Yves here. Juan Cole contends that Israel, operating as a US airbase with a country appended, is the vehicle for the two nations practicing aerial imperialism in the Middle East. But I wonder if this particular embodiment is approaching its sell-by date faster than most realize.
Israel, like the US, is unduly fond of using manned aircraft for power projection. It also enjoyed a veneer of technological superiority which as proven to be uneven when tested. I recall one of the YouTubers, I think Larry Wilkerson, saying that Israel was believed to have the most effective air defense system in the world and being very much surprised when Iran demonstrated conclusively that it could penetrate it and deliver precision strikes.
Of course, Israel and the US have been operating in a theater where their opposition has mainly been in sandals with AK-47s and shoulder-mounted rocket launchers. Hence the embarrassment of taking blows from the Houthis with a stock of merely-pretty-good missiles, mountainous terrain in which to bunker themselves, and adept use of decoys to bleed off some of the West’s strikes.
Admittedly, and this may be an old-fashioned view, securing territory requires boots on the ground or local governments/stooges acting in that capacity. But air campaigns are more than sufficient to create failed states. But how is that a good idea, particularly if that failed state is in your neighborhood? The much-bemoaned and politically destabilizing if economically-convenient-for-many immigrant influx into the US is due to a significant degree to our regime change efforts in Central America.
By Juan Cole. Originally published at TomDispatch
Donald Trump’s and Benjamin Netanyahu’s nomination of former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, his hands already crimson with the blood of innocent Iraqis, to run post-war Gaza, brings to mind a distant era when London sent its politicians out to be viceroys in its global colonial domains. Consider Blair’s proposed appointment, made (of course!) without consulting any Palestinians, a clear signal that the Middle East has entered a second era of Western imperialism. Other than Palestine, which has already been subjected to classic settler colonialism, our current neo-imperial moment is characterized by the American use of Israel as its base in the Middle East and by the employment of air power to subdue any challengers.
Swarming
The odd assortment of grifters, oil men, financiers, mercenaries, White nationalists, and Christian and Jewish Zionists now presiding in Washington, led by that great orange-hued hotelier-in-chief, has (with the help of Germany, Great Britain, and France) built up Israel into a huge airbase with a small country attached to it. From that airbase, a constant stream of missiles, rockets, drones, and fighter jets routinely swarm out to hit regional neighbors.
Gaza was pounded into rubble almost hourly for the last two years, only the first month of which could plausibly have been justified as “self-defense” in the wake of the horrific Hamas attack on Israel on October 7, 2023. Even the Palestinian West Bank, already under Israeli military rule, has been struck repeatedly from above. Lebanon has been subject to numerous bombings despite a supposed ceasefire, as has Syria (no matter that its leader claims he wants good relations with his neighbor). Yemen, which has indeed fired missiles at Israel to protest the genocide in Gaza, has now been hit endlessly by the Israelis, who also struck Iranian nuclear enrichment sites and other targets last June.
Some of the Israeli bombing raids or missile and drone strikes were indeed tit-for-tat replies to attacks by that country’s enemies. Others were only made necessary because of Israeli provocations, including its seemingly never-ending atrocities in Gaza, to which regional actors have felt compelled to reply. Many Israeli strikes, however, have had little, if anything, to do with self-defense, often being aimed at civilian targets or at places like Syria that pose no immediate threat. On September 9th, Israel even bombed Qatar, the country its leaders had asked to help negotiate with Hamas for the return of Israeli hostages taken on October 7th.
In short, what we’re now seeing is Israel’s version of air-power colonialism.
Typically, its fighter jets bombed the Yemeni capital of Sanaa on August 28th, assassinating northern Yemen’s prime minister, Ahmed al-Rahwi, along with several senior members of the region’s Houthi government and numerous journalists. (Israeli officials had previously boasted that they could have killed the top leadership of Iran in their 12-day war on that country in June.)
In reality, Tel Aviv is now shaping governments of the Middle East simply by wiping their officials off the face of the earth or credibly threatening to do so. Israel has also had an eerie hand in shaping outside perceptions of developments in the region by regularly assassinating journalists, not only in Palestine but also in Lebanon and as far abroad as Yemen. However, by failing to come close to subduing the region entirely, what Tel Aviv has created is a negative version of hegemony rather than grasping any kind of positive leadership role.
Negative Imperialism
The massive June bombardment of Iran by Israel and the United States, destroying civilian nuclear enrichment facilities at Natanz and Fordow, came amid ongoing diplomatic negotiations in Oman. As a signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, Iran has the right to enrich uranium for civilian uses and no credible evidence was presented that Tehran had decided to militarize its program. The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) condemned both sets of strikes as severe violations of the U.N. charter and of its own statutes. They also posed public health concerns, mainly because of the release of potentially toxic chemicals and radiological contaminants.
Those attacks, in short, were aimed at denying Iran the sort of economic and scientific enterprises that are a routine part of life in Israel and the United States, as well as Brazil, China, France, Germany, India, Japan, the Netherlands, Pakistan, Russia, and the United Kingdom. Several of those countries (like Israel) do, of course, also have nuclear weapons, while Iran does not. In the end, Tehran saw no benefit in the 2015 nuclear deal its leaders had agreed to that required it to mothball 80% of its civilian nuclear enrichment program. Indeed, President Trump functionally punished the Iranian leadership for complying with it when he imposed maximum-pressure sanctions in May 2018 — sanctions largely maintained by the Biden administration and in place to this day.
Those dangerous and illegal air strikes on Iran should bring to mind nineteenth-century British and Russian resistance to the building of a railroad by Iran’s Qajar dynasty, a form of what I’ve come to think of as “negative imperialism.” In other words, contrary to classic theories of imperialism that focused on the domination of markets and the extraction of resources, some imperial strategies have always been aimed at preventing the operation of markets in order to keep a victim nation weak.
After all, Iran has few navigable waterways and its economy has long suffered from transportation difficulties. The obvious solution once upon a time was to build a railroad, something both the British and the Russians came to oppose out of a desire to keep that country a weak buffer zone between their empires. Iran didn’t, in fact, get such a railroad until 1938.
In a similar fashion, twenty-first-century imperialism-from-the-air is denying it the ability to produce fuel for its nuclear power plant at Bushehr. The United States, Europe, and Israel are treating Iran differently from so many other countries in this regard because of its government’s rejection of a Western-imposed imperial order in the region.
Popular movements and revolts brought the long decades of British and French colonial dominance of the Middle East to an end after World War II. The demise of colonialism and the rise of independent nation-states was, however, never truly accepted by right-wing politicians in either Europe or the United States who had no interest in confronting the horrors of the colonial age. Instead, they preferred to ignore history, including the slave trade, economic looting, the displacement or massacre of indigenous populations, the mismanagement of famines, and forms of racist apartheid. Worse yet, the desire for a sanitized history of the colonial era was often coupled with a determination to run the entire deadly experiment all over again.
The framers of the ill-omened Global War on Terror’s nightmares in Afghanistan and Iraq during the administration of President George W. Bush would openly celebrate what was functionally the return of Western colonialism. They attempted to use America’s moment as a hyperpower (unconstrained by great power competition after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991) to attempt to recolonize the Greater Middle East.
Predictably, they failed miserably. Unlike their nineteenth-century ancestors, people in the global south are now largely urban and literate, connected by newspapers and the internet, organized by political parties and nongovernmental outfits, and in possession of capital, resources, and sophisticated weaponry. Direct colonization could now only be achieved through truly genocidal acts, as Israeli actions in Gaza suggest — and, even then, would be unlikely to succeed.
“We Destroyed the Villages by Air Patrols”
No wonder imperial powers have once again turned to indirect dominance through aerial bombardment. The use of air power to try to subdue or at least curb Middle Easterners is, in fact, more than a century old. That tactic was inaugurated by the government of Italian Prime Minister Giovanni Giolitti during his country’s invasion and occupation of Ottoman Libya in 1911. Aerial surveillance pilot Lieutenant Giulio Gavotti fitted detonators to two-pound grenades, dropping them on enemy camps. Though he caused no injuries, his act, then seen as sneaky and ungentlemanly, provoked outrage.
The ruthless British subjugation of Palestine, aimed at — this should sound eerily familiar today — displacing the indigenous population and establishing a European “Jewish Ulster” there to bolster British rule in the Middle East, also deployed air power. As Irish parliamentarian Chris Hazzard observed, “Herbert Samuel, hated in Ireland for sanctioning Roger Casement’s execution and the internment of thousands following the Easter Rising in 1916 — would, as Britain’s first High Commissioner in Palestine, order the indiscriminate aerial bombardment of Palestinian protestors in 1921 (the first bombs dropped from the sky on Palestinian civilians).”
The most extensive use of aerial bombardment for imperial control, however, would be pursued by the British in Mesopotamia, which they derogatorily called “Mespot.” The fragile British occupation of what is now Iraq from 1917 to 1932 ended long before imperialists like then-Secretary of State for War, Air, and the Colonies Winston Churchill thought it should, largely because the armed local population mounted a vigorous resistance to it. A war-weary British public proved unwilling to bear the costs of a large occupation army there in the 1920s, so Churchill decided to use the Royal Air Force to keep control.
Arthur “Bomber” Harris, a settler in colonial Rhodesia, who joined the British Air Force during the first World War, was then sent to Iraq. As he wrote, “We were equipped with Vickers Venon and subsequently Victoria aircraft… By sawing a sighting hole in the nose of our troop carriers and making our own bomb racks we converted them into what were nearly the first post-war long-range heavy bombers.” He did not attempt to gild the lily about his tactics: “[I]f the rebellion continued, we destroyed the villages and by air patrols kept the insurgents away from their homes for as long as necessary.” That, as he explained, was far less expensive than using troops and, of course, produced no high infantry casualty counts of the sort that had scarred Europe’s conscience during World War I.
Colonial officials obscured the fact that such measures were being taken against a civilian population in peacetime, rather than enemy soldiers during a war. In short, the denial that there are any civilians in Palestine, or in the Middle East more generally, has a long colonial heritage. It should be noted, however, that, in the end, Great Britain’s aerial dominance of Iraq failed, and it finally had to grant that country what at least passed for independence in 1932. In 1958, an enraged public would finally violently overthrow the government the British had installed there, after which Iraq became a nationalist challenger to Western dominance in the region for decades to come.
Of course, Harris’s air power strategy, whetted in Mesopotamia, came to haunt Europe itself during the Second World War, when he emerged as commander-in-chief of Bomber Command and rose to the rank of air chief marshal. He would then pioneer the tactic of massively bombarding civilian cities, beginning with the “thousand bomber” raid on Cologne in May 1942. His “total war” air campaign would, of course, culminate in the notorious 1945 firebombing of Dresden, which devastated eight square miles of the “Florence of Germany,” wiping out at least 25,000 victims, most of them noncombatants.
Terror from the Skies
In the end, the way Bomber Harris’s deadly skies came home to Europe should be an object lesson to our own neo-imperialists. At this very moment, in fact, Europe faces menacing drones no less than does the Middle East. Moreover, unlike genuine international leadership, the Frankenstein monster of negative hegemony in the Middle East stirs only opposition and resistance. Despite Israel’s technological superiority, it has hardly achieved invulnerability. Poverty-stricken and war-ridden Yemen has, for instance, managed to all but close the vital Red Sea to international shipping to protest the genocide in Gaza and has hit Israel with hypersonic missiles, closing the port of Eilat. Nor, during their 12-day war, did Iran prove entirely helpless either. It took out Israel’s major oil refinery and struck key military and research facilities. Instead of shaking the Iranian government, Israel appears to have pushed Iranians to rally around the flag. Nor is it even clear that Iran’s stockpile of highly enriched uranium was affected.
Most damning of all, Israel’s ability to inflict atrocities on the Palestinians of Gaza (often with U.S.-supplied weaponry) has produced widespread revulsion. It is now increasingly isolated, its prime minister unable even to fly over France and Spain due to a fear of an International Criminal Court warrant for his arrest. The publics of the Middle East are boiling with anger, as are many Europeans. In early October, Italy’s major labor unions called a general strike, essentially closing the country down to protest Israel’s interception of the Global Sumud Flotilla, a group of ships attempting to bring humanitarian aid to Gaza. As with Bomber Harris’s ill-starred domination of Iraq, terror from the skies in Gaza and beyond is all too likely to fail as a long-term Grand Strategy.
Copyright 2025 Juan Cole
There has been an idea kicking around for near a century that air-power will solve all military problems. In the US in the 30s there were a group of US Army Air Cops officers – nicknamed “airdales” – who said that you could use strategic bombers to bomb a country into submission and then all you had to do was land and accept their surrender. The US 8th Air Force was used according to this idea in WW2 and those bombers were not even given full fighter escorts as it was deemed unnecessary due to the firepower of the B-17 & B-24. Those bombers got butchered continuously until finally long-range fighters were introduced that could escort them all the way to a target and back again.
Fast forward to the present day and there is still this obsession of air-power allowing you to murder your way to success. But lets look at the past two years. The US and some allies put their full weight into defeating Yemen – and lost. The ROI was bad enough with Yemeni twenty thousand dollar drones being shot down by two to three million dollar US missiles. Add in a few close calls for the US Navy they just called it quits. They couldn’t defeat Iran who not only absorbed heavy punishment, but dished out a lot on Israel which shocked people there. And look at Gaza. Yes, the IDF has been very successful killing tens of thousands of people and destroying nearly all the buildings in Gaza but the long and the short of it is that Hamas is still there. And that means that Israel lost. Air-power will only take you so far and in a world where nations are investing more in tunneling, it will be less effective over time.
If anything, the cost of manned airpower, as Yves observes, seems to have made the idea obsolete. To achieve anything like what the advocates imagine, the cost would be unacceptably prohibitive. (I mean, it was expensive even during WW2 and 1950s, but now, Israeli air force shouldn’t exist at all if not for all the subsidies, for example–and I wonder if US could afford its air force the way it is now set up for long without some sort of political catastrophe at home.)
Drones might be the way of future aerial dominance–but I don’t know. There might be other issues there, too (like, maybe Skynet? but that’s probably not the way things will wind up going down, though…)
Drones are being viewed as the new super weapon that solves all of the previous problems. Look at military history and you’ll see various weapons have been cosnidered that for millenia. But they all tend to solve some problems and cause new ones. They are all countered in the end because there are few things as motivating as finding a way to stop being killed by some new weapon.
Right now American and Israeli senior officers will be thinking drones will solve their problems with cost and manpower shortages. And they may do. But opponents will throw up nrw problems that need solved.
No, this is a handwave. The rise of ISR and net-centric warfare is a revolution, on the level of the machine gun. Drones are one of the biggest pieces of that.
No it isn’t handwave. The machine gun was revolutionary. It was countered, largely by longer range artillery and tanks. Those in turn were countered. Drone warfare being revolutionary does not mean it will achieve all the goals that are currently being hoped for. And it does not mean it will not be countered.
And how long did that take? The Gattling gun was introduced in IIRC the US Civil War. In World War I, tank warfare was barely getting started and did not stop the machine gun slaughter during trench warfare, which literally killed millions of men
I stand by my claim. Your counter is not convincing.
https://aurelien2022.substack.com/p/learning-from-the-defeat
Alon Mizrahi has written about the psychology of air bombing and the cult of the “knight” pilot. He argues there is an imperialist cultural aspect to the act of hand delivered air strikes.
Conversely, Malcom Kyeyune has argued that expensive cold war jets are becoming obsolete, the implication being the era of air carrier and airstrip supremacy may be coming to an end.
The Substack is paywalled but thanks for the hint nonetheless!
Good research term.
My Grandpa gave me some of his books many years ago. Among them was a series of books called The War Illustrated. It was a collection of a magazine printed in the UK during the war. One of the picture articles is about the first German aircrew killed over Britain and photos showing them being given burials with full military honours by the British. Inlcuding Nazi German flags draping the coffins. That sttitude of the honourable “knoght” pilots certainly exisited at that time, though it died soon after once large scale bombing of civilians started.
thanks for this info!
Do you happen to remember the issue containing the article about the killed German crew?
case in point, exhibit A of such “knights”: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Baron_(disambiguation)
Thank you.
re: Iron Dome
What still puzzles me is the degree to which Iron Dome capabilites are or are not perceived honestly among military personnel.
As was known in the past live videos taken of missile intercepts were censored as much as possible.
I guess the leaked videos of interception failures into social media during the most recent clash with Iran were difficult to control 100% (I haven´t had time to check that issue but enough info has leaked.)
Same true for the crash sites of interceptor missiles. Immediate lockdown by military so no evidence gets out.
But if even I knew well before Oct. 7th that the system doesn´t work , IDF will not seriously have ignored this fact.
So how real is the assumption that Israel was “surprised”?
Isn´t this potentially a textbook case of doublethink & double-speak, to control the public narrative while coping internally with the harsh military truth?
From what I can see, the iron dome is very effective. But all air defence systems can be overwhelmed. And the larger the area to defend the easier that is. Israel is quite fortunate in that situation of being a smallish country, compare that to Russia who is having a lot of issues defending such a large country from small scale drone strikes.
However, for political reasons the Israeli state liked to make statements bigging it up nore than it deserved. Stating that it could stop all attacks when no system can. Can’t help but be reminded of Hermann Goering saying that is a single bomb dropped on Berlin he should be known as Hermann Meyer.
Huh? You have no basis for that claim. It performed badly when tested by Iran, the first time in the most favorable conditions imaginable for Israel (pre-set time and targets, Iran even broadcast on TV when its slow-moving drones started leaving Iran). Iran hit every target with pinpoint accuracy. This has been described repeatedly long form by Scott Ritter and shorter form by others.
I’ve seen claims between 65 to 90% were intercepted. Taking he lower estimate that is still an impressive number for an air defence system against modern drones and missiles. It is only people who take the claims of it being able to stop everythi g that see that as bad. But in military terms it is impressive. Unfortunately for the Israeli state their claims about how perfect it is could never stand up to reality. That’s the problem with propaganda, it always hits reality and then needs explained away (or hidden).
The Iranians sent a large wave of slow moving drones, the ones they broadcast launching on TV. Their purpose was to get shot down. If any of those got through, it would really indict the system as a serious fail. They were to both draw fire and deplete stocks and give the Iranians more information as to how the Iron Dome worked.
Did you not get the point? In PERFECT conditions for the defender, as in a pre-set date and time for attacks, and per-negotiated targets, which were one of military importance and included ones that were supposedly the best defender, Iran hit them all with pinpoint accuracy. That is a failure.
Larry Wilkerson similarly remarked that before 12 day war, the widespread belief was that Israel had the best air defenses in the world, and that no one believes that anymore.
Again, you need to listen to Ritter on this. You are not up to speed.
quickly
TED POSTOL
interview with BOSTON GLOBE
October 13, 2023
Israel’s Iron Dome system doesn’t work, says missile defense critic
By Hiawatha Bray
https://archive.is/0ThHq
US Congress admitted Postol´s criticism re: Patriots was correct after he had looked into data of the Gulf War.
Even Wiki admits this much:
“(…)
A House Government Operations Committee investigation in 1992 concluded that, contrary to military claims on effectiveness, Patriot missiles destroyed only 9 percent of SCUD missiles during attempts at interception.[16] MIT Technology Review’s senior writer, David Talbot, wrote that Postol “debunked claims by the U.S. Army that its Patriot missiles were successfully shooting down Iraqi Scud missiles during the first Gulf War”
(…)”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theodore_Postol
When I talked to Postol in person he confirmed this in hindsight. He added that ARROWs today however like PATRIOTS more or less don´t work the way as claimed in theory, either.
Others among the NC-commentariat are better informed to actually explain from personal experience as to why this could as well be intention in a certain way or a flaw inherent in the design of the Western MIC.
There is a reason why rising military powers such as India want RU AD not US made, or why Turkey even risked a crisis with the US over sticking to their S-400s.
MOON OF ALABAMA
March 26, 2018
Two Failures In One Day – Missile Defense Is An Embarrassment – It Won’t Work
https://www.moonofalabama.org/2018/03/two-failures-in-one-day-missile-defense-is-an-embaressment-it-wont-work.html
October 25, 2024
What Has Israel Achieved In The Last Year? – by Arch Bungle
https://www.moonofalabama.org/2024/10/what-has-israel-achieved-in-the-last-year-by-arch-bungle.html
“(…)
7. Recent and previous strikes carried out by the IRGC on Tel Aviv showed the failure of the Iron Dome and the failure of ALL Israel’s air defense systems. David’s Sling. Arrow. Patriot. Moreover, the air defense systems of Israel’s satraps (Jordan) were also proven to fail. Further, the interception systems of the USN were proven to be inadequate.
This has massive implications for war-gaming a conflict between the US and Iran. It means that the US will have to consider the fact that regardless of what it may inflict on Iran, it will not be able to shield anyone and itself against a concurrent Iranian retaliation.
Moreover, the US must now acknowledge that Iran has the ability to destroy it’s carrier groups.
Marine power projection is therefore no longer of any use in the Persian Gulf, Indian Ocean, Red Sea, Gulf of Oman … It must now recalculate all it’s previous attack plans.
(…)”
ALASTAIR CROOKE
Alastair Crooke corrected Chris Hedges on the issue of military successes by the IDF vs. Iran in the “12-day-War”, I believe second half.
Remarkable by both because Hedges immediately accepts Crooke´s expert opinion which Crooke expresses with all patience and respect for Hedges.
July 11 2025
Everything You Need To Know About the U.S. / Israeli War With Iran (w/ Alastair Crooke) | The Chris Hedges Report
Alastair Crooke and Hedges note that this conflict is far from over and the future of the Middle East and the global economy hinges on what comes next from Israel, Iran or the United States.
https://chrishedges.substack.com/p/everything-you-need-to-know-about?utm_source=publication-search
I will spare you my usual Andrei Martyanovs 😉
Great article. One may not always agree with Juan Cole (in the past on Syria) but he knows how to cut to the chase.
And the message here is not about morality but about practicality. If you deny other people’s right to live then they may just use their human ingenuity to do the same to you. Therefore the powerful must always live in fear of this and that is the source of so much modern violence. Add in nuclear weapons and it cannot continue.
And yet it does because like that scorpion we can’t overcome our own natures.
Good piece, but just once I’d like to see the Hamas attack described without any qualifying adjectives like “horrific” or “terrorist”, etc. Even Cole can’t help himself.
If we are ever to be rid of the Zionist entity, it needs to be made clear that Palestinians have a right under international law to defend themselves, and they have been under occupation for over 75 years now, despite the knots Zionists twist themselves into to try to claim otherwise.
It is amazing. Isn’t it? FOX keeps talking about ending the terror, by which they mean threats to Israel.
In a normal/sane world, a cost-benefit analysis of the past 2 years would dramatically lessen the arrogance of zionazis using multi-million dollar missiles and jets to intercept $20K drones (not to mention Chinese balloons).
But both parties have proven they’re OK with saddling US taxpayers with monumental debt and destruction of social services to keep the little hats happy.
The whole world sees the bravery and righteousness of Palestinians, Yemenis and Iranians. We also see the cowardice and delusions of the west and monarchies in West Asia.
Missing from a serious discussion of the future of air colonialism is the modern equalization of drones and missile technology. How it started in the early 1900s is a nice, but irrelevant, bookend.
Europe facing “menacing drones”!! From who? One presumes Russia, but given the distances, that is ludicrous (i.e., repeating propaganda). Now, if JC had stated “menacing oreshniks,” it would have a reality basis.
Not certain at all how “air colonialism” fits into genocide – the Brits were quite capable (and the US) of genocide in the old, pre-air warfare days. And the revulsion has more to do with the modern democratization of information dissemination rather than anything to do with air colonialism – I had never heard of the Nakba 1 until fairly recently.
I recommend Alistaire Crooke’s recent piece, “move fast and break things” to describe the tactics (not strategy) of the empire in its twilight days.
https://strategic-culture.su/news/2025/10/08/moving-fast-breaking-things-a-new-doctrine-takes-root-a-new-era-of-coerced-dominance/
I have to beg to differ. The bigger drones overlap with missiles in their destructive abilities. Not that the ones that have allegedly gone on European holidays amount to that.
Very true, but drones can and often are shot down, especially with all the NATO territory they need to cross (albeit very useful for depleting A/D for older, slower missiles), whereas Oreshnik is hitting target A/D or no A/D, and thus is a “real” menace as opposed to a manageable menace.
IMHO, if Russia were menacing Europe, it would do so with weapons that are un-interceptable – it would be counterproductive to menace with a drone that NATO could likely intercept.
“Nakba 1”
Wouldn´t be surprised if Israelis´ next missile would be named after that…
(think “Apache”, “Comanche”, “Tomahawk” in the US…)
Can someone explain to me what happened to the studies and estimates about the true number killed (direct/”indirect”) in Gaza, that varied between 100k-500k?
Don´t tell me that all of a sudden those doctors and researchers after 2 years realized, `Gee, we miscalculated by 300k.´
Something is off in this matter…
The Gaza Health Authority is counting deaths only when they have actually verified a body with a name. So no one who is buried under rubble or starved to death is in their tally.
Although jet fighters and bombers are invincible in the air, they are vulnerable on the ground. As the Ukrainians have demonstrated, attacking parked aircraft is easy. It is even possible to assassinate the pilots of those planes.
Not quite that easy: during the Korean War, “bedcheck Charlies” attacked US airfields (that they could get to anyways) nightly and were practically impossible to stop (they were using same planes and tactics Soviets developed during WW2–very low performance biplanes flying low and slow and bombing airfields.). They dropped quite a few (admittedly small) bombs, but very few planes they hit were total losses. Properly defended airfields (even with passive defenses like good dispersion, camouflage, berms, and alert response teams) are not easy to attack–except in cases where arms limitation treaties get in the way.
“Most damning of all, Israel’s ability to inflict atrocities on the Palestinians of Gaza (often with U.S.-supplied weaponry) has produced widespread revulsion.”
If revulsion and shame had any effect on the actors involved and mentioned, none of this would be happening and continue to happen.
Too many in the region following the script or following the money.