It is not a novel point that Israel acts like a rogue state, or that its behavior toward the United States often more closely resembles the behavior of an adversary than that of an ally. But it’s still worth periodically noting just how extreme its misbehavior on the world stage is, given that it is underwritten by the US taxpayers, even as majorities of Americans don’t want it to be.
Let’s just keep it to things that have happened roughly this past week; otherwise this piece could end up being the length of a medium-sized book.
There was the incident where illegal Israeli settlers in the West Bank—who are financed, armed, enabled, and otherwise supported in every possible way by the Israeli government—viciously attacked a Washington Post photojournalist, breaking her ribs and fracturing her vertebrae, and a day later attacked a group of European diplomats from Belgium, France, and Poland (countries that, unlike Israel, actually are US treaty allies).
The reaction was, well, muted. The Israeli government at first tried to cast doubt on the reports, accuse Palestinians of being the culprits, and even blame the diplomats. The US secretary of state said it was “not a good look.” The German government called it “troubling” and said it should “be criticized,” while the European Union called vaguely for “full accountability.” The Israeli government did arrest ten suspects and has now released nine of them from custody and into house arrest.
Given that merely bringing charges against a group of Israeli soldiers who gang-raped a Palestinian prisoner led to Israeli rioting, which then led to those charges being dropped and one of the rapists becoming a quasi-celebrity in the country, don’t hold your breath waiting for this accountability.
At the same time, Israel continues to violate ceasefire agreements at will in the multiple wars in neighboring countries it’s fighting, routinely killing innocent civilians. In Gaza, it has in recent days killed a ten-year-old boy, a young girl, a seventeen-year-old, and a married couple, among others. These are just a small fraction of the more than 1,500 Palestinians it has killedin the territory since it signed a ceasefire last year—a death toll that alone is higher than the number of Israelis killed, both civilian and military, on 7 October 2023.
Israel is also still bombing Lebanon, another place where it signed a ceasefire months ago yet continues to attack anyway, and where its soldiers are still demolishing entire villages and posting videos cheerfully mocking their victims. This behavior isn’t limited to low-level grunts. The Israeli defense minister has launched a flurry of threats against Lebanon, including to carry out more bombings on its capital, to illegally seize more of its land, and to displace a million people.
Lebanon is only one of Israel’s neighbors whose territory it is illegally occupying, where it has imposed restrictions on the behavior of the local population. Another is Syria, where it launched a series of ground raids and set a curfew and other restrictions on a set of villages this week. This is not counting Palestinian territories, where Israeli officials are flagrantly defying international law and world opinion by occupying and calling for the annexation of Gaza and by gradually annexing the West Bank through the very violent settlers responsible for those shocking attacks last week.
Eight of nine Israeli political parties earlier this month rejected the idea of an independent Palestinian state, going against what has been the overwhelming global consensus for decades and effectively committing to a one-state solution of explicit apartheid, with Israel controlling territory holding five million Palestinians without granting them basic rights like voting. (The one party that didn’t reject it was cut off by a bad connection.)
Oh, and the Israeli prime minister is vowing to carry out regime change in an entirely different country, Iran, which he is reportedly actively making plans to attack next month after the US elections.
Less than two weeks ago, a former Israeli military intelligence chief laid out for a prominent Israeli think tank the country’s new security doctrine—not what he thought it should be, or what some officials are working to make it, but what it already is based on the country’s actions the past few years. The core planks: the subordination of democracy to ethnonationalism, a state of permanent war with the entire Arab world, pursuit of preemptive sneak attacks as a matter of policy, and a rejection of Arab neighbors’ sovereignty coupled with the need to destabilize them.
So, in summary, the Israeli government is: complicit in violent attacks on Western countries’ citizens and government officials; routinely and flagrantly violating ceasefire agreements and international law; having its officials make wild, explicit threats of bombing and ethnic cleansing; waging or plotting war on at least three of its neighbors (four counting Palestine); and illegally occupying or planning to seize their land—all as it plans a future as an undemocratic ethnostate launching never-ending preemptive wars on the entire Arab world.
And this is just covering the past week or so. We can add all this to the numerous other violations Israel has racked up the past few years: its literal war on the United Nations, attacks on diplomatic facilities, assassination of foreign officials and negotiators, or, of course, the widely recognized genocide it’s carried out, to name a few. And now, it’s set to get much worse, as the Israeli government yesterday jumped on the shooting of two soldiers in the West Bank—a shooting that follows years of intensifying Israeli military and settler violence and destruction aimed at Palestinians there—to launch what it calls a Gaza-like war on the West Bank and quite possibly kill the two-state solution for good.
There are plenty of countries doing terrible things in the world—just look at Russia’s pitiless bombardment of Ukraine or Saudi Arabia’s renewed destruction of Yemen. But there is no other country that you can say all of the above about, whose rap sheet even comes close to the length and breadth of Israel’s recent violations.
If Israel were an official US adversary, it would have been hit with an ever-growing pile of sanctions long ago, and we would be hearing constant demands for war against it—which, to be clear, would be a disastrous course of action here, but one that the United States and Europe have taken for much less than what Israel is currently doing.
Instead, the Israeli state does not even receive a slap on the wrist. Worse, actually, as Washington and most of Europe’s capitals continue to stubbornly arm or provide diplomatic and economic support to Israel as it does all this, effectively supporting the very behavior they would never accept from any other country, and a policy most of their own citizens disagree with. And so it goes on, with no end in sight.
Im hoping it will seriously backfire here, eventually. Does everyone know about Israel's rat infestation. Apparently they have spent over a million shekels and they are pouring into the towns from the fields. They are everywhere and have invaded people's homes and gnawed through cables. So guess what they are now trying? They are bombing the fields from quadcopters with Roche 80 a poison associated with killing wildlife and causing a major food product recall as wheat was contaminated. So it is a miniature probable flicker of a smile, from me. How about you? 😂