How Far Will Israel Go?
Pedro Canales
Israel continues bombing Lebanon and promises to “go to the end.” But what is that “end”? French President Emmanuel Macron has asked Israel to agree to a ceasefire with Hezbollah and to stop the war in Lebanon. British Prime Minister Keir Starmer follows the same line. The White House, in a statement sent to the UN General Assembly in New York, declared that “the situation between Lebanon and Israel since October 8, 2023, is intolerable and presents an unacceptable risk of a broader regional escalation.” A joint statement from France, the United States, and other allies of Israel calls for a “21-day ceasefire between the Israeli army and Hezbollah.”
All this is nothing more than words, perhaps filled with good intentions, but nothing more. The proverb attributed to the Roman philosopher and politician Marcus Tullius Cicero, “money is the nerve of war,” is still relevant more than two thousand years later. Cicero knew what he was talking about; war was the backbone of the Roman Empire, its raison d’être, and the guarantee of survival.
Money continues to flow uninterrupted to Israel from London’s financial district, from Parisian banks, and from the U.S. House of Representatives. Money means financial flow, cyber capital, and war materials. Israel will receive an aid package of $8.7 billion from the United States. Other allies of the Jewish state also provide arms and money, though in smaller amounts.
Curiously, Washington also announced these days a military aid package of $375 million to Ukraine, which adds to the $61 billion unlocked five months ago that had been withheld by the House of Representatives. The three U.S. military donation packages go to Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan, totaling over $90 billion this year. What do these three recipients have in common? The answer lies in global strategy and geopolitics.
Ukraine and Taiwan make sense because the former is at war with Russia, and the latter is threatened by a potential conflict with China. Both Russia and China are considered by the United States as “current or potential enemies.” But Israel, why? It is Tel Aviv that initiates wars. Neither Syria, Lebanon, Yemen, nor Iran has declared a state of war against Israel; on the contrary, it is the Israeli military and its black legions that have opened war fronts with all of them.
It is difficult to understand what Israel wants and how far it is willing to go in its warlike escalation. It is a country that has evolved from being a refuge for Holocaust survivors, an event that took place in Europe and was perpetrated by Europeans, to an ultra-militarized state whose goal seems more to impose a Peace of the Dead in its entire geographical vicinity and reign as the sole master.
A few days ago, the Community of Sant’Egidio, an organization used by the Vatican to intervene in global conflicts, met to discuss the conflicts in the Mediterranean and the possible solution to the Arab-Israeli conflict with all its variants and actors: Israel, Syria, Iran, Palestine, Yemen, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis, etc.
At the meeting, there was talk of the hypothesis that the current Iranian regime might collapse, thus deflating its influence in Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Yemen, and Palestine, which some believe would bring peace to the Middle East in the medium term.
This opinion did not seem to be shared by former Tunisian President Moncef Marzouki, who argued that “Netanyahu’s solution is apartheid for the Palestinians,” meaning that there will not be two states, as Western allies of Tel Aviv would like to make us believe. For Marzouki, “given the rightward shift in Israeli opinion over the past twenty years, the tribal people are convinced that the annexation of the West Bank is inevitable.” This would be Israel’s first scenario: annex Gaza, the West Bank, some regions of Syria such as the Golan Heights, and, why not, the Sinai, to form Greater Israel.
This scenario would explain the calls made by Israeli Zionism for all Jews worldwide to settle in Israel, where the state offers them settlements on Palestinian lands, evicting their inhabitants and owners, all protected by the army. Ten years ago, Israel’s population numbered 7,794,000, and today it has reached 9,300,000. If Tel Aviv absorbs the 5.5 million Palestinians from Gaza and the West Bank into its “Greater State,” the population will reach around 15 million, and the repression of the Palestinians will become a simple internal issue about which none of its allies will say anything.
However, this is not the only plausible scenario. Over the decades, Israel has become a battering ram, a giant, sophisticated U.S. military base in the heart of the Middle East. The alliances Washington has forged in the Near East region have shifted from Shah Reza Pahlavi’s Iran to the generals of Turkey, who have controlled power over the last century in old Constantinople, sometimes directly and other times through allied parties. These roots of the American military-industrial complex in the region, be it Iran or Turkey, are not entirely reliable for Pentagon and White House strategists. Israel, on the other hand, is trustworthy.
If this second scenario is part of the “hidden plan” of international Zionism, a variant feared by those who continue to denounce the secret resolutions of the First Zionist Congress held in Basel (Switzerland) in 1897, exposed by the pamphlet “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” the wars in Gaza and Lebanon will only be a step in the chain. The “secret weapons” Israel has begun to use make us fear the worst.
