¡Viva Israel, Carajo!
Also, the siege in southern Lebanon continues.
(Abu Ali Express)
It’s Wednesday, August 12, and Israel may never have had a better month diplomatically. Back in June, if Vice President JD Vance is to be believed, Israel had a single ally left in the world. Yet in the space of a few weeks it seems to have found several new ones, above all in South America.
Few leaders, Donald Trump included, can out-philosemite Argentina’s Javier Milei, the self-declared “most Zionist president in the world”—he has given even Isaac Herzog a run for his money. But Milei now has competition on his own continent.
Over the past month, Colombia’s new president, Abelardo de la Espriella, has moved to reverse wholesale the hostile posture of his predecessor, the leftist Gustavo Petro, who had severed ties with Israel and halted Israeli arms imports over the war in Gaza. In July and August 2026, Bogotá ordered the full restoration of diplomatic relations, pledged to move Colombia’s embassy to Jerusalem, and withdrew from South Africa’s genocide case against Israel at the International Court of Justice. Then, on Monday, Colombia became only the second country in the world, after the United States, to recognize Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights.
Venezuela, improbably, has moved in the same direction. On Tuesday, the two countries announced they had agreed to renew consular relations, 17 years after severing all diplomatic ties in 2009 under Hugo Chávez. The thaw followed Israel’s dispatch of an aid delegation—led by the Foreign Ministry and the IDF’s Home Front Command—after the double earthquake that killed thousands in Venezuela in late June.
Vance’s advice about not alienating Israel’s most important ally still holds. His claim that it was Israel’s only one is aging rather less well. As Milei would put it: ¡Viva la libertad, carajo! (“Long live freedom, goddamnit!”)
IDF forces operating at Beaufort Castle in southern Lebanon. (IDF)
Not far from the medieval ruins of Beaufort Castle, Israel’s war in southern Lebanon has taken on a pre-modern character. Nearly two months since the ceasefire, dozens of Hezbollah operatives are besieged inside a fortified underground compound on the Ali Taher ridge. Hezbollah is desperately trying to resupply the fortress while Israel is steadily tightening the noose.
How have these fighters survived underground for so long? Because this is not the makeshift dirt warren of the Viet Cong, or even the concrete-lined tunnels of Gaza. The Ali Taher compound is a military fortress that, by the IDF chief of staff’s account, Hezbollah spent 20 years building into the ridge. More than a kilometer of command bunkers and combat tunnels runs beneath the summit, cut largely from solid rock that shrugs off everything short of a bunker-buster. Built with Iranian help as the nerve center of Hezbollah’s Badr division—the formation responsible for the sector north of the Litani—it was engineered to run a war: a command-and-control hub, fire-control arrays for rockets and missiles, sleeping quarters, showers, and everything else needed to keep men underground for months.
Israel decided it would not fight its way into the tunnels. Instead it sealed the exits, took the heights, and settled in to wait. Israel has recently struck the compound’s water tanks and cut its power lines; Hezbollah has tried flying replacements in by drone at night—before being spotted and dispatched by IDF forces. Now, Lebanese sources say, the group is going even more pre-modern, digging fresh tunnels around the ridge to reach its trapped men another way, racing hunger and thirst.
The fortress is on the verge of falling, it seems, whether it is Crusaders fighting jihadists or the IDF against much the same—in the end, hunger wins.
English Editor: Ari Tatarka
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