Ramzy Baroud

Israel’s escalating wars reflect a long-standing strategy of military dominance, but recent conflicts are exposing its limits and internal contradictions.

It is tempting to argue that Israel’s new military doctrine is predicated on perpetual war – but the reality is more complex.

Not that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu would object to such an arrangement. On the contrary, his relentless drive for military escalation suggests precisely that. After all, his openly declared quest for a “greater Israel” would require exactly this kind of permanent militarism – endless expansion and sustained regional destruction.

However, Israel cannot sustain an open-ended fight on multiple fronts indefinitely.

Israeli officials boast about fighting on “seven fronts,” but many of these are, in military terms, largely imaginary rather than sustained battlefields.

The real wars, however, are entirely of Israel’s making: from the genocide in Gaza to its unprovoked regional wars.

Still, that fact should not blind us to another reality: in the lead-up to the war on Iran, and in the escalation against Lebanon, there was near-total consensus among Jewish Israelis. An Israel Democracy Institute survey conducted on March 2–3 found that 93 per cent of Jewish Israelis supported the joint US-Israeli attack on Iran. Support cut across all political camps.

The same enthusiasm for war accompanied the Gaza genocide and the various wars and escalations in Lebanon.

Even Yair Lapid – so often and so falsely marketed abroad as a “dove” – fully backed these wars, admitting after the Iran ceasefire that Israel had entered them with “rare consensus” and that he supported them “from the very first moment.”

His repeated criticisms, like those of other Israeli politicians, are not of the war but of Netanyahu’s failure to deliver a strategic outcome.

And this is the crucial distinction. Israelis mostly support the wars, but many no longer trust Netanyahu to translate destruction into strategic victory. By mid-April, 92 per cent of Jewish Israelis gave the army high marks for its management of the Iran war, but only 38 per cent gave high ratings to the government.

In other words, the public still believes in war but increasingly doubts the leadership waging it.

That distinction may not matter much to us, since the outcome remains mass death, devastation, and colonial violence. But in Israel’s own military and strategic calculations, it matters enormously. Its wars have historically followed a familiar model: crush resistance, impose military and political domination, and translate battlefield violence into colonial expansion.

Netanyahu delivered none of that.

This is why the uproar in Israel over the April 16 Lebanon ceasefire has been so fierce, and why the fears surrounding a possible stalemate with Iran run even deeper.

The Lebanon ceasefire clearly did not secure one of Israel’s central declared aims: the disarmament of Hezbollah. Israel kept troops in southern Lebanon, but the agreement halted offensive operations and fell far short of the promised “total victory.”

For many in Israel, any outcome that falls short of total victory is immediately read as defeat. One northern Israeli regional leader, Eyal Shtern, captured that mood with brutal clarity when he reacted to the Lebanon ceasefire by asking how Israel had gone “from absolute victory to total surrender,” in remarks reported by CNN.

That is the real crisis now confronting Israel: not that it has discovered the limits of permanent war, but that it has once again discovered that exterminatory violence does not automatically produce political victory.

While Iran possesses political leverage that could allow for a long-term, or even permanent, truce, Lebanon and Syria remain in a far more vulnerable position. However, no one is in a more precarious condition than the Palestinians, particularly those in Gaza.

Unlike others who retain some political margin and space to manoeuvre, Palestinians live under Israeli occupation, apartheid, and siege. Gaza, in particular, has been reduced to a sealed enclave of devastation.

Its hermetic siege has produced one of the most horrific humanitarian catastrophes in modern history: an entire population surviving on polluted water, with infrastructure destroyed, food critically scarce, and thousands still buried beneath the rubble.

Aside from their legendary steadfastness – sumud – Palestinians operate under severe constraints in their ability to impose conditions on Israel, particularly as it continues to receive unconditional support from the United States and its western allies. Yet their resilience, collective action, and enduring presence remain powerful forms of leverage that cannot be easily contained.

Netanyahu – and those who will come after him – will always find in Palestine a space in which war can be waged continuously and at relatively low cost to Israel itself. Unlike other battlefields, where war becomes politically, militarily, and economically unsustainable, Israel has turned its occupation of Palestine into a permanent battlefield.

Even if Netanyahu, now politically diminished and aging, exits the political scene, the underlying paradigm will remain intact. Future Israeli leaders will continue to wage war on Palestine, not despite its costs, but because of its perceived benefits: it is financially subsidised, colonially advantageous, and politically sustainable within Israel’s current structure.

To break this paradigm, Palestinians must generate leverage – real leverage. This cannot come from futile negotiations or appeals to long-ignored international law. It can only emerge from sustained collective resistance to colonialism, reinforced by meaningful support from Arab and Muslim states and genuine international allies, and amplified by global solidarity capable of exerting real pressure on Israel and, crucially, on its principal benefactors.

For now, Netanyahu continues his wars because he has no answer to his own strategic failures. Here, escalation is not a strength; it is the last refuge of a leadership that cannot deliver victory.

This, however, also reveals something else: Israel is entering a moment of unprecedented vulnerability.

That vulnerability must be exposed – clearly, consistently, and urgently – by all those who seek an end to these senseless wars, an end to the Israeli occupation of Palestine, and a path toward justice that has been denied for far too long.

https://www.counterpunch.org/2026/04/23/israels-war-obsession/

READ FROM TOP.

PLEASE VISIT:

YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT — SINCE 2005.

         Gus Leonisky

         POLITICAL CARTOONIST SINCE 1951.

         RABID ATHEIST.

         WELCOME TO THIS INSANE WORLD….

PATRICK LAWRENCE: War Against Individual Conscience

The head spins — while the Zionist regime goes on a persecutorial rampage against Christians, its imperial sponsor enables it at every turn in the name of Christian righteousness.

I cannot get past the recently published photograph of that Israeli soldier taking a sledgehammer to the crucified Jesus in southern Lebanon. And the thought that this was an isolated incident is too preposterous even to consider. 

But, then, I cannot get past that altogether weird image of President Donald Trump dressed up as Jesus, laying a healing hand on a supine sufferer. Or, Trump having deleted this out of sheer embarrassment, a new one he posted depicting Jesus embracing him. 

It has come to this in the 250th year of the American republic?

For that matter I cannot get out of my mind — this fascinates me to no end — Pete Hegseth’s daily preaching of Old Testament smiting and merciless killing “in the name of Jesus Christ.” Who is this man’s pastor?

And J.D. Vance telling Pope Leo with faux-authority he had better stay clear of theological questions because he, Pope Leo, is not qualified to comment on them. I will note this occasion without comment but to remind readers Leo is of the Order of St. Augustine.  

The head spins. We have the Zionist regime on a persecutorial rampage against Christians, and we have its imperial sponsor enabling it at every turn in the name of Christian righteousness. 

Say whaaa? 

There is only one way to understand this heap of contradiction and hypocrisy. You have to view it, this tilt into the most profane sorts of religiosity, against the backdrop of U.S.–Israeli savagery in Gaza and the West Bank, U.S.–Israeli savagery in Lebanon and the savage attacks on Iran — all of this profoundly against any version of humanity, morality, decency and justice you can name. 

And then you have to recognize that what is under attack in this single, unified assault on the human cause, apart from the Palestinians, Lebanese and Iranians who daily suffer these barbarities, is the individual conscience — that place in the human psyche wherein notions of morality, decency and justice reside, that place that gives rise to resistance in the face of depravity, atrocity and iniquity.

Zionist Pogrom on Christianity

To begin with, the spectacle of an I.D.F. soldier desecrating a crucifix was not an aberration by a rogue member of “the world’s most moral army,” as the Zionists like to advertise the Israel Defense Forces. Bibi Netanyahu professed to be “stunned and saddened.” Here is Gideon Sa`ar, his foreign minister, as quoted in The Times of Israel:

“I’m confident that the necessary strict measures will be taken against whoever carried out this ugly act. This shameful action is completely contrary to our values. Israel is a country that respects the different religions and their sacred symbols, and upholds tolerance and respect among faiths.”

Chutzpah, anyone?

The photo was taken in Debel, a Maronite community and one of the few Christian villages remaining in southern Lebanon. It appears to have been shot and circulated on social media on April 19. What it depicts is wholly in keeping with the pogrom — take it or leave it, I hold to the term — the Zionists now conduct against Christians.    

Zionist fanatics (if the phrase is not redundant) have of late been aggressively and pointedly attacking Christians and their churches in Israel proper, in the West Bank and in Lebanon [and earlier in Gaza.]

Last month Israeli police blocked Pierbattista Pizzaballa and Father Francesco Ielpo, the Catholics’ senior clerics in the Holy Land, from celebrating Palm Sunday at the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem. 

A day after the incident at Debel was photographed, Almazidi Fatima, a Lebanese human rights activist, posted a video on “X” of a church I.D.F. soldiers turned into a latrine in the course of wrecking it. 

Study the photograph of the soldier desecrating the crucified Jesus, just for a sec. He is sledgehammering the forehead, isn’t he?  In Christian iconography this is where consciousness and the conscience reside. 

Who knows what was going on in the mind of the barbarian wielding the hammer, but mine goes to why Zionists nurse so visceral a hatred toward Christians. It is precisely the privilege the man on the cross awarded the individual — his or her thoughts, judgments and certainly conscience. This is why, when Christians honor the spirit, it is “the Holy Spirit” and gets capitalized.  

The Old Testament privileges not the individual or the individual spirit but external authority. In the Torah, the first five books — Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy — the Law of Moses is laid down and obedience to it is decreed the imperative. 

This explains, to take a ready-to-hand case, why the Zionist leadership regularly cites the Amalekites, the hostile tribes (by the evidence probably mythical) that God commanded the Israelites to destroy, in order to explain their slaughter today of Palestinians:  It is written, God commands it. 

A Radical Misinterpretation

Israel Shahak, the late (and controversial) Israeli scholar explains the primacy of authority in the rabbinical tradition with brilliant clarity in Jewish History, Jewish Religion: The Weight of Three Thousand Years (Pluto, 1994). Independent thought, to say nothing of conscience, were not to be taught: Obedience to the law and the authority of the rabbi were to be taught. 

[But Jesus said all of Moses’ Law can be reduced to two commandments: “Love God and your neighbor.” (Matthew 22:36-40, NIV)]

Do not wonder, I mean to say, how Zionists can in good conscience treat Palestinians and various others so abominably. As Christians mean this term, they have no conscience. They act in accordance with the law of the Torah, or — I must add this immediately — a radical misinterpretation of it.

It is not Judaism, any more than the Islam of al–Nusra is Islam or the Christianity of Christian Zionists is Christianity. It is “Israelism,” or Zionism, and I consider either term valid to name the phenomenon.

I come to Pete Hegseth and the beyond-belief buffoon who still — also beyond belief —resides in the White House. There is no selling obedience to higher authorities in the land of the free and home of the brave — not to hyper-individual Americans. 

Equally, in these people’s minds (and in history), America is a Christian nation — a Christian nation complicit in the Zionists’ genocide, a Christian nation that has nothing to say as the Zionists attack Christians in the streets of Jerusalem and desecrate their churches and icons.   

What these two and others in the Trump regime come out with therefore bears interpretation.  

Here is the defense secretary holding one of his prayer meetings at the Pentagon on March 25, his first after the U.S.–Israeli attacks on Iran: 

“Let every round find its mark against the enemies of righteousness and our great nation. Give them wisdom in every decision, endurance for the trial ahead, unbreakable unity, and overwhelming violence of action against those who deserve no mercy.”

The enemies of righteousness, overwhelming violence, those who deserve no mercy: Hegseth, who follows the Congregation of Reformed Evangelical Churches, passes off utterances such as this — of which many — as Christian. How this? Why? 

And here is President Trump doing his bit for “America Reads the Bible,” a frightening exercise in over-the-top religious fervor extended, 9 a.m. to 9 p.m., over a week. Trump read last Tuesday — not from Matthew or Mark, not from the Acts, but from 2 Chronicles 7: 11–22, wherein God speaks to Solomon after the latter has completed the First Temple. 

The passage in part:

“As for you, if you walk before me faithfully as David your father did, and do all I command, and observe my decrees and laws, I will establish your royal throne, as I covenanted with David your father when I said, ‘You shall never fail to have a successor to rule over Israel.’

But if you turn away and forsake the decrees and commands I have given you and go off to serve other gods and worship them, then I will uproot Israel from my land, which I have given them, and will reject this temple I have consecrated for my Name. I will make it a byword and an object of ridicule among all peoples. This temple will become a heap of rubble….”

Why don’t these two simply pledge allegiance to the Zionist state and have done with it?  Why don’t they come out and condemn acts of conscience or judgments of the Iran war, the genocide in Gaza and all the rest — conscience itself, indeed — in the name of authority and obedience?

It is not “in the American grain” is the simple answer. And so the Trump regime resorts to implicit condemnations of the individual conscience, always in the name of Jesus, which is to say in the name of the individual conscience. 

There can be no surprise here: These people have already led us into “an abyss of lawlessness” in the name of law.  

And there can be no surrendering to these charlatans, no foregoing one’s conscience as the foundation stone of resistance, Christian or otherwise, no bowing to authority or obedience to it.

Footnote: Last Wednesday the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a Texas law requiring public schools to display the Ten Commandments in all classrooms, saying it does not violate the separation of church and state.  The law mandates the size and typeface of these displays and requires they be visible from everywhere in each classroom.  

Patrick Lawrence, a correspondent abroad for many years, chiefly for the International Herald Tribune, is a columnist, essayist, lecturer and author, most recently of Journalists and Their Shadows, available from Clarity Press or via Amazon.  Other books include Time No Longer: Americans After the American Century. His Twitter account, @thefloutist, has been restored after years of being censored. 

TO MY READERS. Independent publications and those who write for them reach a moment that is difficult and full of promise all at once. On one hand, we assume ever greater responsibilities in the face of mainstream media’s mounting derelictions. On the other, we have found no sustaining revenue model and so must turn directly to our readers for support. I am committed to independent journalism for the duration: I see no other future for American media. But the path grows steeper, and as it does I need your help. This grows urgent now. In  recognition of the commitment to independent journalism, please subscribe to The Floutist, or via my Patreon account.

https://consortiumnews.com/2026/04/27/patrick-lawrence-the-war-against-individual-conscience/

READ FROM TOP.

PLEASE VISIT:

YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT — SINCE 2005.

         Gus Leonisky

         POLITICAL CARTOONIST SINCE 1951.

         RABID ATHEIST.

         WELCOME TO THIS INSANE WORLD….