    The Beginning of the End for the Zionist State of Israel?

    Mparent7777.livejournal.com – August 15, 2006

    Alan Hart at International Institute of Strategic Studies,
    New Civilisation debate, on Thursday, August 10, 2006.

    I’m going to suggest to you that what we might now be witnessing is the
    long beginning of the end of the Zionist state of Israel. In the next 10
    minutes or so I will talk my way to an explanation of why I think so;
    and then I’ll address the question of what the most likely consequences
    would be. I can see two One State of Palestine for All and real, lasting
    peace, or Catastrophe for All... and by "All" I don’t just mean Israeli
    Jews and the Arabs of the region, I mean all of us, everywhere.

    I thought I would be the first to give voice in public to the idea that
    Israel might be planting in Lebanon the final seeds of its own
    destruction, but while I was working on my text for this evening, I came
    across an interview given by Zbigniew Brzezinski, who was President
    Carter’s National Security Adviser. He said: "Eventually, if neo-con
    policies continue to be pursued, the United States will be expelled from
    the region and that will be the beginning of the end for Israel as
    well."

    As Israel’s bombardment of Lebanon unfolded, a great deal of nonsense
    was written and spoken by pundits and policymakers throughout the mainly
    Gentile Judeo-Christian world about why it was happening. The main
    thrust of the nonsense was that Hizbullah started the war and that
    Israel was merely defending itself. I think the truth about Hizbullah’s
    role in triggering the war can be summarised as follows bearing in mind
    that the border incident of 12 July was one of many since Israel’s
    withdrawal from Lebanon in May 2000, and which more often than not,
    according to UN monitors, were provoked by Israeli actions and/or
    Israeli violations of agreements. By engaging an IDF border patrol,
    killing three Israeli soldiers and taking two hostages, and firing a few
    rockets to create a diversion for that operation, Hizbullah gave
    Israel’s generals and those politicians who rubber-stamp their demands
    the PRETEXT they wanted and needed to go to war a war they had planned
    for months.

    I was reminded of what was said to me on the second of the six days of
    the 1967 war when I was a very young ITN correspondent reporting from
    Israel. One of my sources was Major General Chaim Herzog. He was one of
    the founding fathers of Israel’s Directorate of Military Intelligence.
    On the second day of that war he said to me in private conversation: "If
    Nasser had not been stupid enough to give us a PRETEXT for war now, we
    would have created one in the coming year to 18 months."

    Hizbullah’s purpose in taking Israeli prisoners/hostages was to have
    them as bargaining chips - to secure the return of Lebanese prisoners
    Israel had refused to release in a previous prisoner exchange. As former
    President Carter implied in an article for The Washington Post on I
    August, it was not unreasonable for Hizbullah to assume that an exchange
    would be possible because "the assumption was based on a number of such
    trades in the past." But on 12 July 2006 the government of Israel was not
    interested in trades. It did not give a single moment to diplomacy or
    negotiations of any kind. It did not even consider a local retaliation
    to make a point. Israel rushed to war. As Defence Minister Amir Peretz
    put it: "We’re skipping the stage of threats and going straight to the
    action." On the subject of Hizbullah’s rockets, (which are hit-and-miss
    low tech weapons when compared with Israel’s state of the art
    firepower), it is right to ask Why, really, were they there? What,
    really, explains Hizbullah’s stock-piling and its bunkering down? The
    honest answer, which has its context in the whole history of the
    Arab-Israeli conflict, and Zionism’s demonstrated designs on Southern
    Lebanon in particular, is this: Hizbullah was strengthening itself
    militarily for the same reason as Eygpt did when President Nasser, with
    great reluctance after America had refused to supply him, accepted
    weapons from the Soviet Union. Nasser did NOT upgrade Eygpt’s military
    capabilities to make war on Israel. He wanted to be able to demonstrate
    to Israel that attacking Eygpt - to impose Zionism’s will on it - was not a
    cost-free option. In other words, Hizbullah had been improving its
    military capability to deter Israeli incursions and attacks, which was
    something the Lebanese army was incapable of doing. Am I suggesting that
    Hizbullah would NOT have let loose its rockets if Israel had not gone
    for the war option? YES! The notion that, on 12 July 2006, Hizbullah was
    joined in conspiracy with Iran and Syria to wipe Israel off the face of
    the earth is nothing but Zionist and neo-con propaganda nonsense to
    justify Israel’s latest war of aggression and also, perhaps, to justify
    - in advance of it happening - war on Iran.

    It’s true that the rhetoric of Iran’s President gave and gives a degree
    of apparent credibility to Zionist and neo-con spin but only to those
    who are unaware of, or don’t want to know, the difference between the
    facts and documented truth of the real history of the Arab-Israeli
    conflict (as in my book) and Zionism’s version of it.

    To those who really want to understand why the Zionist state of Israel
    behaves in the way it does, and is (as described in a recent article
    courageously carried by The Independent) "a terrorist state like no
    other", I say not only read my book, but give special attention to page
    485 of Volume One. On it I quote what was said behind closed doors in
    May 1955 by Moshe Dayan, Israel’s one-eyed warlord and master of
    deception. He was in conversation with Israel’s ambassadors to
    Washington, London and Paris. At the time the Eisenhower administration
    was pressing Israel to abandon its policy of reprisal attacks.

    Eisenhower was aware that Nasser did not want war with Israel, and that
    he would, when he could, make an accommodation with it. Eisenhower also
    knew that Israel’s reprisal attacks were making it impossible for Nasser
    to prepare the ground on his side for peace with Israel.

    In conversation with Israel’s three most important ambassadors to the
    West, Dayan explained why he was totally opposed - whatever the pressure
    from the West - to the idea that Israel should abandon its policy of
    reprisal attacks. They were, he said, "a life drug."  What he meant, he
    also explained, was that reprisal attacks enabled the Israeli government
    "to maintain a high degree of tension in the country and the army."
    What, really, did that mean? Israel’s standing or full-time army was (as
    it still is and must be) relatively small, not more than about 23,000
    souls in all. The other quarter of a million fighting men and women who
    could be mobilised in 48 hours were reservists from every walk of
    Israel’s civil society. The real point? Without Israeli reprisal attacks
    and all that they implied - that the Zionist state was in constant danger
    of being annihilated - there was a possibility that some - and perhaps
    many - reservists would not be motivated enough to respond to Zionism’s
    calls to arms. Put another way, what Dayan really feared was the TRUTH.
    He knew, as all of Israel’s leaders knew, that Israel’s existence was
    NOT in danger from any combination of Arab forces. And that was the
    truth which had to be kept from the Jews of Israel. Dayan’s fear was
    that if they became aware of it, they might insist on peace on terms the
    Arab regimes could accept but which were not acceptable to Zionism.
    Among those present when Dayan explained the need for Israeli reprisal
    attacks as a "life drug" was the Foreign Ministry’s Gideon Rafael. He
    reported what Dayan told the ambassadors to Prime Minister Moshe Sharret
    - in my view, with the arguable exception of Yitzhak Rabin, the only
    completely rational prime minister Israel has ever had. And we know from
    Sharret’s diaries what Rafael then said to him: "This is how fascism
    began in Italy and Germany!"

    Ladies and gentlemen, I think future historians may say that was how
    fascism began in the Zionist state of Israel.

    The idea of Israel as a fully functioning democracy is a seriously
    flawed one. It’s true that Israeli Jews are free to speak their minds
    (in a way that most Jews of the world are frightened to do), and to that
    extent it can be said that Israel has the appearance of a vibrant
    democracy... But in reality, and especially since the countdown to the
    1967 war, it’s Israel’s generals who call most of the policy shots, even
    when one of them is not prime minister.

    In June 1967, Israel’s prime minister of the time - the much maligned Levi
    Eshkol - did NOT want to take his country to war. War was imposed
    upon him by the generals, led by Dayan. As I explain in Volume Two of my
    book, what really happened in Israel in the final countdown to that war
    was something very close to a military coup in all but name.

    And that’s where we are today - the generals effectively calling the shots
    in Israel, to the applause of the neo-cons. Why, really, did Israel’s
    generals want to make war on Lebanon? There was obviously much more to
    it than the collective punishment of a whole people - as part and parcel
    of a stated objective - the destruction of Hizbullah (a Moslem David
    which could hit and hurt the Zionist Goliath). I think there were two main
    reasons.The first was that Israel’s generals believed they should and
    could restore the "deterrent power" of the IDF (Israel’s war machine).
    They believed, correctly, that it had been seriously damaged by
    Hizbullah’s success in not only confronting the IDF following Sharon’s
    invasion of Lebanon in 1982, but eventually forcing it to withdraw,
    effectively defeated and humiliated... I think it is more than reasonable
    to presume that for most if not all of the past six years, Israel’s
    generals were itching to make war on Lebanon to repair that damage to
    restore the IDF’s deterrent power. Put another way, it was time,
    Israel’s generals believed, to give the Arabs (all Arabs, not just
    Hizbullah) another lesson in who the master was.

    The second main reason for the insistence of Israel’s generals on 12
    July this year that war was the only option. I think it’s also more than
    reasonable to presume that they saw the opportunity to ethnically
    cleanse Lebanon up to the Litani River, with a view, eventually, to
    occupying and then annexing the ethnically cleansed territory. For
    Zionism this would be the fulfilment of the vision of modern Israel’s
    founding father, David Ben-Gurion - a Zionist state within "natural"
    borders, those borders being the Jordan River in the East and the Litani
    River of Lebanon in the north. Israel gained control of the Jordan River
    border in its 1967 war of expansion, but - prior to its rush to war on 12
    July - all of its attempts to establish the Litani border had failed
    since 1982, because of Hizbullah’s ability to cause the occupying IDF
    forces more casualties than Israeli public opinion was prepared to
    tolerate. According to those currently calling the policy shots -
    Israel’s generals and politicians, the neo-cons in and around the Bush
    administration and their associate in Downing Street - the name of the
    game is creating a "new Middle East". It IS happening. A new Middle East
    is being created.

    But what kind of new Middle East will it actually be? In my analysis it
    will be one in which the Zionist state of Israel, having rejected a
    number of opportunities to make peace with the Palestinians and all the
    Arab states, will become increasingly vulnerable and, at a point,
    actually for the first time ever in its shortish history, could face the
    possibility of defeat. In my view the seeds of that possible defeat have
    just been sown in Lebanon. The fact is that Israel’s latest military
    adventure has been totally counter-productive in that it has caused
    Hizbullah to be admired by the angry and humiliated masses of the Arab
    and wider Moslem world. That being so, would it really be surprising if,
    in growing numbers, Arabs and Moslems everywhere begin to entertain - if
    they are not already entertaining - something like the following thought:
    "If 3,000 Hizbullah guerrillas can stand up to mighty Israel for weeks
    and give it a seriously bloody nose, what would happen if we all joined
    the fight?" (Do I hear the sound of pro-Western Arab regimes being
    toppled? Yes, I think so). I imagine that even the thought of Israel
    being defeated one day will bring joy to very many Arabs and other
    Moslems. But there ought to be no place for joy because there’s no
    mystery about what would happen in the event of Israel actually being on
    the brink of defeat. I want to quote to you now from one of my Panorama
    interviews with Golda Meir. (It can be found, this quote, on the second
    page Volume One of my book, in the Prologue which is titled Waiting for
    the Apocalypse).

    At a point I interrupted her to say: "Prime Minister I want to be sure I
    understand what you’re saying... You are saying that if ever Israel was in
    danger of being defeated on the battlefield, it would be prepared to
    take the region and the whole world down with it?" Without the shortest
    of pauses for reflection, Golda replied: "Yes, that’s exactly what I’m
    saying."  In those days Panorama went on-air at 8 o’clock on Monday
    evenings. Shortly after the transmission of that interview The Times had
    a new lead editorial. It quoted what Golda had said to me and added its
    view that "We had better believe her."  How, actually, would the Zionist
    state of Israel take at least the region down with it? It would arm its
    nuclear missiles, target Arab capitals, then fire the missiles. Such an
    End-Game to the Arab-Israeli conflict, if it happened, and which I would
    describe as a self-fulfilled Zionist prophesy of doom, would probably
    take many years to play out. But the countdown to such a catastrophe
    would be speeded up if, as Brzezinski put it, "neo-con policies continue
    to be pursued."  If they are, and if Iran is attacked, I think that a
    Clash of Civilisations, Judeo-Christian vs Islamic, would become
    unstoppable. Is there no way to stop the madness and create a "new Middle
    East" worth having? Yes, of course, there is, but it requires the agenda
    of the neo-cons and their associates to be thrown into the dustbin of
    history, in order for there to be a resolution of the Palestine problem,
    which I describe as the cancer at the heart of international
    affairs. Unfortunately, and because of the facts Zionism has been allowed
    to create on the ground in Israel/Palestine, it’s already much too late
    for a genuine two-state solution - one which would see Israel back behind
    more or less its pre-1967 borders with Jerusalem an open city and the
    capital of two states. The conclusion which I think is invited is this:
    If the countdown to catastrophe for all is to be stopped, the only
    possible solution to the Palestine problem is One State for All. That
    would, of course, be the end of Zionism’s colonial enterprise and of
    Zionism itself. But in my view that’s what has to happen if there’s to
    be a "new Middle East" in which there can be security and peace for all,
    Arabs and Jews... Ladies and gentlemen: I’m not a politician or, any more,
    a working journalist and broadcaster who must write and speak in way
    that doesn’t offend very powerful vested interests. I am a reasonably
    well-informed human being who cares and who is free to say what he
    really thinks. (Which probably makes me a member of a very small club!)
    And in summary of all that I’ve said this evening, what I really think
    comes down to this: The equation is a very simple one: No justice for
    the Palestinians = no peace for any of us.

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    Last updated 16/08/2006