More and more, Israel is becoming a case study in national pathology. It keeps relentlessly and savagely killing Gazans and obliterating their social structures, apparently in case their genocide-in-progress falls short. It is defiant despite its near-complete global isolation, seemingly secure in the idea that the US will always come to its rescue, when it finally may have come to a nexus where the US can’t bail them out.
High on its hubris, Israel looks determined to go to war with Lebanon, a conflict that many experts say that Israel will not only lose, but could lose so badly that it will jeopardize Israel’s existence as a state. After the IDF announced that it had approved war plans for a Lebanon operation, Head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Charles Brown said directly that the US might not be able to defend Israel in a war with Hezbollah.
Another alarm came from the head of the company that manages Israel’s grid. From The Cradle late last week:
Israel’s power grid is vulnerable to a Hezbollah attack that could render it “uninhabitable” 72 hours later, Haaretz reported on 21 June.
According to the CEO of a company that manages and oversees Israel’s electrical systems on behalf of the government, Israel is entirely unprepared for a war with Hezbollah that would likely target the country’s power infrastructure.
“We are not ready for a real war. We live in a fantasy world, in my eyes,” said Shaul Goldstein, head of Noga – the Israel Independent System Operator.
But Israel has gone into “shoot the messenger” mode, with Naga debating Goldstein’s ouster, even as a former Israel Energy Ministry official backed Goldstein’s concerns.
No amount of Israel Lobby arm-twisting can surmount the fact that the US is overextended and can’t do much beyond bolstering Israel’s air offenses a bit and air defenses a bit less, when Israel’s key opponents are well bunkered and have also become expert at attritting US and Israel firepower on the cheap.
As readers may recall, the immediate cause for Israel action is that Hezbollah started shelling northern Israel after October 7. Hezbollah has said it will stop the attacks when Israel enters into a lasting ceasefire in Gaza, which is a non-starter. Hezbollah’s campaign has succeeded in driving at least 60,000 and by some estimates as many as 200,000 settlers out of the border area. Israel regards this situation as intolerable. At a minimum it is costly, since any economic activity in that area is kaput and the residents are beign housed at government expense. Israel and the US emissary, who is also an Israeli citizen, Amos Hochstein, have been trying to pretend that their proposal, that Lebanon pull back its forces to the Litani River, which is tantamount to ceding that part of Lebanon to Israel, as reasonable. Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah has said Lebanon will not surrender any of its land to Israel.
Now admittedly, neither Hezbollah nor Lebanon want a war. Even though Lebanon won the 2006 war that Israel launched, the economic and physical costs were high. The economy was already in a crisis when Lebanon was severely damaged by a massive fertilizer ship explosion in Beirut in 2020, one of the biggest non-nuclear blasts in history, which left over 300,000 homeless and destroyed important grain stores. A friend who comes from a very wealthy family described the currency collapse and the difficulty in importing many type of supplies, which had massive knock-on effects to businesses and households. So with the country still in very difficult straits, even the damage sustained in a minor conflict would do disproportionate economic harm.
But militarily, Hezbollah is generally acknowledged to be more than the IDF’s match. Scott Ritter, who knows Israel well, has opined that Hezbollah learned from the 2006 conflict and will not allow Israel to take the war into Lebanon, but will instead push into Israel.
So why is Israel gunning to take this mad step? Is it merely its deeply ingrained belief in its own superiority? An excellent post by Joseph Jordan gives some insight. He describes how throughly Hezbollah bested the IDF in 2006, a fact not presented as clearly as it ought to be in the Anglosphere media, and apparently not well internalized by Israelis either. From his piece:
On July 14th, 2006, two days into Israel’s bombing campaign against Lebanon, Hezbollah announced a special televised address from Secretary General Hassan Nasrallah.
During his speech, he promised the Lebanese people a cathartic surprise. “Now, in the middle of the sea, facing Beirut, the Israeli warship that has attacked the infrastructure, people’s homes, and civilians” he teed up, “look at it burning.” Viewers followed his instruction and looked onto the Mediterranean sea with disbelief when, right on Nasrallah’s cue, the Israeli naval vessel parked off their coast was suddenly engulfed by a bright orange fireball. Hezbollah’s anti-ship missiles, which Israelis were unsure they possessed until this strike, successfully penetrated the American-built Israeli warship, the INS Hanit, killing multiple sailors and decommissioning it for the rest of the war’s duration.
This was just one of 33 days of embarrassments the Israelis endured during their last confrontation with the Shia nationalists in South Lebanon.
Expecting a hit-and-run insurgency, poorly trained IDF soldiers were astonished to find fortified fighting positions and a professional army capable of holding ground and defeating them in set-piece battles. IDF Commander Dan Halutz, who was later forced to resign as the scapegoat for Israel’s abysmal performance in the conflict, had focused his battle doctrine entirely on Iraq war style “shock and awe” aerial bombing, except in his case, in lieu of any coherent plan for a follow-up ground invasion. This strategy was a failure from the start. Hezbollah had prepared to counter Israeli air supremacy by orienting their logistics around a network of underground bunkers and tunnels. When all was said and done, just 7% of Hezbollah’s military resources were damaged by the Israeli Air Force…
Looking back on the conflict, pop historians and mainstream journalists have refused to grant Hezbollah victory and instead settled on referring to the outcome of the 2006 war as a stalemate. But this view is not held by experts with skin in the game, such as Matt M. Matthews of the US Army Combined Arms Center at Fort Leavenworth, who has written about Israel’s performance in the war as a textbook example of what a catastrophic military failure looks like. The Israeli government’s own 2007 Winograd Commission excoriated every facet of the campaign, from the top generals to the average soldiers to the IDF’s core doctrine, prompting Nasrallah to react with praise for the candidness of the Israeli investigators.
Mind you, Hezbollah has become even more formidable and better armed since then, while the IDF’s shambolic performance in Gaza (except in flattening buildings and killing defenseless civilians) says if anything it is weaker than in 2006.
As Alastair Crooke has repeatedly pointed out, Israel has not changed its doctrine. It still acts as if it can win a short, airpower dominated war, when it decisively lost using that strategy against Lebanon. Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran all are set up to counter that, with deep tunnels and very large caches of missiles and rockets. Iran demonstrated in its reply to Israel’s bombing of an embassy compound in Beirut that it can hit Israel’s best-defended installations, and at enormous cost to Israel too. Israel admitted its response cost $1.35 billion; other experts have estimated that if US support were properly counted, the total expenditure was more on the order of $2.3 billion.
Mind you, there is no indication that Iran would become directly involved in a Lebanon conflict. The example above illustrates that Israel has yet to meaningfully change its approach in light of the Axis of Resistance developing an approach to Israel designed to vitiate its strength. But the Houthis, who are happily messing with Israel-related Red Sea shipping and even US aircraft carriers, are sure to do whatever they can to help Hezbollah in a hot war.
Hezbollah has also received manpower offers but so far is turning them down. From Associated Press over the weekend:
Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah said in a speech Wednesday that militant leaders from Iran, Iraq, Syria, Yemen and other countries have previously offered to send tens of thousands of fighters to help Hezbollah, but he said the group already has more than 100,000 fighters.
“We told them, thank you, but we are overwhelmed by the numbers we have,” Nasrallah said….
Officials from Lebanese and Iraqi groups backed by Iran say Iran-backed fighters from around the region will join in if war erupts on the the Lebanon-Israel border. Thousands of such fighters are already deployed in Syria and could easily slip through the porous and unmarked border.
The Western media has started pointing out the vaunted Iron Dome is not what it is cracked up to be. Two days ago, the Guardian discounted Nasrallah’s ground forces to a mere 1/3 of his claimed 100,000. But it depicted Israel’s allies as mighty worried about Hezollah’s missiles. From Israel’s Iron Dome risks being overwhelmed in all-out war with Hezbollah, says US:
Israel’s Iron Dome anti-missile batteries risk being overwhelmed in the opening strikes of any significantly escalated conflict with Hezbollah.
The assessment delivered by US officials late last week, echoing recent analysis by experts in Israel and the United States, comes amid fears that a war with Hezbollah could be a far more dangerous undertaking than the devastating 2006 second Lebanon war, when Israeli bombing caused huge destruction in Lebanon…
Since 2006, Hezbollah, the world’s best-armed non-state group, has significantly expanded its arsenal and capabilities, including acquiring suicide drones which Israel has struggled to counter, an anti-aircraft missile capability and a widely expanded array of missiles which experts now believe number between 120,000 and 200,000….
While the majority of Hezbollah’s stockpile comprises tens of thousands of unguided missiles – both short and long range – since 2006 it has acquired hundreds of guided ballistic missiles, with the ability to fire them from hardened bunkers and from mobile launchers.
Complicating the issue has been Hezbollah’s increasing and effective use of drones, including kamikaze weapons, which Israel’s existing air defences have struggled to counter.
A three-year research project by Reichman University’s Institute for Counter-Terrorism in Israel, completed not long before the Hamas attack on 7 October, concluded Hezbollah could fire up to 3,000 missiles a day, a rate that could be sustained for up to three weeks. Its key aim would be to force the collapse of Israel’s air defences.
Let us return to the Joseph Jordan piece. He explains that Hezbollah has an acute sense of Israel weakness:
The key to understanding Hezbollah’s approach to Israel is in Nasrallah’s view that Jews are weak and opportunistic bullies. Nasrallah holds that the Israeli public is a fragile “spider web,” one which constantly cries out for Arab blood but simultaneously has a low threshold for pain and inconvenience. By inflicting heavy military casualties and forcing Israelis in towns and cities either into bunkers or to flee their homes, Hezbollah believes the Zionist state can collapse under its internal contradictions.
One of those contradictions is that the ultra-orthodox refuse to serve in the military, putting the burden on secular Israelis.
Jordan continues:
The typical Israelis ambitions are completely out of sync with their actual will power and abilities. This petulant and craven citizenry’s inability to connect actions to reactions is so stunning that it has prompted IDF army chief Herzl Halevi to issue a statement telling the public that they do not seem to understand the magnitude of the consequences that await them once the war in Lebanon formally begins.
Reader raspberry jam provided some intel that helps explain why Israelis are detached from their conduct and risks. Aside from diminished tourist and other business activity, they don’t see much evidence the war is on. I am reproducing it in full even though it goes beyond observations related to the conflict:
I just returned yesterday from a business trip to Israel. Some anecdata to share:
– the flight there was three-quarters full; the return was entirely full. Lots of families on both. At passport control on the US side of the return most of the people on the flight went through the Israeli passport line, not the US passport line. So it was mostly Israelis leaving, not tourists.
– news in Tel Aviv does not show much about what is going on in Gaza. The nightly news was more focused on the fires at the Lebanon border and the death of multiple IDF soldier in a Rafah attack. Nothing really about the counter-attacks and communal responses.
– there are protests almost nightly in front of the IDF headquarters and many nights in front of Netanyahu’s personal residence in Jerusalem. The protesters are mostly the secular types (or “State of Israel” types as defined in the Pappe piece linked here yesterday).
– even the secular types are rabidly racist against anyone deemed ‘arab’. Was subjected to a six-hour tour of Jerusalem organized by work where the tour guide ranted about ‘the arab mindset’ and went to great pains to point out how Israel was not an apartheid state because a single muslim woman was working as a tour bus driver. Israeli execs at company dinner made multiple casually racist comments about employees at a vendor with Persian surnames being arab terrorists (the vendor and employees are canadian, didn’t matter).
– People in Tel Aviv are partying and behaving like nothing bad is going on. If you had been there since last October and were only exposed to local news I doubt you’d have any idea of how bad the situation in Gaza really was. And this feeds into the paranoid/delusional mindset around ‘the arabs’ and ‘antisemitism’.
– the touristic industries have completely collapsed. There were no lines in Jerusalem for the big religious sites, we walked right into the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and there were maybe 30 people inside the entire complex and no real lines on the tomb and site of the crucifixion. The tour guide said it had been like this since the war started and many in his line of work had gone bankrupt.
– most of the big tourist hotels are being propped up by direct payments from the government in exchange for housing settlers from the north who were evacuated. Our hotel, right on the Tel Aviv beach, was at least half full of these people who had been living there full time for months. On the weekends Israelis from outside of Tel Aviv would fill up the hotel for beach going but during the week it was empty except for the housing. We only realized this because there were tons of children during the week who were being shuttled to and from schools and it didn’t make sense that would be happening for tourists.
– as an American what stood out to me was the lack of homeless people in Israel because this is utterly inescapable in the US. I guess I’m glad my taxes are ensuring people somewhere are staying off the streets but it made me angry that my taxes are being used to prop up a foreign social safety net at the expense of mine here. The housing market in Tel Aviv is grossly overpriced relative to wages. Most of the people I talked to wanted to immigrate to the US for the higher salaries.
Jordan finally turns to the Israeli plans:
A factor working against Hezbollah is that the amount of pain such a war will cause the Lebanese people is unimaginable. Netanyahu has publicly stated that the IDF’s plan is to turn Beirut, a city of 2.4 million, into Gaza. During the 2006 war, Israeli forces frustrated by their inability to advance more than a few miles into Lebanese territory eventually gave up on fighting Hezbollah and leaned into the Dahiya Doctrine, which deliberately targets civilians in hopes of breaking the spirits of defenders and generating internal political pressure against Hezbollah. Many believe that in the next war, Israel and its Western sponsors will be taking the Dahiya Doctrine to new heights in hopes of compelling the Lebanese army, Christian militias and even some Sunni purist groups to attack the Shia fighters from behind and fight another civil war inside the multi-confessional state.
We’ve seen in the Ukraine war that attacks on civilians harden the resolve to beat the enemy, so the idea that the Dahiya Doctrine would foment a civil war seems far-fetched. But one wonders how much punishment the Lebanese people could take. However, Nasrallah’s assessment of Israel seems intuitively correct: the Israelis are not prepared to take much if any. And yet they are still itching for this fight.
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If Israel invades and in return Hezbollah wrecks the power grid, water-filtration and sanitation plants, airports as well as air bases, fuel depots, and port installations that would, well, drop the Israeli population into the same way of living as the Palestinians have with perhaps the only way out being their border with Egypt. And as the State would be crippled, all that support that goes to keep the Settlements on life support goes away though I am positive that they will demand first priority. If Netanyahu is not careful, he may end up doing a Mussolini.
Short of an epiphany of realizing the easiest and only solution is to allow Palestinian statehood or full citizenship in Israel, maybe the easiest “solution” would be for all/most Israelis to permanently move to USA and leave “Israel” behind forever. With AIPAC in almost total control of the US, they could do what they want – make settlement in some comparable climate state in the West. In full control of the Federal government, laws could be passed to allow even some sort of self autonomy if that is what they decide. But with the control they already have on the national level, that would be preference not a necessity.
Personally I do not favor that but I recognize the fact my government is controlled by Israel, not me.
Give them Gainesville. Do settler colonialism on the Christian Zionists.
Hah, good one, Mike Liston
All this is true For an Analysis of Israels prospects. You forget one thing, that the US has troops in the area this time around, unlike 2006. We most definitely will be drawn in, as we were with everything else the Neocons and Israel planned–Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria,..and let us not forget the Levant. Syria, Lebanon, Israel, Cyprus. And right now Israel has been dropping white phosphorus bombs in Lebanon and Syria. If Israel invades Lebanon we will, the US, be fighting this war with our troops and Israel has this fact included in their equation! We take out their enemies with all these regime change wars. The most disgusting of which was Libya! Please tell me how Israel is our Ally? What have they done for us
ever?
Making Shit Up is a violation of our written site Policies. The US had considerably more troops in the region then, per Voice of America:
https://www.voanews.com/a/us-troops-in-middle-east-what-are-they-doing-and-where-/7469452.html
https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/citations/ADA476607
“Hezbollah wrecks the power grid”
I think Russia’s experience in Ukraine indicates this is much easier said than done… I’m sure Israel lacks the post-Soviet industrial redundancy of Ukraine’s grid and thus easier to collapse. But Hezbollah certainly lacks the choice of weaponry at Russia’s disposal.
Having said that, western elites seem to be collectively members of a WW3 death cult. How I wish to see a definitive defeat of these monsters that doesn’t include ICBMs.
But Israel presumably uses Western standards, and so is easier to fix. If it isn’t we’re in really bad shape….
Easier to fix, yes, easy to fix with a houthi blockade and missiles ready to destroy the replacement transformers (which take years to build and which the US is in short supply due to for some reason their being regularly attacked domestically and attrition of the US industrial base?)
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/04/us/electrical-substation-attacks-nc-wa.html
and how long can israel survive (without mass emigration) with no electric power (no refrigeration, no tele communication, no jobs).
Israel is just 3% the size of Ukraine, and imo most of their pop and infra is in the north half. Really target rich within 100 miles of the border. Relatively short range missiles are quite adequate. Plus Russia has tried very hard not to kill civvies, there is no reason for Hezbollah to be so careful given Israeli efforts to kill civvies.
We might see a real exodus if the war takes out a lot if Israeli infra and missiles begin hitting Tel Aviv. Unlike the gazans, Israelis can go to the us by hopping on a plane.
That “hopping on a plane” window could close rather quickly. And it doesn’t scale. Nevertheless, your gambit likely describes the optics from the Israeli perspective
Israelis can go to the us by hopping on a plane.
Unless the airport is not operational due to some reason…..
I hope the plane is a Boeing supermax.
… Is your comment anti-Semitic? or anti-Boeing? \s
It’s anti-Supermax.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1jYTmSH6n_w
The average Israeli had/has as much say in the Gaza atrocities as the average US citizen has over the US State Department instigating the Ukraine proxy war…
That does not even remotely exculpate them. Public support is overwhelmingly in favor of the genocide. Polls even show a proportion of voters think the army should be more aggressive. There are TONS of videos and tweets of regular Israelis saying the most horrible bloodthirsty things. They are all on board with the genocide. Don’t pretend otherwise.
For starters, where are the protests? None.
Do you know if protesting could lead to severe violence or permanent job loss to protestors? US students are having their whole careers threatened for protesting, I could imagine it’s much uglier there.
There weren’t anti-slavery protests in the us pre civil war south because speaking against slavery was very heavily punished in violation of the constitution. Lack of protests doesn’t necessarily indicate public opinion.
That said, I understand polls agree with your take.
Aah, the constitution. A piece of paper made to be used on “as needed” basis, just like the toilet kind.
> Lebanon was severely damaged by a massive fertilizer ship explosion
Lebanon was severely damaged by 3,000 tonnes of fertilizer stored in a warehouse, not a ship.
I wonder if Hezbollah has missiles that can reach Dimona. Iran does.
That could get interesting.
Acacia if I am not mistaken, Nasrallah has warned Nethanyahoo about this nuclear facility. From what I know reading about Nasrallah he doesn’t make empty threats.
Rev, you are right as far as you go, BUT
Israel has nukes and WILL use them in the scenario you described.
That said, I would not be surprised if Israel had to use a very large number of nukes to disable Hezbollah.
But if Israel used nukes in southern Lebanon, how could they then claim the land for their settlers? And they had better hope that the wind does not blow that radioactive dust back into Israel itself. In any case, if Israel resorted to nukes, even old Joe could not save Israel from being totally embargoed by the international community and thrown out of every international organization – the UN included – that there is.
And, without any other clue than nukes being ridiculously expensive to maintain (the devices themselves deteriorate due radiation and become unreliable), I seriously doubt Israel can afford to keep 200 warheads operational with a military budget half of that of France. France uses annually what is 25% of Israeli military budget to “modernize” it’s nuclear weapons. And France allegedly has 290 warheads.
That 200 is more likely the number Israel has build total since 1966, and if they have any operational, it’s more likely in tens than in hundreds. And those are reserved for Iran and Saudi-Arabia, not for something the IDF still thinks it can squash with it’s traditional, infinite weapon stock.
Several threads ago someone referrenced an article which suggested the same analytical distinction that I used to offer between “Israel” and “Likudistan” or “Lesser Israel” and “Greater Likudistan” or whatever. But that article said it better by calling it the difference between the secular-zionist State of Israel and the national-religionist State of Judea. And that the Judeans were conquering the State of Israel from within and were planning to overtake it and turn it into the State of Judea.
To the extent that the distinction between “Israelis” and “Judeans” is a distinction with a difference, it is the rising State of Judea which plans to jump off the ledge and is planning to throw the State of Israel off the ledge with it. If the “Israelis” who make up the fading “State of Israel” had the same level of cold unfeeling ruthlessness which the “Judeans” who make up the rising “State of Judea” have, they would save the State of Israel by exterminating in personal detail every member of the cultural and political and intellectual leadership and followership cadres of the State of Judea. They would then move on to exterminating enough followers of the State of Judea, and exterminate them fast enough and hard enough to shock and awe any surviving Judeans into abject surrender to Israeli State authority. The problem is that the “Israelis” lack that level of cold unfeeling ruthlessness, which is why their state will disappear into the rising tide of Judea the way a spice harvester disappears into the open mouth of a sandworm. (Here is the relevant scene from Dune so people can get that referrence. )
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cr-KO1P_rFU
Even if the Israelis had that level of cold unfeeling ruthlessness, it is too late for them to reconquer their State of Israel from the Judeans. The Judeans are now too powerful and too infiltrated and entrenched into the State of Israel for the remaining State of Israel to be able to rise up and exterminate the Judeans into submission or extinction.
They had a chance to do that right after the Rabin Assassination by the Likudian forces of Judea, acting through a “lone Judean gunman”). Revulsion and real fear among Israelis against the Judeans was just deep enough and broad enough that if Shimon Peres would have called an immediate Snap Election as a referrendum on ” Will we pursue the Oslo Process to its Two State Endpoint ( and exterminate as many Judeans as necessary to make it possible)”, he MIGHT have won it. And he could have then lead the State of Israel government in taking all necessary and convenient measures against the Judeans that might be needed to crush and flatten their opposition to State of Lesser Israel and a State of Lesser Palestine. But he didn’t do it, because he was a man of no character, which is different than being a man of bad character. So that one last chance was lost. Never to be regained.
The only chance that Israelis have to save themselves is to admit that their State of Israel will sink from sight in the tarpits of Judea. Once they admit that, they can then all emigrate from the State of Judea and admit that they are going back into Diaspora. Once they do that, they should understand that they will never reclaim Israel the way the Miami Cubans still imagine they will reclaim Cuba some day. They should admit that it is the State of Judea now, and they should let it meet its own Rendesvous with Darwin.
Their backstop is the US.
This could be interesting times, where years happen in a week.
War
Debate
Carter last days?
Samson?
Sorry, not “interesting” so much as downright terrifying. Thanks to Biden’s support for corrupt UKR and certifiably insane ISR we’ve never been closer to WW3 and nuclear war. I suppose the question is whether the first use will be by Putin or Bibi.
Well, at least Assange is free. Let’s hope he manages to live a few more decades.
This could be very convenient for Genocide Joe and the Ds, If Israel does launch a full attack on Hezbollah/Lebanon, it will take the heat off JB supporting genocide and the focus will shift to Lebanon and hyperventilating US MassMedia proclaiming that Israel is fighting for its very existence against terrorists and Jew-haters.
Assange is free for now, but he still has to appear in a US imperial court in the Marianna Islands, I’m still not confident that the rogue, lawless thugs will not pull any stunts.
The JB regime can take credit for Assange’s release, and Genocide Joe’s reputation among “liberal” voters will be rehabilitated – and our faith in US democracy restored. (sarc)
In the upcoming debate Trump can get back at Biden by asking why it took him 4 years to free Assange, just to score points for the election?!
Didn’t Assange get sent to prison under Trump’s watch? What is his excuse then?
riffing on that old quote/omen: May you live in interesting times.
The crisis point will probably be when the first salvo of Hezbollah rockets hits downtown Tel Aviv.
The dominant elite in Israel seems to be the hard line settler/colonist clique. This lot are just crazy enough to use some nuclear warheads against Lebanon. Then all bets are off and we race blithely into WW-3.
The present Middle East Muddle has the hallmarks of the worst kind of conflicts. It is a war between cousins, and it is also a war between religious fundamentalists.
If the rest of the world can keep the atomic destruction confined to the so called ‘Holy Land,’ we will have the least worst outcome.
Israel dropping nukes on Lebanon wont raise an eyebrow if you account for our complicity and silence on the ongoing genocide. It wont event make a one week news cycle.
Maybe not here in America. But the rest of the world will notice, and start to plan out how to rein in this insanity.
This must be sarcasm.
No way this isn’t a major world news event.
For starters, you can count Japan out of any future events in the region. It may even cause a rift with the US. The current PM is very unpopular, and all it would take is one major event to wreck that situation…
The fallout would also render Israel itself uninhabitable, and all that precious land the settlers crave worthless.
The reason Israel is considering something 1982 should have taught them was a quagmire, is that Netanyahu knows the day he loses power is the day he goes to jail. Perhaps it’s time for Biden to offer him the kind of deal that was offered to Idi Amin: golden exile in exchange for his resignation. That does not serve the interests of justice, but the lives saved are in the balance.
If Biden wants to do this he had better do it before the election, and also have our Intelligence Community quietly tell Netanyahu that it can reach out and touch him ” 6 ways from Sunday” if he refuses to take the deal. It would have to be an Offer he Cannot Refuse and Netanyahu would have to be brought to understand that if he refuses it he will find something worse in his bed than a horse’s head.
If Biden does not impose this deal on Netanyahu before the election, and if Trump then wins, Trump will humor his Rapturaniac Armageddonite base by allowing Israel to start throwing nukes, thereby getting itself turned into a sheet of glass so holy it glows in the dark. The Rapturaniac Armageddonites would welcome this as being “close enough” to Biblical Prophecy that it will usher in the Return of Christ to Rule over His Kingdom of Righteousness for a Thousand Years.
Both Hiroshima and Nagasaki were rebuilt in a few years. Obviously cancer risk were high in those areas for a really long time but many atomic bombs do not have a Chernobyl style effect where it’s permanently uninhabitable. One of the bigger reasons for this is because they were aerial detonation which significantly reduces residual radiation. That changes though if Israel did a ground detonated bomb (not as effective, smaller blast radius) what is more likely than a ground detonation would be a sub-surface detonation on Hezbollah bunker infrastructure but I don’t know if Israel has that capability or not and if it’s a compelling enough thing to do. An underground detonation can launch a lot of radioactive debris around.
Radioactive fallout will also kill Israelis, albeit more slowly, not the best outcome, in a nuclear war the lucky one dies early. Not to mention that Jordan and the Egyptian megalopolis will receive enough nuclear fallout to kill a lot of people there too. If anyone has visited those places then they understand how fragile the border between life and death is in an area where agricultural and water resources are concentrated in very small spaces and coincidentally close to war zones. More generally, the existence of a multitude of nuclear weapons in an increasingly belligerent world and only at the beginning of a final resource crisis, I fear makes their use inevitable somewhere sooner or later.
I don’t think any other nuclear-armed power will start chucking bombs at Israel in retaliation thus kicking off WW3, but they’d have no need to. All Israel’s neighbours directly affected by the fall-out from Iran and possibly Turkey to Egypt would have every incentive to tackle Israel with their militaries the way you would a rabid dog in a school yard, Europe on the fringes of it could hardly show any sympathy and the rest of the world apart from the US would condemn Israel for being utterly beyond the Pale. If it still had any desire to support Israel the US would be taking on the entire rest of the world and, all evidence to the contrary, I can’t think the US would be that stupid.
From DN just now:
So perhaps that’s where the extra IDF bodies will come from.
Let’s see . . . after six weeks of boot camp and learning how to march all in the same direction those Yeshiva draftees will be minimally ready to go fight for a nation that won’t exist by then.
Hezbollah knows greater Lebanon can’t take any abuse right now, so they will take the fight into Israel, and go for a quick, crushing defeat, mostly done by missiles vs. infrastructure. Unfortunately, that will leave Israel with no option but to toss some nukes around.
The urge for other state actors to step in will be irresistible.
I had a couple of business trips to Israel in 2013.
The locals who expressed an opinion sure seemed to resent the Ultra-orthodox sense of privilege.
To borrow from a Tom Friedman in-depth research technique, a taxi driver mentioned that he had a “black lady” in his cab (black lady = dressed in black = ultra orthodox) and after he complained about the favors granted to them, she responded with “but we pray to the lord for you”.
He told her that if he wanted to pray to the lord, he’d do it himself.
Losing government funding might be an acceptable choice vs losing one’s life.
it’s nice that they’ll get to add “overt racism” against the orthodox jews to balance out the genocide of their first cousins, the palestinians.
Pass the popcorn. Have to wonder how much enthusiasm the ultra-Orthodox will retain for wars they actually have to fight and die in.
I wonder how many different flavors of ultra-Orthodox there are. Are these same ultra-Orthodox the same as the Hasids who are grouped around two main Hasidic power centers . . . the End-Time Messianic-Zionist Lubavitchers and the anti-Zionist Satmars? Or are these three different groups of ultra-Orthodox, perhaps callable ultra-Orthodox, hyper-Megadox and mega-Hyperdox so as to keep the distinctions in mind? And if so, are the Lubavitchers the mega-Hyperdox and are the Satmars the hyper-Megadox? Or is it the other way around?
They will be assigned to sinecures like guarding the Western Wall. Their demographic and thus electoral power is only growing and most of the smarter secular Jews who have options are emigrating while they still can, which only accelerates the takeover.
The remnant legacy Israelis should get out as fast as they can, before the Judeans seal the border to keep the remaining Israelis from escaping. The Judeans will maintain the name “Israel” but it will really be Judea and they will turn Judea into the North Korea of the Middle East for as long as they can once the outflow of Israelis appears to really weaken and destabilize the State of Israel.
Well, Fanon pointed out that a system like colonialism, which is predicated on violence and sustained by further violence, can only be overcome by violence. And that the brunt of violence of anticolonial war is borne by the colonized.
I’ve been saying since the start we are looking at Algeria unfolding again. The “Israelis” cannot back down (otherwise their project ends), but they cannot win either. Violence is what remains. It won’t be pleasant getting to the end of the Zionist Entity, but it calls its own gravedigger with each passing day.
I do not see your comparison between Israel’s current actions and the war in Algeria. Perhaps you might elaborate your insights.
>>>Reader raspberry jam provided some intel….
Thank you to poster, and thank you for reproducing the comment in its entirety.
Allegedly on social media, the IDF reservists have been rotated in/out of Gaza and in service on a very strict rotation—presumably to minimize any domestic war fatigue—-this will not happen if Israel starts a war w/Hezbollah.
The Israeli home front sounds exactly like the US home front from 2001 to 2010’s—-normalcy must be maintained!
How the US and Israel acts remind me of the Lucius Accius/Caligula line….Let them hate us, so long as they fear us.
As per the question on why/how Israel make its choices:
From Big Serge’s substack .
By definition, if you agree with such definition, Israel cannot take other, let’s say, diplomatic choices. They must show military strength.
Big Serge is wrong–there’s no need to come up with fancy new terms to describe the Israeli system, which is really nothing special. It’s antiquated, common even. Israel is a classic, boring settler colonial state enacting all the barbarities against the colonized such states are made for. Other examples include: the USA, the UK, Apartheid South Africa, Australia, and Canada.
There’s a reason the US has such affinity for Israel. We have a similar history. The difference is that the Israelis are in an earlier phase, one that the United States completed during the final Indian Wars in the late 19th century. The USA’s genocide, ethic cleansing, and establishment of bantustans is well over and done with, while Israel has yet to accomplish its full infamy.
For the US, cheering on Israel is like cheering on a little brother following in big brother’s footsteps. It’d be an intolerable insult to the “family” if Israel was to fail in its endeavor. Imagine if the US had lost the Indian Wars! Are there enough fainting couches in North America to catch those elite obesities as they collapse at the mere thought that little brother might not grow up to be like big brother after all?
In a broad historical sense, Israel is just another European Crusader State, and will suffer a similar fate of the previous projects. Many Palestinians view it this way.
https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2000-nov-19-op-54180-story.html
Garrison state, settler-colonial outpost of Europe. Israel is even included in the cringe-worthy Eurovision song contest. No matter how you slice it, or what label we use, Israel’s days are numbered. The worry is that if thing spiral out of control, the US and Israel will use disproportionate and asymmetrical military responses (so-called Samson options)
Also see:
https://www.resilience.org/stories/2012-11-21/in-the-twilight-of-empires/
The Israelis would insist that their divine mandate is superior all others, to the point of ineffability. For them, that is the ultimate high ground.
The Pervasive Power of the Settler Mindset
More than simple racism or discrimination, it is built upon violent elimination.
Nikhil Pal Singh
https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/nikhil-pal-singh-pervasive-power-settler-mindset/
Do the Indian Nations in AmeriCanada consider their reservations to be “Bantustans” to which they are confined? Or do they consider their reservations to be the remnants of their own former lands and the remnant bases of their own Once and Future National Sovereignty?
Yes.
Yes to which?
Yes, that was a great analysis by Big Serge (and his essay in Links today is really good too).
What happens when prophecy fails? What happens when Hezbollah launches their attack and wins? Will Israel try and topple the region with nukes?
And what of the American fundamentalists who follow Scofield, LaHaye, and their ilk? Will they volunteer to fight? Will they demand US retaliation? Will they lose faith? Or will they shift to the Dominionist type of Rushdoony and North (Similar to the Seven Mountains types of today)?
Eschatological Garrison State seems like an elegant description. It’s the religious zealots that make me uneasy. They always have a reason more important.
Not my impression from the twitterati coverage. To the contrary Hezbollah appears eager to escalate, probably thinking correctly that their newer drone tech has given them a once-in-a-lifetime advantage over sclerotic cold war era western military doctrines. Matters in Ukraine and Yemen suggest “shock and awe” is an outdated concept.
(Wider Lebanon of course is desperate to avoid a war, but is in no control of matters)
Again I disagree with the premise here that the US will be unwilling or unable to commit fully to Israeli defense. I can’t see this going anywhere short of a full scale troop deployment or invasion of Lebanon.
If Hezbollah do launch large scale rocket attacks on Israeli cities (as they are now claiming they can), or even proceed to the point of actually invading the Galilee, I foresee no other outcome than a full declaration of war by the US and subsequent “Gulf 3” deployment. All logisitics and dire auguries from military experts be dammed.
We are talking about the same government that leaped headlong into Ukraine verses Russia without even enough artillery shells to hand. How credible is it to think they will hesitate verses Hezbollah when Israel itself is under existential threat? How many panicked CNN and NYT headlines about bombs in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem does anyone imagine the US Government will be able to sit though without committing to go all in?
I see a US congress ready to sign a new draft law in 24 hours, a White House that is all but an overseas consulate for Netenyahu, and Washington as a reality-optional zone. Politically the US joining this war is a done deal.
No, Hezbollah does not want a war. Hezbollah is a party in the government. They are well aware of how devastating a war would be for Lebanon. But if Israel insists, they won’t shy away.
Re Israel, the IDF does not want a war v. Lebanon. There is every indication that the considerable delay in launching the war that the hawks and the displaced settlers wand is due to the IDF putting on the brakes. The war enthusiasm among the population at large is for the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. There has been an effort by the hard core to whip up support for an attack on Lebanon due to the fires in the border area that resulted from recent shelling.
And I don’t see that you offer any basis for challenging Brown. It took the US a full year to do the pre-positioning for the war in Iraq. We don’t begin to have the lead time. And our army is way smaller than in 2003. And with the Houthis threatening aircraft carriers, our ability to bolster any air defense/offense is limited.
You confuse wanting to help to being able to. Huge difference.
Too, this time the US would probably be without even the minimal military and moral support it had from the UK and others in the Iraq war, and more importantly the use of local land for the build-up and support as was given by Kuwait and the Persian Gulf States for the Iraq campaign.
Interesting, but I cannot see the US putting boots on the ground in Lebanon. It was a disaster the last time we did it, and there is no reason to believe that it wouldn’t be worse this time.
Russia has already said that it will be seeking asymmetric opportunities to drain the US military, and they are still right over the line in Syria. Turkey, second largest military in NATO, is making noises like it wants to leave NATO, and they have finally (per analysts on Judge Napolitano) even ceased to deliver oil to Israel. Turkey has bases on Cyprus and will prolly refuse the US use of Incirlik, at a minimum. Both Russia and Turkey have escalation dominance in the area, and there are militias everywhere throughout the region.
If Turkey and Russia decide to go in, one cannot assume that Iran won’t do so as well. This whole thing could be over within a week, and the US would not come off well. I’m not sure that even Lindsey Graham would be that stupid, and then there are the elections coming up.
That is just a tar baby waiting to happen, and they have enough of those to be getting on with already.
Israel’s government is ruled by zealous religious and secular fanatics, who may well get their wish to attack Hezbollah. Israel’s military will try hard to resist this. If the fanatics win, they will quickly go to a tactical nuke or two. I think Netanyahu and Co see this as their only resort against Hezbollah. The other, more hopeful, possibility is a military coup by the IDF to prevent that outcome from happening. The only relatively sane voices in Israel currently are the military ones. Of course, Genocide Joe could have put the brakes on all this months ago, had he cut off the weapons. But then he would likely lose the fall election, judged having “abandoned” our 51st state.
Imo if either Hizbollah or idf wanted a war there would already be one. And, other than our nuttiest warmongers, I doubt that either our elites or the country either want a draft or would tolerate one.
Regarding the former, it looks to me hizbollah’s delicate calc is exactly how much damage they can cause without forcing israel to respond with a full war. Granted, they may have miscalculated.
Shock and awe only work on exposed armored and mechanized infantry with only fox holes.
Shock and awe never worked on Tarawa, Iwo Jima because a but of sand and roofing demands highly accurate shots, that give slight effect.
Hezbolah , like Hamas would drag the IDF in and hold them by their belts reducing the effect of high tech fires.
While the Houthi have area, in Levant they dig.
What CJCS Charlie Brown says is interesting. Is all that US AirPower in Jordan just air defense? Are they short heavy bombs and guidance kits, already shot in Gaza and Ukraine? Hard to send heavy stuff to the inland bases.
What of Hezbolah SAMs?
Real shock and awe: Immediately discontinue all financial and military aid to Israel. That might wake them up, and lead them to seek some kind of peaceful resolution to this never-ending Mid-East madness. Enough of mindless American politicians feeding this slaughter with our taxes,
“Immediately discontinue all financial and military aid to Israel” – that’s how isolation is DONE.
It’s actions, not words.
Israel is a typical Western country, and the people there are so used to living in prosperity that they have too much to lose to endure a real war. If an all-out war breaks out with Hezbollah, they will choose to get on a plane to the U.S. rather than pick up a gun and fight.
One needs to remember the Israeli possibility Nukes. These and the focus on ‘Mowing the grass’ used by fervent Israelis, coupled with a possible mind set which would become If we cannot have Israel, then no one cam have Israel, (The Land) coupled with a belied We are protected by res erection at the end times One I does not see any possible compromise or sharing the land.
I lived in South Africa and was interviewed when I made a causal remark abort nuclear enrichment, a Seemingly joint and South African and Israeli program.
Many believe the Israelis completed their nuclear program.
That’s for sure, everyone knows about Israel’s nukes. Even wikipedia acknowledges it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_weapons_and_Israel
Most estimates put their stockpile at around 200 warheads. They seem to have them distributed between medium and longer distance ballistic missiles, possible aircraft bombs, and cruise missiles that can be fired from submarines.
The problem for Israel, as probably even the most lunatic fringe know, is that Hezbollah does not have a series of distinct bases you can destroy with a nuke. You would need many strikes up and down the length of Lebanon and probably Syria too, which would result in massive casualties of a sort even its most fervent supporters would find hard to justify. Its very hard to see how Israel could survive as an entity if it nuked its neighbour in this manner. The nukes are really to deter Iran, nothing else.
Yes, but I would say the nuclear weapons are more for intimidation than to “deter” Iran. Iran has no nuclear weapons capability, and has exercised restraint and caution in response to Israeli (and US) attacks on Iran and its interests.
I agree about using nukes in Lebanon, that is a rational assessment, but it is arguable if using nuclear weapons would “rational” in any circumstance.
The border region is not very large — any use of nukes will have to be weighed against the possibility of radioactive contamination of Israeli territory and population.
The other side is that what’s going on in Gaza changes the nuclear deterrence calculation. As an Arab state/civilian, you have to weigh the risk of getting nuked to the risk of being genocided/ethnically cleansed/casually “martyred” if you keep giving in to Israeli demands. Would you prefer a quick nuking to being a Gazan for the last 9 months/years/decades? Nukes are scarier when you have more to lose.
The problem for Israel, if it used a nuclear weapon in Lebanon, is that other states in the region would rush to acquire nuclear weapons as a deterrent.
The U.S. blazed a trail from nuclear weapons from theory to fact in less than 5 years using 1940’s technology. Today, how to make a nuclear bomb isn’t a secret. The difficult part is obtaining enough fissile material. I suspect Iran, Iraq, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia would all become candidates to join the nuclear club if Israel used a nuclear weapon.
Thus, I don’t see how Israel using a nuclear weapon against Hezbollah improves Israel’s security in the long run. It will make it weaker, not stronger
I wrote a paper in 2009 about Israeli nukes & strategy. You can access it here:
https://ia601608.us.archive.org/34/items/TheIsraeliNuclearWeaponsProgram/TheIsraeliNuclearWeaponsProgram.pdf
It’s an excellent paper. Thanks for sharing it.
What might happen in the fog of Israel’s impending suicide if the US, UK, and Israel simply go ahead and drill for oil in the contested offshore region? And just curious, what could possibly go wrong if Israel used a nuke or two on southern Lebanon, maybe coming a little too close to the gas/oil fields and Leviathon lives up to its name and then some? Actually blowing all the gas and oil “out of the water”, as the saying goes. Alternatively both sides could back away from their crazed suicides and simply horse trade their way out of this insanity.
Offshore oil has nothing to do with the current crisis
If it was about oil, the Zionists would have picked Iraq instead of Palestine
Just one point on the outcome of any war – the only certainty is that we don’t know what will happen. The Ukraine conflict should have told us that at a time of technological and geopolitical flux, predictions about warfare are almost worthless. Perhaps someone knows otherwise, but I can’t think of a single analyst who came close to accurately predicting the nature of the conflict in Ukraine 2 years ago, and few if any correctly identified the strengths and weaknesses of both sides, despite vast amount of open source information available.
Its a very different region than in 2006. Hezbollah is a very different organisation and in particular, has significantly changed its military organisation,mostly thanks to its experiences of the Syrian conflict. They certainly learned a lot in that war, but they also suffered a lot of casualties, and its impossible to really know how this has effected its mid-rank command structure, which is crucial in a conflict like this. There were indications a few years ago that they had lost a lot of their most experienced and best officers in Syria and were struggling to replace them.
Likewise, the Israeli has changed. We often forget that they are pioneers in the use of drones and a world leader in electronic warfare. They’ve been making and using drones longer than anyone, and the one time they’ve been used in anger outside Israel, by their ally Azerbaijan in the second Nagorno-Karabakh war, they wiped the floor with Armenia (mostly Russian armed) with Israeli technology and knowhow.
While Israel has performed poorly in Gaza, its army has been built around conflict with its enemies to the east, not Hamas. It does have plans and will no doubt have a few unpleasant surprises prepared, although of course this works both ways.
From what we know of both sides capabilities, which despite some commentators apparent confidence, really isn’t much, Israel will probably suffer yet another catastrophe in Lebanon, and maybe Syria too if it tries a flanking move from Golan. My guess is that the clear winner will be the side that can hold its nerve and invite the opposition on to them – both sides will operate better on their own territory. It certainly seems like Hizbollahs leadership is far more strategic and less subject to provocation, although they have their own domestic political calculations to deal with.
I’d like to think that the Ukraine war wound up resembling what many people predicted, even if it didn’t start that way: people watching the region knew that Russian military resources were limited and their interests were to the east. A sort of limited incursion for control of the Donbas was the obvious move. The confusing part was when columns of armor appeared at unexpected places, like outskirts of Kiev, which we know know were more “political” than “military” moves.
The Azeri success with the drones etc over the Armenians (and the early Ukrainian success with the same) were more surprising, at least to me. But, even when it comes to drones, we shall still have to see: Israel seems to have fallen to the Western disease of using overly (relatively speaking) sophisticated and expensive stuff, while Hizb’ullah has gotten very skilled at using cheap and largely disposable drones (although they seem to be using more sophisticated variants as well). This will be, well, at least one interesting thing to watch carefully.
Yes, this is the thing about drone warfare – its not a ‘drones vs tanks’ thing, its very much a game of measure and countermeasure. Cheap and simple drones are great, up until your opponent manages to work out how to jam them, then you have to invest in military grade hardened electronics, which hugely increases the cost and so changes your tactics (like the way Ukraine has focused its drone use on fronts away from where Russia has focused its defences). Cheap gps guidance works very well, likewise until its jammed, then you add electro optics to the guidance, and so the jammers find themselves sending out useless electronic signals which make their own systems easy to detect and target. It probably won’t be for decades until we find out the real story of the behind the scenes electronic warfare now ongoing between Russia and NATO, but it seems certain there has been a lot of unreported localised tactical successes on both sides. They don’t call it the fog of war for nothing.
I’d compare drones to torpedoes in the 19th Century. When the first useable torpedoes were developed it caused panic among the big powers, when they suddenly realised their monstrously expensive battleships could be taken out by a little gunboat with a single cheap torpedo. But instead of killing off the battleship, it provoked a tit for tat of technology that is still ongoing. The torpedo didn’t topple the usefulness of a battleship (in fact, surprisingly few battleships were sunk by torpedoes in both world wars), but they still proved very useful in the armories of both small and large militaries.
Almost all wars that go on for more than a year end up with very different weapons and very different tactics than they started with. Its very, very difficult to predict what will happen, pretty much the only certainty is some much ballyhoed weapon/tactic will prove a bust, and some obscure one will turn out to be very useful.
While it is difficult to predict exactly how wars will be fought, the outcome is often predictable. Ukraine, for example, is not going to take Moscow. Japan was never going to beat the U.S. in WWII. The US would lose to China in an Asiatic war.
The lesson here is don’t get into wars with countries having three or more times your population and industrial base. That a losing strategy.
After first month of SMO was over (and troops retreated from the north), I could predict that it will be a long grinding war. Russians even publicly said that phase one is over, and that phase two will be done by-the-book. Russian by-the-book war is war of attrition. Back in the day western experts (including RItter and Mccgregor) were talking about big arrow offensives, because they are crap.
During December of 2022 Putin said the war could be a long term process. I had no reason to doubt him then. Nor now.
Its a good job nobody told the Vietnamese about that lesson.
the yanks always leave a mess and go home when fighting a guerilla war.
I was referring to wars between nations. Wars by colonies against their colonizers are different obviously. All the colony has to do is outlast the colonizers until they give up and go home.
What “home” will the Israelis give up and go “home” to? Maybe the culture-Western Euro-Oriented Israelis can go generically “home” to the generic West. Will the Arab Jews be expected to go “home” to the lands of their former Dhimitude ( which became such after the conquest of those lands by the conquering Arab Legions of Islam)?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dhimmitude
https://dhimmitude.org/
‘Japan was never going to beat the US in WWII’ is an interesting one. The US may have had a vastly larger industrial base, but it wasn’t a given that it was all going to be deployed effectively and in the national interest (J.K. Galbraith wrote about his struggles getting that view accepted against the interests of big corporations).
For example, do you really think the current US government would be capable of the kind of national mobilization that was needed to counter Japan in the Pacific? The same forces were in play back then, and might have prevailed. In different circumstances, I don’t think the Pacific Theater going the way of Vietnam would have been at all improbable.
You can’t forget something that is not true. Here’s a hint about drones:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tupolev_Tu-141
Saying that someone else but Soviets/Russians are world leaders in electronic warfare, only hurts the credibility of the one claiming it.
Recent Azerbaijan vs Armenia stuff, is more of Gulf War style conflict as far as power ballance is concerned. There was never a question who will come out on top, with or without Israeli technology and knowhow.
The Tupolev 144 was a pretty straightforward design, typical of many experimental designs from the period. Drones have been used for military use since the 1920’s at least, and all sides had some kinds of drones during WWII, depending on your definition of drone, including of course suicide drones like the V1 and guided drones like the Fritz X.
Israel has been selling its electronic surveillance, intelligence, communication and deception hardware and software worldwide for years now, often in a very secretive manner. They have access to more advanced chips and hardware than Russia. No doubt Russia has very advanced and capable technology as we’ve seen, and are probably better at real world applications. But there is no grounds for saying they are technologically more advanced, even Russia acknowledges its limitations, mostly due to issues of access to the most advanced hardware.
I mentioned Tu-141 because it was actually used in currently ongoing conflict. If drones have been used since the 1920’s at least, then Israel could not be a pioneer, because it did not exist back in the day, unless they are also pioneers in time machines.
I did not say that Russians are “technologically more advanced”, but that they are the ones that have always been world leader in electronic warfare, and not Israel. It is one of the fields that Soviets have been investing more than The West (just like AA, and missiles of all kinds, and tanks, etc.). All the modern systems that Russians deploy nowdays did not appear over-night and out-of-nothing, but are a fruit of the long term effort. In some areas The West is still lagging behind Soviet era.stuff (e.g. anti-ship missiles).
Selling stuff does not make that stuff the best in the world. F-35 sells great, and so does McDonald’s junk. Advanced hardware includes much more than low nm chips. Wno is the best in warfare is determined only on the battlefield, and Israel is not doing great, to put it mildly. If top shelf advanced hardware is not performing, then it’s not really top shelf advanced hardware, but a bag of hype. Anyone can bomb weddings and funerals. Up until recently bunch of people actually believed that Merkava is the best tank in the world. They also believed that the Iron Dome is world’s best. The list goes on and on.
Russia acknowledges its limitations, but USA/Israel do not. That’s why USA/Israel consider themselves the greatest in the world in everything, and everyone else cavemen using primitive technology. Cavemen wielding hypersonic weapons, that is.
Sarma T I agree with you about electronic warfare and Russian superiority in this field. They use Air defense systems as well as Electronic warfare to fight Western supplied munitions to a great effect may be around 80 to 90% now compare that to the Iranian attack on Israel with the help of US/UK/France Israel spent any where around 1 to 2 Billion dollars and still the Iranian missiles reached the most sensitive air field. So much for the Iron Dome/Patriot missile systems effectiveness. Thanks
Israel’s supposed leadership in electronic warfare was insufficient to prevent critical sites, the most highly protected in Israel, from being hit in the Iran retaliation for the Israel strike on the Iran embassy compound in Beirut. And that’s before getting to the huge cost to Israel and the US v. Iran of a defense against a single attack led by large number of cheap drones.
Israels investment has been overwhelmingly on the offensive, not defensive side. Hamas has been very successful in making life difficult for Israel by keeping things very simple.
I’m not claiming that Israels weapons are particularly effective or unbeatable – nowhere near. Most likely most of the fancy weapons they show off at defence sales events are not workable in the real world. The point I made about Azerbaijan is that they used a lot of Israeli tech and certainly for them, it seems to have worked exceptionally well on what is a relatively modern and well organised Armenian military. Hezbollah, like Iran, has always focused on building and using what they know works, which is a huge advantage in a war like this, but its still no guarantee.
My point is that nobody really knows what Israel has planned for an invasion, neither do we really understand Hezbollah’s’ capabilities. Both have what they hope are surprises up their sleeves for the other as they’ve been planning for this for years. We don’t even have a clear idea of what weapons both sides will use, let alone the tactics. Even the assumption that Hezbollah will fight harder and smarter than Israel is not a given, as we know they lost a lot of their best fighters and officers in Syria, and its hard to assess if this in any way impacted on their Lebanon base. It may have weakened them, it may have strengthened them, we just don’t know.
In any prospective war, its foolish to ignore Tysons law – everyone has a plan until they get a punch in the face.
EW works by transmitting signals that interfere with the signals transmitted by your enemy. Russia, for example, has had great success spoofing GPS signals that U.S. made weapons use for guidance. These fake GPS signals have made all sorts of U.S. munitions ineffective.
Radar has been jammed and spoofed for decades. For example, when I was in the U.S. Navy decades ago, helicopters had electronics the would detect anti ship missile radar and emit a signal that would make the helicopter appear as a large ship to the enemy missile radar. The purpose was to attract the missile away from real ships.
I don’t know how Iranian missile are guided. However, if they do not use radar or external electronic signals that can be jammed or spoofed for guidance as I suspect, even the best EW is useless against them.
Israel is already jamming GPS. When I was there a few weeks ago, there were times where nobody knew where to go, as their GPS told them they were in Egypt. I’ve no idea if this jamming works for Hezbollah.
GPS antics explained very well here on YouTube.
As Scott says, for quite a lot of things there are backups. However he is careful to not cause waves by discussing in too much detail how this stuff could lead to escalation to the two key areas we are all talking about.
Speaking about Russians jamming for decades (not to be confused with Bob, or Stevie, that could only jam until the break of dawn), here is a historical tidbit, that puts many current things into perspective:
https://archive.ph/UAnEV
Munich is where Stepan Bandera lived & worked, until Soviets got him. Radio Liberty still keeps fighting his kampf.
As far as Iranian missiles go, INS (inertial navigation system) by itself is not enough to achieve accuracy they have. They have to use some external data (GPS, GLONASS, radar, camera with AI target recognition, or whatever).
No matter how many wealthy dual citizens get on planes to flee, many Israelis (and as pointed out, even more Lebanese) will die if the violence escalates. The denizens of the US Homeland will not be bombed, the UK/US can enjoy the “splendid isolation” of geography. As prof. Hudson pointed out: let’s have them fight until the last Ukrainian, and fight until the last Palestinian, Israeli (and Lebanese). As usual, we ask: who will be the ones getting blown to bits and dying by the thousands?
This can also be viewed as a proxy war between the “west” and the rest. The vast majority of the world has been against Israeli policy for DECADES.
I still think that many view the conflict as Israel independently dictating US policy. No doubt the Lobby has huge influence, but in many ways, if viewed in a broad historical context, US foreign policy is just a continuation of long-standing European imperialist/colonialist policy and Israel is always included as part of the “west” and Western Civilisation Inc.
Any Israeli can go to us without requiring a visa, citizenship not required.
So what? So can people from other visa-waiver countries, that’s not the point. WTF?
They can also go to Russia without a visa. In both cases, only for a limited time (in theory)
Not fully correct. Several hundred thousand US dual citizens will be trapped in Israel. And these are likely to be in the upper crust or well connected to it. Israel today is closer to the Hawaiian Kingdom circa 1898 than just another random foreign country.
Actual US “annexation” is unlikely (though not completely impossible). But another possible outcome is a “color revolution” type event, where a belligerent Israeli administration is removed by a combination of protests, media pressure, and “NGOs”, to be replaced with a more compliant government that can at least be muzzled by Washington if not brought entirely to heel.
That said, maybe it’s as likely a color revolution could be done the other way around if any US administration gets too many notions about who is the real boss. Who even knows anymore?
Not fully correct? US citizens living abroad are not currently denizens of the US Homeland. You missed the point.
Any such color revolution here would be a National Christianist/ Rapturaniac-Armageddonite color revolution, for the ultimate achievement of National Christianist/Rapturaniac-Armageddonite aims and goals.
Those goals include the ultimate extermination of Israel as the final paving of the way to the Return of Christ and the Establishment of His Kingdom.
The vast majority of the world has been against Israeli policy for DECADES, including a significant population of the west. It’s our leaders who have an unseemly fondness for the Zionist state (and Epstein’s stable of pre-legal girls). Go figure.
And we
wondershake our heads and mutter about why Ghislaine Maxwell has been quiet for so long…The who’s who or Who, Whom, in those published Epstein island flight logs includes way too many gov’t officials who allegedly represent the people.
Add those to the suppressed evidence about Hillary and others in Wiener’s laptop, and the evidence on that recently-acknowledged legit Hunter laptop, and there seems to be a pattern emerging.
Or merely SOP. Rotten to the core.
All that while considering the Epstein/Maxwell honey trap was likely but one among several methods of extracting compliance.
Yes and: As if the perps have to be pressured into crimes in the first place. The Epstein business is small potatoes compared to bombing children by the thousands, and the corruption is formalized and institutionalized- not just a few “bad apples”. In a crude way this is all really simple: we have the power to mass murder people, steal all their stuff and occupy their land and make millions of people believe the victims are to blame. History rhymes and all that eh…
Why hasn’t Maxwell been Epsteined? Probably because she had her own total copies of every Epstein-relevant fact deeply hidden and ways arranged in advance to publish every single fact if she were to be Epsteined. And since our Intelligence Agencies can’t find where they are and figure out how to stop them from all being omni-published and omni-exposed, our Intelligence Agencies have been too afraid to have her Epsteined.
Turns out she is smarter than Epstein was.
I heard a shocking but not surprising conjecture about the fate of the hundreds of DVD-Rs that the FBI seized from various Epstein residences. It’s that they were delivered to the MIC to continue exerting pressure on the US elites who exploited the girls Epstein offered them. Maybe the CIA. Maybe 3rd parties. But not destroyed and not entered into evidence as far as anyone can tell. This is such a corrupt system.
High on its hubris, Israel looks determined to go to war with Lebanon…
Being high on their hubris for the psychopathic Zionists is nothing new:
“If I knew it was possible to save all the children in Germany by taking them to England, and only half of the children by taking them to Eretz Israel, I would choose the second solution. For we must take into account not only the lives of these children but the historic interest of the people of Israel.” — David Ben Gurion (1938)
A few questions:
I’m not asking this rhetorically! Israelis haven’t experienced war, so how can we be so sure they would buckle so easily? Is it reasonable to guess that a genuinely threatening military action from Lebanon would rally the country? They would be able to take the pain and the IDF will improve if forced to. Perhaps the IDF’s weakness is caused in part by the fact that they only have experience pushing around stone throwing kids, but they are getting experience in Gaza now against the al-Qassam brigades. Is it realistic to think this will improve them?
I know this is sort of a horrible way to put it, but I’ve wondered if part of the problem of the IDF morale is that the soldiers don’t honestly believe they are fighting for the existence of Israel. (As bad as Oct. 7th was, it isn’t in and of itself a direct threat to the nation state.) If the threat of their state falling apart becomes undeniable because of large scale physical destruction of their infrastructure might that improve the effectiveness of the IDF?
Another question, admittedly unpleasant: what is Israel’s nuclear doctrine/plans? If they go to war with Lebanon and Nasrallah is correct that the “spider web” falls apart, how likely is it that Israel lashes out with a nuclear weapon?
The Israelis have only experienced extremely short wars by historical standards. And Alastair Crooke has stresses that their doctrine is to fight short, air-power heavy conflicts. They are not set up to fight a long or attritional conflict.
Before their operation in Gaza (which is a massacre and not a war), the longest war they fought was the above-mentioned 33 day conflict in Lebanon, which is an eye-blinkd compared to most conflicts. And even though they got their head handed to them militarily, they did not suffer meaningful territorial damage. So I agree with Nasrallah.
“It is defiant despite its near-complete global isolation…”
Isolation on paper. The way it stands now, a country would have to isolate the USA and Britain in order to truly isolate Israel.
The more the US chains itself to Israel the lower its standing in the world.
harder the resolve
should probably be
harden the resolve
Fixing, thanks!
Yves Smith – Know that these comments of yours are especially valued. Thank you so much.
“Treachery” may be too strong–no one expects a holocaust–but this history of the early Zionists is worth a look.
https://consortiumnews.com/2024/06/24/the-treachery-of-the-nazi-zionist-alliance/
The gist is that they were fanatically devoted to nationalism and not necessarily to the fate of the Jews. In fact Jews who dissented from the cause were harassed.
Still true?
Two pictures side by side. One, an emaciated Auschwitz survivor, the other
an emaciated Palestinian child. Disregarding the difference in age, I believe
most people would find them remarkably similar.
There’s a typo in the first paragraph, oblitherating should be oblitherizing.
Yes, there is a typo, but it is an “h” in obliterating.
After ‘the beach’ incident and Putin’s veiled threat prior to this I would think that some iskander missiles are on their way to Iran and from there presumably into the hands of ‘deniable’ third parties.
Israel , like many in the EU , have lost their minds.
What I have been reading is that Hezbollah is using low cost munitions targeting communication facilities and has eliminated the “eyes and ears” of Israel within 60 km of the border and have forced the Israeli’s living there to escape south. The idea is to save the expensive and bigger weapons for later, but for now they are using cheaper weapons, drones, inexpensive missiles, etc. to diminish Israel’s ability to coordinate air and land attacks.
They are publishing photos online showing Israeli installations before and after destruction, so people will not think they are making shit up.