IDF Get Shown Up Hilariously - And It Took Just One Man!
Right, so Israel built itself a buffer zone in Lebanon to tell the north that the danger had been pushed away, and then the Israeli army had to announce that one armed man crossed from Lebanon near Ramim Ridge and breached the border. That's the event with the military varnish scraped off. One man. Israel called him a terrorist, public reporting says it was unclear whether he was even affiliated with Hezbollah, though there are reports he was dressed in a Hezbollah gear so caveats there and the same reporting says this was the first crossing of its kind from Lebanon in this round of fighting. The IDF border gets beaten by one man and that’s the real embarrassment here isn't it? [CLIP] Israel built a security line, sold it as protection, occupied ground in southern Lebanon to make it real, and the thing now sitting in front of it is one armed man getting through the very line that existed to keep exactly that image off Israeli screens. Regional reporting has also alleged that Israeli military media treated the incident as an operational failure, which is something of an understatement if one guy can breach your perimeter – imagine what two could do? And that nearby northern communities were told to stay indoors while the searches went on, lockdowns as that footage there made clear. The Israel Defence Forces, or Israeli Occupation Forces if you prefer, many do, the name doesn’t matter to me, it’s the most amoral army in the world and in my view that’s all they deserve to be called, has spent months trying to turn southern Lebanon into a controlled space, the Gazafication of Lebanon and Israel's government calls that control security, because they always call it that don’t they? Anything but occupation, especially when that occupation is being sold to their own population as protection rather than to the people living under it as force. Taken a knock now though hasn’t it? Israel's deranged Defence Minister Israel Katz has spoken of retaining a security zone in southern Lebanon until Hezbollah is removed as a threat, but given Israel were already there before, firing on Lebanon through a ceasefire and all whilst Hezbollah spent more than a year giving their government a chance to fix this, it’s a hard pill for any observer to swallow that that is remotely true. Hezbollah sits at the centre of a very simple sales pitch to northern Israeli communities: the army goes forward, the danger moves back, and you can breathe again. That's the bargain Netanyahu's government has been offering. Benjamin Netanyahu gets to present force inside Lebanon as a shield for the north, Katz gets to dress the occupation up as a security necessity, and the Israeli military gets to play line manager here. But the trouble with building your politics around a line, though, is that the line becomes a test. Every breach after that belongs to the people who swore the line was enough and when just one man showed he was capable of doing just that, it hits that much harder.
