The Wisdom of Thucydides

By Lucio Caracciolo

Israel is successfully fighting its war of self-destruction. In the words of General Udi Dekel, one year after the October 7th massacre: ‘It has become evident that Israel’s leadership sees only perpetual war on the horizon. This ongoing conflict benefits Israel’s enemies and aligns with Iran’s strategy of promoting a prolonged, multi-front war of attrition against Israel until its eventual collapse’. The drift is suicidal, bent on the annihilation of the Enemy – Iran and its imperial constellation – by overwhelming everyone and anyone who stands between Israel and Amalek, the Biblical archetype of Evil and prodigious aggressor of the Israelites, who Jewish orthodoxy dictates must be destroyed. Yesterday, it was identified in Hitler, today in Iran and associated Arab terrorists, and as regards tomorrow all bets are on the table.

Benjamin Netanyahu confirms, addressing his soldiers: ‘Remember what Amalek did to you!’, while christening ‘Swords of Iron War’ the limitless retaliation launched against Gaza and continuously extended to new fronts. This all takes us to the first Book of Samuel. As a reminder that ‘the foundation of the existence of the Jewish people for thousands of years has been the constant struggle for our lives and our freedom’. From Joshua to Bibi, the soldiers of eternal Israel certify themselves eternally belligerent.


It would be foolish to treat Israel’s sanctification of this war as a propaganda ploy. It is not only the religious but a large part of secular public opinion that supports Swords of Iron, as just punishment for the Hamas murderers that has been extended to all the people of Gaza, held as co-responsible for October 7th, women and children included. And this goes on and on in concentric waves, one Amalek after another, from Beirut to Tehran, perhaps even beyond. It boils down to perpetual warfare erected as a national identity stretching over thousands of years, resting on the verb of the furious God of the Hebrew Bible where the word ‘war’ recurs 310 times, excluding peace by definition. The destiny of the Israeli is no longer to live with a rifle at his feet, but always in his hand.


It would be worse than foolish to neglect the faith of the Jewish people in the mandate received from God. They are the chosen race who are on a mission on behalf of God on the sacred Land of Israel. They are therefore the supreme race. After the Shoah, this divine privilege crossed into the deleterious memory of the Nazi extermination. A double register that does not allow the Israeli to recognise himself as equal to other human beings. And peace among unequals is not peace.

Finally, it would be unforgivable to forget the path followed by the State of Israel. Since May 14, 1948, Independence Day, Israel has faced and won (or achieved a draw in) defensive and preventive conflicts. Five days after that baptism, the Law and Administration Ordinance was passed, imposing a state of emergency for three months. Article 9 (in paragraphs a and b) delegates special powers to the Executive to deal with the Arabs who intended immediately to throw the Jews back into the sea – the emergency is still in force today. For three generations, Israelis have lived in long truces between conflicts with enemies that have been variable like the Amalekites. Never at peace, for two generations the Israelis have occupied territories wrested from the Arabs in 1967, where half a million Jews sponsored by various governments, including secular and left-wing ones, have settled in order to crush the two-state hypothesis, the refrain of beautiful souls. Or just lazy ones.


Israel survives by the day. It trusts in atomic bombs that it does not declare, in the power of the Defence Forces (IDF), in super-technologies, and above all in American protection, with its many highs and (current) lows. It espouses the ‘mad dog’ tactics dear to General Moshe Dayan, he who once re-conquered Jerusalem. Israel’s strategy is to have no strategy, otherwise what ‘mad dog’ would it be? It acts in limitless deterrence mode.

Inversely apocalyptic because we postulate perpetual peace, and therefore equally lacking strategy, we Europeans are refractory to combat. We observe with disgust the upside-down world that inflames our near abroad, which we perceive as alien. But for many Israeli Jews (not for diasporans, otherwise they would be in Jerusalem), we are the crazy ones. What appears to us as suicide in stages, for the defenders-in-arms of the Jewish state is a blessing. One lives one day at a time. Death is within life. The horizon does not exist. The new anti-Semitism excited by perpetual war rehashes the terrible stereotypes of the past from this antipodal sentiment. It is the racism of enraged progressives.

The defeat of October 7th is the child of Israel’s narcissism. Jerusalem imagined that keeping Hamas in the Gaza cage on a monthly payroll with Qatari money transferred via the Mossad and Egyptian services was a guarantee of an endless truce. So much so that in the area of the massacre, small squads of very young recruits, mostly female soldiers, remained on guard. Why waste the best troops, deployed in Judea and Samaria at the settlers’ disposal? The inhabitants of Gaza were supposedly subhuman, incapable of challenging Tzahal. This was but a prejudice, tragically disproved by the incursion of thousands of Palestinians on the hunt for Jews to capture or slaughter. The unremitting reprisal owes much to the pain of humiliated superiority.

Was there any alternative to the massacre of the Palestinians that in a few weeks almost erased October 7th from mass communication in the rest of the world, Israel’s friends included? Absolutely. Witness the almost physical clashes in the War Cabinet, tamed with admirable stubbornness by Netanyahu, undoubtedly among the most unscrupulous and talented politicians of our time. For instance, one could have carried out earlier the targeted assassinations of Hamas and Hezbollah leaders, after laying siege to Gaza, with commando raids to rescue hostages and disrupt Hamas. Or one could have penetrated southern Lebanon to disarm Hezbollah as prescribed by UN Resolution 1701 that the UNIFIL mission would have never implemented, thereby unleashing civil war in Beirut to undermine the Party of God. Thus fracturing Iran’s imperial corridor by keeping the Arab states interested in the Abraham Accords in the knowledge that no one intends dying for the Palestinians, to whom they all apply the ‘disposable objects’ dogma each according to its own respective interests. Jerusalem would thus have secured the full support of the United States, with Europeans in tow. And it would have reduced the anti-Israel media flood to a summer shower.

Branding the horror of the al-Aqsa Flood an existential threat was Netanyahu’s intended mistake. Not even had Hamas been about to conquer Jerusalem! Golda Meir, the Iron Lady of heroic Labourism, confided that after the Holocaust Israel could afford anything. Bibi applies her motto to October 7th. There was a time when sacrilege would have been invoked. After he himself attributed the idea of annihilating the Jews to the Mufti of Jerusalem, thereby reducing Hitler to the mere material author, any play with history became permissible. Netanyahu has given himself a free hand to wage war without rules against any declared or presumed enemy, starting with the Palestinian civilians in Gaza, to pave the way for occupation. And never to leave again.

Israel dedicates itself to slaughtering tens of thousands of Gazans considered as ‘animals’ – a term used by the Defence Minister, the moderate Yoav Gallant (there are no reports of protests from animal rights activists). Labour’s Yitzhak Herzog, the uninfluential Head of State, adds: ‘It is an entire nation out there that is responsible. It is not true this rhetoric about civilians not being aware, not involved. It’s absolutely not true. They could have risen up’. The so-called ‘Generals’ Plan’ attributed to Giora Eiland, nourished with implicit references to biblical sieges, sums it all up. Gaza is to be sealed off, destroyed and cleared of all ‘animal’ presence section by section, from north to south. The inhabitants are given ten days to choose whether to surrender or starve. In the hope that many among them will break through the Egyptian wall at Rafah and flood into Sinai. Here, Israel would help to ghettoise them by financing warehouses for Palestinians to be under Cairo’s surveillance. Finally, the Star of David would shine on reannexed Gaza, rebuilt and enriched with military bases. The collateral damage would be that with these massacres, Israel guarantees itself generations of young Palestinian terrorists/patriots thirsting for Jewish blood.

For those who are by profession devoted to analysis, the anthropological caesura that dehumanises the enemy – the premise of endless war – is a moral and intellectual challenge. Geopolitics helps us compensate for this hiatus because it does not admit absolute truths, much less does it hand out patents of ethicality. Geopolitics is an exercise in modesty and love for the subjects it studies, in order to intuit their intentions and capabilities. It is also an exercise in empathy for the other, especially if the other is an enemy. All that which is lacking in the elites that rule the Jewish state, not only in the national-religious wing of the War Cabinet. Besides an intimidated and leaderless Opposition, there remain robust exceptions in the intelligence services – in Mossad (foreign) and Shin Bet (internal) more than in Aman (military) – and in part of the Armed Forces, who are appalled by the Premier’s nihilism. The IDF enjoys the trust of nine out of ten Israeli Jews against the less than four who like Netanyahu, while three out of four are convinced that Israel’s soldiers will win the Gaza War.

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There is an unspeakable reason that drives Israel to risk self-sacrifice: the terror of civil war, which the external war at least serves to postpone. In the war equation, the fallout on the diaspora – threatened in infidel and sometimes complicit lands by anti-Semitic fury, the final sequence of anti-Zionism preached even by a Jewish minority – is not considered. The very principle of the State of Israel as protector of all Jews is thus denied; the suicide already half-accomplished.

Limes has long investigated the prodromes of the domestic emergency, manifested in the growing otherness between the tribes of the Jewish state – most recently in the issue called Israel vs. Israel. This crisis is taken to extremes in demonstrations held by ultra-Orthodox Israeli Jews who wave the Palestinian flag shouting ‘Nazis!’ in the faces of the policemen of an entity they consider blasphemous… while waiting for judgment day, i.e. the verdict of the Commission of Inquiry into October 7th that Netanyahu promised but keeps never forming, since it would condemn him to ridicule, if not imprisonment. Yet another argument in favour of endless war.

The leaders of Hamas, always ready to exploit the disunity among the Israelis to strike from Gaza, had seen it coming. But perhaps not even the wildest of haters of the Jewish state were willing to consider that Jerusalem would fall into the trap to the point of reneging on the commandments to which it had bound its destiny. From the founders onwards, its political and military leaders had practised seven of them.

First. The ‘mad dog’ can only afford short conflicts, due to demographic and territorial paucity. The current one has already broken the record set by the War of Independence, between May 1948 and March 1949. Otherwise, the timeline for war has always been weeks, if not days.

Second. The enemy must be divided. Netanyahu has instead coalesced Israel’s enemies by opening seven fronts so far: Gaza, Lebanon, Judea and Samaria, Syria, Iraq, the Red Sea (crucial for Europe’s connection to the Indian Ocean, via the Bab-el-Mandeb Strait), and provinces of the Islamic Republic, with which he is engaging in the decisive duel. All fronts remain open as Netanyahu threatens to cut off the head of the Iranian snake and calls on the ‘noble Persian people’ to overthrow the Pasdaran regime.

Third. And implicit. Iran is not to be destroyed. It is the perfect enemy. Therefore allied because it contributes to Israel’s cause by being the absolute Evil that threatens to destroy Israel while it is determined to preserve the ‘Zionist entity’ around which to tighten the chain of Islamic hatred and Arab-Palestinian revanchism. And of course vice versa. These symmetrical manipulations might have expired after October 7th and the reciprocal attacks directed at each other on opposing soil, in a situation that may spin out of control despite the intentions of those who have managed it so far. Today, even the Saudis are ruling out the possibility of the Abraham Accords being viable, as they wait for the storm to calm down and Israel to invent a stratagem to save the fiction of the Palestinian statelet.

Fourth. And consequential. Netanyahu has staked everything on an understanding with the Gulf petro-dictatorships and other Arab neighbours to establish a security belt around Israel in the name of a common aversion to Iran. This was only partly formalised but stabilised until before the Swords of Iron War.

Fifth. And strategic. The United States of America is and must remain the ultimate guarantor of Israel’s security. The diaspora in America must be cultivated to contribute to this end, along with the Evangelical, Apocalyptic Christian Zionists who are waiting for the Last Day, when Jesus will return home recognised as Messiah by his people. But immediately after the massacre around Gaza, Netanyahu rejected Biden’s invitation to ‘not repeat our mistakes’, to reject the temptation of the carrying out a war on terror like the US did in Afghanistan and Iraq which resulted in the humiliation and credibility crisis of Number One. While waiting for the changing of the guard at the White House, relations between Washington and Jerusalem are becalmed. In Israel, there is still the sporting interpretation that Moshe Dayan, the hero of the Six-Day War, liked to give of Israel’s bond with the US: ‘Our American friends offer us money, arms, and advice. We take the money, we take the arms, and we decline the advice’.

Sixth. And determining. So far, Israeli governments have agreed to negotiate prisoner exchanges with terrorists, up to one Jew for more than a thousand Palestinians, as in the case of Gilad Shalit, for whom Israel had released Yahya Sinwar, future architect of October 7th and leader of Hamas in Gaza. On the strength of this and other lessons, Netanyahu set up a theatre of mock negotiations allegedly intended to free the hostages held by Sinwar, taking care that they failed. With this, he triggered an outcry from relatives and the many Israelis who sympathise with them. Tactical necessity has prevailed over the Jewish and humanitarian principle violated by this government. Protecting the life of every single Jew is no longer dogma.

Seventh. And decisive. Jerusalem’s mantra is deterrence. It worked, and how, with the Arab states and – less so – with Iran. That is, with former adversaries now tamed and interested in technology, armaments, and flourishing trade with the Jewish state; in the case of Iran, it is dedicated only to the theatre of enmity. But deterrence cannot work with terrorists, equally apocalyptic and agitated by a frenzied vocation for martyrdom.

War on terror – terror being the fighting mode normally adopted by the weak against the strong – rules out deterrence. Unless one terrorises the terrorists. Or exterminates them all.

Let’s make a reference to Thucydides, the secular bible of American neo-cons and their Israeli counterparts who are in love with the praise of preventive war that they insist on finding in that two-thousand-year-old masterpiece. In reality, this is but a selective use of history in defiance of context, admittedly a fashionable exercise. Too bad they do not quote an illuminating passage from The History of the Peloponnesian War: the speech of the Athenian Diodotus, son of Eucrates, on whether or not to put to death all the adult males of Mytilene, a rebellious ally. Diodotus says, ‘It is impossible to prevent and only great simplicity can hope to prevent, human nature doing what it has once set its mind upon, […] by any […] deterrent force whatsoever’.

There are those in Israel’s leadership who understand the tunnel the country has entered, but do not resign themselves to it. They see self-isolation from the rest of the world as repairable, the Abraham Accords as recoverable and extendable. They consider the risk of civil war serious, but also that it can be limited with the only victory possible today: defining state borders by forcibly reducing the percentage of Arabs in Judea, Samaria, and Gaza, to be forcibly evacuated to Jordan and Egypt to the tune of dollars. Then to annex those portions of the Holy Land and christen a reduced but relatively secure Great Israel. Thus extinguishing the ‘ring of fire’ lit by Tehran around the Jewish hearth, without having any illusions of overthrowing the regime of the Guardians of the Revolution. All within months, because time is running short for Jerusalem.

Translated by Dr Mark A. Sammut Sassi