One Tuesday afternoon, my grandfather picked up my sister and me from high school. He remarked that today marked nothing less than the beginning of World War Three.
That day was September 11, 2001.
Now that ended up being a premature announcement by two decades I would say, but it perhaps was the beginning of a process that led us to where we are today: the expansion of the Gaza war to an regional war in the Middle East. As Iranian missiles fall on Israel, I think it would behoove us to recount the recent events that led us to this precipice. As tanks and missiles are shipped to Ukraine while water systems fail at home, an accounting of sorts is in order.
Success has many fathers, but failure is an orphan. This failure has many fathers, but none will claim this child of war.
For Israel, the degeneration of this once merely, controversial nation into international pariah took decades of work. Founded by secular, socialistic European Ashkenazi Jews, the idea of a Jewish State was considered laughable by that very group at first. The idea came from a non-practicing literary editor in Vienna. One of his famous Jewish correspondents, Stefan Zweig, wondered how in the world would Jews get along after centuries upon centuries away from the Holy Land and from each other. Zweig, for example, was secular, educated, urban, rich, and German-speaking. Other communities lived in rural areas in the Russian Empire and had nothing in common with his experience. Many believed that their exile from Jerusalem made them cosmopolitan and international which ended up advantageous over time.
I think of Zweig’s point when reminding myself that the president of Israel proclaimed in March 2023 that Israel was heading towards a civil war. Massive protests against indicted (for corruption) Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s plans to take control of the judiciary were fracturing the country. Secular and Ashkenazi but leading a far-right Cabinet, Netanyahu faced the opposition of the more secular and business-oriented communities that resembled him more than his supporters. “Save our Start-up Nation,” cried the opponents. Instead, this graduate of a Pennsylvania high school and MIT relied on the support of religious fanatic settlers, the ultra-Orthodox, Russian immigrants, and Kahanist Jewish supremacists. Not exactly a group that would care about losing venture capital funding from California for the Start-Up Nation.
This absolutely polarizing and corrupt career politician had brought Israel to the brink of internal conflict within the Jewish community in 2023. Undoubtedly, Netanyahu had his own legal cases in mind with the changes in the judiciary planned. Meanwhile, he had seen great successes in foreign policy by getting everyone to ignore all the illegal settlements and occupations of the West Bank, East Jerusalem, the Gaza Strip, and the Golan Heights of Syria.
- In 2017, President Trump recognized Jerusalem as the capital of Israel despite United Nations protests. President Biden continued this policy and moved the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.
- In 2018, President Trump killed the Iran nuclear deal negotiated by President Obama despite the opposition of his defense secretary on the grounds it could cause war with Iran. This was nuclear deal never restarted by President Biden.
- In 2019, President Trump recognized the occupied Golan Heights as part of Israel not Syria. This was not reversed by President Biden.
- In 2020, President Trump and Jared Kushner moved to normalize relations between Israel and many Muslim nations with the Abraham Accords. Previously, they refused to recognize Israel due to the illegal occupation of Palestinian land.
And this was all while the Israeli Knesset passed a law proclaiming Israel a “nation-state” of the Jewish people, formally making non-Jewish citizens (one-fifth of Israeli citizens are Arabs) second-class citizens in 2018. Arab parliamentarians declared this to be an apartheid law. In 2021 and 2022, Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International respectively agreed that Israel was an apartheid state.
So much success externally, yet so much danger internally for the prime minister. Perhaps a common religion is not all you need to create unity as anyone running a Baptist church could tell you. As early as 2011, we could see cost of living protests in Israel. A shocking “Move to Berlin” initiative began due to unaffordable homes in Israel, encouraging young Jews to return to the land their grandparents abandoned during the Third Reich.
But The Bubble, as Tel Aviv is known, did not care much or have to deal much with the frontier wars and internal apartheid as they discoed, traveled, surfed, and occasionally protested. Meanwhile when Israeli Prime Minister Ariel “the bulldozer” Sharon withdrew Israeli settlements and the military from Gaza in 2005, he locked in the people without the ability to leave or travel or have a functioning economy or even fish in its own waters.
When from 2018-2019, peaceful protesters in the open air prison known as the Gaza Strip began their weekly Great March of Return. While Palestinians protested from the border fence, Israel shot the civilians, killing hundreds and crippling thousands; Tel Aviv partied on and protested not.
The October 7, 2023 attacks on Israel by the Gaza-based Hamas can be seen as a prison break, a war of liberation under occupation, a massacre of civilians, a war crime, or all of the above. I saw one writer compare it to the Tet Offensive by the Vietnamese in 1968. But for the controversial and indicted prime minister it was a godsend. Now he could use a war against Israel’s enemies as a way to cajole Jewish Israelis into unity.
Suspiciously, the government of Israel seems to have been warned in shocking detail by Israeli, Egyptian, and American governments about an attack long before the fateful day. The decision to extend a music festival to the date of the attack is also shocking malpractice. That Netanyahu began work on exploiting the trillion cubic feet of natural gas just off the coast of Gaza earlier in 2023 also leads me to suspect that he needed this attack to justify clearing out the Gaza Strip for real estate and gas deals regardless of how many Israelis get killed or kidnapped. His interest in the hostages is also minimal as the Hannibal Directive instructed the Israeli Defense Forces to shoot and kill their own citizens rather than let them be hostages. Possible deals for civilian hostage releases based on prisoner exchanges of Palestinians and ending the Gaza blockade were available within weeks. Netanyahu refused every single offer despite the protests of the family members of the hostages to this bloody day. Instead, he destroyed every university and hospital in Gaza while killing approximately 186,000 people according to the Lancet medical journal and running prisons on a diet of rape and torture.
Now one year later, Israel has yet to find the hostages and has killed many of them with indiscriminate bombing. The Israeli economy has collapsed, and many of the 10% of Israelis with two passports have left the country. Hezbollah rocket attacks from Lebanon keep the north of the country evacuated, and Hezbollah will not allow Israelis to return unless Israel ends the Gaza war.
Hamas has not been destroyed, and Israel has now conducted attacks or assassinations in Iran, Syria, Lebanon, and possibly even the Russian naval base of Tartus. Like in the Spielberg movie Munich, Israel seems to want to assassinate those more willing negotiate like Ismail Haniyeh. South Africa, the former apartheid state, has sued in the International Court of Justice and won a ruling that acts of genocide are occurring and the occupation of Palestinian land is illegal. The separate International Criminal Court seeks the arrest of the defense and prime minister and three Hamas leaders for war crimes.
Despite that the now doubly-legally disgraced Netanyahu (corrupt domestically and war criminal internationally) was received with bipartisan rapture by the United States Congress in July. Aid and arms have been flowing liberally despite our crumbling health, education, and infrastructure needs. The Vice President, now the Democratic nominee for president, pledged to “ensure that Israel is able to defend itself, including from Iran and Iran-backed militias, such as Hamas and Hezbollah” after his warmongering speech to Congress. 6 days later the Hamas political leader was assassinated in Iran, a month later the West Bank (which is not run by Hamas) was invaded, two months later Hezbollah pagers exploded in Lebanon, and last week Hassan Nasrallah was blown up by the Israeli Air Force while Netanyahu was at the United Nations in New York. The United States will go for broke for this nation and this criminal prolonging his career to prevent arrest. And to prolong his career, he has to prolong this war. And to prolong this war, he has to expand this war. And to expand this war, he needs capabilities only possible by drafting the United States into direct participation to fight a nation ten times more populous.
It cannot be more transparent than that, and yet here we are on the verge of World War III: Middle East edition. The East Asia theater has yet to begin, and the Eastern Europe theater has already begun. And perhaps the only thing that can stop an apartheid state is military defeat as the Battle of Cuito Cuanavale defeated the South Africa Defence Force in 1988.
And as the rockets’ red glare gave proof through the Tel Aviv night, that war has now come.