The Missing Option to Defuse Iran Threat

Nonetheless, Benjamin Netanyahu's government has been beating the drums of war, linking the Iranian "threat" to a second holocaust (a comparison dismissed by Nobel Laureate and Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel). His newly appointed home front defense minister, Avi Dichter, says, "Israel's existence is threatened." Israel's top-tier missile defense system was announced upgraded and missile alert system tested. In a nationwide experiment to continue through Thursday, text messages warning of incoming missiles are being sent to cellphone users. Gas mask centers have already distributed more than four million masks.

Israeli warmongering is creating, in Saguy's words, an "orchestrated and purposely timed hysteria" in Israel as if "someone is lighting a fire, then yelling that it has to put out."

Financial markets are shivering, foreign investors are on guard, Israeli new shekel is growing increasingly weaker against the dollar and Pnina Grinbaum, a 55-year-old government clerk in Jerusalem, was quoted by the Associated Press on August 16 as saying: " I'm very afraid. I want peace, not war."

The international stand -- off on Iran's nuclear program as well as on the Syrian crisis is very tightly linked to the impasse, which saw the Arab and Palestinian -- Israeli peace process reach a dead end.

The Syrian crisis in particular is more closely tied to the impasse in the Arab -- Israeli conflict. De-linked from this conflict, it would boil down to an internal crisis that could be easily solved by Syrians themselves.

Regional and international involvement in the Syrian crisis has nothing to do with the internal crisis per se, but has exploited the internal crisis because it has a lot to do with the U.S. -- Israel plans to isolate and contain what both countries perceive as an Iranian regional threat to their interests.

To this end, Israel and U.S. are now doing all what they can to break the alliance between Iran and Syria and the Syrian bridge linking Iran to Lebanese and Palestinian movements resisting Israeli military occupation, thus cutting off Iran from the Mediterranean,  as well as depriving these movements from their Syrian support, by coordinating a "regime change" in Damascus.

For four years since Benyamin Netanyahu came to power, Israel risked a confrontation with the U.S. administration of President Barak Obama over his order of priorities in the Middle East, which gave precedence to reaching a negotiated political settlement for the Palestinian -- Israeli conflict as a precondition to building up a U.S., Arab and Israeli front against Iran.

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