Another day in the paradise that is the Holy Land found Israeli tanks bulldozing their way into a UNIFIL post while Hezbollah’s rudderless foot soldiers busied themselves launching drones at Haifa.
There were conflicting accounts of the tank incident. UNIFIL — the UN’s peacekeeping mission in southern Lebanon — said a pair of Merkavas “destroyed” the main gate and “forcibly” overran the post. The IDF denied “storming” the mission, but Benjamin Netanyahu repeated his demand that the UN withdraw the peacekeepers. You know, for their own good.
Among other things, UNIFIL’s supposed to keep the border demilitarized — “free of any armed personnel, assets and weapons other than those of the Government of Lebanon and of UNIFIL,” as the relevant Security Council resolution puts it. Suffice to say there are “armed personnel, assets and weapons” in the area, and a lot of them (most of them) don’t pledge allegiance or belong to the Lebanese army. Netanyahu says that state of affairs constitutes a dereliction of duty on the UN’s part.
His position on UNIFIL is the same as his position on anyone else who’s between Israel and Hamas or Hezbollah: Get out of the way or we’ll kill you. UNIFIL hasn’t complied with his demands to evacuate, so, to paraphrase Ivan Drago, “If they die, they die.”
On Sunday, he released a video message addressed to António Guterres. The UN’s “refusal to evacuate” makes the mission’s soldiers “hostages of Hezbollah,” he declared. Netanyahu hasn’t always shown a lot of regard for civilian hostages in Gaza over the course of a year-long bombing campaign that’s turned the enclave into a moonscape. That’s a polite way of saying the IDF has surely killed at least a few of the Israeli captives held by Hamas by accident. So, how many damns do you reckon he gives about accidentally killing non-Israeli, non-civilian UN peacekeepers in Lebanon while pursuing Hezbollah? (No damns. He gives no damns about that.)
The IDF says Hezbollah uses UNIFIL personnel and assets as shields. That’s the same thing the IDF says about women, children, schools and hospitals in Gaza and Lebanon. Long story short: Anyone or anything which ends up as collateral damage in an IDF airstrike was being used as a “shield,” which means the only blame to be apportioned goes to Hamas and Hezbollah, never to the people dropping the 2,000-pound bombs on crowded neighborhoods.
In a statement, the IDF said Hezbollah launched 25 rockets and missiles from positions in and around UNIFIL posts over the past month. Two Israeli soldiers were killed as a result, the military claimed. Remember: That’s not supposed to happen. The only people who’re allowed to die in conflicts to which the IDF’s a party are brown people. Like Jesus.
The IDF went on. And on. The military’s located all kinds of Hezbollah arms stockpiles in subterranean underground bunkers built in close proximity to UNIFIL posts, the same statement said.
On the bright side, no UN personnel were injured on Sunday. (“No animals were harmed in the making of this melee.”) Of course, one way to get the peacekeepers harmed is to position Israeli troops and tanks around them. Kind of like positioning bunkers and weapons depots around and under residential buildings.
And do note: UNIFIL personnel have sustained injuries during recent “festivities.” A couple of peacekeepers were hurt on Friday in blasts near Naqoura, for example, and another had to have a bullet surgically removed after catching a stray. It’s like Compton over there. Except less rational.
At some point Sunday, Hezbollah’s busy worker bees dispatched a swarm of drones at Binyamina. As of this writing, no Israeli civilians were dead from injuries associated with that incident. Hezbollah said it targeted an IDF infantry training camp. At least four Israeli soldiers were killed.
Lebanon’s health ministry, like Gaza’s, doesn’t differentiate between innocents and soldiers, but all told, more than 2,300 Lebanese are dead in Israeli strikes against Hezbollah since Hamas’s attack on Israel last year. Out of those 2,300, 1,600 died in the past four weeks, which is to say since Mossad started paging Hassan Nasrallah. Out of the recently-killed, more than 300 are (or were) women or children. (“We should be so lucky,” one of the 14 people still alive in Gaza muttered, of the death toll in Lebanon.)
All of this for what, exactly? I implore you to step back and ask yourself that question. All of this for what? For the glory of gods which are no more real than any of the gods worshipped by any other society across the millennia, and for the sake of land that’s no more holy than the dirt in your backyard.
There are, to paraphrase America’s last president, lunatics on both sides.
Unclear what purpose UN peacekeepers serve there. They are not keeping the peace, and have no hope of doing so. Nor are they keeping Hezbollah out of any areas, and it seems quite plausible that Hezbollah is using UN positions as cover.
Of course they don’t serve any purpose. And of course Hezbollah’s using them for cover. It’s not that the IDF’s lying, it’s that the IDF’s a bunch of assholes. Nobody trusts Hezbollah’s word over the IDF’s word. It’s not an issue of “Are there really weapons buried in the ground?” Or “Does Hezbollah deliberately shield itself with civilians?” The answer to all of those questions is “Yes, absolutely” and everyone knows it. But that doesn’t mean the IDF’s thereby righteous when they murder 300 people trying to kill 2, or when they engage in an textbook act of terrorism (e.g., the exploding pagers) on the excuse that you can’t make an omelette (disfigure 2,000 Hezbollah members and blind a few hundred as a bonus) without breaking eggs (injuring who knows how many people just minding their own business inadvertently standing next to exploding fanny packs). This is a classic Big Lebowski: “You’re not wrong, Walter, you’re just an asshole!”
It is a war that both sides see as existential. There are no rules. That is to say, no rules that will be followed by the ones fighting for, they believe, their survival. Better, they both think, to be assholes than to cease existing.
Regardless of the merits of the argument, I think John hit the nail on the head. Netanyahu is (at least partially, likely totally) motivated by his own political and personal survival, but the rest of the cabinet and public opinion is largely on his side regarding the war generally.
I thought this was really well reported and one of the first articles on the subject (besides H’s) where I felt I learned something.
https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2024/09/israel-gaza-war-biden-netanyahu-peace-negotiations/679581/
They’ve really decided they are going to die unless they push the axis back from their borders. It may or may not be true (I’ll plead the fifth on that), but the fundamental calculus within IDF brass/cabinet has changed and it’s immensely important to understand that.
What has personally shaped my opinion is that Biden/Lloyd Austin/etc seem to agree with the Israeli assessment and have begun to underwrite it. You can make a lot of conspiracy theories as to why, but to me that’s a key fact pattern that doesn’t get discussed. Curious if anyone has any thoughts?
This is not ‘Nam, John, this is– actually, nevermind, this is basically ‘Nam. There are no rules.
HIT “We are even !”
“No we aren’t”! Hits back. , “Now, we are even”!
” MOM ! He won’t stop hitting me !”
4 year olds in the back seat.
Netanyahu remains an incredibly unpopular leader in Israel. As things go with strongmen, when you are unpopular you need a foil to shield yourself with. That foil came to fruition on October 7 last year, and for the past year he has leveraged the horrors of that day to justify indiscriminate violence against the people who look like the attackers to shield himself from public accountability. Obviously, that violence was only going to sate Israelis only for so long before it became clear that more violence wasn’t going to solve the problem in Gaza. That is the threat from Hamas had been reduced to nearly null and now Israeli’s were just being seen as the same sort of folks that have indiscrimenantly killed them for thousands of years. Next up, Hezbollah, I imagine this violence will follow the same playbook as Gaza until Bibi has used up all of that capital as well. But there are no shortage of countries on Israel’s border that he can leverage to keep himself in power for at least 5 or 6 years, because at one time or another all of them have been active threats to Israel. That is up to and including Iran. He’s able to achieve all of this because he has the full support of the most advanced arms manufacturing power on the planet and thousands of years of repeated attempts at genocide against his people to justify his own violent aims. What’s the end game for Netanyahu? I don’t know that he’s thinking that far ahead, he’s in survival mode politically and I think he’s willing to take this as far as he can to protect himself all the while claiming to be protecting Israel. For Americans this should be viewed as a dark preview for what Trump would also do in similar circumstances. If you don’t like the face of Israel right now, then don’t put a Netanyahu clone in power.