On Saturday, a rocket struck a soccer field in the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights. At least twelve people were killed, mostly teenagers and children. Israel blamed the Lebanese paramilitary group Hezbollah for the attack. Hezbollah denied the charge and claimed Israel’s vaunted Iron Dome technology malfunctioned and hit the soccer field. On Tuesday, Israel hit the southern suburbs of Lebanon’s capital, Beirut, with an air strike. The bombing killed civilians and possibly a Hezbollah commander.
However, the Golan Heights bombing, which Israel might frame as the “inciting incident” for an all-out war with Lebanon, highlights Israel’s obsession with a sort of imperial techno-optimism that could very well be its undoing.
According to the International Relations and Critical Political Economy scholar Timothy Di Muzio, techno-optimism is a “collective image” in the minds of people who “believe that markets and corporations, coordinated by the price system, will find a solution” to our biggest problems.
Implicit in Di Muzio’s work is a government supremacist ethos:
“…the construction of a highly uneven and hierarchical petro-market civilization on a global scale was never dislocated from the apparatuses of force and the near-continual application of violence based on constant technological innovation in the leading belligerent states. As Luxemburg pointed out long ago, ‘[F]orce is the only solution open to capital: the accumulation of capital, seen as a historical process, employs force as permanent weapon…”
While it is true that the history of economic development has been interwoven with the history of state violence, “capital” is not dependent on “force as permanent weapon.” First of all, capital lacks agency; money and resources aren’t doing stuff to people. Secondly, individuals and corporate agents (which do have agency) always have a choice: interact with other individuals and corporate agents voluntarily or resort to initiatory aggression. There is always a choice, except for the state. The state by its very nature must employ “force as permanent weapon.” If the state ceases to resort to initiatory aggression (especially taxation) it ceases to be the state. It ceases to exist.
The state of Israel has been pondering and threatening a full-scale invasion (or Gaza-like, scorched earth bombing campaign) in Lebanon for months. And now the attack appears imminent, which is 100% insane. Yes, war is the health of the state, but as Institute Director Scott Horton puts it, “War is the health of the state unless you really lose, then you’re dead.” An Israeli escalation in Lebanon could make Beirut look like Gaza, but it risks (to the point of guaranteeing) mass casualties in Israel and the possible strategic defeat of the state. And yet, the Israeli state thinks it can win a war against Hezbollah (despite losing a war against Hezbollah in 2006) due to its advanced technology.
According to the Israel cheerleader Center for Strategic & International Studies (CSIS), Hezbollah is “technologically outmatched by the IDF, which has long prepared for a rematch of the 2006 war, has been engaged in a war with Hamas since October 2023, and will be able to bring much greater firepower to bear from its land- and air-based platforms.”
Israel sure does have some fancy platforms, such as the Merkava IV Tank, the Heron TP and the Skylark I-LE UAVs, the F16I Sufa and of course, “the most technologically advanced fighter jet ever made”, the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter. But even with all this, it hasn’t defeated Hamas.
The F-35 is a good example of why this is the case. They call it a fighter but it’s really a bomber. They call it a fighter because that sounds cooler for the pilots and implies Top Gun type action. But F-35s aren’t getting into “dogfights” with enemy aircraft. That has never happened. And if it did happen, the F-35 would be in trouble.
F-35 enthusiasts will claim it is unfair to call their beloved jet a bomber just because it’s never been in air-air combat. It has been in air-ground combat, after all. Yes, meaning dropping bombs on ground targets, which for Israel in Gaza means dropping bombs on women and children in tents. Think about that. The U.S. taxpayer has officially spent more than a trillion dollars on the F-35 and Israel uses it to bomb women and children in tents. The U.S. taxpayer might as well fund time travel technology so the Israelis can fly their F-35s back 40,000 years ago and incinerate some hunter-gatherers.
Israel also has nuclear weapons, and it is definitely crazy enough to use them. Such dramatic escalation would most likely bring other actors into the struggle, such as Pakistan (which has nuclear weapons), Turkey (which could get nuclear weapons from Pakistan) and Iran (which knows how to make nuclear weapons). Basically, if the gloves come off then the gloves are coming off.
But the real technology Israel is obsessed with is the state itself. Ever since the first archaic states arose to “manage” the new agricultural technology with their “civilizations of certainty” the mouthpieces of state have been promising humanity prosperity. Sometimes the state takes credit for everything good. Sometimes it takes credit merely for providing the prerequisite security and stability necessary for peaceful and productive people to do their thing. But the state is a real-life Tower of Babel that delivers famine, slavery, war, absurdity, and “apparatuses of force.”
Israel might also be deliriously counting on America to wage war alongside it:
“Media reports said the US was warning Israel against targeting Beirut, but the US is still providing unconditional military aid and not using any of its leverage to rein in Israel. The US has also previously ensured it would back Israel in a full-blown war in Lebanon.“
Israel might be the “Jewish State” and there might be a tendency to emphasize the “Jewish.” But it is the “State” that should be emphasized and feared. The Israeli state, enamored of its own structure and wedded to fancy technology, is marching toward the abyss. At least it’s optimistic.
