Video: Israel is Winning ...

and losing

My pessimistic take on how Israel is achieving its main objective in Gaza, while engaged in a battle with Palestinian resistance forces that it cannot win but will turn into a high-risk confrontation with Iran that endangers the whole world (as I analyzed in my previous article: Israel’s Solution to Gaza: War on Iran).

AI-generated transcript is below.

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Transcript (AI generated):

SPEAKER 4

You don't know me but I'm your brother I was raised here in this living hell You don't know my kind in your world

SPEAKER 2

I'm Jim Kavanagh, known online as The Polemicist.

I do wish everybody a happy and healthy New Year.

I would like to be able to make a more upbeat message about the New Year, but I'm afraid I have to confirm and repeat warnings that I've already made about what's happening in Gaza, Palestine, Israel, etc.

I'm afraid the beginning of the New Year is likely to bring more horror and wider conflict.

The first thing I want to say is that Israel is winning in Gaza, and it's important that we don't kid ourselves about that.

I know, I know what many anti-Zionists on social media are saying.

Hamas and not just Hamas.

Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, all the resistance groups are more than holding their own against the IDF in Gaza.

They are being incredibly smart, brave, and effective.

They post videos every day showing their ability to blow up tanks and kill Israeli soldiers, and these are important and effective actions.

Israel cannot take many casualties and cannot sustain a long-term, large-scale mobilization

So, many say, Israel is failing in its stated objective of eliminating Hamas.

But Israel's stated objective in Gaza is not its real objective.

Its real, its main objective is to eliminate Palestinians in Gaza by exterminating or expelling them.

And it is doing that.

And no one is stopping or planning to stop it from doing that.

Israel knows very well it cannot stop Palestinian resistance as long as there are Palestinians.

It knows, at least as well as, maybe better than, American and Western leftists, the truth of Mao's dictum that, quote, the guerrilla, the Palestinian resistance in this case, swims among the people like a fish swims in the sea.

Without the support of the people, the guerrilla is a fish out of water.

It cannot survive, end quote.

Israel is draining the sea.

It knows that whatever difficulties it has fighting the fish will inevitably diminish, and in fact become irrelevant, once the sea is dried up.

In whatever sense Hamas is winning, the people of Gaza are losing.

I've seen many hopeful anti-Zionists cite the resistance struggles of the Vietnamese and the Algerians against powerful armies as an example of how Hamas and the armed Gazan resistance groups can triumph over Israel.

Nope, I'm afraid not.

The Vietnamese people and the Algerian people weren't going anywhere.

Neither the United States nor France had any notion of expelling the Vietnamese or Algerian people from their lands.

Nor did the apartheid Afrikaners have any such scheme for expelling the black people of South Africa.

There was no possibility of draining the sea that nourished resistance groups in these struggles.

Nor in those instances were their cohorts of very wealthy and powerful people in major Western countries committed not just for geopolitical reasons, but existentially committed as a matter for them of identity, morally imperative historical recompense, and tribal self-preservation,

committed to keeping the U.S., France, or white Afrikaners in permanent colonial control of the Vietnamese, Algerian, and black South African peoples.

No wealthy, important cohorts existentially committed to maintaining any of those colonial projects against any level of mass or military global resistance by any means necessary, including blowing up the whole world in nuclear conflict.

There Was Nothing Like the Transnational Commitment to Zionism that Dominates Western Politics and Identity Today.

It's been wonderful to see the videos online of so many American Jews as a result of what they have learned from watching Israel's atrocity in Gaza, rejecting the idea they were raised with, that Zionism is a necessary and integral part of their Jewish identity.

But it's not only Jews.

We've all been inculcated with the notion that Zionism is a part of American identity and Western identity.

And Gentile Americans may be at least as reluctant to shake that off.

You can't beat more Zionists than this.

SPEAKER 1

I have said to people when they asked me, if this Capitol crumbled to the ground, the one thing that would remain is our commitment to our aid

SPEAKER 2

Yes, American people's attitude towards Zionism and Israel are changing, more rapidly and radically than I would ever have expected.

But it's going to take more time than the Gazan people have to change the existential commitment of that U.S. political establishment to support anything Israel does and guarantee the continuation of the Zionist project at whatever cost to the less important Palestinian people.

The apt analogy, I'm afraid, is not Vietnam, Algeria, or South Africa.

It is the Nakba of 1948.

Because it's not an analogy.

It's what is still happening.

Israel is confident it can expel enough Palestinians to stabilize the Zionist project for many decades at least, because it already has.

Zionists, by brute armed force, killed and expelled 80% of the Arab population of Palestine in 1946-48, creating a fait accompli, a Jewish state, that the world accepted and still accepts.

They are confident they can kill or expel 80% of Gazans,

which for them is, which they correctly understand as, finishing and guaranteeing the fedakompli, the Jewish state, that the world has already accepted.

A fedakompli that the entire Western political and media class treats as a righteous moral imperative they must defend, even in the ashes of their own countries.

Israel has every right to be confident.

It has already gone a long way toward achieving its main objective, the destruction and depopulation of Gaza.

The armed Zionist militias achieved that by brute military force in 1948 and could only have been stopped by military intervention on behalf of the Palestinian Arabs, which didn't happen.

The Army of the UN-seeded, nuclear-armed, unconditionally U.S.-backed Jewish State of Israel is doing that now, and can only be stopped by military intervention on behalf of the Palestinian Arabs, which will not happen.

Gaza has already been made unlivable, and the Gazan people are being ruthlessly massacred and driven into a corner of the Strip, where they scavenge among the rubble, and those who aren't killed by Israeli-fired U.S.

bombs and bullets will die of hunger and disease.

Half a million may die from hunger and half a million from disease, according to the UN and international agencies.

That would get rid of half the population, apart from any bombing or immigration.

In a situation where 1,000 children have had their limbs amputated without anesthesia, Israel is removing anesthetics from aid shipments.

It's a vicious, deliberate crime against humanity.

The world is watching it horrified, but doing nothing to stop it.

Except the Houthis, who are doing something concrete, but they can't do enough.

And Hamas blowing up tanks isn't stopping it either, as long as Israel controls humanitarian and reconstruction aid to Gaza.

Which, since Israel will never give up that control willingly, means until and unless massive amounts of that aid are brought in quickly

Here's a thing that could have made a real difference.

Sufficiently powerful countries like Russia, Turkey, and Egypt

Such forces, which would not be attacking Israel, but undertaking a humanitarian aid mission to a territory Israel has no right to devastate and control.

That kind of action might have saved the Gazans.

It still might, but nobody has or will do it.

Please make me wrong.

What is happening is that Israeli and American politicians are offering the peaceful humanitarian solution to this.

That is, openly calling for ethnic cleansing of Gaza under the euphemism of voluntary emigration.

Countries who want to help the Palestinians must not even think about doing what would be necessary to stop and reverse Israel's devastation of the Gazan people.

Rather, they should take the Gazans away from the violence and misery.

In fact, we, the U.S. and Israel, will reward you for your goodwill.

Thus, plans are being floated to cancel the foreign debt of countries taking Gazan refugees, and to make taking in Gazans a condition of U.S. aid.

It's a moral solution to help the Gazans flee from Israel and the tyrant control of Hamas.

exactly the kind of harm reduction lesser evil that will appeal to many progressive U.S. politicians.

A much lesser evil than the only other alternative, which is to put an end to the Zionist project in Gaza.

This ethnic cleansing is The Plan.

Soon, very soon, some country—Canada, Germany, Egypt, Congo, can you believe that?—will be bribed or threatened or cajoled to take in some tens of thousands of Gazans.

And the ball will start inexorably rolling.

And then the humanitarian offer will be extended to the Palestinians of the West Bank.

Will all countries and all Gazan families refuse on the principle that it's ethnic cleansing?

Who will stop them from participating?

However, they can hurt the IDF.

Hamas, the PJIJ, and the PFLP do not have the power to stop this in time, and they can't very well try to forcibly prevent Gazans from leaving.

Will any country or countries that does have that power

Rather than participate in this voluntary immigration scheme, do what is necessary to stop it.

Intervene with military force against Israel and the U.S.

to remove the IDF and Israel from controlling Gaza and help Gazans rebuild the possibility of a decent life in Gaza free from Zionist conditions.

Gamal Abdel Nasser said, and the Zionists know it, that what was taken by force can only be restored by force.

The Zionists are confident that no power will act with the force necessary to retake and restore what they have already taken and destroyed, or to prevent them from completing their 75-year-long ethnic cleansing Nakba in Gaza, any more than they did when it started in 1948.

Are they wrong?

Please Convince Me.

Anti-Zionists, myself included, will say that, nonetheless, Israel is losing—indeed, has lost—a crucial asset, its claim to be a reasonable, modern, democratic regime that has the right to defend itself.

Israel is ruthlessly and explicitly carrying out the worst genocidal massacre and ethnic cleansing program since World War II.

It has demonstrated its racist colonial character in a way that's impossible to overcome.

Too many people now see that the Zionist apartheid regime does not have the right to defend itself or to exist.

It will be a pariah state.

This is what Netanyahu and the Zionist leadership, with the overwhelming support of Israeli Jews, say about that.

So what?

We are a pariah state now, as we're demolishing Gaza and murdering its children.

And nobody is stopping us.

Six months from now, we will be a pariah state, with multiple UN resolutions and court judgments denouncing us.

And we'll be in control of what goes in and out of the Gaza Strip, with 50 to 100,000 fewer Palestinians in it.

Two years from now, we will be a pariah state.

In Control of the Gaza Strip, with 80% fewer Palestinians, scores of our own settlements, and with economic agreements that we have already initiated with Arab countries finalized.

Five years from now, we'll be a pariah state among leftists, with the rest of the world accepting our fait accompli, just as it has since 1948.

Whether anybody thinks we have the right or not, we will exist, in a purer Zionist form than ever.

We know, at least as well as Western leftists, that we are putting the Zionist Project itself in question by putting it on display.

We are now continuing, unashamedly, live-streamed in real time, the ethnic cleansing we did in 1948, demonstrating that the nature of the Zionist Project is ethnic cleansing.

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Nobody is going to do anything to stop us, because we are backed by our own nuclear weapons, which we will use if we feel the Zionist project is really threatened, and backed by the unconditional military, political, and diplomatic support of the United States, which is equally committed to the Zionist project.

The only countries powerful enough to stop us may object, but they may also benefit, to the detriment of the United States,

After having accepted our genocide and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from 1948 to 2023, after having done nothing to stop us from killing and maiming tens of thousands of Gazans and voluntarily emigrating more than a million, is some international power then going to renounce and attack the now largely Arab-free, nuclear-armed, Jewish-supremacist, Zionist regime that rains from the river to the sea?

Which power or powers that did not intervene to stop our slaughter of Palestinians within Israeli-controlled territory are going to attack Israel when most of those Palestinians are gone?

We are very confident we know the answer to that.

We don't care whether anybody thinks we're a pariah state or has the right to exist.

We care about existing as the Zionist Project, as the Jewish Supremacist State of Israel, we’ll be an existing, persisting pariah state.

The Palestinians will be sympathetic victims scattered throughout the world.

The world will, again, accept all that as a fait accompli.

So that's what Netanyahu said to me in my dream.

I really hope someone can explain to me how he's wrong.

That's why I think Israel is winning and the people of Gaza losing in Gaza.

Let me say something about Israel's fundamental weakness in the larger frame that may cause it and the people of the region, if not the world, a loss of immense proportions.

It's true that Israel cannot afford a long-term, large-scale mass mobilization war, either economically or in terms of manpower.

Israel is too small a country either to take large casualties in combat or to take a large cohort of people out of the economy for a long time.

Israeli Jews do not want to be constantly fighting against determined Palestinian fighters whose children and parents they have killed.

They want to enjoy a life of peaceful, prosperous colonial mastery.

And resistance groups, especially Hezbollah, are capable, and are right now, forcing them out of that bubble.

Causing Casualties and Economic Disruption Over 200,000 Israelis have been evacuated from their homes in northern Israel because of fear of Hezbollah.

Israel correctly thinks it must eliminate the constant threat not only from resistance groups in Gaza in the south, but from Hezbollah on its northern border.

That's a little more complicated, since Lebanon is a sovereign state.

Israel knows that if Hezbollah were to unleash its full military power on Israel, it would do serious damage and pose a threat that Israel could not cope with alone.

Israel also knows that the United States will use all its military power in support of Israel in such a case.

And Israel is betting that Hezbollah and its supporting partner Iran, who also know that, will make a deal rather than get into such a fight.

in order to avoid a regional, if not worldwide, war in which Iran will be hit with Israeli nuclear weapons.

That may be a bad bet.

I'd say it's 50-50.

It is a bet made out of Israel's weakness and desperation, out of its recognition of how fundamentally precarious the Zionist project has now become.

If Israel is right, it will ease the ethnic cleansing of Gaza and the West Bank and result in the stabilization of the Zionist project for decades at least.

If Israel is wrong, it will mean a war with Iran, and beyond that, may result in the end of the Zionist project, and will result in massive death and destruction all around.

We are seeing Israel playing out this gambit in Lebanon right now.

Israel will not shrink from this bet, though.

And in important respects, it needs it.

Israel is determined to achieve a final solution to the Palestinian problem and knows it must coerce Hezbollah and Iran to accept that, either by military means or outright decisive military defeat.

As I said in my article, Israel's Solution to Gaza War and Iran, which I'll link below,

Israel has been pressuring the U.S. for war on Iran for 15 years.

Israel and the U.S. have been planning it for six years.

Politicians in Israel and the U.S. are all for it.

The military apparatus is in place for it.

Israel and the U.S. are losing power and influence and know they will never be stronger in relation to the anti-Zionist resistance than they are now.

And what else can divert from the issue of genocide?

To sum up, here's what I see as the New Year starts.

In Gaza, Israel is achieving its main objective, which is the destruction and depopulation of the enclave.

In the larger picture, Israel is engaged in a military battle with Palestinian resistance forces that it cannot win.

It is demonstrating the genocidal nature of the Zionist project and losing every shred of the phony legitimacy it cloaked itself in for the past 75 years.

And it is dragging the United States and the world into a high-risk confrontation with Iran that will endanger the whole world.

It is an extremely destructive and dangerous train that Israel is driving.

We, as well as the Palestinians, are in its path, and nobody is doing anything like what would be necessary to stop it.

So, that's me for now.

Happy New Year.

I'll leave the last word to someone infinitely more eloquent and courageous than I.

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