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What Does Israel Want?
Imagine a group of high ranking generals who simulated for years Third World War scenarios in which they can move huge armies around, employ the most sophisticated weapons in their disposal and enjoy the immunity of a computerized headquarters from which they can direct their war games. Now imagine that they are informed that in fact there is no Third World War and their expertise is needed to calm down some of the nearby slums or deal with soaring crime in deprived townships and impoverished neighborhoods. And then imagine - in the final episode in my chimerical crisis - what happens when they find out how irrelevant have their plans been and how useless are their weapons in the struggle against the street violence produced by social inequality, poverty and years of discrimination in their society. They can either admit failure or decide none the less to use the massive and destructive arsenal at their disposal. We are witnessing today the havoc wreaked by Israeli generals who opted for latter course of action.
I have been teaching in the Israeli universities for 25 years. Several of my students were high ranking officers in the army. I could see their growing frustration since the outbreak of the first Intifada in 1987. They detested this kind of confrontation, called euphemistically by the gurus of the American discipline of International Relations: ‘low intensity conflict’. It was too low to their taste. They were faced with stones, molotov bottles and primitive arms which required a very limited use of the huge arsenal the army has amassed throughout the years and did not test at all their ability to perform in a battlefield or a war zone. Even when the army used tanks and F-16s, it was a far cry from the war games the officers played in the Israeli Matkal – headquarters – and for which they bought, with American tax payer money – the most sophisticated and updated weaponry existing in the market.
The first Intifada was crushed, but the Palestinians continued to seek ways of ending the occupation. They rose again in 2000, inspired this time by a more religious group of national leaders and activists. But it was still a ‘low intensity conflict’; no more than that. But this is not what the army expected, it was yearning for a ‘real’ war. As Raviv Druker and Offer Shelah, two Israeli journalists with close ties to the IDF, show in a recent book, Boomerang (p. 50), major military exercises before the second Intifada were based on a scenario that envisaged a full-scale war. It was predicted that in the case of another Palestinian uprising, there would be three days of ‘riots’ in the occupied territories that would turn into a head-on confrontation with neighboring Arab states, especially Syria. Such a confrontation, it was argued, was needed to maintain Israel’s power of deterrence and reinforce the generals confidence in their army’s ability to conduct a conventional war.
More
http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article5003.shtml
The first Intifada was crushed, but the Palestinians continued to seek ways of ending the occupation. They rose again in 2000, inspired this time by a more religious group of national leaders and activists. But it was still a ‘low intensity conflict’; no more than that. But this is not what the army expected, it was yearning for a ‘real’ war. As Raviv Druker and Offer Shelah, two Israeli journalists with close ties to the IDF, show in a recent book, Boomerang (p. 50), major military exercises before the second Intifada were based on a scenario that envisaged a full-scale war. It was predicted that in the case of another Palestinian uprising, there would be three days of ‘riots’ in the occupied territories that would turn into a head-on confrontation with neighboring Arab states, especially Syria. Such a confrontation, it was argued, was needed to maintain Israel’s power of deterrence and reinforce the generals confidence in their army’s ability to conduct a conventional war.
More
http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article5003.shtml
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Israel does exactly what the US wants as it is nothing more than a US military base to protect US oil profits in the Middle East, or as is said, a catspaw of imperialism. Now that the 9/11 Inside Job has been exposed to millions of people as being a Reichstag Fire, carried out at the behest of Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld & Rice, with the planes hitting the Twin Towers & Building 7 guided by the US Air Force on automatic pilot with no hijackers on board (9 of the hijackers were alived on 9/12/01), the Twin Towers & Building 7 destroyed by construction explosives in a few seconds in their own footprint in small enough pieces to be carted away immediately, the Pentagon hit by a US missile and the US Air Force destroying the plane over Pennsylvania, the more common agent provocateur and war actions are being done by US imperialism to influence American voters to vote Republican in this fall's Congressional elections where a few dozen seats could change from Republican to Democrat, giving the Democrats a majority. The Democrats are just as reactionary on war in general and on Israel in particular. Every single Democratic and Republican official at all levels of government, by definition, is pro-Israel, which is to say, pro-war, and thus, supports anti-Arab racism. The bombings around the world that are immediately assumed by the capitalist press to be the work of Muslims, and this invasion of Lebanon and Gaza were all obviously long planned by US and Israel jointly. Israel is of course infamous for being the US agent provocateur all around the world. As soon as Bush tells Israel to stop, it will. Anti-Arab/Anti-Moslem racism runs deep in US society, and the fear of being labeled anti-Semitic for criticizing Israel is also very great. As we saw with the 9/11 Inside Job, there is no low to which Bush & Company will not stoop, and invading Lebanon and Gaza is much easier to get away with both because of distance from the US and the racism in the US toward the victims. Of course, all of this only makes American economic conditions worse as we pay for all of it, and it is the economy that is usually decisive in these elections. Beyond all this, please stop voting for any Democrat or Republican at any level. Only socialist parties, like Peace & Freedom Party on the California ballot and the Green Party support the Palestinian liberation struggle. A vote for any Democrat or Republican is a vote for the warmongering and agent provocatuer terrorist actions of Israel and the USA.
Israel, the US and the New Orientalism
By M. SHAHID ALAM
The West has never had an easy time coming to terms with Islam or Islamicate societies. There was a long period, lasting more than a millennium, when the two were seen as existential threats. In order to mobilize the energy to contain and then roll back these threats--first from the 'Holy Lands' and Southwestern Europe and later from Southeastern Europe--European writers presented Islam as a Christian heresy, a devil-worshipping religion, Mahomet's trickery, a militant and militarist cult crafted for Bedouin conquests. To this list of dark qualities the thinkers of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment added a few more. Now Islamicate societies were also seen as despotic, fatalistic, fanatical, irrational, uncurious, opposed to science, and inimical to progress. When Europe gained the upper hand militarily in the nineteenth century, this complex of Orientalist ideas would be used to justify the conquest and colonization of Islamic lands.
Starting in the nineteenth century, a small minority of European thinkers began to reject the standard Orientalist constructs of Islam and Islamicate societies. They began to look at Islam and Islamicate societies as they were described in Muslim sources; they wrote of Islamic achievements in philosophy, the sciences, arts and architecture; they emphasized Islam's egalitarian spirit, the absence of racial prejudice, and their greater tolerance of other religious communities. Many of these Europeans who had chosen to give Islam its due were Jews who had only recently escaped from the ghettoes to enter into Europe's academies. In part, these Jews were appropriating for themselves the achievements of another Semitic people. In calling attention to the tolerance of Islamic societies, they were also gently reminding the Europeans that they had far to go towards creating a bourgeois civilization based on humane values. Less charitably, one might say that the Jewish dissenters were undermining the Christian West by elevating its opposite, the Islamic East.
More
http://counterpunch.com/alam07142006.html
By M. SHAHID ALAM
The West has never had an easy time coming to terms with Islam or Islamicate societies. There was a long period, lasting more than a millennium, when the two were seen as existential threats. In order to mobilize the energy to contain and then roll back these threats--first from the 'Holy Lands' and Southwestern Europe and later from Southeastern Europe--European writers presented Islam as a Christian heresy, a devil-worshipping religion, Mahomet's trickery, a militant and militarist cult crafted for Bedouin conquests. To this list of dark qualities the thinkers of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment added a few more. Now Islamicate societies were also seen as despotic, fatalistic, fanatical, irrational, uncurious, opposed to science, and inimical to progress. When Europe gained the upper hand militarily in the nineteenth century, this complex of Orientalist ideas would be used to justify the conquest and colonization of Islamic lands.
Starting in the nineteenth century, a small minority of European thinkers began to reject the standard Orientalist constructs of Islam and Islamicate societies. They began to look at Islam and Islamicate societies as they were described in Muslim sources; they wrote of Islamic achievements in philosophy, the sciences, arts and architecture; they emphasized Islam's egalitarian spirit, the absence of racial prejudice, and their greater tolerance of other religious communities. Many of these Europeans who had chosen to give Islam its due were Jews who had only recently escaped from the ghettoes to enter into Europe's academies. In part, these Jews were appropriating for themselves the achievements of another Semitic people. In calling attention to the tolerance of Islamic societies, they were also gently reminding the Europeans that they had far to go towards creating a bourgeois civilization based on humane values. Less charitably, one might say that the Jewish dissenters were undermining the Christian West by elevating its opposite, the Islamic East.
More
http://counterpunch.com/alam07142006.html
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