As Hegemons Go, Israel Isn't All That Benign [View all]

[justaprogressive]

As I write mid-day on Tuesday, I can state with existential certitude that a ceasefire between Israel and Iran is on, unless it’s off. Our president is no student of history, and is largely surrounded by Trump-besotted nincompoops, but someone might have told him that it’s invariably easier to start a war than end it.

Even as that ceasefire looks suspiciously like Schrodinger’s cat, however, one thing that is definitely alive is Israel’s status as the Middle East’s hegemon. To its pre-existing status as the region’s sole nuclear power, it has now augmented that status by its further reduction of the Palestinian Authority to a floundering letterhead organization, by its increasing appropriations of Palestinians’ West Bank homes and farms; by its war on Hamas, which, since its treatment of Palestinians engenders more armed Palestinian opposition and more Hamas recruits, has been from the start a war on all of Gaza; by its evisceration of much of the Hezbollah, its incursions into Syria, and, with crucial U.S. assistance, by its serious diminution of an Iranian threat.

Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran all truly sought Israel’s destruction, and no Israeli government would have hesitated, or has hesitated, to use some level of military force against them. But the Netanyahu government’s refusal to bargain with moderate Palestinians and their Arab allies (even, for that matter, to recognize the existence, much less the legitimacy, of moderate Palestinians) set the table for its blood-drenched, ultra-nationalist approach to its war on Gaza and its increasing take-over of the West Bank.

This is Jabotinsky Zionism—which calls for expelling all Palestinians and conquering their Arab allies—on steroids. Any chronicle of the current Netanyahu government will surely mark it as the most purely Jabotinsky-esque that Israel has ever had. There’s one other forebear, though, that might be cited as well: the Old Testament’s Book of Joshua.

https://prospect.org/blogs-and-newsletters/tap/2025-06-24-netanyahu-israel-gaza-palestine-iran/