Benjamin Netanyahu (Photo: Platon)
Looks like Benjamin Netanyahu has been reading Nate Silver and is getting ready for life in with a second Obama administration. Netanyahu is making headlines from a bellicose interview he gave with Israeli television reiterating that Israel will attack Iran with or without American support.
From the New York Times:
“When David Ben-Gurion declared the foundation of the state of Israel, was it done with American approval?” Mr. Netanyahu asked in an interview broadcast on Israel’s Channel 2 on Monday night. “When Levi Eshkol was forced to act in order to loosen the siege before 1967, was it done with the Americans’ support?
“If someone sits here as the prime minister of Israel and he can’t take action on matters that are cardinal to the existence of this country, its future and its security, and he is totally dependent on receiving approval from others, then he is not worthy of leading,” Mr. Netanyahu added. “I can make these decisions.”
The same news program that featured the interview with Netanyahu also reported that Netanyahu and Defense Minister Ehud Barak ordered the Israeli military to “prepare for an imminent attack on the Iranian nuclear program” in 2010, but were rebuffed by the Israeli military and intelligence establishment who saw the two as over stepping their bounds and attempting to “steal a war.”
Meanwhile, perhaps taking advantage of the world’s eyes being focused on Dixville Notch, the Israeli government announced it is moving forward with construction on 1,200 new settlement homes in East Jerusalem and Ariel.
From the Associated Press:
The government announced late Monday that it was accepting bids from contractors to build the homes in two Jewish enclaves in east Jerusalem, Ramot and Pisgat Zeev. It also reopened bidding for 72 homes in Ariel, deep inside the West Bank.
Anti-settlement watchdog Peace Now accused the government of issuing the tenders when the world’s attention is on the American presidential election. The projects were all originally announced months ago.
Daniel Seidemann posted a map of the building tenders on Twitter:
(h/t Ira Glunts)
I hope that tomorrow morning Obama,s first call will be to Niet-and yahu to lay out a few new rules of engagement in the coming 2nd term.
You can only get kicked in the posterior so many times before you kick back.
Show some cahones Barak.
It’s all Zionist manipulation; the key is the increase in illegal Israeli settlements, more Jews on more land. Bibi knows the Jewish Israeli well and they like the settlements, and everybody can see neither Obama nor Mitt will do anything effective to end ever more land grabs, more “facts on the ground” that will determine Israel’s future, and as to that, Jewish Israelis long ago concluded more land is always better, both for basic strategic military reasons and to fulfill their biblical chosen dream of Greater Israel, as well as to provide negotiation pawns as if the Jews involved had a right to that land in the first place that’s been recognized by anyone except Israel and influential diaspora Jews.
“When David Ben-Gurion declared the foundation of the state of Israel, was it done with American approval?”
It was, indeed.
The decision to cover Israel’s whimpering ass in 1973 when supplies were running out was also American.
Over 50 UN vetos supporting Israel have been American
Figure shows the label “Terrestrial Jerusalem”. As distinguished, I suppose, from “Celestial”?
N’yahu is really pushing here. Doing what (as NYT says) Israel has always done, do for itself what it wants to do. First (against majority opposing local opinion but no particular military resistance) it created itself “vi et armis”. A criminal act in the usual circumstances of armed acts against the people and property of a place.
Thereafter, finding itself unloved and unwanted (as any criminal hoarding its violently acquired gains would naturally be), it fought war after war, occasionally in defense, mostly in offensive (aggressive and therefore illegal) wars. And now, more talk of doing it again. No end in sight. Indeed, Israel has never (I believe) had a politician who has spread before his countrymen a vision of long-lasting peace. Instead, its politicians have had only a vision of never ending warfare.
I wonder if that is where Bush got his idea for a war-without-end against “terror” (by which he meant endless USA attacks on people making armed resistance to the USA’s ever more fierce and ever more unwelcome world-wide imperium).
And I wonder if the ease with which the USA accepted aggressive war-without-end explains why the USA accepts the OIL and COAL and GAS war-without-end on the natural environment which produces and enhances Global Warming. All sense of caution, morality, and fear of blow-back is absent.
Can anyone suggest a live feed of US election reports, I would prefer it to watching it on our own two major public channels or the private one that will cover it.
Ideally with a link?
I would be very, very pleased.