Bibi’s Blatantly Bad Battlefield Behavior is An Existential Threat to Israel
The Israeli government’s baffling immolation of the Jewish nation’s reputation by consistently rejecting shared human values may have disastrous consequences far beyond the war in Gaza.
Israel is losing the PR war, former President Trump recently said in an interview, calling the images of the Jewish state’s battlefield behavior cabled out from the rubble of Gaza a “disaster.” He called for the violence and deaths to stop.
Behind the marketing-speak aphorism – perfectly in line with Trump’s business-programmed mind – lies, of course, human tragedies on a massive scale. Even the U.S. Department of Defense, which is supplying the Israelis with the ordnance used to turn civilian housing, hospitals and infrastructure into dust, speaks of civilian deaths in the tens of thousands – many of these nameless victims being women and children. UNICEF claims that Israel has killed 14,000 children.
At the same time, the Israeli government, with key war cabinet posts manned by bloodthirsty Jewish supremacist lunatics like Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich, has done nothing of substance to present a competing image, even calling Palestinians “human animals” and some Knesset members demanding a nuclear strike on the remaining Gaza population.
To the Western mind, the blatant arrogance and inhuman stance of the Israelis is extremely foreign and difficult to process from the point of reason. As disrespectful to human life as some of our own engagements have been in the past, at least our leaders tried to obfuscate, lie and snake themselves out of it, spending millions on PR consultants and whitewashed corrupt “investigations” – at least to try to maintain good standing with the more naïve set of the voting population.
In order to try to get some understanding of why the Israelis so cavalierly are blowing up every shred of public confidence they had around the world, I spoke with two sources familiar with the topic.
“They just don’t care, and they never have,” says a former senior military intelligence operative who has worked with Israelis in kinetic capacities. “For example, in 1948, some of the men who would go on to lead Israel both politically and militarily assassinated the Swedish mediator Count Folke Bernadotte without apology. That’s the reason why the Swedish royal family has never set foot in Israel,” he says.
“It’s a type of arrogance that is hard to unpack, but I think it has to do with a combination of supremacist beliefs and existential paranoia. In one way, it makes them extremely confident, driven and successful from a kinetic point of view, but it comes at a high political price.”
My other source, a former IDF officer who grew up in Israel and fought in the first Lebanon war, has more elaborate interpretations of what is going on.
“There’s an ideological and religious element to this rampant disrespect for human life,” he says. “Some members of the Israeli government belong to the most racist, genocidal and insane aspects of Jewish culture. They are inspired by Messianic rabbis who view non-Jews as sub-human, basically as slaves or cattle. This interpretation comes from the Babylonian Talmud, which forms the religious texts that movements such as the Kahanists and Chabad Lubavitch rely upon,” he explains, adding that he views these elements as “terrorists.”
“As a Jew, I struggle with this every single day and night. I feel extreme guilt and disgust… It was long ago now, but I went to war for this state; I believed what I was told… But it makes me sick to my stomach.”
Here in America, boomers are shocked to the core as younger America First conservatives are starting to pivot their support toward Arabs instead of Israelis. After all, many of the older generation supported wars that killed millions of innocent Iraqis and Afghanis, convinced by the Bush-era war criminals that these people somehow were a threat to our “freedom.”
But once you scratch the surface and attempt a simple deconstructive analysis, this major redirect is not terribly complex to understand. Americans of the patriotic and Constitutional type are slowly starting to get a taste of what it feels like to be labeled enemies of the state, as the U.S. national security complex has started to define them as “domestic terrorists.”
Then, it becomes only natural to identify more with a resistance movement than a government that has turned on them and works day and night to take away their rights and liberties.
If Netanyahu and his cronies had followed the Bush script and at least made a half-assed attempt at keeping the hearts and minds of the Western population, they would not have been the target of this unprecedented outpouring of rage and resentment for the Jewish state. But the Israeli government has made its bed, and now the innocent people of Israel have to lie in it, too.
And that is a crime in itself.
Great article Jonas!
It's well worth mentioning though that there are NO "good guys" in this story. Only different shades of bad.
Ultimately, the Zionists, Hamas as well as Hizbullah and their Iranian masters ALL answer to the SAME bosses!
It is those bosses who are the ULTIMATE enemy of humanity and the one we are ACTUALLY fighting against in WWIII, a war we as a species simply cannot afford to lose, no matter what!!