The chair of the Join Chiefs of Staff, CQ Brown, has told the Israelis that the Americans will not be going boots on the ground in the case of a full out war between Israel and Hezbollah. Brown warned Israel that a conflict in Lebanon would have a violent ripple effect that would put US forces in danger, and that Hezbollah’s capacity for war would be very hard to deal with. Moreover, Brown stated that Iran would likely back Hezbollah with more intensity than it has for Hamas, “particularly if they felt that Hezbollah was being significantly threatened,” thus causing a major war beyond Israel’s borders. According to the Hill:
Air Force Gen. CQ Brown, chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, warned Sunday that an Israeli invasion of Lebanon against Hezbollah could spark opposition from Iran, potentially putting U.S. troops in the region at risk.
The comments underline Biden administration pressure on the Israeli government not to move against Hezbollah, as tensions rise in the region amid the Israel-Hamas war.
Brown said that Iran “would be more inclined to support Hezbollah,” adding that Iran would likely give more support to the militants in Lebanon than Hamas “particularly if they felt that Hezbollah was being significantly threatened.”
Former Lebanese general, Elias Hanna, stated in an interview:
“The United States of America does not really want to fight on many theaters… they are fighting in Europe, and they are fighting now in the Middle East … and what would happen if something comes up in [the] Taiwan front?”
When asked if Israel intends to war with Hezbollah, Hanna said:
“They would like to do it … but they don’t have the means and they don’t have the legitimacy and they don’t have the backing of the United States of America.”
The General CQ Brown exhorted Israel “to think about the second order of effect of any type of operation into Lebanon, and how that might play out and how it impacts not just the region, but how it impacts our forces in regions as well”.
It looks like Netanyahu, knowing that Israel cannot fight on two fronts with equal levels of intensity, is planning on lessening the war effort in Gaza to divert focus on Lebanon. Netanyahu announced that the current stage of fighting in Gaza is winding down, which seems to portend shifting most of the focus onto dealing with Hezbollah. The IDF recently authorized operational plans for a war aimed at pushing Hezbollah north of the Litani River (the stated goal of 2006’s UNSC Resolution 1701).
A war between Israel and Hezbollah is currently in its lighter stage, but a full on war is inevitable, and the United States is letting the Israelis know that the US will not be doing a full on war to defend Israel. America is exhausted by war, and does not want to repeat the nightmare of Iraq. War is extremely unpopular in American society, with all the warhawks now being deemed as a fringe group, and the isolationists praised as patriots and true Americans. With this major shift in the zeitgeist, the idea of defending Israel with boots on the ground is seen as not only outrageous, but abominable. In 2018, Norman Finkelstein wrote that “Israel has been slowly but steadily losing the battle for public opinion in the West.” Finkelstein wrote this 4 years after the 2014 Israeli military operation known Protective Edge, in which scores of civilians were killed. Reading the accounts of survivors of the bloodbath that took place in Rafah in 2014, one can see why Finkelstein wrote that support was declining. The Israelis unleashed hell on Rafah after Israeli Lieutenant Hadar Goldin was captured in a firefight. Israel decided to implement its “Hannibal Directive” (killing its own people while they are held hostage; Israel did this to Israeli hostages during the October 7th attack) and make the area which it “believed to be the location of Lieutenant Goldin” into a flaming heap of carnage of destruction. Even after forensic evidence confirmed Goldin was dead, the bombardments continued as a way to enact revenge. Israeli soldiers testified that “the Israeli military continued its attacks” in Rafah to “show them,” “settle accounts,” and “extract [sic] a price”. The bombing took a very sinister form in which the Israelis would tell civilians to stay in their homes to stay safe, and then bomb the homes. One survivor recounted:
They were saying, ‘The Israel Defense Forces is warning you not to go outside your houses or move from one place to another, unless you want to put yourself in danger — you’ve been warned.’ So they tell us not to go out and then they destroy our house on top of us. [One dead child was] “thrown onto the roof of a concrete house,” [a second was] “shredded into pieces,” [while a third’s] “head was cut open and his brain was coming out.” (Amnesty International, “Black Friday,” pp. 62-64, brackets mine, quoted from Finkelstein, Gaza)
Amnesty International reported that “In some case, there are indications that [Israeli military forces] directly fired at and killed civilians, including some who were fleeing .. in some cases they warned civilians to stay in their homes which were then bombarded.” (“Black Friday,” p. 91). Is it any wonder that support for Israel has declined tremendously? Even Donald Trump, arguably the most zionist president in US history, affirmed that Israel is “absolutely losing the PR war”, and exhorted Israel: “Get it over with and let’s get back to peace and stop killing people. And that’s a very simple statement… They have to get it done. Get it over with and get it over with fast because we have to — you have to get back to normalcy and peace.” When even the most pro-Israel president is telling Israel that its losing the support of the world and needs to “stop killing people,” you know very well that things are shifting from the pro-Israel ways we got so accustomed to. We were told for years of the moral superiority of Israel over its neighbors, and yet in the 2008 devastation of Gaza (known as “Cast Lead”) Israel used white phosphorus on the civilian population. White phosphorus is 1500 degrees of heat burning human flesh. Human Rights Watch reported that Israel “repeatedly exploded white phosphorus munitions in the air over populated areas, killing and injuring civilians, and damaging civilian structures, including a school, a market, a humanitarian aid warehouse and a hospital.” An Israel soldier later recounted: “You are allowed to do anything you want… for no reason other than its cool,” and when another soldier was asked, “Why fire phosphorus?” he replied simply: “Because it’s fun. Cool.” Initially, Israel denied using white phosphorus, but its own soldiers admitted using it because it was merely “cool.” This deception is what made Marc Garlasco, a senior military analyst at Human Rights Watch (HRW), tell Haaretz in 2009:
“They said in Lebanon they did not use cluster bombs. We found 4 million. They evade answering that they use phosphorus, and we stand there every day watching. They claim to have bombed a truck full of Grad missiles, and according to witnesses who spoke with Haaretz, it turned out to be a truck with oxygen tanks. Not everything that is long is a missile. How can anyone trust the Israeli military?'”
My goal is not to say that Israel is the evilest country in the world, or the wickedest army (far from it), but to show that as the tide turns against Israel, we can at least understand why. There are people who express their animosity towards Israel who have their own evil motivations, and they point to these dark truths to further bolster their position. We must keep this in mind, and see the totality of the picture in this trend of darkness that is growing to a repeat of the Shoah.
Another problem that is clearly visible is the idea that this is purely a war between Israel and Gaza; the reason why this is a problem is because its not the full picture. Its Israel versus a terrorist organization that Netanyahu strengthened. It is a frankenstein made by the Israeli government with the intention of delegitimizing the Palestinian cause represented by the Palestinian Authority. The logic behind this is that with Hamas’s presence Israel could then point to Islamic fanaticism as the reason to reject the idea of a Palestinian state. In the words of Tel Schneider: “Most of the time, Israeli policy was to treat the Palestinian Authority as a burden and Hamas as an asset. Far-right MK Bezalel Smotrich, now the finance minister in the hardline government and leader of the Religious Zionism party, said so himself in 2015.” Schneider goes on to write:
According to various reports, Netanyahu made a similar point at a Likud faction meeting in early 2019, when he was quoted as saying that those who oppose a Palestinian state should support the transfer of funds to Gaza, because maintaining the separation between the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank and Hamas in Gaza would prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state.
Furthermore:
Hamas was upgraded from a mere terror group to an organization with which Israel held indirect negotiations via Egypt, and one that was allowed to receive infusions of cash from abroad.
The words that lift up Israel as if it is a nation of morality still push on, still pushing forward with the echoing grimace of hasbara. One need only to read the testimonies of Israeli soldiers in the website, Breaking The Silence, to see how this never ending talk of the clean heart of Israel is at odds with the full truth. An Israeli soldier named “Aviv” told Breaking the Silence about the dark things that went on during Operation Cast Led in 2008-9:
“inside Gaza you are allowed to do anything you want, to break down doors of houses for no reason other than it’s cool … to write ‘death to Arabs’ on the walls, to take family pictures and spit on them, just because you can.”
He talks about what happened when his company commander spotted an elderly woman walking down a road. “In the end, he sent people on the roof, to take her out with their weapons … I simply felt it was murder in cold blood.” The interviewer asked Aviv why she was murdered, to which he replied:
“That’s what is so nice, supposedly, about Gaza: You see a person on a road, walking along a path. He doesn’t have to be with a weapon, you don’t have to identify him with anything and you can just shoot him. With us it was an old woman, on whom I didn’t see any weapon. The order was to take the person out, that woman, the moment you see her.”
Another veteran of Cast Lead spoke of how rabbis were teaching the soldiers that they were on a religion mission to purge the gentiles out of Jewish land:
“Their message was very clear… We are the Jewish people, we came to this land by a miracle, God brought us back to this land and now we need to fight to expel the gentiles who are interfering with our conquest of this holy land. This was the main message, and the whole sense many soldiers had in this operation was of a religious war.”
The fanaticism in Israel is only getting worse, more intense, with the frenzied flame of the demons that possessed the souls who cried out “Crucify Him!” only looming ever more clearer in its decimation of the souls of Israel. The Muslim is not, and will not be the only target of these fanatics; the Christians are hated as idolaters, the Jews who are like the Good Samaritan are and will be hated by mobs who see their bloodshed, and anyone who proclaims the Nazarene will be sought out like those Christians of Syria who were butchered by NATO-backed rebels. But as Israel’s heart hardens, the world’s warm towards the Jewish state will only grow colder, and the light of its only friend — America — will only dim until its light is extinguished. What will Israel do if it is isolated? The fanatics will look to the moderates and say, ‘What good is there for your calmness? What benefit did it bring us? Now the restrainer has let go of his fetter, now the leash is no more. What point is there for civility, for following rules?’ The fanatics will overwhelm the sensible, just as they did some decades after the Crucifixion of Christ, when they rebelled against Rome and butchered the Jews who they saw as too soft. The light of peace will be no more, and the glimmering candlelight of hope will be put out amidst an Israel left to itself. All things come to end, Israel is not exempt.