This past week, Israel massively escalated its attacks on Lebanon, killing 32 and maiming over 3,000 in so-called “pager attacks” (e.g. a textbook war crime), and killing 558 people, including 34 children, by dropping over 2,000 bombs in 24 hours and unleashing a fresh set of bombings in Beirut on Friday, flattening several residential buildings and killing hundreds more. The scenes of carnage are staggering, hospitals are overwhelmed, families are running for their lives, people are justifiably scared of all electronic devices, and terror permeates Lebanon. This was, by far, the deadliest week in Lebanon since the Lebanese Civil War ended 34 years ago.  But, rest assured—influentital Western media outlets tell us—Israel was only dropping bombs on Lebanese people and exploding their devices in a coordinated terrorist attack in order to bring about peace. The escalated violence, we’re told, is actually a means of de-escalating the conflict. In the wake of the attacks, without a whiff of skepticism, both The New York Times and The Guardian were quick to parrot the Israeli government and military’s self-serving justification; that is, that they are massively ramping up their war on Lebanon not because they want to kill and humiliate a designated enemy, but because they want to compel the militant group Hezbollah into a “ceasefire” or to “withdraw” its forces.  Rest assured—influentital Western media outlets tell us—Israel was only dropping bombs on Lebanese people and exploding their devices in a coordinated terrorist attack in order to bring about peace. Chief among those buying this convenient talking point is Patrick Kingsley of The New York Times. After allowing “ex” Israeli officials to echo this line without pushback for several days, Kinglsey skipped the middleman and just parroted the line himself in a September 23 “analysis,” writing: Israeli officials had hoped that by scaling up their attacks over the past week — striking Hezbollah’s communications tools, and killing several key commanders as well as Lebanese civilians — they would unnerve the group and persuade it to withdraw from the Israel-Lebanon border. The officials believed that if they increased the cost of Hezbollah’s campaign, it would be easier for foreign diplomats, like Amos Hochstein, a senior United States envoy, to get the group to stand down. Kingsley takes for granted that Israel’s goal with these acts of war is not to encourage more war but to simply push Hezbollah into a ceasefire at their Northern border—nothing more. Such a premise is so squishy and nebulous as to be meaningless, yet still hard to falsify. It also defies the basic tenets of military strategy and historical precedent. What we saw this week were not “defensive” actions taken with the objective of peace and getting Hezbollah to step back and stand down. The objective is surrender and calling it peace, which is tantamount to saying, “We’ll have peace after I kill you and control large parts of your territory.”  Israel is bombing Lebanon to achieve a military goal. It is not bombing for peace, it is bombing to control the terms of capitulation.  Israel is most likely attempting to militarily occupy Lebanese territory, as it did from 1985 to 2000. So yes, if Hezbollah simply hands over Lebanese territory—just like if Hamas unilaterally surrenders and allows Israel to occupy Gaza uncontested—then indeed there would be “peace” in the sense that Israel will have used extreme violence and human suffering to achieve domination. Again, this is a feature of winning a war, and it has been a feature since there’s been war, but Western commentators today are trying to rebrand the long-established terms of war with the vocabulary of peace. Israel is bombing Lebanon to achieve a military goal. It is not bombing for peace, it is bombing to control the terms of capitulation.  If Hezbollah or Palestinian militants attacked Israel in the same fashion right now, killing 558 people, including 34 children, in one day, one wonders if Kinglsey would have taken at face value that they only did so reluctantly with the hopes of forcing a peace deal, compelling Israel to grant them a Palestinian state, or securing an agreement from Israel to never bomb Lebanon. The answer is mostly likely not. There is a subtle but effective mode of propaganda at work here: It’s just taken for granted that the US and Israel only engage in wide-scale violence as self-defense, as a tool to achieve peace, as a last resort. US and Israel’s enemies, on the other hand, whether they be Palestinian militants or Hezbollah, are assumed to be violent for the sake of violence. They are assumed to be ontologically sadistic, with no strategy beyond mindless death.  This isn’t to deny that Hezbollah has fired rockets into Israel—rockets that, according to Hezbollah, were fired in solidarity with those being bombed and starved in Gaza, and that still constitute a fraction of the attacks Israel has launched on Lebanon since October 7. Yet the former is always painted as the aggressor—and Israel is perennially, by definition, a purely defensive rational actor.  NPR’s report from September 22 allowed Israeli officials to run with the “bomb to de-escalate” line with zero pushback. The report gave Israeli officials the last word, paraphrasing Amir Avivi, a “retired Israeli brigadier general,” and telling listeners that “Israel was seeking to force Hezbollah to withdraw with these ever intensifying aerial attacks… Israel is basically putting in front of Hezbollah a very clear message, either you withdraw or it’s a full-scale war.” Maiming thousands and killing over 600 people in one week is apparently not an act of a “full scale war,” just penny ante messages from Israel, truly a reasonable and measured actor simply looking to de-escalate, signaling they want peace.    “Escalation suggests Israel gambling on bombing Hezbollah into ceasefire,” Dan Sabbagh, Defence and Security Editor at The Guardian, headlined his equally credulous piece published on September 24. “What is now unfolding is an Israeli strategy of military escalation against Hezbollah,” Sabbagh writes, “premised on the risky belief that the militant group can be bombed into a ceasefire before fighting in Gaza ends.”  Maiming thousands and killing over 600 people in one week is apparently not an act of a “full scale war,” just penny ante messages from Israel, truly a reasonable and measured actor simply looking to de-escalate, signaling they want peace.    “Bombed into a ceasefire,” again, is a concept so vague as to be meaningless. In principle, all war is pursuant to some eventual “ceasefire” in the sense that one side will capitulate once the other party achieves its military goal, thus ceasing fire. But this is not how the concept of launching large-scale attacks killing hundreds and maiming thousands is typically framed. It is only put in “peace” terms when done by a US/UK ally. Pearl Harbor was designed to compel a “ceasefire” from the US and allow oil to flow back into Japan, but framing it this way would have been considered bizarre, insensitive, credulous, and—above all—extremely fatuous. A similarly Orwellian framing, of course, has dominated the fake “ceasefire” coverage with respect to Gaza. For months, Israel has successfully branded its repeated demand for unconditional surrender of Hamas and other militant groups as a “ceasefire offer.” The term has lost all meaning, and now, demands of total capitulation on pain of continued bombing by Israel and the slaughter of hundreds a day are presented to confused liberal readers in the West as magnanimous olive branches.  “War is peace” is a popular cliche in reference to Orwell used to mock deceptive language like this. So when The New York Times and Guardian adopt, more or less, this exact phrasing unironically, it doesn’t bode well for Western media’s ability to accurately capture how extreme, dangerous, and wanton Israel’s latest escalation in violence is.