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Air force strikes on electricity transformers on 28 June cut power to more than 70 per cent of the Gaza Strip and the damage is expected to take up to six months to repair. Full Story  

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict isn’t about land anymore. It is about who is human, and who is not: who is a lord, and who is a helot. It is about power and domination, and the Israelis, by means of their much-vaunted "unilateral withdrawal" from parts of the occupied territories, have set up a theater in which their ideology of domination can be acted out indefinitely. Of course, they need a "reason" – which can be provoked or manufactured, as the case may be – but in reality they can invade at will, for any and no reason, and this ability to dominate is the payoff, the orgasmic climax the Israeli leadership is seeking.

The buzzing of Bashar al-Assad’s summer residence, the mass arrest of democratically elected Palestinian lawmakers and ministers, the targeting of infrastructure in violation of the Geneva accords and the commonly held concept of human decency – the Israelis do it simply because they can. This isn’t "colonialism" – it’s sadism.

Israel’s amen corner is constantly reiterating two themes that supposedly justify whatever horrific tactic the IDF employs: (1) The other side targets innocent civilians, and (2) Israel has the right to defend itself. The evil suicide bombings in pizza parlors and night clubs have – rightly – turned public opinion in the West against the perpetrators and lessened support for the Palestinian cause. Yet the tables are turning: Israel is now openly targeting the civilian population of the Gaza Strip. "Retaliation" for the kidnapping of a soldier and a Jewish settler on occupied lands is clearly not at all defensive: soldiers, after all, are fair game in wartime, and the settlers are clearly involved in an act of aggression, i.e., dispossessing Palestinians of their land.

Everything the Israelis do, according to them, is " retaliation," and dutifully reported as such in our hopelessly biased media. The clear implication of much of Western coverage of the current crisis is that this is the culmination of another one of those inexplicable bursts of Palestinian rage that bubbles up to the surface, seemingly, just in time to nix other, more positive developments – such as the moderate-radical split in Hamas, or recent indications that the newly elected Palestinian leadership may be willing to recognize the Jewish state.

Professor Juan Cole, of the University of Michigan, takes the media to task for dropping the context of the escalating conflict:

"The U.S. press has, as far as I can see, been irresponsible in not broadcasting much about the prologue to the present violence, the Israeli military’s bombing of civilians on a Gaza beach earlier in the month. This atrocity was on the front page of every Arabic language newspaper every day for a while earlier this month. We cannot understand the region if we cannot understand how outraged they are, and the source of the outrage."

The source he speaks about – a day at the beach.

On June 9, Israeli gunboats opened fire on beach-goers in Gaza, killing eight, including most of an entire family. The lone survivor of the Ghalia family, 10-year-old Huda, screaming in existential agony as she rolls around on the bloodstained sand and pounds it with her little fists, is bound to go down in history as an emblematic image of the Palestinian struggle for statehood – and for the full humanity of an entire people. Do you want to understand why the medievalist ideologues of Hamas have come to power in Palestine? Then just look at this video one more time, particularly the first part, and then tell me you just don’t understand.

The Israeli response has been outright denial. This denialism is expressed in terms that recall the fanatic illogic of the Holocaust-deniers, who focus on weird out-of-context details (there were no gas chambers, and the gas couldn’t have killed anyway, besides which the order for the Holocaust was never signed by Hitler, etc., ad nauseam). They exclude all evidence – like, say, those piles of bodies we’ve all seen, and the testimony of the survivors – that doesn’t fit their denialist paradigm, and deride the killing of millions as a " Holo-hoax." The parallels with Israeli denialism in the face of the IDF’s murderous brutality are eerily similar, as this Human Rights Watch analysis shows:

"The IDF’s conclusion that it was not responsible for the deaths on the beach was based exclusively on information gathered by the IDF and excluded all evidence gathered by other sources. Its investigation centered on mathematical models said to show a ‘statistical impossibility’ that a shell fired by IDF artillery was responsible for killing the civilians. The reliability of such a conclusion should be evaluated by independent experts with access to the underlying data."

"An investigation that refuses to look at contradictory evidence can hardly be considered credible," says the senior military analyst at Human Rights Watch, Marc Garlasco – but not according to the mindset of nationalist fanatics, who see reality through ethnic-tinted lenses. Major-General Meir Kalifi, who oversaw the Israeli "internal investigation," avers that Palestinian witnesses are to be discounted because they "have no problem lying." Therefore, any and all evidence submitted by Palestinian officials was thrown in the trash, including "155mm shrapnel, both new and old, and dirt from the beach and crater." This interdict also includes evidence offered by Westerners who don’t toe the Israeli line, including Human Rights Watch researchers who offered the general proof of Israeli culpability and were similarly rebuffed.

The IDF claims the murdered beach-goers and over 40 wounded were hit after 4:50 p.m. on June 9, when the Israeli shelling had ceased. However, independent sources document that the killings occurred well within range of the shelling period:

"Computerized hospital records that show children injured at the beach were treated by 5:12 p.m., and handwritten hospital records that show they were admitted at 5:05 p.m. In light of the 20-minute round trip drive between the hospital and the beach, this evidence suggests that the blast that caused the family’s death occurred during the time of the IDF shelling."

The Israeli response to this mountain of evidence is… more classic denialist drivel. Shrapnel removed from the bodies of the murdered is dismissed by Gen. Kalifi: Anyone, he avers, can dip shrapnel in blood! The official Israeli line on the Gaza Beach Massacre is that a gigantic conspiracy was instantly created by Palestinian groups and their Western accomplices to frame the IDF and Israel for the senseless murders, and that the members of this conspiracy were instantly mobilized, moving within moments of the shelling to pull off a gigantic hoax.

Again, this limns the mindset of the Holocaust-deniers, who portray a huge, all-powerful "Zionist conspiracy" that systematically fakes evidence, suppresses the "truth," and falsifies history. Jewish critics of the "Holo-hoax" mythos rightly deride the fantastic conspiracy theories of the denialists as being so outlandish as to be laughable as well as sinister. Human Rights Watch spokesman Garlasco takes a similar approach to the Israeli denialists and their conspiracy theories:

"’If the Israeli allegations of tampered evidence are to be believed, many Palestinians would have to have engaged in a massive and immediate conspiracy to falsify the data,’ said Garlasco. ‘The conspirators – witnesses, victims, medical personnel, and bomb disposal staff – would have had to falsify their testimony, amend digital and handwritten records, and dip shrapnel into a victim’s blood. It beggars belief that such a huge conspiracy could be orchestrated so quickly.’"

It beggars belief – unless you’ll believe anything that fits your ideological preconceptions. In which case, anything goes, and it is possible to dismiss the evidence provided by your lying eyes – the shattered bodies of Palestinian children, for instance, who a moment ago were cavorting happily on a beach.

The Israeli blitz is clearly a response, not to the pinpricks of the mostly ineffective assaults on outlying Israeli suburbs, nor even to the electoral triumph of Hamas, but to the American invasion and occupation of Iraq. With the resources and attention of enemy regimes and guerrilla groups diverted away from Palestine and toward Iraq, the pressure is off the Israelis, and they are free to ride roughshod over the occupied territories, absorbing what they need (and can get away with) and discarding the useless bits. Israel is preparing to unilaterally "settle" the Palestinian question by establishing its own borders and crouching behind the " security fence" that accidentally-on-purpose annexes many acres of valuable farmland.

As John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt put it in their recent Harvard University study, " The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy," the main purpose of the invasion and occupation of Iraq was to further Tel Aviv’s military position and security interests. As the Israelis roll over the Palestinians in this latest series of attacks, we can see how that purpose has been very well served.

Of course, Olmert’s comment, and the deep-seated racism at the heart of Israeli politics that it seems to expose, can be rationalised with the claim that it is not unreasonable that an Israeli Prime Minister would be more concerned about the lives of Israeli citizens than those of the Palestinian ‘enemy’. After all, this is "war", is it not? Well, yes and no. Yes, if your definition of "war" is:

• to dispossess an entire people from large parts of their land
• shepherd them into refugee camps
• exile others and refuse them a right to return
• manipulate international opinion via the mainstream press and demonise the dispossessed people as terrorists when they resist your brutal measures against them
• deprive them of any real means to resist yet when they do manage to strike back, portray them as being a greater source of evil than you
• isolate them from any international aid and begin a process of slowly making their lives into a living hell
• periodically murder them, including many children to an average of 600 per year and then lie about it and ensure that their suffering is played down in the international mainstream press.

When stating his belief that Israeli citizens were inherently more worthy than their Palestinian brothers and sisters, Olmert made the comparison between the people of Gaza and the inhabitants of the Israeli town of Sderot who, as stated, have been making a lot of noise about their suffering from rockets fired by the palestinian resistance. The important details, which are as usual ignored by the mainstream press, are that, in the 9 day period from June 14th – June 23rd this year, 14 innocent Palestinian civilians were murdered by the IDF as part of the effort to stop the firing of rockets at Sderot. Yet in the past 5 years, just 5 Israeli citizens have been killed by such rockets, despite the fact that hundreds have been fired.

The simple fact of the matter is that , if the Israeli government was truly only concerned with protecting Israeli citizens and bore no visceral, racist hatred towards Palestinians, then we would surely be much further along the road to a peaceful solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But it is hard to convince anyone that your primary goal is defence when:

• your air force fires 1,000 missiles per week at a 7×30 mile strip of land (Gaza) that is home to over 1.4 million impoverished people (Palestinians), 50% of whom are under the age of 15.
• 3012 Palestinian Civilians have been killed by Israeli Occupation Forces forces in the Occupied Palestinian Territories since the beginning of the Palestinian uprising (Intifada) in 2000.
• 22,750 Palestinians have been wounded by Israeli Occupation Forces in the Gaza Strip and West Bank in the same period.

And all of this when:

• in the same period approximately 700 Israeli civilians have been killed as a result of Palestinian attacks
• during all of 2005, just six Israeli Occupation Forces were killed by Palestinian resistance fighters

Yet the Israeli government does a very good job of convincing the whole world that it is the victim in the conflict. How can this be? Israeli control of the press? Could that ubiquitous "conspiracy theory" actually be closer to a conspiracy fact? I don’t really care, all I want is for someone to explain to me how, in a situation where there is massive evidence that 1.4 million completely isolated Palestinian civilians in the Gaza strip are being systematically murdered and starved by the state of Israel with its shiny 21st century military and all the tax dollars and support America can muster, somehow the entire world believes that those 1.4 million dispossessed are "evil terrorists" and "only have themselves to blame".

Somebody, please tell me how it comes to pass, if not by control of the mainstream press, and very significant control at that.

In fact, save yourself the bother, here’s how it happened:

9 Israeli children’s deaths were reported in the headlines or first paragraphs of AP articles on the Israel/Palestine conflict in 2004, when 8 had actually occurred. During the same period only 27 out of 179 Palestinian children’s deaths were reported. Additionally, Palestinian children made up a disproportionately large number of Palestinian deaths in general. Children’s deaths accounted for 21.8% of the Palestinians killed, while children’s deaths accounted for only 7.4% of Israelis killed during this period. 22 times more Palestinian children were killed than Israeli children. AP reported on 113% of Israeli children’s deaths in headlines or first paragraphs, while reporting on only 15% of Palestinian children’s deaths. That is, Israeli children’s deaths were reported at a rate 7.5 times greater than Palestinian children’s deaths.

You might want to consider this one also, and realise that, if the BBC "favors Israel", then American networks are positively "in love" with Israel:

BBC news ‘favours Israel’ at expense of Palestinian view

Dan Sabbagh,
Media Editor BBC News
May 3rd 2006

The BBC’S coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict implicitly favours the Israeli side, a study for the BBC Governors has concluded.

Deaths of Israelis received greater coverage than Palestinian fatalities, while Israelis received more airtime on news and current affairs programmes. The references to “identifiable shortcomings” surprised BBC News executives, who are more used to accusations that their coverage is routinely anti-Israel. […]

Gaza power station destroyed by Israeli Air Force

In any case, within a few days of Olmert’s remarks about the Palestinian people and their lack of innate worth, Olmert himself clarified exactly how he feels about Palestinians by way of his response to the capture by the Palestinian resistance of a single Israeli soldier.

Enshrined in article four of the third Geneva convention is the right of a people to physically resist the invasion and occupation of their land by a foreign power. Nowhere in the world do we find a clearer example of an unjust and illegal occupation and oppression of a land and its people than in the Israeli annexation and occupation of Palestine. On the morning of Sunday June 25th, Palestinian resistance fighters, using a tunnel they had dug under the border fence with Israel, launched an attack on an Israeli army check point on the southern border of the Gaza strip. Such IDF check points are an integral part of the Israeli military apparatus that is being used to terrorize and oppress the Palestinian people in the Gaza strip including the denial of basic provisions like food and water, and as such, are legitimate military targets. The Palestinian attack left 2 IDF soldiers dead with one, Cpl. Gilad Shalit, taken prisoner. Three Palestinian resistance fighters were also killed.

The Palestinians currently holding Cpl. Shalit have made it clear that their goal is a prisoner exchange. Israel is currently detaining, or rather interning, thousands of Palestinians, many of them innocent civilians. Among them are women and small children. Indeed, the three militant groups who claimed responsibility for the capture of Cpl. Shalit have stated that they would release him in return for the release of Palestinian women and children under the ago of 18 held in Israeli jails. Sounds like a reasonable offer, right? Unsurprisingly, Israel refused the offer. Ffalling back on the much-used "we don’t deal with terrorists", Olmert stated that there would be no negotiations – either Shalit is handed over, or the residents of the Gaza strip would suffer the dire consequences.

Now, I know what you are thinking: all of this seems to suggest that Israeli politicians and military advisors don’t want their precious soldier back, that they want to use him as an excuse to attack Hamas and the people of Gaza and maybe start a war with Syria. Heck, you might even be thinking that the Israeli military and government actually knew that a Palestinan attack by tunnel in that area was planned, and maybe decided to allow it to happen to create a crisis. Indeed, it is very possible that one or other (or both) of these scenarios is very close to reality.

The initial response by the Israeli government to the capture of Cpl. Shalit was to escalate the standoff and bomb the main power station and several bridges (two days ago) in Gaza, cutting off power and water to most of the 1.4 million people living there. Palestinian workers have said it may take up to 6 months to repair. No power, no water, for 6 months. But before you decide on the appropriateness or otherwise of such an ‘opening salvo’ that punished 1.4 million people in one go, including 700,000 children under 15 years of age, let me just update you on the conditions, imposed by Israel, in which Gazans were living even before this latest aggression.

For close to 60 years, through its original and continuing theft and occupation of Palestinian land, the Israeli government has been in flagrant violation of international law. Repeatedly over that time, the Israeli army has, and continues to engage in what are clearly crimes against humanity in its attempts to utterly extinguish any form of Palestinian resistance and therefore the inherent right of the Palestinian people to oppose Israeli government barbarism and murder.

The forced migration and ethnic-cleansing of Palestinian civilians from their homes and property in 1948, referred to as the Nakba of Palestine, led to the expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians to neighboring countries and various countries around the globe. The State of Israel was established on Palestinian towns and villages that had been cleansed of their original inhabitants. Palestinian civilians were scattered and Palestinian refugees came to the West Bank and Gaza Strip, Lebanon and Syria. Most of these refugees continue to live in refugee camps, including 8 camps in the Gaza Strip. These refugees lost their property, land, homes and livelihoods and were therefore subjected to a state of poverty, deprivation and exposure.

– 1967 constituted a continuation of the sequence of poverty and deprivation for Palestinians. IDF (Israeli Defence Forces) occupied the Gaza Strip and West Bank. This occupation was accompanied by uprooting of more Palestinians and the creation of more refugees. As a result, the state of poverty and deprivation was exacerbated.

– IDF imposed a number of policies in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, including the annexation of Jerusalem. These policies included the issuing of a series of military orders that facilitated the confiscation of hundreds of thousands of dunums of Palestinian land and control of Palestinian resources, particularly water resources. These policies ensured Israeli control over the consumer and production sectors of the Palestinian economy, making it a market for Israeli products and a source of cheap labor. In addition, a heavy tax system was imposed, which led to a decrease in the income of Palestinians.

– The living standards of Palestinians decreased at the end of 1987 after the eruption of the popular uprising (Intifada) in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. This led to an increase in poverty among civilians. IDF imposed restrictions on Palestinian labor in the Israeli market, resulting in the loss of work for tens of thousands of laborers, who now joined in the ranks of the unemployed.

– In 1991, living standards in the Occupied Palestinian Territories deteriorated further due to outbreak of the Second Gulf War. A large number of Palestinians lost work in the region as a result. Many families depended on money transfers from expatriates, particularly those working in the Gulf states (Iraq). In addition, monetary transfers from the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) to the West Bank and Gaza Strip decreased due to the loss of funding from Gulf states.

– The Palestinian National Authority (PNA) was established in 1994 after the signing of the Oslo accords between the PLO and the government of Israel. The accords were based on the Declaration of Principles signed in Washington in 1993. Palestinians were soon disappointed, however, when the economic prosperity expected from the peace agreement was not achieved, especially in light of international promises to establish a developed Palestinian economy. Contrary to promises made, IDF continued to strengthen its control over Palestinian natural resources, as well as control over all border crossings linking the Occupied Palestinian Territories to the outside world or to Israel, and control of the movement of goods and individuals.

– In 1996, IDF introduced policies of comprehensive closure and siege of Palestinian territory. IDF isolated the West Bank and Jerusalem from the Gaza Strip, depriving Palestinians of geographical contiguity. In addition, IDF prevented thousands of Palestinian laborers from reaching their work places in Israel, resulting in the increase of unemployment rates. The living standards of tens of thousands of Palestinian families deteriorated and poverty rates increased.

– On 29 September 2000, the "Al-Aqsa Intifada" erupted. Since then, IDF have imposed a comprehensive closure on the Occupied Palestinian Territories, which has led to a halting of economic exchange and which has paralyzed economic and production sectors. More than 120,000 Palestinian laborers from the Occupied Palestinian Territories were prevented from reaching their workplaces inside Israel as a result of closure. In addition, thousands of Palestinians employed in the local market became unemployed due to the closure of workshops and factories, which were affected by the closure policy or were damaged/ destroyed by IDF. Unemployment rates reached unprecedented levels, which further exacerbated the poverty problem in the Occupied Palestinian Territories.

– From September 2000 to the end of 2005, the number of Palestinian civilians killed by IDF and Israeli settlers reached 2,936, including 651 children and 106 women. Tens of thousands of Palestinians were injured. The injured included 8,662 injured people from the Gaza Strip, including hundreds who now suffer from permanent disabilities.

– IDF carried out extensive destruction of Palestinian property. This destruction included the bulldozing of agricultural land, demolition of agricultural and industrial establishments, as well as destruction of infrastructure. PCHR documented the bulldozing and uprooting of over 31,699 dunums of agricultural land in the Gaza Strip, comprising approximately 20% of the agricultural land in the Strip.

– IDF actions and the comprehensive closure affected the living standards of Palestinian families. Unemployment reached unprecedented levels, resulting in raised poverty rates. The Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics (PCBS) indicates that the percentage of Palestinian families living under the poverty line increased to more than 64% from the beginning of Al-Aqsa Intifada to April 2001, meaning that over two million Palestinians were living under the poverty line. The geographical distribution of these impoverished Palestinians was 55.7% in the West Bank and 81.4% in the Gaza Strip.[2]

– The Special UN Rapporteur on the Right to Food in the Occupied Palestinian Territories classified families living on brink of a humanitarian disaster. He indicated that the main reason behind this situation was the strict security procedures imposed by IDF on the Occupied Palestinian Territories, since the outbreak of Al-Aqsa Intifada on 29 September 2000. The Rapporteur indicated that acute malnutrition in the Gaza Strip was on the same scale as that seen in poor countries of the Southern Sahara Given the fertile nature of Palestinian land, such comparisons were startling.

More than 22% of Palestinian children under the age of 5 suffer from malnutrition, including 9.3% suffering from acute malnutrition, 13.2% suffering from chronic mal-nutrition and 15.6% suffering from acute anemia. It is expected that this will lead to long-term negative effects on the physical and cognitive development of many of these children. More than half of Palestinian families eat one meal a day only. Food consumption in Palestinian families dropped by 25-30% per person, especially protein intake. The number of Palestinians living under extreme poverty multiplied threefold since the beginning of the Al-Aqsa Intifada.

– PCBS also indicates that the percentage of families that face extreme difficulties in obtaining healthcare for children during the Intifada is 41%, 32.1% in the Gaza Strip and 44.6% in the West Bank. Anemic children in the 6-59 months age group, 41.6% face extreme difficulties in obtaining healthcare.

– International organizations, including humanitarian organizations working in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, foresee catastrophic humanitarian effects in the Occupied Palestinian Territories in general and the Gaza Strip in particular. World Bank estimates indicate that unemployment is expected to rise to 40% in 2006 and to 47% by 2008. The economic and social situation will be more acute in the Gaza Strip and northern West Bank, where unemployment and poverty rates are high and work is dependent on the PNA civilian and security branches. Some organizations estimate that unemployment in the Gaza Strip will reach 60%. Other estimates point to poverty rates in the Occupied Palestinian Territories rising to 67% in 2006 and to 74% by 2008.

– International organization data indicate that the policy of closure imposed by the Israeli government on the Occupied Palestinian Territories has led to the loss of nearly two-thirds of the international aid donated to Palestinians since the establishment of the PNA.

Israeli soldiers pray before entering Gaza

At present then, having cut off electricity and water to a people already suffering terribly and who possess no effective means of defending their lives or the lives of their children, the Israeli military has begun shelling the Gaza strip under "Operation Summer Rain" (of bombs). Palestinians have fled the areas being occupied by the Israeli military which is poised to launch a wholesale invasion of Gaza, during which, we can be sure, many Palestinians will be killed as "collateral damage" for which Mr Olmert will undoubtedly shed crocodile tears. At the same time, Olmert’s government is apparently seeking to escalate the matter by ordering Israeli (American-financed) jets to overfly the home of Syrian President Assad in an act of unmitigated belligerence which, coincidentally occured just a few hours after U.S. ambassador to Israel, Richard Jones, stated that the problem behind the Israeli hostage crisis is in Syria, at the home of Hamas’s exiled political supremo Khaled Meshaal, who Israel and America claim is being sheltered by the Syrians. The Syrians, for their part, activated their air defences and claim to have forced the Israeli jets to flee.

But before you start to think that there is more to this than meets the eye, I would like to remind you that the Israeli government would like to remind you that all of this is about one thing and one thing only – bringing a poor Israeli boy home to his parents. In saying this, I am not dismissing the life or plight of Cpl. Gilad Shalit, but as a soldier, he knew the risks involved, however small, in participating in the maintenance of the brutal oppression of the Palestinian people. In "war" ( however inappropriate that term is for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict) there are soldiers and there are civilians. What Cpl. Shalit probably had not bargained for however, was that his life would be used by Israeli politicians in an opportunistic attempt to settle their regional and ‘internal’ problems once and for all.

What I want you to ask yourself is what the details of this conflict, and the current escalation over the capture of Cpl. Gilad Shalit, say about the value that Israeli politicians assign to the lives of Palestinian civilians, simply as a people, and what, if any, parallels with events in Europe from 1939-1945 come to mind.

I am also waiting on someone to explain to me what mechanism exists to ensure that the details of the conflict, particularly those damaging to Israel, are systematically denied to the international community, and how it is that Israel can possibly be promoted in the mainstream press as the ‘victim’. Perhaps an indicator is to found in a very relevant recent news story that you surely also somehow missed. It concerns Dana Olmert, the daughter of Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, who created a stir recently when she joined 200 demonstrators outside the Tel Aviv home of Dan Halutz, the Israel Defense Forces chief of staff, to protest the murder of those 14 Palestinian civilian adults and children who were accidentally murdered by the IDF as they went about their job of "fighting terrorism".

The abovementioned Israel Defense Forces chief of staff, Dan Halutz is an interesting guy. In August 2002, he ordered the Israeli airforce to drop a one tonne bomb on an occupied apartment block in Gaza where, he claimed, a Hamas member was living. The Hamas leader was killed, along with 14 innocent civilians. When hearing of this "collateral damage", Halutz told his top gun crew:

"Guys, you can sleep well at night. I also sleep well, by the way. You aren’t the ones who choose the targets, and you were not the ones who chose the target in this particular case. You are not responsible for the contents of the target. Your execution was perfect. Superb. And I repeat again: There is no problem here that concerns you. You did exactly what you were instructed to do. You did not deviate from that by so much as a millimeter to the right or to the left. And anyone who has a problem with that is invited to see me."

When questioned by a reporter about the morality of the strike and about the feelings of a pilot when he drops a bomb, Halutz stated:

"That is not a legitimate question and it is not asked. But if you nevertheless want to know what I feel when I release a bomb, I will tell you: I feel a light bump to the plane as a result of the bomb’s release. A second later it’s gone, and that’s all. That is what I feel."

There you have it then. To the Israeli oligarchs, the death of Palestinian civilians is "superb", and they feel nothing when they kill women and children. What more can I say – either someone does something about these sick pyschopaths, or they, and their kind in Washington and around the world, will destroy us all.

The answer is that the foundations for this massive propaganda blitz and subsequent ratcheting-up of war hysteria were laid at about the same time as the Iraqi misadventure was conceived. The same people who lied us into war with Iraq have all along been deeply involved in a similar effort in regard to Iran: indeed, the two projects are intimately intertwined, as Laura Rozen – a senior correspondent for The American Prospect and one of the most consistently interesting reporters on the international affairs beat in Washington – reveals in her latest piece, " Three Days in Rome?", which appears on the Web site of Mother Jones magazine.

Both efforts came together at a secret meeting between intelligence operatives of at least three nations, held on Dec. 21, 2001, in Rome. Hosted by SISMI, the intelligence section of the Italian military, this clandestine conclave – featuring both the storied and the soon-to-be-famous – had an agenda as varied as the attendants. Over three days, American, Italian, and Iranian participants – including Manucher Ghorbanifar, the infamous wheeler-dealer at the center of the Iran-Contra scandal – discussed Middle East politics, exchanged bits of gossip, and then got down to the real business of plotting regime-change in Iran. Rozen writes:

"Even as Chalabi and company were spinning tales in Washington about how Saddam’s regime would collapse with only a minor effort from the United States, the administration’s Iran hawks were eager to hear the same about Tehran – and to that end, Ghorbanifar had delivered a special guest. The guest was ‘a very high-level ex-Revolutionary Guard,’ Ghorbanifar later told me. ‘His situation was so high that the Italian intelligence network, in order to prove he had a special mission to Italy, created a kind of fake cover itinerary to give him an excuse to the Iranian authorities.’"

Rozen cites Tyler Drumheller, former CIA spook-in-chief for Europe, as remarking:

"They drag these guys out and say they’re from the Revolutionary Guard. In fact, they’re actually from some rug store. In any city, it’s an industry."

Ghorbanifar’s legendary dodginess was nearly equaled, however, by some of the other participants, particularly in the American delegation:

• Harold Rhode, a specialist on Islam who speaks Hebrew, Arabic, Turkish, and Farsi, and a veteran of the Office of Special Plans set up by DoD Undersecretary for Policy Douglas Feith, which played such a key role in legitimizing Ahmed Chalabi‘s lies about Iraq’s alleged WMD.
• Larry Franklin, a Pentagon analyst whose specialty is Iran, a neoconservative ideologue, another OSP alumni – and a confessed spy for Israel.
• And last, but far from least, Michael Ledeen, another veteran of Iran-Contra – he brokered the connection between Israel and the Iranians, enabling the weapons to pass from the former to the latter – and the would-be Svengali behind an elaborate scheme to push the U.S. into a showdown with the mullahs.

The campaign to topple the regime in Tehran is utilizing the same back-channel model that served the neoconservatives so well before. Their method was to stovepipe disinformation disguised as "intelligence" directly into the White House, where all manner of fibs found expression in presidential proclamations of Iraq’s indubitable perfidy. The OSP, or some other makeshift official sub-agency created especially for this purpose, would do an end run around the mainline intelligence organizations, such as the CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency, cherry-pick bits and pieces of data that fit into a preconceived conceptual model, and serve up the resulting concoction of canards as fact or near-certainty. These parallel intelligence-gathering and -disseminating operations were disbanded after their goals – misleading the Congress, the executive branch, and the American people – were achieved, and the resident operatives quickly went on to their next project: bamboozling us into war with Iran.

Surely the ground has been well-prepared for such a conflict. To begin with, the invasion and occupation of Iraq could have led to nothing else. With Sunni-Ba’athist domination a thing of the past, the Iranians were bound to extend their influence deep into the " liberated" country. The winning coalition in the much-touted elections owes its political existence – and much of its funding – to the mullahs, who succored them when they were exiled during the years of Saddam’s rule, training the militias which are now Shi’ite death squads and giving the future lords of Baghdad refuge on Iranian soil. What is, in effect, a rising Shi’ite super-state would naturally collide with American ambitions in the Middle East, and the result – given the invasion of Iraq – is almost geographically fated to occur.

Secondly, however – and more importantly – a well-motivated cadre of warmongers stood ready in the wings, waiting for the right moment to begin agitating for war relentlessly. We are now living in that moment. It is fascinating to see how the roots of the present "crisis" were planted, and Rozen does an excellent job of reporting some of the little-known facts:

"Rhode sent a classified cable from the telex room of the U.S. Embassy in Rome back to the Pentagon, reporting that the group had ‘made contact with Iranian intelligence officers who anticipate possible regime change in Iran and want to establish contact with the United States government.’ The cable, portions of which were obtained by Knight Ridder’s Washington bureau, continued, ‘A sizable financial interest is required.’"

Isn’t it always?

Just what that Rome meeting – and at least two subsequent meetings – was all about, and who authorized it, have remained rather murky and obscure subjects. The Pentagon has kept mum and stubbornly resisted efforts by congressional investigators to get at the truth. But Rozen is on the job:

"The real story, as I learned in the course of a two-year investigation that took me from sterile Washington offices to smoky exile pubs in Paris, is more interesting. It’s also not over. As the crisis with Iran deepens and moves to the fore, the Bush administration is putting in place key elements of the vision spun in part by the men at the Rome meeting. In a new campaign to ramp up pressure on the Iranian regime, millions of dollars are pouring into exile groups, anti-regime propaganda, pro-democracy projects, and intelligence gathering. State Department and intelligence personnel are being deployed to the region and new Iran operations offices are being ‘stood up’ in the State Department and Pentagon – the latter even featuring some of the names familiar from the pre-Iraq-war Office of Special Plans."

The second phase of the War Party’s Middle East regime-change project is now moving into high gear. The same sort of tall tales we heard from Chalabi & Co. are now coming from Ghorbanifar, including a story about a secret store of weapons-grade uranium that somehow passed from Iraq to Iran (Aha! So that "explains" the curious case of the missing WMD! Talk about killing two birds with one stone…). What doesn’t get into the White House "talking points" will doubtless make it into future issues of The Weekly Standard.

The Bush administration is currently ladling out $75 million to various Iranian exile groups, and the gold rush is on: every major player and fly-by-night operator in the "democracy-promotion" racket is eager to cash in, and not just monetarily. We have to ask, aside from those who directly profit from this tremendous outpouring of taxpayer dollars, who really benefits from this effort? Who is pushing for war with Iran – and why?

The role played in these intrigues by former Pentagon analyst and convicted spy Larry Franklin should give us more than a hint. Franklin spent 2003 and a good part of 2004 passing classified information [.pdf] to two employees of AIPAC, the premier pro-Israel lobbying organization in Washington: Steve Rosen, the longtime sparkplug of the group’s energetic lobbying efforts, and Keith Weissman, AIPAC’s Iran specialist. A good part of this information was focused on U.S. relations with Tehran, including internal U.S. government deliberations, and especially Iran’s nascent nuclear research activities. This information was given to Rosen and Weissman with the clear understanding that it would be passed on to Israeli officials.

Franklin, then, was acting as a conscious agent of a foreign power, even as he conspired with Ledeen and Rhode to topple the Tehran regime and worked assiduously to pass off Chalabi’s fabrications as fact. Who else in this cabal was acting in a similar capacity? Ledeen, we know, is the founding director of the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs ( JINSA), which has very close connections to Israeli military and intelligence circles, and Rhode is a neoconservative ideologue who, as Chalabi’s unofficial handler,

"Quickly alienated most of the American military and civilian pros in the country by saying all manner of unfortunate things about Arabs, Iranians, and Muslims in general. Later he holed himself up with Chalabi at the latter’s hunt-club headquarters and bombarded Washington with faxes about plans to install Chalabi as the George Washington of Iraq. Following his subsequent recall – not so voluntarily, we hear – Rhode showed up sitting next to Chalabi in the front row at Vice President Dick Cheney’s rally-the-neocon-troops speech at the American Enterprise Institute in July."

With Franklin an admitted spy for Israel, Ledeen – the Israel-Iran go-between in the arms-for-hostages deal between Reagan and the mullahs – and Rhode, the rabidly anti-Arab ideologue, we have a commonality of interests that is hard to avoid. If ever there was a living demonstration of the thesis advanced by professors John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, in their Harvard University paper " The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy," then this is it. As the London Review of Books version of their piece averred:

"Pressure from Israel and the Lobby was not the only factor behind the decision to attack Iraq in March 2003, but it was critical. Some Americans believe that this was a war for oil, but there is hardly any direct evidence to support this claim. Instead, the war was motivated in good part by a desire to make Israel more secure."

This thesis has been controversial – the Lobby has struck back, and brutally, by labeling the two brave professors bigots, and that is one of the milder accusations – but if we look at the cast of characters deeply involved in what we might call Project Regime Change (Middle East version), we can only nod in agreement. The Iraq war, and now the looming conflict with Iran, will go down in history as two of the most successful covert actions ever undertaken by a foreign government on U.S. soil. As Professor Paul W. Schroeder put it in a piece for The American Conservative on the case against invading Iraq:

"It would represent something to my knowledge unique in history. It is common for great powers to try to fight wars by proxy, getting smaller powers to fight for their interests. This would be the first instance I know where a great power (in fact, a superpower) would do the fighting as the proxy of a small client state."

War with Iran will be the second instance – engineered by the same cabal that cooked up the first.
 
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