Believe what Israel says - and stop it
Israel has done to Gaza what it said it would do. Now it is doing to the West Bank what it has done to Gaza. And it is threatening a similar fate for its neighbours.
In October 2023, Israel’s right-wing politicians and military told us what they intended to do to Gaza. They said they would kill men, women, children, babies, even livestock. They said they would deprive the population of water, food, power and fuel. They said they would raze Gaza to the ground and render it uninhabitable.
They have done exactly what they said.
Long before that, they told us what they intended to do in the West Bank. Senior government ministers and members of the Knesset said Israel would drive the “Arabs” out of “Judea and Samaria.”
Ethnic cleansing of the West Bank is now in progress.
They have repeatedly threatened to do to Lebanon what they have done to Gaza. And now, they are menacing other countries in the region.
Israel’s politicians and military have shown that what they say they will do, they do. There is no reason to doubt their intentions towards Lebanon and other countries.
They have gone mad. The world must act to stop them. Before it is too late.
How Gaza played out
Early in the war, the IDF told residents of the north of Gaza to move to the south, across the Wadi Gaza. Many of them moved to Khan Younis, massively expanding its population. Humanitarian conditions deteriorated, but at that time were not catastrophic. The truce in the last week of November 2023 raised hopes that the war would end and people would be able to return to their homes. But the Israeli government was still promising its population “total victory”. No way was a military action that ended at Wadi Gaza going to achieve this. The eventual invasion of the rest of Gaza seemed inevitable to me.
In December 2023, Israel drove out most of the inhabitants of Khan Younis, then flattened much of it. In July 2024, they expelled those who had returned, then flattened it again. And in May 2024, they did the same to Rafah. Now, almost all of Gaza’s 2m population is squeezed into a tiny barren coastal strip where there is no food, healthcare or sanitation, there is little water except for the sea, and the only shelter is tents. Israeli armed forces bomb the tents and shoot at anyone who enters the sea.
Health workers report an alarming rise in preventable diseases and malnutrition, particularly among children. The lack of sanitation is causing skin diseases, gastro-enteritis and respiratory illnesses. There are also fears of a polio epidemic: the World Health Organisation is attempting to roll out a vaccination programme but is seriously hampered by Israel’s armed forces targeting “protected” people such as healthcare workers and aid workers. The UN has now suspended aid after the IDF attacked a clearly-marked World Food Programme aid convoy - fortunately no-one was injured, because the vehicles were armoured.
It is now likely that large parts of the Gaza population will die from starvation and disease as a direct result of Israel’s actions. And as the seasons turn towards winter, cold and damp will add to the death toll.
Whenever anyone points out that this is a crime against humanity and, potentially, genocide, the response is always the same: “If Hamas hadn’t attacked on 7th October, this wouldn’t have happened.” Hamas is the excuse for Israel’s rampant war crimes and crimes against humanity.
What is now happening in Gaza is what Israeli politicians and military intended from the start. They have done exactly what they said they would do. And the world has done nothing to stop them.
No doubt the US is trying to find ways of removing Palestinians from Gaza, because ethnic cleansing is preferable to genocide. But Israel doesn’t care. Overwhelmingly, the people of Israel support getting rid of the Palestinians, and if that means letting them die by the thousand on the beach at al-Mawasi, so be it.
How the West Bank is playing out
It’s not just the Palestinians of Gaza that Israel wants rid of. The Israeli govt also intends to clear the West Bank and East Jerusalem of Palestinians and annex those places permanently. For some years now it has been making life difficult for Palestinians in the hope of persuading them to leave. But since the 7th October 2023, forcible expulsion of Palestinians has been on Israel’s agenda.The problem is how to do it without losing the support of important Western allies.
Provoking West Bank Palestinians into a Hamas-style attack was the obvious way of justifying ethnic cleansing and obliteration of their towns and villages. So the IDF and settler paramilitaries subjected Palestinians to a barrage of violence, theft and pogroms:
Settlers, backed by the army and police, demolished homes, torched cars and destroyed crops. Palestinians who dared to resist were attacked, arrested and killed.
Israeli armed forces conducted repeated raids on Palestinian townships (“refugee camps”) in the West Bank. They demolished homes and attacked hospitals. They damaged essential infrastructure and ploughed up roads. They detained thousands of Palestinians, many without charge: there are credible reports that they routinely tortured detainees.
In East Jerusalem, settlers used Israel’s discriminatory laws to demolish Palestinian homes and steal their land. The ancient Armenian Christian community is under particularly serious threat.
But it didn’t work. There has been some response to Israeli provocations, of course, but nothing like 7th October. Nothing that would justify the level of violence needed to clear the West Bank.
But now, the Israeli government thinks it has found someone to take the blame. So it has embarked on its planned programme of destruction. A massive “military operation” has commenced in the West Bank.
In a tweet in Hebrew, Israel’s Foreign Minister, Israel Katz, explained the reason for the assault and what Israel intends to achieve: (translation from Google):
The IDF is working intensively from tonight in the Jenin and Tulkarm refugee camps to thwart Islamic-Iranian terrorist infrastructures that have been established there. Iran is working to establish an eastern terrorist front against Israel in the West Bank, according to the Gaza and Lebanon model, by financing and arming terrorists and smuggling advanced weapons from Jordan.
We must deal with the threat just as we deal with the terrorist infrastructure in Gaza, including the temporary evacuation of Palestinian residents and whatever steps are required. This is a war for everything and we must win it..
There is no doubt what Katz means. Israel will do to the West Bank what it has done to Gaza. And Iran and Jordan will take the blame.
Who will be next?
Once the West Bank is cleansed and annexed, Israel will move on to its next victim. Again, the rhetoric of politicians and military brass tells us who this is likely to be. For some months now, senior members of the Israeli government and the Knesset, and IDF officers, have been threatening to do to Lebanon what Israel has done to Gaza. There is no reason to doubt that they mean what they say.
Israel has long coveted Lebanon. According to the historian Tom Segev, David Ben-Gurion, the first Prime Minister of Israel, thought Israel should annex the south of Lebanon and expel its Muslim inhabitants (presumably to Syria). Israeli right-wingers agitate for annexation and settlement of at least the south of Lebanon, putting forward a variety of reasons for why it should be Jewish.
Israel also has unfinished business with Lebanon. The south of Lebanon hosts a large and very angry Palestinian population, mostly descended from those whom Israel expelled in the 1948-49 Nakba. Israel regards this - with reason - as a serious threat to its security. For nearly half a century, it has tried and failed to eliminate it.
Israel launched its first invasion of Lebanon in March 1978, following a brutal attack by Palestinian militants in which 38 Israeli civilians died. Israel captured all of south Lebanon as far as the Litani river. The invasion cost the lives of 1,100-2,000 people, all but 20 of them Palestinians and Lebanese, and a quarter of a million people were internally displaced. Eventually, the United Nations intervened, instructing Israel to withdraw its forces from Lebanon and sending a UN peace-keeping force (UNIFIL) into the area south of the Litani river. UNIFIL is still there today.
In 1982 the IDF invaded again, this time capturing Beirut. It intended to remove Lebanon’s pro-Palestine government and replace it with a pro-Israel government headed by Bachir Gemayel. But Gemayel was assassinated in September 1982, and the massacre of Palestinians in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps triggered worldwide condemnation and Israeli popular outrage, forcing the IDF to pull back from Beirut. In 1985, the war ended with the creation of a “security belt” in south Lebanon, administered by Maronite Christians with full military support from Israel. It was Israeli occupation in all but name. This image shows the area under occupation.
In 2000, Israel withdrew from the security belt. But the cross-border tension remained.
The area south of the Litani river is now controlled by Hezbollah, a Shi-ite Muslim political group and paramilitary organisation hostile to Israel. Hezbollah and Israel have been trading blows across the border for decades. But the barrages intensifed after Hamas’s attacks on 7th October 2023, forcing Israel to evacuate towns and villages along the Lebanon border. This creates a perfect justification for another Israeli invasion of Lebanon.
However, invading any part of Lebanon presents serious difficulties. Hezbollah is a formidable opponent, and the IDF’s record in Lebanon is frankly dismal. Every previous attempt to capture and hold territory has ended in failure. For sure, the IDF has something to prove since its ignominious defeat at the hands of Hamas. But it is by no means clear that it has the capacity to defeat the far better armed and organised Hezbollah.
Nonetheless, if the rhetoric from Israeli politicians and military is to be believed - and there is every reason to believe it - Israel intends to try it on again.
When might this be? Well, Netanyahu’s trial for corruption starts in December. The court has made it clear that the war in Gaza isn’t sufficient reason to postpone it. He needs a better excuse. So I think he will authorise an invasion of Lebanon within the next couple of months.
Israel Katz’s threat to Jordan
Lebanon is not the only state that Israel is menacing. In his Hebrew tweet, Katz blamed Jordan for the arming of the West Bank, though later he issued a tweet in English that was more conciliatory:
The IDF has been operating since last night in the Jenin and Tulkarm refugee camps to dismantle Islamic-Iranian terror infrastructures established there. Iran is working to destabilize Jordan and establish an eastern terror front against Israel, following the Gaza and Lebanon models, by funding and arming terrorists and smuggling advanced weapons into Jordan and then into Judea and Samaria.
This is a shared interest of Israel, Jordan, and the moderate states in the region to prevent the establishment of another Iranian-Hamas-Palestinian terror front.
We must address this threat by all necessary means, including, in some cases of intense combat, allowing the population to temporarily evacuation from one neighborhood to another within the refugee camp to prevent civilian harm and to enable the dismantling of terror infrastructures established there.
This is a war in every sense, and we must win it.
With Israel, as with Russia, it is what politicians say to their domestic audience that matters. Katz is threatening Israel’s neighbour and long-standing ally. But why?
Israel has for some months now been briefing to the gullible Western press and captive media that Iran is smuggling advanced weapons into the West Bank via Lebanon, Syria and Jordan. How much substance there is in these allegations is unclear. Israel claims smuggling into the West Bank has vastly increased in recent months, but the brutal clampdown in the West Bank would seem to make this unlikely.
Katz’s English-language tweet appears to demand that Jordan support Israel’s action in the West Bank, with a thinly veiled threat of some kind of action against it if it doesn’t. And his Hebrew tweet implies that Jordan is working with Iran.
This is foolish talk. Jordan has had a peace treaty with Israel since 1994. It is a US ally and is hostile to Iran.
That said, there’s little doubt that weapons are being smuggled through Jordan, and some of them probably are reaching the West Bank. But how many, and what kind of weapons, is unclear. Jordan says it has foiled many smuggling plots.
Anyway, smuggled weapons are not necessarily intended for the West Bank. In May, Reuters reported that Jordan had foiled a weapons smuggling plot and arrested those responsible. The commentary says that the plotters were “trying to destabilize Jordan”. Perhaps that’s the origin of Katz’s comment in the English-language tweet that “Iran is working to destabilize Jordan.”
Whether or not Iran is involved, there is a growing risk of serious political instability in Jordan. Jordan’s largely Palestinian population is universally supportive of the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, and very angry about the Hashemite monarchy’s fence-sitting. It wouldn’t take much to spark a popular revolt, and in the Middle East, monarchies don’t usually survive popular revolts. For King Abdullah, refusing to support Israel is nowhere near as dangerous as infuriating his people.
But if Jordan doesn’t support Israel’s action against West Bank Palestinians, then that will reinforce the popular view in Israel that they are surrounded by Arabs who want their blood - and in turn, this will empower the religious right to seek war with Jordan.
Why does the religious right want war with Jordan?
Jordan was part of the territory of Palestine governed by the British after World War 1 under a Mandate from the League of Nations, the predecessor of the United Nations. The territory of Mandatory Palestine originally comprised present-day Israel, the West Bank and Gaza, and the whole of what is now Jordan. It also included parts of south Lebanon, Syria and Saudi Arabia, though the borders were later adjusted.
The Mandate incorporated the “Balfour Declaration” of 1917, in which the British government said it would use its “best endeavours” to facilitate the establishment in Palestine of a “national home for the Jewish people.” Zionists at the time - and indeed thereafter - took this to mean that the whole of the Mandatory territory of Palestine would in due course become a Jewish State. When the British created an Arab devolved administration in the part of Palestine to the east of the Jordan river, then known as “the Emirate of Transjordan”, they were less than pleased. However, they continued to build their plans for a “Jewish home” in the whole of the Mandatory area, believing that the British would eventually hand Transjordan over to them in return for concessions such as (bizarrely) agreeing to create “reservations” for Arabs in Transjordan.
But in May 1946, Transjordan became independent from Britain and changed its name to “the Hashemite kingdom of Jordan.” Suddenly, the area available for the “Jewish home” was less than half of what the Zionists thought Britain had promised them. They were furious. The British had cheated them of their rightful inheritance.
Now, the Zionist right are calling the shots in Israel. They are propping up Netanyahu’s government. And they want Jordan. They believe it is theirs by right. While the likes of Bezalel Smotrich remain dominant in Israel, it is only a matter of time until Israel finds an excuse for a war with Jordan. Indeed, it may already have found one.
The ambitions of the religious right
I do not think we should ignore the territorial ambitions of the Israeli religious right. They are in power, and they have big plans. Eliminating the State of Palestine, and annexing Lebanon and Jordan, will not satisfy them.
This map has been doing the rounds:
In this version of the map from Wikimedia Commons, the west and east boundaries run, respectively, along the river Nile and the river Euphrates - hence the wiggly lines.
When the religious far right talks about the Promised Land extending “from the Nile to the Euphrates”, it’s this area they mean. As the maps show, it encompasses not only Israel, Gaza and the West Bank, but all of Jordan, all of Lebanon, most of Syria, half of Iraq, part of Kuwait, a third of Saudi Arabia, all of Egypt east of the Nile (including the vital Suez Canal), and a small part of Turkey. It’s not hard to imagine the effect that turning all of this into a Jewish ethnostate would have on the Middle East, and indeed on the world.
Other maps of “Greater Israel” (Eretz Israel) are also circulating. Israel’s far-right Finance Minister caused a storm when he gave a speech from a podium displaying a map of the original territory of Mandatory Palestine, because he appeared to be laying claim to the entire territory of Jordan and parts of Lebanon, Syria and Saudia Arabia.
Zionist demands for far more territory than the present boundaries of Israel are nothing new. The “Jewish homeland” claimed by the World Zionist Organisation after World War 1 included parts of Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and Egypt:
And this map shows the supposed extent of the Kingdom of Israel during the reign of King Solomon, upon which some religious zealots base their territorial claims for the modern State of Israel. It assigns to “Eretz Israel” part of Egypt, much of Jordan, the south of Lebanon, most of Syria and a significant part of Iraq.
All these maps say the same. The Jewish State should be much larger than it is. And of course it must be exclusively for the Jews. There must be enough room in Eretz Israel to allow the Exiles to be gathered from the ends of the earth. The existing non-Jewish populations must cease to exist. Whether they die, flee or are violently expelled is not the religious right’s concern. And nor, apparently, is international law that prohibits seizure of territory by force, ethnic cleansing and genocide.
However, the religious right know there is no chance whatsoever that Israel could significantly expand its territory peacefully. So they want war.
The fastest way of igniting a war with all their neighbours would be to demolish the Al-Aqsa Mosque and build the Third Temple on its site. So of course that’s what the religious right want to do.
The religious right are totally mad. And they are in power. If they aren’t stopped, and quickly, they will blow up the world.
Related reading:
When the current head of Shin Bet describes the actions of Israeli settlers aided by the army as terrorism, and an Israeli general described them as pogroms, Israeli Jews have no excuse for denying what they are doing to Palestinians.
As I said, Israel has become a rogue state and an active threat to wider world peace
"Eretz Yisrael" simply means "the Land of Israel" (ie "Israel" as a geographic expression rather than a state): "Greater Israel" would be "Eretz Yisrael Hashlema".