[Orig to FB]
In the run-up to the last presidential election, it was my strong sense that Netanyahu’s government was carefully modulating its war effort specifiucally to stoke conflict among US Dems / libs / progs / lefts. Put plainly, in my view, he used ethnic cleansing and genocide as a lever to punk the US ‘left’ into the internecine warfare that contributed to Trump’s election. I think that’s happening again this election season, with the aim of minimizing the risk that the Dems win both houses. Netanyahu himself can’t be seen as doing this right when Trump is ripping him a new one over the phone, so instead we saw (1) an astonishingly large group of ultra cabinet ministers and Knessest members at NYC’s Israel Day parade, (2) ginned-up media outrage over Mamdani’s principled choice not to attend, and (3) low-level background noise about whether this or that US politician knew in advance which genocidal lunatics would be out in front — all signs of a state visit without all the statery. The implication of this view is that Israel’s ultra-aggressive incursions into Lebanon are driven in part, possibly in large part, by their political reception in the US: the worse the reception here, the better for Israeli fascists. If so, ideas about “complicity” that have been so faddish on the left for the last few years, are mostly backwards: the louder you yell GENOCIDE, the more likely Netanyahu and Crew are to actually do it. They want to do it anyway, they benefit from the collapse of the civility that makes debate possible, they kneecap the universities they see as factories of anti-Israel sentiment, and they hobble the left-leaning segments of the Democratic Party.