All Zone Media.
It's it could happen here. It's the podcast.
I didn't write an intro for this because everything, everything incredibly sucks. This is the podcast where bad things happen. I'm your host with me as Garrison.
Yeah, it's been a lot of bad things the past week, past year, but the past week and a half it's been pretty bad.
Yeah.
And one of the things that's been very bad is literally everything Israel has been up to, like I mean, since it was founded, but the last three four weeks somehow things have gotten worse, which is a sort of unbelievable thing to say about a genocide, but it's expanding. So yeah, there is at the end of this one of the most bizarre trunk quotes I've ever seen. So that's my promise to you to stick with this. But
oh boy, everything is very very bad. So we now have I guess I don't even know if French is the right way to talk about this, but what we have in Gaza, which is where the main Israeli offensive is going right now, well we'll get into that. There's a bunch of stuff in Lebanon too, where they're pulling troops to but in Gaza, everything just continues to get worse, even though so these Raelis have pulled out some troops from Gaza, but they're also still making another offensive into
northern Gaza. And the thing about the way that the Israelis make offensive into places is that the thing that the Israelis do is they just immediately start shooting at hospitals.
So that's been a big part of what's happening.
Something that used to be like controversial and like widely news, where the a year ago at taxon hospitals now have become so normalized, to be sensitized that it doesn't even make headlines, which that's been one of the most indicative factors that this has gone about as bad as it
could have. I remember a year ago, we were like debating whether or not the Israeli military intentionally like struck a hospital, and this was like this was like a week's long debate trying to figure out what exactly happened. And now attacks on hospitals are just complete commonplace. It's like we've just totally lost.
Yeah, And I mean, you know, like it's not even just that that the Israelis are deliberately targeting hospitals, it's that the temporary facilities people have been trying to set up because the hospitals are being blown up are also being.
Attacked, Yeah, which has also been going on for ages, yeah, almost a year now, like almost immediately as soon as like humanitarian aid and like and like like impromptu medical tents were set up, those were also the targets. And this is also just continued.
Yeah.
And I think the thing that's you know, it's bleak about it, right is like, I mean, I mean, it's not the thing. The thing that's bleak about it is that they're blowing up hospitals. But I mean, we've reached a point into this where it's not even user but be the Israelis don't even like attempt to justify it anymore. I mean, if you if you remember a year ago when they were doing this, it'd be all of the stuff about how, oh we found homas tunnels under the hospitals, and there's just not.
E vent anymore.
They're just they're just shooting at hospitals. Sometimes they give evacuation orders. They've been That's the other thing that's been happening periodically is the Israelis keep basically you know, in places in northern Gaza. They'll be like, everyone has to leave now, and then they'll bombit it and they'll keep
bombing it. Part of the thing about covering Gaza right is all of the stuff that we're saying is stuff that was a major news story like six months ago and is no longer a major news story because the
slaughter has become just sort of so rutinized. But you know, so people are fleeing from northern Gaza into what's supposed to be the safe zone in central Gaza, except the Israelis keep shooting at their refugee camps in central Gaza, so it's not actually there's there's not actually a place you can be in Gaza where you're not getting bombed. What there is is some places sometimes are less bond
than other places. And you know, I think there had been a tiny amount of hope that the only conceivable upside about the invasion lebanonmal that the would be a pull out of troops and we'd see less offensive, But you know, they've just been escalating bombing campaigns and are doing some offensive anyways. So yeah, there's there's there's continuingly sort of is really attacks into into Partian North and Gaza.
The other big thing, and this is what most of this episode is going to be about, is a new front after already having like having this entire thing in Gaza. There was also like an invasion of the West Bank, which again is like, I don't know how to express how insane it is to have a war where you're nominally fighting against Hamas and then invade the West Bank, a place where there isn't Hamas. But they've done that too.
There's been parts of the West Bank, there's been a bunch of really troops and you know, we know they've been fighting in Yemen as much bombings in Yemen, but also now they've just straight up invaded Lebanon. And this is the sort of chain of events of this was I don't know if kicked off is the right word, but it was. It was dramatically accelerated by the assassination of Fassan Nosraala, who is I think most.
People are aware that he's the head of Hesbalon.
Has been the head of his blow since like nineteen ninety two, which is longer than anyone who's on this episode right now has been alive.
Was this the one who was killed in those like apartment like carpet carpet bombings. Yeah yeah, so I mean yeah, even still, assassination is a strong word for or I guess a light word for just bombing. Like it was like what three large apartment complexes.
Yeah, they just obliterated a bunch of complexes with like something like eighty bunker busters.
Yeah.
So this is actually the second time that the Israelis have just straight up killed someone they were supposed to nominally be negotiating with. They killed the head of Hamas like in Iran. So you know, we talked about on this show the initial wave of attacks on Lebanon, which is the sort of the Pager explosions, and the fallow up to the Pager explosions was that they figured out what bunker that ISRAELA was in and they just killed him.
This is extremely bad for a lot of reasons, one of which is that has blawed kind of hadn't really been on full war footing until this point. Like they've been doing a bunch of rocket attacks on northern Israel, right and there've been these sort of exchanges of rocket fire across the border, but they hadn't really escalated beyond that.
And then the Israelis were like, well, just fuck it, okay, we want our invasion of Lebanon, and Raala was kind of like, I don't know if like auderating force is quite the right term here, but his policy wasn't that Hesbolah was going to fight a total war against Israel, and the Israeli just fucking murdered him anyways, So we should probably talk about who Nocerala is. He's not from like the original Hesbela cadres from from the original lebaneseivil
war when it emerges is an eighty two. He's not from that cadre, but he's a pretty old school Hesbola guy by this point. He's you know, I've talking about like he's been in charge of Hesbelag for fucking ever. Like I am not old enough to remember a time when he was not in charge of Hesblah because I
wasn't born yet, I don't know. He's he's one of the people who's seen Hesbelah's sort of expansion and also seen Hesbelod be able to be like the only of the sort of major Lebanese political parties who are in the negotiations to end the civil war. He kind of oversaw the process of Hesblah being like the only armed party like left in in Lebanon other than like the regular army.
Right.
He was also very famously in charge of Hesbela's I don't know how exactly you wanted.
I don't know.
There's a whole bunch of stuff about how the war in two thousand and six started. But in two thousand and six Israel made this attempt to sort of like do their big antie Hesbelah push. They invaded Lebanon, and Israel didn't do very well. They were expecting and I think what most people were expecting has Bla to fight like, you know, like a gorilla army right doing hit a run attacks, doing doing the sort of like the whole sort of last century of gorilla hit and run campaigns.
And they didn't do that. They basically they sat there. It fought like a conventional army with a bunch of bunker networks. And the Israelis did extremely poorly in that war. And I think this is influenced a lot of the way that people were thinking about how this how this fight was going to work, and it hasn't. But you know the fact that I was able to sort of stave off the initial attack, and then the Israelis spent like forty more days doing a bombing campaign and everyone
just called it quits. Was absolutely huge for Hesbelaws a political force. Unfortunately for them, I guess they burned an unbelievable amount of that political capital that they'd gotten from being really the first people in a long time to like actually be able to viably claim that they defeated Israel.
And I mean, it's obviously like both both sides of that declared victory, but Hesbelood puts up a better fight against the Israelis, and like it's like stops their ground advance in a way that like was almost unimaginable at
that point. Even though Hesbola had sort of fought pretty well during the Lebanies of the world, is better than most of the other sort of like anti Israeli factions that weren't a state, and even I mean even most of the states that have fought issue have done extremely poorly. We're going to go to ads and then when we come back, we're going to talk a bit about how has Blood's position weakened and how the Israelis have just sort of decided that this is a moment they can.
Just murder everyone in.
So we are back with more I guess, very very short summary of what has been up to over the
last about thirty years. So part of the reason that things haven't been going enormously well for HESBLA is that a lot of their capacity was weakened by the fact that HESBA law during the Ausurian Civil War through their entire backing behind the SOD And this was like hideously unpopular for I think, I think reasons that are obvious most people listening, But one of the big ones is it's hideously unpopular in like in Palestine, God I Thine who ran the poll, but there so there's a very
famous pole that was showing like the disapproval rating in
paleside different world leaders. I mean, they didn't pull in that in Yahoo because obviously, like isn't that Yahoo, But like the two highest ones that weren't at Yahoo, where it was like Biden at eighty percent, and then slightly higher than Biden was Bashar al Assad because he is hideously unpopular, partially for a bunch of shit that he did in a very very large palasinine refugee camp there that you know, has belat fucking backed them for and so has well spent a lot of the last decade
just sort of running around Syria backing the Assaud machime and that I don't know, Garrison, I that doesn't make you popular anywhere other than like extremely weird sections.
Of the American left. Yeah, I mean, I guess some of the American right.
When you're backing a guy who is just like who is doing a thing the israelis due like obviously on a smaller scale, but like shooting up like Palsaden refugee camp, He's not going to be normally popular.
Whenever there's a guy who's like seriously maimed your family members, Yeah, it's pretty pretty easy to dislike him.
Yeah, and like whatever things that's going on in the story that like we need a fucking seven depart episode to talk about. But Syria occupied a bunch of Lebanon for a long time, and that also like hasn't made him enormously popular in the region.
But you know, Heslo's.
Position is that they had like they have the slogan that goes the road to Jerusalem runs to a Lepo, which is just like just not how any of this has worked, it's been a complete fiasco, has lost.
Performance in Syria hasn't been very good.
And it can explain what that phrase means.
Yeah. Yeah, So so the point of this basically was that in order to defeat the Zionists through some incredibly murky logic, like the Asade regime had to be kept in power, and this was this was a sort of the justification that was used by Hesbela to just send a bunch of troops there to coordinate with a bunch
of other different groups there. And I mean, like it's it's a really terrible decision, both on a moral and a strategic level, in the sense that like it caused a rift between what it's supposed to be the resistance factions in Palestine, and it just killed a bunch of people.
And like the Iranians are sending I don't actually know howny people know about the story, but one of the like terrifying things that's happening in this is that there's a bunch of refugees from Afghanistan you flee to Iran, and the Iranians like basically conscrict a bunch of these people and send them into Syria with rifles. So it's like these people are like fighting alongside has balon Hesla.
They don't do great because Hezeblah has always been good at fighting like fairly obviously morally justified defensive wars inside of Lebanon. And then they go off and fight basically like a semi imperial war in Syria.
It's fucking shit show.
And this has been extremely bad for their capacity and it also really hurt has Blot politically because again it was also very very unpopular in Lebanon.
And this kind of all leads us.
To the last few weeks of like terrible shit that's been happening, where yeah, these Reeli's just fucking launched this hideous bombing campaign, I mean just really just all over Lebanon, right, you know, most of the most of the reporting has been about their attacks in the south, but like they've bombed the capital, they've bombed Tripoli, they've killed I think so far it's one of these things where the death counts kind of have stopped updating, but in the last
few days it looks like they've killed about two thousand people. It's not enormously clear, but yeah, things that things have gotten extremely unbelievably bad. And this has also really, I think been a kind of mask off moment for both the US and the Israelis, where all of the things that they've been pretending for the last year, they've just
straight up saying that they don't believe anymore. I think that the best indicator of this is there's a White House press conference and Matthew Miller, who's one of the White House spokesperson answered a question about, yeah, it's just about the conflicts, and he said, quote, yes, we do so port Israel launching these incursions to degrade has blows infrastructure, which like kind of sounds like a standard like the US word Israel thing, But if you actually read into
what that's saying, he's saying the US's official position is no longer ret there trying to get a ceasefire, right, That's that's what he's saying. This is immediate and active support for the israelis not not only not attempting to end the war, but expanding it into Lebanon. And this is something that like hadn't been in an explicit like war goal for for Israel sort of until this point.
The line had always been that the point of this was to bring back the hostages, right, but like there's no fucking hostages in Lebanon, Like there isn't there just aren't.
Right, That's that's not how any of this works.
And at this point all of the sort of pretenses falling away and it it just degrading into this pure slaughter. And when we when we come back from this ADS, we're gonna wrap up with more stuff that mostly sucks. And also Trump's latest thing on this, which is very weird.
We are back.
So as this has been going on in the past couple of days, Netanyahu posted a I don't even know how to describe it, one of the weirdest videos I've seen since like that insane Kevin Bacon won. That's just him threatening Lebanon. He says, quote, you have an opportunity to save Lebanon before it falls into the abyss of a long war that will lead to destruction and suffering like we see in Gaza. She's just straight up threatening Lebanon. As as Israeli troops are moving across the borders or
shoes for occupying or tempted occupied cities. He's just straight up saying, like Lebanon needs to just throw out Hesbela somehow, even though it's just like a political party. They need to completely destroy Hesbela somehow Otherwise Israel is going to do to Lebanon when they've done to Gaza, and that, I don't know is a unbelievably hideous expansion of the war.
Could you give some context for like why Israel is making moves into Lebanon. We know like their targeting has been but there's also like a degree of territorial dispute over where Israel ends and Lebanon begins. Yeah, that Israel has been kind of like wanting to increase tensions over for a while, and it feels like they're just using the war in Gaza as a cover to also try to claim like territory of southern Lebanon.
Yeah, And I mean this gets into so I think there's three kind of reasons, and I think that are all overlapping factors for different groups of people, you know, because like different Israeli political factions, different sort of strategic like elements of the military set, etc. Are doing things for sometimes overlapping sometimes different reasons. Like there's the obvious one, which is like, Okay, there's a dislike for has blawed.
That's been funneled because a bunch of people in settlements in northern Israell have been like have been evacuated because they keep getting bombed, right, and those people are unbelievably pissed off, and they've been pushing for this for a long time. There's the second one, which is I think the one that liberals use as is like the excuse
for the entire the entire genocide was wrong. But it is also true that net and Yahoo does like personally need this war to keep going because the moment the war.
Stops, he's gone, He's screwed. Yeah.
Yeah, So like that that's a personal extentive for net and Yahu. There's also another one outside of the political pressure from from the northern settlers and you know, the general idea has bluffing and net Yahoo personally, which is like is really so doas have always been. It's it's most extreme, like most sort of far right, most genocidal like political element right. But increasingly we're watching them get radicalized even further in real time, and we're watching them
become increasingly powerful. And one of the things that those people want is they have this unbelievably deranged thing that I mean, I guess all nationalist movements eventually get to there greater whatever your country is thing, But they've entered the greater Israel phase where they're talking about just like you're talking about Israel as this as a state that's supposed to like encompass like all of Lebanon again, like I mean, I've seen so many different maps like encompassing
a bunch of partial Syria.
Well, I mean, and this is also what's influenced their continued attacks in the West Bank, specifically in the past few months, where they're similarly using what's going on in Gaza, like hiding behind their own atrocities in Gaza as a cover to like try to actually claim more territory in the West Bank, or at least at least push more of like the Palestinian people out of their homes to expand the Israeli settlements. So I think both of these
are kind of happening for similar reasons. And Israel's trying to like just weaponize the actual atrocities that are going on in Gaza as a big shield because those are getting so much more attention. Trying to get away with this territorial expansion in other areas, not just the Strip.
Yeah, And I mean also I should say that there's a lot of a lot of the people on the ground are pretty convinced that the Israelis are trying to basically just like completely ethnically cleanse like parts of.
The Strip so they can annex it.
And I mean it's not something that we like have, like we don't have like a document from Israeli High command that says we're going to annex all of this stuff, but it's it's something that's very least consistent with everything they've been doing. And this is also like another sort of one of the cyclical factors here. This is a cyclical factor behind the settlements. We've talked about this back when we did episodes about the West Bank, is that
the Israelly housing market is such a fucking disaster. And this this is something that you know, like this kind
of real estate speculation shape. And in the same way that like George Washington, as a real estate speculator was was sort of like motivated to do more attacks on an indigenous land in the US, and this sort of like field westward expansion is all these land speculators, you know, moved out, and people who couldn't afford like houses in like Tel Aviv and Jerusalem where housing prices are really high.
Those people have become this political force to keep pushing this and this is you know, just fueling the expansion of the Israeli occupation into more and more places.
Yeah.
So right now, where we're at with Lebanon is that one point two million people have fled their homes, which is I mean, even if like the Israelis had literally done nothing else in the entire time that this has been happening, right, forcing one point two million people to flee their homes, is it an unimaginable level of suffering. And this is like just effectively being reported as a footnote in the fact that they've fucking done all of this other shit.
And just in the past week and a half, they've killed thirteen hundred people. Yeah, it's insane, And like that's more than the number of people who were killed in
Israel on October like seventh. Yeah, that just doesn't matter because of because of like all of the racialized aspects of how of how like israel genocide campaign has been able to operate, Like you're not going to see memorials in the States or the thirteen for the thirteen hundred people killed in Lebanon, the same way that we will for October seventh.
Yeah, you might get them on a college campus for the cops destroy it.
But like that's and that's just in one week.
It's over.
They've done over a thousand air strikes the past week. They've killed all these people, and that's I don't yeah, I don't know what else to say.
Yeah, I'm going to close by on a slightly lighter note from this one of the like even by Trump's standards, an extremely weird quote that he gave we Gaza. This is from The Guardian. Quote asked by Hewitt, which is a guy whose podcast he was on, if Gaza could be transformed into Monaco if properly rebuilt, Trump replied, quote, it could be better than Monaco. It has the best location in the Middle East, the best water, the best everything. It's got it it's the best. I've said for years.
I've been there, and it's rough. It's a rough place. Before all the attacks and back and forth it's happened over the last couple of years. He went on, I mean they have the back of a plant facing the ocean. You know, there was no ocean as far as that was concerned. They never took advantage of it. You know, as a developer. It could be the most beautiful place, the weather, the water, the whole thing in the climate. It was so beautiful, it could be the best thing in the Middle East.
Yeah.
I mean that's in line with stuff that Kushner has been saying for a long time and how they are hoping to turn Gaza into a part of Israel, specifically to do real estate development, to turn it into like a resort, to turn it into a golf course, and they're willing to kill tens of thousands of people to do it. And that is like the primary driver at least like for them, for like Trump's team, for why they are they're very happy to see in NATANYAHUU just do whatever he wants.
Yeah, And I think there's something else here, which is that like a lot of the kind of Marxist analysis of this from like a very sutent kind of Marxist has been about how Palestine has been rendered as like surplus population. This is the population that has been kicked out of the circuit of a capital accumulation they're not necessary for capital to reproduce itself to make more capital, and so no one cares if you kill them. And I think that's wrong, and I think this quote is
actually evidence of why they're wrong. Like this, You know, these people think purely, and like people like Trump right, think purely in terms of economic assets, and there are there's an unbelievable amount of economic assets, like in Palestine that a regime that is like maybe only thirty percent less, like hideously cruel and murderous, like could have turned into
viable economic engines. But the Israelis don't want that. They have made a decision, like an actual conscious decision that instead of trying to expect people for labor, they'd rather just fucking kill them all and try to steal their land.
Right.
They have decided that this fucking real estate speculation bullshit on a bunch of land that they're taking by just fucking slaughtering all of its inhabitants is more efficient for them than even doing fucking regular capitalism. And that's an absolutely fucking hideous note. And it's the kind of thing that Biden is saying, okay too, and Trump fucking loves because fundamentally, like Trump's fucking real estate brain, is pro genocide and Biden doesn't give a shit about stopping them,
and he's also pro this. So yeah, the gears of genocide continue to grind. These Reelis are plotting their attack against Iran that they're going to do in response to Ron shooting missiles at them, in response to them killing the leader of Festivo La. I don't know by the time this comes out, it's possible that attack will have happened.
They're going to do something. It's going to make everything worse.
But yeah, until then, this has been an update on the genocide and Palestine and the new invasion of Lebanon.
It Could Happen Here is a production of cool Zone Media.
For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website Coolzonemedia dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can now find sources for It Could Happen here listed directly in episode descriptions. Thanks for listening.