FINKELSTEIN: Israeli Troops Are Good at Playing Video Games, Not on the Ground

Hezbollah’s strategy is to lob missiles into Israel every time Netanyahu tries to claim victory in the north, which will force Israel into a ground invasion, he says

Norman Finkelstein, the Middle East scholar, said in an interview published Sunday and described the Israeli military, which is continuing its punishment campaign in Gaza while expanding the war into Lebanon, Syria, and Iran.

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Finkelstein told “Robinson’s Podcast” that he understands Israel’s strategy in Lebanon because he has studied the past. He said Israel would carry out one of its “high-tech murder sprees, which it is expert at.”

He said the goal is to kill a large number of people in Lebanon and get the people in the country to turn on Hezbollah, which is why the IDF is targeting Beirut.

“Israel wants to discredit Hezbollah, so it will keep bombing, and bombing, and bombing…Hezbollah will fire its rockets back because Israel wins in an air war…It’s a no-brainer. But Israel loses in the ground war,” he said.

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Hezbollah knows that these rocket attacks will put pressure on Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to approve a ground war, but the Israelis “do not want to fight in hand-to-hand combat with the Party of God [Hezbollah].”

He noted how eight Israeli soldiers were killed in Lebanon and if the war continues, it will be a catastrophe for Israel.

“Israel’s very good at playing video games,” he said. “Very good at playing…I will not dispute that. Sitting behind a computer and killing people…for real…not just virtually…They’re very good at that. They’re the best mass murderers out there, for sure. But actual combat? No. That’s not their game.”

Israel invaded Lebanon in 2006 and Eliyahu Winograd, the head of an Israeli government commission, said in 2008 that the war had been “a big and serious failure” for Israel because the ground offensive did not achieve its objectives. 

Daniel Byman, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, spoke to the WSJ about the possibility of a ground invasion. He said, “It’s a little like saying to the United States in 1980, ‘Let’s go back into Vietnam.’”

Finkelstein joined Glenn Greenwald on “System Update” last week to discuss Israel’s approach to war with Hezbollah. He said there is no state in the Middle East that has the technology to compete with the Israeli Air Force.

“However, Israel loses, hands down, in a ground invasion, and Israel dreads a ground invasion for the very simple reason that, believe it or not, Israelis don’t want to die,” he said. “They like to kill… it’s fun to kill Arabs… it’s more fun than shooting fish in a barrel.”

He continued, “Israelis like to kill Arabs, humiliate Arabs, degrade Arabs, torture Arabs, but it doesn’t like to fight them. In particular, they don’t want to fight the Party of God [Hezbollah].”

He noted that Hassan Nasrallah, the former head of Hezbollah who was killed in an Israeli strike, said in a speech a few months ago that there are over 100,000 fighters in Hezbollah. Israel does not want to confront that on the ground, so it conducts air campaigns to pulverize the enemy, he said.

He said Israel conducted the same tactic in Gaza. While it amassed troops along the border of Gaza in the hours after the 7 October Hamas attack, the ground force did not enter until about three weeks later, after a brutal blockade and massive bombing campaign across the enclave to “reduce it all to dust.”

“There was no ground war in Gaza. There was an aerial annihilation in Gaza,” he said, noting that Israel has been cagey about its war dead and estimates that about a soldier a day has died in Gaza.

“So, Israel is hoping it could knock out Lebanon by air,” he said. 

Hezbollah’s strategy is to lob missiles into Israel every time Netanyahu tries to claim victory in the north, which will force Israel into a ground invasion, Finkelstein said. 

He said Nasrallah told Israel to “please invade” in one of his last speeches. 

Finkelstein said Hezbollah “yearns” for that invasion so they can “finally settle the score with that satanic state, man-to-man in hand combat.”

One former Hezbollah military officer spoke to the WSJ about military preparations and said Lebanon’s south is “like a beehive right now.”

“Everything the Iranians have, we have,” the former officer said.