Commentary
Israel’s ‘New Order’ is a tank
The concept of international legality in the Middle East, if it was ever applied, is now being erased, and Netanyahu wants to rewrite it altogether.
“Deliberately” and “repeatedly,” according to a UN statement, the UNIFIL mission's headquarters and military base in Lebanon, where the Italian contingent is stationed, was hit by direct fire from an Israeli Merkava tank. They also surveilled the base with a drone and destroyed security cameras – what is it that they don’t want to be seen?
This episode of open warfare against the UN and the Italian contingent comes amid the gathering darkness of the start of Tel Aviv's war response to Tehran after the Iranian missile attack in response to Nasrallah's killing, and while the massacre in Gaza is still ongoing: on Thursday, dozens more unarmed civilian victims were added to the 42,000 casualties of this blood-drenched year.
At first glance, in the face of so much horror, this would seem to be a marginal incident, not all that dramatic, since it only led to injuries for two Indonesian blue helmets. It is not. This is an extremely serious event that shows the dangerous threshold that Netanyahu wants to cross with impunity, no longer as revenge for the heinous Hamas attack of October 7, 2023, but instead, taking advantage of the moment and the euphoria in Israel over the reported “victories” (whatever happened to the hostages that needed to be freed?), to implement his stated design for a New Order in the Middle East. In itself, the bombing of UN facilities is certainly not new in this now four-front war of Gaza, West Bank, Lebanon and Iran.
In Gaza, the headquarters of UNRWA, which has managed the humanitarian plight of the Palestinians since 1948, have been repeatedly and deliberately razed with the killing of dozens of U.N. workers; and in Lebanon, the 1996 Qana massacre comes to mind, when the Lebanese territory was still occupied by Israeli forces and, in response to the resumption of the conflict, Shimon Peres decided to bomb a UN facility where many civilians had taken refuge: there were 103 dead, and an investigation by the UN revealed that the Israeli government knew about the presence of civilians.
This time, however, Netanyahu went even further, if that’s possible. Because the message is crystal clear: in his “New Order,” the interposition and monitoring function of the UN troops, implementing Resolution 1701 which forbade both Hezbollah and Israel to use the area beyond the Blue Line for military purposes, can no longer be there. Basically, the UN must leave, or, if it stays, it must play Israel’s game: guarantees for one side only.
Even more: “deliberately” targeting the facility where the Italian contingent is stationed is a very serious message to a country which, under the current right-extreme right government, has a prime minister who comes from the neo-Fascist tradition of Almiranti and has been “mimetically” pro-Israel for this very reason, repeatedly siding with Israel because “it has the right to defend itself ... while respecting humanitarian law,” according to Giorgia Meloni's latest statement.
But Netanyahu has not respected “humanitarian law”: we are at 42,000 dead in Gaza, hundreds in the West Bank, and 1,500 in Lebanon, most of them civilians. Furthermore, the ongoing Israeli offensive in Lebanon, for the ostensible purpose of making it safe for 60,000 refugees to return to Galilee, has caused 1.2 million refugees to flee from southern Lebanon, including to war-torn Syria, from where many of them had fled in the first place.
The Israeli prime minister warned on Wednesday that Lebanon could end up “like Gaza,” but Lebanon is already a new Gaza. After the announcement of his intention to “liberate” the Iranians, he called on the Lebanese to rise up against Hezbollah, which, before Nasrallah's deliberate killing in recent days, was a political actor among others in Lebanon, including with government roles. It was a call for even more chaos, in short, a new Lebanese civil war after the too many it has already experienced, and it’s possible some will take up that call.
At least for now, Bibi's “liberation” of Iran, supported by the Palhevi monarchy, which even spoke before the Knesset to call for it, is being rejected by the Iranians, who are seeing the massacre of thousands of women in Gaza and know about the history of their country, which saw the Palhevi royal family, on the payroll of the U.S., make a mockery of Mossadeq's secular and democratic turn in the 1950s.
But how will Italy respond? It was Defense Minister Crosetto, not Foreign Minister Tajani, who summoned the Israeli ambassador. What exactly did he want to tell him? Perhaps, since he is a defense minister with a background at Leonardo, that there would be an end to the provision of weapons systems and intelligence, as Macron threatened? Or the suspension of the military treaty between Italy and Israel, and sanctions? As if. In the end, it was only some strong words: “The United Nations and Italy cannot take orders from the Israeli government,” was Crosetto’s message to Tel Aviv.
But they’re not taking orders, they’re taking tank rounds. If UNIFIL is chased away from the field by Israeli tank fire without any break in diplomatic relations - first and foremost by Italy and France, which have been the main supporters of the new UNIFIL – it would be, first and foremost, a political snub for Italy’s failing government, to say the least: one that doesn’t recognize the state of Palestine, that says it supports a “ceasefire” that has become a fairy tale bromide even more than “two peoples, two states,” that abstains at the UN, toeing the line of the shortsightedness, silence and impotence of the U.S., which under Biden has never put limits on the hubris of Netanyahu – recently sending him another 18 billion in arms – and his New Order. All Biden had to say about the killing of Nasrallah was that it was a “measure of justice.”
If one looks closer, this “New Order” comes in the wake of the Abraham Accords sought by Trump, which effectively erased the Palestinian issue, as Netanyahu has repeatedly shown with his own maps at the United Nations. The attack on UNIFIL, which Crosetto said could amount to “a war crime,” continues the line of the attack on Guterres, declared persona non grata in Israel, and on the United Nations itself, which Netanyahu called an “anti-Semitic swamp.” The concept of international legality in the Middle East, if it was ever applied, is now being erased, and Netanyahu wants to rewrite it altogether. So much for the accusation of “double standards.”
How can we forget who Netanyahu really is and what the state of Israel has become under his leadership: not only is it less secure than ever before, but it has been indicted at the International Court of Justice in The Hague for “plausible genocide,” and an arrest warrant has been sought by the Prosecutor General of the International Criminal Court for the Israeli premier (together with Hamas’s Sinwar) as a “war criminal.” Can a war criminal bomb anyone and everyone, thanks to the impunity he owes to U.S. and Western protection, without anyone being able to stop him?
Originally published at https://ilmanifesto.it/il-nuovo-ordine-a-cannonate on 2024-10-11