In the 40-plus years I’ve been studying the US-Israeli relationship up close, my views of its dynamics have changed (as have the dynamics themselves.) However, one view of the relationship that has lasting validity and some inherent elasticity of its own is to view Israel as a sometimes out-of-control attack dog that over the past few decades has been built and sustained overwhelmingly through the support of– and as perceived longterm investment for– the U.S. military-industrial-governance complex.
But has the Rottweiler now slipped the leash and started to turn on its master?
Not wholly.
The problem right now is that the “master”, that is Pres. Joe Biden and his administration, has basically dropped the leash, due to a combination of factors. And that has left the Rottweiler rampaging across the battle-fields and “norms” of global politics with very little apparent restraint or discipline but only an outsized desire to visit death and destruction (in the name of “deterrence”) on as many of its neighbors in West Asia as possible.
So what has caused the Biden administration to drop the leash? Firstly, of course, it is the evident mental incapacity of not just that ageing narcissist the president himself but also of just about all of the “principals” in his National Security Council. But secondly, there is another very important dynamic at play: Namely the ability and willingness that PM Netanyahu and his rightwing cronies in Israel have shown, to exert a crude kind of “protection racket” blackmail against Washington, regarding its many military operations against its neighbors.
I see this protection racket as having been run in– as of now– two distinct phases. Phase 1, which lasted from October 8, 2023 through roughly the end of September 2024, consisted of Netanyahu and his hirelings conveying to the U.S. president a clear message to this effect: “Hey, Biden, I know you have lots of U.S. interests– and many thousands of U.S. service members– strung out throughout West Asia. Wouldn’t it be a pity if anything happened to them. Which it just might if we were to blow up the Lebanon front… So anyway, you were trying to get us to be more restrained in Gaza. We could consider a deal: You let us proceed as we want in Gaza and we’ll abide by your preferences re not escalating in Lebanon.“
And it worked. Oh boy, did it work. In Gaza, the Israeli military easily bust through U.S. “Red Line” after “Red Line”, while the Israeli political echelon blocked and blocked any U.S. suggestion that it should act more restrained there, or allow sufficient amounts of aid into Gaza, or agree to a ceasefire there.
Phase 1 of Netanyahu’s protection racket worked so well, indeed, that over recent months he proceeded to Phase 2. He and his people probed to see Washington’s reactions to various escalatory Israeli provocations: in Lebanon, in Syria– and even in Tehran, with the killing of Ismail Haniyeh there on July 31. And Washington’s reaction each time was: Goose egg. Nothing. Or actually, sometimes something worse than goose egg: something more like some imperfectly hushed applause for Israel’s “ingenuity”, or its daring.
So Phase 2 was an enlargement of the same protection-racket-style approach we saw in Phase 1. This time it was: “Hey, Biden, I know you have lots of U.S. interests– and many thousands of U.S. service members– strung out throughout West Asia. Wouldn’t it be a pity if anything happened to them. Which it just might if we were to trigger a big regionwide escalation by launching a major attack against Tehran… So anyway, you were trying to get us to be more restrained in Lebanon. We could consider a deal: You let us proceed as we want in Lebanon and we’ll abide by your preferences re not escalating against Iran.”
And once again, this Mafia-style blackmail against Biden has thus far seemed to work. Biden and his advisors right across the board have seemingly bought in to all of Netanyahu’s arguments about the necessity/desirability of Israel extending its Gaza-proven tactics of mass destruction from that benighted strip to the whole southern and eastern portions of Lebanon. (Indeed, some of the neocons in the Wall Street Journal and elsewhere have been salivating at the prospect that these Israeli military rampages in Lebanon might bring about a pro-Western regime change there… Like that worked so well back in 1982… )
And meanwhile, Israel has now found it relatively simple and low-cost to continue its genociding in Gaza, given that it already long ago destroyed all of the strip’s basic infrastructure and tightened its stranglehold on the delivery of vital necessities to the strip’s 2.2 million now much weakened residents.
The figures that UNOCHA has released this week about the status of aid deliveries into Gaza are shocking. First, the figures for the average number of trucks of aid the Israeli military has allowed into Gaza in each of the recent months
That average has declined every month since April. The figure for September was just one-third of what it was in April, and was just 10.6% of the average number of truckloads of goods that went into the Strip every day before 10/7/23– a time when the population’s humanitarian needs were nowhere near as pressing. In the first week of october the daily average plummeted further, to an average of just 13 trucks/day.
… And here’s what’s been happening to humanitarian aid missions— that is, presumably, small convoys of cars carrying certified humanitarian personnel– in recent months… and specifically since the beginning of October:
Here you can see the stark disparity between the Israelis’ treatment, October 1-7, of aid missions going to the north of Gaza, and the south. In the north, 26 of the 40 aid mission applications were flat-out denied (65%), while for those going to the south, “only” 50% were denied.
It seems so easy at this point– now that the Rottweiler has gotten its supposed “master” so thoroughly terrorized and blackmailed into obedience–for it to carry on genociding the Palestinians in Gaza… While it also continues its savage and mega-lethal rampages around Lebanon… and insouciantly lays waste to all the remaining tenets of international “law.”
Just one final graphic here. This one is from the Twitter feed of the incomparable Palestinian thinker Susan Abulhawa earlier this week:
No further comment needed.
