US Neocons & Israel’s far Right: Part 1

In March this year Jerusalem Post ran a piece by Avi Gil under the title, Ben-Gvr is good for the Palestinians. While acknowledging that Netanyahu is a prisoner of Zionism’s far Right, it rightly claims that this constrains him on tactics rather than goals: that the old fox shares the Ben-Gvr and Smotrich dream of a Greater Israel – ultimately from the Nile to the Euphrates, Jerusalem to Damascus – but given his druthers would be less obvious about it. ¹

Whoever explains Netanyahu’s credo as mere opportunism takes his job too lightly. In his long reign he has doggedly defended his ideological positions and maneuvered daunting pressures and constraints. He worked tirelessly to put off a decision on the West Bank ² and assumed that time is on Israel’s side; that a better geopolitical reality would emerge down the road to provide Israel with more territory and fewer Palestinians …

… Netanyahu’s power has eroded. Ben-Gvir and his ilk allow him to sit as prime minister, and deal with his legal entanglements from an advantaged perch, but deny him flexibility and forbid him to even hint at territorial compromise with the Palestinians. ³

Under Ben-Gvir’s duress, Netanyahu must unequivocally retract his false promises from the past, and can no longer feign commitment to the two-state formula. He withstood the heat for years but, now captive to the messianic Right, his genius for concealing the ideology that guides him is collapsing.

Gaza shows how the Israeli-Palestinian conflict could spark a wider war, intensifying clamor for a resolution. Israeli rigidity prompts the world to consider enforcing a solution from outside, thus bringing Israel closer to the two-state solution.

Two remarks. First, that last sentence is the basis for the claim in the title that Ben-Gvr is “good for the Palestinians”. (A huge act of faith on Avi Gil’s part, as we’ll see.) Second, that a two state solution seems light years away should not be read as endorsement, given a theological divide on the matter, of One-State True Believers. For now and the foreseeable, both are off-the scale unlikely, though this appears to have eluded Mr Gil:

Now that Ben-Gvir has unmasked Netanyahu’s ideological intransigence, what option do the two leave for a very concerned world other than dictating how to end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict?

What other option? Avi Gil posed this rhetorical question – as if it allowed but one conceivable answer – in March, i.e. before Iran’s April and more importantly its October 1st strike. Of which I have on at least three occasions said:

In its capacity to slice through Iron Dome and David’s Sling, Tehran has telegraphed in sterner terms than those of April that Zionist impunity is over. No Western asset in the Middle East is untouchable. Be it an RAF base in Cyprus supplying intel for the IDF, a US warship in the eastern Med, the oil fields of Arab autocracies, ships in the Hormuz choke point or, indeed, the apartheid state itself – all are vulnerable …

I revisited the matter most recently on October 12 – Does Israel have a death wish? – in reply to a piece the previous day in The Economist  which told us that Israel:

… could hit leadership, missiles, oil—or the nuclear option, Iran’s enrichment facilities.

But Iran can, and has promised that it will, hit back on all of those options. After pointing this out I added:

I don’t say this would necessarily stop a regime of do-or-die fundamentalists with the scent in their nostrils of a Greater Israel from Nile to Euphrates, Jerusalem to Damascus. Just that the uncharacteristic delay in Israel’s response – not even a first anniversary IOU for October 7 – lends itself to the possibility that True Promise 2 brought a touch of sobriety to, and focused some at least of the hearts and minds in, the control centres of Jerusalem, Tel Aviv and more importantly Washington …

Was I indulging in wishful thinking of my own? Here’s Britain’s Independent newspaper a few hours ago:

The Independent, today, October 16. Click on screenshot to access the piece

It is far from clear that a THAAD – Terminal High Altitude Area Defense – battery could do what Iron Dome and US warships with state of the art anti ballistics kit could not on October 1st. But that’s not the point, is it? Look at the kicker to that Independent header. The THAAD requires US personnel – a hundred, says the Pentagon – to operate it. Should Iran opt to take it out in reply to Israel’s yet to materialise response to True Promise 2, Americans could be going home in flag draped coffins.

And that is the point: Washington has signalled to Iran (and by extension the other members of a de facto Axis of Resistance, namely Russia, China and DPRK) a red-lined double-down. ⁴

Since Russia has S400 surface-to-air missiles in Iran, and since they mirror the THAAD situation in requiring Russian operators, things appear to be speeding more towards confrontation than Avi Gil’s pipe-dream of ‘a very concerned world’ overcoming its very serious differences to bang Israeli and Palestinian heads together for a two-state or any other kind of solution.

Which leaves us with two – or perhaps three – questions:

• How high are the stakes for the US empire and its Israeli beachhead in the middle east? (This implies another: to what extent are the secular goals of a Washington in frightening denial of its own decline in darkly satanic alignment with the messianic vision of men like Ben-Gvr, Smotrich and their nominal boss?)
• How high are the stakes for the ‘Axis of Resistance’?

All matters to be explored, unless events overtake me, in part 2.

* * *

1. For brevity I’ve edited all quoted passages, including selfies.
2. Avi Gil seems blind to a military reality I noted in my last post but one:

   Ben-Gvr has armed the illegal settlers of the West Bank. Since they are 800,000 strong, and regard the Bible as a deed of entitlement to the land they stole, any attempt to enforce UN Resolution 2334 will – when military wisdom requires an attacker to outnumber a determined defender three to one – call for a force of some 2.5 million.

   Actually this, taken from remarks by Alastair Crooke – former UK diplomat and arguably the most deeply informed of all Western commentators on the region – overstates the case. For one thing the 800,000 figure includes infants and elderly. More importantly the settlers are dispersed, and “armed” does not equate to “combat trained”. But the wider point stands: to ignore the obstacle posed by their do or die presence to any imposed settlement betrays a weak grasp of situational realities.

3. A few weeks before October 7 last year, Israel’s liberal Haaretz wrote under the header, Netanyahu Unleashed a Beast to Secure Immunity. He Can No Longer Control It.

   Netanyahu legitimized the darkest forces in Israeli society to pardon himself from his criminal convictions. While he can manage the messianic persecutors of LGBTQ people, he can’t rein in the pyromaniacs hellbent on igniting conflict with the Palestinians, or the assassins of the justice system who have polluted his base

   Why can’t he “rein in the pyromaniacs”? Because (a) they can crash his fragile coalition the moment he displeases them; (b) when he leaves office he faces criminal charges that could jail him for the rest of his days. See this Jerusalem Post article of May 2022.

4. Some say the THAAD delivery is a quid pro quo in return for Israel delaying its retaliation against Iran, with attendant soaring of oil prices, till after the US elections. I don’t know that, they don’t, and until there’s concrete proof I see little advantage in guessing. Ditto on how much Pentagon/Lloyd Austin prudence on the one hand, the hard core Zionism of Blinken, Sullivan et al on the other, are at odds. Still less on which will prevail. Amid the fog and smoke and mirrors I’ve grown tired of idle speculation, as distinct from the very necessary sketching out of distinct if alarming possibilities.