One ex-Israeli official put it best. Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu seems to be “going berserk.”
He is demanding that the United States set a “red line” that, once crossed, will automatically initiate a US attack on Iran. He doesn’t even bother to pretend that war with Iran is in US interests. He just wants his war trigger. But, and this seems literally to be driving him crazy, he sees the chances for war diminishing every day.
I think his latest tantrum was produced by last week’s New York Times op-ed by its former executive editor, Bill Keller which stated that even if Iran develops nuclear weapons, they would not necessarily pose a significant threat to Israel, let alone to the United States.
Keller merely suggested what Israelis say privately: this whole Iran scare is not about nukes per se, it is about Israel’s fear of losing the ability to do whatever it wants to whenever it wants to. Bomb Gaza. Bomb Lebanon. Bomb relief ships. Bomb whoever, whenever.
It is about regional hegemony. After all, militarily Israel can more than handle Iran and both countries know that. That is why Israelis do not share Netanyahu’s enthusiasm for war.
Not only do they not want war, they rightly fear that an attack on Iran would result in thousands of missiles, being launched against Israeli population centers by Hizbullah and Hamas. Even though Defense Minister Ehud Barak promises that only 500 Israeli civilians would be killed (how did he come up with that number), Israelis do not want their kids to be among that number.
None of this seems to matters to Netanyahu, who acts less an Israeli leader than a US neocon. That is why he is the first Israeli prime minister not even to go through the motions of serious negotiations. He is not interested.
Fortunately, President Obama — like President George W. Bush before him — is standing in the way of an Iran war. Netanyahu’s plan requires the United States to jump in to bail Israel out once it begins a war it cannot finish, but Obama, like Bush, won’t permit it.
So what is Netanyahu to do? He will defeat President Obama (at least in his dreams) and bring in a Mitt Romney under the sway of Sheldon Adelson. He believes Romney would go to war and so he is engineering conflict with the United States to tip the election.
Forget the fact that he can’t do it. The percentage of Jews who vote based on Israel’s perceived desires is 3% at best, and not even that 3% necessarily believes war is in Israel’s interests. Nonetheless, that is what Bibi’s whole game is about.
The irony is that it is unlikely a President Romney would go to war either. With the military opposed, one would have to imagine that Romney would risk American interests (most importantly, young lives) to please a donor and the same neocon claque that led Bush to war with Iraq.
Really? A new Republican president would want to begin his term with another Middle East war? Dream on, Bibi.
The only force in the United States that favors war is the Israel lobby (AIPAC and its satellite organizations), neoconservative pundits and some Christian rightists (although the latter are more enthusiastic about going to war against a woman’s right to choose and gay rights than against Iran). War with Iran could destroy Romney’s presidency and he surely knows it.
The bottom line then is that all Netanyahu is accomplishing with his ugly saber-rattling is threatening the survival of the US-Israel relationship.
Don’t kid yourself. No matter what Obama says publicly, he is furious with Netanyahu. Privately, it is hard to imagine that even Republicans like seeing the United States being treated with such contempt by a tiny country we sustain with $3.5 billion a year in aid (exempt from all cuts, unlike every other program) and UN vetoes that make America look like Israel’s satellite. The only thing that keeps them all quiet is intimidation and campaign contributions. That won’t last forever, particularly as younger American Jews have moved toward indifference to Israel due to the policies it has pursued since an Israeli fanatic killed Yitzhak Rabin.
Israelis need to wake up. IL Kenen, the founder of AIPAC, called the United States Israel’s defense line. It is. And Bibi is jeopardizing it.
Binyamin Netanyahu poses an existential threat to the Jewish state. Those who claim to care about Israel need to speak out. Will we really allow this rightist egomaniac to destroy a 2000 year old dream?
Netanyahu’s father who died a few months ago, had been a vociferous proponent of bombing Israel’s way to “Greater Israel”. He was also one of the voices that had provided the underlying rationale for the unconscionable (and on-going) Israeli brutality against other Semitic peoples, including the Palestinians, who have lived continuously, to the present day, in the ME for millennia. (Which renders the boring “anti-semite” invective redolent of self-inflicted name-calling considering Israel’s barbaric rhetoric and acts over the last 7+ decades.)
The man who had lived thru WW2 never learned the lesson that “uber alles” is a terminal ideological cancer, as is the “eretz yisrael” delusion. There never was a historic nation of Israel in antiquity (Silberstein/Finkelstein “The Bible Unearthed”). Furthermore, the idea of nations and nationality is a philosophical concept that had emerged out of the Sturm und Drang of 18th century’s Romanticism. Until then, tribal/conquered lands had been the property of assorted chiefs, kings, pharaohs, tzars, and other self-appointed despotic 1%ers of the day who controlled the unwashed and unlearned masses with priests and promises of power in the hereafter, if meek and mild in this life. They ruled over peoples/tribes, not nations. Even the mythological Israel of the bible needed a succession of invented kings to rationalize (with the superimposition of hindsight) the concept of an illusory “nation”. (Nota bene: the more appropriate term for today’s Israel should have been Judea, but I digress…)
N.Sr. had, it would seem, a hugely destructive influence on his progeny. To-date, Jr. is unable to accept that the “use by” date for the invention of the silly mythology that had stirred the zionists almost two centuries ago and, subsequently, Sr’s generation, had expired a long time ago. That preposterous and dangerous idea needs to be toned down and adapted to modern day reality tout de suite. Something that Shlomo Sands attempted in his “The Invention of the Jewish People”. Lest it give “Pastor” Jones of Florida the idea that just because adherents to his set of beliefs are scattered all over the globe, it should give the US the right to call the planet “greater US”.
On the other hand, could it be that Jr., a nasty piece of work, but not a stupid man, is projecting stage 3 of his grief (Anger) when making those reprehensible threats against world’s humanity that is outliving his dad? Rather than waste time and vacuous vanity on re-election and pursuit of the “Greater Nonsense”, he should seek professional help. He’s free to self-destruct if he cannot/will not control himself. He is not free to take the world into his hell with him.
Israel’s (and Bibi’s) preferred and actual course is to remain in conflict with the Palestinians and through them with the Arab (and Muslim) world through insistence on its imposition of an anti-democratic apartheid-style one-state “solution” (or continuation) of the I/P conflict indefinitely. Tension can only increase in the world as the non-aligned see USA and EU as under the thumb of AIPAC-like elements (vastly rich capitalists with a hard-line agenda for Israel) and accordingly “freely” choosing to trash international law and Palestinian human and national rights indefinitely.
How long can Israel/AIPAC/USA get away with this? Is it a Ponzi scheme which “must” fail or is it a force of nature guaranteed to succeed forever? The Dem’s half-hearted breakaway from undivided-obeisance to undivided-Jerusalem is a suggestion that Mr. Ponzi had better prepare for jail.
Let’s make an example, you are a state and may succeed, as it happens, in driving another state’s foreign policy by the steady work of your agency in that state, by spending some money in this, and setting the right man to push the more convenient button.
So, you spend some millions to bribe… oops, fund a would-be congressman or senator, the future president’s campaign or stuff.
You take this as an investment.
Then – who knows? – maybe you’ll be able to get your money back some tens times. Although, you know, PR are pretty expensive, it’s possible to reach your goal. As a result, in the end, maybe you will have a politician capable to get for you-state-investor a gift worth 3.5 billion/year.
It’s just an example, of course.
On the one hand, we can be sure that Obama doesn’t like the risk of alienating the Israel Lobby, but when enough is enough… Well, luckily, Obama ain’t George W., and apart some counselors, like Dershowitz and stuff… I mean, anyway, he’s one hundred miles off. He panders the Lobby, of course, but his attitude is far from patological. I’d say, he relies on an unbearable opportunism.
On the other hand, recalling the aborted deal on the Golan Heights, Camp David and so forth, I had thought that Ehud Barak had been a disgrace (and he definitely was). Later, I thought Olmert was anything but a genius, not to mention what Sharon (or what is left of him) was. In this sense, though, I’d prefer cope with a bad man, than an idiot, because the latter is unpredictable.
In fact, Bibi Netanyahu could be even worse. He is a complete imbecile, with a merit, insofar as he looks like having succeded, as of today, in getting the (likely) US President not willing to send another Colin Powel, waving a test-tube full of baking soda or stuff, in front of the UN.
So, if he wants to wage war at Iran, well, it seems he’ll have to push the button alone, with all due consequences.
But, what If – as it happens – the US doesn’t move?
Do you really think the US will actually enter the war and nuke Iran to get a quick result from a wrongful war? Do you really think any US President – unless he is and idiot (I omit any examples) – is capable of casting in hell the US and the whole world, and all this for some dirty money and a pat on the shoulder by the Israel Lobby?
I definitely don’t think so.
If you say yes, well, we are really in the lurch, more deeply than ever. I’d say we are going to be turned into something similar to some billions of dead men (still) walking for a short while.
You do realize that most Israelis have a dual citizenship with the US or other favorable nations to the Jews? As well, lets also talk about the National Security Estimate on Israel wont survive another 20yrs. Israel and most Jews would come to the US if they had to evac Israel. It would be an undertaking, but we could do it if it needed to be done.
Not “most” Israelis only olim or sabras with higher ed and significant financial means. If the jewish establishment continues at this rate, Americans won’t be very hospitable to Israeli immigrants. Had it been done ten years ago…but relocation is not impossible.
Just realised what the Nov Presidential Election is about!!
I had this naieve idea that it was about American people chosing a candidate to govern in their best interests.But no. Its all about the candidate who can best be manipulated to serve the interests of ,guess who…?
How would you feel about relocating Israel?