Teaching by killing
On the messages sent between occupier and Resistance
Over the past year I have tried to focus on the military question in the expanding war / genocide the US / Israel has been waging on the Palestinians, Syrians, Lebanese, Yemenis, and Iranians. As figures from the Resistance have said and reiterated, the issue will be decided on the battlefield. And although struggle in all these areas has a role to play, the issue also won’t be decided in the feelings of the oppressor communities nor even in Western genocidal media, campuses or streets. Military affairs require extensive study, encompassing the particulars of weapons systems to topography and maps, to supply chains and logistics, to propaganda and morale. History is always the principal tool, but used with caution: the future is different from the past and the present is maximally dynamic.
The quintessential Western military theorist, von Clausewitz, the subject of a previous post of mine, described war as an extension of politics. Politics involves communication between enemies, and so does war.
Israel, and following it the whole West, has transformed itself over the course of the year. It presents itself as a new and different kind of opponent. All year I have wondered about the long-term consequences of such a voluntary self-transformation. Let us now focus on the image Israel is trying to project, how it communicates that new image, and how this will ultimately compel the Resistance to transform as well.
If you’ve followed the utterances of genocidal Western elites or of Israelis, you’ll hear a lot of pedagogical language. “The Yemenis are about to learn why we don’t have free healthcare”, said one memorable tweet. “We will teach them a harsh lesson,” a repeated theme. But what exactly is the lesson? If you were to ask an Israel advocate, they would say probably that the lesson is “don’t mess with Israel”, as Israeli bots like to add under anti-genocide posts on social media. But the strategic lesson Israel seeks to teach its victims is a bit longer. If it could be spelled out, it would be more like: We can do whatever we like to you, and if you resist we will make it even worse for you. That there are unimaginable punishments in store for those who resist is the most important lesson the oppressor, the abuser, wants to teach.
In his speech on the anniversary of al-Aqsa flood, the spokesman for Hamas’s armed wing, the Qassam brigades, Abu Obeida, intimated that the operation of Oct 7/23 was a pre-emption against an Israeli plan against the al-Aqsa mosque, a pre-emption of an Israeli plan to advance the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians. The arrival to power in Israel of the Kahanist settler movement would give credence to this line of thinking.
If the Oct 7/23 raid was indeed a pre-emption, it explains why the Israelis were so ready for October 7/23 in every way but defense. While they didn’t repel the raid, they managed to deploy their helicopters and ground forces to kill hundreds of Israelis to prevent them from becoming captives that might then be tradeable for thousands of Palestinian prisoners, in a “mass Hannibal” event. Israel was prepared to destroy houses full of Israelis in the kibbutzes. This is one of the messages: Israelis would die so that Palestinians could remain imprisoned, Israelis would die so that Palestinians could be killed. Israelis are willing to die for the sake of imprisoning and killing Palestinians.
Israel and its advocates were ready with a package of lies about atrocity crimes, lies that people who knew the dynamics of the conflict and its antagonists instantly recognized as such and fairly quickly proved their case - not that it mattered for Western media and politicians who repeat the same lies a year later. The specific lies about atrocities against children and lies about sexual violence are more than just standard colonial tropes. The point of the lies is a deep one. Morale is the key to the anti-colonial struggle. The preparation and propagation of lies about atrocity crimes were designed to make supporters of the struggle ashamed. To make the operation of October 7th a shameful operation. To sap the elation of courageous fighters entering their homelands for the first time and successfully taking the fight to their invader, and instead force supporters to defend against accusations of the worst crimes. Israel has conducted several successful genocidal operations over the year, but the atrocity propaganda operation is one of its most successful. And here is another message Israel sends its victims: We can turn your victories into shame, because we control how the world sees you. The goal is both demoralization and isolation of the Resistance’s cause from friends and allies who are silenced by the viciousness of the lies.
After massacring Israelis and preparing the full package of atrocity propaganda, Israel quickly moved into genocide mode, announcing intent in advance and then proceeding to impose food, water, and power blockades, methodically destroy Gaza’s health care system, hospital by hospital, while targeting children and boasting about it to the world. The lies they told to justify these massacres – of human shields, of command centers under hospitals and schools, etc. – were never meant to be believed. Their target was the oppressed: We can lie about you and we will be believed, not you.
Israel was so ready with the whole genocide package that some came to believe that the Israelis knew about the Oct 7/23 attack and allowed it to happen. I’m not among them: I think Israel was ready with an accelerated genocide plan because Israel has always been ready with an accelerated genocide plan. Israel came into existence in 1948 through an accelerated genocide plan, and everything it has done since has been to add more and more American technology to the unfolding of that original plan.
Israeli strategy is open-ended and opportunistic: grab what is possible. If limits are hit, wait for the next opportunity - or force one. Israel made a plan to force the people of Gaza into Egypt’s Sinai (and then occupy it, of course) and discarded it when Egypt demurred. Israel has enumerated many plans for the post-war occupation of Gaza that assume they’ve won the war and defeated Hamas. More can be grabbed when the oppressed are demoralized than when they are hopeful. This explains the message sent by the revelling in atrocity - dressing up in dead women’s underwear and playing with dead children’s toys, demolishing universities and mosques, etc. You have suffered so much because you resisted. This destruction is your fault.
This last message, the abuser’s look what you made me do, is Israel’s most important one for the subjugation of the Palestinians (and now Lebanese, Syrians, Yemenis, Iranians…). The total destruction is spun as the victim’s fault for the logic of subjugation, analogous to the way Resistance successes are spun as atrocity crimes to try to achieve the isolation of the Resistance. Destruction and lies, subjugation and isolation. These are the messages sent by the colonial power to those who would resist.
Adapting to the colonizer’s classroom
Long term, subjugation is a pipe dream. One of the most spectacular projects of colonization (which the early Zionists tried to participate in) was the Scramble for Africa, when all the Great Powers of the 19th century - far more powerful in relative terms than they are now - got together to colonize the immense continent of Africa. They had a formal meeting, the Berlin Conference, in 1884 and had rolled up most of the continent within a couple of decades, killing millions of Africans in the process and during the colonialism that followed. Africans threw most of them out by the early 1960s. Africa expelled the invaders even though their leaders were murdered; even though their people were displaced and genocided, imprisoned and tortured; even though they lost most of the battles they fought with their technologically overpowered colonizers. Faced with the look what you made me do carnage, decolonizers put their heads down and kept fighting. Faced with the 19th century version of atrocity lies, the claims that they were savages, not ready for self-government, two-legged beasts, racial inferiors etc., decolonizers once again put their heads down and kept fighting.
In the current war, the anticolonial resistance has actually challenged Western media and narrative control of the colonial power - something the 20th century decolonizers hardly even tried to do. The armed resistance has also gone beyond trying to survive (win or lose) until the colonizer has to leave. Instead it has tried to impose a different “equation” on Israel. The Resistance always talks about “the equation.” Besides the escalation ladder, the equation is the most pervasive metaphor used to describe the battle with Israel.
Trying to take Israeli prisoners to exchange for Palestinian prisoners was an attempt at creating an equation, one that had freed many Palestinian prisoners in the past, and one that could equal freeing all Palestinian prisoners if the calculation was correct. This is the equation Israel was trying to cancel through the formalization of the Hannibal doctrine: the willingness to kill Israelis before, during, and after capture, to make sure Palestinian prisoners remained captive and hopeless.
Creating armies and Indigenous arms industries that could challenge and defeat Israeli ground forces was an attempt at creating an equation, one that the Resistance hoped could deter Israel. Once the message was firmly sent that Resistance ground forces could not be defeated by the Israeli army, there could be talk of a long-term ceasefire that was not on the basis of subjugation. Israel is trying to cancel this equation in two ways: by showing willingness to send the Israeli army in again and again and use media strategy to claim victory even if there wasn’t any on the ground; and use their superior air force to commit genocide from the air, returning to the message of look what you made me do.
Open equations
Several equations remain open.
In 2012, Nasrallah promised a yet new equation: if Israel again destroyed Beirut from the air the way they had done in 2006, Hezbollah had missile capabilities to do the same to Israeli cities. In 2024 Israel has set out to test whether this is the case, by assassinating Nasrallah and bombing Beirut exactly as Nasrallah promised would bring the destruction of Haifa. Haifa still stands, but the war is just starting.
In 2023, Ansarallah in Yemen announced that they would be blockading Israel and attacking any ships that tried to go to Israel for any reason, until Israel ends the genocide and the blockade on Gaza. The US sent their Navy to try to get Yemen to back down, which they did not. The US, UK, and Israel have bombed Yemen many times over the year. Each time Yemen emerged to resume their blockade and their attacks on Israeli shipping and the US navy. Israel has announced that it wants to assassinate Yemen’s leaders; Yemen announced that they have implemented new security measures… and resumed launching missiles and drones, including on Tel Aviv.
In April 2023, Iran attacked Israel with a series of drones and missiles after Israel attacked the Iranian consulate in Syria. In October 2024, Iran attacked Israel again, after Israel assassinated Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh and Hizbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah. Israel has promised that it will attack Iran, and Iran has promised it will attack Israel again if that happens. If there’s an equation here, no one knows the variables yet.
In addition to the above three open equations, to repeat the other communications so far:
Israel tries to tell the Palestinians that resistance is futile. The Palestinians do October 7/23. Israelis claims the story of October 7th and paints the event as an atrocity crime to isolate Palestinians from allies and demoralize them through a demonstration of media domination and Western message discipline.
Israel commits aerial genocide to show Palestinians and now Lebanese that they should submit to Israel’s will. Resistance ground forces fight to show that they can keep fighting as long as it takes.
Israel takes thousands of Palestinians prisoner and tortures them to try to demoralize and subjugate the nation. Palestinians take Israeli prisoners to try to get an exchange. Israel responds by showing a willingness to kill Israeli prisoners rather than let an exchange happen.
Another Resistance message that would confound Westerners if they knew (which they don’t) is their adherence to the rules of war as they understand them. Hizbollah and Iran both conducted missile strikes which they said were revenge for assassinations and massacres, revenge that inflicted almost no casualties. While Qassam in Gaza has fired on attack helicopters with shoulder-launched missiles, they have not fired on medical evacuation helicopters, content to watch and film them. Despite the most daring campaign of lies about October 7th, returned Israeli hostages have reported that the Resistance did not abuse them and repeatedly told them “we are Muslims, no harm will come to you” – the same phrase that Ansarallah told the crew of the Israeli ship (Galaxy Leader) when they took it over and sailed it to Yemen last year.
This message seems to be: No matter how low you sink, we will not abandon our (Islamic) principles of fighting honorably. Perhaps Israel will succeed in eliminating the honorable warriors and Westernizing the next generation, one day to face an opponent more like themselves. From the Resistance perspective, there are probably two reasons they stick to their beliefs: first, because they draw their strength from the same place that these beliefs come from; and second, perhaps, because they view themselves as the future government of all of Palestine, and are fighting the war on the same principles with which they wish to rule.
What happens in Year 2?
As the Resistance has tried to drill the lesson that aerial destruction will not defeat us on the ground, Israel has tried to drill the same lesson from a different perspective: repeatedly defeating Israel on the ground will not protect Palestinian and Lebanese civilians from aerial genocide. Nasrallah’s 2012 deterrence formula, that the destruction of Lebanon’s cities will lead to the destruction of Israel’s cities, has been taken as a challenge by Israel, which is forcing Nasrallah’s successors to either follow through on the threat or accept that nothing can stop Israel from committing genocide safely from afar.
As Israel drills the lesson that we will not be deterred regardless of military casualties, it is arguing that it will not make concessions, not negotiate, and will continue war while it has the ability to do so. The Resistance took prisoners and established military forces towards a long-term ceasefire with a prisoner exchange. Israel’s reply: while Israel exists and while the US is based there, there will be genocide against the peoples of the region. The Resistance did not believe in Year 1 that conditions were right for bringing matters to a decision like this - the most statements by the Ayatollah and by Abu Obeida suggest that the Resistance has come to realize that the US/Israelis believe they can genocide to victory.
As Israel has drilled the lesson that we would rather kill our own people than let them be exchanged for Palestinian prisoners, the only way of freeing the Palestinian prisoners without an exchange is the Khiam model (when Hizbollah drove the Israeli occupation out of southern Lebanon in 2000 and liberated the prisoners by liberating the prison).
As Israel has drilled the message that we have the narrative mastery to tell your story including whatever lies we wish, the Resistance has made strong efforts on the war propaganda front through videos that depict their continuing capability and ability to inflict losses on the ground, as the unarmed resistance challenges the lies using whatever media are available through censors and monopoly control. This, too, is an open equation. The truth doesn’t always prevail, and we don’t know whether it will prevail here. All we can do is tell it.
Israel is still planning to attack Iran and dramatic events are certain to occur in the coming days. Can the Resistance win? Nasrallah said that war is like this - one day for the enemy, one day for you. The US and Israel could assassinate even more people, Israel’s army could collapse and be backfilled by the Americans directly. Maybe they’ll blow up the world.
Let’s suppose they don’t, since there’s not much point in continuing this post if they do.
Suppose they don’t and that they win the war, somehow destroying Hizbollah in the mountains of Lebanon, completing the genocide and starving the fighters of Hamas to death, cleansing the Palestinians of the West Bank to Jordan, destroying Iran’s missile abilities, crushing Iraq, perhaps miring Yemen and Syria in fratricidal wars? Then Israel will have bought itself a decade or two of tranquility to dance again in the ashes. And in a generation, a new war, in a totally different geopolitical and technological world than today’s, with foes that make it long for the enemies of today, who were foolish enough to think they could force a Western enemy committed to genocide and racism to fight with reason and honor.
Thanks for your insightful article. Having read it just now, I think I finally understand the failed ceasefire between Rome and Hannibal after Cannae (cf. Israel’s Hannibal Directive). It’s backwards the way Westerners see it. Rome is presented by Western academics as a brave, indefatigable nation, unwilling to admit defeat, and so they remarkably refused any ransom of prisoners with Hannibal. In fact, Rome’s elites were willing to sacrifice their own people for empire, not for their country. Italy was occupied, and Rome and its colonies throughout the peninsula were essentially armed camps. The militaristic ideology of the Republic reminds me of the Wehrmacht’s campaigns, and Israel’s genocide now: provided the resistance fighters die in greater numbers, the occupying army is fine taking casualties, their families just have to deal with it, in fact they should be grateful that their sons died for patria, for Vaterland, for Holy Land, etc., etc. Thanks again for your article, and I think you’re right, the empire will long for the days when they faced milder enemies, that is if this round goes to them.
My take is that Israel is running on empty like Ukraine, keeping up a bellicose front but has already lost strategically, and it's a matter of how badly it wants to lose now. Ukraine can't pay its soldiers without Western money, and Israel's economy is likewise shattered along with soldier morale (after that brief terrorist-frenzy-high in Lebanon). Using your imagery, I do see the abusive relationship between Israel and the Palestinians, but Iran's communications is more of a yawning smack down from an indolent silverback against an uppity adolescent. I gave you warning one, and now warning two. There will be no third warning.
The US is stretched thin and is facing de-dollarization with 35T in debt. It was not militarily capable of defeating Iran in the noughts when it had more money, a jingoistic electorate, and greater military advantage. Now a confident and solid Russia-China-Iran alliance is on the rise. If the US engages in a direct confrontation with Iran and loses, the loss of US perceived dominance in Iran's oil-rich region will be fatal to its global power projection. There is no win here for the US.
The Palestinians have shown they will continue to resist and the Shi'a only get more fierce as their people are martyred, so attempts at subduing through death will not work. While I have my moments of doubt (it would be so easy to sink to the lows of the colonizers), I think holding on to honour and justice also strengthens resolve. In this existential Palestinian-Israeli death spiral, it is the Israelis who do not have the will to persist. The question is how many Lebanese and Palestinians and Yemenis and Iraqis and Syrians and Iranians the colonialists will murder before they admit defeat.
I think for resistance in the belly of the beast, now is the time to prepare Nuremberg-like dossiers for Biden so that as soon as he ceases to be President he is taken to court. He needs to be publicly pilloried along with his Secretary of State for their war crimes and flagrant violations of US domestic law as a cautionary tale for other cowardly aiders and abettors of the genocide so things wind down sooner rather than later.