Decolonize the Levant

Why now is the time for Israel to take the offensive in the war of ideas

As cathartic as killing bad guys can be, a string of opportunistic operations do not add up to a strategy. Yes, we should feel safer now that Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh, Hamas general Mohammad Deif, and Hizbullah general Fuad Shukr are no longer among the living. Yes, Israel has once again proven to its allies that it is incredibly good at finding and ending the leaders of enemy forces sworn to destroy it and the West. Yes, removing autocrats and their henchmen is undoubtedly a good thing for those among their own people who yearn for a better life.

Yet: War is not a game won based on the number of kills racked up. Haniyeh’s removal will sow chaos in the remaining Hamas ranks and potentially delay the organization’s ability to agree to a ceasefire or surrender, potentially delaying the return of hostages. Moreover, despite the terrors and tragedies they’ve inflicted on Israel, Hamas remains a key (although minor player) in the larger war against Israel. It only exists because of international largesse and imperialist aspirations.

If anything, the global wave of performative mourning over the untimely death of Haniyeh has done more than anything else to expose the current extent of the influence of Islamic imperialism – and the extent of Israel’s dislocation from the movement to oppose it.

Which is why I believe it is so important to look beyond the current round of curses and vows from the usual suspects to identify the patterns emerging. As Ed Rettig points out, if it wasn’t tragic, it would be silly. NATO-member Turkey flying its flag at half-mast to honor a NATO-recognized terrorist leader; the deputy foreign minister of Russia being sent to declare that this was an “absolutely unacceptable political murder,” only hours after negotiating the release of their own political murderers from the US; the BBC memorializing a leader committed to the eradication of Israel as ‘pragmatic,’ the New York Times eulogizing him for managing negotiations. All of these are as much clarifications of loyalties and alignments as they are celebrations of Israel’s would-be executioner.

And they are a reminder that Israel has prosecuted this war against Hamas without addressing the context in which the war developed. Israel, under Benjamin Netanyahu’s leadership, has fought this war as if it were no more than a grown-up version of previous bouts with the Palestinians. As if victory on the battlefield against Hamas – even the destruction of Hamas as an organization – will ensure Israel lives in peace for evermore. As if Hamas is operating independently and its only aspirations are an end to the Jewish rule of the land we call Israel.

The world’s reactions to Haniyeh’s death reminds us that we cannot afford to ignore the context, cannot afford to imagine that defeating Hamas will enable Israel to live in peace. What we face is no less than a broad network of states aligned with the dedicated effort to extend the empire of the Islamic Republic across the region, and upset the liberal democratic order as a whole. A non-Western imperial moment, led in equal measure by Iran and Russia and China to capture territories and impose their way of life on peoples who have other aspirations for their national independence.

Israel, alongside Ukraine and Taiwan as the target of the hour, has a role to play in this imperial moment: it should lead the resistance. It should declare its intention to decolonize the Levant.

It is not enough to target Hezbollah in Lebanon. We must call out Iranian imperialism in Lebanon and openly speak to the national rights of the different peoples of the region, smashed together into a French colony against their will over a century ago. It is not enough to target Iranian forces in Syria. We must call out the Iran backed destruction of that country under the brutal dictatorship of a minor tribe kept in power to oppress the many ancient peoples living in the land. It is not enough to call Turkey names. We must call out Turkish imperialism, its severe and brutal and century-old military occupation of Kurdish and Assyrian lands and subjection of indigenous peoples.

For Israel to live in peace we need to end imperialism. To clearly align Israel with those who believe in freedom and liberty, with those who believe that every people has a right to self-definition and self-determination. We need to recognize that a State and its government should only exist as an extension of the governed and with the consent of the people. Which is why the Netanyahu government’s inability to acknowledge the desire for Palestinian self-determination is so strategically unsound, so deeply retarding of our aspirations to live in security. No matter how many terrorist masterminds we kill, we will be unable to defeat Hamas – or the organization the Islamic imperialists will prop up in its place – until we live up to Zionism’s core value of national liberation.