'Everything is legitimate to do!'

This newsletter promises to “explore the unseen connections behind world affairs, politics, disaster, and more” — but, reader, it is hard to keep up. I already had a full plate of topics to cover, just in the U.S. and the Middle East alone. Then, last night, Israel decided to accelerate a wanton assassination spree in a way that could drag the entire region into an all-out war — and with it, potentially, upend the recently upended U.S. presidential election.

The first hit came yesterday, in the early afternoon U.S. time and the early evening in the Levant, when an Israeli missile plowed into the top floor of an apartment building in Beirut, the capital of Lebanon. The strike killed a senior Hezbollah military commander, Fouad Shukur, along with two women and two children, and injured dozens of others.¹  

Barely twelve hours had passed before word came down of an even more startling hit: Ismail Haniyeh, the chief political officer of Hamas and the former prime minister of the Palestinian National Authority, was killed in Tehran, the capital of Iran. He was in town to attend the inauguration of Iran’s new, purportedly reformist president, Masoud Pezeshkian. Israel has not claimed responsibility for Haniyeh’s killing yet, but both Hamas and Iran say it was the result of a “Zionist airstrike.”

It is impossible to say where all this is going; I wouldn’t be surprised if the players themselves haven’t decided yet. But the new president of Iran, whose predecessor decided to stop escalating after the last Israeli strike in the ratcheting tit-for-tat earlier this year, will certainly feel pressure to respond to the assassination of an ally on his soil. Israel probably doesn’t know either; as the Israeli journalist Yossi Melman writes today, “Lacking any coherent plan for ending the war, while vowing that it will continue for years to come, the Netanyahu government is driven only by vengeance and is enamored with targeted killings;” killings, Melman says, that have “become an end in itself.”

To recap, it was less than a week ago that Benjamin Netanyahu wrapped up his high-profile visit to the U.S. — a visit in which he addressed a rapturous remnant of Congress, thanking them for having “Israel’s back” in both the slaughter in Gaza and the peripheral wars with Iran, Hezbollah, and the Houthis. Netanyahu also met with President Biden, whom he “privately” (read: extremely publicly) pressured to speed up the delivery of weapons systems. He also met both of the presidential nominees: trying to sandbag Kamala Harris before flying down to kiss Trump’s ring at a sunlit table at Mar-a-Lago, in hopes of repairing the damage he inflicted by tacitly admitting that Trump failed to steal the 2020 election nearly four years ago.

Harris, for her part, tried to thread an extremely thin needle between her party’s antiwar and Liberal Zionist wings, both of which she likely needs to win election this fall. She told Netanyahu that she would “always ensure that Israel is able to defend itself, including from Iran and Iran-backed militias, such as Hamas and Hezbollah,” while going a rhetorical step further than her current boss ever has in referencing “the images of dead children and desperate, hungry people fleeing for safety, and swearing: “We cannot allow ourselves to become numb to the suffering and I will not be silent.”

Netanyahu responded by trying to preemptively blame the Democratic candidate for the rolling failure of the ceasefire talks that he is doing everything possible to derail — including, now most recently, killing one of the senior political leaders involved in the negotiations.

Back in Israel, meanwhile, society was breaking down over the revelations of unspeakable abuses at the Sde Teiman military base — a concentration camp in all but name in the Negev desert, where the New York Times has reported, citing U.N. agencies, that Palestinian detainees including nurses and journalists have been tortured, electrocuted, and raped with an “electric stick.” In one horrific grace note, the Times noted that “a detainee ‘died after they put the electric stick up’ his anus.

Under pressure, Israeli officials ordered at least nine military reservists be detained for questioning in connection with the abuses on the base. Instead of sharing in the horror, ultranationalist Israelis—including several right-wing lawmakers—broke into the facility where the reservists were being held, possibly in hopes of securing their release.

It was a kind of grosser simulacrum of the January 6th coup attempt. Or better said, one of its political antecedents: the racist mobs who stormed jails to lynch prisoners in the post-Reconstruction South, or the local celebrations and defenses of the murderers of Emmet Till. Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant condemned the protest, with Gallant saying the action “plays into our enemies’ hands during wartime.” But Knesset Member Hanoch Milwidsky, a member of Netanyahu’s Likud Party, furiously defended the accused soldiers during a meeting of lawmakers on Monday. When someone asked him if it was “legitimate to insert a stick into the rectum of a human being,” Milwidsky shouted: “Yes! If he is a Nukhba [a Hamas fighter], everything is legitimate to do! Everything!”

There is one more side note I need to put into this scatterplot of seemingly disparate but intimately interrelated things — “targeted” assassinations, the U.S. presidential race, the January 6th coup attempt, torture, rape, racism, massacres, war — to bring them all together. By sheer coincidence, while all this was going down, news broke in the Washington Post that William Calley, Jr., the only person convicted in connection with the 1968 My Lai massacre in Vietnam, had died in obscurity at age 80. Calley, once one of the most alternately hated and celebrated men in America, had fallen so far off the radar that his death, at a Florida hospice center in April, had gone unnoticed until now.

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