On the Perils of Wishful Thinking

Did Israel Lose?

There is a tendency among those of us who are enraged by Israel’s recent behavior in Gaza and the Lebanon, and its long history of ethnic cleansing and apartheid suppression to seize any opportunity to declare its imminent demise. I don’t say this is impossible (see the reference to Scott Ritter’s assessment below) and some of my remarks in yesterday’s post might support that point of view. However, I do think it is going too far to say that Israel has “lost” its battle against Hamas.

Israel’s basic purpose is to rid itself of Palestinians in Gaza and in the West Bank, and in that sense it is making great progress. Hamas was merely the tool. Hamas was in part a creation by Netanyahu to limit the power of the Palestinian Authority; I find it difficult to believe that it was not from the beginning penetrated by Israeli intelligence; I find plenty of evidence to suggest there was a 9/11-like “They Let it Happen,” motif on October 7th, whose real history and events have been deeply obscured, for the moment, by Israeli propaganda.

Secondly, while we can see plenty of evidence that Hezbollah is resisting the Israeli invasion of southern Lebanon, and is still firing missiles at Haifa and other targets in Israel, even as Israel struggles to create a buffer zone that will make space between Hezbollah-controlled Lebanon and northern Israel to allow for the return of thousands of Israelis to northern Israel, and keep Palestinians bottled up towards the south of Gaza, for the time being, there can be no question that the organization has been weakened by the assassinations of its top leaders.

Whatever Iran’s actual strength, and whatever force it derives from its alliance with Russia, Iran is not behaving with the confidence that one would expect to see from a power that has the means to cripple Israel indefinitely. In the face of a crescendo of chatter about an upcoming Israel retaliation for Iran’s striking at Israel with hundreds of ballistic missiles on October 1st, Iran seems to just want to wait to see what Israel will do to it, rather than undertake the kind of pre-emptive strike that could avert any such threat of retaliation and perhaps undermine Israel altogether.

This is the calibration of fear. And it does little or nothing to stop or assauge in any way the odious genocide of Palestinians in Gaza or in the West Bank.

Rather than thinking of Iran as the center of a network readying itself for bellicosity with the support of resolved allies, I think we can see it as a wavering vessel that has less than full faith in its friends. To its southwest it has Jordan under the autocratic rule of a foreign, Saudi-related, Hashemite monarchy for whose elites the main anxiety is the street power of their 11 million Palestinians; their need, as they see it, is to prevent the flow of more Palestinians into their territory. Yet rather than be overcome with anger at US/Israeli actions designed to push Palestinians into Jordan and Egypt, Jordan has provided its support to Israel by firing on Iranian missiles that have been launched on Israel from Iran.

Russia is primarily preoccupied right now with the challenge of Ukraine and I expect is biding its time before being dragged by Israel into a regional war that will complicate Russia’s ability to navigate the Ukrainian war to what for Russia will be a satisfactory conclusion, and it would prefer not have to do anything before the BRICS meet in Kazan in two weeks’ time. Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Iran itself seem all to have grown far more aware of the West’s overall weakness yet are still struggling to balance their economic interests, however awkwardly, between the West and their affiliations with the Global South.

In Southern Lebanon, the IDF has found itself in conflict not only with Hezbollah but also with UN peace keepers. For Consortium News, Mick Hall today (Hall) reports that an Irish-Israeli diplomatic crisis has been defused after Israel withdrew its invasion force from firing positions metres from a U.N. post in south Lebanon staffed by Irish peacekeepers. Hall remarks that the incident “underlined how Israel is increasingly alienating itself on the international stage while continuing to undermine institutions and instruments of international humanitarian law”. Hezbollah, Lebanese media, and Irish Defence Minister Micheál Martin had accused the IDF of using the Irish troops as cover, or human shields. There is a force of 10,000 UNIFIL international peacekeepers in southern Lebanon. They patrol the so-called Blue Line, a demarcation negotiated before Israel was forced from the country in 2006 following its invasion in 1982.

Ritter on the Fall of Israel

For Scott Ritter, writing in Consortium News (Ritter), the ultimate trajectory for Israel is distinctly downward. He considers that the Hamas raid on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, was a global geopolitical event with no contemporary counterpart. It would lure the Israeli Defense Forces into Gaza into a forever war they could not win. Israel’s “Hannibal Doctrine” (kill the hostages) and its practice of collective punishment, the “Dahiya Doctrine,” has earned Israel global revulsion and exposed Israeli’s apartheid regime for what it is.

The war has crippled the Israeli economy, killing off the proposed India-Middle East-European Economic Corridor that had been described by Netanyahu as the greatest cooperation project in Israeli history. Saudi Arabia declared that it could not normalize relations with Israel, a condition for the project to proceed, until the Palestinian state is recognized by Israel - something the Knesset voted earlier this year would never happen.

Tourism is down 80 percent. The port of Eliat no longer functions. Tens of thousands of Israelis have been displaced. 300,000 reservists have been mobilized. Unchecked, Israel is looking at economic collapse. Israel’s economy has been hit by the tune of $67 billion already. All this makes it a much less attractive long-term ally for the USA.

“Investments are down, the economy is shrinking, and confidence in an economic future has evaporated. In short, Israel is no longer an ideal place to retire, raise a family, work…or live. The biblical “land flowing with milk and honey,” if it ever existed, is no more”.

Israel is being bombarded on a near-daily basis by projectiles fired from Hezbollah, militias in Iraq, and the Houthi in Yemen. And the extent of the Iranian threat is greater than before.

The prospects for an apartheid state are dim. 10 million people live in Israel. About 7.3 million are Jews; another 2.1 million are Arabs. There are some 5.1 million Palestinians under occupation, leaving a roughly 50-50 split when looking at the combined totals between Arab and Jew. In the meantime many Israelis with dual citizenship are leaving. There are an estimated 350,000 Israelis who hold dual citizenship with an EU country, while more than 200,000 hold dual citizenship with the United States. Another 1.5 million Israelis are of Russian descent, with many of those holding valid Russian passports. Some 34,000 Israelis had permanently left Israel between July and October 2023, primarily in protest over the judicial reforms being enacted by Netanyahu. 12,000 left after Octob ers 7, 2023, and the number of permanent emigrants in 2024 was around 30,000.

Israeli War Crimes

For Countercurrents, Brett Wilkins (Wilkins) reports that the Hind Rajab Foundation, a Belgium-based advocacy group has announced it “filed an unprecedented and historic complaint with the International Criminal Court against 1,000 Israeli occupation forces soldiers for war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide in Gaza,” where more than 150,000 Palestinians have been killed or wounded and millions more displaced, starved, and sickened by Israel’s yearlong onslaught. IDF personnel identified by name in the International Criminal Court (ICC) complaint “are accused of participating in systematic attacks against civilians during the ongoing genocide in Gaza”. The IDF soldiers identified in the complaint include at least 12 American, 12 French, four Canadian, three British, and two Dutch nationals.The complaint, supported by over 8,000 pieces of verifiable evidence—including videos, audio recordings, forensic reports, and social media documentation—demonstrates the soldiers’ direct involvement in these atrocities,” the group explained. “All of the named soldiers were located in Gaza during the genocidal assault, and the evidence reveals their participation in violations of international law.”

US Naval Weakness

Iranian diffidence appears not to have been fortified by evidence of increasing weakness in US naval power, even as the Navy claims to be preparing for war with China in 2027 (raising the question as to what might happen were China, unlikely as this would be, were to go to war withm the US in 2025 or 2026).

Iran’s attack on Israel on October 1st increasingly appears to have had substantial impact. Writing for CNN, Retired Admiral Cem Gurdeniz (Gurdeniz) noted that Iran’s attack on Israel with around 300 missiles and drones on April 14, 2024, and its second attack with 180 ballistic missiles on October 1, 2024 had revealed serious problems with Isrsel’s much touted Iron Dome. Hits included the Nevatim and Hatzerim air bases.

Overall US-supported Israeli air defense comprises the Iron Dome Low Altitude Air Defense System; the David’s Sling Medium/High-Altitude Ballistic Missile Defense System and the Arrow 2/3 High Altitude Ballistic Missile Defense System. This system includes American Patriot and THAAD systems and the high precision and range X-band radars located in the Necef Desert, Keren and Kürecik Malatya.

The Pentagon announced that 81 UAVs and 6 ballistic missiles were shot down by American air defense efforts in Iran’s April 14 attack. Following the October 1 Iranian attack, the Pentagon announced that a dozen of the 180 missiles were shot down by two of the three American destroyers in the Mediterranean (USS Bulkeley and USS Cole).

Gurdeniz notes that in the October 1 attack, the US provided support to Israel with roughly 50% fewer ships compared to the April 14 attack. Most importantly, there was no American aircraft carrier strike group in the Mediterranean when the October 1 attacks took place. This represented a US naval weakness. That 106 ships out of a total of 295 were deployed is an indication, he opines, of how low the ships’ combat readiness was. It will take years to raise the combat readiness of the remaining, and warships held in the American reserve fleets are on average over 40 years old and in poor condition.

Critiquing NAVPLAN 24, Gurdeniz picks up on the plan’s intent to increase the current force to 80% combat readiness. In effect, he says, taking into account such things as repairs, readiness level will be around 50% in the best of all circumstances. The real problem is the maintenance and repair problem of the ships. The maintenance of surface fleets (cruisers, destroyers, amphibious ships and corvettes) is currently about 2,700 days behind, or almost seven years. These and other considerations lead Gunderiz to conclude

“The parameters of the US-USA balance in the Cold War and today’s US-China balance are extremely different. The USSR could not defeat the US because the American Navy’s enormous size of 600 ships confined the Soviets to the continent and weakened them. China, on the other hand, is far more advanced at sea than the US naval power today. China has the advantage in terms of both its geographical location, naval power and number of anti-ship missiles. The conditions are more in its favor than ever to bring this to a dynamic conclusion. The US is weakening its power in the Mediterranean and the Persian Gulf because of Israel. China, on the other hand, will use every opportunity to protect and develop its own geopolitical interests, especially in Taiwan and the South China Sea, as long as the Israel-Iran crisis continues.”

Orban Vs Overweening European Liberal Authoritarianism and Censorship

In a recent post, commentator Gilbert Doctorow (Doctorow) notes that veteran broadcaster of European news, Euronews, provided only Hungarian subtitles for an address by Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban to the European Parliament in his capacity as President of the European Council. Normally, the subtitles would have been in English. More remarkable, however, was the content of his speech.

Following a low-key statement of his objectives for the duration of his presidency, taking inspiration from Mario Draghi’s recent report on Europe’s economic weaknesses, Orban was viciously attacked, Doctorow explains, by Ursula von der Leyen (President of the European Commission) and a couple of her minions. Orban responded:

“Orban opened by saying that no Commission President before von der Leyen would have dared to engage in partisan politics openly before the chamber as she had just done. The job of the Commission as stated in the foundation documents of the Union is to protect its Constitution not to engage in partisan politics or to shut up all those with different views on given issues from the Commission.

He asked how the President dared to question the legitimacy of Hungary’s deputies in Parliament over their winning only 45% of the popular votes in their country, when her own party in Germany only gathered 30%.

He asked how she dared to make a fuss over the number of Russians working under work permits in Hungary (7,000) when there are 300,000 such workers in her own Germany, 100,000 such workers in Spain and 60,000 Russian workers in France.

He asked how she dared to criticize Hungary for its imports of hydrocarbons from Russia, when other EU countries imported more Russian petroleum in 2023 than before the invasion of Ukraine and when they bought in the last year more than $8 billion in refined petroleum products from India, knowing full well that the crude oil behind these products came from Russia.

He asked how the European Institutions can be called democratic when his own bloc of Patriots for Europe, which now counts about one-third of all MEPs, was not given a single ministerial portfolio by von der Leyen.

I will not introduce here more of his debating points, which, had she any sense of honor, would have seen Frau von der Leyen slink out of the hall in reptilian style. I leave to you, valued readers, the pleasure of discovering in this video why I say that Viktor Orban is the most courageous, the most experienced and the most intelligent statesman in Western Europe”.

Big Tech Censorship

In another display of increasing Western censorship (on the pretext of opposing “hate speech”) in response to its fear of dissident opinion, courtesy of Big Tech, Mark Sleboda’s channel - admittedly pro-Russian although not, so far as I know, directly affiliated to any Russian media outlet - was taken down from You Tube (whose parent company is Google) even though he had not uploaded anything to it for ten months. This has now been restored, following the restoration of some other channels, whether monetized or otherwise, such as those of Glenn Diesen, Rachel Blevins, Larry Johnson and others, possibly following an intervention on their behalf by Jeffrey Sachs (former neoliberal adviser turned socialist opponent to the Washington consensus) although these channels are still under the threat of being taken down if guilty of behavior (i.e. views) of which You Tube disapproves. Sleboda charges Google with having become weaponized by the State Department in the service of regime change.

AI Colonialism

For TomDispatch today, Joshua Frank (Frank) discusses the implications for the Global South of the transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy sources.

He cites The World Economic Forum estimation that the transition will require three trillion tones of metals, in addition to between 35 and 194 massive copper mines by 2050. Most of the minerals are located in Latin America and Africa, half of them near or on indigenous lands.

The IMF estimates that global revenues from the extraction of just four key minerals — copper, nickel, cobalt, and lithium — will total $16 trillion over the next 25 years. Sub-Saharan Africa alone is believed to contain 30% of the world’s total critical mineral reserves. The Congo is likely responsible for 70% of global cobalt (key ingredient for lithium-ion batteries) output and approximately 50% of the globe’s reserves.

China has committed $4.5 billion to African lithium mines alone and another $7 billion to investments in copper and cobalt mining infrastructure. In the Congo, China controls 70% of the mining sector. In response, Western countries are growing more resolute in setting their sights on Africa and its green energy treasures. Few are considering the geopolitical ramifications or acknowledging the impacts of massively increased mining on the continent. A lot of pressure comes from the development of AI data centers that are expected to be consuming 1050 TWh by 2025 in contrast to Europe’s total energy consumption in 2023 of around 2700 TWh. The massive expansion of cobalt and copper mining leaves disastrous environmental poisoning in its wake.