The author of this episode spent more than a month several dozen
kilometers south of the Lebanese-Israeli border, where the war iscurrently going on, in the reality of almost daily, sometimes several
times a day, air raid sirens. He received a very strange life experience
and came to gloomy conclusions. ---- Check the stove ---- Israel has a
very powerful, comprehensive air defense system. Expensive apartments
have built-in bomb shelter rooms, good houses have bomb shelters in each
entrance or at least one for several entrances. There are street bomb
shelters. In the realities of war, additional ones are quickly built.
Because if a missile or a drone is flying into your area, you have 30
seconds, a minute or a minute and a half to hide before the enemy shell
is shot down and shrapnel starts flying. If you don't make it to a bomb
shelter, take cover in any shelter, ideally one that is separated from
the street by two walls and has no windows nearby, so as not to get hurt
by shards of glass. If there is no shelter, lie down on the ground and
cover your head with your hands.
Elderly people and wheelchair users, if they don't have a bomb shelter
at home, often sleep in public shelters, because they won't have time to
run there at night: it's not much fun, it's like taking your bed out
into the entryway and sleeping there.
There are a lot of air defense systems: they are not visible from the
outside, but when needed, interceptor missiles fly out of the most
unexpected places. Air defense systems are called "Iron Dome" (a
reference to the kippah, the headdress of religious Jews), "David's
Sling" and other epic names. Israeli military aesthetics actually have a
lot in common with the Thor Steinar vibe, only the set of images is
slightly different.
Air defense shoots down about 99% of missiles and drones. When a missile
is shot down, fragments fly off from it and the interceptor. Often, car
windows are knocked out; if you don't hide and a fragment hits your
head, you'll get into trouble. When there are a lot of missiles, the
system overloads and makes mistakes, so there are isolated hits on houses.
It is very hot in Israel from July to September, October is the most
comfortable month of the year in terms of temperature. But you can't get
out into nature, outside the cities, whatever comes, comes, there is no
air defense.
At the time of writing, after more than a month of shelling in northern
Israel (air raid alarms affect about one and a half million people),
there are less than ten dead and several dozen wounded. After the
shelling, many more people are hospitalized not wounded, but people who
were injured while running to a bomb shelter.
There is a forced trust in the state: if you hear explosions, but there
is no air raid siren, most likely, there is no need to hide anywhere,
the explosions are several kilometers away from you.
If an air raid siren catches you at home, before rushing to shelter, you
need to check if the stove is turned off. When you walk down the street,
you constantly analyze where you will run if the siren wails.
There is a scale of threat levels, very similar to the one that was
during Covid: how many people can be involved in events, whether schools
can work, etc. Each locality can move up and down this scale from day to
day. All this is very stressful psychologically, has a negative impact
on the economy, but so far it is not even close to catastrophic for Israel.
For Palestine?
Judging by the news, there is a huge amount of destruction in Lebanon,
about a million refugees. From the outside, it probably looks like
"colonialist Israel is again harassing its Arab neighbors". But is this
true?
There are some minor disputes between Lebanon and Israel about the
border, but this concerns two or three hills, this happens between many
countries, and is not a reason for war. Lebanon as a state now exists
more formally, the main force there is the Iranian-controlled Hezbollah
group, which does not represent the majority of Lebanese.
Before Israel went on the offensive, Hezbollah shelled the border areas
of Israel for a year. 70 thousand Israelis left there, dozens of people
died under these shellings.
To take seriously Hezbollah's claims that it is doing this in
"solidarity with Palestine" is to broadcast a lie, hypocrisy or
misunderstanding of the situation. In the north of Israel there are
Jewish cities, there are mixed ones (Haifa, Acre), there are Arab ones.
There is a very large agglomeration: the world-famous city of Nazareth
(according to the Gospel, Jesus Christ spent his youth there), Sakhnin,
Tamra, Shfaram and others: these are tens of square kilometers with a
100% Arab population. And there are no fewer missiles flying there than
in Jewish cities. That is, Hezbollah exposes Arabs to no less danger
than Jews.
The day before writing this text, a Hezbollah missile killed two Arabs:
it flew into a gym in the village of Majdal-Krum.
Yes, military bases can be near Arab cities. But in more than a month of
shelling, Hezbollah has only hit something that can be considered a
military target a few times. The main hits were on civilian objects, and
Hezbollah named terrorizing the civilian population of northern Israel
as one of its priority targets.
In Israel, there have been all sorts of things between Arabs and Jews,
now it is far from love, but there is no obvious conflict. The author of
the text lives in a Jewish area and constantly sees Arabs coming to the
local shopping center to shop, or to relax on the beach. There are no
problems with this. Arabs and Jews often work in the same factories, in
the same offices. In hospitals and clinics, doctors and patients are
Arabs and Jews mixed together.
Demonstrations under Palestinian flags are periodically held in Arab
settlements. In the Israeli parliament, out of 120 deputies, ten are
from Arab parties; they advocate for Israel's recognition of Palestine.
There are also many Jewish initiatives for interethnic equality, but the
situation of Arabs in Israel is of no interest to the group from
Lebanon: Putin is just as sane when he "fights for the Russians in Donbass."
Middle Eastern Wagner
If we draw parallels with Russian realities, Hezbollah (the Party of
Allah) most closely resembles the Wagner PMC. Remember how quickly
Prigozhin was gaining popularity over a year ago: conservative rhetoric,
the aesthetics of brute force, an appeal to the people's sense of
justice, social programs and social lifts for people from the lower
classes. Putin was able to wring Prigozhin's neck, but that didn't work
out in Lebanon at the time, and Hezbollah practically replaced the state.
Israel tolerated shelling of its border for a year because Hezbollah had
accumulated a huge number of missiles. It was predicted that if they
were launched simultaneously, the air defense would not cope, and there
was a possibility, for example, of the destruction of the entire power
supply system in Israel. The operation with pagers, then the destruction
of the Hezbollah military elite made this impossible.
In the case of both Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon, it is
striking that their territories are riddled with underground military
installations, but nothing is known about them building bomb shelters
for the population under their control. Complete disregard for their
lives, for their homes, which are being demolished by Israeli bombing.
Hamas and Hezbollah are criminal organizations in relation to the
population under their control, if only because they have been drawn
into a war with the Israeli army, which is five heads better armed.
A typical Hezbollah attack - one or two wounded, broken windows, for
example, of 15 cars, and some balcony demolished by an air defense
missile that was not intercepted. But no one was hired to tolerate this:
as a result, for most Israelis, this legitimizes the next bombing of
Lebanon, wiping out several villages at a time or a couple of blocks in
the southern suburbs of Beirut.
What to do
Would it be better for Israel to start negotiations with Hezbollah? It
is not an obvious question whether negotiations are necessary with armed
radicals who are the first to start shooting at you and making demands,
guided by certain geopolitical and religious motives, as well as the
interests of the ayatollah regime in Iran.
Israel's obvious mistake is relying only on military methods to solve
its problems. They can bring quick results, but strategically they only
spin the spiral of violence, creating more and more people who have lost
relatives at the hands of the Israeli military and are ready to take
revenge in the future.
Israel lives surrounded by hundreds of millions of Muslims, while there
are practically no "soft power" programs, communications, or dialogue
between Israel and the Islamic environment.
A separate problem is the current Israeli government - formed following
the elections two years ago, according to all polls it does not reflect
the current mood of Israelis. There are Jewish ultra-rightists
(Ben-Gvir, Smotrich), for whom the involvement of Israel in a
large-scale war with problematic, but neighbors is not a tragedy and
nonsense, but rather a positive development of events.
"Invisible" Turkey
While all the attention of the world media is focused on the Palestinian
problem, Turkey calmly bombs Syrian and Iraqi settlements, claiming that
Kurdish terrorists are hiding there. According to information from the
Internal Security Forces of Northern and Eastern Syria as of the evening
of October 25, it is known that
the Turkish state attacked the region 685 times
killed 17 people (14 of them civilians)
wounded 48 (39 of them civilians).
These are the territories where refugees from Lebanon are currently
located, among others.
The Right of Force
And the saddest thing is that there is no system of international
moderation of armed conflicts. Thousands of armed UN peacekeepers have
been in Lebanon for 18 years. In general, their goal was, among other
things, to disarm Hezbollah. But UN peacekeepers did nothing about
Hezbollah's attacks on Israel, or about the participation of Hezbollah
fighters in the civil war in Syria on Assad's side.
And at this time, the BRICS forum was held in Kazan, Russia.
Representatives of many countries came to visit Putin, including very
powerful countries and very high-ranking representatives. UN Secretary
General Antonio Guterres came and shook hands with the man on whose whim
the largest and bloodiest war since Hitler was unleashed.
A complete failure of the international law system, a universal system
of coordinates of good and evil.
Israel is also taking advantage of this failure, occupying the West Bank
of the Jordan, explaining the occupation by saying that "this is our
land, because it is written so in our holy books." There is talk that
Ukraine can assemble a so-called "dirty" atomic bomb for self-defense:
in general, this is a disaster and drawing humanity into the prospect of
a nuclear massacre. But against the background of everything that is
happening, one cannot say that the Ukrainian military will act
illogically if they assemble such a bomb.
So, we have to live where the local army has better missiles? Who will
attack whom and why in the near future, who knows.
There were films about "Mad Max", where all sorts of gangs and dictators
ruled in the post-apocalyptic desert. It seems that humanity has come to
something similar. Some kind of terrible point from which it is time to
get out. When we start to get out, it will most likely quickly become
clear that ordinary Israelis and Lebanese, Russians and Ukrainians have
absolutely no need to demolish each other's houses with missiles. That
they are far from being the beneficiaries of wars.
Well, that's all for today! We remind you that in "Trends of Order and
Chaos" the participants of Autonomous Action and other authors give
anarchist assessments of current events. Listen to us on YouTube,
SoundCloud and other platforms, visit our website avtonom.org, subscribe
to our social networks and e-mail newsletter.
The issue was prepared by Listyev
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