The Daily Cartoon and Live Briefing: Tuesday, September 24, 2024

Editorial Notebook: In Lebanon, you can time an Israeli assault to American communiques there. You can time then to when the American Embassy lets its citizens know that they should get the hell out. Like when rats sense something is amiss on ship and scurry. It’s Lebanon’s version of the cone of probability–the National Hurricane Center’s cone–sitting all this months just far enough to let one’s guard down, then shifting just enough to make you its bulls eye. It’s happened, like clockwork, before every major Israeli assault. There was 1978, there was 1982, there was 1996, there was 2006. Those were the major ones, unlike the daily insults of Israeli jets’ violation of Lebanese airspace, when they like to break the sound barrier just to frighten everyone below, animals included, their literal daily blasts of arrogance, or unlike the regular bombing runs any time a Hezbollah militant happens to spit past the border fence. The hospitals literally prepared for the attack before it happened the same way we prepare for hurricanes. They knew it was coming. This is where I’m required to say–to denounce–Hezbollah, as most Lebanese who aren’t Shiites always do, in peace or war: we hate Hezbollah. But we also understand its violence. Unlike the PLO< Hezbollah is indigenous to the Lebanese south. Its fief is endlessly violated by Israel’s impudence. In this case Netanyahu has been looking to get something started: he is seeing his massacres in Gaza peter out. He needs to stretch out the killing, at least until rump is elected. That’s his end game: his reset, if Trump regains the White House. But he cant make peace until then, can’t give Biden and the Democrats the satisfaction. He needs war. So does Trump. So Monday he unleashed his well-trained killers. They struck at least 800 sites (at least at the time when I was writing this), putting in motion the other ritual: if Americans fly out and ship out, the Lebanese jam the highways, heading north, though that’s not always wise. The Israelis like to strike highways. They like to demolish infrastructure, not just human beings, not just children. Reporters are calling it the deadliest day since 2006, when George W. Bush and Coni Rice stood by and watched it happen, a clap short of cheering. Hundreds dead already, a thousand injured. Mostly with American-made ordnance. Over here the fuckers will justify it, repeat the old mantras about terrorists and  Israeli self-defense and all other tired tropes trotted out of AIPAC’s basements for easy consumption, and the days will accumulate with Hezbollah missiles one way and Israeli attacks the other until Israel, it its eternal imbecility and lust for mass murder, invades again, to gain nothing more than it has in Gaza. The juxtaposition is just too bewildering. 

—P.T.