© The Cradle
If you watched "
Game of Thrones," you know the pattern by heart. Every season, someone captures a castle, claims a throne, or raises a banner over an ancient wall and declares victory. Yet the story is never decided by who occupies the fortress.
The castle changes hands. The banners change. The kingdom keeps bleeding. The men obsessed with holding stone are usually the last to realize the battle has moved elsewhere.
Southern Lebanon, 31 May 2026. The "lord" is Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The castle is Beaufort, a 900-year-old Crusader fortress on a cliff above the Litani River, seized by the occupation army's Golani Brigade and crowned with an Israeli flag for the first time since 2000.Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz vowed the invaders would hold it "as part of the security zone in Lebanon," and Netanyahu declared the occupation had returned stronger than ever.
The same brigade took the same rock in 1982, buried its own men doing it, held it for 18 years, and in 2000 blew up the position before retreating south under cover of darkness. Crusaders raised those stones, Salahuddin took them, then Baibars. Every army that ever planted a flag on that ridge
eventually carried it back down.The Israeli press knew exactly what to do with the image.
Haaretz acknowledged that a single photograph of the flag above the fortress was enough to bury the only conversation that mattered:
what, exactly, this war is winning.So look at what the flag was raised over.The same day the banner went up,
a Hezbollah drone eliminated a 21-year-old Israeli soldier a few kilometers away. The weapon driving this reality across the front costs a few hundred dollars and trails a thread of glass that Tel Aviv's air defense industry
still cannot stop. Across the Galilee,
more than 50 rockets and a swarm of drones landed throughout the same afternoon. The Israeli army captured a castle and could not secure a single quiet hour.
This is the game of drones: an army staging photo opportunities on empty ruins while a wire bleeds it in the open, then calling the photograph
a victory.
Comment: Ireland, with its history of occupation and suffering under the English have a visceral understanding of the Palestinian situation.