Whatever happened to the Israeli Psyche?

The slaughter of Gaza has shown the world that Israel, those circle around Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, no longer function rationally. Their daily acts of ordering mayhem and destruction on a defenseless people in Gaza to get to Hamas, is surely signs of deep psychological disturbances. If not stopped, such atrocious behavior will lead to unforeseen instability in the region and the world. After all, Israel has the nuclear bomb and everybody knows it.    

I see the Israeli government and the war cabinet on my television set daily, in fact at least few times a day. I see Netanyahu and his ministers and military officers around the table nonchalantly discussing the war on Gaza. 

Unbelievable is the fact, and over the past eight months, they have assembled in unison, as if this is a series of business meetings discussing among themselves which parts of Gaza they should bomb today, what type of American missiles they should use and which homes harm should be inflicted on. 

These are supposedly top Israeli leaders reduced to a genocidal state of atrophy and political degeneration. Up till now they have not been able to get to the crux of the Hamas fighters and/or their whereabouts.

So, one can imagine them talking about which communities, blocks of flats, housing areas their so-called top brass and elite soldiers would bomb on that particular day. Is it fathomable? Its like George Orwell’s 1984 but in deadly style; here its Big Brother with flying machine guns, tanks on innocent civilians and so-called soldiers with pointed rifles ready to shoot men, women, children and babies.

Its madness, but statistics show it. The number of children that have been killed through Israeli barrel-bombing stands at 15,000 according to international statistics provided by the United Nations.

And the Israeli cabinet meetings go on today, next day, the next and the next, plotting what madness to carry out and follow. it’s a parody of massacres, while the world cheers on and justice is served. Its an odd form of confused chaos, staring from Israel to the White House and different capitals of the world. Who is playing the tune and who is listening to it?

But it’s willful, wonton, determined destruction and bloody killings, all for the sake of ending shady, terrorism and ghost-like terrorists.  

How do these people feel about themselves. Can they be called people, maybe humanoids in suits, shirts, slacks, shoes. How do these so-called politicians look at each other when they order the bombing of a row of houses in downtown Gaza, Khan Younis, Dier Al Balah, Beni Suhaila or Rafah. Where are the Hamas operatives. They are starving children and women, the mighty Israeli war machine is bombing at full speed and with no compunction!

 Don’t they watch their Godless bloody-infested handiwork? Surely, Israeli government leaders, if such an expression can be used, must see television images of those sprawled devastating photos and videoclips on the social media.

Human hatred per excellence. Maybe they are so blinded by rage and are prepared to see the worst kind of genocidal atrocities even if they are innocent babies. This war on Gaza has shown the distorted Israeli psyche of the mad people in power which means their indifference to human lives, including Israeli, is just a matter of collateral damage.

Human lives become worthless and with a machine-gun in one’s hand, they become mere figments to be shot at.  Israeli soldiers have seen it as their moral duty to kill Palestinians running on the Gaza beaches in search of food dropped from the skies to block their insatiable hunger.    

We see horror of death everybody, bodies and torn limbs amidst debris and wreckage. We see women and children pulled from under concrete blocks in cement and blood with gashed heads and torn torsos and legs.

I think to myself, isn’t Netanyahu moved. The passion to bomb and destroy has become irrevocable. There is a twist in the mind of a man who gets up every morning and sees his bloody objectives can only be achieved by bombing more, displacing more, setting Palestinian on a circle of movements to be dictated by his vicious army in an opiate terror-mode.

Then there is his agent Herzi Halevi, the so-called Israeli Chief of Staff who willingly obeys a sinister man in power. What kind of a person is a man who tells his soldiers to bombs houses regardless of who is in them: men, women, children, the old, sick and the infirm?

Israel has lost all sense of direction. The people in power have no interest in political deals. Today, it’s about the perpetuation of war that is becoming permanent because the stomping out of Hamas and the Palestinian resistance lies in the realm of imagination than reality.

Marwan Asmar is an Amman-based writer covering Middle East affairs.

  • CrossFireArabia

    CrossFireArabia

    Dr. Marwan Asmar holds a PhD from Leeds University and is a freelance writer specializing on the Middle East. He has worked as a journalist since the early 1990s in Jordan and the Gulf countries, and been widely published, including at Albawaba, Gulf News, Al Ghad, World Press Review and others.

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    Hormuz: Mines, Strategy or Business?

    By Ismail Al Sharif

    The US thought that assassinating senior Iranian leaders would bring down the regime, but this did not happen.

    Iran’s inability to match American military and technological superiority led it to adopt a number of strategies, most notably what is known in the military literature as the Mosaic Defense Doctrine. This doctrine is based on dismantling its military central command into small, independent units, each operating autonomously and making its own decisions without consulting the higher command.

    From Day 1 of the war, Iran adopted this approach. However, the lack of coordination and the disintegration of the military hierarchy led to chaos and confusion which affected the management of its operations. The situation became contradictory; the politicians were declaring one thing and military commanders acting in a completely different manner and direction.

    This was reflected on the ground through extremely dangerous behavior. Military units, using small boats, indiscriminately laid naval mines to deter enemy ships. However, the lack of coordination here backfired resulting in the Iranian navy officers losing their ability to pinpoint the coordinates of the mines they planted in the Hormuz Strait with no accurate maps or reliable records. Some of these mines may have been completely displaced by the currents of the sea. This was further complicated by the fact that these mines were not primitive but far from it; they were sophisticated and able to detect sound and pressure, and thus able to track the passage of large ships and submarines, and detonate automatically upon approach.

    However, mine removal is not easy task, as history shows. Even today, news reports continue to surface of mines in various parts of the Kingdom, half a century after the last war. Indeed, mines from World War II are still being discovered on land and at sea.

    Even with Britain’s pledge to remove mines after the war, and despite possessing the latest specialized technologies in this field, the task remains arduous, protracted, and uncertain. The specter of a sudden explosion looms, reminding us that the danger of mines is not easily eliminated.

    But the decisive factor in weakening navigation in the Hormuz Strait is not primarily military, but rather material. Commercial ships are massive investments, with some vessels valued at around $150 million and their cargoes potentially worth hundreds of millions of dollars. Therefore, a single mine explosion can cause catastrophic losses to both the ship and its cargo. Consequently, no ship sails without insurance; ports, banks, and shipping companies refuse to deal with uninsured vessels, and without insurance, global shipping grinds to a halt.

    Herein lies the real surprise: the fate of the Strait is no longer dependent on Iran’s pronouncements regarding its opening or closure, but has effectively fallen into the hands of insurance companies. With the escalating risks, insurance costs have skyrocketed; “war risk” premiums have jumped from approximately 0.25% of the ship’s value to nearly 1% or more, exceeding a massive $1 million per voyage. And it doesnt stop there; seven major insurance companies announced their complete withdrawal, issuing notices of coverage cancellation just within just 72 hours.

    And here comes the decisive turning point: Once the insurance coverage is lost, maritime traffic ground to a halt. During this 39-war, ships have effectively ceased sailing with the number of vessels transiting the Strait plummeting by more than 80%. Around 150 oil tankers remain anchored offshore, and major shipping companies suspended their operations, as if this vital artery of global trade had been frozen by a financial, rather than a military decision.

    The US government attempted to provide alternative insurance coverage, but this effort failed and US President Trump’s pronouncements regarding mine removal were inconsistent with the reality.

    The issue of reopening the Strait has once again become a prominent topic, but the deeper truth is that its fate is no longer determined by political statements or military actions, but rather by the decisions of insurance experts. Even if the war were to end immediately, ships would not resume sailing right away. Insurance companies need time to reassess the level of risk, and they base their decisions not on political logic, but on cold, hard numbers and rigorous data.

    This article was originally published in Arabic in Addustour daily newspaper and republished in English in crossfirearabia.com.

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    Analysis: Middle East in Iranian Eyes

    CROSSFIREARABIA – During the Israeli Genocide on Gaza Benjamin Netanyahu used to stand up and say with a smirk: ‘We are changing the face of the Middle East’.

    Upbeat about murdering the women and children of Gaza from the late 2023 onwards, he was talking about the further normalization of the Arab world as established by the Abraham Accords, establish an economic order under Israel’s hegemony and end Hamas, Hezbollah and Houthis while clipping the wings of Iran.

    Of course, Netanyahu’s face soon changed, albeit two-and-a-half years later, when Iran and Hezbollah were forced into a war generated by Israel and the USA on 29 February, 2026. While Iran got a battering, in the next 39 days, US ships and military bases in the Gulf and Jordan received such a hammering that soon forced US President Donald Trump to plead for a ceasefire.

    In this war, Israel received a great shock, being attacked literally on an hourly and daily basis with its buildings, military basis and infrastructure taking directs hits while its millions of people living in underground shelters around-the-clock. 

    To use a metaphor Tel Aviv’s nose was being rubbed in the sand in a way that has never been imagined by Netanyahu nor his ilk of extremist right wing fascist politicians who started calling for the expulsion of Gaza Palestinians from their homeland ever since the Israeli genocide on them since 7 October, 2023. 

    Today’s Netanyahu’s vision of a new Middle East has been drastically changed, thrown in his face in fact! Iran’s political stances and its missiles have changed things around. The US and Israel were not able to change the current Iranian government in Iran despite killing the country’s spiritual leader Ali Khameini, have not ended the country’s nuclear program nor ended its ballistic missiles. 

    So what is Netanyahu talking about? Yes, today there is clearly a new Middle East emerging but it is not according to Netanyahu’s eyes nor his wishful thinking. If anybody should be ‘celebrating’ it is clearly Iran, it’s government, revolutionary guard, its Generals, officers and soldiers who are very probably changing the face of the Middle East and may even be setting the map of how the region should look like in form from now on. 

    From day one of the war, Trump started running scared despite his outlandish mutterings! He came to realize quickly that Netanyahu and the Mossad pushed him against Iran, convincing him it would be an easy fight and the government there would fall like a pack of cards. Trump since, started kicking himself as he finally fell to Netanyahu’s squinted prism to go after that country. Netanyahu kept pushing for this wild step since the 1990s through previous US presidents from Bill Clinton, George W Bush, Barack Obama and Joe Biden.

    But they did not listen to him however, Trump fell into the trap and maybe this is why he is now privately kicking himself because he basically sent the globe into an economic tailspin and soaring exorbitant oil prices, a potentially deep recession and financial chaos.

    In this war Netanyahu may have shot himself in the foot. His alliance with the USA  juxtaposed by Hezbollah whose fighters laid dormant since November 2024 when it stopped firing at Tel Aviv was a big surprise to the latter. Israel had previously thought that Hezbollah agreed to a ceasefire out of weakness and thus their entry into military action was unexpected. Hezbollah kept the military pressure on for six more days after Washington signed off with Iran and beating the Israeli army into submission.

    On day 46 Trump intervened calling on the Israeli army to stop fighting Hezbollah. He had ulterior motive, he wanted to extract a normalization agreement between the Lebanese government and Israel; their ambassadors had just started meeting in Washington at the invitation of the US State Department in an upbeat atmosphere and inline for a final agreement to establish an accord between Tel Aviv and Beirut alongside the ones signed between Israel and four Arab states, the UAE, Bahrain, Sudan and Morocco starting September 2020. 

    Thus a normalization agreement would be a feather in Trump’s cap, a sort of prestige move for the US president. But his pressure may have been seen as a life-saving formula. Trump was saving Israel from Netanyahu’s insistence that his army to keep fighting in southern Lebanon. Its fight has already cost Israel at least 13 soldiers who were killed, more than 500 injured and more than 100 topnotch Merkava tanks destroyed. Israeli towns and cities were being hammered from the north.

    Israel was being beaten from the north. Its towns, cities and military bases again were wide-open to incoming rockets from Lebanon and were not being deflected. It was a war that had to be stopped. This time Trump insisted. If a ceasefire with Iran was going to stick, then Netanyahu had to be forced to make his soldiers stop their fight in Lebanon. 

    Thus for the time being Netanyahu’s hand lie in check. Yet in the long run his dream for a new Middle East with Israel playing a central part in it may have been halted. After all, no Gulf or even Arab states now would think of normalizing with Israel despite the fact that Lebanon is being forced into it, but even for then its early days.

    Netanyahu can kiss goodbye his long-life attempt to sign a normalization accord with Saudi Arabia for instance, a kingdom which is seen as a “major puller” in the Arab and Muslim world. It has already said that normalization is off the table with Israel. The Gulf has been disappointed in this war because it showed that America were not able to protect them from Iranian missiles that targeted their infrastructure as well the US military bases strewn across the region.

    Netanyahu has lost on the economic level as well. His country stands economically devastated, army in ruins as admitted to by the Israeli chief of staff Eyal Zamir, and the dream of opening an ‘economic Middle East’ is definitely dashed for the time being.

    America, as Trump knows, is left to pick up the pieces of a tattered world caused by war any choas in a region that is vital to the global system.

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