THE ISRAELI ZIONISTS OBSESSION WITH IRAN

You could be forgiven for thinking that the Israeli extreme right must be nuts for being so obsessed about Iran when the Islamic State (IS), a far more bloodthirsty and ruthless organisation that borders on being an anarchistic-fascist organisation hell bent on destroying anything and everything that doesn’t conform to its beliefs, is almost at Israel’s northern borders. Rest assured, however, that there is method in Israel’s apparent madness.

The Israelis for years, indeed, long before IS came along, have considered Iran as their mortal enemy accusing them of wanting nothing less than the destruction of Israel. To reinforce this notion, Israel accuses Iran of developing nuclear weapons for the sole purpose of attacking and destroying Israel. Israel says that ‘Iran is an existential threat’ to Israel, a call repeated only recently by Netanyahu when he addressed the US Congress in Washington on Tuesday 4 March 2015.

The world, on the other hand, tends to think differently. Apart from the fact that there is no evidence whatsoever that Iran has a nuclear weapons program, the US, Britain, France, Russia, China and Germany, the so-called P5+1, believe that Iran can be prevented from the possibility of moving toward being nuclear armed by a mixture of negotiation and sanctions. These negotiations, instigated by the US under Obama’s administration, have all but destroyed Israel’s aspirations to get the US to attack Iran ostensibly to destroy Iran’s nuclear facilities but in reality to affect regime change in Iran.

For Israel and their Republican and neoconservative supporters in the US, regime change in Iran is essential because it would strip Israel’s enemies at home, Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, of their ability to resist Israeli aspirations to create a Greater Israel that includes annexing the Gaza Strip, the West Bank and possibly even southern Lebanon up to the Litani River. Regime change in Iran will also effectively put a halt to Iranian hegemony and influence throughout other regions of the Middle East including Syria, Iraq and the Yemen. This would then allow a right-wing led future US government to launch a full-scale offensive against IS and what remains of Bashir al-Assad’s government in Syria while Israel launch all-out attacks against Hamas and Hezbollah.

All this though requires a change of political scenery in the US; a change that could well occur at the next US Presidential election in November of next year.

Jeb Bush, George W. Bush’s brother, has already thrown his hat in the ring for nomination as the Republican candidate and has taken on advisors who are well known Zionist supporting neoconservatives. Israel has an election coming up on 17 March this year and it is likely that the right-wing of Israeli politics will prevail with Netanyahu a strong possibility of retaining the Prime Ministership and, if not Netanyahu, then, in what I consider to be the worst case scenario, the Zionist extremist Avigdor Liebermann who has called for regime change in Iran, the invasion and annexation of the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, and the destruction of Hezbollah.

It seems clear to me that the purpose of Netanyahu’s provocative speech to Congress last Tuesday was to pave the way for a drastic realignment of US foreign policy after the US Presidential elections in 2016, a realignment that favours Israeli plans for the future of the Middle East returning hegemony firmly back in the hands of the US and Israel and rendering Iran’s influence null and void thus realising Israel’s dream of creating a Greater Israel.