Losing the plot: Why did Israel attack Gaza - again?

Israel is interested in anything but peace, interested in nothing but "maiming and murdering more Palestinians".

AN EXCELLENT PIECE

By Hamid Dabashi

Al-Jazeera

".....But underlying all these factors is Netanyahu's instinctive fear of the Arab Spring, of the succession of Arab revolutions - the democratic uprising from one end of the Arab world to another - that poses THE existential threat to Israel. To imagine Mahmoud Ahmadinejad or even the Islamic Republic, as an existential threat to Israel is a silly joke that the Israeli propaganda machinery has turned into a deadly serious phantasm.

But the Arab revolutions, even in this nascent and turbulent stage (or particularly in this stage) are the existential threat to the Jewish apartheid settler colony - and neither the Likudnik nor the liberal Zionists seem to have a clue how to reconfigure the fate of six million plus human beings trapped inside a bankrupt ideology, within thick apartheid walls and now even capped by an Iron Dome.

Raining bombs on innocent Palestinians in Gaza was yet another desperate attempt to pull the clock back to December 2008-January 2009, just a year before the Arab revolutions began - it was a murderous nostalgic act of a desperate Zionist whom history has left behind. 

So, yes, perhaps, Netanyahu was also testing Morsi? But if so, he was not the only one - Egyptians and Arabs at large are also testing Morsi. As soon as the Israeli, American, Saudi bait went down, Morsi swam for it, jumped for a supercilious power grab and within minutes that he brokered a truce and started cozying up to Obama, suddenly a bizarre looking tyrant emerged from him. But not so fast brother! - for the Egyptians were out in their streets calling him "Mohamed Morsi Mubarak" and pharaoh, and torching the office of the Muslim Brotherhood faster than he could call uncle and run to his brothers.

Morsi was delusional trying to grab more power. But the fear of Netanyahu and the cause of his having lost the plot is not Morsi - it is in the volcanic eruption that brought Morsi to power in the first place. Israel that he leads, plus Saudi Arabia and other retrograde Persian Gulf potentates and the US, on one side, and opposing them the ruling clergy in Iran and the mass murderers holding to power in Syria, are all afraid of one concrete and abiding fact: the Arab revolutions - that will - sooner than later - dismantle all these regimes. In the excellent words of Haidar Eid, a professor at Al-Aqsa University in Gaza:

Now is the moment of truth, the moment of sending a clear message to the new Arab world: The Mubarak and Abu el-Gheit era is gone. That the power of deterrence, in light of the massive imbalance of power between Israel and the Palestinians, lies with the ordinary citizen in the streets of Tunis, Cairo, Rabat, Doha, Amman and Muscat. The demonstrations, which have erupted in London, New York, Glasgow and other cities must be translated into a new, concrete reality steered by Palestinians and Arabs. Egyptians, in particular, should be partners, not mediators. "