by ANIS SHIVANI
This is just a short essay to refute the fantastic claims of most on the podcast and commentariat left that Israel is losing the war in the Middle East. They said that since Day One, arguing that Hamas was ultimately undefeatable. They are making the same claim now about Hezbollah in Lebanon and about Iran. They were wrong at the start, and they will continue to prove themselves to be wrong.
We heard soon after the genocide was initiated that Israel was losing the narrative war. Yes, but I argued then, you can lose the narrative, but what if all your opponents end up dead, or for all intents and purposes extinguished as an entity? Young people—meaning really privileged young Americans—had turned against Israel for the first time in history, taking their woke anti-colonial lessons to heart. This was a sea change, we were assured, and it would be proved by the success of the BDS movement, the only way to get Israel to see the light. Finally, the student encampments really turned these analysts on, as a revival of the kind of spirit we hadn’t seen since Vietnam.
We were told throughout the Gaza genocide that Hamas’s victories were unseen but real anyway. Just be patient, and Israel’s defeat would be obvious. When Iran retaliated for the first time in April, it was praised for its “restraint.” The same praise was heard when it recently launched 200 ballistic missiles after Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah’s assassination, without causing any casualties. Iran is a civilized nation, we were told, and didn’t want to inflict civilian harm upon Israel. Just wait and be patient, and it would become abundantly clear that Israel could never defeat a nation like Iran, many times its size.
The Hamas catastrophe has more or less reached its conclusion. The annihilation of Hezbollah in Lebanon is well underway and will probably be accelerated dramatically, should Kamala Harris win, immediately after the election. The suspense with Iran continues but I am not holding my breath for any kind of victory, real or symbolic, on the part of Iran. Instead, if and when Iran’s nuclear and oil infrastructure are taken out, Iran won’t be able to do anything about it.
Who are the people painting these mostly delusional—or at best naively optimistic—scenarios of the wars in the Middle East? Mostly academics and journalists I more or less appreciate, even if I don’t agree with all their views, such as John Mearsheimer, Scott Ritter, Chris Hedges, Rashid Khalidi, Richard D. Wolff, and others of similar ilk in the American thinkspace, along with many Palestinian, Muslim, Arab, Jewish, and Christian activists both in the Middle East and the West. They insist that Israel cannot possibly sustain itself as an apartheid state in this day and age. They tell us that public opinion around the world has sharply turned against Israel, so in that sense Hamas’s initiative has been rewarded.
One of the notable aspects of the ongoing genocide for the last year has been the insistence of secular Jews in the American commentariat, such as Katie Halper and Max Blumenthal, that the state of Israel or Zionism do not in any way represent their own philosophy. They are vociferous in making an absolutely binary division with zero overlap between their belief system and all that Israel has come to represent. Not surprisingly, whether it is Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) or orthodox rabbis who never believed in the Israeli project, Palestinian and Muslim activists and thinkers have been eager to join forces with self-proclaimed non-Zionist Jews in peddling the by-now familiar narrative of eventual Israeli defeat, culminating in the one-state solution.
The subject of non-Zionist Jews making such an absolute distinction between Judaism and Zionism, as an act of self-preservation with many facets, is something I intend to return to in a more detailed essay, but among other facts, remember that more than nine out of ten Israelis support the Gaza genocide, and nearly two-thirds of American Jews do so as well.
These are well-meaning intellectuals who really believe that Israel is losing, even in the face of the annihilation of one-fourth of the population of Gaza, and the near-complete destruction of the infrastructure, making the area unlivable for the foreseeable future. These naïve projections remind me of the ecstasy that rippled among many Muslims when poor Saddam Hussein lobbed a few harmless Scud missiles over Israel during the first Persian Gulf War. He too was alleged to have taken the path of prudence when he transported his fighter jet fleet to Iran rather than deploying it in war when he had the chance to do so. We are now being told that Iran is likewise holding back its incredible arsenal of weapons, because as a rational country it doesn’t seek an all-out war, or that Israel has barely scratched Hezbollah’s awesome stockpile. I want to make some relevant points about the checkered histories of Hezbollah and Hamas in another essay, but my focus here is simply the misrepresentation of these forces as heralding the ultimate comeuppance for the state of Israel.
What is the real problem of analysis I’m getting at? If Israel were the arch-enemy of humanity as it is said to be, if Israel were indeed a free agent of evil incarnate, the optimism of these well-meaning commentators would have some substance behind it. But the analysts are viewing the whole matter upside down. It is not the power of the Israel lobby or the recalcitrance of Netanyahu or any Israeli political leader against world opinion that is the issue. Israel is simply the executing arm of America’s Middle Eastern foreign policy, which has been forcefully revived in the last year of the Biden regime after the earlier pull-out from Afghanistan forced upon it by the Trump administration.
The war with Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank, with Lebanon, with Yemen, with Syria, and with Iran is American foreign policy, it is not fundamentally Israeli foreign policy. We are watching not the end game of Israel play itself out (although even if it is I am indifferent to the matter, just as I am indifferent about what non-Zionist Jews might or might not feel about the genocide, because it is ultimately irrelevant at best, and distracting at worst), but the end game of American empire play itself out, which also has a Eurasian and Asian frontier. To target the supposedly all-powerful Israeli “lobby” is easy, if beside the point; to explain the genocide as being enforced by the U.S., as is true of the escalations against Lebanon and Iran, is a whole different matter—which won’t get you views and likes and subscribes.
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