Under Bibi, its Middle Eastern supremacy is one of blood and iron.View this email in your browser [link removed]
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****JUNE 24, 2025****
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****Meyerson on TAP****
**As Hegemons Go, Israel Isn’t All That Benign**
**Under Bibi, its Middle Eastern supremacy is one of blood and iron.**
As I write mid-day on Tuesday, I can state with existential certitude that a
ceasefire between Israel and Iran is on, unless it’s off. Our president is no
student of history, and is largely surrounded by Trump-besotted
nincompoops, but someone might have told him that it’s invariably easier to
start a war than end it.
Even as that ceasefire looks suspiciously like Schrodinger’s cat, however, one thing that is definitely alive is Israel’s status as the Middle East’s hegemon. To its pre-existing status as the region’s sole nuclear power, it has now augmented that status by its further reduction of the Palestinian Authority to a floundering letterhead organization, by its increasing appropriations of Palestinians’ West Bank homes and farms; by its war on Hamas, which, since its treatment of Palestinians engenders more armed Palestinian opposition and more Hamas recruits, has been from the start a war on all of Gaza; by its evisceration of much of the Hezbollah, its incursions into Syria, and, with crucial U.S. assistance, by its serious diminution of an Iranian threat.
Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran all truly sought Israel’s destruction, and no Israeli government would have hesitated, or has hesitated, to use some level of military force against them. But the Netanyahu government’s refusal to bargain with moderate Palestinians and their Arab allies (even, for that matter, to recognize the existence, much less the legitimacy, of moderate Palestinians) set the table for its blood-drenched, ultra-nationalist approach to its war on Gaza and its increasing take-over of the West Bank.
This is Jabotinsky Zionism—which calls for expelling all Palestinians and conquering their Arab allies—on steroids. Any chronicle of the current Netanyahu government will surely mark it as the most purely Jabotinsky-esque that Israel has ever had. There’s one other forebear, though, that might be cited as well: the Old Testament’s Book of Joshua.
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Joshua, which is the book that immediately follows the Torah, the five books of Moses, isn’t one of those Biblical books that lend themselves to adages and homilies in common parlance. It’s chiefly an account of what the people of Israel did when they ended their 40 years in the desert and moved into Biblical Palestine: specifically, which other peoples they defeated militarily to occupy the land, and, once the occupation has been completed, which of their tribes and families got which plots of land to dwell on.
I make no claims for my Biblical scholarship, which is largely non-existent, but I’m struck by the fact that the verb that most commonly appears in the Book of Joshua—after “said” and “went”—is “smote.” The Book of Joshua recounts two types of encounters between Joshua’s advancing legions and the people they run into. Some agree to be servants for his oncoming horde, for which reason they’re not killed. The others are smote down one after the other. When the Israelites take Makkedah, they “utterly destroyed them, and all the souls that were therein.” At Eglon, “they smote it with the edge of the sword, and all the souls that were therein he utterly destroyed.” Then it was on to Hebron, where “they smote it with the edge of the sword, and the king thereof, and all the cities thereof, and all the souls that were therein.”
“So Joshua smote all the land,” the book continues. “He left none remaining, but he utterly destroyed all that breathed, as the Lord, the God of Israel, commanded. And Joshua smote them from Kadesh-barnes even unto Gaza….”
Vladimir Jabotinsky—a Russian-born secular Jew who died on Long Island in 1940—was no more religious than Bibi Netanyahu is; neither of them believed in a god, much less a god that had commanded Jews to occupy or re-occupy Palestine and drive out everybody else. Only a fraction of today’s Israeli settler militants literally believe that Yahweh has commanded them to drive the Palestinians from Gaza and the West Bank.
That said, a history of the current Israeli government will be replete with imperfect echoes of Joshua’s book, scaled back, to be sure, to the limits of what 21st century civilization will allow, or at least, to the not all that confining limits of what the Biden and Trump administrations have allowed. And just as Joshua’s book recounts incidents where the Lord directly interceded by dropping stones on Israel’s enemies, so the Bibi Chronicles will recount the droppings of Donald Trump’s B-2s.
I have no quarrel with driving ayatollahs from power wherever they are, with eliminating the scourge of theocrats and autocrats both religious and secular. My concern is for “all the souls that are within” their domains. The current Middle Eastern hegemon appears less concerned than I.
**~ HAROLD MEYERSON**
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