"With Israel's position of attacking anyone who attacks them"

Was Gaza and Oct. 7 an "attack" on Israel or was it a response to Israel's 70+ year long illegal occupation of Gaza and refusal to allow a Palestinian state?

Israel has turned Gaza into an "open air prison" and official Israel gov't policies have been enacted to inflict "malnutrition" on Gazans -- not "starvation" because that'd create bad PR. In the face of such policies, we should expect the people of Gaza to rebel against their illegal occupation shouldn't we?

or Lebanon?

Lebanon, or Israel's fight against Hezbollah, is where Israel is really failing! Israel can operate all through Gaza but Israel cannot invade Lebanon on the ground.

If we remember, in 2006 Israel activated one of its "named" (elite) armored brigades and sent its 50+ tanks and other armored vehicles to invade Lebanon. In that attack Israel got its ass kicked! Israel could not take the very first Lebanese village. Israel was flat-out defeated, losing dozens and dozens of tanks and vehicles to innovative Hezbollah tactics and Hezbollah's Syrian-supplied Russian anti-tank missiles that chewed up Israel's Merkava tanks. A complete Israeli route! So Israel just bombed the hell out of Lebanon, taking its anger out by killing innocent civilians, and then Israel declared "victory."

This war is much the same!

Israel has attempted to invade Lebanon on several fronts but it has not made any progress. Hezbollah has planned for this war for over a decade. They have every "avenue of approach" plotted and planned with artillery and mortars. Hezbollah has gamed out and theorized where Israel might concentrate forces. And today Hezbollah is executing its plans.

Israel has not gained ground and they're suffering horrendous amounts of casualties (their medical services are pretty good so their killed-in-action numbers are low). But for Israel's population, they can't handle an extended war on their small Jewish population.

Now for a full year, Hezbollah's artillery and short-range rockets have meant that tens of thousands of Israelis have had to evacuate northern Israel (Israel's key agricultural area!). That population of Israel refugees have had to be relocated to central Israel and housed at gov't expense (Israel's budget and economy are a disaster!). This is a dynamic that cannot be sustained for a long term.

This all caused Netanyahoo to want to invade Lebanon. But the Israeli defense minister deals with military reality and not "political desires." The defense minister noted the shortage of ammo, the shortage of armored vehicles, the disastrous level of morale among the Israeli army(!), and of the state of Hezbollah, and he came to the conclusion there was no f*cking way Israel could attack Lebanon and have any chance of success.

But Netanyahoo didn't want to hear that. So he fired his defense minister and replaced him with a yes-man who would wage his war.

These are some of the reasons I say Israel is suffering a strategic defeat on a monumental scale! They're losing wars on all fronts -- Gaza, Lebanon, and Iran has proven it can strike Israel and has the missile capacity to devastate much of the tiny country.

Now add in the demographics -- the huge numbers of Israelis that have already fled the country and the many more Israelis that may flee if things get much worse.

Today Haifa and the cities of central Israel is under frequent attack by missiles and drones. Much of the population has to sleep in bomb shelters on many nights -- do you think a pampered population wants to deal with that or the high prices caused by Netanyahoo's wars?

Netanyahoo is now an indicted war criminal by the ICC and cannot travel to many European and other countries in the world. Israelis themselves are starting to demand investigations into Oct. 7 and whether Netanyahoo allowed the attack to happen deliberately to avoid his trial on corruption charges.

All in all, Israel is in a very weak state.

Read the mainstream Israeli media (please!). Israeli media does a much better job of objectively reporting things than does the 5 corporations that make up US mass media, which is essentially a parrot for the US gov't.

Israel's army is mauled. Israel's army is a reservist-based army. It's designed to fight short wars and not a year-long or "endless" war. The reports about what's happening is shocking.

Now, after a year+, when Israel calls up a reservist unit ~20-25% of that unit's soldiers "desert" -- they refuse to report and go to war. Israeli media (Haaretz in particular) feature stories about Israeli soldiers committing suicide over the war crimes they've committed, similar to the suicide rates among US veterans (22 per day for us!).

In Gaza the Israelis have leveled everything, committed horrendous war crimes, killed obscene amounts of people and are inflicting starvation on the population and doing things like letting polio and other diseases run rampant. The Israeli army can go anywhere it wants in Gaza, fighting its way in to take areas suffering constant guerrilla attacks by Hamas.

But when Israel leaves an area in Gaza, Hamas returns. When/if Israeli troops go back into an area the 2nd (or 3rd or whatever) time, they have to fight their way back in -- they're fighting a guerrilla war. It's estimated that Hamas has lost only about 1/3 of their fighting force and they're getting new recruits, in addition to some new volunteers from outside of Gaza(!).

Hamas still has the ability to manufacture advanced, dual-warhead RPG rounds that are capable of disabling Israel's Merkava tanks, and manufacture these all inside of Gaza! Remember, Hamas has planned for this war for over a decade and has huge facilities buried underground that Israel hasn't touched.

Israel has suffered a huge amount of tanks and armored vehicle losses in Gaza. Not only vehicles disabled by enemy fire, but also vehicles worn out from the intense wear and tear of 1+ year of warfare. This means Israel is cannibalizing vehicles to maintain vehicles.

It's so bad that Israel has stopped its sales/export of Merkava 3 tanks because they're putting them into use due to the losses of Merkava 4 tanks. This is a critical area, and it's not only tanks. APCs and other armored vehicles are also problem areas.

"There's really 5 companies that control 90% of what we read, see and hear." -- Ted Turner, founder of CNN.