Israel in Lebanon

In the Guardian two days ago, Peter Beaumont asked why Israel is raining terror on Lebanon.

What was the point of Israel’s surprise mass strikes on Lebanon that killed more than 300 people and drew widespread international condemnation?

Prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and other officials have claimed the largest strike against Hezbollah during the month-long war against Iran was carefully aimed at members of the armed group, but the attacks appeared to be as much a piece of violent spectacle to benefit Netanyahu as militarily useful.

Others have speculated that the attack – without warning and initially hitting more than 100 targets in 10 minutes including in densely populated residential areas in central Beirut – was aimed at undermining the US-Iran ceasefire that many see as being imposed on an unhappy Netanyahu ….

Guardian, April 9 2026

Beirut, April 9 2026. Israel bombs residential areas “to defeat Hezbollah”

…

A few remarks:

• I detect in ‘serious’ corporate commentary a truth oft observed: we only see how bad things are when we realise how good they can be. Only when we encounter journalists who truly and fearlessly do their job do we see how ill served we are, without exception, by mainstream media. ¹ I’ll be concluding today with a sixty-two minute video featuring a former UK diplomat, erudite Middle East scholar and highly lucid geopolitical thinker, his analyses never other than compelling. Frankly, Alastair Crooke’s understanding knocks Peter Beaumont’s into a cocked hat.
• Julian Assange had it right about Mr Beaumont’s employer in a 2011 interview with SBS, Australia’s public service broadcaster, shortly after he’d learned that the Guardian had been breaking its agreements with Wikileaks and sharing confidential files:

What drives a paper like the Guardian or New York Times is not inner moral values. It is that they have a market. In the UK, it is called ‘educated liberals’. Educated liberals want a newspaper like the Guardian so an institution arises to fulfil that market. ²

• This puts such media in a tight spot. While their executives and senior editors are either wholeheartedly pro-Zionist or live in fear of the dreaded call from The Lobby – though the latter’s power, we have cause to hope, is on the wane as Westerners, Jews included, turn in disgust at its client’s normalisation of genocide – they still have to cater to their liberal market. Caught between rock and hard place ever since October 8, an occasional column like the one Mr Beaumont penned the other day is a business imperative. ³
• Israel cannot defeat Hamas or Ansar Allah, far less Hezbollah. Seventeen months after Bibi boasted of its elimination by decapitation strike, and by those pager attacks which killed and maimed indiscriminately, the military wing of Iran’s Shia ally is back with a vengeance and wreaking havoc on IDF tank columns south of the Litani. Peter Beaumont, timidly serving up glaring facts as tentative questions, nevertheless points us to the truth. The IDF is in Lebanon – inter alia ⁴ – not to destroy Hezbollah but for the same reason its decapitation strikes take out moderate voices – an Ali Hosseini Khamenei or Ali Ardashir Larijani – it fears may reach a settlement with Washington. The last thing Israel at large, its beleagered prime minister in particular, want is Trump’s ‘ceasefire’.
• Then again, even self evident facts are not, ipso facto, the whole truth. Yes, Bibi needs the war he and his ilk have long lusted after – witness the decades of crying wolf that Iran is “weeks away” from acquiring nuclear weapons. ⁵ Now more than ever he needs this war and hence, since Israel cannot win it alone, a US fully onboard. Having achieved none of his goals, and under intense domestic pressure, keeping this criminal war going is this criminal’s only way of staying in office and out of jail. But the Biblical Israel ideologues in power (including atheists like Bibi ⁶ ) have a deeper and even darker reason for being in Lebanon and beyond. In the third of four posts eighteen months ago on the alignment of the ethnostate’s expansion, by God’s order, with US empire designs, I mapped out that reason:

The territorial aspirations of Israel’s religious Right, by no means confined to West Bank settlers who deem the bible a Deed of Entitlement which trumps international law, look for legitimacy to conflictual texts written between the 7th and 1st centuries BCE and collectively known as the Old Testament. Genesis 15:18-21, for instance, defines the land granted them by Jehovah (a self-avowedly “jealous God” with psychotic leanings and not above such collective punishment as visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation) as extending “from brook of Egypt to Euphrates“.

Numbers 34:1-15 is less generous. It speaks of land divided between the original twelve tribes of Israel after Moses, with divine assistance, escorted them out of slavery in Egypt. For their part, Exodus 23:29 and Deuteronomy 7:22 promise territory to be given piecemeal to the children of Israel over many years.

US Neocons & Israel’s far Right: Part 3

Over then to Alastair Crooke. He comes closer than I would to the ‘Israel drives US policy’  camp in that vexed question but does so without dogma. In any case that chicken-and-egg issue is beside the point here. The first part of his conversation with Colonel Daniel Davis at the Deep Dive gives a characteristically close-argued presentation of just how and why Netanyahu has pushed Trump ⁷ into a war whose outcome is now certain to advance the very thing the empire seeks to avert in its dealings with the Islamic Republic. The latter has paid and continues to pay a terrible price for refusing to kneel to a blood-soaked hegemon and its blood-soaked proxy, ⁸ but the now near certain outcome is that Iran emerges not just stronger but as a regional and quite possibly – time will tell – global heavyweight.

A truth even now seemingly lost on the Trump Administration is that the world’s most powerful military force has been defeated by a loose alliance including the three aitches – Hezbollah … Houthis ⁹ … Hamas – but centred on a global south state it had thought a ‘house of cards’ ruled by a detested theocracy and mortally weakened by decades of sanctions. ¹⁰

The propaganda on the Ayatollahs being loathed by most Iranians never bore serious scrutiny but, even if it had, this is a people under no illusions – witness the throngs who took to the streets after the failed CIA/Mossad/MI6 coup in January to stand with their government, and those who formed human chains this week around plausible infrastructural targets following Trump’s schoolyard bully vow to return their “civilisation to the Stone Age (where it belongs)” – about Washington’s agenda.

As for being crippled by sanctions, in an age of drones, hypersonic missiles and asymmetric warfare the mighty US Fleet – the tangerine oaf’s “beautiful armada” – is forced, on pain of consignment to the Gulf seabed, to stand a thousand kilometres from the kill zone …

The USS Gerald R Ford

… see my post of October 2023 on Floating Pointlessness.

Even more significantly, geography, in the stubborn form of its command of a two mile wide ¹¹ choke point vital to global wellbeing, is now the instrument through which Iran is rewriting the rulebook of hegemony to end decades of punitive isolation and the suffering of a proud race strengthened by long tradition and hardened by decades of economic siege; both conferring the moral advantage, in a war of attrition with time on its side, of readiness to absorb more pain than its decadent oppressor.

* * *

1. The corruption of corporate media is systemic, ultimately reliant neither on mendacious practitioners nor conspiracy to deceive – though both can and do exist. I’ve written often on this, such as here and here and here.
2. For more on the Guardian’s cowardly and vindictive treatment of a man whose exposure of state wrongdoing – its extent making him in my book history’s greatest ever journalist – earned it plaudits and a pretty penny, see my posts, Dear Guardian Media Group and Julian, Guardian and the law of volitionality.
3. In fairness to Guardian and Peter Beaumont, even their tepid framing of Israel’s motive for murder in Lebanon puts them, as this Mondoweiss piece shows, ahead of the field – low bar though that is.
4. A motive raised by Alastair Crook, ancillary to the goal of a Greater Israel, is to sow civil war between those loyal to Lebanon’s Sunni prime minister, and the country’s 40-50% Shia.
5. It’s been my view for some time that Iran should acquire a nuclear deterrent. That wins few friends, and not just with folk brainwashed into believing Iran poses a military threat to the West. Many of those who know better are understandably appalled by the thought of yet another state joining the nuclear club. I sympathise but, since 170 Minab schoolgirls would be alive today had Iran possessed such a deterrent, my only doubt on the point is that control of Hormuz may obviate the need for it.
6. For all his genocidal invocation of Amalek, there’s little evidence of Netanyahu being a believer even in the warped sense cabinet blackmailers colleagues like Itamar Ben-Gvr and Bezalel Smotrich are.
7. On the carrot side, Netanyahu and Christian Zionists like Lindsey Graham have appealed to this vainglorious buffoon’s desire to be the one who finally succeeded where previous presidents, though all were tempted, either failed or sensibly balked at. On the stick side it stretches coincidence theory to breaking point to suppose Israel and/or US neocons lack Epstein kompromat  on Trump – though that’s another topic corporate media give a wide and deafeningly silent swerve.
8. This morning a good friend alerted me to this FB post:

   I am writing these words from Israel on April 10 2026, at 1:00 AM, from my home in Jaffa. I live in the heart of an unrestrained war machine that was once, perhaps, a country.
   This is where I live, inside a human‑meat grinder. This is where I was born. This is home.
   When they ask how it happened, tell them that we wanted this war.
   Anyone who hasn’t lived inside the human‑meat grinder cannot understand it — but we were waiting for it. With equal parts anxiety and excitement, we waited for the war to erupt, to set the Middle East ablaze.
   A war with Iran was a forbidden, thrilling fantasy. Generations of [Israeli] Defense Ministers promised to ‘return Lebanon to the Stone Age’, and an entire people swore that ‘Gaza must be flattened’.
   In our dreams, we emptied the West Bank, and in the small hours of the night we prayed to be pushed into that final corner, where we could mutter to ourselves that there was no choice, that the time for the nuclear weapon had come.
   An entire society lost its sanity.
   Armed to the teeth and raining fire and brimstone in every direction, while proclaiming its right to defend itself, violently silencing anyone who dared point at its crimes and sins.
   Reciting to ourselves day and night, possessed, that everyone around us always only want to kill us all, to the very last person, and that they have no other aspirations or desires — and therefore we have no choice but to kill them first. Self‑defense.
   A whole society, truly convinced that any threat near it, small or large, real or imagined, immediate or possible, was a blank check for total destruction of everything around it: villages, cities, or entire countries, along with their inhabitants.
   It’s not October 7, not Hezbollah across the border, not the Iranian nuclear program. These are merely lies that justify our sacred right to destroy.
   We are not “fighting.” Armies do not fight hospitals and ambulances, schools and journalists, energy and water plants and infrastructure that sustains millions of human beings.
   We are destroying — and lying that if the human‑meat grinder stops even for a moment, we will all die.
   When they ask how it happened, tell them that we cheered for the gunpowder. We fought each other to the death over leadership, but we all applauded in unison in support of our planes, tanks, the missile-launching ships.
   We were thankful for the iron and concrete and elevated soldiers to the rank of saints. The army was God.
   War provided order to the world, meaning to things, meaning to life. Meaning to death.
   Tell them that we wanted this war. We waited for it, and from the moment it broke out, we supported it without reservation.
   At no point did we doubt, did we stop to look at the work of our own hands, did we recoil from the blood that stained them, did we wonder where this road leads, did we ask ourselves whether there had ever been another possibility.
   Life in Israel only deteriorated, became more and more unbearable — and the lesson we drew was that we probably hadn’t used enough force. That we had been too soft, too gentle, too compassionate. That we probably hadn’t destroyed enough, and that next time — may it come soon — we would destroy sevenfold.
   We lost the battle against Iran. It doesn’t matter. Flesh was ground-up in the human‑meat grinder, and that is what counts.
   Now we take out our revenge for the loss in Iran on the citizens of Lebanon. More flesh. More and more chunks of flesh taken in the West Bank, all ground-up in the human‑meat grinder.
   The machine’s wheels begin to turn again, to swallow flesh once again in the still-smoldering ruins of Gaza.
   We haven’t ground-up enough flesh. It is never enough.
   I don’t know how this will end. I don’t know if or when the bill will be due for payment, and I don’t know if we will wake from this madness and see clearly everything we have done.
   I don’t know if we ourselves will ever ask, how did this happen, but I know there will be those who will ask — and to them you will say that this is what happens when an entire society descends into madness.
   I will try to hold on here as long as I can, in the heart of this death machine, and call it by its name. To describe things as they look from the inside. Maybe it will help prevent similar horrors in the future.
   The horrors of the present are already too late to stop.
   In the meantime, I am here.
   Tom Zandman, Israeli Citizen.

   Though I rarely visit FB these days, far less comment, I had to reply …

   Outstanding – the more so from one with the courage to say such things within the state he rightly calls a death machine. As I do his compatriot Gideon Levy, and white ANC leaders and supporters (disproportionately Jewish as it happens) who faced the wrath both of Pretoria and their fellow ethno-supremacists in apartheid South Africa, I stand in awe of Tom Zandman.

   … before shamelessly adding a link to this post. Should Mr Zandman read it, I hope he’ll get in touch so I can offer in person my gratitude and admiration.

9. The Houthis, or Ansar Allah, are well placed, should the US-Israeli alliance of distressed convenience opt to continue the offensive, to augment Iran’s control of Hormuz – hence Persian Gulf – with that of Bab el-Mandeb – hence Red Sea and Suez.
10. I omitted China and Russia from the list, despite every sign they are actively helping Iran, because I’ve covered this – and why neither can let Tehran fall to the empire – in posts like that of January this year, asking Why didn’t China prop up Iran’s rial?
11. The Hormuz is twenty-one miles wide at its narrowest point but the waters are shallow, leaving only a two mile strip of navigability for oil tankers and other large ships.