On sich totsiegen – Adam Shatz in LRB:

“On 18 june, the sixth day of Israel’s attack on Iran, David Petraeus gave some unsolicited advice to Donald Trump in an interview with the New York Times. Trump, he said, should deliver an ultimatum to Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, ordering him to dismantle Iran’s uranium enrichment programme or face ‘the complete destruction of your country and your regime and your people’. If Khamenei were to refuse, he added, ‘that improves our legitimacy and then reluctantly we blow them to smithereens.’ That Petraeus was recommending Iran, a country of ninety million people, be reduced to Gaza-like conditions hardly occasioned comment: murderous threats from US officials against foreign leaders and their people no longer provoke shock, much less condemnation; they’re simply part of the ‘conversation’ about how the US should manage its empire.
On 22 June, the US air force dropped GBU-57 Massive Ordnance Penetrator bombs on uranium-enrichment sites at Fordow and Natanz, and fired Tomahawk missiles at the nuclear research centre near Isfahan. Initially, it seemed as if Trump was following Petraeus’s counsel, but then he rushed to proclaim victory, declaring that the strikes had demolished Iran’s nuclear capacity (according to a preliminary classified US report, the programme has been set back by only a few months); he then prevailed on Israel and Iran to accept a ceasefire. Israel’s strikes had caused extensive damage to residential neighbourhoods and property; as many as a thousand Iranians were killed. But Khamenei was not assassinated, despite Israel’s threats, and the US did not bomb Iran to smithereens, even if Trump compared his actions to Truman’s use of atomic weapons at Hiroshima (‘that stopped a lot of fighting, and this stopped a lot of fighting’) when he welcomed Netanyahu to the White House on 6 July. The starvation and killing in Gaza grew still worse, but so long as Israel and Iran were at war, Palestinian suffering was off the front page.”

(…)

“When Trump made plain that he wanted Israel to stop bombing, Netanyahu had little choice but to acquiesce. (Under a Democratic president, the US might not have joined the war, but the fighting could well have dragged on, amid impotent cries of ‘concern’ about casualties.)”

(…)

“The Iranian regime is not only militarily weak, it is also widely loathed by Iranians for its oppression and corruption. Among the regime’s officials and civil servants, the ardour of revolutionary Shiism long ago gave way to cynicism, with the Revolutionary Guard smuggling liquor and the Basij looking the other way when women took off their hijabs. The regime is also infested with spies: Israel’s campaign couldn’t have proceeded so smoothly, or with such velocity, without the help of a network of spooks and informants.”

(…)

“ During the war with Iraq, he insisted that the ‘path to Jerusalem runs through Karbala’, as if the battle with Saddam Hussein were the first stage of the liberation of Palestine. The Israelis responded by arguing that the path to Pax Israeliana ran through regime change in Tehran. Netanyahu has long been a vociferous advocate of military confrontation with the Islamic Republic, and in a video address released in the first days of Israel’s assault, he made an explicit appeal to the Iranian public: ‘As we achieve our objective, we are also clearing the path for you to achieve your freedom.’”

(…)

“For all Trump’s triumphalism, the ‘twelve-day war’, far from having ended Iran’s search for a nuclear weapon, may accelerate it.”

(…)

“Hard power can only get you so far if you have no soft power. But Netanyahu and the Israeli political establishment don’t seem concerned about these diplomatic costs – or about the collapse of the country’s moral reputation as a result of the wanton destruction of Gaza. They simply shrug off the criticisms; after all, they say, the world is against us. In fact, Israel still has the governments of the US and most of the West behind it.”

(…)

“After the 1967 war, Isaac Deutscher recalled a German phrase, ‘Man kann sich totsiegen’ – ‘you can triumph yourself to death.’ The same is true of Israel’s wars today, and for largely the same reasons. ‘Unless Israel decides to forcibly expel hundreds of thousands or even millions of Palestinians into Egypt or Jordan,’ Yezid Sayigh, a Palestinian analyst based in Beirut, told me, ‘it can’t overcome the principal obstacle to total colonisation, which is the fact that the Palestinians are still there, in Gaza and the West Bank. Which is to say: Israel has set itself on a trajectory for which it has no solutions other than a final solution, and final solutions aren’t easy to implement.”

(…)

“The New York Democratic machine and the New York Times, which has been running hit pieces on Mamdani unconvincingly disguised as reportage, dislike him because of his democratic socialist convictions, but the chief focus of their attacks has been his opposition to Israel’s occupation and his criticisms of the war on Gaza. Since the last weeks of the campaign, Mamdani has found himself denounced as an antisemite, a jihadist, a supporter of the 9/11 attacks, because he spoke of ‘apartheid’ and ‘genocide’ in Palestine, and because he refused to say that he supported Israel’s ‘right to exist as a Jewish state’. (He said that he supports its right to exist as ‘a state with equal rights’ – a position that, from a conservative Zionist perspective, is tantamount to calling for Jews to be thrown into the sea.) ‘Zohran “little Muhammad” Mamdani is an antisemitic, socialist, communist who will destroy the great City of New York,’ Andy Ogles, a Republican congressman from Tennessee, wrote on X. ‘He needs to be DEPORTED.’”

(…)

“Achcar says that the 7 October attack was ‘the most catastrophic miscalculation in the history of anticolonial struggle’. A strong case can be made that it has set back the Palestinian struggle for the foreseeable future.”

(…)

“Malley and Agha argue that, for negotiations between Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs to work, they will have to include ‘powerful groups who felt that what was discussed was at odds with their core beliefs’ – the rejectionists of both camps, from Palestinian Islamists to Jewish settlers and the ultra-Orthodox. They believe that something could come out of a more open-ended conversation, with no clear horizon, or ‘solution’. These groups, they write, might even find a way of co-existing in the same land without renouncing their larger aspirations, as Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland have done since the Good Friday Agreement.”

(…)

“Even so, it’s extremely difficult to imagine the dismantling of Israel’s apartheid system, or to imagine a serious challenge to its domination emerging anytime soon. In a world of rising authoritarianism and ethnonationalism, where the rule of law has all but crumbled, the brutal, pitiless state run by Netanyahu looks more like a pioneer than an outlier.”

Read the article here.

Isaac Deutscher was not always right, but often he was, and yes man kann sich totsiegen.

One day the Good Friday Agreement, in this or that form, will come to Israel and Palestine, that’s the long-lasting hope of all those who don’t believe that God is in favor of the forever war.

October 7 was a miscalculation, but I’m not sure if it will have “set back the Palestinian struggle for the foreseeable future.”

Netanyahu is bringing the Palestinian closer, precisely because he is doing his utmost to prevent such a state forever.

But Shatz is right, Netanyahu is not an outlier, he is a pioneer. The brutal, pitiless nation state, shaped in the image of Carl Schmitt, might be on a victory path.

The small comfort is that no victory path lasts forever.