What, Really, Is (or Was) Netanyahu’s Game Plan?
By Alan Hart
23 July, 2014
Alanhart.net
Here is my speculation which was provoked by a headline in The Times of Israel over a report of remarks by Dan Shapiro, America’s ambassador to the Zionist state. The headline was Envoy says US will work to get Abbas back ruling Gaza after conflict over. According to the report Shapiro said in an interview with Israel’s Channel 2 News that the US wants to see Abbas’s Palestinian Authority restored to ruling Gaza and “will make efforts to bring this about.”
In 2007, at the request of American policy makers and led by Mohammad Dahlan, Abbas’s Fatah forces were planning to launch an Israeli-backed coup to remove Hamas as the elected authority in the Gaza Strip and destroy it. The coup didn’t happen because Hamas got wind of the plot and launched an Israeli-like pre-emptive strike that defeated Fatah’s forces and drove them out of the Gaza Strip.
Against that background and in the light of Shapiro’s remarks my speculation is that Netanyahu’s real game plan was the product of two hopes.
The first was that he could put Hamas out of military and political business and set the stage for the Palestinians of the Gaza Strip prison camp to be ready, however reluctantly, to accept Abbas and his corrupt and discredited Palestinian Authority (PA) as their leadership. (Netanyahu might also have thought that the task of restoring Abbas and his PA to control in the Gaza Strip would be greatly assisted by the US pouring money into its coffers for re-construction and development).
The second was the hope that once the authority of Abbas and his cronies was restored to the Gaza Strip there would be Palestinian elections which could and would be rigged to bring on Dahlan as Abbas’s successor.
Very many Palestinians believe, as I do, that Dahlan, currently in exile in the UAE and in contact with Israeli leaders as he prepares his comeback, is an Israeli asset, in which capacity he was, almost certainly, the one who administered the Israeli-supplied polonium that killed Arafat. (Abbas himself has said he believes that was the case).
It could be that in Netanyahu’s vision of the future Dahlan as Palestinian “president” would be prepared to use whatever means were necessary, including force, to compel his occupied and oppressed people to abandon their struggle in return for crumbs from Zionism’s table – a few Bantustans here and there on the West Bank which they could call a state if they wished. In other words, the Dahlan of Netanyahu’s vision would bring about a Palestinian surrender on Zionism’s terms.
I agree that’s a sick, mad scenario but it could very well be what was in Netanyahu’s mind. Am I suggesting that he is sick and mad? Yes, and one of his latest comments is surely proof of that. He said on CNN that Hamas wanted more and more Palestinians in the Gaza Strip to be killed by Israel in order to generate worldwide support for its cause and push American tv presenters into asking him tough questions. One of his actual quotes was: “They (Hamas’s leaders) want to pile up as many civilian dead as they can. They use telegenically dead Palestinians for their cause. They want the more dead, the better.”
At the time of writing there are some indications that President Obama and Secretary of State Kerry are beginning to panic because they know that the latest killing spree by what Ismail Haniyeh (Hamas’s top political leader) has called the “Zionist murder machine” is unacceptable to a growing number of people around the world. And I think this has made Obama and Kerry realise they if they don’t put real effort into bringing about a ceasefire, they will be exposed, fully naked, not only as moral cowards, not only as hypocrites but also as puppets of the Zionist state and its lobby in America.
The problem for Obama and Kerry is that as long as Hamas has rockets to fire at Israel (it currently has thousands) there is no way it can agree to a ceasefire unless its main condition, the lifting of Israel’s siege of the Gaza Strip, is part of the agreement. And there is no way Netanyahu will accept that because lifting the siege which is best described as occupation by remote control would mean defeat for him. (It other words, the lifting of the siege would demonstrate and prove that Israel’s latest war had been totally counterproductive).
In that light it seems to me that if the Israeli war machine is to be stopped Obama will have to confront Netanyahu and the Zionist lobby’s traitor agents in Congress.
Will he do so?
With the mid-term elections only about four months away and the soliciting of funds for them gathering momentum, I will be more than astonished if he does.
Last Friday the US Senate voted 100 to 0 in support Israel’s war on the Gaza Strip, so Netanyahu has good reason to believe that Obama is not in a political position to press him to accept a ceasefire on terms other than his own and that he, Netanyahu, will therefore remain free to escalate his war on the Gaza Strip and with it the killing, slaughter, of more and more Palestinians.
The only thing that could cause Netanyahu to seek a face saving way out of the conflict on terms other than his own is a change in Israeli public opinion.
Because they have been conditioned (brainwashed) to regard themselves as the victims when they are in fact the oppressors, most Israeli Jews don’t care about how many Palestinians are killed by their war machine. Some even chant “Death to the Arabs” and scrawl the same message in graffiti on walls.
But almost all Israeli Jews have a very low tolerance level of casualties on their own side. It is not impossible that if more and more Israeli soldiers are killed in combat with Hamas fighters a significant number of Israel’s Jews will say to Netanyahu, “Enough is enough. Stop the war.”
We shall see.
Alan Hart is a former ITN and BBC Panorama foreign correspondent. He is author of Zionism: The Real Enemy of the Jews. He blogs at http://www.alanhart.net and tweets via http://twitter.com/alanauthor
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