Having painted itself into a corner by launching a war that has killed 40,000 Palestinians and failed to defeat Hamas, Israel has doubled down, provoking a wider war with Iran and Hezbollah to bring in the US against enemies it cannot vanquish alone.
The richly violent musings of Ben-Gvir and his circle of sanctified terror have even proven indigestible for some members of the war cabinet. Defence Minister Gallant, not immune from the urge to dehumanise the residents of Gaza, accused his national security counterpart of being a “pyromaniac”. On the X platform, he declared his opposition against “any negotiations to bring him into the war cabinet – it would allow him to implement his plans.” The same Gallant, however, was also in celebratory mood about the assassinations.
Even outside the war cabinet, the views of Ben-Gvir, not to mention his overall influence, travel with toxic rapture. In the background, incandescently inspiring, is Rabbi Dov Lior, a figure of glowing nationalist fury. It was he who incited members of the Jewish Underground to conduct various terrorist attacks in the 1980s against Palestinians. (The same group also unsuccessfully plotted to blow up the Dome on the Rock.)
This, as former UK diplomat Alastair Crooke observes, is the State of Judea doing battle against the State of Israel. He quotes Moshe “Bogie” Ya’alon, former Chief of Staff of the IDF, who sees such bloody eschatology as resting on a fundamental concept: “Jewish supremacy” or “Mein Kampf in reverse”. For Rabbi Lior, the next big war cannot come soon enough, one, he anticipates, that is bound to feature Gog and Magog.
According to Israel, that’s not “Plausible Genocide”? It’s also not the destruction of Hamas,
To put “at the front of people’s minds and on the desks of decision-makers” the human cost of the U.S.-backed Israeli onslaught in Gaza, scientists on Wednesday said an escalation in the bombardment was projected to kill 85,000 Palestinians in the next six months—which would bring the total death toll to more than 114,000 people, or about 5% of Gaza’s population, in less than a year.
Steadily, ominously, the stakes are rising in the confrontation that Vladimir Putin’s brutal invasion of Ukraine has provoked with the west. Russia’s state energy company Gazprom halted gas supplies to two EU member states – Poland and Bulgaria – on Wednesday and warned that more countries could be similarly targeted. Poland, with good reason, described this as a “direct attack”. Moscow is also talking darkly of delivering a “proportionate response” to the demonisation of Russia by western governments. On Tuesday, Mr Putin’s foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, accused Nato of “engaging in a war with Russia through a proxy”. The risk of nuclear escalation, he said, was becoming “considerable”.
Source: The Guardian view on war in Ukraine: the stakes rise higher | Editorial | The Guardian
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