Firstly, this Foreign Affairs article must be said to be a kind of breakthrough because finally, a reputable scholarly media journal is admitting to the atrocities committed by Israel after Oct 7 and is not making excuses.

However, some details are omitted. There is no mention of the fact that Israel was founded by terrorist groups committing genocide in areas like Deir Yassin that terrorized the Palestinians into leaving their homeland in 1948. Nor does the reader learn that the so-called Nakba was ongoing for 7 decades, with atrocities committed regularly by the Israeli authorities and illegal settlers.

Secondly, the author is overly and unjustifiably optimistic about the future of the Israeli crime syndicate. At variance with the article, there is no sign either at the higher levels of government or among the populace that any sort of positive change is on the way or is possible.

Thirdly, the author does not bring up the fact that the US is the main reason that Israel has been able to continue the atrocities unabated for 70+ years, and everything said about Israel should be applied equally to the US government and its sounding board in media.

To a great extent, the cover provided by the US is helping to solidify the dismal scenario. America is like a bad friend, who lets his friend drink and drive.

However, if Israel is in danger of collapsing, then so is the US, dragged down by the perception of an accomplice to atrocities.

Quote

Israel still has the capacity to pull itself back from the brink. The cost of not doing so may be too great to bear.

And

On its current course, the state may morph into something that would destroy the humanist Jewish vision that inspired many of its founders and supporters around the world. It is not too late for Israel to save itself from its own demise and find another way forward.

Sorry, Foreign Affairs, it is far too late. When a mass murderer is identified, no one would think of saying it is not too late for this felon to redeem himself. So it is no more appropriate to speak of the Israeli criminal regime somehow redeeming itself.

The “humanist vision” never corresponded to reality. The entity that the UN called a state in 1948 was founded by 3 terror groups, ie, the Irgun, Lehi and Haganah. Terrorists do not found legitimate humanitarian states. The same terrorists that stole the land from the Palestinians remained in power since then. They never became honest, never accepted universal concepts of humanity, democracy, law, or treated Palestinians as human beings with the same rights as the Jews. The author no doubt realized all this but didn’t dare say it.

Nor did Israel accept the laws of Judaism, while pretending to be based on them.

Leviticus 19:34 The foreigner residing among you must be treated as your native-born. Love them as yourself, for you were foreigners in Egypt. I am the Lord your God.

You can’t pretend the above commandment is abstruse and subject to interpretation. If there is but one God, there is but one set of commandments and one way to interpret them.

Ironically, as Israel becomes more and more “religious,” it increasingly tramples the scripture passages that could have made it more human.

I see absolutely no possibility whatsoever of Israel’s capacity to pull itself back from the brink or to save itself from its own demise. Its very founding was a crossing of the brink into free-fall. And it took the United States with it into oblivion.

If the world knew nothing about the horrible atrocities committed over the decades, This ignorance of the public is thanks to the complicity of government and media for all that time.

But Trump has foolishly staked his political future on this optimistic view expressed by Foreign Affairs. He and his MAGA troops may believe he will save Israel and Murica, but it is too late for both the Jewish state and the pseudo-Christian US, which has provided cover for its atrocities since the beginning, ie, essentially since 1947-1948.

Ironically, the US Constitution, imitated everywhere in the world, forbids what the US has been doing. The Constitution instituted a well-known concept known as separation of church and state. However, the entire US government and its toadies in media have been catering, in their Israel policy, to a group known as “Christian” Zionists, which have totally distorted the message of Jesus. There is absolutely nothing Christian about this or about Zionism itself. But this one Zionist doctrine, posing as “Christian” not only has replaced the teachings of Jesus in the Evangelical “church,” but has done so with the wholehearted support of the entire US government, in which almost every lawmaker has received bribes (euphemistically called “campaign contributions”) to support Israel in all its aspects, including its atrocities against Palestinians, from AIPAC, a lobby operating illegally without registering as required by law. Washington has made a mockery of our Constitution and even our statutes, all in the interest of Israel, which is now taking a sledgehammer to the prestige of the US and to the trust that the world once placed in it. EU foreign minister Josep Borrell and his rejection of Israel reflects the newfound rejection of the US by Europe.

When you commit actual demonstrable genocide, and the ICJ and ICC – two politically unrelated tribunals – BOTH condemn you and your political leader, issuing a guilty verdict that induces countries to declare you a criminal and issue arrest warrants on the basis of atrocities, you are beyond the brink and have fallen over. There is now no redemption in the eyes of the non-US world.

Israel is now in Masada 2.0 awaiting the end.

The US sat silent when the European Jewish terrorists – the actual founders of “Israel” – committed the heinous murders at Deir Yassin and elsewhere. Our newspapers failed the public by refusing to report it, and kept it out of Western memory. US Evangelicals acclaimed the founding of this mafia state, based on their ideology of “Christian” Zionism.

https://www.foreignaffairs.com/israel/undoing-israel  

The Undoing of Israel

The Dark Futures That Await After the War in Gaza
By Ilan Z. Baron and Ilai Z. Saltzman

August 12, 2024…

Excerpts:

At Israel’s creation, in May 1948, its founders envisioned a country defined by humanist values and one that upheld international law. [Not true. Its founders were terrorists who knew they would continue to kill, maim, jail and terrorize Palestinians until they were all dead or evicted. The Declaration was a sham. This Pollyanna fictional account is just more of the same whitewashing of Israeli crimes we have been force-fed since 1948] The Declaration of Independence, Israel’s founding document, insisted that the state “will ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race, or sex” and that it would “be faithful to the principles of the Charter of the United Nations.” But from the very beginning, this vision was never fulfilled—after all, for nearly two decades after the signing

The country is on an increasingly illiberal, violent, and destructive path. [Yes, it is worse now, but the ill treatment of Palestinians is nothing new. The path has been the same since the outset] Unless it changes course, the humanist ideals of its founding will disappear altogether as Israel careens into a darker future, one in which illiberal values define both state and society. [The dark future is now] Israel is on track to become increasingly authoritarian in its treatment not just of Palestinians but of its own citizens. [The author is suggesting that Israel was humanitarian before. It never was. We were just duped] It could fast lose many of the friends it still has and become a pariah. [But were they ever real friends? Trump’s Abram accords were aimed at duping or bribing Arab dictators into signing agreements to recognize and normalize Israel in exchange for gifts of money or weapons, but polls showed that the vast majority of the street Arabs in these regimes rejected normalization] And isolated from the world, it could be consumed by turmoil at home as widening fissures threaten to break up the country itself. Such is the perilous state of affairs in Israel these futures are not at all outlandish—but neither are they inevitable. Israel still has the capacity to pull itself back from the brink. [As long as the regime is far right and the people are brainwashed, they will either remain at the brink or fall off the cliff]The cost of not doing so may be too great to bear. [Would that this were true, but alas, there is no realistic hope of salvation, and the main reason is the complicity of the US government, many of whose representatives awarded the lying, hypocritical Netanyahu with undeserved applause during his speech to Congress. Just as much as Netanyahu, these Congress people have the blood of thousands of Palestinians on their hands. There can be no redemption for either side]

THE END OF ZIONISM

Israel is on an increasingly illiberal, violent, and destructive path.

The judicial reform protest certainly revealed concerns within Israel about the character of the country’s democracy [what democracy is the author referring to?], but it did not raise questions about Israel’s responsibility toward Palestinians living under occupation. Indeed, many Israelis see their country’s treatment of Palestinians as separate from its functioning as a democracy. Israelis have long tolerated, if not sanctioned, violence by Jewish settlers against Palestinians. In a contravention of international law, Israel subjects Palestinians living under its rule in the West Bank and East Jerusalem to what is in effect martial law. Successive Israeli governments have overseen the expansion of Jewish settlements in the West Bank, imperiling the future creation of a sovereign Palestinian state. The war in Gaza, where Israeli forces have killed around 40,000 people, according to conservative estimates, has revealed a country that appears unable or unwilling to uphold the aspirational vision in its independence declaration. [This public tolerance of injustice towards Palestinians is the crux of the matter and the reason I believe this author is unrealistically optimistic.]

As many progressives within Israel have long acknowledged, the brutality of the military occupation and the imperatives of being an occupying military power have a corrupting effect on all of Israeli society. Yeshayahu Leibowitz, an Israeli scientist and philosopher, observed “the national pride and euphoria” that followed the Six-Day War, in 1967, and saw a darker turn ahead. That celebration of country, he warned in 1968, would only “bring us from proud, rising nationalism to extreme, messianic ultranationalism.” And such extreme passions, Leibowitz claimed, would be the undoing of the Israeli project, leading to “brutality” and ultimately “the end of Zionism.” That end is now closer than many Israelis care to admit. [All the more reason for pessimism]

SPARTA WITH A YARMULKE

On its current path, Israel is veering in a deeply illiberal direction. Its current hard-right turn, pushed by politicians as well as by many of their constituents, could see Israel become a kind of ethnonationalist theocracy, run by a Jewish judicial and legislative council and right-wing religious extremists, nothing less than a Jewish version of Iran’s theocratic state. Israel’s demographic and sociopolitical changes, including a rapid increase of the ultra-Orthodox population, the rightward tilt of young Israeli Jews, and a decline in the number of Israeli Jews who identify as secular, have produced a more devout body politic that perceives the continued existence of Israel as part of an irreconcilable struggle between Judaism and Islam. [More reason to fear for Israel’s future]

Ultra-Orthodox nationalist politicians who overtly call for a state in which religion plays a more definitive role include Bezalel Smotrich, Itamar Ben Gvir, and Avi Maoz—all key players in Netanyahu’s coalition government. They represent a relatively new but increasingly influential segment of the religious Zionist movement known as the Hardal, which believes that God promised the entire biblical land of Israel to the Jews, rejects Western culture and values, and fundamentally opposes the accepted norms of Israeli liberalism, such as LGBTQ rights, some separation between synagogue and state, and gender equality. Figures associated with the Hardal currently serve as ministers in the Israeli government, occupy powerful positions in the Knesset, and are prominent leaders of yeshivas and pre-military preparatory academies known as mechinot. Political and demographic trends suggest that the far right in Israel will remain electorally influential, even dominant, for the foreseeable future. [And these Judaic fundamentalists are supported wholeheartedly by American “Christian” Zionists, who in turn support Zionist lawmakers, creating a vicious circle that cannot be broken. Only the multipolar world order led by Russia and China can effectively oppose this]

But many Israelis who are not especially religious are also beginning to subscribe to this increasingly extreme ethnonationalist ideology. Since the October 7 attacks, the Israeli right wing has grown even more radical. For them, and many others in Israel, Hamas’s massacre proved that there can be no compromise with the Palestinians or their supporters. These conservatives see Israel as existing in an eternal state of war, with peace unthinkable—a state, to borrow the phrase of Israeli historian David Ochana, akin to “Sparta with a yarmulke.”

That stance could harden into a broad consensus among Israeli Jews and produce a fully illiberal Israel, in which the war in Gaza leads to the complete erosion of democratic norms and institutions that were weakened by Netanyahu and his allies. The war has already provided the government with an excuse to restrict civil liberties; the Knesset’s National Security Committee, for instance, recently promoted legislation that authorized the police to conduct searches without warrants. There has also been an increase in state-sanctioned violence against Palestinians in the West Bank, and Israeli peace activists are increasingly viewed as traitors. An Israel dominated by the far right would become more authoritarian, with civil liberties curtailed, particularly gender rights. The state would wield a deleterious influence on public education, with a rounded civic understanding of Israeli democracy replaced by a more baldly nationalist and illiberal one.

An illiberal Israel would also become a pariah state. [Israel already is a pariah state]Israel is already becoming increasingly isolated internationally, and multiple international organizations are seeking punitive legal and diplomatic measures against it

There is a lot more to read and it is all of interest.

Continue here

**

Here’s your daily air strike update for August 18, 2024

Translation with my notes in bold and in [brackets]

https://rg.ru/2024/08/18/kiev-s-rannego-utra-atakovali-rakety-i-drony.html

08/18/2024

Kiev was attacked by missiles and drones starting in the early morning
Alexey Komolov

It is noted that from five in the morning there was an attempt to strike with ballistic missiles and drones, and by 7.00 there was a new attack with Iskander cruise missiles.

Eyewitnesses reported explosions on the left bank of the Dnieper.

It is noted that from five in the morning there was an attempt to strike with ballistic missiles and drones, and by 7.00 there was a new attack with Iskander cruise missiles.

Eyewitnesses reported explosions on the left bank of the Dnieper

The previous morning, explosions occurred in the vicinity of Kiev, and on Friday night a series of explosions occurred in the capital of Ukraine amid an air raid raid.

**

Translation with my notes in bold and in [brackets]

https://radiosputnik.ru/20240818/rezervy-1966887071.html

18.08.2024

Russian troops strike Ukrainian Armed Forces reserves in Sumy Oblast

The crew of a Ka-52 Alligator helicopter is carrying out a combat mission to destroy Ukrainian Armed Forces units on the border with Kursk Oblast - RIA Novosti, 08/18/2024

MOSCOW, August 18/ Radio Sputnik. Crews of the operational-tactical aviation of the Russian Armed Forces attacked the reserves of the Ukrainian Armed Forces, as well as ammunition and fuel depots of the enemy in the border area of ​​​​the Sumy Oblast, the Russian Defense Ministry reported.

"

"Operational-tactical aviation carried out strikes on reserves, ammunition and fuel depots of the 22nd mechanized, 80th airborne assault brigades of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, the 103rd and 107th territorial defense brigades in the areas of the settlements of Atynskoye, Belopolye, Vorozhba, Kiyantsa, Kositsa and Shalygino in the Sumy oblast," the department said in a statement on its Telegram channel.

Radio Sputnik also reported that more than 20 Ukrainian Armed Forces soldiers surrendered in the Kursk region.

**

Translation with my notes in bold and in [brackets]

https://smotrim.ru/article/4099407?ysclid=m002q64lns327533179

18 August 2024

"North" inflicted blows on three brigades of the Ukraine forces in the Volchansk and Lipsov regions

The agency added that Russian troops inflicted defeats on three Ukrainian brigades in the districts of Liptsev, Beloy Kolodez and Volchansk in the Kharkiv oblast.

In addition, an ammunition depot of the Armed Forces of Ukraine was destroyed.

The losses of the VSU in the area of ​​responsibility of the group "North" amounted to up to 90 soldiers, 3 vehicles, an American howitzer M777, 2 howitzers D-30, radio-electronic combat station "Anklav-N"

**

Scott Ritter: Russia unleashes fury: Kursk offensive devastates Ukraine. – No more holding back

Quote:

“In the State Department, staff members are not allowed to get smart on Russia.”

There is a deathly fear in the State Department that their staff and the US grassroots might learn too much about Russia. This is weird because the teachings of Sun-Zi are pointed out by the profs at West Point, and the most memorable advice in this doctrine is “know your enemy.” Yet, the Neocons (Neo-Nazis) in Washington are intent on keeping all knowledge about Russia away from their staff and the US grassroots. Ignorance is the name of the game. It is doomed to fail.

I suspect that this fear of knowing Russia may be related to the fact that Russian departments in big-name universities do not hire professors who teach Russian courses on the graduate level in the Russian language. The Master’s degree students read English translations of Russian literature selections and hear lectures on these in English. How can they call them Russian courses?

I learned this the hard way, and wrote about it here:

https://open.substack.com/pub/donhank/p/ivy-league-doesnt-teach-russian-language?r=46c03&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true