My friend Christopher Varley of Toronto writes:
A friend has said to me, "I keep seeing/hearing reports that now that Tzipi Livni can't get the
ultra-orthodox into a coalition, Netanyahu is the favourite to win the
election she will be forced to call. This is not good news. I hope when Obama gets elected, he can soothe Netanyahu into a
less hawkish frame of mind."
That's a tough assignment. I don’t believe that Netanyahu can be “soothed”,
but if Obama is elected he could always put him on a short chain, and give it
a sharp jerk whenever required. I don’t think that there’s a snowball’s
chance in hell that Netanyahu can talk Obama into attacking
Iran.
The sooner the separate and distinct national interests of
Israel and the
U.S. are disentangled, the
better. The entanglement only feeds Israel
’s megalomania and ties America
’s hands. It also lends credence to the suspicion that North American
Likudniks have “dual loyalty” or “double identity”.
The Zionist hawks demand too much from the
United States
, and have naively placed too much faith in the continued success of the
(currently failing) American project.
For more insights into Israel
’s behaviour, I strongly recommend Zeev Maov’s “Defending the Holy Land” (
University of
Michigan Press , 2006). It’s an
insider’s critique of the pernicious effect that creeping militarism has had
on Israel
and its prospects.
Maoz argues that
Israel initiates practically all
violence in the region.
Here are 2 excerpts from an op-ed that he wrote during
Israel ’s war on
Lebanon in 2006:
Both in Gaza and
in Lebanon ,
Israel–as if
it has been cast into an infinite programming loop– repeats the policies that
had failed so many times in the past, by using disproportionate force against
weak governments or political authorities that lack the capacity to impose
order on their constituents.
Israel
carried out massive area bombardments in
Lebanon in the past (operations
Accountability in 1993 and Grapes of Wrath in 1996). Beyond the suffering
they inflicted on the Lebanese people and on Israeli residents of its
northern border, these operations yielded no tangible results…Israeli resort to disproportionate force is
predicated on a conception of "escalation dominance," a flawed
notion that the massive force can reduce the motivation of its adversaries to
attack Israeli targets. Israelis still subscribe to the notion that if a
problem cannot be solved by force, it would be solved by applying greater
force.
Is Maoz a “self-hater”, or will his name be counted among the
righteous 50 years from now?
