'IIsrael is not occupying Lebanon, it is liberating it. Therefore declared France's greatest liberal philosopher Bernard-Henri Levy Israeli tanks rolled across the border and its warplanes bombed villages in the south and residential districts in Beirut. “There are moments in history,” he said happily.'Aggrandizement' is a necessity and a virtue.” For Levy, liberating Israel liberates not only Lebanon, but much of the Middle East.
Levy is not the only one unhappy with Israel's widespread military offensive. For many, Israel is waging war not merely in “self-defense,” but in the words of President Isaac Herzog “to save Western civilization, to save the values of Western civilization,” a claim echoed by many of its supporters. Gaza, its hospitals and universities destroyed and 40,000 people killed? 2,000 people killed in Lebanon in a fortnight and a fifth of its population displaced? Collateral damage on the way to saving civilization.
I don't need to say this, but since it has become commonplace to portray any critic of Israel's wars in Gaza and Lebanon as supporting Hamas or Hezbollah, or celebrating the massacre of October 7th last year, I say what Hamas did was barbaric. That, as I wrote at the time, “Hamas represents a betrayal of Palestinian beliefs and a threat to Jews”. The same can be said about Hezbollah.
And yet, as of 7 October 2023, the Prime Minister of Israel and much of his government is far more pro-Hamas than I ever was or ever wanted to be. “Anyone who wants to prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state should support Hamas and transfer money to Hamas.” Benjamin Netanyahu told a Likud meeting in 2019. “To block the two-state option,” observed Gershon HaCohen, a former Israeli general who supported Netanyahu's policy for many years, “he is making Hamas his closest partner. Obviously, Hamas is an enemy. Presumably, it is an ally.”
Israel's support for Hamas goes back decades, as a senior CIA agent told UPI 20 years ago, “an attempt to use a competing religious alternative to divide and dilute support for the strong, secular PLO.” This strategy was so successful that Hamas took power in Gaza in 2006, and the Palestinian Authority was cut in two, with Hamas controlling Gaza and Fatah the West Bank.
In recent years, the The Times of Israel Observed “Israel has allowed suitcases containing millions of Qatari funds to enter Gaza through Gaza since 2018”, while practically turning a “blind eye to incendiary balloons and rocket attacks from Gaza”. On October 7, the day after the assassination, it added: “The concept of indirectly strengthening Hamas has gone up in smoke.”
Hamas claimed responsibility for the October 7 massacre. But Israel helped develop it for the express purpose of denying the Palestinians a state. Now, in an attempt to undo its earlier work, it has laid waste to Gaza. Israel must “enact another Nakba [catastrophe]”, emphasizes Hacohen. “Kazans must be evicted from their homes for good”
Yet, as cynical as it may be, there is nothing exceptional about Israel's strategy. For decades, Western governments have sought to exploit Islam to further their political agendas, from funding international jihadists to ousting the Red Army in Afghanistan after the Soviet invasion of secular France in 1979. Encourages the building of prayer rooms in factories, in relation to Islam, in the words of Paul Djodin, Minister of Immigration in Valéry Giscard d'Estaing's government, “a stabilizing factor that turns believers away from defection, crime or membership of trade unions or revolutionary parties”. Such policies often created a space in which radical Islamic movements could flourish. We still live with the fallout from this strategy.
Netanyahu's aim is to expand Israel's wars and threaten to turn Lebanon into another Gaza, not to “liberate” anything or anyone, but to maintain control internally and externally. The lessons of previous invasions of Lebanon in 1978, 1982 and 2006 should be clear enough. In the first two cases, Israel invaded to confront the Palestine Liberation Organization, and in the third to try to eliminate Hezbollah, which emerged with Iranian support in response to the 1982 invasion and occupation. Each invasion has been marked by considerable bloodshed – in 1982, 3,500 Palestinians and Lebanese Shiites were massacred in two Beirut refugee camps, Sabra and Shatila, by Lebanese Christian Phalangist militias allied with Israel – and no one could call “liberation”. ”.
There is also a deeper issue here. In modern times, The Historian Ronald Schechter wrote that “Jews became good thinkers [with]”, a point echoed by David Nirenberg in his classic history of “anti-Semitism”, who observes that “modernism thinks with Judaism”. They mean that the identity roles imposed on Jews became a means of solving wider social problems. “The Jewish question,” wrote Nirenberg, “is not simply an attitude toward Jews and their religion, but a way of critically engaging with the world.”
The use of “Jew” as a means of perceiving the world is the very reality of anti-Semitism. For antisemites, belief in mythical Jewish power explained the evils of the world. The same is true of many strands of philosophy, originally developed by anti-Semitism, but more widely used to describe the views of those who especially admire the presence of Jews in the world.
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And, increasingly, it has become a reality of sentiments about Israel, which has taken on symbolic status on both sides of the debate. For many of those hostile to Israel, the state has become one of the many evils of the modern world. For proponents of the Jewish state, it is a particularly moral nation, bearing the burden of defending civilization against barbarism. One view leads to the celebration of Hamas's murderous attack on October 7 as “resistance,” while the other views the destruction of Gaza and the invasion of Lebanon as a necessary defense of Western values and “civilization.”
If October 7 is an act of “resistance,” and the destruction of Gaza and the brutality of Lebanon are dismissed as necessary steps toward a more civilized world, I suggest that we rethink what “resistance” and “resistance” mean. civilization”.
Kenan Malick is a guest columnist
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