Following the war in Gaza, you often feel like you’re going crazy, and not just because of the daily atrocities carried out by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF).
No, it’s that it feels like you’re stuck in a time loop, a geopolitical Groundhog Day where every week or so the same pattern unfolds: Israel slaughters dozens of Palestinian civilians while escalating things to the brink of regional war, Washington tut-tuts and loudly announces a cease-fire deal it claims is backed by Israel and is oh-so-close to being finalized, at which point Israel rejects the deal and continues bombing and escalating, prompting calls to cut Israel off from US military support entirely — which the White House ignores, letting us repeat the cycle all over again.
This is exactly what’s happened this week. Israel has effectively started a war with Hezbollah in Lebanon, launching a massive bombing campaign against the country that killed more than five hundred people in a single day, most of them civilians, including fifty children. Though Hezbollah has not quite responded in kind yet, launching a limited amount of rockets at Israeli military bases and some cities, things are close to tipping over the edge, with Israel threatening a ground invasion and Iran’s president ominously warning that “Hezbollah cannot stand alone” against it.
To prevent the Middle East from erupting into all-out war, President Joe Biden and his administration, together with a handful of allied leaders, has put forward a twenty-one-day-long cease-fire proposal that it says Israel supports, while publicly backing Israel’s actions. The deal would, depending on who you listen to, either be unconnected to a deal between Israel and Hamas or possibly serve as an on-ramp to one, or even see Israel announce an end to its systematic destruction of Gaza, the main condition under which Hezbollah has said it would end the rocket attacks that are ostensibly the reason Israel is now…
La suite est à lire sur: jacobin.com
Auteur: Branko Marcetic
