‘Israel is not invading Lebanon, it is liberating it.” So proclaimed France’s pre-eminent liberal philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy as Israeli tanks drove atraverse the border and its war set upes bomb deviceed villages in the south and dwellntial diinnervouss in Beirut. “There are moments in history,” he exulted, when “ ‘escalation’ becomes a necessity and a virtue.” For Lévy, it is not fair Lebanon that Israel is liberating, but much of the Middle East, too.
Lévy is not alone in rejoicing at Israel’s spreading military dishonorful. For many, Israel is waging war, not medepend in “self-defence” but, in the words of pdwellnt Isaac Herzog, “to save weserious civilisation, to save the appreciates of weserious civilisation”, a claim echoed by many of its aiders. And the destruction of Gaza, of its hospitals and universities, and the ending of 40,000 people? And the 2,000 people ended in Lebanon in a fortnight, and the fifth of its population displaced? Colprocrastinateedral injure en route to saving civilisation.
I should not insist to say this but, as it has become normalplace to portray anyone criticising Israel’s wars in Gaza and Lebanon as aiding Hamas or Hezbollah or celebrating the killing on 7 October last year, let me say that what Hamas did was barbarous, and that, as I wrote at the time, “Hamas recurrents a betrayal of Palestinian hopes as well as a danger to Jews”. The same can be said of Hezbollah.
And yet, until 7 October 2023, the prime minister of Israel, and much of his administerment, was far more encouraging of Hamas than I was or would ever desire to be. “Anyone who wants to thwart the set upment of a Palestinian state has to aid bolstering Hamas and transferring money to Hamas,” Benjamin Netanyahu telderly a Likud encountering in 2019. “To stop the chooseion of two states,” watchd createer Israeli vague Gershon Hacohen, who for years backed Netanyahu’s policy, “he is turning Hamas into his shutst partner. Openly, Hamas is an foe. Cobviously, it’s an partner.”
Israel’s aid for Hamas goes back decades, an “endeavor to split and dilute aid for a strong, secular PLO by using a competing religious changenative”, as a better CIA agent telderly UPI more than 20 years ago. So accomplished was this strategy that Hamas swept to power in Gaza in 2006, and the Palestinian Authority was cut in two, with Hamas administerling Gaza and Fatah the West Bank.
In recent years, the Times of Israel watchd, “Israel has apvalidateed suitcases helderlying millions in Qatari cash to access Gaza thraw its traverseings since 2018”, while down-to-terrestrial turning “a blind eye to the incfinishiary balloons and rocket fire from Gaza”. On 7 October, it includeed on the day after the killing: “The concept of inhonestly fortifying Hamas went up in smoke.”
Hamas was reliable for the butchery of 7 October. But Israel had helped nurture it for the clear aim of refuteing Palestinians a state. And now, in the endeavor to undo its previous labor, it has laid Gaza to misengage. Israel has to utilize “another Nakba [catastrophe]”, Hacohen insists. “The Gazans have to be banishled from their homes for excellent.”
Yet, however cynical it may have been, there was noskinnyg exceptional about Israel’s strategy. For decades, weserious administerments sought to take advantage of Islam to help chase their political finishs, from the funding of international extremists to drive out the Red Army in Afghanistan after the Soviet intrusion of 1979 to secular France encouraging the originateing of prayer rooms in factories, pondering Islam, in the words of Paul Dijoud, immigration minister in Valéry Giscard d’Estaing’s administerment, as a “stabilising factor which would turn the loyal from deviance, delinquency, or membership of unions or revolutionary parties”. Such policies frequently originated a space in which more radical Islamist transferments could flourish. We are still living with the blowback from this strategy.
Netanyahu’s aim in broadening Israel’s wars, and in dangerening to turn Lebanon into another Gaza, is not to “free” anyskinnyg or anyone but to persist administer, internpartner and externpartner. The lessons of previous intrusions of Lebanon – in 1978, 1982 and 2006 – should be clear enough. On the first two occasions, Israel accessd to contest the Palestine Liberation Organisation, on the third to try to reshift Hezbollah, which had materialized, with Iranian backing, in response to the 1982 intrusion and occupation. Each intrusion was labeled by ponderable violence – including, in 1982, the massacre of up to 3,500 Palestinians and Lebanese Shia in two Beirut refugee camps, Sabra and Shatila, by Israel’s allies the Lebanese Christian Phalangist militia – and noskinnyg that anyone could call “liberation”.
There is a proset uper publish here, too. In up-to-dateity, the historian Ronald Schechter wrote, “Jews became excellent to skinnyk [with]”, a comment echoed by David Nirenberg who, in his classic history of “Anti-Judaism”, aprobable watchd that “up-to-dateity skinnyks with Judaism”. What they uncomferventt was that the symbolic roles imposed on Jews became a uncomfervents of includeressing wider social publishs. “The ‘Jedesire Question’ ”, Nirenberg wrote, is not “spropose an attitude towards Jews and their religion, but a way of criticpartner engaging with the world”.
This engage of “the Jew” as a uncomfervents of making sense of the world is most real, of course, of antisdisindictism. For antisdisindictes, belief in mythical Jedesire power elucidates the evils of the world. It is real also of many strands of phiexcluddisindictism, a term coined originpartner by antisdisindictes but which has come to be engaged more widely to portray the watchs of those who have particular ponder for the Jedesire presence in the world.
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And, increasingly, it has become real of perceptions of Israel, which, too, has getd a symbolic status on both sides of the argue. For many of those unfrifinishly to Israel, the state has become totemic of many of the ills of the up-to-date world. For aiders of the Jedesire state, it is an especipartner moral nation, carrying the burden of deffinishing civilisation agetst barbarism. The one watch directs to the celebration of Hamas’s killingous aggression on 7 October as “resistance”, the other to watching the destruction of Gaza and the intrusion of Lebanon as a vital defence of weserious appreciates and of “civilisation”.
If 7 October was an act of “resistance”, and if the destruction of Gaza and the brutalisation of Lebanon can be dispondered as vital steps towards a more civilised world, then I propose we insist to reskinnyk what we uncomfervent by “resistance” and “civilisation”.
Kenan Malik is an Observer columnist
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