good read on a bad situation...
July 30, 2024
Zero Sum Game With a Fatal Option
by Lawrence Davidson
Most Israelis perceive their national life as a zero sum game. This may well be a lasting heritage of the Holocaust. Accurately perceived or not, survival is always in question in their minds. You win or you lose. Only short term tactical compromises are allowed. Negotiations with enemies are often fraudulent delaying tactics. All of which seems to translate into, ‘the world does things the Israeli way or you declare the world antisemitic and ignore it.’ To sustain this zero sum outlook you must be able to maintain a winning profile. What happens if it looks like you might lose? Back in 1973, the Egyptians surprised the Israelis with an invasion of the Sinai that sent the Zionist army into retreat. Israel was saved by an American resupply effort. Now the Israelis figure that American backup is forever.
The Israelis run the zero sum game with the Palestinians. It all began with the conviction that Israel could only survive if all the local Palestinians were made irrelevant to the world at large—and thus disposable. For over 70 years, the Israel leaders tried to do this casually: a bit of land confiscation here, a bit of resource theft and house demolitions there. They even tried to appropriate Palestinian cuisine as “Israeli.” Generally, they purposely made the lives of millions of Palestinians as miserable as possible—on the hopes that they would just pack up and leave.
Predictably, such persistent oppression (“mowing the lawn” and all that) provoked periodic violent and non-violent resistance from the Palestinians. It must be said that, despite all the modern sentiment in favor of non-violence, the impulse to strike back in kind is very human. Of course, it is altogether another question—just how human is the act of persistent persecution?
Thus, on 7 October 2024, the Palestinians did the human thing and struck back. On that day, they too “mowed” a bit of lawn. Some 1200 Israelis died, a good number of them killed by the Israeli army—under cover of their “Hannibal” directive. The rest of Jewish Israel was shocked and scared. They insisted that the Palestinian attack was the action of animals, insects, preying wolves, etc. After 7 October 2024, they shouted those epithets so loudly that the language was used by the ICC as a sign of Israel’s genocidal intent. It is an expression of the kind of deep hatred for the “other,” that can be set in stone by a persistent and purposeful stereotyping. Ironically, the Israelis have used against the Palestinians many of terms that antisemites use for the Jews.
Their fear and hatred has long blocked the way to an Israeli understanding of the consequences of their own actions. In turn this blindness lay at the core of the zero sum game the Israelis play, and the logic of which they now apply to the Gaza Strip. Because they hold themselves forever the victim, the only wronged party, there can be no meeting the Palestinians halfway. Thus, the only feasible reaction to 7 October is to obliterate Gaza and its population. That is what winning means within this mindset.
Israel’s Northern Border
The Palestinian resistance has long had an ally in Hezbollah, the Lebanese militia organized in the 1980s to defend the Shia minority of that country from internal enemies, and the country as a whole from outside Israeli encroachment. Hezbollah is allied to Shia Iran and the latter has helped the former with training and armaments. At this point, 2023-2024, Hezbollah has the military capacity to 1) fight an Israeli invasion of southern Lebanon to a standstill and 2) do considerable damage, with missile attacks, to Israeli cities such as Haifa. Soon after 7 October, the alliance with the Palestinian resistance was activated and Israel’s northern border became a place of increasing violence.
Israeli leaders have talked a lot about invading Lebanon and pushing Hezbollah back off the northern border far enough (6 miles is the proposed distance) to make it safe for the return of some 80,000 Israel evacuees from this area (removed due to Hezbollah military action) to return to their homes. Under the present circumstances, with Israel’s military largely tied down implementing the genocide in Gaza, and its commanders complaining about a shortage of men and armed vehicles, this is a problematic goal.
So now there is talk coming from members of the present Israeli government as well opposition politicians, and at least one leading academic, about using nuclear weapons (one assumes this is a reference to the “tactical” variety) against both Hezbollah and Iran. Some have included Gaza too. This is why one Israeli newspaper describes, “an annihilation discourse taking over Israel.”
It is not a surprising turn of events. It is rather a consequence of Israel’s leadership playing out their zero sum game while having set themselves goals (ones mistakenly seen as divinely fated) that cannot be accomplished conventionally. The major one is the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians of Gaza and the West Bank. Even given the ability, mainly due to air power, to reduce the Gaza Strip to rubble and support a program of pogroms on the West Bank, the Zionists are facing resistance that they cannot overcome. Destroying the Gaza Strip’s infrastructure has made it all the more hospitable to guerrilla style resistance, including rockets launched into Israel the “Gaza envelope”—Israeli territory adjacent to the Gaza Strip.
Therefore, Israel’s tactics have made it unsafe for their citizens to return to homes in the southwest of the country, and we have noted a similar state of affairs in the north. For all intents and purposes, Israel has territorially shrunk in ways for which its continued brutal West Bank expansion cannot compensate. And, to all of this you can add the horror felt by the rest of the world over Israel’s starkly barbaric behavior. Beyond the judgments of the ICC and ICJ lay the beginnings of Israel’s worldwide isolation—begun with a rash of “Zionist free Zones” popping up in private mercantile sites throughout Europe and Asia.
What this comes to is an Israeli sense that the country is losing. It cannot establish a new sense of normalcy, including their normal sense of dominance. The frustration created by this situation is driving some sectors of Israeli Jews (those on the right already of a fanatical mindset) to say: ‘Well, if it takes nuclear weapons to win, let’s use them.’ This is the Israeli zero sum game with a fatal option.
Historical Regression
The zero sum game represents historical regression and such regression may also encourage use of the nuclear weapons. Why so? Because the way the Israelis would have it, it is a game played without restraining rules. After World War II, the experience of massive murder and destruction was such as to spur the world community to create international laws, often in the form of treaties signed by most nations. These treaties enumerated crimes, now described as “crimes against humanity,” that were made officially punishable actions. Yet the way Israel has fashioned its zero sum game—with territorial expansion and ethnic cleansing as sanctified goals—those laws cannot help but be violated. For Israel to get away with this is the equivalent of the rest of the world giving up international law.
It is to be noted that the background to this seems to be an broader age of regression back to narrow nationalism. The U.S. invasion of Iraq, Russia’s incursion into Ukraine, Azerbaijan’s aggression against Armenia, Serbia’s treatment of Bosnia, and the ongoing ethnic wars in Africa, among other flare ups, all have eroded the respect for international law. It is of course a form of insanity: “doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” But the behavior of Israel stands out nonetheless, not only for its brutality, but because its genocidal actions are backed by Western powers such as the United States, United Kingdom and Germany. “We have met the enemy and he is us.”
The Fatal Nuclear Option
You might think that fearing the Israelis will consider the nuclear option while pursuing their zero sum game is just exaggeration. After all, allegedly, the use of nuclear weapons is regarded by everyone as out of the question. However, as time passes, those who dismiss the possibility do so because they retain an objective historical memory, the lessons of which they take seriously. But what if, again over time, ideological considerations are given more weight than historical memory? Most Israeli leaders, and certainly the present ones, have always believed in biblical promises more than any clear understanding of current events. Recent American leaders have trended in the same direction: George W. Bush’s pseudo religious delusions and Joe Biden’s anachronistic Cold War thinking, were ominous signs. Then, of course, there is that psychotic narcissist Donald Trump tying himself to millions of fundamentalists driven blind by their religious myopia.
For such “leaders,” how large a step is it from mass murder—be it of Iraqis, Afghanis and Palestinians (to say nothing of a million Vietnamese)—to the use of tactical nuclear weapons launched, of course, as a “deterrent” (as they would be described in the case of southern Lebanon)? Remember these are “leaders” who have already disowned international law.
Apologia
I guess I should beg pardon for introducing such an ominous possibility as the use of nuclear weapons into an already dangerous and crazy political environment. But it is what a good analyst must do: think about probabilities with an open mind and based on the evidence.
OK, just to be upbeat, I will give the last word to the U.S. State Department. Their spokesperson has declared that the Israeli rhetoric about the use of nuclear weapons is “wholly unacceptable.” That should make us all feel better.
Lawrence Davidson is a retired professor of history at West Chester University in West Chester, PA.
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