Netanyahu is making Israel radioactive

EREZ, Israel – Today Israel is in grave danger.

With similar enemies Hamas, HezbollahTHE Houthis and Iran, Israel should enjoy the sympathy of much of the world.

But it isn’t.

Because of the way the Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and its extremist coalition have waged war in the Gaza Strip and occupation of the West Bank, Israel is becoming radioactive, and diaspora Jewish communities everywhere are becoming increasingly unsafe.

I’m afraid he’s about to get worse.

No impartial person could deny Israel’s right to self-defense after the October 7 Hamas attack that killed some 1,200 Israelis in one day.

The women suffered sexual abuse; Children were murdered in front of their parents and parents in front of their children.

Dozens of kidnapped Israeli men, women, children and elderly people remain hostages in terrible conditions more than 150 days.

But no impartial person can observe the Israeli campaign to destroy Hamas, which has killed more than 10 people 30,000 Palestinians in Gazaabout a third of them fighters, and don’t conclude that anything went terribly wrong there.

Among the dead there are thousands of children and among the survivors many orphans.

Desolation

Much of Gaza is now a wasteland of death and destruction, hunger and ruined houses. Urban warfare brings out the worst in people, and this is certainly true of Israel in Gaza. This is a stain on the Jewish state.

But Israel is not alone in creating this tragedy.

The stain on Hamas is also black.

Roles

This Islamic militia began the conflict on October 7 without any warning, protection or refuge for Palestinian civilians, and it did so knowing him very well In my experience, Israel would respond by bombing Hamas strongholds dug under homes, mosques and hospitals.

Hamas has shown complete disregard for the lives of Palestinians, not just Israelis.

But Hamas has already been labeled a terrorist organization.

He is not an ally of the United States and has never claimed to practice “purity of arms.”

That said, Israel’s standing in the world may soon take another blow due to something that has made me wary of its invasion from the start:

Netanyahu sent the Israel Defense Forces into Gaza without a coherent plan to govern it after the dismantling of Hamas or the ceasefire.

In my opinion, there is only one thing worse for Israel, let alone the Palestinians, than a Hamas-controlled Gaza: a Gaza where no one is in charge, a Gaza where the world expects Israel to provide order, but Israel can’t or will. no, so it becomes a permanent and overwhelming humanitarian crisis.

Future

My recent visit to the Gaza border suggested to me that this is exactly where we are headed.

On March 2, I accompanied the US Centcom commander, General Michael Kurilla, on his visit to the Erez border between Israel and Gaza.

Kurilla was responsible for the humanitarian food drops of the United States that was about to take place.

With the sound of drones flying overhead and the distant boom of artillery, a local Israeli commander explained that the majority of Israeli forces in northern Gaza, which includes its largest urban area, Gaza City, had retreat to the Israeli border area or along the highway. . which divides Gaza from north to south.

From now on, another senior Israeli official said, Israeli troops and special forces will only enter and exit northern Gaza attack threats specific to Hamas, but basically no one was in charge of the day-to-day governance of the civilians left behind, except a few hundred Hamas fighters and local gang leaders.

I immediately understood how a chaotic scene had been created around the food distribution two days earlier.

Israel is break the control of Hamas but it refuses to take responsibility for the civil administration of Gaza with its own forces and refuses to recruit any Palestinian Authority in the West Bank, which has thousands of employees in Gaza, to carry out this task.

He behaves this way because Netanyahu does not want the Palestinian Authority to become the Palestinian government in the West Bank and Gaza, which could give him a chance of credibility to one day become a Independent Palestinian state over there.

In other words, Israel has a prime minister it would apparently prefer Gaza to become Somalia, ruled by warlords, and risk Israel’s military gains by dismantling Hamas, rather than working with the Palestinian Authority or any legitimate, broad-based non-Hamas Palestinian government because its far-right allies in the government, who dream that Israel controls all the territory between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean, including Gaza, and will oust him from power if it does so.

The Netanyahu government apparently hopes to recruit local Palestinian clan leaders for post-Hamas Gaza, but I seriously doubt it will work.

Israel tried and failed this strategy in the West Bank in the 1980s, as these locals were often stigmatized as collaborators and never gained traction in the government.

I confess that while contemplating all this from the border, I had two flashbacks that were sort of daytime nightmares.

The first was to remember how the United States invaded Iraq with the goal of building a new democratic order to replace the tyranny of Saddam Hussein, which I supported.

But when it came to implementing it, the Bush administration bankrupted the Iraqi army and the ruling Baath Party without a coherent plan to create a better alternative government.

This turned many anti-Saddam Iraqis against the United States and created the conditions for an anti-American opposition uprising.

I summarized all this in an article published on April 9, 2003.

It had been 20 days since the American invasion of Iraq and I had entered the country with a Kuwaiti Red Cross team that was delivering medical supplies to the main hospital in the Iraqi port of Umm Qasr.

There are three things I noticed almost immediately:

how few American or allied troops were present to maintain order, the chaos this was producing, and how irritable people were.

I wrote it like this:

“It’s hard to smile when there’s no water. It’s hard to clap when you’re scared. It’s hard to say, “Thank you for freeing me,” when liberation meant looters ransacked everything from grain silos to the local school, where they even took the blackboard. …

It would be idiotic to even ask Iraqis here what they think about politics.

They are in a primordial and pre-political state of nature. For the moment Saddam has been replaced by Hobbes, not by Bush.”

I wrote that I had entered with members of a Kuwaiti rescue team, “who, taking pity on the Iraqis, launched extra food from the window of a bus as we left.

The inhabitants of Umm Qasr rushed to look for that food… jostling for bread crumbs.

This was a scene of humiliation, not liberation. We have to do better.”

I have finished:

“The United States destroyed Iraq; The United States now owns Iraq and has primary responsibility for normalizing it. If the water doesn’t flow, if the food doesn’t arrive, if it doesn’t rain and if the sun doesn’t shine, now it’s America’s fault. “We better get used to it, we better do it right, we better do it early and we better get all the help we can get.”

Flashback no. 2:

It’s May 22, 2018, and I’m writing an article near Gaza’s border with Israel that would be titled “Hamas, Netanyahu, and Mother Nature.”

Based on data from environmentalists Israelis and Palestinians, I wrote about how (due to Hamas’ mismanagement of Gaza’s economy and the diversion of building materials to dig tunnels into Israel) Gaza was suffering a deficiency infrastructural criticismin particular from wastewater treatment plants.

Therefore, every day Palestinians discharge around 100 million liters of untreated sewage into the Mediterranean.

Why should Israelis care?

After all, Gaza is “over there”, behind a fence.

Meet Mother Nature.

Due to the prevailing current in the Mediterranean, most of Gaza’s untreated wastewater discharged into the Mediterranean flowed north to the Israeli coastal city of Ashqelon, home to Israel’s second largest desalination plant.

About 80% of Israel’s drinking water comes from desalination, and 15% of its drinking water comes from the Ashqelon plant alone.

Due to floating waste from Gaza, the Ashkelon desalination plant had to close several times to clean dirt from filters.

Israelis and Palestinians are interdependent.

Lost there, felt here.

The only question is whether they will ever be able to create healthy interdependence or whether they will be condemned to unhealthy interdependence.

But they will be interdependent.

Every community needs a leader whose actions are motivated by that fundamental truth.

Right now none of us have one.

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