SATISH SHARMA - not just Rotigraphy.: he strategy certainly seems to be one shock and awe campaign after another. Iran is currently in the crosshairs, but the message is directed at all Middle Eastern states: do not dare challenge Israel’s bid for regional hegemony or ethnic cleansing of Palestine.

https://x.com/MaryKostakidis/status/2032269338355646750

Mary Kostakidis

NEW article by Ilan Pappe: ‘The strategy certainly seems to be one shock and awe campaign after another. Iran is currently in the crosshairs, but the message is directed at all Middle Eastern states: do not dare challenge Israel’s bid for regional hegemony or ethnic cleansing of Palestine. Achieving the first would give Israel the immunity it needs for the second: rectifying the mistake the historian Benny Morris lamented when he criticized Ben Gurion for not expelling all the Palestinians in 1948. As Bezalel Smotrich said to Palestinian members of the Knesset in 2021, ‘you are here because Ben Gurion did not finish the job’. In the eyes of the government, and the political elite in general, the moment seems to have arrived to finish the job. … Ironically, the best interpretative schema here may be that which orientalists have typically applied—not always very accurately—to the Islamic Republic: that this is a power not acting according to a ‘Western’ rational and humanist approach to politics but a fanatical ideology. Those determining the present Israeli strategy are explicit about its roots in the teaching of messianic Zionism and their vision of the present war as divine fulfilment. Netanyahu may be less ideological than his allies, and more narrowly concerned with his own political survival, but there is little doubt he accepts his glorification as both a strategic genius and messenger of God. For this camp, Israeli society itself needs to become far more theocratic. It is not yet, laments Smotrich, the ‘state of the Cohanim’, but is on its way to being ruled by a harsh biblical version of the Halachic law: ‘The State of Israel, the country of the Jewish people, with God willing, will go back to operating as it did in the days of King David and King Solomon.’ Much of the government’s domestic legislation is devoted to pursuing this end. Second, there is a need to resolve the Palestine question. Gaza is the model. Smotrich again: ‘There are no half-measures. Rafah, Deir al-Balah, Nuseirat—total destruction. “Thou shalt blot out the remembrance of Amalek from under heaven. There is no place for them under heaven.”’ Cont

12:35 PM · Mar 13, 2026