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Only one nation can stop a rampant Israel from continuing on its path of bloodshed. That nation is the USA, Israeli’s closest ally…its  largest supplier of treasure and arms.

On Friday 27 September, Israel hit Beirut with around 80 ‘bunker busters’ that took-out the leader of Hezbollah, along with a couple of hundred civilians. Those bombs were supplied by the US . Having to all intents and purposes destroyed Gaza, Israel has now moved on to doing likewise in Lebanon.

The Israeli lobby in America is immensely powerful, disproportionally so. Neither Democrats nor Republican Parties seem capable of resisting its demands. The Biden administration keeps claiming that the US is cautioning Israel to moderate its military destruction of Gaza and the conscious blocking of the delivery of basic humanitarian aid. He reports America has threatened not to supply heavy weapons unless Israel moderates its behaviour. Time and time again America says it claims Israel acts without consulting it. Month after month the US announces progress in peace talks that amount to nothing. Nothing.

In spite of all its protestations, the day after the Beirut raid Biden announced the USA  supported the action, describing it (for a variety of reasons) as ‘ justice’. Green light again. The US wags its finger at Israel, warning it not to be naughty, but always forgives Israel for anything it does.

The USA behaves like a giant Goliath who always buckles to the bully boy tactics of the Israeli Government. That’s a huge strategic error from a long-term point of view …for America and the West as a whole, including Australia.

Israel’s argument that it, as a state, has a right to survive in peace is an undeniable one. But that doesn’t mean that other peoples don’t have the same right. They do. Israel also states it can never be secure until Hamas and  Hezbollah are annihilated. They can never achieve such a goal. The history of Palestine attests to that.

The antecedents of modern Israel have been expansionary in intent. Put simply, the Jewish peoples of Palestine have long sought more land by (one way or another ) dispossessing Arabs. Since the inception of Israel as a sovereign state in 1948/9 the pressure for more ‘living space’ (as in the case of ‘illegal’ settlements on the West Bank) or ‘defensive barriers’ (the numerous buffer zones in Gaza, the Egyptian border, West Bank, Golan Heights, South  Lebanon) has accelerated the quest for wider Israeli control by means politic, economic and military.

Is it surprising that Arab peoples have resisted that expansion? Should they meekly submit? Would the citizens of Israel submit if the situation were reversed? No. They too would resist.

The more Israel seeks to annihilate its opponents, the more it seeks to impose its will, the more Palestinians and Arabs it kills, maims, starves, dehouses or impoverishes, the greater will be their drive to resist – and retaliate. Cutting down Arab leadership will only serve to fertilise the next crop of resisters.

Of all the peoples on earth it should be those that suffered the horrors of The Holocaust who most realise this. Why would those Arabs now experiencing Israel’s wrath feel differently to the way Jews did and still do? If Israel chooses to live by the sword it risks, in time, dying by the sword and/or becoming a pariah amongst liberal nations, not a shining example of democracy.

If the future is to be more positive than the past it’s naïve and pointless doing more of the same over and over again expecting a different and better result.

How many wars must innocents suffer before the nations of the area realise that guns don’t make for enduring peace? America needs to put its foot down  and definitively say no more. No more arms, no more public money. It (and the West ) needs to bring Israel to heel, until Israel listens to and respects the rights of others to live their lives their way, not the way Israel would like them to. 

Democracies, including Israel, have no more moral right to assert their will on others, peoples outside their State, than do any other form of government. Being a democracy doesn’t make a State sinless no matter what it does.

Surely the US’ long and unsuccessful interference in foreign wars (Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan) and plots to bring down Latin American governments it didn’t like (Cuba, Brazil, Chile, Argentina, Bolivia et al) should have taught us the dangers of trying to ‘liberate’ (read force) other nations to accept the values of the West, our view of the way the world ought to be.

We democracies certainly don’t like, and resist, any other peoples/states/religions insisting we should change our ways to accommodate their view of the way the world should be structured. We call such people terrorists. Our opponents call them freedom fighters.

Israel’s dual strategy of (1) territorial expansion (both legal and illegal) and (2) eliminating its opponents by force of arms will not secure Israel the peaceful future it seeks. It will only seed further hatred and guarantee future outbursts of the kind that shocked the world on October 7, 2023.

Why should this ‘new’ war prove any more successful than the previous seven Israeli-Arab wars? Israel will probably win this war (as it usually does) only to lose the peace.

Unless Israel learns to live with Arabs it will continue to die alongside them.

All children in the middle east (Israeli, Palestinian, Lebanese) deserve a far, far better fate than the one they currently suffer.

The time is well overdue for Pax America to live up to its own self-image – and for western democracies to follow suit. Australia should be in the vanguard of that peace movement, not the soft-speaking, tentative laggard we’ve been to date.

It’s time for democracies to live up to internationally practise what they so self-righteously  preach domestically.