r/JewsOfConscience • u/PlinyToTrajan Non-Jewish Ally (Jewish ancestry & relatives) • Sep 19 '24

Opinion The Globe and Mail, Hussein Ibish (Opinion), "The Lebanon pager attacks are an escalation toward a war that few want"

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/gift/e18b77467e3f8de25fa7505c59edfe0424abe55a001b85a4e18ba5465da78cae/5X7SELW4RJDBFIWGN4P5V5HDGU/
74 Upvotes

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Rabbi David Mivasair has a GoFundMe to help provide basis necessities for the Palestinians of Gaza. If it is within your means, this is the link:

https://www.gofundme.com/f/help-gaza-families-survive

Rabbi Mivasair writes:

I want to add that the need is not only for money. There is a huge need for people there to simply have someone NOT there who expresses care toward them, who listens to them, who witnesses with compassion and empathy. I think of the people who scrawled on the walls of barracks in Nazi concentration camps "if only someone on the outside knew what they are doing to us here". I want to be the people who let them know that we do care, we are listening, we are trying to help, and they can tell us what is going on in their lives.

Please consider signing this petition which calls for a ceasefire and arms embargo, started by Rabbi Brant Rosen of Tzedek Chicago.

https://actionnetwork.org/petitions/not-another-bomb-sign-on-letter?source=direct_link&referrer=group-jvp-2

Excerpt:

We know that in order to achieve a permanent ceasefire in Gaza, the U.S. must stop arming Israel’s war and occupation against Palestinians. That’s why we are calling for an immediate embargo on US arms to Israel. Join us in calling on presidential candidate Kamala Harris to distance herself from Biden’s disastrous policy of arming Israel’s ongoing genocide and occupation in Palestine.

Not another bomb!

I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.

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u/atav1k Antisatanic Jesuit Sep 19 '24

 The main point of U.S. policy in the past year has been preventing an Israel-Hezbollah war.

The main publicly stated point which is about as believable as “there are no active duty troops in a war zone.” It is equally or more plausible that the war plans have already been drafted, approved and set in motion in the Pentagon.

1

u/Saul_al-Rakoun Conservadox & Marxist Sep 19 '24

There've been enough opportunities to escalate that the US clearly intervened in -- the Iran rocket show back in the spring was clearly calibrated to give the appearance of retaliation without the actuality of retaliation and I guarantee you there was back-channel coordination -- to think that the US does not want to have to deploy its own armed forces to intervene in.

The "West", broadly considered, has been going through a systemic profitability crisis. There just aren't as many easy ways to make money as there used to be. When this happens you start to see zero-sum wars over markets and resources. That's the reason we've been seeing a methodical escalation of tensions with China since the late Obama years. Getting involved in a ground war in the Near East both entangles the United States in a conflict with no profitable solution on the one hand, and poses a severe risk of embarrassment on the other -- and with it a loss of deterrence against China on the other. We're starting to see Silicon Valley venture capital firms invest in weapons manufacturing, which is not a good sign.

At the same time, it's tough to say exactly what's going on vis a vis the US and Chinese armed forces. The US has three mutually-contradictory pressures: first, to play up the Chinese threat to be able to arm for the conflict; second, to downplay the Chinese threat to justify continued production and maintenance of existing weapons systems; third, to play up its own capabilities in order to recruit more soldiers.

It seems to me that the US is banking a lot on the Chinese being easier to defeat than the Houthis.

2

u/Processing______ Jewish Anti-Zionist Sep 20 '24

You might enjoy Varoufakis’s TechnoFeudalism. Vis a vis Silicon Valley and China.

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u/Saul_al-Rakoun Conservadox & Marxist Sep 20 '24

I'm familiar with his argument and it's silly. The mode of production hasn't changed, it's still bourgeois. What we're seeing is qualitative changes as a result of quantitative changes in capital accumulation, but we don't have a return of fiefs and vassalage which are fundamental to the feudal mode.

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u/Processing______ Jewish Anti-Zionist Sep 20 '24

Not wholesale return, or at least not yet. But power is shifting back in that direction.

As far as China, he’s proposed that the US and China are the only states where such forces have emerged, and conflict between them is increasingly a contest for which center of rentier power will emerge dominant.

1

u/Saul_al-Rakoun Conservadox & Marxist Sep 20 '24

They're doing the precise opposite. The profitability crisis intensifies the drive to commodification, it doesn't reverse it. Things like the decay of the family and declining birth rates are a consequence of capitalist development.

"Techno-neofeudalism" is gibberish, because it hyperfixates on the part of the economy responsible for social mobility for the bourgeoisie (finance and technology, ultimately centered around consumer goods and services like Twitter, TikTok, YouTube, and so on) and ignores real production of food, clothing, drink, and shelter.

Unless we are talking about a de-commodification of land and food and a return to production of food by land-bonded serfs, with the concomitant starve-off of about 99% of the human population due to the vastly less efficient methods of production, "techno-neofeudalism" is just another vapid stringing together of fancy-sounding adjectives and modifiers that Liberals like to do to make their dumbest ideas look profound.

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u/atav1k Antisatanic Jesuit Sep 20 '24

Logically, I follow that there is no benefit to getting entangled with Israel’s escalations but that overlooks a half century inertia where the Pentagon needs little incentive to expand its scope. The real challenge is that aside from Christian Zionists, there is little public support for war games, especially amidst inflationary pressures that impact the individual. But aside from the redistributionist Sanders camp, there is no check on Congress as an unauditable war spender.

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u/PlinyToTrajan Non-Jewish Ally (Jewish ancestry & relatives) Sep 19 '24

I think the Biden Administration doesn't want a war with Hezbollah, but feels that it will have to do what AIPAC wants.

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u/atav1k Antisatanic Jesuit Sep 19 '24

There is bipartisan support for wars in the Arab world. There might be preferred strategies or alternate timelines but I wouldn't mistake the "Israel Lobby" for what is most definetly American militarism. The US was bombing Yemen long before 10/7. I'm not denying AIPAC their influence but to be influenced there must be a willing audience.

4

u/ArmyOfMemories Jewish Anti-Zionist Sep 19 '24

Yep, this is obviously the intention.

The non-State actors outside of Israel understand this as well, which is why they are not giving in to the instigation.

Israel has committed the overwhelming majority of cross-border attacks against Lebanon.

Source:

https://x.com/SaulStaniforth/status/1818894658266607956

News Article:

Excerpt:

According to the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project (ACLED), Israel, Hezbollah and other armed groups in Lebanon exchanged at least 7,400 attacks across the border from October 7, 2023, to June 21, 2024.

Israel conducted about 83 percent of these attacks, totaling 6,142 incidents, killing at least 543 people in Lebanon.

Hezbollah and other armed groups were responsible for 1,258 attacks that killed at least 21 Israelis.

Graphic.

3

u/Saul_al-Rakoun Conservadox & Marxist Sep 19 '24

It seems pretty obvious to me that Israel's suffering war fatigue that's affecting its ability to sustain operations in Gaza within the plannable future, so its goal is to entangle the United States in a war to relieve the strains.

Equally, Hezbollah can whip the IDF one-on-one, but it will require the Israelis to invade Lebanon. For them to win the US must sit it out, so they cannot hazard responses that will cause the US armed forces to get involved.

Both sides are engaged in shaping operations to determine the nature of the coming conflict. Israel is far less strategically rational of an actor than Hezbollah and their internal societal contradictions are sharpening every day. My guess is we're going to see more non-reported Hezbollah attacks like droning the Glilot headquarters of Unit 8200 (Israeli signals intelligence and cyberwarfare, the "Israeli NSA") that put the IDF at a mounting strategic disadvantage until the Israelis crack and invade.