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