Our call this week will be at our new regular time: Friday at 11 AM Eastern.
Given the growing chance of a regional war in the Middle East, our guest will be one of the best analysts of Palestinian and Middle Eastern politics, Mouin Rabbani, Co-Editor of Jadaliyya, a publication of the Arab Studies Institute, and a Non-Resident Fellow at the Center for Conflict and Humanitarian Studies. We’ll talk about the attack in Majdal Shams, the spate of recent Israeli assassinations, and the potential for a conflict that envelopes the entire region.
Paid subscribers will get the link this Tuesday and the video the following week. They’ll also gain access to our library of past Zoom interviews with guests like Rashid Khalidi, Thomas Friedman, Ilhan Omar, Omar Barghouti, Benny Morris, Noam Chomsky, and Bret Stephens.
Sources Cited in this Video
Israeli columnist Nadav Eyal on Israel’s lack of preparedness for a Hezbollah assault. (His comments are near the end of the podcast. In my video, I’ve slightly compressed his remarks, but the substance is the same.)
Even Israeli security officials admit that Israel can’t destroy Hamas.
Things to Read
(Maybe this should be obvious, but I link to articles and videos I find provocative and significant, not necessarily ones I entirely agree with.)
In the Jewish Currents (subscribe!), Nicola Perugini and Neve Gordon discuss Israel’s use of “human shields” as a justification for the Gaza war.
Why Iran may not want a regional war.
The problem with Josh Shapiro.
Joe Biden’s long relationship with AIPAC.
Help Abir Elzowidi rescue her brother from Gaza.
See you on Friday at 11 AM,
Peter
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:
Hi. I’m recording this on Sunday. So, by the time people see it on Monday or later, there may have been more serious retaliation by Hezbollah and/or Iran for Israel’s recent spate of assassinations of a Hezbollah operative in Lebanon, of Ismail Haniyeh, the Hamas leader in Iran, and perhaps even for the Hamas leader Mohammed Deif in Gaza. This whole trajectory is not only so frightening, but I find it so deeply depressing for so many reasons. One of which is just that, for me, as someone who cares about the safety of Israelis, worries about that a lot, I think that what Benjamin Netanyahu is doing just from the perspective of the safety of Israelis is incredibly, incredibly reckless, a kind of Trump-level action of just complete disregard for the safety of your own people.
And I just want to give a quote. This is from Nadav Eyal, who’s a columnist at the Israeli newspaper, Yedioth Ahronoth. Not a leftist by any means. Someone with very, I think, generally establishment views. Very close to the Israeli security apparatus. And he’s talking about the question of whether Israel is prepared for the kind of attack that Hezbollah is capable of. Remember, Hezbollah has a much stronger arsenal, a more formidable arsenal than Hamas, one that could really overwhelm the Iron Dome system, devastate Tel Aviv.
And this is what Nadav Eyal is saying about whether the Israeli security officials believe that Israel is prepared for what Hezbollah might do in response, or Iran. And Nadav Eyal says—and this is from Dan Senor’s podcast, Call Me Back—Eyal says, we have numerous reports by the defense community that the home front isn’t ready. I didn’t see any report saying that the home front is to any extent ready. And by ready, I mean, I’m talking about electricity. I’m talking about infrastructure. The Israeli administration is saying to itself that they’re not ready. That Israelis are not prepared from the perspective of civil defense for the kind of retaliation that Israel and Benjamin Netanyahu would have had to know was very likely after this spate of assassinations, which followed the attack of the Druze town of Majdal Shams earlier.
But it’s part of this larger cycle that’s been going on since October 7th. And I’ve been worried about this for a few months now because if you listen to Israeli officials and kind of commentators who are close to the Israeli government, the dynamic of their conversation in the past few months, if you notice, has really changed. If you listen to Israeli discourse and kind of pro-Israel discourse in the US in, you know, in the winter, even into, let’s say, the early spring of this year, you heard people saying, we have to destroy Hamas, right? That of course was the Israeli government line. We are gonna go into Gaza. We’re going to destroy Hamas.
But I started to notice over the last few months a real shift. And some of this even came from official Israeli spokespeople. Like Daniel Hagari, the spokesperson, said, ‘we can’t destroy Hamas.’ And you notice that people started to kind of acknowledge, or at least implicitly stop saying we’re going to destroy Hamas because it’s becoming more and more obvious that Israel cannot destroy Hamas. It may ultimately end up with a situation where Hamas is no longer in charge of picking up the garbage in Gaza. But there’s lots of reporting that Hamas doesn’t actually particularly want to be doing that anyway. But in terms of whether Hamas still is a rebel force that can be attacking Israel, there’s no question now that that will remain after this war. And, in some ways, Hamas will be more formidable because it’s more popular in the West Bank. It has a huge new group of potential recruits.
And so, Israel, in some ways, has kind of given up on that goal in Gaza, the central goal of the war as stated by the Netanyahu administration. And as it has moved away from that goal, we’ve seen more and more of this conversation of kind of turning towards this focus on the north, right? It’s almost as if, kind of, well, you can’t win this war. But this war, now, it turns out is not the most important war anyway. That Hezbollah is much more dangerous. And so, let’s go and focus on the war in the north. It’s a deeply distressing, to me, and an incoherent kind of line of argument, right? If you can’t defeat Hamas, which is a much weaker force in terms of military arsenal than Hezbollah, why on earth would you think you can defeat Hezbollah, right?
But you see this, kind of, in some ways, I feel like, almost like a compensating for the failure of this war in Gaza. Instead of asking some really fundamental questions about the limitations of military force as a strategy in general, you basically up the ante and say, okay, maybe we haven’t won this war, but we’re going to win an even bigger war, right? And the logic one often hears is, well, Israel has to go to war against Hezbollah, and maybe even Iran, because it has all of these people who had to evacuate the north of Israel because of Hezbollah rocket fire. Which again also reminds me very much of the things that I heard right after October 7th, which is that people said, we have to destroy Hamas because otherwise people will never feel safe living in the south of Israel again in all these communities, in what was called the Gaza Envelope, that people had to flee or be evacuated from after the massacre on October 7th, right?
But there’s a fundamental flaw in this logic, right, which is to say, we have to go and do something that we’re not actually able to do because that’s the only way of returning these people to these areas from which they’ve been evacuated, right? It’s all well and good to say, we have to go and defeat Hezbollah, because that’s the only way we can convince people to return to the north of Israel. But it only makes sense if you can actually do it, right, if you can actually defeat Hezbollah. And I haven’t heard anyone explain how Israel could do that. I mean it could do massive, massive damage to Lebanon, to Beirut, as it’s done massive, massive damage to Gaza. But there’s no reason to believe that that actually will destroy Hezbollah. Israelis talk in terms of restoring deterrence, right, by basically just bombing the crap out of everything. But whatever you buy, it seems to me, in terms of buying deterrence has to be balanced against, right, the intense hatred that you produce, which is a driver of new recruits for the organizations you’re fighting against, right?
So, I am sympathetic, of course, to those Israelis who say, we want people to go back and live in the north of the country, just as you wanted people to live in the south of the country. But what’s not considered in this whole mainstream discourse that dominates Israeli discourse, and I think dominates so much American discourse too, is the basic idea that the only way to solve these problems is political. It’s not military. That the best way—probably the only way—to be sure you could stop Hezbollah rocket fire would be a ceasefire in Gaza, right? That Hezbollah has said this again and again, right, that they will stop firing rockets once there is a ceasefire in Gaza. Israel has now done exactly the opposite. It’s torpedoed the possibility of a ceasefire in Gaza by assassinating Ismail Haniyeh, the very guy who was doing the negotiation, right?
Another thing you could do if you wanted to make it less likely that Hezbollah was going to send rockets into the north of Israel, which makes it impossible for many Israelis to live in the north of Israel, would be to stop bombing Lebanon, right? And Syria, right? Because, often times in the media discussion, you would think that Hezbollah is just launching these rockets, and Israel’s not doing anything on the other side. Israel has been for years and years and years basically been bombing Lebanon, bombing Syria, in the name of reducing Hezbollah’s arsenal, right? And maybe they have reduced Hezbollah’s arsenal to some degree. But it’s not realistic to be continually bombing a place and not expect that people are gonna shoot back, right?
So, there are political decisions—and not to mention the more fundamental question of which is that Hezbollah’s fight against Israel is very much interconnected with the Palestinian struggle against Israel, right? And if you create a situation where Palestinians have absolutely no hope that they are going to have basic freedoms, right, that’s also a context in which it’s going to be much less likely to have an enduring kind of ceasefire, even a political agreement, that’s gonna make the north of Israel safe again vis-à-vis Hezbollah.
So, it just seems to me, again and again, Israel reminds me a little bit of America, especially in the post-9/11 era. I think things have changed a little bit in America now because we’ve seen how disastrous this has been. But Israel has this idea that basically every problem must be a nail because what you have is the hammer of military force, right, and a complete unwillingness to try to solve some of these problems through a political lens, which takes seriously, right, the needs and concerns of the people on the other side of this conflict—Palestinians above all. And because we don’t have that, it seems to me, we’re potentially headed, and could even be by the time you’re watching this, into an enormously frightening regional war, something that could even dwarf the horrors that we’ve seen so far.
