Israel Determined to Dig Is Own Grave

As an acute observer remarked to me this week, 'The Middle East today is like Europe on the eve of the Great War of 1914-18. It needs only a spark to set the whole region on fire.'

By Patrick Seale

"What would it take to persuade Israel to rethink its attitude towards its Arab neighbors - and primarily towards the Palestinians? The Hamas victory in Gaza is surely a clear signal that an Israeli change of direction is urgently needed.

All Israel's efforts to break the democratically-elected Hamas government have failed. Its policies of boycott, siege and starvation, of bombing and shelling, of extra-judicial murder, of withholding tax revenues, of the systematic destruction of Palestinian institutions have served only to create a time-bomb of hunger, despair and defiance on Israel's flank......

The word from Washington is that combating 'terror' remains the U.S.-Israeli priority. President Mahmud Abbas, who rules courtesy of the IDF and the settlers over three or four beleaguered Bantustans on the West Bank, has been instructed to join the war against his Palestinian brothers, if he is to earn a few crumbs from the rich man's table......

If this were not enough, the trend to which Israel should perhaps pay the greatest attention is that its main ally, the United States, is bogged down in an unwinnable war, waged in large part because Israel's American friends, the Washington neo-conservatives, thought that if America smashed Iraq, Israel would no longer have anything to fear from the east. It could then continue its West Bank land-grab and its destruction of Palestinian society without risking any serious Arab reaction. The neo-cons are now pressing hard for a U.S. war against Iran, as if unaware that the long-suffering American public is increasingly uneasy about their country being dragged into distant and costly wars on Israel's behalf......

As a result, Mahmud Abbas will move into ever greater illegality and will be seen more and more as a Quisling; Fatah will continue its terminal decline; and Israel and its neighbors will be doomed to decades more of violence and war......"