural goodness and energy; people who understood and respected the natural world, who lived light, united by blood or brought together by a shared revolutionary idea or religious drive.
Ibn Khaldun defined asabiyya as this force that binds people together.
Like so many words in Arabic, asabiyya exhibits a range of diverse, loosely connected meanings. Arguably, the most relevant is esprit de corps, team spirit, and tribal solidarity – just as Ansarallah exhibits.
As Ibn Khaldun demonstrates, when the power of asabiyya is fully harnessed, reaching way beyond the tribe, it becomes more powerful than the sum of its individual parts, and can become a catalyst to reshape history; to make or break Empires; to encourage civilizations; or force them to collapse.
We are definitely living an asabiyya moment, brought about by the Yemeni resistance’s moral strength.
Solid as a rock
Ansarallah innately understood the threat of eschatological Zionism — which happens to mirror the Christian Crusades a millennium ago. And they are virtually the only ones, in practical terms, trying to stop it.
Now, as an extra bonus, they are exposing the plutocratic Hegemon, once again, as bombers of Yemen, the poorest Arab nation-state, where at least half the population remains “food-insecure.”
But Ansarallah is not heavy-weapons-free like the Pashtun mujahideen who humiliated NATO in Afghanistan.
Their anti-ship cruise missiles include the Sayyad and the Quds Z-O (range up to 800 km) and the Al Mandab 2 (range up to 300 km).
Their anti-ship ballistic missiles include the Tankil (range of up to 500 km); the Asef (range of up to 450 km); and the Al-Bahr Al-Ahmar (range of up to 200 km). That covers the southern part of the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden, but not, for instance, the islands of the Socotra archipelago.
Accounting for roughly one-third of the country’s population, Yemen’s Houthis, who form the backbone of the Ansarallah resistance, do have their own internal agenda: gaining fair representation in governance (they launched Yemen’s Arab Spring); protecting their Zaydi (neither Shia nor Sunni) faith; fighting for the autonomy of the Saada governorate; and working for the revival of the Zaydi Imamate, which was up and running before the 1962 revolution.
Now, they are making their mark on The Big Picture. It’s no wonder Ansarallah fiercely fights the Hegemon’s vassal Arabs – especially those who signed a deal to normalize relations with Israel under the Trump administration.
The Saudi-Emirati war on Yemen, with the Hegemon “leading from behind,” was a quagmire that cost Riyadh at least $6 billion a month for seven years. It ended with a wobbly 2022 truce in a de facto Ansarallah victory. A signed peace agreement, it should be noted, has been disallowed by the US, despite Saudi efforts to seal a deal.
Now, Ansarallah is turning geopolitics and geoeconomics upside down with not just a few missiles and drones but also oceans of craftiness and strategic acumen. To invoke Chinese wisdom, picture a single rock changing the course of a stream, which then changes the course of a mighty river.
Epigones of Diogenes can always remark, half in jest, that the Russia-China-Iran strategic partnership may have contributed with their own well-placed rocks in this path to a more equitable order. That’s the beauty of it: we may not be able to see these rocks, only the effects they cause. What we do see, though, is the Yemeni resistance, solid as a rock.
The record shows the Hegemon, once again, reverting to auto-pilot mode: Bomb, Bomb, Bomb. And in this particular case, to bomb is to redirect the narrative from a genocide committed in real time by Israel, the Empire’s aircraft carrier in West Asia.
Still, Ansarallah can always increase the pressure by sticking firmly to its narrative and, driven by the power of asabiyya, deliver to the Hegemon a second Afghanistan, compared to which Iraq and Syria will look like a weekend at Disneyland.
For over two-and-a-half years, the United States has supported Saudi Arabia in a war against the Houthi movement in Yemen. The war has created the worst humanitarian catastrophe in the world and threatens to turn into the largest famine in decades.
Yet very few Americans know who the Houthis are, what they stand for, and why they are our de facto enemies. Two administrations have backed the war against the Houthis without a serious campaign to explain why Americans should see them as our enemies.
Yemeni politics are incredibly complex and volatile—rather than get drawn into a quagmire against an enemy they hardly know, the United States and its partners should get serious about finding a political solution.
What you need to know
First and foremost, the Houthis are Zaydi Shiites, or Zaydiyyah. Shiite Muslims are the minority community in the Islamic world and Zaydis are a minority of Shiites, significantly different in doctrine and beliefs from the Shiites who dominate in Iran, Iraq, and elsewhere (often called Twelvers for their belief in twelve Imams).
The Zadiyyah take their name from Zayd bin Ali, the great grandson of Ali, Muhammad’s cousin and son-in-law, whom all Shiites revere. Zayd bin Ali led an uprising against the Umayyad Empire in 740, the first dynastic empire in Islamic history, which ruled from Damascus. Zayd was martyred in his revolt, and his head is believed to be buried in a shrine to him in Kerak, Jordan. Zaydis believe he was a model of a pure caliph who should have ruled instead of the Umayyads.
The Houthis have made fighting corruption the centerpiece of their political program, at least nominally.
The distinguishing feature of Zayd’s remembered biography is that he fought against a corrupt regime. Sunnis and Shiites agree that he was a righteous man. The Zaydi elevate him to be the epitome of a symbol of fighting corruption. The Houthis have made fighting corruption the centerpiece of their political program, at least nominally. The Zaydi do not believe in ayatollahs like the Twelver Shiites—who are the Shiite sect in Iran and most of the Muslim world—nor do they practice the other Twelver doctrine of taqqiyah (dissimulation), which permits one to disguise his or her faith for self-protection.
In short, they are a very different sect than the Iranian version of Shiism that Americans have come to know since the 1979 Iranian revolution.
Followers of Zayd established themselves in north Yemen’s rugged mountains in the ninth century. For the next thousand years, the Zaydis fought for control of Yemen with various degrees of success. A succession of Zaydi Imams ruled the community and Zaydis were the majority of the population in the mountains of the north. They fought against both the Ottomans and the Wahhabis in the 18th and 19th centuries.
With the collapse of the Ottoman Empire in 1918, a Zaydi monarchy took power in North Yemen called the Mutawakkilite Kingdom. The ruler, or imam, was both a secular ruler and a spiritual leader. Their kingdom fought and lost a border war with Saudi Arabia in the 1930s, losing territory to the Saudi state. They also enjoyed international recognition as the legitimate government of North Yemen. Their capital was in Taiz.
Source: CIA World Factbook.
In 1962, an Egyptian-backed revolutionary military cabal overthrew the Mutawakkilite king and established an Arab nationalist government with its capital in Sanaa. With Soviet assistance, Egypt sent tens of thousands of troops to back the republican coup. The Zaydi Royalists fled to the mountains along the Saudi border to fight a civil war for control of the country. Saudi Arabia supported the royalists against Egypt. Israel also clandestinely backed the Zaydi Royalists. The war ended in a republican victory after the Saudis and Egyptians resolved their regional rivalry after the 1967 war with Israel and lost interest in the Yemen civil war.
A Zaydi republican general named Ali Abdullah Saleh came to power after a succession of coups in 1978. Saleh ruled—or misruled—Yemen for the next 33 years. He united north and south Yemen in 1990, tilted toward Iraq during the 1991 Kuwait war, and survived a Saudi-backed southern civil war in 1994. He had complicated relations with both Riyadh and Washington, but by the late 1990s was generally aligned with both against al-Qaida. The al-Qaida attack on the USS Cole in late 2000 in Aden drew the Americans closer to Saleh, although his cooperation against al-Qaida was always incomplete.
The Houthis emerged as a Zaydi resistance to Saleh and his corruption in the 1990s led by a charismatic leader named Hussein al Houthi, from whom they are named. They charged Saleh with massive corruption to steal the wealth of the Arab world’s poorest country for his own family, much like other Arab dictators in Tunisia, Egypt, and Syria. They also criticized Saudi and American backing for the dictator.
2003: The tipping point
The American invasion of Iraq in 2003 deeply radicalized the Houthi movement, like it did many other Arabs. It was a pivotal moment. The Houthis adopted the slogan: “God is great, death to the U.S., death to Israel, curse the Jews, and victory for Islam,” in the wake of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq. The group also officially called itself Ansar Allah, or supporters of God. It was a turning point largely unrecognized outside Yemen, another unanticipated consequence of George Bush’s Iraq adventures.
Hezbollah, the Shiite movement in Lebanon which successfully expelled the Israeli army from the country, became a role model and mentor for the Houthis. Although different kinds of Shiites, the two groups have a natural attraction. Hezbollah provided inspiration and expertise for the Houthis. Iran was a secondary source of support, especially since the Houthis and Iranians share a common enemy in Saudi Arabia.
After 2003, Saleh launched a series of military campaigns to destroy the Houthis. In 2004, Saleh’s forces killed Hussein al Houthi. The Yemeni army and air force was used to suppress the rebellion in the far north of Yemen, especially in Saada province. The Saudis joined with Saleh in these campaigns. The Houthis won against both Saleh and the Saudi army, besting them both again and again. For the Saudis, who have spent tens of billions of dollars on their military, it was deeply humiliating.
The Houthis won against both Saleh and the Saudi army, besting them both again and again.
The Arab Spring came to Yemen in 2011. The Houthi movement was one part of the wide national uprising against Saleh. It was primarily concerned with advancing the narrow interests of the Zaydi community, not surprisingly. When Saleh was replaced by a Sunni from the south—Abdrabbuh Mansour Hadi, who had been Saleh’s vice president at the behest of the Saudis—the Houthi response was predictable. They were critical of the process and of Hadi.
A national dialogue was instituted to address the future of Yemen after Saleh, with regional and international assistance. It proposed a federal solution with six provinces with some autonomy. The Zaydi-dominated north got two landlocked entities, which the Houthis argued was gerrymandered against them.
In 2014, they began colluding with Saleh against Hadi secretly. Even by the standards of Middle East politics, it was a remarkable and hypocritical reversal of alliances by both the Houthis and Saleh. Much of the army remained loyal to Saleh and his family, so together with the Houthis the two had a preponderance of force in the country. Hadi was deeply unpopular and seen as a Saudi stooge.
The war
After months of gradually moving into the capital Sanaa, it fell to the rebel alliance in January 2015, just as King Salman ascended to the throne in Riyadh. The Houthis opened direct civilian air traffic between Sanaa and Tehran, Iran promised cheap oil for Yemen, and rumors of more Iran-Houthi cooperation spread quickly. The main port at Hodeidah fell to the Houthi forces and they began marching to take Aden, the capital of the south and the largest port on the Indian Ocean.
For the Saudi king and his 29-year-old defense minister and son Prince Muhammad bin Salman (MBS), it was a nightmare. A traditional enemy with ties to their regional foe was taking over the country on their southern belly. The strategic straits at the Bab al Mandab could be in the Houthis’ hands. It was a very difficult challenge for an untried team in the royal palace.
For the Obama administration, the picture was more complicated. American intelligence officials said that Iran was actually trying to discourage the Houthis from seizing Sanaa and openly toppling Hadi. Iran preferred a less radical course, but the Houthi leadership was drunk with success. Moreover, Undersecretary of Defense Michael Vickers said on the record in January that Washington had a productive informal intelligence relationship with the Houthis against al-Qaida. He suggested that the cooperation could continue.
The Saudis chose to go to war to support Hadi and prevent the Houthi-Saleh rebellion from consolidating control of the country. Operation Decisive Storm began in March 2015, MBS taking the public lead in promising early victory for the Saudis. They forged a coalition to back them including the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, and other traditional Saudi allies. Two refused to join: Oman, Yemen’s neighbor, and Pakistan, whose parliament voted unanimously against the war.
Obama backed the Saudi war. In the choice between the Saudi ally and the Houthis, the president—not surprisingly—took the side of a 70-year old alliance. U.S. and U.K. support is essential to the Royal Saudi Air Force (RSAF), which is equipped with American and British aircraft. The RSAF has dropped tons of American and British munitions on Yemen since.
Almost three years later, the Saudi air and naval blockade of Houthi-controlled territory has created a humanitarian disaster, with millions of Yemenis at dire risk of starvation and disease. The Saudi-led coalition has tightened the blockade and gradually gained more territory, although Hadi has little if any control over the territory recovered from the rebels. He resides in Riyadh. All sides are credibly accused of war crimes.
Saleh broke with his putative ally this month, signaled to Riyadh that he was flipping sides again, and was killed days later. The Houthis won the battle for Sanaa but are isolated from the rest of Yemeni politics and political parties. Riyadh portrays them as Iranian puppets, but many Yemenis see them as patriots fighting the country’s traditional enemy Saudi Arabia and America, Israel’s defender. Houthi propaganda plays to the line that Yemen is under attack by a Saudi-American-Israeli conspiracy.
A major consequence of the war is to push the Houthis and Iran and Hezbollah closer together. U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Nikki Haley underscored that point, perhaps unintentionally, when she presented compelling evidence of Iranian support for the Houthis missile attacks on Saudi and Emirati targets last week. With their own cities under constant aerial bombardment, the Houthis are firing missiles at Riyadh and Abu Dhabi, with Tehran’s technological assistance. The war costs Tehran a few million dollars per month, while it costs Riyadh $6 billion per month.
Tehran and the Houthis are playing with fire, of course. If a missile hits Riyadh, Jeddah, or Abu Dhabi and kills dozens or more, the pressure for retaliation against Iran will be significant. The Trump administration is poorly designed to provide cooling counsel.
This brief and simplified account of the background of the Houthis should underscore how complex Yemeni politics are and how volatile they can be. Saleh called running Yemen to be akin to dancing on the heads of snakes. It is a foolish place for Americans to be drawn into a war and a quagmire against an enemy they hardly know. The administration has recently called for an easing of the blockade. It’s time to get serious about a political solution, not to wade deeper into quicksand.
In a single move, Yemen’s Ansarallah has checkmated the west and its rules-based order.
• 1,300 WORDS •
Whether invented in northern India, eastern China or Central Asia – from Persia to Turkestan – chess is an Asian game. In chess, there always comes a time when a simple pawn is able to upset the whole chessboard, usually via a move in the back rank whose effect simply cannot be calculated.
Yes, a pawn can impose a seismic checkmate. That’s where we are, geopolitically, right now.
The cascading effects of a single move on the chessboard – Yemen’s Ansarallah stunning and carefully targeted blockade of the Red Sea – reach way beyond global shipping, supply chains, and The War of Economic Corridors. Not to mention the reduction of the much lauded US Navy force projection to irrelevancy.
Yemen’s resistance movement, Ansarallah, has made it very clear that any Israel-affiliated or Israel-destined vessel will be intercepted. While the west bristles at this, and imagines itself a target, the rest of the world fully understands that all other shipping is free to pass. Russian tankers – as well as Chinese, Iranian, and Global South ships – continue to move undisturbed across the Bab al-Mandeb (narrowest point: 33 km) and the Red Sea.
Only the Hegemon is disturbed by this challenge to its ‘rules-based order.’ It is outraged that western vessels delivering energy or goods to law-breaking Israel can be impeded, and that the supply chain has been severed and plunged into deep crisis. The pinpointed target is the Israeli economy, which is already bleeding heavily. A single Yemeni move proves to be more efficient than a torrent of imperial sanctions.
It is the tantalizing possibility of this single move turning into a paradigm shift – with no return – that is adding to the Hegemon’s apoplexy. Especially because imperial humiliation is deeply embedded in the paradigm shift.
Russian President Vladimir Putin, on the record, is now sending an unmistakeable message: Forget the Suez Canal. The way to go is the Northern Sea Route – which the Chinese, in the framework of the Russia-China strategic partnership, call the Arctic Silk Road.
Map of North-East and North-West Passage shipping routes
For the dumbfounded Europeans, the Russians have detailed three options: First, sail 15,000 miles around the Cap of Good Hope. Second, use Russia’s cheaper and faster Northern Sea Route. Third, send the cargo via Russian Railways.
Rosatom, which oversees the Northern Sea Route, has emphasized that non-ice-class ships are now able to sail throughout summer and autumn, and year-round navigation will soon be possible with the help of a fleet of nuclear icebreakers.
All that as direct consequences of the single Yemeni move. What next? Yemen entering BRICS+ at the summit in Kazan in late 2024, under the Russian presidency?
The new architecture will be framed in West Asia
The US-led Armada put together for Operation Genocide Protection, which collapsed even before birth, may have been set up to “warn Iran,” apart from giving Ansarallah a scare. Just as the Houthis, Tehran is hardly intimidated because, as West Asia analyst ace Alastair Crooke succinctly put it: “Sykes-Picot is dead.”
This is a quantum shift on the chessboard. It means West Asian powers will frame the new regional architecture from now on, not US Navy “projection.”
That carries an ineffable corollary: those eleven US aircraft carrier task forces, for all practical purposes, are essentially worthless.
Everyone across West Asia is well aware that Ansarallah’s missiles are capable of hitting Saudi and Emirati oil fields, and knocking them out of commission. So it is little wonder that Riyadh and Abu Dhabi would never accept becoming part of a US-led maritime force to challenge the Yemeni resistance.
Add to it the role of underwater drones now in the possession of Russia and Iran. Think of fifty of these aimed at a US aircraft carrier: it has no defense. While the Americans still have very advanced submarines, they cannot keep the Bab al-Mandeb and Red Sea open to western operators.
On the energy front, Moscow and Tehran don’t even need to think – at least not yet – about using the “nuclear” option or cutting off potentially at least 25 percent, and up, of the world oil supply. As one Persian Gulf analyst succinctly describes it, “that would irretrievably implode the international financial system.”
For those still determined to support the genocide in Gaza there have been warnings. Iraqi Prime Minister Mohammed Shia al-Sudani has mentioned it explicitly. Tehran has already called for a total oil and gas embargo against nations that support Israel.
A total naval blockade of Israel, meticulously engineered, remains a distinct possibility. Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) Commander Hossein Salami said Israel may “soon face the closure of the Mediterranean Sea, the Strait of Gibraltar, and other waterways.”
Because if the Straussian neo-cons in the Beltway get really unhinged by the paradigm shift and act in desperation to “teach a lesson” to Iran, a chokepoint Hormuz-Bab al-Mandeb combo blockade might skyrocket the price of oil to at least $500 a barrel, triggering the implosion of the $618 trillion derivatives market and crashing the entire international banking system.
The paper tiger is in a jam
Mao Zedong was right after all: the US may be in fact a paper tiger. Putin, though, is way more careful, cold, and calculating. With this Russian president, it’s all about an asymmetric response, exactly when no one is expecting it.
That brings us to the prime working hypothesis perhaps capable of explaining the shadow play masking the single Ansarallah move on the chessboard.
When Pulitzer-winning investigative journalist Sy (Seymour) Hersh proved how Team Biden blew up the Nord Stream pipelines, there was no Russian response to what was, in effect, an act of terrorism against Gazprom, against Germany, against the EU, and against a bunch of European companies. Yet Yemen, now, with a simple blockade, turns global shipping upside down.
So what is more vulnerable? The physical networks of global energy supply (Pipelineistan) or the Thalassocracy, states that derive their power from naval supremacy?
Russia privileges Pipelineistan: see, for instance, the Nord Streams and Power of Siberia 1 and 2. But the US, the Hegemon, always relied on its thalassocratic power, heir to “Britannia rules the waves.”
Well, not anymore. And, surprisingly, getting there did not even entail the “nuclear” option, the blockade of the Strait of Hormuz, which Washington games and scaremongers like crazy.
Of course we won’t have a smoking gun. But it’s a fascinating proposition that the single Yemeni move may have been coordinated at the highest level between three BRICS members – Russia, China, and Iran, the neocon new “axis of evil” – plus other two BRICS+, energy powerhouses Saudi Arabia and the UAE. As in, “if you do it, we’ve got your back”.
None of that, of course, detracts from Yemeni purity: their defense of Palestine is a sacred duty.
Western imperialism and then turbo-capitalism have always been obsessed with gobbling up Yemen, a process that Isa Blumi, in his splendid book Destroying Yemen, described as “necessarily stripping Yemenis of their historic role as the economic, cultural, spiritual, and political engine for much of the Indian Ocean world.”
Yemen, though, is unconquerable and, true to a local proverb, “deadly” (Yemen Fataakah). As part of the Axis of Resistance, Yemen’s Ansarallah is now a key actor in a complex Eurasia-wide drama that redefines Heartland connectivity; and alongside China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), the India-Iran-Russia-led International North-South Transportation Corridor (INSTC), and Russia’s new Northern Sea Route, also includes control over strategic chokepoints around the Mediterranean Seas and the Arabian peninsula.
This is another trade connectivity paradigm entirely, smashing to bits western colonial and neocolonial control of Afro-Eurasia. So yes, BRICS+ supports Yemen, who with a single move has presented Pax Americana with The Mother of All Geopolitical Jams.
It looks like the United States, along with 9 allies — Great Britain, Italy, Bahrain, Canada, France, the Netherlands, Norway, Seychelles and Spain — are on the verge of entangling itself in a new Middle East quagmire as an international armada assembles in the international waters around Yemen. The mission? Stop Yemen from threatening cargo and oil tankers headed to Israel.
Tiny Yemen has surprised the West with its tenacity and ferocity in attacking ships trying to ferry containers and fuel to Israel. Yes, this is a violation of international law and the West is fully justified in trying to thwart Yemen. On paper it would appear that Yemen is outnumbered and seriously outgunned. A sure loser? Not so fast. The U.S. Navy, which constitutes the majority of the fleet sailing against Yemen, has some real vulnerabilities that will limit its actions.
Before explaining the risks, you must understand that the U.S. Navy is configured currently as a “Forward-Based Navy” and is not an “Expeditionary Navy.” Anthony Cowden, writing for the Center for International Maritime Security in September, examined this issue in his article, REBALANCE THE FLEET TOWARD BEING A TRULY EXPEDITIONARY NAVY.
Due to the unique geographical position of the U.S., the Navy has the luxury of defending the nation’s interests “over there.” Since World War II, it developed and maintained a navy that was able to project power overseas; to reconstitute its combat power while still at sea or at least far from national shores; and continuously maintain proximity to competitors. This expeditionary character minimized the dependence of the fleet on shore-based and homeland-based infrastructure to sustain operations, allowing the fleet to be more logistically self-sufficient at sea.
However, late in the Cold War, the U.S. Navy started to diminish its expeditionary capability, and became more reliant on allied and friendly bases. A key development was subtle but consequential – the vertical launch system (VLS) for the surface fleet’s primary anti-air, anti-submarine, and land-attack weapons. While a very capable system, reloading VLS at sea was problematic and soon abandoned. While an aircraft carrier can be rearmed at sea, surface warships cannot, which constrains the ability of carrier strike groups to sustain forward operations without taking frequent trips back to fixed infrastructure. The Navy is revisiting the issue of reloading VLS at sea, and those efforts should be reinforced.
The next step the Navy took away from an expeditionary capability was in the 1990s, when it decommissioned most of the submarine tenders (AS), all of the repair ships (AR), and destroyer tenders (AD), and moved away from Sailor-manned Shore Intermediate Maintenance Centers (SIMA). Not only did this eliminate the ability to conduct intermediate maintenance “over there,” but it destroyed the progression of apprentice-to-journeyman-to-master technician that made the U.S. Navy Sailor one of the premier maintenance resources in the military world. Combat search and rescue, salvage, and battle damage repair are other areas in which the U.S. Navy no longer has sufficient capability for sustaining expeditionary operations.
So what? Each U.S. destroyer carries an estimated 90 missiles (perhaps a few more). Their primary mission is to protect the U.S. aircraft carrier they are shielding. What happens when Yemen fires 100 drones/rockets/missiles at a U.S. carrier? The U.S. destroyer, or multiple destroyers will fire their missiles to defeat the threat. Great. Mission accomplished! Only one little problem, as described in the preceding quote — the U.S. Navy got rid of the ship tenders, i.e. those vessels capable of resupplying destroyers with new missiles to replace the expended rounds. In order to reload, that destroyer must sail to the nearest friendly port where the U.S. has stockpiled missiles for resupply.
Got the picture? If the destroyer must sail away then the U.S. carrier must follow. It cannot just sit out in the ocean without its defensive screen of ships. The staying power of a U.S. fleet in a combat zone, like Yemen, is a function of how many missiles the Yemenis fire at the U.S. ships.
But the problems do not stop there. Each of the Aegis missiles, as I noted in my previous post, cost at least $500,000 dollars. A retired U.S. DOD official told me today that the actual cost is $2 million dollars. If Yemen opts to use drone swarms to saturate the battle space around a carrier, then the United States will firing very expensive missiles to destroy relatively inexpensive drones. This brings up another critical vulnerability — the U.S. only has a limited supply of these air defense missiles and does not have the industrial capability in place and operating to produce new ones rapidly to make up the deficit.
Getting the picture now? The U.S. Navy may find itself having to sail away without finishing the job of eliminating the drone/missile threat from Yemen. How do you think that will play in the rest of the world? The mighty Super Power having to retreat to rearm because it could not sustain intense combat operations. This is not classified information. It is published all over the internet. If I can figure this out then I am certain that U.S. adversaries, not just Yemen, realize they have a way to give the U.S. a very bloody nose in terms of damaged prestige.
What happens if Yemen is able to sink one or two U.S. Navy ships? Then the shit really hits the fan. The United States does not have a magical supply of missiles squirreled away to deal with this contingency. The U.S. ships would have to sail away to rearm after picking up the survivors from a sundered ship.
Then there is the problem of finding the mobile missile platforms in Yemen. Remember the problems the United States had in Iraq in 1991 trying to find and destroy SCUD missile launch systems? While ISR systems are better today, there is still no guarantee of being able to locate and destroy in a timely manner. The Yemenis have more than 8 years experience dealing with U.S. ISR and U.S. drone attacks. On November 9th the Yemenis shot down a MQ-9 Reaper drone. That baby costs a little more than $30 million dollars.
Here is the bottomline. The United States flotilla, along with its allies, can do some damage to Yemen but are unlikely to achieve a decisive victory. Yemen, for its part, can inflict some serious damage to some of the ships — maybe even sink one or two — and by doing so, score a moral victory that will fuel doubts about America’s naval capabilities and staying power. Perhaps this explains why the U.S. has been so slow to respond to the attacks launched by Yemen.
No one ever lost money betting on the ability of the Empire of Chaos, Lies and Plunder to construct a “coalition of the willing” whenever faced with a geopolitical quandary.
In every case, duly covered by the reigning “rules-based international order”, “willing” applies to vassals seduced by carrots or sticks to follow to the letter the Empire’s whims.
Cue to the latest chapter: Coalition Genocide Prosperity, whose official – heroic – denomination, a trademark of the Pentagon’s P.R. wizards, is “Operation Prosperity Guardian”, allegedly engaged in “ensuring freedom of navigation in the Red Sea.”
Translation: this is Washington all but declaring war on Yemen’s Ansarullah. An extra US destroyer has already been dispatched to the Red Sea.
The Houthi military not only reaffirmed it has “weapons to sink your aircraft carriers and destroyers” but made a stunning call to both Sunnis and Shi’ites in Bahrain to revolt and overthrow their King, Hamad al-Khalifa.
As of Monday, even before the start of the operation, the Eisenhower aircraft carrier was around 280 km off the closest Ansarullah controlled latitudes. Houthis have Zoheir and Khalij-e-Fars anti-ship ballistic missiles with a range of 300 to 500 km.
Ansarullah Supreme Political Council member Muhammad al-Bukhaiti felt compelled to re-stress the obvious: “Even if America succeeds in mobilizing the entire world, our operations in the Red Sea will not stop unless the massacre in Gaza stops. We will not give up the responsibility of defending the Moustazafeen (oppressed ones) of the Earth.”
The world better get ready: “Aircraft carrier sunk” may become the new 9/11.
Shipping in the Red Sea Remains Open
Weapons peddler Lloyd “Raytheon” Austin, in his current revolving door position as head of the Pentagon, is visiting West Asia – mostly Israel, Qatar and Bahrain – to promote this new “international initiative” for patrolling the Red Sea, the Bab al-Mandeb strait (which links the Arabian Sea to the Red Sea) and the Gulf of Aden.
As al-Bukhaiti remarked, Ansarullah’s strategy is to target any ship navigating the Red Sea linked to Israeli companies or supplying Israel – something that for the Yemenis demonstrates their complicity with the Gaza genocide. That will only stop when the genocide stops.
With a single move – a de facto maritime blockade – Ansarullah proved that the King is Naked: Yemen has done more in practice to defend the Palestinian cause than most of the key regional players put together. Incidentally, they were all ordered by Netanyahu in public to shut up. And they did.
It’s quite instructive to once again follow the money. Israel has been hit very hard. The port of Eilat is virtually closed, and its income fell by 80%.
For instance, Taiwanese shipping giant Yang-Ming Marine Transport Corporation originally planned to re-route its Israel-bound cargo to the port of Ashdod. Then it cut off any shipments to any Israeli destination.
It’s no wonder Yoram Sebba, President of the Israel Chamber of Shipping, revealed himself to be puzzled by Ansarullah’s “complex” tactics and “unrevealed” criteria that have imposed “total uncertainty”. Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Jordan have also been caught in the Yemeni net.
It’s crucial to keep in perspective that Ansarullah only blocks ships that are going to Israel. The bulk of maritime shipping in the Red Sea remains wide open.
So shipping giant Maersk’s decision not to use the Red Sea, alongside other global shipping behemoths, may be pushing the envelope too fast – as in nearly begging for a US-led patrol to be in effect.
So far, on one side we have Yemen virtually ruling the Red Sea. On the other side, we find UAE-Saudi-Jordan tandem, in the form of an – alternative – cargo land corridor set up from the port of Jebel Ali in the Persian Gulf across Saudi Arabia to Jordan and then Israel.
The corridor uses logistical tech from Trucknet: that’s truck-based overland connectivity in practice, reducing transport time from 14 days via the Red Sea to a maximum of 4 days on the road, 300 trucks a day, everyday.
Jordan of course is in, operating the trans-shipment from the UAE and Saudi Arabia.
The overarching framework for all this is the
One Israel plan, enthusiastically promoted by Netanyahu, whose key aim is a link with the Arabian peninsula and most of all the NEOM tech metropolis to be built theoretically up to 2039 in the northwestern Tabuk province in Saudi Arabia, north of the Red Sea, east of Egypt across the Gulf of Aqaba, and south of Jordan.
NEOM is MbS’s project to modernize the country, which is incidentally bound to feature Israel-operated AI cities.
This is what Riyadh is really betting on, much more than developing closer relations with Iran under the framework of BRICS+. Or to care about the future of Palestine.
On the planned naval blockade of Yemen though, the Saudis were way more circumspect. Even as Tel Aviv directly asked the White House to do something, anything, Riyadh “advised” Washington to exercise some restraint.
Yet as few things matter most for the Straussian neocon psychos who currently direct US policy than to protect the trade interests in the Red Sea of its aircraft-carrier in West Asia, the decision to set up a “coalition” was all but inevitable.
Enter the latest – actually fourth – incarnation of the Combined Maritime Force (CMF): a multinational coalition from 39 nations established in 2002 and led by the US Fifth Fleet in Bahrain.
The task force already exists: it’s CTF 153, focusing on “international maritime security and capacity building efforts in the Red Sea, Bab al-Mandeb and Gulf of Aden”. That’s the basis for Coalition Genocide Prosperity.
Members of CTF 153 include, apart from the usual suspects US, UK, France and Canada, Europeans such as Norway, Italy, Netherlands and Spain, superpower Seychelles and Bahrain (the Fifth Fleet element).
Saudi Arabia and UAE, crucially, are not members. They know, after a seven-year war, when they were part of another “coalition” (the US was sort of “leading from behind”) what it means to fight Ansarullah.
All Aboard the Northern Sea Route
If the Red Sea situation turns really red, it will instantly shatter the Riyadh-Sanaa ceasefire. The White House and the US Deep State simply do not want a peace deal. They want Saudi Arabia at war with Yemen.
The Red Sea turned red will also send the global energy crisis into a tailspin. After all at least four million barrels of oil and 12% of total global seaborne-trade to the West transits the Bab al-Mandeb every single day.
So once again we have graphic confirmation that the Empire of Chaos, Lies and Plunder only calls for ceasefires when it’s losing badly: see the Ukraine case.
Yet no ceasefire in Gaza – supported by the overwhelming majority if UN member-states – runs the risk of metastasizing into an expansion of the war in West Asia.
That may fit into the clumsy imperial rationale of setting West Asia on fire to disturb China’s commercial BRI drive and the entry of Iran, Saudi Arabia and UAE into the expanded BRICS next month. Simultaneously, and in tune with the absence of real strategic planning in Washington, that does not take into consideration an array of appalling, unintended consequences.
So according to imperial optics, the only path ahead is further militarization – from the Mediterranean to the Suez Canal, the Gulf of Aqaba, the Red Sea, the Gulf of Aden, the Arabian Sea and the Persian Gulf. That fits exactly into the framework of the War of Economic Corridors.
An axiom should be set in stone: Washington would rather bet on a possible, deep global recession than simply allowing a humanitarian ceasefire in Gaza. The recession may well turbo-charge a widespread economic collapse of the collective West, and an even more rapid rise of multipolarity.
To offer much needed relief of so much insanity: almost casually, President Putin recently remarked that the Northern Sea Route is now becoming a more efficient maritime trade corridor than the Suez Canal.
Photo Credit: The Cradle
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