Essay: The Widening War

Israell's Aggression Spreads to Lebanon

Israel’s war on Gaza is metastasizing like a cancer into a broader regional war that will result in more civilian deaths and the further empowerment of ethnic and theocratic nationalists in Israel and across the Middle East.

As we approach a year of fighting in Gaza and the anniversary of the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks, a year that has left more than 41,000 Palestinians dead and nearly 100,000 wounded, Israel has expanded its assault and is now targeting Lebanon in response to Hezbollah rocket attacks that have driven 60,000 Israelis from their homes.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his cabinet have apparently dismissed cease-fire negotiations with Hezbollah, describing the “U.S.-French proposal” as a nonstarter.

"The news about a so-called directive to moderate the fighting in the north is also the opposite of the truth,” a statement said, adding that “The prime minister instructed the IDF to continue fighting with full force, and according to the plans that were presented to him.”

The BBC reports that “a third of Lebanon's population come from families that have already fled their homes at least once, either in Syria or many years ago on land that now forms part of Israel, Gaza or the occupied West Bank.” And Israel’s bombing campaign — and impending ground invasion — are forcing more people to flee their homes, putting “Lebanon on the brink.”

“There is no real option but to end this enormous aerial campaign against Lebanon, and of course Hezbollah to stop with these indiscriminate rockets going into Israel,” Eglund said.

That is not enough, though. What we are witnessing is not new. Israel invaded and occupied southern Lebanon through much of the 1980s and 1990s. It has occupied the West Bank and Gaza for much longer. Its earliest arguments for doing so were strategic, part of a plan to create a buffer between the new nation and hostile neighbors. That history is contested, of course, and Israel’s actions from its inception have helped create the tensions that continue to exist, and that have been exacerbated by a shift from secular leaders to a hard-right coalition of proto-fascists and theocrats who are bent on establishing a “Greater Israel” that includes the Occupied Territories and parts of other Middle Eastern states.

Israel’s actions — and the rationale of its governing elite — closely parallel those of Vladimir Putin and Russia in Ukraine. Putin argues that Ukraine is part of a greater Russia, that it was never independent.

The comparison might seem a stretch, but I think it is supported by an honest retelling of the history that takes into account not just Israeli voices but Palestinian voices, as well, and allow us to address the largely moral questions at the center of a conflict that goes back more than a century and that has roots that go back even farther.

Israelis and their supporters often start the clock on Oct. 7, as if it was a singular event and not part of a broader continuum of violence. Yes, the attack on civilians by Hamas — a non-state actor with support among many Palestinians — was unprecedented in size, resulting in 2,200 deaths. Israel responded quickly and viciously, and beyond all proportion. It has waged a nearly year-long war on the Palestinian people in Gaza, repeatedly violating international law, bombing civilian neighborhoods, schools and universities, hospitals. It has made no effort to protect civilians — despite its declarations to the contrary — and has blamed Hamas for the deaths of Palestinians killed by Israeli bombs and Israeli troops. It has treated civilians as acceptable collateral damage, and has treated its own hostages as game pieces.

Hamas is not innocent. It has shown as little regard for civilian life — in Israel and Gaza — as Israel has shown. It is uninterested in coexistence with Israelis — mirroring the anti-Muslim and anti-Arab racism of the Israeli government with an underlying antisemitism. But Hamas lacks the kind of power wielded by the Israeli Defense Forces and Benjamin Netanyahu’s government, and — this is key — the narrative does not start with Hamas. The group is an outgrowth of Israel’s own policies — the brutal occupation of Gaza, in particular, and the refusal of Israel to live by its own agreements (along with ineptitude on the part of the less-militant Fatah). It’s why many see them as the tip of a spear for the Palestinian movement — to use the language of a young Nelson Mandela — and not as the theocratic terror group they are in practice.

The existence of Hamas — and Hezbollah in Lebanon and whatever connection they have to Iran — should not allow Israel to claim the moral high ground. Nor does the region’s history, which is contested and at the center of this permanent war. The political Zionism that drove Jewish settlement in Palestine was built on an erasure of the Palestinian Arab population that had lived there. European antisemitism, which treated the Jew as an “other,” as non-human, and segregated and killed Jews in large numbers even before the Holocaust, drove Jews like Theodore Herzl to argue for a Jewish homeland. Herzl argued that Jews could not be safe except in a land of their own, which many in the early Zionist movement saw as the original land of Israel.

One problem: The region was already inhabited. The new settlers addressed this by claiming the existing population was backward and undeserving of its own agency, and by buying up as much land as it could. The underlying assumptions ultimately made co-existence impossible. The Palestinians would need to be moved elsewhere, by force if necessary.

A lot happened during the intervening half century — between Herzl’s publication of Der Judenstaat in 1896 and his convening of the First Zionist Congress in 1897 and the declaration of Israel’s independence in 1948 — including the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, the Holocaust and two World Wars. Six million Jews were exterminated in Europe by Adolph Hitler and the Nazis, millions more were imprisoned and ultimately left stateless. The movement to create a Jewish state gained momentum and ultimately led to founding of the state of Israel.

Palestinians see this history differently than Israelis do, calling the war and the formation of the Israeli state “the Nakba” or catastrophe. Hundreds of thousands were forced from their homes and made refugees. They were expected — by the new Israeli government and by much of the West — to be assimilated into the Arab nations in the region, because of a shared language and religion, but those governments made that impossible — both because of cultural differences and because of the political value they derived from pretending at being the protectors of Palestinians.

This, briefly, is the history as I understand it and as I interpret it, and I recount it as context for my contention that Oct. 7, as shocking as it was, was inevitable. Franz Fanon writes about the cleansing nature of violence for the colonized and, while I disagree with his contention that violence of this kind might be justifiable, we cannot dismiss his larger point.

Occupied people will always fight their occupation, will always push back, usually with violence. See Haiti, Algeria, the decades of violence in South Africa, and all of the other revolutions that routed monarchs and tyrants. Even our own history as a nation begins with a rifle shot and a several-years war.

This is what the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. meant when he said “riot is the language of the unheard” — not that riots are justified, but that leaving grievances to fester unaddressed often left the “unheard” feeling they had little choice. He was speaking of the Civil Rights movement, but his point applies to the Palestinian push for self-determination and independence, as well. When you deny a people rights of citizenship, subject them to checkpoints and pen them in massive camps, you are denying them their humanity. This is the “dream deferred” that Langston Hughes writes about, the one that festers and oozes and in the end explodes.

Netanyahu and his enablers say the Israeli assaults on Gaza and Lebanon will destroy Hamas’ and Hezbollah’s operational capacity, that it will leave them inert and safeguard Israel. The reality is that indiscriminate bombing and the killing of civilians do nothing but ratchet up the anger and make the inevitable explosions that much more deadly.