Who Is Going To Destroy Israel?
There can be no doubt that Hamas and Hizbollah could do some serious damage to Israel, but only to a point at which Israel would respond with maximum force to destroy the military capabilities of both movements
Some commentators made much of Israel’s failure to defeat Hamas in the warrens of its home ground in southern Lebanon in the summer of 2006, but that was a failure of strategic military thinking not military capability. If instead of trying to do the job mainly by air Israel’s generals had launched a major ground offensive with the objective of rolling up Lebanon to the LitaniRiver, it would have been a very different story. Sure the IDF would have taken heavy casualties, but it could have destroyed Hizbollah as a fighting force and prevented the return of armed hostiles to Lebanon south of the Litani. The point is that what Israel did not do in southern Lebanon in 2006, it could do at any time of its choosing in the future.
The assertion that Hizbollah and Hamas do or could pose a threat to Israel’s existence is plain silly.
So, given that the Arab regimes are not going to war with Israel, what about a nuclear-armed Iran as a threat to Israel’s existence?
For the sake of argument, let’s assume that Iran has nuclear weapons a few years from now. Would it then launch a nuclear strike to wipe Israel off the map? How one answers that question depends on whether or not one thinks that any leadership in Iran would be mad enough to invite nuclear retaliation. I don’t think any Iranian leadership would be that stupid. I also believe that if there are some in the present leadership who do want Iran to have nuclear weapons, they want them for only one purpose – deterrence, to deter Israel from attacking Iran.
But I also think it’s most unlikely that Iran will actually develop nuclear weapons. Its leaders know that if they got to within one or two years of doing so, Israel, with or without America’s blessing, would take them (Iran’s nuclear facilities) out, and would do with with a nuclear strike if its generals believed they could not do the job with conventional weapons.
The assertion that Iran does pose or could pose a threat to Israel’s existence is also plain silly.
Only Jews (and not all of them) believe that Israel’s enemies have, or one day will have, both the desire and the capability to destroy the Zionist state; and they believe it only because they’ve been conditionedby Zionism to so believe. A large part of the problem, or so it seems to me, is that many Jews, Israelis and others, needto believe tha
t Israel’s very existence is threatened by its enemies. And this need exists because it saves Jews from having to ask themselves uncomfortable and painful questions about the nature of the Zionist state and its criminal behaviour.
The irony, perhaps the greatest irony in all of human history to date, is thatthe only real threat to Israel’s existence is the demographic time-bomb created by Zionism’s conquest and colonisation of the West Bank including Arab East Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip in 1967.
Sharon’s decision to end Israel’s occupation of the Gaza Strip had nothing whatever to do with advancing a peace process. In his advancing years Prime Minister Sharonhad come to grips with one aspect of reality, it being that Israel would have three options if it stayed in occupation of the Gaza Strip and all of the West Bank.
OPTION 1 was formally annexing the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, and, to enable Israel to go on claiming that it was a democracy, to grant all of its citizens equal rights. The problem with this was that it would bring about the end of the Jewish state by political means because, in due course, the Arab citizens of Greater Israel would outnumber and outvote its Jewish citizens.
OPTION 2 was formally annexing the West Bank and the Gaza Strip but denying Greater Israel’s Arab citizens (the majority in-the-making) equal rights. In this scenario Greater Israel would have to treat its Arab citizens even worse than the black majority in South Africa was treated by its apartheid regime. And that would not be acceptable to most Jews of the world and, perhaps, at least half the Jews of Israel. It would also present the international community with no choice, at some point, but to declare Greater Israel a pariah state and impose sanctions on it.
OPTION 3 was to resort to another and final round of ethnic cleansing – provoking an all-out confrontation with the Palestinians to give the IDF and the armed settlers the pretext for driving the Palestinians out of the occupied territories and into Eygpt, Jordan or wherever, all in the name of self-defence, of course. If the Palestinians refused to flee, there would be a bloodbath. A Zionist holocaust.
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