Ian Welsh

The horizon is not so far as we can see, but as far as we can imagine

Category: Israel and/or Palestine Page 1 of 10

Middle East War: The Israeli Ground Forces Still Can’t Deliver

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On October 28, 2024

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Israel has three great assets:

  • Its air force;
  • Its spies;
  • America.

What it doesn’t have is a good army:

After nearly five weeks of intense fighting, Israeli soldiers have managed to enter several border villages, advancing a maximum of just under two kilometres in some areas. However, they have been unable to establish overnight positions. These forces have resorted to widespread destruction, levelling homes and mosques along the border to create “scorched earth” zones. This tactic, however, exposes Israeli tanks, making them vulnerable and preventing adequate concealment as they cautiously advance through Lebanese villages. Consequently, Israeli casualties have surged

Or, to put it another way, Netanyahu’s mouth has written checks that Israel’s ground forces can’t cash. So Israel is back to wanton destruction, mostly by air.

I’ve said for years that Hezbollah’s army is one of the best in the world, man for man, and so far it seems that judgment is vindicated.

Israeli forces are currently only engaging Hezbollah’s “spoiling attacks” within the “engagement area”. They are yet to penetrate the “main battle area,” where Hezbollah’s primary defences and “striking forces” are positioned. Hezbollah’s strategy integrates conventional and guerrilla warfare tactics, employing adaptable defences above and below ground. It focuses on attrition strategy, using mobile defence tactics to harass and weaken enemy forces before drawing them into decisive engagements. These tactics include tactical retreats that expose enemy flanks, allowing Hezbollah to strike at Israel’s advancing spearhead, systematically disrupting momentum and inflicting heavy losses.

Meanwhile Israel’s attack on Iran does not appear to have done great damage and Hamas ordered Northern Israeli villages being used as invastion staging points to evacuate, and has started hitting them with missiles and drones, leading to another couple hundred thousand Israeli internal refugees.

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But the weak suffer what they must, and Northern Gaza has spent October under complete embargo of food and water. The Israeli genocide of Palestinians continues, and the clear intention is to occupy North Gaza permanently once its residents are displaced or dead.

Indeed the Israeli way of war is now clearly “genocide uber alles” with Israel’s air attacks in Lebanon prioritizing civilian buildings, with multiple attacks on hospitals, at least one attack on an orphanage and repeated warnings that they will strike first responders who try to save lives.

Israel is attempting to break the will of civilian populations through terror. Israel’s war doctrine is mass terror, ethnic cleansing and genocide, with attacks meant to maximize civilian casualties both during and after the attack. The fewer hospitals, doctors and so on, the more people who will die or be permanently maimed.

This is a war of the cowardly against civilians, which makes sense: Israel’s occupation has left its military specialized in brutalizing civilians. It had great difficulty against Hamas, a rag tag militia with missiles and other weapons built in basements. Against Hezbollah’s ground forces: seasoned, well equipped and dug in, it has been unimpressive.

The problem for Israel is simple enough: terror from the air doesn’t win wars and doesn’t break moral. Instead it makes people more determined to resist, not less.

If Israel, after its assassinations and attacks on warehouses had declared victory, it would still look strong. But engaging with Hezbollah on the ground has proven a serious mistake.

Israel is a great example of “those who are abused become abusers.” Israel might as well be Nazi Germany when it comes to both ideology (national ethnic supremacy) and actions: genocide of a despised ethnic/religious group.

It is a sad thing to see, both for their victims and for themselves. They have become monsters, and with polls indicating over 90% support for the way the war is fought, it’s clear that this has infected the mass of the Israeli citizenry.

When Israel is finally defeated, likely in a future war, it will need to completely de-Zionised, in a way Germany was never properly de-Nazified.

This entire war is sad and stupid and based on the fundamental injustice of taking other people’s land and homes. It is pursued thru terror, mass murder, genocide and ethnic cleansing and war crimes are so routine they happen every day as a matter of policy.

Every nation who supports Israel in this is stained by Israel’s crimes. We all know genocide is happening, and our countries have supported it, made it possible and opposed all efforts to end it.

To riff on Jefferson, we had best hope that there is no just God.

The Czechloslovakia Analogy Is Overused, But It Fits Israel

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On October 9, 2024

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Yesterday I wrote an article about how lack of aggression has allowed Israel to control the initiative and choose the time and place it wants to fight. If you haven’t read that article, please do so now.

Back in 1938 the Allied powers agreed to let Hitler cut up Czechloslovakia. At the time the Czechs had a huge army, and if supported, they were willing to fight. They weren’t supported and, soon enough, France and Britain had to fight Germany minus a massive central European army at their side.

Woops.

October 7th took the Israelis by complete surprise. For two days Hamas roved free. After that, the Israelis systematically bombed the hell out of Gaza and then invaded. They were incompetent and Hamas fought well, but Hamas was vastly outnumbered and out-equipped. To this day they haven’t been able to stop Hamas entirely, but they’ve done a lot of damage and certainly killed hundreds of thousands of civilians.

During all this Hezbollah just launched missiles. Oh, they did damage, for sure, and they caused hundreds of thousands of internal refugees and an Israeli economic crisis. Iran supplied Hezbollah and Yemen but unless hit, did nothing directly.

Hezbollah could have hit far, far harder. They could even have invaded, especially during the period when much of the army was tied up in Gaza.

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There’s a concept in military strategy and tactics called “initiative.” The side with the initiative is forcing the other side to react to it. Hamas started with the initiative, but soon lost it and the Resistance sat back and let Israel do what it wanted, when it wanted. Israel mapped out Southern Lebanon, took its time setting up assassinations and figuring out where the missile stocks were: then it struck.

Israel was gifted the initiative by the Resistance (well, not so much Yemen, they did what they could).

Hamas wasn’t ever very strong, to be sure. Not Czechloslovakia, but no joke. Their hope was always that if they provoked a war, the Resistance would join in and they could win.

But the Resistance, who were resentful that Hamas didn’t warn them of October 7th, half-assed it, and didn’t strike when Israel was most vulnerable. (It’s clear Hamas was right not to tell Iran and Hezbollah about October 7th given how compromised they both are by the Mossad.)

Now Hamas, though still fighting, is no longer a serious threat to Israel and Hezbollah was caught on its back foot though I hear at least one credible report that they’re recovering fast.

To go back to the Nazi analogy, Israel is a genocidal power with wants lebensraum.

If the shoe fits.

You don’t play around with Nazis, and so far the Resistance has been doing just that. And even more than Hezbollah, this means Iran.

Surrender, or fight. Stop the half measures.

How Lack Of Aggression Cripples Resistance Orgs

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On October 8, 2024

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Let’s talk about Corbyn and Hezbollah and Iran.

These three things aren’t the same in many ways. But all three are fighting an entrenched system.

When Corbyn was leader, he had the majority of the membership behind him, he took control of the executive committee and he only lacked control of the MPs, who were almost all neoliberals united in hatred of him and his program.

This was a simple situation to deal with: Corbyn had the power to force re-selection: to make MPs face elections in their ridings. Almost all would have been replaced by left wingers: they weren’t popular and couldn’t win.

He refused.

He also had the power to replace the administrative class running the party and elections. He didn’t, and they sabotaged him. Without that sabotage he would have won the 2017 election, which was extremely close. This isn’t hyperbole, we have emails showing they deliberately sabotaged the campaign: they would rather the Tories win than Labour under Corbyn,

Starmer has had no such weakness: he has ruthlessly purged the party membership and leadership of left-wingers.

Now let’s turn to Hezbollah. They kept up steady pressure on Israel since October 7th, but they never seriously attacked. They did damage, for sure: most of the Northern settlements are abandoned and there has been a huge economic cost, but they never did what they could. They were scared, I think, of Israel attacking Lebanon.

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Israel is now attacking Lebanon, hitting multiple hospitals, at least one orphanage and telling first responders that if they go to help injured civilians, they’ll be killed.

What Hezbollah wanted to avoid, happened.

Hezbollah really had two choices: go all in and attack with everything, or do nothing. Half-assing it was not smart. It let Israel choose the time of their attack and spend a year planning and executing, which has lead to the loss of much leadership and apparently a good chunk of Hezbollah’s missile stocks.

This is not 20-20 rear view sight. I said at the start of the war that Hezbollah should attack. Why wait for Israel to beat Hamas down, then turn on them? (Yes, Hamas is still fighting, but attacking when most of the Israeli military was in Gaza and before Hamas had been badly degraded is obviously optimal.)

Now, as for Iran, they too have been overly cautious. I’m impressed by their missile capacities, but they too are sitting on their asses. This is getting close to a North Korea/China situation and it’s time for them to just go all in and stop with the proxy bullshit. Send men and stop the crap.

Khameini himself is 70% of the way to understanding this. He said that the enemy comes for countries, and if you do not defend those countries, why then they eventually come for you. Iran is the end-goal. If Hezbollah is defeated conventionally (they won’t lose a long term guerilla war) then Iran is next.

Caution: building up resources, has served Iran well. But there is time for that, and a time for using the resources. Mao was a war leader, and one of the great generals of the 20th century. He was not afraid of war, and he understood when it was time to fight.

If Iran doesn’t, they put themselves at great risk. Including the possibility that they lose a lot of their weapon stocks in a pre-emptive attack. Are they less compromised by the Mossad than Hezbollah was? Are they sure?

The bombing and so on they seek to avoid will come to them anyway, just as it has to Hezbollah and Lebanon.

Either fight the war or give up, bow to the US and Israel and stop the Resistance.

(Machiavelli observed that most men don’t change. They keep doing the same thing they have always done, even when circumstances change to make old strategies ineffective. Hezbollah has a chance, because their old leadership is dead. Iran needs its old leadership to wake up before they wind up dead and Iran loses.)

Look, Israeli Ground Forces Suck & Their Country Is Postage Stamp Sized

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On October 5, 2024

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Any time Iran wants, they can over-saturate Israeli missile defenses, turn off the power and destroy the military bases. That was proven this week.

Israel’s ground forces are incompetent and cowardly. They had grave trouble fighting Hamas. Hezbollah whipped them back in 2006 when they dared attack on the ground. Hezbollah’s troops are seasoned war vetrans, and extremely motivated.

What Israel has is airpower, good intelligence, and the USA.

And nukes.

Airpower’s nice, but it doesn’t win wars. And if all your airbases are destroyed or under constant attack, a lot of it goes away. Neighbouring countries have said they won’t base Israeli airplanes.

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The reason that Israel spends most of its time assassinating leaders and mass-murdering civilians is that it knows it can’t actually win on the ground. It can “clear” areas of Gaza, but it can’t hold them, and Hamas has only a shadow of Hezbollah’s strength.

Without nukes, in a conventional war, Hezbollah might win against Israel: by which I mean that invade and conquer the country. It too has tons of missiles and has been holding back. If Iran went all-in, Israel’s defeat in a conventional war would be certain.

The two things stopping this from happening are America and that Israel has nukes and everyone thinks they’ll use them.

The time of elite Israeli ground forces is gone. It was gone by 1990 or so.

And military technology has changed. In the old days if you didn’t have an air force, that was it: but drones and new missile tech has changed that.

These aren’t your grandfather’s Israelis, and these aren’t  your grandfather’s Muslims.

Iran Hammers Tel Aviv & Israel

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On October 1, 2024

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Just eyeballing it, but it seems that more missiles are getting thru than are intercepted.


Iran has said this is punishment for the Israeli assassinations. It has also said that it will defend Lebanon. And, as Nate pointed out, the missile attack is widespread:

 

All of Israel is covered by air alerts

Seems Israel isn’t going to have everything its own way.

Meanwhile the US has sent thousands of troops to Israel to “defend.” The US has been an active participant, for a while, as have been Germany, Britain and others, but this is a step beyond.

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Let’s make this really simple. If you’re trying to stop a genocide, you’re a hero. If you’re enabling a genocide, you’re a villain. Hezbollah and Iran have been trying to put pressure on Israel to stop their mass murder, and most of the West, with a few honorable exceptions like Ireland, have been helping them.

But what’s clear now is that if there’s a real war, it isn’t going to be one-sided. In the past the Israelis would bomb the shit out of their enemies, and be almost entirely safe. No longer. Israel’s not a large country, and Iran has plenty of missiles.

The main thing I’d want to see now (though I doubt it will happen) is for Russia to put Iran under their nuclear window: announce that use of nukes against Iran will be considered use of nukes against Russia.

This conflict, which threatens to become general war, is far from over.

Edit: initial reports of Mossad HQ being taken out appear to have been wrong. My apologies.

The Senders stumble into the Terror Dome

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On October 1, 2024

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Soundtrack for this post.

William S. Burroughs postulated four political parties in his 1959 novel Naked Lunch: Liquefactionists, Senders, Divisionists, and Factualists.

Per Wiki:

The city is contested by four rival political parties: Liquefactionists, who want to merge everyone into one protoplasmic entity; Senders, who want to control everyone else through telepathy; Divisionists, who subdivide into replicas of themselves; and Factualists, who oppose the other three.

The Senders are a metaphor for mass media propaganda as practiced by Edward Bernays, Leon Trotsky, Joseph Goebbels, and American political consultants.

The Democrats and their allied Never Trumper Republicans are the heirs to this legacy.

The rise of the Internet, then the World Wide Web, and finally social media initially threw them for a loop and played a role in Trump taking over the G.O.P.

Their reaction was to impose a surveillance and censorship regime using the tech monopolies as bottlenecks:

Essentially the Biden administration’s communications policy has been to relentlessly and flagrantly spin, distort, lie

Unfortunately, combining surveillance and censorship with slick media campaigns using the power of celebrity to encourage supporters to form parasocial bonds with politicians is way too much power for anyone to handle.

Because there’s no way not to get high on your own supply.

As YouTuber History Legends said of the Ukrainian war effort:

The propaganda was too strong and too effective.

We have an entire army of NAFO trolls (on) Reddit and Twitter. People that believed 100% everything that was being said by Ukraine.

The Ukrainians will only show their successes to their population as if the Ukrainians are constantly winning.

At the same time we have a million Ukrainian men abroad. We have countless Ukrainian soldiers and enlisted personnel that are not at the front.

We have people in Kiev partying as if there’s no war happening.

The problem for Ukraine is that they haven’t managed to create (a) national feeling of it’s now or never. They always try to portray the war as ‘oh we’re winning. It’s fine.’

So everybody kind of kept their life going because everything is going well at the front but it’s not true and now it’s too late.

The disorientation goes to the top, as US Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s new piece for Foreign Policy illustrates.

The Biden administration’s strategy has put the United States in a much stronger geopolitical position today than it was four years ago. [Really??] But our work is unfinished. The United States must sustain its fortitude across administrations to shake the revisionists’ assumptions. It must be prepared for the revisionist states to deepen cooperation with one another to try to make up the difference. It must maintain its commitments to and the trust of its friends. And it must continue to earn the American people’s confidence in the power, purpose, and value of disciplined American leadership in the world.

Meanwhile, air alerts over Israel:

All of Israel is covered by air alerts

Eyeless in Gaza, indeed.

Ryan Grim tweets:

This is either a complete and total failure to contain the conflict by the Biden administration -- or this is what the White House wanted and it's the most egregious lie told to the public since WMD. Either incompetence or duplicity--no 3rd option. Malevolent in either case.

Incompetence or duplicity? What do we think?

The Future Of Hezbollah and Israel’s Conflict

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On September 28, 2024

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Nasrallah is dead, assassinated by the Israelis. There have been significant bombings in Beiruit, and escalation between Hezbollah and Israel are clear.

First, let’s state the obvious. Israel’s intelligence has seriously comprised Hezbollah, much more than they ever did to Hamas. I suspect this is a result of not taking Hamas particularly seriously and the differing nature of Lebanon and Gaza. Gaza, by all accounts, was a fairly tight knit community, united in their opposition to Israel. Lebanon is not, it’s a sectarian state with a great deal of internal divisions.

There was a lot of anger in Iran and Hezbollah that Hamas did not forewarn them of October 7th, but it’s clear they were right not to. If they had, Israel would very likely have found out, and this is especially true if Hezbollah had been told.

As for the assassination, it’s much less important than people make out: decapitation strategies don’t significantly degrade strong ideological organizations like Hezbollah. The real question is how much knowledge Israel has of the actual military infrastructure. Nasrallah was a well loved leader, but he was a very cautious man and much less interested in fighting Israel than many make out. The new leadership, and given Israel’s success at assassination, it is almost all new, will be far more willing to fight.

Intelligence, airpower and its alliances with American and other Western nations are Israel’s strengths, and they are not small matters.

 

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That said, those who are panicking, often hysterically, are premature. Hezbollah defeated Israel militarily in 2006, and before that when it won a guerilla war against Israel’s occupation and forced them out. They are much stronger now than they were then. They have more missiles, more men, who are well seasoned fighters, and they have dug in to a far greater degree than Hamas ever could.

Israeli intelligence and the airforce are impressive, but the actual ground forces Israel have are weak: not in equipment, but in morale and competence. To accomplish Israel’s goal of pushing Hezbollah out of southern Lebanon they will have to go in on the ground, and when they do I very much doubt their ability to win.

Unlike Hamas, Hezbollah’s supply lines cannot be cut: the posturing about Beiruit’s airport is ludicrous, the supplies come in by land and there is no possibility of interdicting most of them.

If Hezbollah does need reinforcements, they will have them, from Iraq’s militias and from Iranian “volunteers.” Manpower will not be an issue, though Hezbollah is unlikely to ask for many men at first, since they are not trained to operate in the Hezbollah manner.

Nasrallah was a cautious man, and Hezbollah has been holding back. Their missile force can output far more and better missiles than they have been using in the past, and the end of the old leadership almost certainly means the gloves will come off.

Further, Hezbollah has done great damage to Israel already. The reason Israel is turning to Lebanon is that Hezbollah has displaced hundreds of thousand of settlers, causing an internal refugee problem, and combined with Yemen’s naval blockade, has massively damaged the Israeli economy. And this is with them holding back, because they did not want a general war.

But the only way to truly defeat Israel is to defeat their military, and the best way to do that is for them to attack into Lebanon. Hezbollah, hopefully, will ramp up its attacks to force Israel to do just that, if it isn’t intending to already (which they almost certainly are), and if it is already intending to, to make it happen sooner.

The war, then, is still in its early stages. Do not fall to doom and gloom (if you support the resistance), nor optimism (if you’re pro-genocide). Wait, and see. The real battles, which will determine the outcome of the war, have not yet happened.

Consequences of the Israeli Pager Explosions Attack

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On September 24, 2024

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Last weeks pagers exploded all over Lebanon. They were pagers bought by Hezbolah, but most of them were not used by military personnel or even by Hezbollah members, though many were.

The attacks were set up to be particularly nasty. Small ball bearings were embedded in the pagers. First the pager would buzz. The person would grab it, bring it up to their face so they could look at the screen, where they would see an error message.

Then the pager would explode. The most common injuries were maiming (the hand), terrible facial wounds, and eye-injuries. I don’t know what percentage caused permanent vision loss but I saw one interview with a surgeon who said he’d removed more eyes in the last day than he had in a career of over twenty years.

Civilians, women and children were hurt.

This attack had been set up a long time ago. Israel had, apparently, received reports that someone was suspicious and that it was a “use it or lose it” situation. They chose to use it. Presumably they had been saving it to use during the next ground war, but that was no longer an option.

There are obvious and in-obvious consequences to this. Hezbollah will retaliate, of course. They say that the current increased attacks, which are hitting as far South as Haifa and appear designed to blow a corridor to Tel Aviv so that becomes a viable target are not that retaliation, but are instead a reaction to Israeli attacks on Beirut. That’s a pretty serious escalation, especially if repeatedly hitting Tel Aviv is part of the plan. An even more serious escalation because of the pager attacks risks all-out war, though that’s not say it isn’t justified.

(To state the obvious, if the pager attacks weren’t terrorism, nothing is.)

But beyond the possibility of a serious war, there are downstream effects. The pagers were branded as made by Taiwan’s Gold Apollo, but were actually manufactured by Hungary’s BAC. Either BAC modified the pagers, or Israel intercepted them during shipment and made the necessary changes.

Hezbollah has reported ordered new pagers (they’re part of how they avoid electronic surveillance) with instructions that all manufacturing takes place in China. If I were them I’d have those pagers guarded from the second they leave the factory to the point of delivery in Lebanon.

But this is a real Pandora’s Box situation. There’s no reason this couldn’t be done to anyone’s devices and almost everyone carries a phone these days. Most of them can’t be fully opened and inspected. You have no way of knowing whether or not there’s a bomb. (Correction–hacking alone is not enough. My apologies.)

It is noticeable that the US and most European countries refused to condemn the attacks. If they won’t even say that this sort of thing is off the table, who will trust that they wouldn’t do this themselves?

There are a lot of countries, and a lot of people (dissidents and so on) which have good reason to know that the West is willing to engage in assassination, violence and coups against them. This isn’t remotely in question: the West and especially the US, France and Britain, have a record. And other Western countries usually cooperate or at least do what they’re told.

So consequence one is going to be a lot of people and organizations a lot less willing to buy Western equipment. Maybe Gold Apollo wasn’t involved. Maybe Hungary’s BAC wasn’t involved. I’m inclined to believe them, actually, especially Gold Apollo, because this is the sort of thing which destroys companies.

But maybe they were, and how can a company really stand up to and refuse strong governmental pressure? It can’t, not if the government is really serious and it’s a domestic firm. Even foreign governments can have a lot of clout if you do business in their country.

Another likely effect is the rise of transparent electronics, similar to technology used in prisons or the transparent phones of the early 2000s (which was just for aesthetic effect.)

In a lot of secure areas I would expect that people won’t be allowed to bring in their own phones. This is already the case in some very secure areas, but I expect it to spread. It may also change policies about phones and other small electric devices on planes.

This is another case of Israel and the West screwing themselves. It’s going to hurt economically and it’s going to lead to copycat attacks by others, including on the West.

And, of course, it was a monstrous action. Very on-brand for Israel and very normal for the US to fail to condemn it.

Even more than before I just don’t want to hear American officials condemning terrorism. Ever. If the word still means anything, they don’t what it is.

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