“Don’t fall for the regime change talk. Israel is ‘mowing the lawn’ in Iran... a form of perpetual conflict management which can never achieve the ‘total victory’ of its most delusional propagandists and which guarantees this third Gulf War won’t be the last.”
- Haaretz, Israel, March 13, 2026
With the chaos, carnage and mass bombings across Iran and Lebanon, it is hard to keep up with the magnitude of the disaster unfolding across the Middle East. So perhaps you haven’t heard the news of the Lebanese family murdered by Israeli soldiers in the West Bank.
The family was returning from a day outing when Israeli soldiers in undercover gear shot up their car. They killed 37-year-old Ali Khaled Bani Odeh, his 35-year-old wife Waad and two of their four children, Mohammad, age 5 and Othman, age 7.
All had been shot in the head.
An Israeli soldier dragged 12-year-old Khaled from the car and beat the boy to the ground. The soldier ridiculed the murder of his family, saying,
“We killed dogs.”
Murdered children. Considered dogs not human beings.
This is how Israel “cuts the grass.”
“Cutting the grass” is a term used by the Israeli Defence Force to describe their operational policy of maintaining “peace” in the Middle East. It involves regular incursions of violence, bombings and assassinations to keep Israel’s neighbours in perpetual uncertainty.
In response to the killing of the West Bank family, the IDF released a boilerplate response about how the soldiers feared a terrorist threat. It was the same kind of spin used to justify bombing hospitals, shooting journalists, or zip-tying the hands of ambulance attendants who were shot in the head and buried in a mass grave.
Under the international rules-based order, these acts constitute clear war crimes. But in Israel, “cutting the grass” has been the operational policy of the Israeli state since the millennium.
Forget trying to make peace. Forget the two-state solution. Forget Oslo and all those other international commitments.
What makes the Iran operation different is that Donald Trump’s regime has been sucked into “cutting the grass” with potentially catastrophic results. Trump can’t seem to control the escalating violence.
And the impacts are reverberating globally.
Joe Kent, the Director of the National Counterterrorism Center, has resigned, stating that there was no credible reason to enter Iran. In a letter to the president, he wrote that:
“high ranking Israeli officials and influential members of the American media deployed a disinformation campaign…. [that created] an echo chamber to deceive you into believing that Iran posed an imminent threat… This was a lie.”
Jonathan Powell, a top UK negotiator, was in the meetings between the US and Iran. He believed Iran had made significant concessions. It would have given Trump an easy victory lap. But Israel wasn’t having it.
As Marco Rubio told the press, Israel was going to bomb Tehran regardless, and so the United States went along.
It was only a matter of time before Israel’s policy of permanent war led to an ever-expanding disaster. In Gaza, the concept of “cutting the grass” was allowed to morph into full-scale genocide.
The world watched and did little.
Since I began writing in The Resistance, I have warned that the failure of the West to push back on Israel’s crimes in Gaza opened the door to the new age of monsters. If the world can be desensitized to the point that we can watch an entire people being starved in real time, then much darker futures become imaginable.
This perspective has received further reflection from journalist Chris Hedges. In a recent piece entitled “The World According to Gaza,” he wrote:
“Gaza is only the start. The new world order is one where the weak are obliterated by the strong, the rule of law does not exist, and barbarism is triumphant.”
For the longest time, Israel has been extremely effective in shielding its brutal repression within the cloak of victimhood.
My generation grew up with the horrifying black and white photographs of the mass killings at Babi Yar and the death camps. I have read many books on the Holocaust and visited the Wannsee mansion near Berlin, where the Final Solution was put into effect. I have always wanted to understand how such horrifying mass atrocities could be committed. The closest I came was in 2019 when I attended the official Holocaust commemoration ceremonies at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem.
The museum was established to show how genocide was made possible. The Nazis engaged in a long and deliberate process of targeting the Jews, denigrating their humanity while desensitizing the Germans to increasing levels of brutality.
This made it possible to move from stripping citizens of their rights to subjecting them to mass murder.
I have thought a great deal of that lesson since then. Especially since I was at the ceremony with both Vladimir Putin and Benjamin Netanyahu — two men who have come to personify a new era of barbarism and war crimes.
Referring to the mass bombings of civilians in South Lebanon as “cutting the grass”, or the shooting down of a family as “killing dogs”, is the 21st-century equivalent of the desensitization that made mass killing of the 20th century possible.
The only chance we have of pushing back on barbarism is to hold to the international rule of law. We must recognize that Israel has become an increasingly lawless force in the Middle East, carrying out terror attacks and atrocities at will.
At the very least, we must push for a total end to weapons sales.
As the situation spirals, Jewish communities around the world are facing increasing insecurity. Canada has a responsibility to take strong action against anti-semitism and violence against Jewish sites in our country.
But we must also be willing to call out the mass violence inherent in Israel’s actions in the Middle East. Otherwise, we are complicit in allowing the world to sink further into a world of monsters.
As Hedges writes:
“The most depraved leaders of human history, those who reduced cities to ashes, herded captive populations to execution sites and littered lands they occupied with mass graves and corpses, have returned with a vengeance.”
