By Gideon Levy
".....For months now, the security establishment has been flooding us with incessant warnings about an impending confrontation with Syria. The source of these warnings and the degree to which they can be trusted has never been clarified. The average news consumer knows merely that Syria has proposed peace and has cautioned against starting a war. He also knows that Israel did not relate favorably to the peace proposal and did not even try to challenge it or to examine how serious it was. The situation is explosive, the defense establishment has told us time and again.
And then suddenly one night - boom! Suspicious cargo from North Korea, according to the report in The Washington Post; North Korean know-how for enriching uranium, according to Fox News; an aerial-photography mission, according to The New York Times; or weapons systems and "a big hole in the desert," according to CNN......
The usual reason given for the resounding silence is that Israel does not wish to embarrass Syria or drag it into a war. That is a strange excuse. It is to be hoped that it was taken into account before the air force planes took off to wherever it was that they flew - if they did indeed fly there. Syria will, or will not, take retaliatory action against Israel not for what it says, but for what it does. News reports do not drive a country to go to war......"
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