Against the backdrop one of the most brutal police state crackdowns on Israel’s own orthodox Jewish Haredim in Bet Shemesh, a city located approximately 30 kilometers west of Jerusalem in Israel’s Jerusalem District, Netanyahu announced the name of the most recent operation as “Arrows of the North,” right after Israeli air raids last night on Lebanon resulted in the death of more than 294 Lebanese, the majority of which are not affiliated with Lebanon’s Hizbollah, a terrorist organization funded by Iran in its wide-reaching Axis of Resistance.
Newscasters on Channel 12 played clips of Israeli police beating Israel’s own orthodox Jewish Haredim with riot sticks with one officer striking one of the Haredim as hard as he could more than seven times all over his body as he covered himself with his hands. A tall, fair skinned, brunette Israeli police officer with long hair kicks a Haredim wildly along the wall in the background, as the Haredim tries to stand up to run away. Newscasters on Channel 12 claimed that the Israeli police received “permission” to clear the Haredim from the area.
The Arabic press has published footage of Lebanese drivers attempting to pass from southern Lebanon to the north, which has caused impassable traffic jams on Lebanon’s highways, paralyzing transportation throughout the south.
Shortly after Netanyahu’s announcement, the Associated Press tweeted a post, stating: “The U.S. will send additional troops to the Middle East amid escalation between Israel and Hizbollah in Lebanon, the Pentagon says.”
In its attempt to defend Hamas, Hizbollah has bitten off more than it can chew but without any visible results. Hizbollah’s eleven month bombing campaign against northern Israel failed to have any effect on Israel’s war on the Gaza strip. Meant to deter Israel, none of Hizbollah’s attacks during that period changed, altered, or stopped Israel’s siege of Gaza.
On September 20th, 2024, Israel’s IDF targeted more than 20 members of Hizbollah, eliminating Hizbollah’s entire command structure for its elite Radwan forces in a single attack. The September 20th attack followed Israel’s attack on Hizbollah’s pagers, which caused more than 3,000 members of the terrorist organization to suffer life-altering or life-threatening wounds, resulting in the loss of eyes, fingers, hands, or appendages. Edward Snowden famously denounced the pager attack as an act of terrrorism.
It is thus from a position of profound weakness that Hizbollah has continued to respond in kind to Israel’s air raids, laying the foundation for Netanyahu to declare war on the organization with the opening of an operation called “Arrows of the North.” Hizbollah, which has existed for more than 20 years in Lebanon, is perceived as a spent force in the Middle East. The Secretary General of the Arab Islamic Council, for instance, considers Hassan Nasrallah to be ‘expired’ on the international scene with few to no achievements inside or outside of Lebanon. In a recently televised interview on Al-Hadath, the Saudi white-label clone of Al-Arabiya, he stated of Nasrallah: “دورك انتهى”.
Under immense pressure internally from the revulsion Americans feel towards the government’s disintegration of civil rights, the continued collapse of the order the United States guaranteed against the former Ottoman Empire is compelling the American ruling elite to exacerbate its reinforcement with ever more stark demonstrations of power. It has been decided at the highest levels of the government that one of the ways to preserve what still remains from that order is to expel Iranian influence in and around Judea. While the exact plans are currently being debated, preparations for Israel’s impending ground invasion of Lebanon are already underway. Israel’s elite division, the 98th, is already transferred to the North; the 98th is one of Israel’s division to have fought in both the previous Israeli wars with Lebanon. Israelis have begun to post footage of military columns heading north with tanks, bulldozers or artillery afoot. These moves indicate that an Israeli ground invasion of southern Lebanon is slowly being prepared for the upcoming months.
Hizbollah, which is far weaker than Israel, never managed to assert control over Lebanon’s internal politics; Israel’s IDF, which operates with the full support of the Israeli government, is a far more powerful force not only for its Western weaponry, munitions or air force but for its thoroughly unified fighting force. Identified as a weak force without a majority of support in Lebanon, Hizbollah, whose sole financial support comes directly from Iran, has little to nothing with which to defend itself from Israeli air raids, Merkava tanks, or Galloper PzH. The IDF, for instance, published diagrams, exposing how Hizbollah has constructed an elaborate network of launch sites for its arsenal of projectiles inside of Arabic buildings ( which are typically a part of a patchwork of two, three, or four story stone buildings on winding roadways ) in villages facing Israel. Israel has estimated together with the United States that right now is the most appropriate time to begin a ‘war of annihilation’ against the terrorist organization with a view for its elimination or eradication as a precondition for the expansion of Israel’s territory to the banks of the Litani river.
Hizbollah’s strategy at this stage of the war is directed towards the degradation of Israel’s anti-air defense systems, scaling from its crudest to its most sophisticated projectiles, as Israel’s Iron Dome, Arrow or David systems exhaust its stockpiles of interceptors. The depletion of Israel’s interceptors on Hizbollah’s crudest projectiles provides the organization with an ever widening window of opportunity for a successful strike with its more sophisticated guided missiles. On Saturday, Hizbollah launched its Fadi 1 and Fadi 2 missiles against Israel for the first time since the last Lebanese war in 2006, the strongest missiles yet launched on Israel. Israeli commentators have rightly predicted that as Israel and Hizbollah continue to exchange blows, the expanse of Hizbollah’s strike range is expected to scale accordingly.
Hizbollah fired these projectiles with more or less the same reckless disregard for civilians as Israel’s own strikes, as many people, both Israeli as well as Arab, are caught in the crossfire of a major escalation in the breakdown of the geopolitical order in the Middle East. These attacks are pummeling cities and villages in both countries, hitting factories, hospitals, schools, bridges, fuel depots & government buildings, leaving paths of destruction from one end of the Middle East to the other.
The expansion of Israel’s war against Hamas in the Gaza strip to southern Lebanon has already begun to shake the former Ottoman territories within the ambit of U.S. imperialism’s spheres of influence. Allegedly paid a paltry sum amount to no more than $1.5 billion dollars, Jordan’s King Abdullah, whose territory is a literal carveout from a part of collapsed Ottoman Empire, has begun to complain openly in unprecedented ways about the Palestinian problem, threatening to declare war on Israel, should Israel seek to expel Palestinians from the West Bank to Jordan, half of whose population is Palestinian.
Despite assurances from Washington to save King Abdullah from his own population, should an Arab Spring explode on the streets Amman, King Abdullah recently announced openly his embrace of Lebanon, according a post Qatar’s Al-Jazeera news agency published in Arabic on September 23rd, 2024.
