Hello dear readers!
Welcome to the first ever News Junkies newsletter, a bi-weekly newsletter from Empire and Economics focused on providing you with summaries, quotes and context for some of the most interesting and important news stories of the day. I do the scouring of sources (often hidden behind paywalls) so you don’t have to!
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News Junkies – Middle East Mayhem
This edition of the newsletter will be focused on the upcoming Israeli elections in the fall and the escalating war between the United States and Iran, with its regional implications.
Israeli Elections
Financial Times: “The man running against Benjamin Netanyahu“
Polling data in Israel is showing that Gadi Eisenkot is leading ahead of Netanyahu for the upcoming fall scheduled elections. Eisenkot is a former IDF chief of staff (that’s the top military position in the country), reflecting a long-standing trend of top generals and military officials transitioning into Israeli politics. Netanyahu is attempting to portray Eisenkot as a leftist (a slur inside rightwing Israel) who will work with “the Arabs.” Eisenkot, for his part, rejects the accusation and repeatedly brandishes his own credentials as a hawkish military figure. Indeed, Eisenkot was the general who formed Israel’s exceedingly brutal military doctrine (prior to the Gaza genocide) known as the ‘Dahiya Doctrine’ (named after the neighbourhood in Beirut, Lebanon, that Israel flattened during the 2006 war on Lebanon). The doctrine called for the use of overwhelming force against civilian targets and civilian infrastructure (an international crime) claiming that because rockets may be fired towards Israel from civilian areas, those areas are then considered military targets. This doctrine was utilized in repeated Gaza wars between 2008 and 2021, up until the outbreak of the latest war and genocide in Gaza that began in October 2023, when the Dahiya Doctrine was essentially expanded and made so much more extreme to the point of targeting the entirety of Gaza for destruction. It was a criminal doctrine that paved the way for Israel’s most criminal war to date.
Eisenkot also joined the Netanyahu government’s so-called ‘war cabinet’ at the start of the Gaza genocide, alongside another notable former army chief-turned-politician, Benny Gantz. HIs son was even killed while deployed in Gaza as part of the Israeli invasion and occupation army of extermination and destruction. But after falling out with Netanyahu, as everyone who works with the country’s ultimate liar does, Eisenkot retired from the war cabinet in 2024. But due to his connections with the IDF, which is still the most trusted institution among Israelis (despite being the number one child murdering institution on the planet, and a perpetrator of genocide), Eisenkot has been rising in popularity, with his party polling just one seat ahead of Netanyahu’s Likud.
In reaction to the attacks from Netanyahu and his rightwing coalition, Eisenkot has assured potential voters that he is no leftist and certainly doesn’t support Palestinian rights to self determination and liberty. “I have never in all my 66 years said the words ‘Palestinian state’,” he recently declared in an interview.
Haaretz: “Netanyahu’s Biggest Challenger: Who Is Gadi Eisenkot and What Does He Stand For?“
This article in Israel’s oldest national newspaper, Haaretz, reported that Eisenkot’s party platform includes efforts to make Israel a regional power, “to expand the circle of peace, to ensuire a solid Jewish majority for generations and establish Israel’s position in the world.” His party platform says very little about the Palestinians, whether those residing inside Israel with Israeli citizenship (who he proposes should be drafted into the IDF (of which they have been exempted to date), but affirmed he does not support a two-state solution, and supports Israeli Jewish settlements in the occupied West Bank, which he refers to as “Judea and Samaria.”
What do these stories tell us about Eisenkot and the upcoming elections?
Firstly, it’s that Israel’s conduct in war and toward the Palestinians is not a government issue, or a purely Netanyahu issue, but an Israeli political and society-wide issue. Getting rid of the Netanyahu government might remove a fascist government from power, but it does not change the fact that Israel is a genocidal state and society. Perhaps the degrees of violence, brutality, racism and genocidal behaviour may change, but the problem is institutional and social. For Israel to truly have change, meaningful change, it would essentially require an almost revolutionary movement and transformation. But there is nothing remotely resembling this inside Israel.
To be sure, there are those inside Israel who acknowledge and oppose the country’s genocide against the Palestinians and ever-expanding imperial presence in Lebanon, Syria, and its criminal war of aggression against Iran, but they are sadly a tiny minority of the population, incapable of effecting real political and social change. The implications of this are that Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians and its imperial footprint in the region will not be abandoned with a change of government, and that change cannot actually come from within Israel. This makes it all the more important for the country’s major arms dealers, financial supporters, and diplomatic partners (the US, Germany, Italy, UK, France, Canada, EU, etc.) to exert extreme efforts and pressure upon the country to make profound transformations. But there is clearly no indication that this is happening. Public opinion across the west, including the United States, has turned steadily and increasingly against Israel and its conduct, but that has yet to turn into policy change. So while Israel has elections on the horizon, it may be elections in the United States, Germany and elsewhere that are ultimately more important to forcing change inside Israel itself.
The sad reality is that no matter who is elected and what parties come to govern the country, the genocide in Gaza, ethnic cleansing in the West Bank, occupations in Lebanon and Syria and wars of aggression against Iran are likely to continue.
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