A long [6400 words] but good summary and analysis by Adam Shatz. Here is a selection:
– The United States has given its imprimatur to Israel’s regional hegemony.
– When Trump made plain that he wanted Israel to stop bombing [Iran], Netanyahu had little choice but to acquiesce.
– Israel also appears to be pursuing a long-range plan to weaken, if not to render defenceless, the other states in the region, so that none is in a position to challenge it. The instability and precariousness of such an order are evident to American and European politicians, but they prefer to remain discreet about them for fear of being accused of sympathy for Hamas or antisemitism.
– For all Trump’s triumphalism, the ‘twelve-day war’, far from having ended Iran’s search for a nuclear weapon, may accelerate it.
– Israel now has control of the airspace over Iran, Iraq, Lebanon and Syria – almost boundless room for manoeuvre – and has always favoured unilateral military assertion over diplomacy.
– Netanyahu and the Israeli political establishment don’t seem concerned about these diplomatic costs – or about the collapse of the country’s moral reputation as a result of the wanton destruction of Gaza. They simply shrug off the criticisms; after all, they say, the world is against us. In fact, Israel still has the governments of the US and most of the West behind it.
– It hasn’t escaped Palestinians’ notice that Israel’s strikes against Gaza have been far less precise than its strikes against Iran and Lebanon: a measure of the contempt in which they are held.
– Gilber Achcar wrote of the 1948 Nakba: ‘It cannot fairly be said that the “uprooting” of the Palestinians ... has been exceptionally extensive or cruel.’ Measured against the standards of the French army in Algeria, ‘the Israeli army pales.’ As Achcar admits in his new book, The Gaza Catastrophe, it wouldn’t be possible to write these lines about Israel now. The catastrophe of the last two years far exceeds that of the Nakba, and ‘deserves the strongest Arabic name for catastrophe: Karitha’.
– After the 1967 war, Isaac Deutscher recalled a German phrase, ‘Man kann sich totsiegen’ – ‘you can triumph yourself to death.’ The same is true of Israel’s wars today, and for largely the same reasons.
– Israel has set itself on a trajectory for which it has no solutions other than a final solution, and final solutions aren’t easy to implement.
– As Sayigh sees it, ‘in a world where the right and far right are on the rise everywhere’, Israel has found it easier to evade criticism since it discovered a growing number of admirers in the West, Latin America and India of its model of ethnonationalism, racial discrimination and reliance on brute force.
– 'In a little over three years, the most influential institutions in the worlds of academia, the arts and multinational finance had evolved from fully genuflecting in front of zealous young activists to trying to silence and crush them. The difference, obviously, was the cause these activists had taken up'.
– As Mamdani came under attack, ‘liberal’ centrists in his own party were nowhere to be found, and some echoed Republican invective. Yet he held his ground, supported by a team that included both Jewish and Muslim leftists. He was the number two choice of Jewish Democrats, an encouraging sign that, for a good portion of Jewish New Yorkers, Mamdani’s anti-Zionism isn’t a problem.
– Achcar says that the 7 October attack was ‘the most catastrophic miscalculation in the history of anticolonial struggle’. A strong case can be made that it has set back the Palestinian struggle for the foreseeable future.
– For Israeli Jews, Hamas’s attack was not merely shocking, it was unfathomable – a regression to the intercommunal violence of the British Mandate. But, as Walter Benjamin wrote, the ‘current amazement that the things we are experiencing are “still” possible ... is not the beginning of knowledge – unless it is the knowledge that the view of history that gives rise to it is untenable.’
– The authoritarian, increasingly fascist drift of Israeli politics, which long predates 7 October, is horrifying but not surprising.
– It’s extremely difficult to imagine the dismantling of Israel’s apartheid system, or to imagine a serious challenge to its domination emerging anytime soon. In a world of rising authoritarianism and ethnonationalism, where the rule of law has all but crumbled, the brutal, pitiless state run by Netanyahu looks more like a pioneer than an outlier.
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