Zionism and the Resistance: The Politics of Morality and Precision

Immediately following Israel’s country-wide, two-day attack against the people of Lebanon, the discourse in Western mainstream media has been steeped in racist tropes and long-debunked claims about Israel’s military “sophistication” and “precision.” These characterizations are not just the latest offering of recycled Orientalist tropes and intentional misrepresentations of a sadistic attack that targeted thousands of civilians and killed children — they also overlook the zionist entity’s most basic and time-honored code of its brutal military operations: unrestrained, unbounded eliminatory violence.

On September 17 and 18, in an attack that has been attributed to Israel, hundreds of telecommunications devices began exploding — in grocery stores, on the street, in cars, and elsewhere, injuring almost 3,000 people over two days and killing at least 37 people. Right away, talking heads in the Western media (and those desperate to break in) praised the country-wide assault as “precise” and an attack only on “Hezbollah pagers” — despite the early news that at least one nine year old child was among the first few to die, and the videos circulating on social media which showed explosions taking place in public, crowded areas.

This is nothing new: media personalities, politicians, wannabe journalists and many others regularly present the asymmetrical warfare between the Israeli-US-Euro alliance and Indigenous resistance and anti-imperial formations with regurgitated talking points that rely on tired tropes: the settler is precise, strong, even defensive when he blows up young girls at home with their families; Indigenous resistance fighters are imprecise, emotional barbarians when they send missiles to military bases in occupied territory.

These personalities draw on myths of technological superiority, pointing out that Israel and its allies possess advanced military technology, ”precision-guided missiles,” drones, cyberwarfare capabilities, and the vaunted Iron Dome missile defense system. Nevertheless, Israel’s advanced “precise” technology does not prevent it from carpet bombing entire neighborhoods and cities. The choice to describe Israel’s attacks on civilians as precise is a deliberate effort to present Israel’s wanton violence as pseudo-vigilance about the rules of war and international law. The fantasy of Israel boasting a well-organized and highly trained military continues to pervade the dominant discourse in corporate media, while Israelis themselves have largely conceded (internally, of course) that the military is a shitshow, with units regularly posting requests for basic supplies on Facebook pages and organizing their own GoFundMe campaigns.

The advocates and benefactors of zionism used to point to the quantitative advantage that Israel enjoys as being a colonial outpost, including receiving diplomatic cover and billions of dollars of “aid” in the form of military weaponry; this, too, is changing. Student groups have sprung into action across campuses worldwide and have taken real risks to disrupt colonial connections. A movement has been growing to hold the US Democratic party to account. Even the larger neo-liberal NGO structure that works to keep activists in line and solely focused on electoralism is facing new challenges, as large NGOs are seen as the counterinsurgent efforts they often are. Political support for imperialism, for zionism, is drying up in some of the remaining supportive spaces.

When Western pundits describe Israel’s dominance in air power and how it enables Israel to strike targets with relatively low risk to military personnel, they omit that this strategy is met with resistance forces’ creativity: air power can be thwarted, or at least undermined, by tunnels and other urban warfare tactics. We are reminded of this fact daily by the videos produced by resistance factions in both Gaza and southern Lebanon.

In fact, the “quantitative” advantage Israel has enjoyed with its firepower, armaments, and heavy weaponry in and of itself isn’t Israel’s main advantage. The entire framework of asymmetry is contingent on one thing, which is Israel’s greatest asset: its ability and commitment to enact eliminatory violence and scorched-earth policies. After all, Palestinians and their allies can't simply bomb Tel Aviv or Jerusalem without the risk of killing Palestinians, stoking the Western Islamophobic and orientalist trope of ‘terrorism’, or otherwise contradicting their internal rules of engagement. Their resistance demands a level of precision not required by Israel.

During the 2006 aggression on Lebanon, the resistance group Hezbollah fired tens of rockets every day at the territories occupied by Israel in 1948. In one of the rocket volleys, two Palestinian kids in Nazareth – Mahmoud and Rabiy’a Talluzi, three and seven-year-old respectively — were killed. Israel attempted to use this incident to rally Palestinians against Hezbollah. Hezbollah’s Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah famously apologized for the mistargeting, stating that “[t]hose who were killed in Nazareth – we consider them martyrs for Palestine, Lebanon, the nation, and the resistance. I extend my condolences and apologies to them, and I hope they accept that." In response, Abed Talluzi – the father of the two kids – thanked Hezbollah for the apology and stated that "[t]he war on Lebanon is an unjustified aggression.”

The asymmetrical nature of violence illustrated in the Israel-US-Euro coalition’s attacks on Palestine, Lebanon, and the larger region doesn’t arise from technological advantages or even necessarily from imperial backing. Rather, it reflects that zionism, as a colonial project in service of imperialism, does not have moral restrictions. Its only boundaries are those set by capitalist interests.

100 years of zionist colonialism has demonstrated the state and its settlers are willing to poison villages’ water wells, bomb residential buildings and schools, slaughter livestock, burn acres of trees, imprison children without charge or trial, and kill their own soldiers. To what moral code has zionism ever adhered? Revisiting a few of Israel’s long list of massacres illuminates the code underpinning the state’s modus operandi.

On April 9, 1948, the zionist militias overtook the Palestinian village of Deir Yassin, carrying out a horrific planned massacre characterized by mutilation and rape. This was one of the defining moments during the broader ethnic cleansing campaign that shaped the Nakba. Those who went on to construct the political architecture of the Israeli state — the Irgun, led by Menachem Begin, and Lehi, under the command of Nathan Yellin-Mor, launched a brutal attack on the Palestinian village and became legends for it within Israeli society. It only took killing over 100 Palestinians to earn a glorified place in zionist lore.

From September 16 to 18, 1982, Israeli forces turned Sabra and Shatila in West Beirut into the site of one of the most horrific massacres in modern history. Over three days, Phalangist militia members in coordination with Israeli forces carried out a brutal slaughter of Palestinian and Lebanese civilians, murdering approximately 3,500 men, women, and children. zionist formations, under the command of Defense Minister Ariel Sharon and Commander Amos Yaron, provided logistical support and cover for the militia as they carried out the atrocities. Coordinating the mass killings would get Commander Yaron promoted to Israel’s military attache to the United States and Ariel Sharon the political capital he needed to later become Israel’s Prime Minister.

Between December 27, 2008, and January 18, 2009, Israel launched a large-scale military offensive on Gaza, known as Operation Cast Lead. Over three weeks, Israel's carpet bombing campaign murdered some 1,400 Palestinians, leaving thousands more disabled, missing limbs, and permanently traumatized. The assault inflicted widespread destruction on Gaza’s infrastructure, homes, and basic services, creating a human catastrophe. International organizations accused Israel of committing war crimes, citing the targeting of civilian areas and disproportionate use of force. The operation was directed by Chief of General Staff Gabi Ashkenazi, Southern Command leader Yoav Gallant, and Defense Minister Ehud Barak, whose leadership played a central role in one of the most devastating periods in Gaza’s modern history. The very same Yoav Gallant is helping to orchestrate the current genocide in Gaza. All of these actors have remained in powerful positions within Israeli society because it is the willingness to animate unspeakable violence in service of both colonialism and imperialism that gives zionism its persisting power.

These examples reveal how Israel’s commitment to indiscriminate murder — not intelligence, not military power — was the determining factor in its operations and the true “code” being operationalized. We can see the application of this code not only in the ongoing genocide in Gaza and the relentless attacks on southern Lebanon but also in the horrific attack across Lebanon earlier this week.

On the other hand, it is well known that Israel’s backers have been apprehensive about opening a full scale war front in the north. The timing of this operation proves that it functions as a form of psychological warfare rather than supporting planned military strategy. The goal of this operation is not necessarily to propel Hezbollah to respond, but to reassure the continuation of its settler colonial project in the north which was halted by the resistance efforts from Lebanon. It is also an opportunity for eliminatory violence and the spectacle of it, to bring back a sense of grandeur for the Israeli military (and its settlers), which has, for almost a whole year, attempted and falsely declared the ‘defeat of Hamas’ only for the resistance to come back stronger. It is not zionism alone that has lost its support internationally and is being defeated by anti-zionist praxis across the globe, but the Israeli government, its settler-colonial enterprise, and its promise of safety for its settlers that are being crushed by resistance in Gaza, in Lebanon, and regionally.

Israel’s strategy — rooted in the code of indiscriminate violence and death — to promote this as an attack solely on resistance in Lebanon and subsequently divide the Lebanese polity from the resistance has proved to be a failure. This was immediately made clear by the scenes of Lebanese people of all ages and sects rushing to donate blood in the moments after each attack. Some brought food for the people affected, and taxis drove others to donation centers for free. Psychological warfare can only be won if the opponent’s spirit is defeated and their popular support is diminishing, which is not the case in Lebanon at the moment. Israel’s strategy of mass violence continues to fail beyond the immediate impact of the physical harm it wreaks, as it has in the past.

The representation of the violent mass attack on the people of Lebanon as precise by Western media serves the effort to salvage Israel’s campaign of eliminatory violence with impunity, drawing attention away from the upcoming anniversary of a brutal genocide in Gaza by painting these attacks in Lebanon as shrewd, meticulous, calculating, and most of all — deserved. They urge the audience not to look for the photos of the young Lebanese boy murdered by one of Israel’s explosions, which might remind you of the dead children in Gaza; instead, please, keep listening to the mantra and memefication of “Hezbollah pagers.”

As the daily assaults on southern Lebanon continue, it must be repeated that these attacks on the Lebanese people are taking place as a result of the resistance axis’ commitment to the Palestinians in Gaza and the staunch refusal to halt these escalating tensions with Israel until there is a ceasefire in Gaza. Social media users in Gaza commented in the last days on the relative quiet, aware that focus of the zionist entity has shifted momentarily to torment Lebanon, expressing their mutual solidarity.

As we deconstruct the false notions of Israeli military superiority and the codes that animate the state’s genocidal violence, we should also remember the revolutionary ethics steering others’ actions. When Israel wages a psychological warfare to undermine the resistance, our commitment should be to extinguish its flames. If Israel and its pundits believe they have won some victory of psychological warfare, we advise them to reconsider learning from the lessons of history and welcome zionism’s impending doom.