by Flying Rodent
Jesus facepalming Christ. Let’s say you were a cartoonish, Ahmadinejadesque lunatic fixated on destroying Israel.
How would you go about achieving your goal?
Well, priority number one would be to isolate the Israelis from their allies, so they have no diplomatic or military cover.
A good start would be to take actions that infuriate military partners like the Turks by killing a load of Turkish civvies, then telling them to fuck off by pretending that the civvies you killed deserved it.
You’d definitely want to sabotage relations with allies like Greece, so that they’d withdraw from joint military operations and bar your military leaders from the country.
You’d want to blacken the Israelis’ image by finding as much video footage as possible of exploded children and Merkava tanks doing donuts in the rubble of civilian housing, preferably from insane, murderous, indefensible and counterproductive wars.
You’d want to rile up Israel’s enemies by marching the Israeli military into conflicts in Lebanon that they can’t win so that they look much weaker than they are, and you’d want to destroy the reputation of Israel’s special forces. At least since the raid on Entebbe, Israeli special forces have looked courageous and invincible – getting some good footage of them blowing away a load of civvies in a clusterfuck operation would be propaganda gold.
Plus, you’d want to isolate the country from the United States by blowing up a load of pointless political pissfights that gain Israel nothing and damage its supporters as badly as possible.
The Israelis don’t need the US to give them every item of military hardware excepting nukes and aircraft carriers, but trying to fund that stuff out of general taxation rather getting them for free would be much more difficult.
In short, you’d want to make Israel look like a paranoid, bloodthirsty and extremely belligerent nation of racist freaks, determined to murder fuck out of civilians with total impunity year-in, year-out, so that the entire planet disowns them by, for example, withdrawing their ambassadors and issuing a barrage of denuncations.
This, I contend, is the actual policy of the Israeli political class, and I’m now certain that the Israeli government is packed to the hoop with Iranian sleeper agents.
Short of handing Syrian intelligence the launch codes to their nuclear arsenal, I really can’t think of any way in which the Israeli political class could do their country more harm.
It’s been clear for years that the Israeli right is utterly dependent on the looniest fringe of Palestinian society for their power and legitimacy, and that both sets of nutters use violence against the other as a means to cementing their rule.
The basic situation over there is that both Hamas and the Israeli government are committed to policies that harm their populations but ensure their own continued rule. It’s a godawful, mutual death spiral that’s heading in precisely the wrong direction.
Shorter – there really is an urgent and perilous threat to Israel. It’s called “the Israeli government”.
, May 31, 2010