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In other words, this plan seems, to be polite, a reckless gamble. Yet the Israelis seem fanatically committed to moving ahead with it. Crooke tries to explain what looks like determination to self-destruct:

Israel is boxed-in, as is becoming very evident to many Israelis. One Israeli correspondent (formerly a Cabinet Secretary) illustrates its nature:

The meaning of the 7th October default is not only the loss of lives … but mainly the potential transformation of how Israel is perceived … as no longer to be feared by Middle Eastern actors.

The Israeli leadership must internalize that we can no longer be content with a ‘sense of victory’ among the Israeli public … It is doubtful whether victory in Gaza is enough to restore the fear of Israel to the levels we had vis-a-vis our enemies. A victory that boils down to just the release of the captives and confidence-building measures to establish a Palestinian state would not be enough in shoring up Israel’s image in that regard.

If the quagmire of Gaza … brings the [Israeli] leadership to the realization that there is no ability to present a clear victory on this front, one that will lead to a strategic change in the region, they must consider switching fronts and reasserting Israeli deterrence through the removal of the strategic threat in Lebanon … victory against one of the richest and most powerful terrorist organizations in the world – Hezbollah – can restore deterrence in the region in general … Israel must remove the threat from the north and dismantle the power structure Hezbollah has built in Lebanon, regardless of the situation in the south.

But without victory in the south, a significant achievement in the north becomes that much more important.

The above quotation goes directly to the heart of the issue. That is: ‘How can Zionism be saved?’. All the rest of the ‘blah-blah’ coming from world leaders is largely bluff. Not only is Gaza NOT giving Israelis a sense of victory; on the contrary, it is widely proliferating a violent anger at a surprise, ‘shameful’ defeat…

The latest Peace Index survey reflects the pervasive gloom: 94% percent of Jews think Israel has used the right amount of firepower in Gaza (or “not enough” (43%)). Three-quarters of all Israelis think the number of Palestinians harmed since October is justified to achieve its aims; a full two-thirds of Jewish respondents say numbers of casualties are definitely justified (only 21% say “somewhat” justified).

Crooke explains that Zionism promised Jew security within Israel, and that promise has been turned on its head. Not only are Jews in Israel now insecure, but blowback from the Gaza campaign is also threatening the diaspora. Biden is merely pursuing containment posturing; the two state solution is a non-starter and as we described earlier, the normalization scheme with Saudi Arabia is an empty exercise in optics. He argues in his latest article that Israel feeling it has its back pushed against the wall has unleashed deeper impulses in the form of hewing to cultural archetypes. His article goes through some analogies. I think Crooke is on the right track but has not quite nailed this analytically. But explaining what looks like a mass psychosis is not easy.

Crooke has another go at trying to explain Israel’s overwrought state in his current Judge Napolitano talk, where he describes the conflict as an Armageddon-like struggle which is partly fueled by the way the Islamic world has been in decline for the last 1000 years, with the meddling of Europeans in the last 500 years a major contributor. And the Israel side even more so is seeing it in Biblical and eschatological terms. Hence the emotionality and lack of sound calculations. Crooke has warned (as have a few others) that Israel is putting its survival as a state at risk if it launches a full scale attack against Lebanon. But even that possibility seems to be no deterrent.