Our Wednesday News Analysis | Israel-Palestine war: For Netanyahu and his political allies, peace is more dangerous than war

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu meets soldiers at an undisclosed location in Gaza on 26 November 2023 (AFP)

They waited a long time for their moment in history. They will not let their life-long dream slip from their grasp that easily. A return to Gantz and talk of a two-state solution? Over their dead bodies and the bodies of thousands of Palestinians and Israelis.

This doesn't mean it won't happen, and the war will continue forever.
It only explains how high the stakes are for Netanyahu and his partners.

And this is why this moment in the war is so dangerous.

This is a decisive moment in Israel’s war with Hamas. It’s also a hugely dangerous one for both sides.

The resumption of a brutal bombing campaign on the south of Gaza was impelled by an overwhelming feeling in the war cabinet, the media, and among the majority of Israelis that the war should go on, that Hamas should be dealt a final blow.

The Israeli public wants vengeance, and they still do not feel that they have had it.

Faced with the blunt choice of a further exchange of hostages and prisoners and returning to the ground offensive, the war cabinet decisively chose war...

Read more: Israel-Palestine war: For Netanyahu and his political allies, peace is more dangerous than war

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THE WEST AGONISES OVER AN ‘ATROCITY UPSURGE’ WHILE BACKING ISRAEL’S GENOCIDE IN GAZA

Source: Declassified UK
https://www.declassifieduk.org/the-west-agonises-over-an-atrocity-upsurge-while-backing-israels-genocide-in-gaza/

By JONATHAN COOK
Published December 11, 2023

The problem isn’t ‘global inaction’ to prevent mass atrocities, as the Guardian claims. It’s intense US and UK support for atrocities so long as they bolster their global power.

Destruction caused by Israeli air strikes on Khan Yunis, Gaza, 7 December 2023. (Photo by Ahmad Hasaballah/Getty Images)

It is about the West’s increasing difficulty in keeping the rest of the world weak, intimidated, and subdued through its atrocities. US military failures in Afghanistan, Syria, and Ukraine – and the growing self-assurance of Russia and China – are marking out new limits to Washington’s supremacy.

The truth is that Hamas’ attack on Israel – horrific as its consequences were – served as a signpost to a different future for many of those who have lived for decades under the thumb, or more often the boot, of the US and its allies. They see that it is possible, even as an oppressed, weak, abused party, to give the bullying global hegemon and its sidekicks a bloody nose.

What is seen by privileged, complacent Westerners purely in terms of senseless, barbaric violence is understood by others as a slave revolt – as an “I am Spartacus” moment.

How do politicians, diplomats, the media and even the human rights community keep us politically ignorant, docile and passive – a collective mindset that prevents us from challenging their power as well as the status quo they benefit from?

The answer: By constantly misrepresenting reality to us and their own role in shaping it. And they do it so successfully because, at the same time, they gaslight us by flaunting the pretence that they crave to make the world a better place – a better place where, in truth, the unspoken danger is that, were it to be realised, their own power would be severely diminished.

A perfect illustration of how this grand deception works was provided in a report at the weekend in the supposedly progressive Guardian newspaper, headlined “World faces ‘heightened risk’ of mass atrocities due to global inaction”.

The opening paragraph reports that human rights activists fear the “international community has given up on intervention efforts to stop mass atrocities, leading to fears that such occurrences may become the norm around the world”...

Read more: THE WEST AGONISES OVER AN ‘ATROCITY UPSURGE’ WHILE BACKING ISRAEL’S GENOCIDE IN GAZA

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I USED TO THINK THE TERM ’JUDEO-NAZIS’ WAS EXCESSIVE. I DON’T ANY LONGER.

Source: Mondoweiss
https://mondoweiss.net/2023/12/i-used-to-think-the-term-judeo-nazis-was-excessive-i-dont-any-longer/

By JONATHAN OFIR
Published December 8, 2023

I used to think that Yeshayahu Leibowitz's term "Judeo-Nazis" was too strong to describe Israel. But today, I feel differently.

PHOTO SHARED BY JERUSALEM’S DEPUTY MAYOR ARIEH KING ON SOCIAL MEDIA OF OVER A HUNDRED NAKED PALESTINIANS WHO WERE KIDNAPPED BY THE ISRAELI MILITARY IN GAZA, DECEMBER 8, 2023

We can hardly follow the horrors, the rising death toll —
while U.S. officials say that the Israeli assault might
continue in its current mode until the end of January and with a “lower-intensity, hyper-localized strategy.”

How on earth can this genocide continue with the whole world watching?

… it continues precisely because the world has chosen to watch rather than stop it. This is on us all.

The late Professor Yeshayahu Leibowitz applied the term “Judeo-Nazis” back in the late 1980s when he referred to former Supreme Court Judge Meir Landau, who effectively legalized torture, by that description. He made his arguments strongly: “The State of Israel represents the darkness of a state body, where a creature of a human form who was the president of the Supreme Court decides that the use of torture is permitted in the interest of the state.”

I took it as a kind of moral exaggeration. It was bad — Palestinians were being tortured systematically, but somehow I thought, we’re not quite as genocidal as Nazis.

But today, I feel differently. Yesterday, Jerusalem’s Deputy Mayor Arieh King tweeted a photo of over a hundred naked Palestinians who were kidnapped by the Israeli military in Gaza, handcuffed, and sitting in the sand, guarded by Israeli soldiers. King wrote that “The IDF is exterminating the Nazi Muslims in Gaza” and that “we must up the tempo”. “If it were up to me,” he added, “I would bring 4 D9’s [bulldozers], place them behind the sandy hills and give an order to bury all those hundreds of Nazis alive. They are not human beings and not even human animals, they are subhuman and that is how they should be treated,” King said. He ended by repeating Netanyahu’s biblical Amalek genocidal reference: “Eradicate the memory of the Amalek, we will not forget.”...

Read more: I used to think the term ’Judeo-Nazis’ was excessive. I don’t any longer.