Bernard Spiegal

According to a Pew survey published in May, based on enquiry undertaken in March and early April, thirty-nine percent of Israelis think that Israel’s military assault on Gaza is ‘about right’. Thirty-four percent, however, believe the military assault has ‘not gone far enough’; and a paltry nineteen percent think it has ‘gone too far’. 

Might the survey result be taken as an indicator of Israel’s moral degradation? On the one hand, a proportion of Israelis are of the view that Israel has achieved the right level of wanton destruction and mass murder; on the other, current levels are insufficient, and more is required.

What does the thirty-four percent – let us call them the ‘dissatisfied – require to be done to persuade them that the Israeli killing machine has got it ‘about right’.

It’s not a speculation too far to suggest that what will satisfy the seventy-three percent – 39% + 34% – is the removal of as many Palestinians as possible from the area bounded by the river and the sea. In this, the entirety of the seventy-three percent should be well-satisfied even now, for that is the policy now being daily enacted throughout the Occupied Territories. The Israeli commentator, Ori Goldberg, captures Israelis’ reality:

We kill Palestinians, all day every day, on automatic mode. We can’t remember a time when we were not killing dozens of Palestinians a day, in Gaza and in the West Bank. On the other hand, we don’t care.

Israelis are in misery. They are traumatised by 7th October. We know they are traumatised, for they never cease to tell us. One wants to feel sympathy, as one would for any person wounded in soul and mind.  But here one stumbles. One stumbles because Israel deploys its trauma as a form of justification.  A justification for Israel perpetrating, and at the same time ignoring, casting away from mind, its sustained aggression against a whole people: Palestinians.

Meanwhile, Israel is fracturing. Centrifugal forces are pulling it apart. It cannot hold. But while it does, it appears to know only one mode of action, one way of being, and that is as masters of destruction, death and maiming. So it is that Israel’s war cabinet can order, and carry out, the assassination of Ismail Haniyeh, the Hamas leader who was leading the ceasefire negotiations, via intermediaries, with Israel.

Hamas has now elected Yahya Sinwar as the new leader. He will take the lead in any ceasefire negotiations. Prime Minister Netanyahu, in response, has made it clear that he too is to be assassinated.  This merely reiterates the message Netanyahu’s sent by way of Haniyeh’s killing: peace is not the aim.

Nor is return of the hostages held by Hamas, they are not a priority of state. This should not surprise, for it is yet another manifestation of the inherent fascist tendencies of the Israeli state, a subject briefly discussed here. Prolongation of the now hard to deny genocide is the means by which Netanyahu can hold together his fractious, blood-thirsty, right-wing coalition; and avoid ending up in court to answer the various criminal charges laid against him.

Regional conflagration?

Netanyahu and his coalition seem intent on goading Iran, Hezbollah, and the Huthis into a regional war. They hope to draw in the USA and allies – in the event the UK government will no doubt wish to trot alongside – into a regional conflict that will result in a wished-for Israeli dominance of the area.

It is inconceivable that the USA, UK, the West generally actually want a regional conflagration. The risk is too high, and potential outcomes shot through with uncertainty.  For Israel’s current far-right, fanatical, messianic coalition, however, there is merit in provoking a wider war.

Where responsibility lies

The USA, UK and the West generally cannot escape responsibility from their pivotal role in taking the region to its current hazardous configuration. They are to a significant degree jointly responsible for all that Israel has been able to do over the last seventy-six years, since 1948.

The USA, UK the West have it in their power to avert a potential regional war by holding Israel in check. There are multiple levers available to be pulled for this to be achieved. Those levers should have been pulled longtime since. Instead, Israel has been enabled to pursue the dangerous fantasy upon which it is built: the idea that a Jewish Supremacist state can be both a practical and an ethical basis for survival, let alone flourishing. 

Israel is like a spoiled child.  For too long it has been allowed to create mayhem and multiple harms without meaningful censure or consequence. As with an unchecked, spoiled child, it has nurtured its narcissism and sense of entitlement, never having to truly grow up. And like a miscreant child, it knows how to break things. But no clue as to how they may be fixed.