As I write this, two major things have just not gotten underway. First, Israeli tanks now roll grindingly into Gaza in the initial stages of the ground strike it promised to deliver in retaliation against Hamas for its evil and brutal terrorist attacks on October 7. Second, Hamas and Iranian leaders are meeting in Moscow to discuss Russia as a potential “platform for mediation” in releasing the hostages Hamas took during their attack, and hopefully halting the impending hellfire and brimstone that Israel has been raining upon Gaza. Never mind these three forces met a few months ago in Russia and that to all appearances (but lack of hard evidence) it seems as if Russia…could have had a hand in planning the attack?
And why wouldn’t they have helped, even if only a little?
Russia pivoted their economy to capitalize on the war, so Russia has no real reason to stop their campaign to seize a sovereign democracy. They know that the entire world is absolutely sick of the situation in Ukraine. It’s dragging on and very likely to continue into a second year. It’s expensive and resource-draining and Ukraine has very little to show for its valiant efforts. Russia reckons that if they just hold out a bit longer, they’ll win what has become a war of attrition. Adding another war front in the Middle East is just a good business strategy for Putin at this point because he knows his economy will stay strong. But you know what an even better strategy is? Creating a nasty situation that forces your biggest military threat to divert resources because of prior and preeminent diplomatic obligations.
Forcing the U.S. out of the Ukraine conflict will make it that much easier for Russia to finally take the country because instead of treating Putin like the land-grabbing tyrant he is and confronting him directly with full-scale war, NATO has been low-key waging a proxy war against Russia IN UKRAINE. In no way does NATO want an ACTUAL war with Russia, so they’re all-in with propping up the Ukraine war. At least the conflict remains “contained” that way. To Europe’s credit, they know full well that appeasement against such tyrants does not work…of course, it would have been nice for them to have remembered this in 2014 when Russia annexed Crimea because maybe things wouldn’t be like they are now.
The one thing that surprised me in all of this was China. I fully expected Russia to do one last massive shock-and-awe push into Ukraine to crush it utterly and drive NATO WAAAY back, and then immediately deploy naval forces to the Mediterranean to counter the US naval presence that is supporting Israel. But then China said, “hold my Tsing-Dao!” and beat Russia to it. With Russia’s blessing.
The idea that Russia and China are involved over concerns that Palestine’s rights as a nation are being trampled is laughable. What Russia has been doing to Ukraine is what Israel as longed and lusted to do to Palestine for 74 years, and it’s what China has longed and lusted to do to Taiwan for 77 years. Russia is 100% violating the national rights of Ukraine. China is in the process of 100% undermining the national rights of Taiwan. The reason that the toxic duo of Russia and China have inserted themselves into the war in the Levant is because during the isolationism of the Trump administration, Russia and China finally became the major global power-brokers they had always wanted to be. The U.S. failed to notice that this had been happening until China brokered peace between Saudi Arabia and Iran. THAT finally woke Anthony Blinken’s State Department from its somnambulant state, but he immediately proceeded to act according to America’s 2015 foreign policy playbook, which had yielded us precisely diddly-squat in that region because it is OUT OF DATE.
Worse than that, actually. On Blinken’s watch, Iran has inched ever so much closer to having nuclear weapons. In fact, Blinken’s state department welcomed the development and along with Office of the Director of National Intelligence refused to countenance the possibility that Iran might possibly be building nuclear weapons and could truly pose an existential threat to Israel EVERYONE IN THE REGION. This is precisely why the US is in the Mediterranean now. We are making sure the fight stays between Israel and Hamas and that Iran and Hezbollah doesn’t even THINK about getting involved. It’s also why Blinders Blinken announced that any attack on US personnel by Iran’s proxies will be considered an attack from Iran, regardless.
As it stands now, the Levant is a frontier honky-tonk, and the US is basically guarding the bathroom door of the bar so that no one can stop our buddy Israel from beating the ever-loving-fuck out of that punk-ass Hamas for their heinous and murderous attack on Israel. We don’t care who started it. We don’t care that our buddy might have done awful things to Hamas’ lady Palestine, because none of that could possibly justify Hamas’ vicious, evil, and violent assault ON OUR FRIEND. We are standing by our buddy because that is what buddies do. The thing is China is now also in this bathroom, and they have inserted themselves between us and our buddy Israel, to make sure the fight stays just between him and Hamas. If our buddy loses the upper hand, we will have to go through China to help him.
Now, it’s pretty clear that China’s dog in this fight involves protecting their oil investments and their influence, as well as keeping Russia in their back pocket. China would like nothing more than to be the reason that the U.S. fails in its commitment to back Israel’s military operations in the Levant. Russia, too, would like to see this. Which is why, as soon as I saw what China had done, I realized exactly how bad, bad, badbadbad this whole situation is likely to get.
You see, this honky-tonk bathroom we’re in isn’t a one filthy one-seater. It has stalls. And in those are waiting Iran, Hezbollah, and Syria. Iran burns with the desire to absolutely push the West out of the Levant and come to dominate it or die trying. Lebanon is still incandescent with rage over the Sabra and Shatila massacres, and wants the West gone from the Levant. Syria is absolutely done with Israel bombing them to smithereens every time it thinks Iran is secretly meeting in Damascus to plot Israel’s destruction. We in the West drastically underestimate the degree of hatred some of Israel’ neighbors hold for them, and for us, because the reason Israel is able to protect its national interests in the brutal manner it has is because we have their back–especially and particularly the U.S. But wait. There’s more.
On the other side of that bathroom door is Russia. It’s likely that North Korea is also tagging along. You know who isn’t on the other side of that door? Anyone in NATO, because they are too busy shoring up their own national protections in case they can’t score a win against Russia in Ukraine and they have to defend their own borders. When all of this finally starts to sink in, one thing is obvious: Hamas isn’t trapped in this bathroom with Israel and the U.S. Israel and the U.S. are trapped in this bathroom with Hamas, Hezbollah, and Syria, and China is blocking all of us in, with Russia waiting on the other side to keep us all trapped in this nuclear pressure-cooker. In the immortal words of Admiral Ackbar, “IT’S A TRAP!”
Plot twist: it was always a trap, and this is the only possible explanation that makes sense. When Hamas attacked Israel, the first thought everyone in the West had was, “Don’t they know what Israel is going to do to them? How could they be so stupid as to think this would work? Are they just suicidal?” The answers to those questions, in order, are, “we were counting on it,” “we have a plan,” and “we have tunnels, we’ll outlast you like Al-Qaeda and the Viet Cong did.” Of Hamas-what they are is fucking angry, fucking violent, and fucking well-allied with and armed by two nuclear superpowers who are eager to dominate the geopolitics of the region even if it means letting a loose cannon like Iran be their top puppet there. Hell yes, they’ve been planning this. They got so tired of waiting for a moment like this that they just bit the bullet and made it happen. And you know who knows I’m right?
Israel. They ignored Egyptian intelligence reports that Hamas was planning an attack; it was just time to get it over with. What they didn’t realize is that they were baited and have now walked into a trap that they absolutely cannot get out of.
Israeli leadership acknowledged on day one that this is going to be a long war, and one they are determined to win. In the face of international censure over civilian deaths, Israel will strive to temper its righteous rage at Hamas and conduct a slow, thorough, and complete militarized demolition of the Gaza Strip whilst showing restraint towards civilians. The thing is…tunnels. America spent 20 years losing the Vietnam War and 20 more years losing the war in Afghanistan. What two major things do these wars have in common? First, despite being a world-class military superpower, America lost both of them. Second, we lost both of them because we insisted on fighting a conventional war against ideologically galvanized ragtag partisans who struck using brilliant and devastating guerrilla tactics but then retreated back to their network of caves and tunnels before we even knew what hit us. This is precisely and exactly what Israel is facing in the Gaza strip. But wait. There’s more.
Israel’s only truly well-protected border is along the Mediterranean coast, largely because the U.S. is there, even if we are being dogged by China. The borders with Egypt and Jordan will remain relatively safe for the foreseeable future, because neither Egypt nor Jordan has any desire to tangle with Israel. However, the sovereign kingdom of Jordan absolutely has not forgotten the map of “Greater Israel” that the current regime’s finance minister presented in Paris earlier this year which featured Israel as having taken over Gaza, the West Bank, and THE KINGDOM OF JORDAN. Jordan will not provoke Israel, but they are unlikely to do any favors whatsoever for Israel going forward.
Moreover, it’s true that Israel normalized relations with the UAE and has been moving towards normalization with Saudi Arabia. That is exactly why on the day of the attack, Hamas delivered the message that Israel could not protect its allies with the “we’re looking at you, Saudi Arabia and UAE,” strongly indicated therein. To be perfectly honest, I can’t imagine that Saudi Arabia relished normalizing relations with a nation that had announced earlier this year its plans to annex a key ally (Jordan) into “Greater Israel.” It’s very likely that their motive for normalization was the promise from the U.S. to finally support the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia developing a domestic nuclear program. Taken together, I think we have an explanation of why Saudi Arabia has remained absolutely silent as this slow-moving horror has unfolded. Neither Saudi Arabia nor the UAE are good enough with Israel to get involved in this. As for Iraq…they have absolutely no love for Israel, but there is a lot of dissent because Hamas acted without the input of the Iran-backed armed militia groups roving the Iraqi countryside. This, combined with a small but significant U.S. military presence in the nation, could stymie any support Hamas would see from that quarter for the foreseeable future. This, by the way, is the best-case scenario.
[Edit: I had not wanted to include this next comment, but thought better of it and so added it later.] Ironically, the least strategically problematic border Israel has to deal with in this quagmire is their border with The West Bank. First off, no part of this border has been left to chance. It is the most well-policed and well-mapped of Israel's borders. Secondly, due to their annexation of the West Bank, Israel effectively controls both sides of this border. Yes, skirmishes with Hamas happen, deadly attacks are planned and executed by Hamas, and rockets are launched by Hamas from the Palestinian side, and far too many of them. Every instance of these is met with crushing and certain retaliation from the IDF. For the duration of the conflict with Hamas, we can expect a greatly increased Israeli presence patrolling the border and more IDF raids on places like Jenin, but...that is to be expected and it's really just a more intense version of what Israel has already been doing. While the situation isn't "stable," it has reached a state of equilibrium and predictability that does not exist along any of Israel's other borders. Regardless of how much the fighting intensifies, Israel will have this border on lock, which is why it is the least strategically relevant border in the entire situation. This could change if Israel decides to go all-in on Palestine rather than Gaza. However, the consequences of Israel taking such an action are so significant that it is doubtful they would take that tack.
This brings us to Israel’s biggest strategic problem: its northern borders with Syria and Lebanon. If Israel goes all in on the destruction of Gaza, they will be pretty vulnerable to incursion from Hezbollah and Iranian militias in Syria. As China is positioned in the Mediterranean to keep the U.S. from influencing the outcome of this regional conflict, Israel will eventually be stuck all alone defending those borders when Hezbollah finally makes their move…which is the whole entire strategy Hamas has come up with. Hamas knows that Israel is committed to a grindingly brutal, long, and punishing ground war in Gaza. The displeasure of the international community at the treatment of Gaza civilians is going to temper the pace and severity of Israel’s actions at first. The best Israel can hope for is that bloody Palestinian civilians recede from the headlines long enough for them to regain the traditional equilibrium they have long observed with the West: Israel does what it must to defend itself, and the West clutches their pearls with one hand while passing heavy artillery to Israel with the other. However. However. This only gets quiet if Hezbollah and Hamas decide that it will, and the odds are, they won’t. Once Israel is good and entrenched in their Gaza campaign, we can expect Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Iranian militias holed up in Syria to start really attacking, which will force Israel to fight on two battlefronts that are on opposite sides of the country from each other. And as has been observed previously, we can expect this to be a protracted and painful war that will force the U.S. to confront our willingness to engage China (and by extension, Russia) militarily in order to help our ally Israel.
As Israel works its way through every possible permutation of this impending engagement, the one thing they need is the one thing they can’t find: an exit strategy where they unequivocally win. They cannot find a sequence of maneuvers that puts them in a solidly winning position, keeps their people and their borders safe, and ensures that their ongoing plans to decimate and annex Palestine will proceed unimpeded by international condemnation or their neighbors’ (possibly nuclear) military resistance. They can’t find it because there isn’t one. To engage further in this conflict is to drag Russia, China, and the U.S. into an economically and ecologically devastating proxy war of global proportions and accept, at best, a devastating Pyrrhic victory and significantly weakened standing in the international community. At worst, and however unlikely it seems in light of history…they could lose a nuclear war and in so doing lose the state of Israel; no way will their neighbors tolerate their continued existence if they fail to hold their ground now. Yet to not engage militarily is absolutely unthinkable if Israel is to avoid looking weak and easily trifled with by the terrorists next door.
Hamas basically set a trap for Israel to walk into, and Israel knows it, even if the West is too full of itself and its outdated theories of global power balance to recognize this fact. Israel is on the horns of a dilemma. They know this, even if we haven’t figured it out just yet. This, more than any other reason, is why Israel is proceeding so slowly in gathering and unleashing their ground offensive in Gaza. The only winning move is not to play. Unfortunately, Hamas enjoyed the privilege of having made the first move and now, there’s no backing out. No matter what they do, Israel’s next move will proceed directly to the endgame, for better or worse. When the dust finally settles, the power balance in the region and the world will be forever altered.
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I spent the summer of 2022 documenting America’s descent into Christian Nationalist fascism. Most of the things I was frightened would come about have come about. Right down to the period checks, the widespread stripping of LGBTQ human rights, the catastrophic health impacts of our draconian abortion bans, and the spikes in antisemitism. I don’t like being right about things like this, but that didn’t stop it from happening. This is just something to consider in mulling over what I’ve written here today.
