Israel is almost exclusively killing civilians in occupied Palestine. They’re targeting hospitals, homes, water supplies, and food. They’re burying people under rubble and trying to starve/dehydrate/sicken them to death; it’s a medieval siege backed by mass media. Israel is executing an openly genocidal campaign which — in addition to being evil — is a major strategic blunder.

The point of war is not to kill civilians. It’s to destroy militaries. As Carl Clausewitz said: “What do we mean by the defeat of the enemy? Simply the destruction of his forces, whether by death, injury, or any other means — either completely or enough to make him stop fighting… The complete or partial destruction of the enemy must be regarded as the sole object of all engagements… Direct annihilation of the enemy’s forces must always be the dominant consideration.”

The point of war is ‘direct annihilation of the enemy’s forces,’ not the annihilation of an entire population. Israel, however, is doing precisely the opposite. Every bomb they drop on a refugee camp is one that won’t drop on a military target. All the snipers shooting patients are not shooting soldiers. All the children they kill create more fighters, with the strongest motivation possible.

Israel is certainly genociding the Palestinian people, but they are not significantly degrading Palestine’s defenders, which is the point of warfare. They’re all collateral and little military damage. Israel is really good at killing babies in incubators, but when it comes to the fighters they incubated in past terrors, they’re barely engaging them, let alone destroying them. Israel is all war crimes and little actual war.

The Israeli Strategy

Israel acts like it has unlimited time and bombs to completely eliminate two million Palestinians, ethnic cleanse the West Bank too, and then fight Lebanon also. It doesn’t. For both Israel and the White Empire that controls it, time is running out. They have no strategy except brutality, which is not a strategy at all.

Israeli ambassadors et al keeping pointing to the firebombing of Dresden as a strategic massacre, but this is misreading both history and never reading Slaughterhouse Five at all. The western allies did not win World War II in the first place, 80% of the Wehrmacht was engaged and destroyed by the Soviets, at great sacrifice. Bombing hundreds of thousands of defenseless German civilians did nothing to end the war. It was just a massacre. Dresden had no military significance at all.

In the same way, razing Gaza to the ground has no military significance now. The Palestinian fighters are underground. Their allies are all around. Israel is just taking revenge upon a civilian population, wasting not just lives but their own resources, time, and reputation (what’s left of it). Israel just doing their usual ethnic cleansing, with no consideration of facts on (and under) the ground. They look both wildly incompetent and immoral.

Israel is simply not fucking with the same Palestinians as 20, 30, or 50 years ago. These are not ‘lone’ terrorists sneaking knives onto a bus. Hamas is an organized paramilitary now. The Al Aqsa Flood of October 7th was a well-organized military hit that hit primarily soldiers and military targets, racist Israeli lies about ‘savagery’ aside. Israel actually panicked and unloaded on their own positions, as is well-documented. Hamas has a metro’s worth of underground tunnels that they retreated into. They have effective anti-tank weapons and the courage to use them at point-blank range. Israel is degrading none of those capabilities and are in fact slowly getting their tanks blown up. All they can do is wildly lashing out at defenseless civilians from above.

While Israel is able to easily bomb the hospitals and homes of Gaza, this does not degrade their actual enemy, which is underground. Whenever Israel actually stands and fights, they get their men and matériel red-triangled and eliminated. Israel is losing sometimes dozens of tanks and armor every day, and they don’t actually have that many. They are spending $50,000 Iron Dome missiles to shoot down $800 Qassam rockets. The once-vaunted Israeli military is steadily getting degraded, while the entire Israel project is revealed as an abomination. Hamas cannot, unfortunately, save their own civilians right now, but they can degrade the Israeli military, which is the unfortunate point of war. And Gaza is only one front that Israel is bleeding on.

Hezbollah, based out of Lebanon, is also fighting Israel, and has been since October 7th. Hezbollah has a much better trained and equipped military than Hamas, with proper stand-off weapons, and the ability to operate above ground. They have beaten Israel once before and seem to be doing it again, slowly and methodically scaling the escalation ladder. Hezbollah ties up a third to a half of the Israeli forces on the Northern Front. As Hezbollah leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah said, “Our operations keep the Israeli’s army at our front and away from Gaza. A third of the Israeli army is now at our borderline. Half of its navy is dedicated to our front. A quarter of its air force is. Half of its Iron Dome missiles. Forty-three settlements were evacuated.” Since then, Israel has had to send more resources north.

Israel hides how much men and matériel they’re losing on the Northern Front, but it’s steadily ratcheting up, and Hezbollah is not even fighting at full force. While Israel flails around and wastes its weapons killing children and shooting down small rockets, Hezbollah is patiently waiting with the big guns in reserve.

Israel is fighting a war on at least two fronts which, if you ask dead Hitler, is not strategically sound. Yemen is also launching missiles through fucking space, and Syria and Iran are standing by with national armies. At some point, there will be a resource crunch, and Israel will wish they hadn’t wasted their tinder burning down hospitals and homes. But at that point it’ll be too late, and Grandpa Genocide won’t be able to help them.

The American Strategy

It’s important to understand, as Hezbollah’s Nasrullah does, that Israel is not in control of its own destiny, let alone anybody else’s. Israel is not a real country. Israel is a western colony set up to divide and conquer the Middle East, pitting Semite against Semite in order to control the oil. It’s classic divide-and-conquer.

Israel would disappear in a week without a constant influx of western weapons and political cover. As Nasrullah accurately says,“We must know that America is fully responsible for what is happening in Gaza and Israel is merely an executive tool.” Once you look past the colony to the colonizer, you see that the war has many more fronts than two, and much less strategic thinking going on.

America is the colonizer, the inheritor of Britain’s overseas territories, and heir to what I call the White Empire. Despite being voted out of Iraq and fought out of Syria, they’re still occupying territory there because they can. Except now, increasingly, they can’t. American occupation bases in Syria and Iraq are under constant attack now, and America can’t even admit it. They have to cover up deaths as ‘training accidents’ and other bullshit. The fact is they’re getting hit, and being revealed as losers that have to take it. American occupation bases are lightly manned based on the idea that America itself will come down heavy, but that idea is being tested and found failing. As Malcolm Kyeyune writes, via Al Mayadeen:

Deterrence was at first a helpful side effect of real American economic and military might. But over time, it became a crutch — and then, a Potemkin village: a façade put up as a cost-saving measure, to cover up the fact that the military was shrinking, political dysfunction growing, and fiscal stability eroding. Now, as drones and rockets rain down on US service members across Syria and Iraq … it is becoming clear that the Middle East has decided that American threats aren’t all that credible anymore.

America actually cannot field many men anymore, nor can they produce much matériel. The fundamentally fraudulent nature of its expensive military has been revealed in Ukraine, and now in the Middle East as well. The Empire has no clothes. They’re just fronting.

Now America has multiple fronts open across the Middle East, multiple fronts across Asia, and it’s losing across all of them. The US Congress seems done with funding Ukraine, is delaying funding Israel, and doesn’t even want to fund itself anymore. The US government has no functioning budgetary process, it just lurches from shutdown to shutdown. It’s due to shit the bed again on November 17th, as it does every few months. This is not a country that can keep its own shit together, let alone an empire.

All America can do is all Israel can do, kill poor people and starve children to death. The only way they can project power is by brutalizing the powerless. Empire is going down and it’s going down ugly. With all the blood in the water it’s hard to tell, but America and Israel are bleeding too. Whenever the Empire actually engages an actual enemy, they burn. Israel has a dancing TikTok Army afraid to get out of their tanks, while America cannot call up reserves at all. They can continue killing, but they cannot win wars anymore. And so, eventually, they will lose.

As the resistance says, Israel is as weak as a spider’s web and America is a paper tiger. As the Taliban told the America, “you have the watches but we have the time.” And time is running out. The White Empire will still kill a tremendous amount of people on the way down, but it’s already fallen. It cannot think, it cannot fight, it can only lash out, like a blinded cyclops. At this point, all they can do is kill civilians, and this is not a winning strategy. It’s just a loss. A loss of all the innocent lives they take, and — inshallah— of the guilty Empire they are.