Israel Is Losing Their War, What More Can America Do?

Earlier this week, Iranian-backed forces launched a drone attack that killed three US soldiers at the Tower 22 outpost in the sovereign nation of Jordan. Fears of a wider regional war breaking out have never been higher.

Tower 22 is a logistical safe zone within walking distance of Syria used to support the al-Tanf airbase, which is illegally situated in US-occupied Syrian territory. The al-Tanf facility, which Jewish foreign policy makers established during Operation Inherent Resolve to prevent Syrian access to the Damascus-Baghdad highway, is a permanent source of regional mischief.

Multiple intelligence services, local Arab tribesmen, and former paramilitary operatives employed by the CIA at al-Tanf have accused the base of being a covert training and provisions center for both ISIS and Al-Qaeda. Fighters are given weapons, then dispatched to wreak havoc against Russian, Syrian and Iranian troops and civilians throughout Homs and Deir ez-Zor, as well as in nearby Iraqi territory.

For this reason, the al-Tanf base and its surrounding 34 mile “deconfliction zone” has for years been targeted by a myriad of actors, including the Russian air force.

The decision from Iraqi militia members to hit al-Tanf on the less defended Jordanian side was likely intended to draw blood in revenge for the US assassination of Popular Mobilization Unit leader Mushtaq Jawad Kazim al-Jawari, who was murdered in a reckless broad daylight drone attack in front of the Iraqi government’s Interior Ministry building in early January. Joe Biden may have feigned shock and outrage in public, but it is unlikely that Washington was too surprised by the response they received for this action. Foreign policy analysts have concluded that American troop deployments in these conflict zones are intended to be provocative and soldiers are deliberately exposed to danger as “tripwires” to justify deeper US engagement on behalf of Israel.

Israel Is Being Defeated

Washington has exhausted almost every feasible course of action to allow Israel a freehand without any red lines against the Palestinians. Since the start of the Jewish nation’s invasion of Gaza, the US has dispatched its navy to the Eastern Mediterranean to deter Hezbollah on Israel’s northern border, on top of sending 2,000 Special Forces soldiers and massive arms transfers (including taking desperately needed artillery shells from the collapsing Ukrainian military) to aid Benjamin Netanyahu’s rampage.

Since October 7th, the US has been relentlessly assassinating anti-Israel leaders in Iraq and Syria and bombing facilities used by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps with impunity. Both Britain and the United States have launched a military campaign against the Houthis in Yemen, Operation Prosperity Guardian, to safeguard Israeli economic interests in the Red Sea at everybody else’s expense. The US and its British vassal state have functioned as Israel’s lawyer before international bodies, shielding the Jewish state from meaningful diplomatic consequences for its systematic atrocities against women and children.

What new escalatory options does the Biden administration even have? So far, none of the aforementioned actions have succeeded in deterring Israel’s regional opponents, whose sole demand is that Tel Aviv stop the slaughter.

Broadly speaking, Israel’s war in Gaza is failing. Casualties are mounting, public anger is growing over Netanyahu’s ineptitude, and after 117 days of war, not a single strategic objective has been met.

Politically and morally, the proud inhumanity of Jewish leaders has caused global anti-Jewish and anti-Zionist sentiment to surge to record highs. Israeli forces have stalled in the mission of releasing any hostages outside of diplomatic channels, which is a personal embarrassment for Netanyahu. Israeli media has been reporting on stories of IDF soldiers actually killing their own people with poison gas during chemical warfare attacks against militants in Hamas tunnels. In a separate anecdote, three Jewish hostages waving white flags were executed in cold blood by IDF soldiers, who confused them for Palestinian civilians from a distance.

The full scope of manpower attrition in the Israeli military is a known-unknown. Following the propaganda strategy of Zelensky’s Ukraine, IDF military censors have placed an unprecedented gag on reporting casualties they have suffered so far in the war. This has demoralized Israelis who want to publicly acknowledge the dead soldiers in their families as heroes, especially since the Netanyahu government is in practice failing to contain loudening whispers of historically unprecedented losses. To get a general idea of Israeli losses in the war, an investigation by Haaretz from December found that over 10,500 IDF soldiers were admitted for battlefield wounds in hospitals. Fatalities are speculated to be in the thousands.

On the Palestinian side, almost all of the casualties inflicted by Israel are militarily insignificant. At least 90% of the Palestinians killed by Israel are helpless civilians, with 40%, or 10,000, being children. This was previously unheard of in the history of warfare and an unambiguous crime against humanity under international law. By comparison, in World War II, where the Allies utilized area bombing of civilians as policy in instances such as Dresden, the ratio of civilian casualties never rose above 50%. Massacring the women, children and elderly of Gaza is a, poorly kept, secret objective in this war.

Adding to Israeli woes is the military’s admission that the overwhelming majority of Hamas’ 100s of miles of sophisticated tunnels remain intact. Videos released daily by both Hezbollah and Hamas feature Israelis standing in place in windows for snipers to pick off and their tanks, almost always lacking infantry support, rolling into obvious ambushes. The US-backed rule of Mahmoud Abbas in the West Bank has been thoroughly discredited, as Israelis take out their frustration on the largely disarmed West Bank. Gaza’s civilian infrastructure has suffered destruction equivalent to Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined, yet this has only further galvanized Palestinians to stand with Hamas, as well as giving Gaza’s army plenty of rubble to defend from. The myth that has for decades kept the Arab world paralyzed in fear, that of the “invincible army”, has been replaced with a more accurate image of a third world military wielding first world American and European weapons.

In Northern Gaza, which Netanyahu has clung to as evidence that he is making progress in the war, it was just announced that Israeli forces are being forced to pull out and Hamas is back in charge. Jewish settlers and Kibbutzim refuse to return to the areas around Gaza, one of many symbolic victories for the Palestinians fighting to take back their land.

Realistically, there is no option left in Gaza other than diplomacy. The US government — represented by the Jews Antony Blinken and Amos Hochstein — is now offering negotiations with the Palestinians in hopes of applying a tourniquet to Israel’s setbacks. This has all the trappings of a familiar scam. US-Israel is currently offering safe passage to Hamas’ leadership to third countries as well as a temporary two-month ceasefire in exchange for all of the hostages, but everybody knows Israel will simply assassinate these leaders and continue bombing Gaza at a later date. There are even reports emerging that the US may be dangling the prospect of establishing a Palestinian state in front of Hamas, though only on the absurd condition that it is demilitarized and placed under the bought off and unpopular Palestinian Authority’s rule.

It is unlikely the Palestinians will give up their main bargaining chip — Jewish hostages — easily, and it would be suicidal for them to do so. The experience of the Oslo Accords is burned in the Palestinian people’s national memory. They have good reason to believe that as soon as Israel gets what they want, they will violate every term of an agreement with full US-backing and pick up their ruthless war of ethnic cleansing where it left off.

The Biden administration is committed to playing hardball, as seen by the sudden decision to cut off access to food and medicine. The goal is to make Palestinians more compliant in these bad faith talks. This week the United States and its satellite states announced that they would defund the UNRWA, which the head of the United Nations warned would be catastrophic for already suffering Palestinian civilians. The bogus pretense given by Blinken for this decision is that Israeli interrogators uncovered evidence that UN relief workers, who are being indiscriminately killed while engaging in humanitarian work in Gaza, are secretly members of Hamas. This narrative was almost certainly extracted through torture. Shin Bet agents have been arbitrarily snatching up any Palestinian — journalists, laborers, UN employed medical staff — they have access to and subjecting them to incommunicado detention, where prisoners are brutally beaten, deprived of sleep, denied food and water, and sodomized with metal objects. Victims of Israeli torture routinely die in captivity.

US, Israel and Lebanon

If a peace deal is successfully brokered in the Israel-Hamas conflict, it should not be automatically assumed that a wider regional war has been averted, as the Israeli military buildup on Lebanon’s border suggests.

Some in the Arab world have criticized Hezbollah’s patient strategy in Israel’s north as too meager, but this is a misread. Hezbollah has effectively utilized a miniscule fraction of its resources to engage in tit-for-tat exchanges harassing Israeli forces, which has effectively forced the Jewish army to divide its military between its border and Gaza. The pain dished out to the Israeli side is ratcheting up, with videos published by Hezbollah embarrassingly refuting Israel’s previous claims that no soldiers have died on the northern front.

Above all, Hezbollah’s chief success has been in forcing over 100,000 Jews on Lebanon’s border to evacuate to the center of the country. Hezbollah has targeted Jewish residential settlements in retaliation for Israeli attacks on Lebanese and Palestinian civilians, adding a whole new dimension to this conflict. The irony of Jews who forced the Palestinian people to live as refugees being forced out of their homes to go live in camps themselves is a devastating blow to the central promise of the Zionist project: Jews are allowed to live anywhere they want, including on other people’s land.

Most analysts believe that Biden’s promise of a new doctrine of extreme measures do not include a strike on Iranian territory due to the high probability that America would lose. This is debatable, as Washington’s support for Israel is not grounded in the laws of ordinary geopolitical reasoning.

If a formal US attack on Iranian territory is off the table, observers should switch their attention to Netanyahu’s chilling threats to turn “Beirut into Gaza.”

There are many downsides to an Israeli offensive into Lebanon. A war with Hezbollah would outright threaten the Zionist state with extinction without significant American intervention — which is basically guaranteed — on its behalf. The Lebanese militia possesses supersonic missiles, suicide drones, and precision Fattah ballistic missiles that could unleash devastation on Haifa and Tel Aviv. It is believed that if the current skirmishes were to grow hotter, Hezbollah would overwhelm the Iron Dome with massive barrages of cheap bait rockets, which would then leave the Jewish state’s defenses vulnerable to more advanced and deadly weaponry.

Thus far, Hezbollah has had no kinetic interaction with the United States, but the US Treasury Department has still targeted them with new sanctions. French and American attempts at strategically isolating Hezbollah within Lebanon, primarily through the funding of the Lebanese military as a counter-balance, have been unsuccessful due to laws mandating Hezbollah-sympathetic Shi’ite representation in the multi-confessional national armed forces. Historically, French and US attempts to intervene in Lebanon in hopes of tilting the scales in favor of Israel have proven unsustainable and culminated in disaster.

For Israel to have a chance against Hezbollah, the United States will be forced to prioritize a temporary end to hostilities in Gaza while intensifying action against Iran’s less powerful allies in Yemen, Iraq and Syria. Washington may also seek to focus on disrupting the supply route from Iran to Hezbollah.

This will remain a challenge. The sole advantage Israel and the US have over Iran and its affiliates is the prospect of a pre-emptive nuclear strike, but Iran has developed its nuclear program to the point of being able to manufacture these weapons with two weeks notice.

Going forward, every US-Israel scenario is painful, save for common sense diplomacy. If Biden fails to advance Israel’s bellicose objectives with his next moves, the Jewish lobby will do everything in their power to ensure he is not re-elected.