Joe Biden's administration has insisted for months that a ceasefire in Gaza was within reach, despite no sign of progress toward that goal. This inaction has consequences: If Israel faces no repercussions for waging genocide against Palestinians, and feels no pressure to stop, there is nothing to prevent it from increasing the scope of the violence.
On Monday, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu released a statement warning the citizens of Lebanon to evacuate the southern region of the country that borders Israel. "I have a message for the people of Lebanon: Israel's war is not with you. It's with Hezbollah," Netanyahu said. "For too long, Hezbollah has been using you as human shields. It placed rockets in your living rooms, and missiles in your garage. Those rockets and missiles are aimed directly at our cities, directly at our citizens. To defend our people against Hezbollah strikes, we must take out these weapons."
These remarks were paired with a series of air raids with a reported death toll of 490, the highest in Lebanon in one day since 2006. Since then, these strikes have killed a total of at least 550, including 50 children, and wounded at least 1,800, according to the country's health ministry. The scenes coming out of Lebanon parallel those out of Gaza: residential areas turned to rubble as inhabitants fled, ambulances destroyed, civilians and U.N. Refugee Agency members mutilated under the guise of securing an unquantifiable degree of safety. From the Washington Post:
Naim Khashish, 63, was in his garden when a strike hit the building next door, killing eight members of his neighbor’s family. The blast fractured his ribs, broke both of his legs and tore up his skin.
Down the hall in the Labib Medical Center was a woman with thick bandages over her eyes. She was fleeing in her car when an airstrike landed nearby, according to an aunt who waited at her bedside. The explosion sliced her face with shrapnel, and killed her mother and sister.
Netanyahu did not issue a warning to the Lebanese out of sincere concern. The purpose of the statement was to manufacture justification to an English-speaking audience. Swap out "Hamas" for "Hezbollah," and the rhetoric is identical: Evil is hiding everywhere, therefore Israel claims uninhibited freedom to attack indiscriminately. Anyone who is killed has only themselves to blame. We warned them. Does Israel really think the Western world is so credulous as to accept such a strategy without scrutiny? The answer, emphatically, is yes. And why wouldn't it? There's been no pushback so far. It beggars belief that anyone would buy this line, let alone a second time, but "belief" isn't the issue here. Even if a majority of Americans want an end to the violence, U.S. policy encourages it. Israel's attack on Lebanon only motivated a lame-duck president to send an undetermined number of troops to the Middle East.
"De-escalation through escalation," one American pundit called it, although it's really only escalation all the way through. This week's bombing followed on last week's attacks, in which Israel detonated pagers and walkie-talkies over two days, killing dozens and injuring thousands. The death toll included two children, one of them 9-year-old Fatima Abdullah, who reportedly picked up her father's pager before it exploded in her face. These attacks were characterized as elaborate and precise. None of the sycophants praising the electronic-based attacks, perceived as the cinematic yet ethical dispatching of terrorists, dwelled too much on the killing of children or bystanders. That would ruin the notion that this was something out of a spy movie rather than an operation to maim and terrorize thousands of people in another country. Anyone within the radius of an exploding pager was assumed guilty of either being Hezbollah or supporting it.
It can be astounding to watch Israel reuse the same justification to commit new atrocities, to expect not just credit but praise for restraint, and then to advocate for the ostracism of critics. Rarely is it considered whether Israel has actually accomplished anything with this bloodshed, or by expanding it to a second country. That's not the point, anyway. There's no strategy; it happens because it can. Netanyahu felt empowered to bomb Lebanon because of the lack of intervention in his demolition of Gaza. Why should anyone expect it to stop there?
