First Putin, Now Netanyahu--Everyone's Telling Us To Shove It

It’s enough to give a nation a complex. But we asked for it.

Americans support genocide in Israel because, hey, that’s we get paid to do. When you do whatever you get paid to do, you can hardly expect respect along with the payments. So it can hardly be surprising that Netanyahu—who, through the Israel Lobby, owns the US government—has told the US to shove its “peace” plans. That’s the way political leverage works. You can buy influence on the cheap if you happen to be the biggest donor. You can, in effect, get the influence at wholesale.

Via Megatron_ron:

Netanyahu told the U.S. that he opposes a Palestinian state in any postwar scenario.

He also said that they are attacking Iran, the head of the snake, which is behind the Hezbollah and Houthi attacks.

He has just rejected Blinken's offer of "Saudi Arabia-controlled Palestine". In a few weeks there will be a major war with Hezbollah.

Netanyahu:

"In the future, the state of Israel has to control the entire area 'from the river to the sea'."

A middle finger to Biden and a declaration of war on all of Palestine and Hezbollah.

With that in mind, I did a highly edited transcript of portions of a video featuring Danny Davis and Matt Hoh (the full video is 40 minutes long). They lay it on the line, but these are just brief excerpts. Davis poses the interesting question of whether Israel is deliberately seeking wider war, knowing that they can force America to do whatever is demanded?

Will Israel *Seek* War with Hezbollah? w/Matt Hoh

DD: Is Israel looking to launch another war and expand this conflagration that's already roiling half the Middle East? You would think that no one seeks war no one's going to start another war when they're already in a huge one? We want to take a look at the potential for this thing to expand not by accident or miscalculation but by design--into the north of Israel, into Lebanon against Hezbollah. If anybody thinks that this is hyperbole, yesterday we had an Israeli politician Ben Gvir actually say that Israel should start a war against Hezbollah in southern Lebanon as a preemptive attack.

I think they're trying to lay the foundation here so nobody's surprised when war against Hezbollah comes. Just a few weeks ago you had another member of Netanyahu's government say that Israel should reoccupy Southern Lebanon for another 50 years. These are statements by senior ranking government and military officials.

MH: A lot of us are saying, What is going on here? This is is madness! The occupation of Lebanon that Israel conducted from 1982 to was just a horror show for Israel. It was a disaster. So you have these prominent people saying we should do it again--maybe this time we'll get it right. Which is what you hear in American foreign policy establishment. When you and I were arguing against escalating the war in Afghanistan they said, well, We learned from Vietnam, we learned for Iraq, so this time we are definitely gonna get it right.

DD: If you did an occupation you would need substantially more troops then you have now. How can Israel even sustain this long term? I mean, it seems to me they are setting the stage for their own self-destruction!

MH: The Israeli military fails like the American military fails. There's just such hubris, the politics of who's running the organizations, how they get to the top, these generals, who they represent, who their benefactors are outside the military so who's advancing their cause. I mean, it's just not a cadre of intelligent, objective analysts. It's people who have political desires, who have ideological beliefs, who have a religious zealotry, that want to see some type of destiny fulfilled. You come across these people saying, We're going to go into Lebanon and we'll occupy Lebanon up to the Litani River and push Hezbollah out. That might be great if all Hezbollah had was Katyusha rockets that fired 15 miles. But that's not the reality. I mean, how far do you have to go into Lebanon to make Haifa and Tel Aviv safe from Hezbollah rockets? All of Lebanon!

This buffer state, whether it's a greater Israel or a buffer around Israel, what does that actually accomplish? What does it mean in practice, talking about the commitment it would put on Israel in terms of manpower, in terms of what percent of its economy, what percent of its government spending is now going to support this? What do you get out of it but politics?

DD: These kind of policies are going to bankrupt their country and make them far more insecure than they were on Sixth of October.

MH: Absolutely. Completely isolated from the rest of the world except for the United States. Which, the Israelis who are in favor of these policies say, That doesn't matter--all we need is the United States. As long as we have the United States and the world's reserve currency backing us, to hell with the rest of the world. We could see that in their actions, we could see that basically in the way they presented themselves at the International Court of Justice last Friday. Their arguments were not legal arguments. They were reinforcing their message to their people as well as to their supporters within the US, giving justification for the continued support of Israel.

I think this is similar to what we've seen with the American policy towards Ukraine--it's a strategy based on hope. So just obfuscate, delay, gaslight, lie, do whatever you can to stretch this out and eventually it'll be over and then we can spin it. I mean, we're dealing with psychopaths. This is why it's so dangerous, because they will say anything.

DD: I wanted to hold off on the discussion about the potential for a third intifada because what Netanyahu is saying sounds eerily similar to what Barack Obama said in December, 2009, when he said we are going to go into Afghanistan heavy so that Afghanistan can never again be used as a platform of terrorism against the United States, and we're going to destroy the Taliban. How did that work out about a decade later and God only knows how many casualties on both sides?

MH: We can call them psychopaths, but there are also the hard realities of power, the hard realities of our political system--the way that the Israel Lobby has its effect on American politics can't be dismissed. It has to be considered as a prime factor in all of this. Joe Biden knows that if he was to tell Netanyahu to stop this war the Israel Lobby would shift all its support to the Republican, quite possibly bring another candidate into the race through the No Labels campaign, and that would effectively, as far as the White House estimation is, lose the election for Joe Biden. The Israeli Lobby, primarily AIPAC, is saying it's going to spend a hundred million dollars to defeat House candidates this cycle who have argued for a ceasefire. This is a very hard reality of our political system. This is the political system that people like Biden and Blinken exist in.

This is a construct that has long been built, so it's not as if the White House woke up one morning and said, Oh man, we have this Israeli Lobby we've got to contend with! Oh, where did this come from? This sytem has been constructed for decades and so for decades both Democrats and Republicans have loved taking that Lobby money, but now they have no choice--they have to support Israel.

DD: They can do the right thing!

[Long discussion on the dynamics of escalation and its high probability.]

Is there any possible way for an offramp for this to happen before this really goes south?

MH: The problem is that there's no one who has leverage over the United States except for Israel, through their Lobby. So the US and Israel are able to thumb their nose at the world and, you know, for the constituencies they represent, that's okay. Because in their ideologies--whether it's the American exceptionalist ideology or the Fortress Israel, Iron Wall ideology of Israel, it's us against the world.

DD: That's why it is just so anguishing to me--and angering. If we had some moral leadership, not tied to cash, somebody who actually said we're going to do the right thing. The very people who are funding this and who are putting pressure on not doing anything to say no to Israel are actually laying the foundation for the harm of Israel for the harm of the Jews and they are not protecting them. They are sowing the seeds for future conflict.

MH: This is what happens with empires and vassal states very often. You see examples of this throughout history, where vassal states will try to do more than they should, will become greedy because they feel they have the empire's backing. We can see this in what happened after the First World War, where Jewish colonists, Jewish settlers, are settling in Israel following the Balfour Declaration, following the British government saying, This is what we're gonna do, we're gonna give this land to the Jewish people. They become greedy and they want to take more because they know they have the British Empire behind them. And the same thing in the modern era. They know they have the Americans behind them so, you know, Smotrich and Ben Gvir, hey, you know, Netanyahu and Gallant all—these people, they know ultimately the Americans are behind them and they can do what they want. Look, if you can kill 117 children a day every day for 105 days, and the Americans keep sending you bombs, you can do whatever you want--and they know that. And that is the truth, even though, as you point out, the consequences of this for Israel are going to be drastic. That's just how it is.

Here are a few interesting updates, again via Megatron_ron, that show that things are heating up.

The U.S. base in Erbil is hit once again

Reports of explosions in Erbil, Iraqi Kurdistan.

Video shows C-RAM air defenses having been activated

Suicide drone attack against the U.S. base in Erbil International Airport – Al Arabiya

American MQ-9 Reaper drone, was downed near Baghdad after taking off from Kuwait

Resistance forces have reached the area and are working to recover the remains of the drone into a safe location.

US ship attacked again in the Red Sea today

Ship attacked again in the Red Sea today. After the US claimed last night that it had bombed warehouses with drones and missiles in Yemen, the Houthis attacked a US ship again today.

Houthis say they have targeted an American ship near the coast of Yemen.

UKMTO also confirmed the incident:

UKMTO has received a report of 4 unidentified Uncrewed Aerial Systems (UAS) flying close to a merchant vessel 85NM South East of Ash Shihr, Yemen.

I heard yesterday that the US evacuated one its FOBs in the area. Also, listening to Col. Wilkerson this morning. He said the US only has four actually operational aircraft carriers. One of those is required to remain in Japanese home waters (per agreement with Japan) and another is the USS Ford—brand new and understaffed.