TheAltWorld Netanyahu’s tall-tree climbdown
The Beirut attack is Israeli escapism at its starkest and most cynical
After three days of threatening to invade Beirut and destroy its infrastructure including its airport and vowing to destroy Hezbollah, Israeli warplanes carried out a ‘make-believe’ attack on a building near the party’s consultative council in Haret Hreik in the southern suburbs and claimed to have killed the person (whose was not confirmed by this writing) responsible for the killing of the children in Majdal Shams.
This is Israeli escapism at its starkest and most cynical. It confirms the low morale of Netanyahu’s army and serves as a retraction of all those threats to avoid a retaliatory response by Hezbollah deep inside occupied Palestine.
Hezbollah has scores of military commanders. Who is to say the figure targeted for assassination, Fuad Shukur, was behind the missile– which Hezbollah categorically insisted it did not fire — that hit Majdal Shams?
Netanyahu needed a way of backing off and climbing down from the tall tree of hyped-up threats, and sought to find one by making up this assassination operation and talking it up.
The assassination of a Hezbollah military commander is nothing new. If reports of Shukur’s martyrdom are confirmed, he will not be the first or the last. This is a long war on the Lebanese front, and Hezbollah’s retaliatory response will most certainly come.
Netanyahu, perhaps the most globally recognised serial liar in modern history, made up the lie that Hezbollah was behind the Majdal Shams missile and hyped up the threatened retaliation in the hope of scaring the party into halting the damaging war of attrition it has been waging in Galilee for the past nine months. But these lies did not wash, nor affect Hezbollah’s position or its seriousness about retaliating in kind to any Israeli aggression.
Netanyahu now says it’s over, meaning he will suffice with this attack, withhold his threats to turn Beirut into ‘another Gaza’ or send Lebanon back to the stone age, and rely on the US and its envoy Amos Hochstein to rescue him from his predicament. But Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah will not throw him a lifeline, nor halt the war until there is a full and permanent Israeli ceasefire and withdrawal from the Gaza Strip.
Israel’s failure to carry out its threatened land assault on Lebanon ‘for now’ reflects the sense of haplessness and dejection afflicting its political and military echelons. Never in the history of the conflict on the Lebanese front has the Israeli army been so reluctant and hesitant to act on its threats, and the reason for that is fear of the Hezbollah-led resistance’s retaliation.
I disagree with claims that the cause of the delay was the rise in domestic tensions and threat of civil war caused by the assault by right-wing Jewish extremists on the Sde Teiman army base to free nine Israeli soldiers accused of gang-raping a prisoner from the Gaza Strip. Such tensions between rival camps in the occupier state have long been present and escalating and often led to clashes. They are not new. What is new is Netanyahu’s anxiety over the scale and effect of the resistance’s certain response to a ground assault on Lebanon.
Netanyahu received a startling message from his supporter and emissary to Lebanon, Hochstein of the US, saying any invasion of Lebanon would trigger an immediate invasion of Galilee by Hezbollah’s elite Radwan brigade and a massive barrage of done and missile strikes on Israeli military and civilian infrastructure.
It was surprising to hear members of the interim Lebanese government saying in effect there was no need to retaliate as the attack was limited and did not target Beirut airport. That is certainly not how it is seen by Hezbollah and its regional allies, especially the Yemenis who were anyway poised to retaliate for the Israeli attack on the port of Hodeida last week. This could come at any moment. Deferral is a purely logistical matter to select the most appropriate targets and keep the Israelis unsettled by prolonging the waiting period.
The martyrs of Majdal Shams, proud Syrians and Arabs from the majestic Golan Heights, will not be avenged by their murderer Benjamin Netanyahu, but by the heroes of resistance in Lebanon who are ready and waiting for the major, and maybe final, showdown.
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