MJ Rosenberg writes:
In recent years, AIPAC’s main message has been about Iran and its view of the dangers posed by the Iranian nuclear program. Speaker after speaker at various AIPAC conferences over the past decade (including, most histrionically, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu) has invoked the Holocaust when discussing the possibility of an Iranian nuclear weapon.
These speakers laid the groundwork for AIPAC’s presentation of legislation imposing “crippling sanctions” on Iran — along with the declaration that the military option remained “on the table” if sanctions failed to end Iran’s nuclear program. Most of the sanctions legislation enacted by Congress and signed into law by the president originated at AIPAC.
But this year Iran will have to compete for attention with AIPAC’s worries about the democratic revolutions that are sweeping the Arab world. For AIPAC, as for Netanyahu, those revolutions have already turned 2011 into an annus horribilis and the year is not even half over.
Early indications are that the main theme that will dominate the conference will be that Israel, once again, has “no partner” to negotiate with. This is an old theme, but one that receded as the Israeli right came to view the Palestinian Authority (led by Mahmoud Abbas and Salam Fayyad) as not only partners but as collaborators in maintaining the status quo.
As Al Jazeera‘s Palestine Papers demonstrated, Abbas and Fayyad rarely said “no” to the Netanyahu government — which made them the only kind of partners acceptable to the Netanyahu-Lieberman-Barak troika.
But, fearing that it might be next to fall to democracy, the PA started showing some spine recently. It refused to yield to U.S. and Israeli demands that it shelve the United Nations Security Council Resolution condemning settlements. It absolutely refuses to negotiate with Israelis until Israel stops gobbling up the land they would be negotiating over. And, most disturbing of all to Netanyahu and company, it says that it intends to unilaterally declare a Palestinian state this summer.
Netanyahu, who needs the illusion of movement to ensure that there isn’t any, is suddenly feeling the heat.
“…”catastrophic and catalyzing event — like a new Pearl Harbor” (page 51). ” PNAC.
The only reason the self serving American law makers take these agents for foreign interests seriously is because of their donations. AIPAC is like the pied piper and the US government are like the rats marching in step to the sweet music of money and power. The Iranian threat is laughable once the rose coloured glasses come of and one can see that the real nuclear menace in the middle east is in fact Israel that exists by war and threat. To hold Israel’s fractured society and nationalist regime together it needs the self delusion of an enemy plus the reality of created enemies. It is a hyped state existing in a national schizophrenia; a fractured regime founded on terrorism, wars of aggression, and colonial oppression, trying to hold its myth together, nursed from crisis to crisis only by the corrupt or coerced.
Its way passed time to take the patient off the meds of exceptional-ism. This patient is already withered from the addiction afforded only by its US cousins. I don’t care if they’re Jews they have to learn to live with their Arab neighbours without the gun, the knife, or the bomb and what’s good for Iran is good for Israel. Israel needs to start with joining the NNPT immediate disarmament in full cooperation with IAEA inspections. Then like Iran they can becoming part of a non nuclear armed middle east.
Let the truth ring loud: there is no credible Israeli partner for a peace agreement; there is no credible American partner for a peace agreement. The Palestinians are a sovereign people and must go it alone.
At this point in time, the events taking place in the M.E. have overtaken even the game makers who play their different scenarios, of who is on top. The stakes have been raised to high for anyone to gamble with. One might even place a wager that W.W. III just might hold the winning hand. Every petty tyrant always stoops to violence in the end, just before they fall. True, they use it to control, but when after a certain point, the people no longer fear, then it doesn’t work anymore. When they get angry, change is what comes next, that change is without the present leaders in charge. There is no room for the West to be sticking its might into one side or the other, that goes for backing Israel too.