Dysfunctional Regional Goals; A Zionist Legacy - By: Reza Bahar

Tehran, Jan 29, IRNA – Ariel Sharon’s death, following eight years of a persistent vegetative state, reminds us of a legacy still casting its shadow over the like-minded, hawkish colleagues of the Butcher of Sabra and Shatila. It is a legacy that has prevailed from the very beginning when Israel’s founders patched up a regime in 1948 after seizing the Palestinians’ homes, killing and expelling them from their lands; a process that is still going on. “It is a myth that the Nakba and the ethnic cleansing that went on in 1948 by the Israelis is over. Itˈs happening today as we stand. The Israelis are clearing villages in the Negev desert so they can take over the very best of Palestinian land. We must stand up against this, said the Nobel Peace laureate, Mairead Maguire, in a speech delivered in Belfast on October 24, 2012. The establishment of the Zionist regime and moving of the Jews from all over the world to live on the occupied territories, however, was just a beginning. Israel’s founders started to seize still more lands to realize the Zionist dream of forming the greater land of Israel, the so-called promised land, and to do this they have never hesitated to employ every means that justifies the end. First, they were the Palestinians who had to be eliminated. But then the Zionists began to conclude that they were the Arabs posing a threat against Israel and its regime, so they should be killed. Philip Weiss, who describes himself as a progressive and anti-Zionist, recalls Benzion Netanyahu, the father of the current Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, as saying at an occasion that the only way to guarantee Israel’s survival was wiping out all the Arabs. “He was a so-called revisionist Zionist, he was a disciple of Jabotinsky. And he thought the only way [Israel] could survive is, well he once told me, by killing all the Arabs,” writes Weiss in his news-centric blog, Mondoweiss (2006–present), quoting Benzion Netanyahu, the hawkish Israeli historian who died in 2012. Similarly, one can investigate the step by step rise in atrocities committed by the Israeli leaders. The killing of the Palestinians in Sabra and Shatila camps, for example, was not the first war crime in Sharon’s career as a soldier and politician. As Avi Shlaim, the Iraqi-born British/Israeli historian, writes in an article Published by the Guardian, Sharon committed his first war crime in Jordan. “In 1953 Major Sharon committed his first war crime: the massacre of 69 civilians in the Jordanian village of Qibya,” he says. Today, this heavy-handed expansionism is still persisting, leading the Israeli politicians and military men to follow the same dysfunctional policies that bode for nothing but, further murders and land grabs. This is why the Zionist regime is increasingly inclined toward extreme, reactionary right. “Israeli politics are now dominated by the extreme groups and figures, ranging from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, his like-minded supporters and the ultra-nationalist religious groups,” writes Muhammad Sahimi in an article published by antiwar.com. Sahimi believes that the rise of men like former foreign minister Avigdor Lieberman to power in Israel is again the result of such an environment. “The New Republicˈs Martin Peretz, a passionate Zionist and critic of the peace movement, calls Lieberman a ˈneo-fascist … a certified gangster … the Israeli equivalent of [Austriaˈs] Jörg Haiderˈ,” writes columnist Fareed Zakaria in the Newsweek. In the same way, the Israeli former and present military leaders tend to follow suit, advocating an extreme right approach. Moshe Yaˈalon, former chief of staff of the Israeli army and the current Minister of War in Israel, for instance, describes the Palestinians who fight to retake their homeland as a cancer-like threat. ˈThe Palestinian threat harbors cancer-like attributes that have to be severed,” Ya’alon told the Haaretz newspaper on August 27, 2002. And as a Zionist soldier, he calls the Jewish campaigns like Peace Now that advocates a two-state solution for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as a “virus”. ˈWe become accustomed to Arabs being permitted to live everywhere, in the Negev, Galilee, Nablus, Jenin, and [on the other hand] there are areas where Jews are not allowed to live. We caused this,ˈ he says. He also believes that, ˈregarding the issue of the settlements, in my opinion Jews can and should live everywhere in the Land of Israel”. Based on its grandiose but dysfunctional geopolitical objectives to create the Greater Land of Israel, the Zionist regime has never stopped to impose its own definition of a roadmap for the region. The process that started in 1948 on the land of Palestine through killing and expulsion, is just going on. If they were once the Palestinians and the Arabs who were regarded as an existential threat for Israel, now every independent nation in the region that claims its legitimate rights and refuse to accept the Zionist roadmap is in Tel Aviv’s crosshairs. The Islamic Republic of Iran, as a powerful state that has managed to change the geopolitics of the region, is no exception. Israel has used its propaganda machine to portray Iran’s legitimate right to pursue peaceful nuclear energy as Tehran’s covert bid to militarize the technology. Under Netanyahu many innocent Iranian people, including some of Iran’s top nuclear scientists have been murdered. Tel Aviv has even recruited “terrorists, such as those of the Jundallah, to carry out terrorist operations in Iran,” writes Sahimi. The Zionist regime has even waged a cyber war against Iran to dismantle its peaceful nuclear program. According to Sahimi, even a recent NATO study recognized the cyber attack on Bushehr nuclear power facility “as being tantamount to the use of force and illegal”. And while Tehran and world powers are on the path to solve the Islamic Republic’s nuclear issue, Israel is busily lobbying in the US to advocate military attacks on Iran. Not surprisingly, with a parent theorizing the killing of all the Arabs, Benjamin Netanyahu has grown up to be a war criminal and lead a government of butchers./end