Middle East on the brink as Israel and Iran face off

Tel Aviv’s muscle flexing in the region is running out of credit with history

It might be useful here to look at the long term, and leave the short aside for a change, as we consider the dangerous turn that events in the Middle East have taken this week, with Israel and Iran seeming on the verge of locking horns in all out war.

We have watched, and daily so, the relentless brutalities inflicted on and the unspeakable suffering endured by the people of Gaza since Israel launched its ongoing war there a year ago, and now we are being made to watch the same brutalities and human suffering inflicted on the people of Lebanon since Israel’s invasion of their country on Tuesday — an invasion preceded by the death of well over a thousand, the injury of roughly 6,000 and the displacement of more than a million people there.

In Lebanon, this is Israel’s first act. The worst, we all know, is yet to come.

It beggars belief that an entity, accredited as a member state of the United Nations, can tell the world that there is no red line it is unwilling to cross — and get away with it.

This column last week probed the question of whether Israel, propelled by the messianic impulses of its current leaders, has become stark raving mad. Perhaps a better question to ask this week is whether this entity has become, as Hannah Arendt presciently predicted in 1944 it would indeed become, a “modern-day Sparta”, much like its namesake in antiquity, the city-state in Ancient Greece whose ideals of military supremacy echoed through the ages and went on in modern times to play a role in framing the tenets of National Socialism and Nietzschean philosophy. (Nietzsche, who believed that war was a prerequisite of happiness and that people should be socialised to accept it, wrote: “One renounces the good life when one renounces war”.)

The annoying (yes, that’s the right word here) fact about Israel’s perpetration of daily atrocities against civilians in its conduct of war in Gaza and Lebanon is that Americans — the folks whose tax dollars have indirectly enabled these atrocities penetration in the first place — have become numb and ceased to care. Annoyingly, they once did.

High-profile war crimes trials

Consider this. On March 16, 1968, a group of US soldiers killed 504 unarmed villagers during the war in Vietnam, a war crime dubbed the My Lai Massacre, that shocked America and finally led to the convening of a much publicised court martial whose proceedings were keely followed by the entire nation And, in like manner, when on Nov. 19, 2005, a group of US Marines killed 24 civilians in the city of Haditha during the Iraq war, the incident led to one of the most high-profile war crimes trials in American history.

The legacy of the massacre of 504 Vietnamese and 24 Iraqi civilians by American service members still lives on in the collective memory of engaged Americans to this day. Yet this is how many civilians Israel’s military forces have been killing on a slow weekend in Gaza over the last year and in Lebanon in recent weeks.

Israel does that because it feels it can — with impunity, and answer to no one.

Now it has needled Iran — with an escalating series of provocations, including the killing of Ismail Haneya in the country’s capital and the leader of Hezbollah in a southern Beirut suburb — to a point where Tehran responded by sending ballistic missiles flying into Israel on Tuesday, an act that the Zionist state will now present to the world as a putative casus belli to go for Iran’s jugular.

It is a fool’s errand to speculate on where the region will go from here on, in the coming weeks. But what we do know is that today, with Hezbollah’s logistics and communications infrastructure crippled, with much of its arsenal of rockets and missile launchers taken out and with many of its senior military commanders, including its top leadership, killed, Israel now has a free hand in Lebanon, much as it has had in Gaza over the last year.

Israel’s bullying tactics

In a speech on Monday, Israel’s prime minister boasted, in a claim he had made several times in the past, that “There’s no place in the Middle East Israel cannot reach”.

That’s modern-day Sparta talk echoing the talk of historical Sparta. That Sparta, you see, was built as a city-state, roughly around 500BC, on land expropriated from its native people, the Helots, whom the Spartans went on to enslave and treat with indiscriminate brutality in order to deter a slave revolt from taking place against its rule.

What finally brought Sparta down was not an uprising by its subjugated people or by an invading outside power but by the progressive corrosion of its soul as a polity, a polity that worshipped and anchored its sense of collective self in the ideal of military supremacy and in its status as the, well, let’s say, the neighbourhood bully looking to beat up on kids less powerfully built than he.

Israel’s bullying tactics in the modern Middle East, I say, are being done on borrowed historical time.

— Fawaz Turki is a noted academic, journalist and author based in Washington DC. He is the author of The Disinherited: Journal of a Palestinian Exile