ISRAEL: AN EXISTENTIAL THREAT TO IRAN.

Israel has for some time claimed that Iran is an ‘existential threat’ to Israel. The reality, however, is that Israel is actually an existential threat to Iran – and in being so, is also a threat to world peace.

Israel’s claim of Iran being an existential threat stems from the deliberately misinterpreted words of Iran’s President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who on 26 October 2005 gave a speech to a conference in Tehran in which he said that the Zionist Israeli government should be wiped from the ‘pages of time’. The right-wing Zionist-supporting neoconservative-controlled organisation known as the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI) who were responsible for the deliberate misinterpretation spun Ahmadinejad’s words to read ‘wipe Israel off the map’. MEMRI were successfully able to push their interpretation to the western media who then picked it up and ran with it throughout most of the mainstream media. Since then the quote, or rather misquote, has been at the core of the US and Israel’s propaganda against Iran. The US and Israel have been able to utilise the misquote together with Iran’s quest to produce nuclear energy for electricity generation in a relentless propaganda bid to demonise Iran by claiming that Iran has a secret nuclear weapons program that will enable Iran to build a bomb with which to carry out what Israel claims is Iran’s threat to physically destroy Israel.

All this propaganda of course, is just that; propaganda. Israel and their neoconservative allies in the US have been harping on about Iran’s so-called nuclear weapons ambitions for years, long before Ahmadinejad came on the scene. When one objectively examines the geo-political reality, however, a completely opposite picture to the one the Israelis and the US paint emerges. Rather than Iran being an existential threat to Israel, it is Israel that is the existential threat to Iran.

Iran, even Israel and the US concede, doesn’t actually have any nuclear weapons. At this moment of time it doesn’t even have a nuclear power plant let alone weapons. Israel and the US do. Indeed, Israel is so heavily nuclear armed that its arsenal alone could completely and utterly destroy all of Iran – and most of the Middle East with it. Furthermore, despite the propaganda, there is absolutely no evidence whatsoever of Iran having any nuclear weapons program. Not a skerrick. Yet time and time again the US and Israel claim the Iranians are edging closer and closer to having a bomb. But not once have either country produced any evidence to back up their claims.

Even in the highly unlikely event of Iran ever having a bomb, the likelihood of them using it to attack Israel is zero since they know that retaliation from both Israel and the US would be instantaneous. The same, unfortunately, cannot be said of the likelihood of Israel using their nuclear weapons against Iran. Some reports have already talked of Israeli plans to use nuclear weapons against Iran and the US has already given the green light for Israel to attack Iran if Israel sees so fit to do.

So what are the Israelis and the US really after with regards to Iran? The answer is the same as it was with Iraq and for the same reasons – regime change in order to cut off support for the Palestinians and the Lebanese of south Lebanon, or, to be more precise, Hamas in the Gaza and the West Bank and Hezbollah in Lebanon. Only these two organisations, and to a lesser extent, Fatah, stand in the way of Israel’s dreams of a Greater Israel that includes the Gaza, the West Bank and southern Lebanon up to the Litani river. Iranian support of Syria is also very much a feature of Israel’s push against Iran.

In all likelihood, by next week Barack Obama will be the President-elect of the United States. However, until he actually becomes President on 20 January 2009, George W. Bush will remain the Commander-in-Chief of Americas armed forces and President of the US still with his wartime powers. With total disregard to the results of the elections, Bush still wields ultimate power. And even with a successful transference of Presidency on the 20 January next year, the world still cannot relax on the likelihood of an inferno engulfing the Middle East. Israel goes to the polls the following month and if Netanyahu wins government, the existential threat toward Iran from Israel will still remain.
The world should not have any illusions about a change of government in the US lessening the threat of attack against Iran and the subsequent turmoil such an attack will have on the Middle East. While the Zionists of Israel and their supporters in the US still maintain their dreams of a Greater Israel, the existential threat to Iran will remain.