 What the news won't tell you: Bibi Netanyahu can only remain in power in Israel as long as he keeps a war burning hot. Hamas in the West Bank is a broken target, so he's turned to a regular substitute—Iran. Iran is safe for Bibi to attack because there is zero risk of a land war: Syria/Jordan and then Iraq or the Gulf lie between Iran and Israel. It's not next door. So all they can do is lob missiles. Hezbollah in Lebanon is an Iranian ally, so … /1 27 comments
3 (end) This entire crisis is because one elderly and deepy corrupt politician is too afraid to give up his death-grip on the highest office in Israel, and is willing to murder tens of thousands of foreigners (and not a few of his own people) to cling on. His support at home is the Israeli equivalent of the USA's MAGA: it's a very angry, militant minority who he's led to power. This too will pass—as long as he doesn't succeed in turning Israel into a permanent fascist dictatorship. @cstross There's only so long a country can live under constant military threat and increasing militarisation of society and stay democratic. It's the old myth that had it been combative sabras instead of effete European Jews, the Holocaust would have gone differently. *Shakes head sadly* @iinavpov Alas, I suspect you're right. (The sane liberal Israelis I know are actively looking for escape/emigration options.) @cstross I also think Bibi and his inability to let go of power - unless he wants to end up in some juice corruption trials - is a core part of the problem. Yet it's not enough to reduce it only to him. The inciting event was #oct7 and this one was entirely on Hamas and probably #Iran by proxy, who wanted to do their new ally 🇷🇺 a solid, but their murdering hordes were way more successful than they actually wanted. @Duncan @cstross De-escalation is quite a tricky thing. And it is important to know what the options of each player are. We are not far enough down the spiral, that the beginning doesn't matter anymore (in which case only victory for one side or war fatigue on both sides, are the only options anyway). @AndiPopp @Duncan For some insight into de-escalation in this sitch, consider the USA's post-9/11 psychotic break, which lasted about 5 years; by 2011 sanity had more or less resumed. October 6th was an order of magnitude higher per-capita death toll than 9/11 … I'm pretty sure Hamas weren't aiming that high, any more than Mohammed Atta seriously expected to drop the twin towers. They achieved overkill, again probably by an order of magnitude. So the current crisis was unplanned. @cstross @AndiPopp @Duncan It's a sobering comparison. It took the US 20 years and four presidents to get out of Afghanistan, after killing around 200,000 Afghans, or 1% of the prewar population. Israel is already well ahead of that killing-wise, but has much farther to go to recognize the absurdity of its war. Whatever he has said and done since, Biden was right when one of the first things he did after October 7 was warn Bibi not to go down the road we did after 9/11. @drdirtbag @cstross @Duncan Absurdity is a strong word. While the death toll was painful and the aftermath costly, 🇺🇸 did manage to crush Al Qaeda. It's somewhat similar for 🇮🇱. They did manage to militarily defeat Hamas for now, take out Nasrallah (who ruled for decades) and at least severely cripple Hisbollah. So far they do lack a plan for what comes after (again because Bibi can't form one for political reasons). But it's not like they did not achieve some of their goals. @drdirtbag @Duncan I would even go as far as to say the absurdity lies with 🇮🇷 and it's proxies. While 🇮🇱 has somewhat achievable goals (wether we agree with them or not), I can't see any for their opponents. They can't actually think they can wipe 🇮🇱 of the map. So what do they want to achieve? I think they dug themselves into a hole because of the overkill they achieved, like @cstross described. And now they can't find a way out. @AndiPopp Fair enough. Al Quaeda never had a chance of "destroying America" or whatever, but they sure managed to (cause us to) seriously damage our international reputation and domestic politics. The parallels continue. @drdirtbag True, that was a result for the US and probably is a result for Israel. I can't argue with that. Yet I still fail to see how Al Qaeda/Iran benefit from that. None of these answers really deal with the question I of relevance. In fact they are just getting further into the weeds of armchair political science. I can just imagine some bully kicking the shit out of a kid on the playground and everyone here sitting around discussing the bully's troubled childhood, violent computer games, lead exposure and aggression... We were talking about how Netanyahu is on a rampage to stay in power. That feels like the only salient point here. @AndiPopp @cstross And the inciting event for oct 7 was decades of harassment/murder/theft/dehumanisation. You are right that the problem is far from only Netanyahu, atrocities have been committed by Israel, its leaders, and many of its people for as long as the state has existed. Netanyahu must go, but I'm not sure how one could salvage something resembling a democracy just because he is gone. @NohatCoder @cstross Well, I would disagree with your assumptions, but that's irrelevant anyway, because this is not how armed conflict works. The fact that Hamas saw reasons for their (atrocious) attacks on #Oct7 does not change the fact that they where the first to take up arms in this particular conflict. If your goal is de-escalation (as you stated), Israel has the worst options. Netanyahu's personal options are even worse.  @cstross the settlers have been land-grabbing for decades, enabled by every Israeli government along the way AFAICT. Hard to see any way to a sustainable peace until they are out of the West Bank, and not allowed to establish themselves in Gaza. Which is probably impossible for any Israeli government which wishes to remain in power, and for any American government to press for given our own voting realities. Unless maybe Iran paid Trump enough money to flip on Israel. @cstross “as long as he doesn't succeed in turning Israel into a permanent fascist dictatorship.” - for Jewish Israelis? @Shunra @cstross But the police will harass them, if they buy an apartment in a Jewish city they won't have school in Arabic for their children, and there is a decreasing chance that the police will help them if someone Jewish decides to randomly spit on them in the street. @ynym I omitted 126 years of nuance because they didn’t fit in the margins.  this sounds all quite reasonable. but it is missing the fact that israel has been attacked by/from lebanon since nearly a year now ... so the attack on hesbollah now is not just to provoke iran ...
@Charlie Stross well, they would if there had been artillery shelling from dublin into belfast ...
 @cstross this is a great summary of the current political situation! @StompyRobot Only 80 years? I rather think it was set on the path to disaster back in 1918, thanks to the intersection of the Sykes-Picot Treaty and the Balfour Declaration. Although Theodore Herzl circa 1896 also had a hand in it. @cstross you're not wrong. @StompyRobot My view is that Zionism is a product of the Austro-Hungarian Empire's fetish for creating national homelands for ethnicities, intersecting with the Balkan nationalist movements that sprang up in the wake of the retreat of the Ottoman Empire and (more generally) just another post-French Revolution European national identity movement. Which got dumped at the crossroads of empire and tookroot there just as fuel oil became a critical strategic asset to all the Great Powers. Oops. |
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So Iran can be RELIABLY provoked by an attack on Hezbollah, but equally reliably, cannot retaliate effectively.
So it gives Netanyahu a pretext to send tanks into Lebanon and justify his emergency grip on power—which is all that's keeping him out of prison on corruption charges—but Iran is not an effective threat to Israel (and is responding predictably to provocation whenever Bibi rattles the cage bars).