The boiling frog vs. the forever war

Reviewing resistance and genocide strategies

They’ll be running the genocide together in 2025

The persistent resistance strategy

After a year of Israel’s genocide in Gaza, now expanding to Lebanon, the strategy of the Axis of Resistance can be roughly mapped. As Sharmine Narwani of the Cradle puts it, the strategy is one of “boiling the frog”. This lecture was just before the pager attack and the war on Lebanon began, but after a shaky period, Hezbollah returned to effectiveness without changing the strategy. Israel intensifies its genocide, with a focus on North Gaza, but the Axis has stuck to the plan: 

• Take Israeli prisoners to try to exchange for Palestinian prisoners

• Naval economic blockade from Yemen to generate economic pressure

• Steady missile and rocket fire on Israeli military targets (and at various targets of the US occupation of Syria) from Lebanon, Iraq, Yemen, and Gaza to generate psychological pressure

• Resistance in the West Bank (mostly the northern West Bank - Jenin, Nablus, Tulkarem, and Tubas) to tie up Israeli forces

• Inflict steady casualties on Israeli ground forces wherever they deploy in Gaza and now Lebanon

• Maintain the threat of major destructive standoff missile attacks from Iran

The stated objective of the Axis, articulated by the late Hezbollah Secretary-General, Hassan Nasrallah, is to win a ceasefire on Hamas’s terms. The Axis hope is that Israel would agree to a ceasefire rather than face a worse alternative: a collapse from within. This would mean a critical mass of soldiers refusing to fight in the face of an unwinnable war, and a critical mass of Israeli settlers leaving for greener pastures in the face of an untenable future. 

As Scott Ritter told Danny Haiphong on Nov 13/24, if Israel fails by internal collapse, then there won’t be a specific trigger moment for Israel to use its nuclear weapons to destroy the region in the so-called “Samson Option”. Samson could be invoked by Netanyahu in his bunker if his enemies are closing in - and the Axis is trying to win in a way that doesn’t lead to world destruction, which is why the Axis would settle at any moment for a ceasefire with full withdrawal from Gaza and Lebanon, an end to the siege, and an exchange of prisoners.

The evolving genocide plan

Now let’s also review the more complicated US-Israeli strategy. 

• Total war - genocide: aerial bombardment and ground-based demolition, targeting, above all hospitals, civilian infrastructure, and gatherings of civilians.

• Avoid occupation of populated areas and responsibility for the occupied population: use genocidal tactics to try to depopulate targeted areas (Gaza, south Lebanon). 

• Depopulation is the long-term goal and a difficult one: short-term, the strategy is just to keep up a continuous and unending series of raids. The ideal air raid is of an encampment of refugees in Gaza, which has no air defense. The ideal ground raid is one where a village in Lebanon is wired with explosives by an engineering unit that withdraws before they can be attacked by Hezbollah infantry. 

• Terrorist attacks including the assassination of Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran, the pager attack, and the dropping of 80-tons of bombs to assassinate Nasrallah.  

• Mobilize Israeli society to support genocide, mass rape, and other atrocities using atrocity propaganda and related methods. 

• Media strategy centered on dehumanization of all of Israel’s enemies as “terrorists”, and have Western media and politicians insist that total war on an entire society is justified if there are “terrorists” among them. 

• Censorship and state repression to depress solidarity movements in the West, Jordan, Egypt, and other strategic countries run by US allies. 

• Discard all relevant UN resolutions, international laws, and international court rulings. Establish the precedents that the law does not apply to Israel, diplomacy does not apply to Israel, Israel does not negotiate.

• Refuse prisoner exchange - kill prisoners or kill Israelis before they can become prisoners (“Hannibal Doctrine”).

• Condition Israeli society to absorb higher casualties and missile attacks while inflicting vastly disparate casualties in Gaza especially (and increasingly, Lebanon) to try to defeat the “deterrence equation” of the Axis of Resistance and thereby avoid the Axis’s ceasefire terms.

• Obtain higher subsidies from the US to outlast economic attrition.

Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz on X: "In Lebanon, there will be no ceasefire and no respite. We will continue to hit Hezbollah with full force until the goals of the war are achieved. Israel will not agree to any arrangement that does not guarantee Israel's right to enforce and prevent terrorism on its own, and meeting the goals of the war in Lebanon, disarming Hezbollah and withdrawing them beyond the Litani River and returning the residents of the north safely to their homes."

The stated objectives of the war: to return Israeli settlers to northern Israel, return Israeli prisoners from Gaza, and to destroy Hamas and Hezbollah - would all follow from the overall objective which is to restore Israel’s dominance. To establish that it is Israel, not its enemies, who determine what happens in the lands that are of interest to it. If dominance is restored, Israel will be able to place its settlers where it wishes, administer the Palestinian prison population as it wishes and where it wishes (in ever-smaller enclaves and perhaps in a re-occupied Sinai), and move the Lebanese population where it wishes. 

Dominance means a society whose primary activity is the administration of prison camps and a military whose primary activity is conducting raids against starving civilians.

Dominance is the current situation, in other words, extended forever into the future. The Western elite will support such a project, financially and politically, unto death. But: can Israel contain the resistance to the point that life can feel somewhat normal for enough Israelis to keep the project going (relying on the fact that resistance rockets have relatively small payloads and high-payload missiles are rather infrequent and could perhaps be spent if enough time passes)? Can Israeli society be conditioned to accept that this is life now, that there will never be a “normal” life again? Are there enough Israelis who are willing to live like this and fight for this? Does America have the resources to support this life? 

Unlimited objectives -> unwinnable war

The Axis of Resistance strategy seems to be based on the hope that the US and Israel can be forced to see reason. Is the US capable of making the strategic decision to call Israel off before dominance has been restored (since it might never be)? Israel and the West have jumped together off the cliff of racial supremacy. The restoration of dominance could be too open-ended of a goal for victory to be possible. 

The US-Israeli victory could look like this: Israel kills everyone in Gaza through famine and bombing, 2 million people, over another year or two. America bombs Yemen so much that Ansarallah is effectively destroyed. Israel depopulates Lebanon to the Litani river, destroys Hezbollah and kills most of Lebanon’s Shia population, another million or more people. Then Israel moves on to the West Bank. Then Syria. Then Iran. Against Iran, there’s not an easily imagined path to victory, but let’s stretch and imagine a miraculous short war that leads to a regime change in Iran and a bloodless coup to bring back the Shah. Egypt and Jordan wait, docile, for Israel to finish with these enemies before offering themselves for occupation. And the march continues like that… or the war with Iran leads to nuclear escalation and perhaps the destruction of human civilization. 

Israeli leaders have expressed as war aims things like “the destruction of all resistance” and “the continuation of the war”. So if the war ends on Israel’s terms, the war doesn’t end. With diplomacy and international law discarded, Israel has to continue warring and genociding until it is stopped. 

To rephrase Frederic Jameson, it’s becoming easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the US-Israel stopping their genocide.

Scott Ritter in the aforementioned video with Danny Haiphong ventured a prediction that the project of Israel and the ideology of Zionism would eventually come to an end and be absorbed into a unitary Palestinian state, the way Apartheid South Africa ended and became the South Africa of today. The other options seem to be forever war or world destruction.