Dana El-Kurd

Israeli politics and this is a shift in Israeli politics in the past I'm going to say I don't know two or three decades I don't know how one would start counting that shift and it does go back to the Palestinian question and in the sense of like them not wanting to address it at all not even pretending that they're going to because they've been pretending you know obviously not actually doing it but even pretending that you know they were doing so the Oslo Accord and whatnot

There isn't even that.

I think it's useful to understand their attitude towards Lebanon as at least in part a continuation of that attitude towards Palestinians.

So in many ways, like the Palestinian question itself remains the one that they want to avoid at all costs.

And whatever that means, bombing Iran, bombing Lebanon, bombing other countries later, I don't know, obviously bombing Syria, they've already done that, you know, and so on and so forth.

genocide as a tool of conflict management yeah yeah it's just domination i guess for its own sake because they can't imagine any kind of other alternative and they haven't had a need to do so because you know as you said they've gotten away with a live stream genocide for over two years now why would they think differently about about lebanon a very poor country that you know doesn't have that many resources and whatnot which isn't to say that they will succeed and they will win and and so on but this is what they've been saying this is their intention

It's a political vision that does not see the other as human, as having agency, as deserving anything, really.

It's not like they have an opposing side or an opponent that they want to defeat, but ultimately have some kind of settlement and move beyond that or whatnot.

There is no long-term plan, is what I'm trying to say, I guess.

And maybe to emphasize a bit more in the case of Lebanon, so what happens next for Hezbollah, for example...

I'm not entirely sure.

I don't think anyone really knows.

It seems clear that the Israelis underestimated their capabilities.

But to what extent that will matter if the Israelis continue to just bomb and bomb and bomb Lebanon for weeks on end, if not months on end and so on, I can't tell.

What I can tell is that in the same way as the Israelis want to ignore the Palestinian question, but it's still there.

It haunts them in a way, because I work on hauntology.

And in case of Lebanon, there is also that in many ways, that if you look at the shift in discourse, even within Israeli politics from like, let's say, 70s, especially 80s onwards, I'm not going to say it was never good.

But there was a stronger component of Israeli politicians, let's say, like a higher percentage of them anyway, that were, for lack of a better term, pragmatic.

that were willing to have concessions, that were willing to have whatever, because if only because they just did not want to deal with like occupying a foreign country that they had no intention to legally annex as they did with the legally, none of this is legal, but like within Israeli law, I mean, as they did with the Golan Heights.

And so that's what I'm saying in the case of Lebanon, that it's almost like the worst case scenario is what's currently happening.