On the last one before the Messiah – Jacqueline Rose in LRB:

“On 7 December, Israel’s army chief, Lieutenant General Eyal Zamir, called the line – which gives Israel control over 58 per cent of the territory – a ‘new border’. Israel appears to want two things: to achieve a total victory and to guarantee that the war with the Palestinians never ends. Not all but a significant majority of Israeli Jews support the war. It seems fair to ask: what is Israel thinking of?”

(…)

“Yair Lapid, the leader of the opposition, took to Twitter/X to address the prime minister: ‘You can change as many names as you want; you will not change the fact that on your watch the most terrible disaster since the establishment of the country happened to the people of Israel. This government is not the government of revival, it is the government of guilt.’ The new title, official and permanent, was approved by the Knesset. For Netanyahu, this was no small victory. It gave him carte blanche to proceed with an endless war that – for all the talk of a ceasefire – continues to flout the Geneva Conventions and international humanitarian law. If we are dealing with a ‘revival’, or even a ‘resurrection’, with its unmistakeable claim to divine authority, then anything is permissible. Genocide is turned into an act of God and Israel’s crimes against the Palestinian people are raised to the status of a cosmic event. State violence has been sanctified. Netanyahu has saved his soul, absolving himself of sin. ‘The government of guilt’ walks free. In late November, he requested a pardon from President Herzog to release him from outstanding charges of corruption and bribery. In the eyes of many, a desperate attempt to forestall the resumption of his trial has been his unspoken rationale for prolonging the war.”

(…)

“In the course of the interview, Netanyahu played a cool hand. That he was performing for my benefit was not something he had the remotest interest in trying to hide. He prided himself on speaking English with a flawless American accent and no trace of Hebrew. He would lead his people, even if, or especially if, his most fervent supporters turned out not to be Jews. He appeared to delight in the fact that no one could tell from his speech or demeanour that he himself was anything other than an American-born Jew. In fact he was born and raised in Israel until the age of fourteen and returned there for his military service four years later, before spending the mid-1970s at MIT and Harvard. As a student in the US, he had changed his name to Ben Nitay, easier to pronounce for the middle American audience he most wanted to impress – a ‘vast and secret continent’, he explained, that stretches from about twenty miles west of New York and Washington to roughly twenty miles east of LA, and accounts for 45 per cent of the population. The Jews, on the other hand, make up a paltry 2 per cent of the American people and Christian conservatives a mere 12.”

(…)

“Similarly against all evidence, Israel persistently denies the deliberate targeting of civilians. In the interview, Netanyahu took this as the moral divide between the conduct of the IDF and the ‘terrorism’ of the PLO. But carefully collated army testimony cites a tolerated ratio of one hundred civilians dead for every senior Hamas commander, up to twenty civilians for low-ranking personnel. This is one of the few statistics to emerge from Israel which does not provide estimates of the actual numbers of the dead: hundreds of thousands if we count those still buried beneath the rubble. In the words of the former Israeli negotiator Daniel Levy, writing on the so-called ‘ceasefire’, ‘they have smashed the whole place up and can kill as they please.’ Consider one example out of so many: the case of Jumaa and Fadi Abu Assi, brothers aged nine and ten, killed in the town of Bani Suheila by a drone attack on 29 November (the agreed first date of the ceasefire was 10 October). They had been picked out as legitimate targets when they approached the Yellow Line in search of firewood.”

(…)

“What should be aimed for is a ‘restrained catastrophe’, to be managed as a perpetual state of war which will render any definitive settlement impossible. Never ending the conflict with the enemy will act as an ‘adhesive’ to maintain the political unity of the Jews. It is a strategy fraught with risk – a breakdown of all restraint and a slide into new catastrophe. In 2015, when Ben-Zaken wrote his essay, no one was yet talking about genocide.
Netanyahu’s abiding fear is not that peace can never be achieved but that it might be. He is the Israeli leader who has most fully actualised Abravanel’s age-old dream. On his way to address Congress in March 2015, Netanyahu stopped off to visit his father’s grave and then released a press statement: ‘My father was never afraid to go out into the storm’ – the exact image used by Benzion Netanyahu to describe Abravanel. Legend has it that the Lubavitcher Rebbe, Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, once told Netanyahu that he would be the last prime minister, the one destined to transfer the leadership to the Messiah. Meanwhile, bodies trailing behind him, he still seems to believe he can sweet-talk his way to the stars.”

Read the article here.

The last prime minister before the Messiah. Or before the final catastrophe?

The eternal war – in the hope to prevent a civil war. The external enemy, in order not to be killed by internal enemies.

A whole new take on Hobbes.