President Lyndon Johnson stood before the American people late at night sixty years ago today, on 4 August 1964, and lied. Two American warships, the USS Maddox and the USS Turner Joy, had come under an “unprovoked attack” by North Vietnamese gunboats in international waters two days before, leaving the United States with no choice but to respond with military force to defend its ships and support its embattled ally in South Vietnam.

“The determination of all Americans to carry out our full commitment to the people and to the government of South Viet-Nam will be redoubled by this outrage,” the President intoned. “Yet our response, for the present, will be limited and fitting. We Americans know, although others appear to forget, the risks of spreading conflict. We still seek no wider war.”

It was a lie. At the time of its engagement with the North Vietnamese navy, the Maddox was well within the twelve-mile territorial limit claimed by North Vietnam and most other countries. The Maddox skirted close to Hong Me Island, where South Vietnamese commandos and their US Special Forces advisors had raided a North Vietnamese installation just two days before.

In the early morning before the attack on the Maddox, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara recommended to President Johnson that the Navy ships steam closer to the Island to prompt a North Vietnamese response. Gunboats closed on the Maddox as it steamed past in North Vietnamese territorial waters; the US Navy destroyer fired a warning shot, and the North Vietnamese fired back.

With the attack on the Turner Joy – which, it turned out, never actually happened – President Johnson had a provocation that he could bring to Congress and ask for a resolution to deploy American military force in Southeast Asia. It passed less than a week later, empowering the President to “take all necessary measures to repel any armed attack against the forces of the United States and to prevent further aggression.”

Johnson sought “no wider war,” and Vice President Hubert Humphrey repeated that formula six months later as US Marines prepared to land at Da Nang to begin a military commitment in Southeast Asia that would balloon to more than a half-million US troops within four years. President Richard Nixon promised that there would be no wider war as he secretly ordered the saturation bombing and invasion of neutral Cambodia five years later.

When this “narrow” war finally ended in 1975, following the US military withdrawal in 1973, some three million Vietnamese were dead, and as many as two million Cambodians would follow over the next three years in the genocide set off by American bombs.

There is no such thing as “no wider war,” it consumes lives as a wildfire consumes forests, and we should be suspicious when leaders claim that it is even possible, whether that war is in eastern Europe or the Middle East. And Benjamin Netanyahu and his gang, as they claim to the world that the war that has already killed almost 40,000 people in Gaza is merely a defensive action, are claiming it now. The purpose, Netanyahu insists, is merely to ensure the State of Israel’s security and to “eliminate Hamas.”

Netanyahu is being disingenuous. A “wider war” is exactly what he, his political allies, and his supporters in the State of Israel want more than anything. Netanyahu is many things – deeply dishonest, bloodthirsty, power-hungry, and racist – but he is not naïve. He could not have survived almost two decades in the chaotic melee of Israeli politics and served some sixteen years as the State of Israel’s prime minister without the gift of canny realism. He knows how the game is played.

And he knew from the beginning that he could not get away with slaughtering tens of thousands of Palestinians in Gaza without provoking the State of Israel’s enemies.[i] It has happened before: when Israeli bombs have fallen on Gaza, Hezbollah rockets have flown across the Litani River into the Israeli north and Iran makes noises about how this time, they will strike back.

Most of the other powerful Muslim states in the Middle East usually stay quiet. Syria is preoccupied with its own self-immolation, of course, but Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States mumble some curses, knowing full-well on what side their bread is buttered (the American side).[ii] Besides, for all their pious pronouncements, most Arab states regard the Palestinians as an annoying problem that they wish would just go away.

Iran’s restraint and the willingness of Arab states like Qatar to broker a ceasefire rather than rattle their sabers has doubtless come as something of a disappointment to Netanyahu and his gang. How can they expand the war into a vast regional conflict that will ensure their power and draw in the United States to defend its “strategic interests” if nobody rises to the bait? Netanyahu’s whole pitch to the Israeli electorate is that he is the strong man who will ensure their “security,” and that only works if they feel insecure.

So, for the last few years, the Israeli prime minister and his henchmen – since he really is the kind of person who has henchmen rather than friends and allies – has hammered home the point that “everyone is coming for us!” BDS, American liberals, Diaspora Jews and, of course, the imagined legions of Palestinian terrorists (since, in his telling, all Palestinians are terrorists) who are about to charge over the minefields, fences, barriers, and walls that ring the State of Israel and sweep Israelis into the sea!

Yet, that was never enough. The BDS battalions in their imagined jackboots (dressed, no doubt, like the demonic Antifa of the MAGA imagination) never came. Nor did the “Un-Jews” of the diaspora, who are notable mostly for ignoring the State of Israel. And while the Palestinian terrorists did come on 7 October 2023, they were beaten back, and the State of Israel’s borders were quickly secured.

Security was restored and that undermined the Netanyahu Gang’s narrative that Israelis are always insecure – thus requiring the strong man to ensure security. Even the War on Gaza has become a farce, a grinding campaign of extermination and destruction that leaves many Israelis wondering if the Palestinians in Gaza really remain much of a threat. Besides, after pounding the rubble of Gaza into finer rubble, the IDF is running out of things to bomb.

Not even Hezbollah, whose artillery and rocket barrages across the Lebanese border has killed some 21 Israelis, seems willing to cooperate. The IDF’s F-16 fighter bombers and long-range artillery have responded, and they have killed several hundred Hezbollah militiamen and assorted bystanders, but the offensive that Netanyahu has warned of since 7 October has never come.

There has been no “wider war,” and Netanyahu and his henchmen, whose grip on power depends on an enduring, widening war, are getting frustrated. So, like Johnson and McNamara sixty years ago, the Israeli prime minister is desperately trying to provoke something that he can take to Israeli voters and say “see? You are insecure.” He needs Iran and Hezbollah to strike back with force.

How else to explain the IDF’s airstrike on Beirut (the capital of neutral Lebanon) last week to assassinate Hezbollah military commander Fuad Shukr? And the (yet unclaimed, but… really…) assassination of Hamas political leader Ismail Haniyeh in Teheran could only have the intention of scuttling a ceasefire agreement, thus keeping the War on Gaza going for a bit longer, and provoking Iran – the State of Israel’s “Great Satan” – into a response.

The State of Israel lives by war, and it will provoke a wider one if it is the last thing that Netanyahu does.

4 August 2024

***

An old friend sent me a message last week. He has been watching the War on Gaza with deep concern but has been keeping his own council in social media and in conversations with friends and family. He has ties to the Middle East, and is deeply committed to social justice and peace; he has many Jewish friends – including me – and has always felt an affinity for Jewish culture. And, at this moment in history, when Jewish identity and culture are entangled with the debates over the State of Israel and Zionism, he feels caught in the middle of a rancorous debate between pro-Palestinian and pro-Zionist friends.

This is an uncomfortable, but not an uncommon position. The passions are intense and, as much as we would like to think that the issues are a simple question of peace or war, life or death – and at a high level, they are – they are filtered though many layers of lived experience and culture. It is hard for Diaspora Jews, for example, to look at “the Jewish State” that they have been conditioned to revere since Hebrew School to suddenly turn around and see it for what the rest of us see.

That’s how ideology works. The defense of Palestinians can be interpreted as an attack on Israelis and thus an attack, if not on all Jews, then on some Jews. And given our history of oppression and antisemitism – still a murderous hate, as the 2016 Tree of Life shooting showed us so well – that is something that many of us feel keenly.

My friend has his own (non-Jewish) investments in the Middle East and also in his connections with Jewish culture. He is struck dumb, paralyzed by the political minefield. But he had one question: “I wonder how Zionists arrive at the conclusion that anti-Zionists are antisemitic. It seems like a broad assumption. Am I being naïve?”

No. My friend is not naïve. This is a question that I am asked all the time. “Is it true that criticism of the State of Israel is antisemitic?” This was my reply:

The idea that anti-Zionism, and even criticism of the State of Israel is antisemitism is a canard of what is often called Maximalist Zionism. This is the idea that the State of Israel is not only a Jewish State, but that it embodies all Jewish life; in effect, Jews and the State of Israel are one and the same. It’s a pretty noxious, somewhat totalitarian ideology whose logical extension is that Jews (like me) who are not Israelis and are not Zionists and completely committed to the State of Israel are not, in fact Jews. This used to be a fairly marginal, extremist view, but it has become mainstream Zionism.

It’s pretty run-of-the-mill tribal ethnonationalism, and not unlike Hindutva – “All India is Hindu and all Hindus are Indian” – and any other version of the same. There is a book to be written (in fact, I am writing it) about how the State of Israel colonized the Diaspora Jewish community and made Maximalist Zionism the dominant ideology of the “official” Jewish community (you know, community organizations, mainstream shuls).

The idea that Israel equals all Jews and that any criticism of the State of Israel is thus antisemitic has been very useful over the last few decades to deflect criticism of the Israeli government. And, the truth is, for many people in public life who are not Jewish – politicians, the commentariat – it can be difficult to untangle the complexities of the relationship between Judaism, Jews, and the State of Israel, especially given their lack of knowledge. So, the easiest thing to do is to go along with what the State of Israel says.

At one level, it’s pretty simple. Palestinians deserve to live in peace and govern themselves because all people deserve this. That is non-negotiable. But the road to this point – the many bad decisions, the betrayals, the “Great Game” of the superpowers, the legacies of colonialism and empire, the Nakba – is long and complex. So, too is the State of Israel’s colonization of the Diaspora Jewish community to use to its advantage in the United States and Canada. And it has been very successful. That’s what makes the issue so fraught for many of your Jewish friends; they have to reject everything that they have been taught about the State of Israel and Zionism.

And that is not so simple. It is a lot to ask of anyone… But surely not too much to ask?

The Israeli War on Gaza is an atrocity (as is all war) and must stop. It cannot achieve its stated objectives and can only destroy people’s lives. Palestinians have a right to national self-determination. They deserve a state and to live in peace, full stop. Saying so is not antisemitic.

31 July 2024

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[i] He almost certainly underestimated the condemnation from the non-Muslim world. But that for another day.

[ii] The days when the Arab OPEC states would take a real stand against the United States and its Allies, as they did in 1973, are long over.