Israel’s attack on Iran, which commenced on the day this publication went to press, has been threatening for some time. Now it has actually happened, it will have consequences that will reach around the world. The narrative promoted by Benjamin Netanyahu that Israel alone decided to make the attack and did no more than inform the United States is simply unbelievable. While this story is backed up by the US Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, there is no way that Netanyahu would have acted without an assurance that the United States would back Israel in this venture.
Meanwhile, social order at home in the United States seems to be fraying, with troops on the streets, growing resistance to the rounding up of potentially millions of illegal immigrants, and gross military parades in Washington. There even appear to be the first signs of extra-legal executions of political opponents. It is hardly an over-reaction to see this as the beginnings of a political unravelling – grounded in a longer-term global unsettling. The world faces an existential crisis.
Despite farcical excess, President Trump is much stronger than in his previous administration. He has managed to take hold of key institutions such as the Supreme Court, the US Congress, intelligence agencies and sections of the military. His well-known capacity to be incoherent is accompanied by a ground cunning that should not be under-estimated. If there is some truth in saying he barely knows what he is doing, there is another in saying that he knows very well that excess brings results. Certainly, there is a shared US-Israel settler imaginary at work here.
Similarly, Benjamin Netanyahu is not simply unhinged. All too often it is assumed that because Netanyahu has no policy plan to end the war, we have entered the world of irrationality, madness, genocide, and politics on the edge of chaos. In other words, it is assumed that rational policy and technique do not explain the mess in the Middle East.
In this ragged ill-defined war-zone, however, connected processes are carrying forward Clausewitz’s aphorism that ‘war is politics by other means’, while changing its meaning. The high-tech irregularity of drones, state-based covert guerillas, and remotely denoted pagers are changing the way that wars are fought. They conduct war by any means, but they are also technically precise and abstractly rational. War no longer needs to be formally declared in that old-fashioned modern way and there are few if any ethical constraints, but it is abstractly rational as politics is ‘drawn away’ from a rules-based geopolitical order. The blitzkrieg on Iran, booby-trapped pagers in Lebanon, and the Russian missile attacks on civilian Ukraine, confirm a shift towards treating ‘collateral damage’ – the mass deaths of civilians – as a rational and legitimated necessity.
As justification, Netanyahu is claiming that Israel – not Palestine, Lebanon or Iran – is the state facing an existential crisis, a battle for national survival. His ability to gain support from Israeli citizens and the elites of all members of the Western alliance is one consequence of the uses to which the resurgence of Holocaust memory has been put over the last two decades. The reaction to 7 October 2023, and Israel’s use of Hamas’s terrorist attack to legitimise the extermination of Palestinians in Gaza, is grounded in a weaponisation of this sense of existential fragility.
For decades ‘resolute’ little Israel’s unilateral, but relatively focused, military acts, served as proxy events for a West which had lost both resolve and competence in projecting power – first after Vietnam, and terminally after Iraq. Now Israel itself has become consumed by those very disjunctures. The collapsing of grounded collective life and increasing insecurity is being ‘solved’ by its projection outward into potentially unlimited violence. As noted in previous editorials, it is this dynamic that lies at the root of a new fascism. It is obvious, writing at this moment, that the potential for an escalation to a nuclear encounter is real. It is clear that those in the West charged with maintaining our security, and their media cheer-squad, are radically unprepared for what may now be a global disaster by other means.