The way in which Israel dealt with the children's kites in Gaza points to a state of paranoia, one that takes a persecutory form and heightens the readiness for a nervous breakdown. To treat those toys as hostile drones resembles seeing a threat in every movement, a plot in every whispered word between two people, and a scheme of surveillance in anyone who happens to walk a few steps behind you. This "conviction," built on a paranoid sense of persecution, drives Israel toward extreme responses, ranging from the utmost violence to the utmost suspicion of malign intent practiced across a vast stretch of geography.
It may be understandable, especially after Al-Aqsa Flood Operation, that the Jewish state's security anxiety should be running higher than any other country's, all the more so given its history with its surroundings and the memory of the Holocaust and the pogroms. But the conclusion the Netanyahu government has reached exceeds every rational calculation and overflows the bounds of politics and diplomacy altogether.
Gaza, the West Bank, southern Lebanon, and southern Syria are hostile territory, handled through killing, burning, and humiliation - varying only in degree. Egypt and Jordan are not to be trusted, no source of reassurance. Other countries are potential threats, if not today then tomorrow. Western Europe, Canada, and America's Democratic Party are home to dangerous, hostile milieus, along with the students in solidarity with Gaza, the international courts, and the artists and athletes who demanded accountability for the crimes being committed. Even the friendship of Donald Trump and his circle can be put to the test.
Many of these adversaries are lumped together under a single label that wavers between the Islamist and the communist, or perhaps a communist Islamism of some strange breed, while every objection to Israel's actions is written off as antisemitism. This is the shabbiest thing a political culture can produce, dragging ideas down into daily propaganda wrapped in a padding of affected cleverness, and it insults the victims of antisemitism the way Stalinism insulted the victims of fascism when it branded all who opposed it as fascists.
But is it conceivable that a party which is a leading candidate for a nervous breakdown should be charged with setting the world's course straight and rationalizing its actions? Or that all those accused or suspected parties should be absolutely wrong, and Israel alone absolutely right? And even if we granted that - impossible as it is - would the solution be war after war, without end?
Conduct like this is inhabited by a deep affliction long attributed to Arab parties: the refusal to examine oneself and one's actions, and the flight instead into the alibi of conspiracy. And if the prevailing Arab narrative made a habit of proposing resistance after resistance, steadfastness after steadfastness, in answer to that conspiracy, the current Israeli narrative proposes nothing but war after war and, accordingly, the drive to raise the military budget from $20 billion in 2023 to $60 billion this year.
Yet the centrality of conspiracy in this consciousness brings Netanyahu's political language close to an inverted antisemitism - one whose incitement is compounded by a personal legal crisis and serious electoral difficulties. Instead of the Jews being a source of danger and conspiracy against the world, as that myth claims, the Jews become the target of the world's danger and conspiracy, as the myth of Netanyahu and his companions claims. And if Stalinism may be invoked once more, it built the idea of "socialism in one country" on its obsession with siege and conspiracy and today Israel, along with Iran, both obsessed with conspiracy and siege, stand alone in building a system that can live only "in one country."
The conspiracy, for its part, never stops working except when there appears on the face of the earth a president shrewd enough, like Colombia's new president, de la Espriella, to volunteer the Syrian Golan Heights to Israel. By such a measure, anyone who offers anything less, even Mansour Abbas, becomes a mere wolf in sheep's clothing.
But this call for a conformity of allegiance is neither politics nor reality. It is the monologue of the strong party, which assumes that everyone else is without rights, interests, desires, or concerns, and that their credibility is measured solely by how far they serve Israel's interests in the way Netanyahu sees fit.
The truth is that every leader of the Jewish state since Ben-Gurion - Netanyahu alone excepted - would not have ignored the major transformations Israel has wrought in the region, nor the political gains to be drawn from them, foremost among them the weakening of Iran and its ragged militias. Folded within these developments was a historic opportunity for the Israelis, and for the region as a whole: their state incorporated into a stable regional order, while the paths to solving the Palestinian problem regained their standing. But those who squandered such an opportunity in the 1990s, completing the work of the Khomeinists, the Assadists, and their like, will not erase with their left hand what they once wrote with their right.
It is not without significance that the "Revolutionary Guards" project and the project of Netanyahu and the settlement monsters are both haunted by doses of the archaic and the mythic - doses that drag the world back toward eras thought long folded away, with their imperial and colonial designs, and that try by brute force to abort every future possibility. With them, war alone has a future, and no door opens onto even a small hope except through their fall, together or separately.
