Military obsession has prevented strategic thinking by Israelis


April 11, 2012
Sarah Benton

Israel’s dumb Zionist atomic bomb

Uri Yaakobi Keller, Alternative News
08.04.12

One of the most recent “achievements” about which the Israeli government brags is the diversion of international attention to Iran and its development of nuclear weapons, a situation perceived as an end of the world by the Israeli mainstream.

It is possible that, to a certain extent, this is indeed an achievement of the Israeli public relations machine, and as evidence the world was a bit more apathetic than usual [about] last month’s Israeli bombings of Gaza (not that the world is normally [that] sensitive). However, the overall Israeli position toward Iran, just like its “achievement”, contains the fundamental flaws existing in the overall Israeli perspective.

Zionism, which established and rules Israel, is a not so special a national movement in comparison to others like it from the 19th century. Like similar movements, it aspired to establish national hegemony and what has forever guided it is military force and not all sorts of contentions concerning justice or rights. The Zionist explanation, which transformed into Israeli public relations, is that the Holocaust of European Jews occurred as “we were not sufficiently strong to prevent it”.

According to this, the behaviour of the Zionist movement – and the state of Israel which was controlled by parts of the Zionist movement and its supporters – was forever founded on an obsession with power and military rule, all the while ignoring the long-term situation and political implications of Israeli actions.

To this day the Israeli mainstream does not understand what is so bad about the deportation of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in 1948, as numerous other movements and countries in the world did much worse things. On the face of it there is a modicum of truth in this contention; only a few years earlier, at the end of World War II, the deportation of peoples on an ethnic basis was still occurring in Europe itself. What Israel finds difficult to understand is that whilst there were indeed times in which deportations and horrific acts were accepted, today these acts are now defined as “war crimes” and “crimes against humanity” and they are finally considered a barbaric anachronism – so that today not all problems can be solved with the sword.

The Israeli obsession with power and the blindness it inflicts on the Zionist state led Israel to numerous strategic, tactical and political errors in the past. So it was, for example, in Lebanon, where Israel offhandedly declared war against Hizbullah only because it could, and so it was with the strengthening of the Hamas movement by Israel in order to weaken the PLO and Fatah, and so it was with the fundamental Israeli error which led to the current situation.

Decades ago already Israel clarified to the world that it possesses nuclear weapons. The step of attaining nuclear arms appears in the Israeli mainstream as a substantial achievement for the Israeli military power. It is almost pitiful that a majority of Israelis do not understand that as a direct result, the other regional powers also wish to gain similar weapons.

The Americans managed to sufficiently bribe Egypt so it wouldn’t go down this route; this is, of course, before the American puppet regime of Mubarak fell, so who knows what will occur now. Syria was apparently never sufficiently strong and wealthy to develop such weapons. The Saudi power has always been founded on petroleum money and friendship with the United States. Iran, in contrast, is simply doing the most logical thing – if Israel, the most aggressive country in the region for the past six decades, is doing it, there is no reason that Iran will not attempt to attain nuclear bombs (which will, of course, force Egypt and Saudi Arabia to reconsider their previous decision on this matter).

In a recent article in Haaretz, Uri Avnery notes there is no chance that Israel will attack Iran – the United States will not permit it due to the implications of war with Iran on the price of oil, and because Iran’s nuclear weapons are almost a done deal and Israel must begin to get used to the idea. This is almost true. The coming months, with a heating up of the American presidential election campaign and a short time following the November 2012 elections, are the most dangerous period from the perspective of Israeli actions.

While all candidates for the American presidency are competing to be virulently pro-Israeli, Israel traditionally feels the most freedom (whilst ignoring, which is also a tradition, the long-term political implications of its actions). It is not by chance that Operation Cast Lead occurred just a bit less than four years ago – only a few months after the election of a new American president, and that the most deadly attack on Gaza since then is happening now. There is too big  a chance that the two clowns of Netanyahu-Barak, who control Israel, in a typical Zionist move lacking all long-term thought, will decide to attack Iran in order to grasp at Israel’s dying military hegemony in the region.

The implications of such a move will be disastrous for Israel in the best case scenario, and for the entire world in the worst case, and in any event will not prevent the Iranian attainment of nuclear weapons, but will simply delay it. Israel missed the real opportunity to prevent a nuclear arms race in the Middle East when it decided to develop its own nuclear weapons.

Translated to English by the Alternative Information Center (AIC)

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