The chaos Israel is sowing across the Middle East could come back to haunt it
Iranians celebrate on a street holding pictures of Hassan Nasrallah after Iran attack on Israel, in Tehran on 1 October 2024
David Hearst writes in Middle East Eye on 1 October 2024:
A ritual is performed every time Israel starts another war, before the white phosphorus rains down, before the fear and panic of people fleeing their homes, before the footage of stunned survivors sifting through the rubble of collapsed apartment blocks.
It’s called the ceasefire ritual – a public display of hand-washing. It’s the charade of pretending that there are honest diplomats out there trying to search every avenue, stretch every sinew, to stop this bedlam from starting.
Much of it is choreographed. Other parts are improvised. But be sure about one thing: it is pantomime. It bears no relationship to reality. Hours before Israel declared that its ground attack on Lebanon had begun, French Foreign Minister Jean-Noel Barrot was vainly insisting in a media conference in Beirut that his proposed 21-day ceasefire was “still on the table”. As he was doing so, the US, France’s co-sponsor, was briefing journalists that ceasefire talks had stopped. This position went through several iterations as the afternoon wore on, and the contradictions accumulated.
The US simultaneously wanted a diplomatic solution, while describing Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah’s assassination as an “unalloyed good”. It claimed to have restrained Israel to a limited operation on the border, while also expressing anxiety about the humanitarian aspect of the operation. And it pledged to continue to work on de-escalating tensions while acknowledging that Israel was a sovereign country that made its own decisions.
If this charade sounds horribly familiar, that’s because it is.
Cut through the verbiage and the bottom line – as the Pentagon has confirmed – is that the US supports a ground invasion of Lebanon, and ceasefire plans can go hang.
Desire for vengeance
The same happened in Gaza a year ago. Israel’s “right to defend itself” is shorthand for flattening every neighbourhood unfortunate enough to live next to it.
This macabre dance serves a purpose: virtually every media outlet in the western world on Tuesday described the unfolding operation in Lebanon as “targeted” or “limited” – precise commando raids that go in and come back out – just as they did during the initial phase of the Gaza war.
“We do not expect it will look like 2006,” a US official told The Washington Post.
Meanwhile, Israeli diplomats and generals could not stop themselves from blurting out the truth. Mike Herzog, Israel’s ambassador to the US, said: “The American administration … did not limit us in time. They, too, understand that following Nasrallah’s assassination, there is a new situation in Lebanon and there is a chance for reshaping.”
A “reshaping” of Lebanon does not mean a targeted operation limited to the border. Nor was limitation in the thoughts of one Israeli army commander, who noted: “We have a great privilege to write history as we did in Gaza here in the north.”
Rage and hate speech have reached psychotic levels in Israel. The desire for vengeance directed against the people of Gaza has swiftly found a new target: the people of Lebanon.