Is Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu offering Mitt Romney another October Surprise? His bellicose threats to attack Iran would impact the election, even as it set in motion a series of events destructive to the region.
Why would he put the lives of his own citizens in such danger?
One strong reason could be his belief that a Romney victory would return Israel to the glory days of George W. Bush. During his recent fund-raising speech in Jerusalem, he said Israel's culture was "superior" to that of the Palestinians.
In what was received by many not at the luncheon at the King David Hotel as a racist statement, Romney was following the guidance of his foreign policy advisor, Dan Senor, a former Bush neo-conservative public affairs officer in Iraq
Romney was so caught up in his culture pandering to his Israeli and American pro-Israel audience, that he completely ignored the impact of the occupation on the Palestinian economy.
Netanyahu enjoyed eight years of his relationship to Republican President George W. Bush, who essentially gave Israel a green light to carry out its plan to take control of what Netanyahu calls Judea and Samaria, but which the international community correctly identifies as the Occupied Territories of the West Bank, Gaza, East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights.
Jeff Halper's essay in the April-June issue of Link magazine, Is the Two State Solution Dead? should
bring an end to the fiction that Israel is sincere in its claim to
support a "two state solution". Here are key paragraphs in Halper's
essay:
"Israel and its supporters also know full well that the two-state solution is dead, and good riddance because it gave too much land and sovereignty to a collection of people whose national rights Israel has always denied.
"But it nevertheless plays a key role in perpetuating Israeli control of the Occupied Territory, holding everything in place until the Occupation is normalized, the Palestinians pacified, and the world moves on to the next urgent conflict.
"By playing along with variations of a two-state solution that it knows are unacceptable to the Palestinians -- for example, a 'two-state solution' in which the Palestinians are locked into a non-viable, semi-sovereign Bantustan -- Israel is able to avoid any genuine solution to the conflict, since any genuine solution would require either too large a concession of land or shared sovereignty with the Palestinians.
"But while Israel endeavors (with the U.S., Europe and, for its own reasons, the Palestinian Authority) to keep the two-state charade going on indefinitely, it has already moved on to the next stage: putting in place an apartheid regime or -- its preferable solution -- simply warehousing the Palestinians forever.
With US polls showing the strength of Obama's lead three months before the election, would Netanyahu dare risk starting a war with Iran which he may think would guarantee a Romney victory?
If that is the thinking in the Netanyahu war cabinet, it is wrong.
Israel's standing with the American public is not nearly as strong as the Congress, and Israel's U.S. backers, think it is. Americans are tired of war and they do not like Romney. If Netanyahu attacks Iran over Obama's objections, there is every reason to believe the American people would reject Israel's action and stand behind their own president.
As a second-term president, Obama would be in a strong position to start terminating Israel's control of the American government.
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