Israel’s Biblical wars of ‘self defense’: The myth of the ‘seven war fronts’
Israeli mothers and fathers, members of Parents of Combat Soldiers, calling for a deal to end the Israel-Hamas war, outside the Tel Hashomer army base, near Tel Aviv on 24 May 2024
Ramzy Baroud writes in The Palestine Chronicle on 23 October 2024:
Israeli officials keep repeating that Israel is fighting on multiple fronts. The truth is that Israel chooses to fight on multiple fronts. The two claims are fundamentally different.
Recently, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu went as far as saying that his country is fighting on seven different war fronts, all driven by the objective of “defending ourselves against … barbarism.” These supposedly defensive wars are also carried out in the name of protecting “civilization against those who seek to impose a dark age of fanaticism on all of us,” Netanyahu said in a speech in early October.
There will be no need to counter Netanyahu’s diatribes. It should be obvious that neither genocide is classified as self-defense, nor does preserving human civilization include burning people alive, as was the case with Sha’ban Al-Dalou, who was horrifically killed alongside his family in the recent Israeli shelling of the al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in Deir al-Balah.
But is Israel being forced to fight on seven fronts? According to Netanyahu, but also other top political and military officials, the fronts are Iran, Gaza, Lebanon, Yemen and groups in Syria, Iraq and the West Bank.
Though the major fighting is only taking place in Gaza and Lebanon, the official Israeli line is keen on exaggerating the number of war fronts to continue capitalizing on the generous US and western military and political support. More wars for Israel also translate into more money.
Of course, Israel is fighting actual wars too; a war of extermination and genocide against the Palestinian people in Gaza, which has killed and wounded more than 150,000 people in the course of one year.
There is also a war in the West Bank, carried out with the precise aim of subduing all forms of resistance, so that Israel may accelerate its settler-colonial project in the occupied territories.
The above is not an inference, but a statement of fact, based on Netanyahu’s own declared policies. “Israel must have security control over all the territory west of the Jordan,” he said during a news conference last January. To be more precise, “between the Sea and the Jordan there will only be Israeli sovereignty,” he said. ‘Security control” is an Israeli euphemism for territorial expansion.