On That Israel Thing...

Wauck found an interview of Alistair Crooke.  It has a very intriguing last graf.

AN: You're painting you're painting a very gloomy future for the Israelis if they continue their destruction of Gaza. Does prime minister Netanyahu recognize that he's playing with fire?

AC: Yes, Netanyahu understands very well this is why he keeps using these apocalyptic terms, that Israel is fighting for its life, this is the great Armageddon battle that's coming, we have have to have complete Victory. This feeling is shared by nearly all Israelis. The polls confirm it. They do not believe it's possible to survive--as they have survived as a Zionist project--when other states no longer fear them. It's been that military edge of fear that has been the survival of Israel and they feel that's gone since the 7th of October, and eroding every day since--unless they can restore that in some way. But you can't just attack Hezbollah. Iraq is already attacking the ports of Ashdod and Haifa. Eilat is already closed. It won't be much longer, perhaps, before we'll find that Ben Gurion is closed. The squeeze is continuing. This is asymmetric warfare.

This is happening. It's happening now, but Israel is compelled not by literal politics--it's compelled by the eschatological, the biblical narrative that Israel has to go in and do these things because it is the will of God. Every day we hear rabbis coming on and saying to the troops--I mean, senior rabbis--saying, 'This means that you have to kill the children in Gaza because they will grow up and they will turn into terrorists who will attack us, and you have to kill the women because these are the vessels that give birth to these future terrorists, and you have to kill all and this is a halakhic command which is not voluntary, which is mandatory on you. You are commanded under halakhic law to do this. Halakhic law is Jewish law to do these things and the Talmud requires us to do these things.' So there's this compulsion.

The West [both America and Europe] keeps conceptualizing this as a sort of typical secular process of management--you know, offer a new state, manage, move people here or there, but actually you're dealing with forces that are very different. These are the forces of biblical myth and story and they compel people to act and follow things that may not make a lot of sense in the literal world but nonetheless are very compelling to those who believe in them

It's likely that no US President since Teddy Roosevelt--and perhaps not even Teddy--understands the force of religion in the Middle East.  Jimmuh Carter may have, but it's clear that neither Bush 'got it.'  As a result, our diplomacy there has had the USDollar as the primary weapon, and the military as a secondary--all in the pursuit of petroleum, and managing regimes toward fulfilling the US' needs for same.

But not everyone worships the USDollar, you see......