Just quickly, here are some of my thoughts on the implosion of key Israeli institutions, and to some extent of Jewish-Israeli society itself, that has recently been unfolding at near-warp speed:
- On Monday we had the showdown at two military bases in Israel between Israel’s military police and rightwing protesters incensed that the MPs had detained some of the grunts who’d been guarding Israeli prisoners there, on grounds that the guards had committed gross acts of cruelty against the detainees, including rape. (The “right to rape” protesters, some of whom are shown above, were joined and egged on by their backers from within both the Netanyahu government and the serving military.)
- On the night of Tuesday/Wednesday, we had the Israeli military/spy services undertaking two highly provocative assassinations– of Hizbullah military chief Fuad Shukr in Beirut and of Hamas’s over-all political leader, Ismail Haniyeh, in Tehran.
- On Wednesday, we had the office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk publicly releasing the crucial report on the abuses Israel has been committing against the thousands of Palestinians it has detained– from Gaza, the West Bank, and from inside Israel– since October 7. (One can surmise that it had been an earlier briefing on those findings to the Israeli military chiefs that had led to them trying to rein in some of the worst abuses, through the actions they tried to undertake on Monday.)
- On Thursday and Friday, the U.S. Department of Defense announced that, in response to the tensions in West Asia that Israel’s assassinations had sparked, it would be sending large new naval and other forces to the region and the bodies of water abutting it…
Israel’s ever-wily PM Benjamin Netanyahu has been working overtime to try to direct attention away from the schisms that are visibly opening up between, for example, his country’s military leadership and its police, or between those same military leaders and himself as PM. This “Wag the Dog” motivation for him– working in close coordination, of course, with the military leadership that he still so deeply distrusts– to authorize the launching on Tuesday night of the two highly escalatory attacks against Arab leaders in distant capitals, is certainly one explanation for why he/they launched them. (Though perhaps not a complete explanation.)
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