Being caught in the middle is a tough place no matter where you are, but when the issues are existential, nobody wants to concede you might be right because that means that their very strong feelings are wrong. This is why I generally insist on not talking about Israel in person anymore except a few close friends and my immediate family with whom I can't avoid the topic. Literally the entire world wants you to tell them what you think privately, and it's always just a smokescreen for them to tell you why you're wrong. What's the point of enduring all this public online heat if we have to endure it person-to-person too?
I have never been completely sanguine on this war, and until the far-right threat is gone from the Israeli government, I never will be. Jews do not endure this ever-present specter of death only to become the death we fear, but I will never apologize for Jews doing what they have to to survive, so long as it's essential for its survival. Well off socialists will never understand what it means to live in a dangerous neighborhood, and neighborhoods don't get more dangerous than Israel's. Doing nothing can get you killed. Doing the wrong thing can get you killed too.
But with the news that Israel has killed a top Iranian official in Syria, my willingness to spill blood for this fight gets thinner until Netanyahu goes. There is no point of killing people except if lives are ultimately saved, and this ends more lives than it saves.
I could be wrong, but I don't think Israel meant to kill this guy. I don't think it was a targeted assassination. I think he simply happened to be at a Syrian base from where Israeli forces were worried weapons of mass destruction could be deployed, and the whole reason he was there was to inspect the base for its fitness to deploy exactly such weapons.
They did not know a high Iranian official would be on the premises, and as usual these days, some high ups in Israel fucked up. This time, it would not surprise me if the Netanyahu administration and the military pretended their incompetence was deliberate.
But this is exactly the excuse Hezbollah needs to saturate the north of Israel with missiles, any of which have a much better chance of having WMD's attached than any missile coming from Gaza. Will they? Probably not, not yet at least, but the clock is ticking, and the whole world is getting closer to a point of no return.
What is the point in supporting a war when you can't get rid of leaders who are, at best, willfully incompetent?
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