Bodily Harm

C: “The machinery that leads to war is based on treachery and (self-)deceit.”

G: “Self deceit?”

C: “I’ve been reading this one Israeli account of what today is called the Deir Yassin Massacre. In his ‘Memories of an Irgun Fighter’, he describes how the Irgun and Lehi saw the village of Deir Yassin as a hub for insurgents. He says:”

BESIEGED JERUSALEM 1948 - YEHUDA LAPIDOT - DEIR YASSIN

The Deir Yassin affair remained in the headlines for many years, and Menahem Begin never evaded responsibility for the events. He consistently claimed that occupation of the village was the logical response to Arab aggression, whose objective was to exterminate the Yishuv. Whilst expressing regret at the casualties, he argued that they were an unavoidable fact of war. Historians have accepted the view that Begin knew in advance of the attack, ordered the use of the loudspeaker and gave orders not to harm women and children.

C: “The problem was that the village already had a non-agreement pact with the security service in the Israeli Yishuv at the time, the Haganah.”

M: “Let me guess. The battle for the media now becomes a matter of storytelling. Did the vindictive Israeli soldiers armed to the teeth betray the trust of a gullible Arab town and slaughter women and children for no reason, or was the bodycount inflated and in reality only belligerents fought it out.”

C: “Very much so, and that in itself is a matter to be determined. However, as I read his account, I notice the much more obvious: »whose objective was to exterminate the Yishuv« …”

M: “That’s what you mean with self deception. We act on our grossly exaggerated misconceptions and that is what drives us towards war. As human beings, we’d rather fight with someone than talk to him.”

G: “I don’t care if you are Ukrainian, Russian, Israeli or Palestinian. If you pull the trigger on a machine gun in the middle of the night and shoot in the direction of the enemy, and you believe you can avoid civilian casualties, you are an idiot.”

M: “And yet, none of us would endure living as defeated human beings for even a second. It doesn’t matter that the foreigner shooting at you from an elevated position believes she is fighting for her life and the lives of her family and community.

We will always feel attacked, and our counter attack will always be justifiable revenge.”

C: “Nevertheless international law keeps taking about self defence. As if the real reason was not revenge.”

M: “Not exactly revenge. Mutual fear of the other’s goal of destruction is a self-powering machine. Once we realise that we have to kill them before they kill us, they realise they have to kill us before we kill them and vice versa.”

M: “Interjecting here with a comment from the book you found. The events are unfolding in the context of the Arab Revolt in 1936”

BESIEGED JERUSALEM 1948 - YEHUDA LAPIDOT - INITIAL ENCOUNTER WITH THE IRGUN

The following day Arabs attacked the Jewish neighborhoods adjacent to Jaffa, murdering six more Jews and injuring dozens. Thousands fled to the center of Tel Aviv, but there was insufficient housing to accommodate everyone and makeshift tents had to be erected in a little park at the end of Sheinkin Street. Witnessing the scene as a boy of eight had a profound effect on me. I could not imagine what the refugees had done to make the Arabs kill them indiscriminately. But what most upset me was the fact that the Jews had not succeeded in defending themselves or retaliating.

M: “I think this is the single most important factor: How we are shaped in our childhood to perpetuate conflict. Later in life such events provide the backbone to stride against the entire world. Vilification and rejection by the world only strengthens you in your loyalty to those lost and forgotten by the same world.”

They all murmured for a little while. War was in a depressing way monotonous. Gerald gave this thought form.

G: “Most of what is written in the volatile media can be dispensed with summarily as devotional fiction. Hopes and dreams about our team winning and their team losing.

What remains is a sad and sorry collection of heartless and rudderless concoction of political realism. It amounts to a series of manoeuvres in broad daylight aiming at raising the hegemonic flag over the corpses of the un-colonisable.”

Christine high-fived him.

C: “That’s what been killing me for years now. Must we really accept that brutality prevails?”

M: “Not brutality, Christine, calculation. That you put aside your emotions and think like a machine. But isn’t that what the military always has been about? Not losing your head when the enemy attacks? Strive for dominance?”

G: “Forget about AI. The machines won ages ago. Our leadership surrendered to their war games before any of us were born and we were never informed.

That is the sad thing about Trump. Not that he is “insane” or whatever else people come up with, but his boyish hope that by acting unpredictable, he can beat the machine. But every single command centre on the planet can outdo him in inhuman surprise manoeuvres. He is a human trying to play a machine’s game. He will loose.”

M: “Gerald, gut reaction, right? We feel the chilling cold when we gain insight into the minds of military men. Ethics to them are a matter of Geneva conventions and even those are balanced against operational objectives. But political rights, forget it. Our interests must prevail.”

G: “See here: I followed a trail from Antiwar.com to The Guardian where a Daniel Levy has an article about Israel’s talk on Greater Israel. There is the usual mention of Netanyahu as the schemer with a plan.”

WHAT BENJAMIN NETANYAHU AND THE ISRAELI RIGHT REALLY MEAN WHEN THEY INVOKE ‘GREATER ISRAEL’ - DANIEL LEVY

When it’s invoked on the Israeli right, “Greater Israel” is often seen as a purely territorial concept: an attempt to increase the size of territory that Israel claims as its own.

The finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, has called for Israel to “expand to Damascus”, and Netanyahu himself claimed to feel “very much connected” to this territorial vision of Greater Israel.

G: “The goal is not land but regional hegemony, though.”

However, Greater Israel should be seen as a geopolitical and strategic concept as much as a territorial one. The acquisition and control of land is, in many respects, the obvious and easy part. Israel’s prime minister is pursuing something both more ambitious and more sophisticated than the simple control of territory – a project of dominion that is made up of new alliances, underwritten by hard power dependency.

[…]

A recently published piece in Hebrew from two high-ranking figures at the official strategy institute of the Israel Defense Forces helpfully filled in some of the blanks. They argued that Israel’s military would not only conquer territory directly, but also achieve “operational control even in areas far from Israel’s borders, without occupying and holding territory”. Israel would be granted “a superior status as a kind of ‘queen’ of the jungle” (it is not uncommon to hear the rest of the Middle East referred to as “the jungle” in Israeli political discourse), establishing “a regional order that will further Israel’s goals”.

G: “So far so good. This is the kind of warnings that usually greets us when faced with military might. Daniel Levy is not a nobody with an opinion. He has been advisor to the Israeli government and participated as negotiator in the Oslo II Accord.

What interests me is taking a step up the ladder. I read the IDF article he linked to.”

Christine jumped up and waved timeout. She wanted to read too, and silence descended upon the little enclave at the cafe.

C: “Why do military analysts always sound like relics from the past? They all deal in balance of power analysis and quote Kissinger.”

M: “Kissinger does create a special reality here. The stable versus the unstable regional system. Revolutionary France was unstable, because the revolutionaries did not accept the status quo neither in France nor outside it. The Marxist-Leninist revolution in Russia accomplished the same: A system of thought that could not be put to rest except by defeat. That’s how Kissinger sees it, according to the article.”

G: “My dusty old book on International Relations concur. It adds how Kissinger believed the solution was a mix of limited war and diplomacy. But the key is his mindset about stability which can only take place when the very principles of the international system is accepted by all: Legitimacy.

Inject an army of revolutionaries who fundamentally deny a global system comprised of nobles holding hereditary power, nothing those nobles could feed theme could ever satisfy their hunger for change.”

CONTENDING THEORIES OF INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS BY JAMES E. DOUGHERTY - CHAPTER 3 - KISSINGER

Legitimacy implies an acceptance of the framework of the international order by all major powers.

[…]

Disputes no longer concerned the adjustment of differences within an accepted framework, but the validity of the framework itself; the political contest had become doctrinal: the balance of power which had operated so intricately throughout the eighteenth century suddenly lost its flexibility and the European equilibrium came to seem an insufficient protection to powers faced by a France which proclaimed the incompatibility of its political maxims with those of the other states.

G: “When Kissinger talks about limited war, it is in contrast with the huge destructive ability of nuclear powers. His idea is that instead of an arms race where the means are out of proportion with the desired result - annihilating half the planet for a symbolic gain - he pictures a return to the 1800s limited warfare. The problem then becomes ideology: It provides a reason to never accept being temporarily beaten.”

Kissinger establishes three requirements for limited war capabilities.

1. The limited war forces must be able to prevent the potential aggressor from creating a fait accompli;
2. They must be of a nature to convince the aggressor that their use, while invoking an increasing risk of all-out war, is not an inevitable prelude to it;
3. They must be coupled with a diplomacy which succeeds in conveying that all-out war is not the sole response to aggression and that there exists a willingness to negotiate a settlement short of unconditional surrender.

[…]

Like Morgenthau, Kissinger views with disfavor the injection of ideology into the international system. Ideology not only contributes to the development of unlimited national objectives, but it eventually creates states whose objective is to the overthrow of the existing international system.

[…]

Although wars occurred, nations did not risk national survival and were able instead to use limited means to achieve limited objectives.

C: “Ah, so that’s why those Israeli generals like Kissinger: Iran is driven by ideology and their quest is the destruction of the nation of Israel.”

G: “Exactly.”

C: “So one example of a an ideology impossible to integrate in a world order would be: The system is flagrantly unjust to the unprivileged classes. It is fundamentally flawed.”

G: “That would certainly be one kind of mentality that could not be integrated in the 18th-19th century mindset, yes.”

C: “And hence would fall into the category of revolutionary surges that Kissinger found problematic.”

G: “Yes. Decency and justice are ideas festering in the unprivileged classes.”

M: “And the Israeli article that The Guardian quoted?”

G: “It focusses on Kissingers worry about breakdown of order.”

QUEEN OF THE JUNGLE? - ON THE ROLE OF ISRAEL’S MILITARY POWER IN ESTABLISHING A NEW REGIONAL ORDER IN THE MIDDLE EAST – BRIGADIER GENERAL DR. EYAL PECHT AND LT. COL. DR. ITAI JIMENIS

“When peace, in the form of avoiding war, was the central goal of a power or group of powers, the international system was at the mercy of the most ruthless actor among them” (Kissinger, 1957:1).

[…] one central question can be identified that troubled Henry Kissinger throughout most of his adult years – how to ensure order in the international system in a way that would prevent a deterioration into anarchic situations, situations similar to those he and his family experienced in Europe on the eve of the Nazis’ rise to power.

[…]

Kissinger saw the USSR in revolutionary France of the 19th century and the West’s attempt to build a stable and secure international order in the efforts of European countries at the time to restore the monarchical order

M: “… As we just talked about. "

Kissinger attributed a central role to military force in creating what he called an "equilibrium," a system of checks and balances, among the actors in the international system, which would help those interested in preserving the status quo prevent the revolutionary actor from trying to work towards a fundamental change in the order.

G: “They see eye to eye with Kissinger, and how could they not. The established order is one where Israel exists, period. Anything even resembling a negation of that fact will to them seem like someone upending the framework of order.”

C: “But seen from the point of view of the revolutionaries in Iran, it is the forced legality of erecting a state in the middle of someone else’s home that is a flagrant violation of the rules of an ordered society.”

M: “One person’s order is another’s chaos.”

G: “On a larger scale, the rules-based order stem from the fact that the US and the USSR recognised Israel along with many others.”

M: “Which did little to alleviate the perception of colonialism in the Middle East. If you are a colonial power, you have the right to decide who is to gain freedom and who is not.”

G: “Holocaust changed everything. It provided a huge reversal of policies in the US in direction of support for Israel. Anyway, back to the article.”

The return of war to the heart of national life in Israel is not a wishful thinking, but prolonged regional fighting is expected to accompany us for the foreseeable future. The war changed the role of the IDF in Israel's national security, but it now has the responsibility to continue to change accordingly - conceptually, organizationally, and resourcefully.

G: “Then he goes on describing how IDF in the following months after October 7 2023 changed and evolved. Whether by design or by chance, the IDF was thrown into a game board where it did things commensurable with it being a new heavyweight player in the region.”

Some of those who recognize the increase in Israel’s military power and the change in its role in the region are even calling for the creation of a new regional coalition to balance it and limit its freedom of action.

[…]

The negative change in Israel's image in the eyes of some countries in the region is not the only change that does not benefit Israel. Another country in the region whose position has strengthened is Turkey

G: “In other words, Israel is becoming a little Middle East superpower. Note how he actually calls that a negative change. He sees the wheels and cogs kicking into motion around Israel and ascribes that to the increased display of strength on behalf of Israel.”

C: “The underlying assumption is of course that they really can sustain the level of attack on multiple fronts.”

G: “The truth of that is not off the table in any way. But anyway, these military men are in many ways applying traditional analysis to new situations. Here is Turkey as an example:”

On the one hand, some warn that the current time is an opportune time for Turkey to realize its neo-Ottoman ambitions for the purpose of re-establishing a hegemonic empire.

M: “In other words, Turkey aims for the same thing as Israel: Hegemony.”

G: “You clearly walk away from the article with the feeling of having peeked inside the mind of a chess playing robot. But of course the guys and girls at West Point or in Russia or NATO are doing exactly the same.”

M: “In contrast to the think tanks who for reasons of hypocritical ideological veneer constantly reminds us that the enemy is after something completely different from what they want, namely a world seeped in injustice and exploitation. At least the military are frank about the goals of the game: Hegemony.”

Either way, the immediate meaning for the IDF is that it is no longer possible to suppress engagement with Turkey and that we must examine the integration of engagement with it as a component of our military strategy in the coming years.

C: “So Turkey is on the list.”

G: “By military logical deduction, yes. And about the jungle metaphor…”

At least until the war, Israel saw itself as a villa in the jungle, a concept coined many years ago by former Prime Minister Ehud Barak to describe the challenge of the existence of a progressive and modern Israel (“the villa”) in a hostile and dangerous environment (“the jungle”).

[…]

No longer. While the jungle remained, albeit with different characteristics (some better and some more challenging), Israel seems to have chosen to integrate into the space. To tie its fate to it and therefore also to influence its image. A choice in which Israel’s unique military power gives it a superior status, as a kind of "queen" of the jungle.

Miranda laughed.

C: “There’s a military man for you. It behooves the proud politicians to see themselves as above the animal kingdom, but an army guy? He knows the jungle law more than anybody. He is part of the jungle.”

M: “The greater picture is unchanged, though. The Israel-Palestine conflict partly grew out of the age of colonialism. The never-ending uncertainty of being a Jew across Europe, Asia, even America was the other part. It fostered a determination to survival that bred life into Zionism. It is also a world view the Zionists are caught inside.”

C: “… but less so because they can’t imagine fostering friendship, but because they ended up in their own ideological trench opposite their enemy’s ideological trenches.”

G: “In this case ideology is the intellectual instrument that can provide us with new spectacles that makes us see how we have become subdued under a hegemon.”

M: “Yes.”

They looked up, then down again. Someone started to collect coffee cups. How anybody could find joy in thinking like a cold monster was beyond them. The night looked bleak and saying good evening and go their separate ways would not improve matters.

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