Interesting history on the rise of the Israeli far-Right

March 14, 2007

In this posting, we're going to delve into the intertwined, and quite convoluted scandals involving, among other things:

• Alleged bribes to Ariel Sharon by Martin Schlaff, an Austrian industrialist, that were used to pay back illegal campaign contributions Sharon used in 1999.
• The scandalous collapse of Refco, the commodity futures giant, and the related collapse of BAWAG, one of Austria's largest banks (Cerberus recently bought BAWAG, BTW).
• Martin Schlaff's investment in Yasser Arafat's "Oasis Casino", and that casino was tied into by the BAWAG/Refco scandals AND Ariel Sharon's right-hand-man Dov Weissman.
• Martin Schlaff's and George "Macaca" Allen's involvement with the "Xybernaut" pump-and-dump stock fraud.
• Martin Schlaff's apparent financier of far-Right Israeli politician Avigdor Lieberman
• and finally, the potential for a crisis in Israel's democracy due to endemic corruption, and the chilling figures that could take advantage of such a crisis.

Get to know your BAWAG
So, let's get started with a look at the BAWAG scandal that rocked Austria's politics:

Austrian Bank Scandal: When Socialists Play With Money
From the desk of Chris Gillibrand on Tue, 2006-04-04 22:53

A major banking scandal is rocking the Austrian political elites – left and right. A bank owned by the Socialist trade union (which is close to the Socialist Party SPÖ, currently in opposition) loses billions in shady hedge deals while the union strike fund evaporates in the Caribbean and the bank gets implicated in a corruption case in Israel. Meanwhile the bank is financed by the European Investment Bank (EIB), and an Austrian Finance Ministry official (married to the Socialist ex-chief of the bank) ignores a crucial report and is appointed to the Executive Board of the European Central Bank (ECB). The Conservative Finance Minister claims to know nothing – after just having sold the Government-owned Post Office Savings Bank (PSK) to the socialist bank. Welcome to Austria, presently presiding the European Union council of ministers.

Let me introduce!

The Bank für Arbeit und Wirtschaft AG, BAWAG or in English, ‘Bank for Employment and Commerce’ was founded in 1922 by the Socialist Chancellor Karl Renner. Up until now the majority stakeholder in the Bank has been the Austrian Trades Union Federation, the ÖGB. With the repurchase of the shares of the Bayerische Landesbank in 2004, it is now wholly-owned by the ÖGB. The bank’s original intent, from which it has strayed far, was to extend cheap credits to the needy.

Almost all of the members of the BAWAG Supervisory Board are fully paid up socialists and trade unionists. The two exceptions are Albert Hochleitner, the ex-CEO of Siemens Austria, and Leo Wallner, the chairman of the state-owned monopoly, Casinos Austria. Günter Weninger, chairman of the Supervisory Board, who has now been forced to resign, also has a day job as the Finance Chief of the ÖGB. He started professional life as an electrician which has given rise to suggestions in the Austrian press that he might have to return to his original trade. The Managing Board has eight members, four of whom have now resigned. The CEO, Johann Zwettler had already resigned in October 2005. He and his predecessor, Helmut Elsner, are now under police investigation.

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Make of note of Casinos Austria's CEO sitting on BAWAG's board, as it will figure in heavily once we get to Arafat's "Oasis Casino".

Continuing...

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BAWAG opened up operations in the Caribbean in 1995 under the direction of Wolfgang Flöttl, the son of the then CEO, Walter Flöttl. The idea was that these investments should hedge risk. When it was made public that the son received $2 billion from BAWAG without the father seeking the formal approval of the Supervisory Board, the Caribbean business got closed after a year. The extent of Supervisory Board knowledge is still questioned.

After the departure of Flöttl Senior, the business was then reopened by Flöttl’s successor, Helmut Elsner, with Supervisory Board approval after only one year. Elsner was already known as Flöttl’s "man for big business." Living well, he enjoyed a service penthouse provided on the top of the BAWAG offices in Vienna as had his predecessor, Flöttl. Also provided with a penthouse was the head of the socialist trade union ÖGB, Fritz Verzetnitsch.

This time around, Flöttl Junior invested in high-risk funds and the business clocked up a massive loss of almost €1 billion which threatened the solvency of BAWAG in 2000. The Bank was only saved by a guarantee from the ÖGB (trade union dues amount to 1% of members salaries, so they have accumulated quite a lot of money to play with). The losses themselves were systematically covered up in offshore accounts in the Caribbean and accounts at a US futures broker called REFCO. The union strike fund went walkabouts as collateral in the Caribbean and disappeared.
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There's much more interesting info on BAWAG in that article, so be sure to check it out.

BAWAG, Refco, Martin Schlaff, PIPEs, and George Allen's Xybernaut scandal
Before we move on to look at how BAWAG and Refco were used for money-laundering by Yasser Arafat(with a great deal of intertwined involved by Ariel Sharon's clique), we should note that BAWAG was sold to Cerberus back in December. One of its new board members includes Former Treasury Secretary John Snow. The purchase of a financial behemoth like BAWAG isn't the only major purchase Cerberus has made recently. In addition to the Bank Leumi takeover, Cerberus acquired a majority stake in GMAC last year, and is reportedly eyeing Chrysler.

These kinds of mega deals pretty amazing when you consider that Cerberus, starting with $10 million in capital in 1992 started off investing the high-risk corporate debt market, moving into outright acquisitions and management of small distressed companies. The purchase of the ailing BAWAG by Cerberus is also somewhat ironic given that BAWAG, in coordination with Refco, was a significant player in the PIPE (Private Investment in Public Equity) market. The PIPE market often act as a source of last resort role for small-cap companies in need of a capital infusion.

And, it turns out, one of the figures involved in with the BAWAG/Refco dealings in the PIPE Market, is the Austrian billionaire Martin Schlaff that will come up quite a bit in Ariel Sharon's scandals.

One of Schlaff's companies used in the PIPE market was Balmore, a British Virgin-Islands-based hedge fund. But Balmore has some other interesting history, as an investor in Xybernaut, a tech company that had George Allen on its board from form August 1998-Dec 2000. Like just about every corporation we're looking at here, Xybernaut's managers, "improperly used substantial company funds for personal expenses" and faces multiple class-action lawsuits. For more Balmore's role in Xybernaut, let's take at look at this Sept 2006 article from the American Prospect:

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Starting in 2000, however, Xybernaut increasingly turned to a newly popular financial instrument to keep growing -- and going: so-called PIPE deals, short for "private investments in public equity." In such deals, private investors are granted warrants or convertible debentures for stock at below-market rates in exchange for financing. All the investor has to do to make money is sell the stock. But some sleazy PIPE financiers go a step further by shorting the stock of the companies they finance, driving down share prices, diluting the shares of other investors, and even -- in a particularly egregious form of illegal short selling known as the "death spiral finance scheme" -- driving the company into bankruptcy through aggressive rounds of financing and short selling. Between March and November 2000, Xybernaut went from 1 percent to more than 15 percent owned by institutional investors who acquired their stock in the company through private deals, according to media reports.

"It really rode the Internet bubble, and it was real hot stuff," recalls Gregory Sichenzia, of Sichenzia Ross Friedman Ference LLP, a law firm that specializes in securities and PIPE transactions, which he described as an increasingly traditional financing mechanism. "It’s not the fault of the financing that the company collapsed."

Several firms that financed Xybernaut during Allen’s tenure on its board, however, have since been linked to a complicated international network of troubled financers and brokers. For example, in April 1998, Balmore Funds SA and Liechtenstein-based Austost Anstalt Schaan signed a private placement deal with Xybernaut granting the firm up to $11 million. One of their registrations of stock for sale came April 4, 2000 -- shortly after the March price peak and a period of unusually high volume trading, which was followed by yet another "going concern letter," in mid-March, and a decline in the stock price. The signatory for Austost Anstalt Schaan was Thomas Hackl, who was from 1991 to 2002 head of treasury at BAWAG, the fourth largest Austrian bank (itself somewhat controversial for losing millions in the financing of Yasir Arafat’s casino outside Jericho). TheStreet.com has linked BAWAG to Austost and also to the hedge fund Alpha Capital Aktiengesellschaft, which invested in Xybernaut in 2001. Last year Hackl became a major figure in the collapse of Wall Street brokerage the Refco Corp., where he was executive vice president, in an accounting scandal that wiped out more than $1 billion in shareholder value.
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Despite the plethora of dubious characters surrounding Xybernaut, the true identity of many of the company’s financiers remains obscure. In the company’s heyday, its officers claimed to have the support of major Wall Street firms, but that was more hype. What SEC records show instead is that during the company’s 16-year history, it relied heavily on offshore firms for financing. And during Allen’s board tenure, it received the vast bulk of its money from outfits based in the most notorious havens for tax cheats and money launderers: the Turks and Caicos, the Cayman Islands, the British Virgin Islands, the Bahamas, Liechtenstein, and Israel.
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So that's the interesting set up connections between BAWAG, Refco, Martin Schlaff, and George Allen. And if you're interesting a very long read on BAWAG, the Refco collapse, how this all relates to the Enron scandal, and the dangers associated with the unregulated explosion in the use of derivatives and hedge fund go here and here.

An Oasis of naughtiness
Now let's move on and take closer look at the Oasis Casino in Jericho and it's complicated dealings with the BAWAG, Refco, and figures close to Ariel Sharon with this June, 2006 Bloomberg article:

Refco Bank Hid $1 Billion Loss From Hedge Funds, Arafat Casino

June 22 (Bloomberg) -- At the Israeli army checkpoint on the edge of Jericho, gamblers from Jerusalem and Tel Aviv streamed into the West Bank town to wager on blackjack, play poker and face off with slot machines at the Palestinian-run Oasis Hotel Casino Resort. The casino was open 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

The party that started in September 1998 ended when a Palestinian uprising scared away customers in October 2000, forcing the casino to close within a month.

The Israeli shells that punched holes in the Oasis's stucco- and-black-glass facade also struck a financial blow to one of the casino's investors, Vienna-based Bawag PSK Bank -- the same bank that backed Refco Inc., the New York-based brokerage that collapsed last October after belatedly reporting $430 million in hidden losses.

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Drexel Burham Lambert, BTW, is where Cerberus found Stephen Feinberg got his start in the 80's. Skipping down in this lengthy and excellent article, we'll see how Martin Schlaff helped bring together BAWAG and Yasser Arafat in the Casino deal. Keep in mind that, as we're going to see, Schlaff is also a primary figure in the Ariel Sharon bribery scandal ...

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Risky Ventures
Following the probe, Walter Flottl retired in 1995, handing the bank's leadership to Elsner. The new CEO expanded Bawag's relationship with Refco and started other risky ventures.

Elsner found such an investment in the Palestinian territories. Arafat, as president of the Palestinian Authority, was on the hunt for ways to develop the local economy after the 1993 Oslo Accord created the framework for Palestinian autonomy in the West Bank and Gaza, former Finance Minister Salam Fayyad says.

Austrian investor Martin Schlaff helped bring Bawag together with Arafat's advisers to build a casino in Jericho, according to Palestinian Authority records that list Schlaff as a board member and officer of the casino.

Schlaff was one of Bawag's biggest customers. Schlaff declined to answer written questions submitted to Michael Fink, his spokesman in Vienna.

On Dec. 17, 1996, Palestine Commercial Services Co., an investment company controlled by Arafat, signed an agreement with a group of Austrian investors, including Bawag, according to a report on the investment's history and financial value commissioned by the Palestinian Authority.

Oasis

The casino would be owned by CAP Holding AG, a Liechtenstein- based company whose shareholders were Bawag, with 11 percent; Vienna-based Casinos Austria International, with 16.5 percent; Palestine Commercial Services, with 23.1 percent; and a company called MS Privatstiftung -- controlled by Schlaff -- with 49.5 percent, according to Palestinian Authority and Casinos Austria documents.

Casinos Austria ran the Oasis, along with 62 other casinos in 17 countries and nine gambling ships.

...

Seven months later, on Sept. 28, violence erupted in Jerusalem as Ariel Sharon, then head of Israel's opposition Likud Party, visited the plaza that contains al-Aqsa Mosque, the third- holiest site in Islam, and the Western Wall, the most sacred location in Judaism.

Casino Closed

An uprising spread throughout the West Bank and Gaza, and in the following month, the casino closed. The hotel stayed open, with managers herding guests, including women and children, into the basement for hours at a time during gun battles.

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With no customers at the gaming tables, the value of the casino plummeted. Still, Bawag engineered a transaction that -- for accounting purposes anyway -- transformed a stricken investment into one worth 120 million euros, Bawag's nonprosecution agreement says.

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The article goes on to provide further details on the financial trickery employed to hide the BAWAG's losses in Oasis Casino.

Sharon's campaign finance fun
Now we're going to move on, and take a look at Ariel Sharon's campaign loan scandal with this May 2004 Jpost article:

Sunday, May 9, 2004
Weisglass pushed Sharon to reopen Jericho casino
Yaakov Katz The Jerusalem Post May 6, 2004

During negotiations with the Labor Party in October 2000 over the
possibility of the Likud joining a national unity government, Ariel Sharon
was asked by attorney Dov Weisglass, today his bureau chief, to speak with then premier Ehud Barak over the possibility of reopening the casino in Palestinian-controlled Jericho, The Jerusalem Post has learned.

The casino is jointly owned by the Palestinian Authority, Casinos Austria,
the Austrian bank BAWAG, and Austrian-Jewish businessman Martin Schlaff, a
key figure in the ongoing police investigation of the prime minister and his son, Gilad. "At the time I did not think anything was too strange with Weisglass's request, since at the time we knew that he was an attorney for the casino," said one of the participants at a meeting in October 2000 at the Sharon ranch. "But now, with the allegations that Sharon may have received bribes from Schlaff, the meeting and the request seem suspicious."

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Following his victory in the 1999 Likud Party leadership primaries, Sharon went into debt to repay NIS 4.7 million in illegal campaign contributions. Gilad Sharon received a $1.5 million loan, originating in Austria, from South Africa-based businessman Cyril Kern in order to repay another loan the family had taken out in order to return the illegal donations.
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The illegal campaign contributions in question funnelled to Sharon via Annex Research, a company set up in 1999 by Sharon's close aide Dov Weisglass in concert with Sharon's son, Omri. Weisglass also happens to be the lawyer for Martin Schlaff's investments in Israel as well as Casino Austria's Israeli investments. Weisglass was also reportedly in daily contact with Condoleeza Rice.

One of the fellows that is believed to be a funder Annex Research is Arie Genger. Genger acted as a private back channel between Sharon and the Bush administration, and also reportedly worked freqently with Condoleeza Rice.

Continuing...

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The police are investigating the possibility that Kern served as a front man for Schlaff, another friend of Sharon's, and a businessman heavily invested in Israel, who could have made the loan in the hope that Sharon would make decisions favorable to his business interests, including the reopening of the Jericho casino.

"We met to talk about whether Sharon should join a unity government with
Barak, and Weisglass told Arik to pressure Barak into reopening the casino," the source said. "They agreed that if Sharon joined the coalition, then they would ease restrictions on the Palestinians in Jericho in order to inadvertently allow for the casino to reopen."
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A quick summary

The article goes on to provide many other details on this case, but let's just summarize some of what we've seen thus far regarding this Casino:

So Martin Schlaff, and Austrian billionaire and friend of Sharon, invested heavily in a casino venture in Jericho along with Yasser Arafat. Another investor in the casino was BAWAG, the bank of the Austria trade unions that imploded in the joint Refco and embezzlement scandals. Both Schlaff and Casinos Austria were major investors in BAWAG.

Sharon's close adviser and chief of staff Dov Weisglass. Weisglass was also involved in setting up some shell companies used to funnel campaign money to Sharon back in 1999. When Sharon was forced to pay back that money, he received a $1.5 million loan from a South African, Cyril Kern, that was believed to be acting as a front man for Martin Schlaff. The loan, with flowed through BAWAG accounts, is believed that the loan represented a bribe to encourage Sharon to allow the reopening of the Oasis Casino, which had been closed down due to the the second Intifada.

Oh, and Cerberus, the large hedge fund that is a major force in Israel's economy, recently bought BAWAG, which was put up for sale by the Austrian trade unions in order to cover their losses over the BAWAG/Refco twin implosions.

On a tangential note, while the involvement of Sharon's close aide in a business deal with Yasser Arafat may seem like an example of strange bedfellows, it's not quite as unusual an arrangement as one might think. Take, for example, Silvio Berlusconi, a major Bush backer and Iraq war supporter: His Swiss-investment adviser, Pier Felice Barchi, doubled as the lawyer for the al-Taqwa, the Muslim Brotherhood's bank! (More on that here) And then there's the GOP's own Muslim-Brotherhood-linked Get-out-the-vote operation.

So now that we're sort of caught up with all this, let's complicate it some more!

Uncooperative Austria

So, adding scandal to scandal, it looks like Austria's government may have jumped into the Sharon bribery game too!

Austrian MP Calls for Inquiry Into Sharon’s Vienna Dealings

Marc Perelman, With Reporting by Chemi Shalev in Jerusalem. | Fri. Aug 08, 2003

An Austrian lawmaker is calling for a formal inquiry into charges that Vienna is blocking an Israeli investigation of alleged campaign finance violations by Prime Minister Sharon — purportedly in exchange for Jerusalem’s agreement to restore diplomatic ties with the alpine nation.

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Pilz said further investigations could be on the way. He said Justice Ministry officials had told him they were considering launching further investigations into allegations that the Austrian government had used money channeled via Austria to Sharon from a South African businessman, Cyril Kern, to influence Israeli policy. He did not specify what sort of influence his government might have been seeking.

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Speculation has been rife in the Israeli press in recent days that Sharon agreed to restore ties with Vienna only after an Austrian judge rejected several requests from Israeli police to subpoena bank records related to the Sharon investigation. Israeli police have asked to see records of a possible transfer of funds from Vienna’s Bawag Bank to a Tel Aviv bank account owned by the prime minister’s sons.

An Austrian judge has twice rejected Israeli requests to examine the bank records. The first request was rejected because the Israeli request came in an incorrect format. The second was rejected on grounds that foreign campaign financing is not a criminal offense in Austria. There were reports that a third request had been made on Wednesday, but it could not be confirmed by press time.

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Israeli newspaper reports have suggested that Justice Ministry officials connected to the far-right Freedom Party might have played a role in Austria’s rejection of the Israeli subpoena requests. Pilz noted that the rejection had come from a judge, not a ministry official.

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Sources in Jerusalem told the Forward that Sharon had been personally involved in calling for an upgrade of diplomatic relations with Austria. Moreover, the sources said, the decision was pushed by the political appointees within the Foreign Ministry rather than by the professional staff, which had allegedly rejected the restoration of ties last November and eventually acceded two weeks ago.

Israel downgraded its ties with Austria in 2000, together with members of the European Union, after the Freedom Party, then led by far-right activist Jorg Haider, was brought into the governing coalition. Haider has since resigned from the party leadership, leading European countries to restore ties. However, the Freedom Party remains in the coalition, which Israel had until last week cited as a reason for continuing the chill. Critics have called on the government to explain its shift.
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Two years after these suspicions, the Austrian government launched a probe of the whole bribery affair, while asserting that it was the Israeli police that were lackluster in their pursuit of evidence. So now that it's all nice and extra confusing, let's add another figure to this whole mess.

Avigdor Friedman, a far-Rightist friend of Martin Schlaff
While Mr. Schlaff may claim his investment in the Oasis Casino was intended to promote peace between the Israelis and Palestinians, his investment in Avigdnor Friedman probably doesn't fall in the category of peace-promotion:

Police probing Lieberman on suspicion of illegal business ties
By Baruch Kra

The police have been conducting a lengthy inquiry into suspicions that Transportation Minister Avigdor Lieberman has an illegal business relationship with Austrian businessman Martin Schlaff, who has substantial business interests in Israel.
...
Haaretz has learned that several years ago, during a special session of an Austrian parliamentary committee investigating that country's intelligence services, information came up regarding business connections between Martin Schlaff, the Austrian businessman who is believed to own 50 percent of the Jericho casino, and Lieberman, and how money was transferred to the political party Lieberman established, Yisrael Beitenu.
...

One of the main constituents for the Yisrael Beitenu party that Liberman formed are disaffected Likudniks that feel Likud just isn't right-wing enough.

In 2002, Lieberman called for the bombing of Palestinian gas stations, banks, and commercial centers in response to suicide bombings. In 2004, he pitched the "Lieberman Plan" that essentially involved complete separation of Arab and Jewish populations. In October 2006, Lieberman joined Ehud Olmert's cabinet in the position of "Minister of Strategic Threats", which was created primarily to deal with Iran's nuclear ambitions.

Along with Schlaff, another figure that has assisted Lieberman and his party is top GOP strategist Arthur Finklestein.

And perhaps most chillingly of all, Lieberman is seen as a rising star in Israel's politics:

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Far from his nakedly anti-Arab approach disqualifying him from the political mainstream, Lieberman is today its rising star. He was welcomed into the ruling coalition in October as "minister for strategic threats" and is now the main ally and crutch of faltering Prime Minister Ehud Olmert.

An immigrant from the former Soviet Union who lives in the illegal West Bank settlement of Nokdim, Lieberman is stoking anti-Arab sentiment and exploiting insecurity and disillusionment after the fiasco of last summer's Lebanon war. Top office, or at least the Defense Ministry, is a realistic goal for Lieberman, a shrewd political tactician who helped Benjamin Netanyahu gain election as Prime Minister in 1996 and served in Ariel Sharon's Cabinet. "If elections were held now, based on the polls, he could presumably be either prime minister or demand any other ministry he wanted," says Yossi Alpher, former director of the Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies.

If Lieberman's pronouncements are to be taken seriously--and there is no obvious reason they should not be--a Lieberman government would exclude some Arab citizens from Israel, would expel others who refuse to sign a loyalty-to-Zionism oath, would turn Gaza into Grozny and would execute Arab members of the Knesset who talk to Hamas or mark Israel Independence Day as the anniversary of the displacement of the Palestinians in 1948.

Many Israelis--and many Americans--are sleeping through the rise of Lieberman. Others are through their actions facilitating the ascendance of fascist ideas in Israel. Lieberman is more than kosher as far as Washington is concerned. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice welcomed him at the State Department on December 11, a day after he was featured at a forum, sponsored by the Brookings Institution's Saban Center, that also included Bill Clinton, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton and several other members of Congress.
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So yeah, fascism appears to be on the rise in Israel as the public turns sour on corruption. Whoopy! And neither is Lieberman the only proto-fascist whose star is rising...

Arkady Gaydamak, a well-armed rising star
now let's take a look at Israel's wannabe kingmaker:

My clout will make Netanyahu PM says Israel's wannabe kingmaker
BEN LYNFIELD IN JERUSALEM

A RUSSIAN-BORN billionaire wanted by French authorities for alleged arms trafficking yesterday positioned himself as potential kingmaker of Israel by announcing a new "social movement" that will give expression to his growing political clout.

Arkady Gaydamak - who has gained a degree of popularity in Israel with a series of high-profile philanthropy projects amid deepening public disgust with established politicians - told The Scotsman last night that his "Social Justice Movement" would enable him to influence politicians without holding public office.

Mr Gaydamak, 54, says he does not have the experience or desire to hold high office. He says the person best suited to be prime minister is Benjamin Netanyahu, leader of the right-wing Likud party.
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A 2002 study by the non-profit Centre for Public Integrity, based in Washington, described Mr Gaydamak as "an entrepreneur with global ties to arms smuggling, resource exploitation and private military companies".
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We should note that one of the conflicts in which Mr. Gaydamak sold his wares was the diamond-fueled Angolan civil war in the 90's. And while Gayadamak was selling his arms to the Angolan government, it was none of than arms-smuggler extraordinaire Victor Bout that was selling to the UNITA rebels. (For more on the most mysterious and important Bout empire, go here and skip down to the section "What the arms trade is all about")

Continuing...

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Israeli analysts see Mr Gaydamek's alliance with Mr Netanyahu as a milestone in the country's politics. Approval ratings for the prime minister, Ehud Olmert, are plummeting after the debacle of last summer's Lebanon war and corruption scandals, while the right wing is rising in popularity. Mr Gaydamek, they say, can deliver to Mr Netanyahu a large chunk of the crucial Russian-speaking immigrant vote, while Mr Netanyahu can offer Mr Gaydamak access to the pinnacle of power.

"Gaydamek has huge resources and can buy up Israeli politics and politicians," says Danny Gutwein, a historian at Haifa University. "He will enlist the Russian vote for Netanyahu. Basically, capitalism will replace democracy."
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Capitalism will replace democracy, eh? Its sounds kind of a like fascism. It also sounds in keeping with what's been taking place across in democratic countries across the world. But as this recent article suggests, Israel's march toward fascism and into the embrace of oligarchic right-wing ideologues just might happen sooner rather than later:

Is Israel Falling Apart?
By Dror Wahrman

Mr. Wahrman is Ruth N. Halls Professor of History and Director of the Center for Eighteenth-Century Studies at the Indiana University History Department (adjunct in English, Jewish Studies, Cultural Studies).

Foreign observers of Israel tend to focus so intently on the dangers the country faces from its Arab neighbours that they have largely missed an astonishing story that has been accelerating over the past few months: that of the Jewish state’s possible move toward internal collapse. If you consider this an exaggeration, just take note of what the past couple of weeks have brought about. A few days ago the chief of the Israeli police resigned after an investigation that found several of Israel’s highest police officers guilty of corruption and negligence. This came within a week of the forced resignation of Israel’s Chief of Staff from the military because of the fiascos of the second Lebanon war. It was also some ten days after Israel’s minister of justice was convicted of sexual assault while on duty, and a couple of weeks after Israel’s president – who holds a largely symbolic position – resigned temporarily following charges of rape and sexual misconduct. It was also the same day that the head of Israel’s tax authority resigned because of possible corruption charges. In the meantime, several other investigations are still pending, not least two or three directed at the Prime Minister himself, Ehud Olmert, concerning corruption and favoritism. And an appeal to the Supreme Court has already been filed against the minister of police’s choice for a new police chief – again, because of old charges of corruption of which the nominee had been acquitted only through a particularly narrow benefit of the doubt.
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One of the corruption probes involving Ehud Omert just happens to involves charges of favoritism in the privatization of Bank Leumi while he was Minister of Finance.

Former Prime Minister Shimon Peres is also facing investigations over some campaign contributions from three foreign contributors, one of which includes Swiss business Bruce Rappaport. Mr. Rappaport also happens to have an interesting history with the Iran Contra, BCCI, and October Surprise affairs.

Continuing...

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Do these events really presage the collapse of the Israeli system of governance and democracy? There certainly has never been such a deep crisis of leadership in the country that touts itself as the only democracy in the Middle East. The leader of the ruling parliamentary coalition, Avigdor Yitzhaki, said so publicly a few days ago. And the Minister of Education has suggested that all schools devote special classes to the "government crisis", so that children can speak out about what might well seem to them like a total collapse of all systems that control their lives. Suddenly the Palestinians and the Hizbullah, and even Iranian nukes, have taken a back seat: Israel does indeed seem in danger of imploding from within, at least as a viable democracy.
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We're going to end this random walk through corrupt history with a couple more interesting links on the topic of the fascist elements in not only Israel's politics and a plug for a public radio fundraiser :-P.

The first link is to a one minute video clip by anti-fascist researcher Dave Emory on the topic of the fascist elements of Zionism. It's a excerpt from The First Refuge of a Scoundrel - The Relationship Between Fascism and Religion, a two hour talk on the topic of religion and fascism he recently gave. The video is available as part of the fund drive for WFMU, a non-commercial, freeform radio station broadcasting at 91.1 FM in Jersey City, NJ. If you tune in during the today (Tuesday, March 13), from 6-7 PM EST (which you can do online here), and make a $75 dollar donation to the station, you can a DVD of the talk thrown in as "swag". Yay!

And the second link is to another Dave Emory show from back in November of 1998, The Republican Party and International Fascism (audio here). It's a half hour show cover the GOP's very real history of working with fascists. It also discusses, ~18 minutes into the show, an interesting 1998 meeting of far-Rightists in Italy that include not only American far-Rightists, but Israeli far-Rightists. It's a useful reminder that, when we're talking about fascism and its history, we inevitably are talking about a larger global movement with cooperation that transcends borders and religions. Authoritarian thugishness, it appears, is a powerful unifying force.

By ftr23532@yahoo.com

George Bush's Samson Option

Thursday, March 08, 2007

by Stephen Lendman

The Samson Option is terminology used to explain Israel's intention to use its nuclear arsenal as an ultimate defense strategy if its leaders feel threatened enough to think they have no alternative. It comes from the biblical Samson said to have used his great strength to bring down the pillars of a Philistine temple, downing its roof and killing himself and thousands of Philistine tormentors. It's a strategy saying if you try killing me, we'll all die together, or put another way, we'll all go together when we go. Richard Wagner had his apocalyptic version in the last of his four operas of Der Ring des Nibelungen - Gotterdammerung, or Twilight of the Gods based on Norse mythology referring to a prophesied war of the Gods resulting in the end of the world.

The Bush Doctrine isn't that extreme, and it's not the intent of this essay to suggest its unintended consequences may turn out that way even though the threat it may is real if they start firing off enough nukes like they're king-sized hand grenades. The Doctrine refers to the administration's foreign policy first aired by George Bush in his commencement speech to the West Point graduating class in June, 2002. It was later formalized in The National Security Strategy of September, 2002 and updated in more extreme form in early 2006 that makes for scary reading not recommended at bedtime. It mentions Iran in it 16 times stating: "We may face no greater challenge from a single country than from Iran" while failing to acknowledge what Pogo said about us on an Earth Day poster in 1970 and in a 1972 book titled - "We Have Met the Enemy and He Is Us."

The updated NSS details an "imperial grand strategy" with new language more belligerent than the original version that was intended to be a declaration of preemptive or preventive war against any country or force the administration claims threatens our national security. It followed from our Nuclear Policy Review of December, 2001 claiming a unilateral right to declare and wage future wars using first strike nuclear weapons that in enough numbers potentially can destroy all planetary life, save maybe some resilient roaches and bacteria. In still other national security documents, the administration intends being ready by maintaining total control over all land, surface and sub-surface sea, air, space, electromagnetic spectrum and information systems with enough overwhelming power to defeat any potential challengers using all weapons in the arsenal, including those nukes masquerading as king-sized grenades.

The doctrine got its baptism in Afghganistan right after the 9/11 attacks and before the 2002 NSS was released. It then played out in real time "shock and awe" force (without nukes) in Iraq that seemed to work like a charm until it didn't. That brings us to today and an administration feeling cornered by failure and needing to change the subject and get a victory in the face of major defeat or at least buy enough time to run out the clock on its tenure so a new administration can take over and deal with the mess left over. It'll be king-sized if the audible war drums now beating are for real.

Enter Iran to play dual roles for the Bush administration plus the same one always center stage when strategic resources are at stake. It's the designated target to pull George Bush's Middle East fat out of the fire and fulfill our 28 year commitment to regime change in the country since its 1979 revolution ousted Shah Reza Pahlavi whom we installed to replace democratically elected prime minister Mohammed Mossadegh in 1953 in the CIA's first-ever go at regime change. Those events began and ended the same way - violently, but if George Bush proceeds as he's now threatening, they'll seem like tempest-in-teapot prologues to the main event ahead looking like full scale war large enough to engulf the whole region and entire Muslim world with it.

CIA's assessment is blunt. If the US attacks Iran, Southern Shia Iraq will light up like a candle and explode uncontrollably throughout the country. CIA ought to know and likely concluded big trouble won't just be in Iraq, Shia Islam and the Middle East. It may show up anywhere including a neighborhood near you but not to express reconciliation and friendship.

Washington's other motive is no mystery to anyone knowing why we attacked and now occupy Iraq. It had nothing to do with nonexistent weapons and everything to do with removing a leader unwilling to accept our imperial management rules whose country happens to have the fourth largest and easily accessible proven oil reserves in the world we want to control. The joke goes - how did our oil end up under his sand. The same is true for Iran and has since 1979. The country's leaders reject our rules, and it too has easily accessible oil reserves that are the world's third largest behind Saudi Arabia and Canada (including the country's heavy reserves). Further, both countries have vast untapped more of them adding to their allure and Washington's determination to control them alone to have veto power over who gets access.

If the US attacks Iran, all bets are off on what's to come. The echoes of Waterloo could turn George Bush's Middle East adventurism into his inadvertent Samson option by expanding the Iraq conflict to a regional one with impossible to predict consequences that won't be good for Western interests and especially US ones. It will inflame the region and produce a tsunami of Shia rage and solidarity enough to inflame and unite the whole Muslim world in fierce opposition to America, its culture and people. It may irrevocably transform the region making it unwelcome for decades or longer to anything Western that only arrives for what it can take and doesn't take no for an answer.

It's backlash may also affect the administration and its party as unintended fallout from an ill-conceived adventure gone sour and beyond repair. And it may have further unintended consequences as well - the painful blowback kind from angry people striking back in catastrophic payback ways far harsher than ever before. It could be a dirty bomb or two detonated in one more US cities or a nuclear reactor core meltdown from sabotage or attack releasing lethal radiation in amounts great enough to make downwind areas from it forever uninhabitable. Imagine a nightmarish vision of New York or Chicago (surrounded by 11 aging nuclear power plants) as ghost towns, their structures intact but unfit to be occupied.

There is a macabre bright side, however, once past the onslaught if it comes and its aftermath. In six years, the Bush administration achieved the near-impossible. It made the US a pariah state alienating the whole Muslim world and vast numbers more everywhere including growing numbers at home with George Bush's approval rating at numbers approaching the lowest ever for a US president. Its policies of permanent war on the world, repression at home, entrenched corruption, worship of wealth and privilege, and indifference to human needs and the people he was elected to serve already destroyed any notion the country is a model democratic state or that Bush and his neocon fanatics should be governing it. Their imperial arrogance accelerated the country's fading global hegemony well advanced since the 1970s and likely irreversible. They buried the nation's influence and dominance in Iraq's smoldering sands and Afghanistan's rubble that are now both graveyards for US ambitions in those regions and beyond.

Attacking Iran will just make things far worse. It would be a fanatical "hail Mary" act of insanity that by one definition is repeating the same mistakes, expecting different results. It has no more chance of success than our misadventures in Iraq and Afghanistan. And if nuclear weapons are used, including so-called low-yield ones, it will be an appalling crime against humanity and catastrophic event potentially affecting millions in the region by radiation poisoning alone. If it happens, it will irreversibly weaken US influence and credibility everywhere accelerating our decline even faster toward second-class status and loss of world leadership already hanging by a thread. It could also be a potentially lethal blow to the benefits of "Western civilization" always arriving through the barrel of a gun and thuggish heel of a colonizer's boot with the US having the biggest barrels and largest shoe sizes.

Key US players know the risks and want our losses cut before it's too late to act. They want an end to war, not more of it in a strategically vital world region too important to lose while fearing it's likely too late. The National Intelligence Estimate supports them believing the war in Iraq is unwinnable, transforming the country into a pro-American state impossible, and the president's notion of victory illusory. George Bush ignores its assessment and presses on.

Reports by Seymour Hersh and others now say the administration wants to weaken the Bashir Assad-led Syrian government's alliance with Iran and further undermine Hezbollah's influence in Lebanon and the region by funding Sunni extremist groups with known ties to al-Queda in what's called a "redirection program." It's the brainchild of Dick Cheney/Elliott Abrams (of Iran-Contra notoriety)/Zalmay Khalilzad/Condi Rice/Saudi Prince Bandar bin Sultan/Israeli elements & Co. with CIA's hands are all over it covertly beyond Congress' reach. It includes a larger effort, with Saudi help, to fund and unleash Sunni extremist elements against Tehran at the same time Washington is preparing to include Iran and Syria in regional discussions on the situation in Iraq. It proves again duplicity and shameless hypocrisy are never in short supply in Washington. They're only topped by the neocon leadership's crazed strategy to make a hopeless Middle East debacle catastrophic.

The Concocted Myth of Iran's Threat

The ancient Persian empire became Iran on March 21, 1935. From that time till now, Iran obeyed international law, never occupied a foreign territory, and never threatened or attacked another state beyond occasional border skirmishes over unsettled disputes of the kinds other nations engage in that are far short of all out wars. It only had full-scale conflict defensively after Saddam Hussein launched a full-scale invasion in September, 1980 backed, equipped and financially aided by Washington that included supplying chemical and biological weapon precursors and crucial intelligence on Iranian field positions and force strength.

The conflict became known as the Iran-Iraq war. It lasted till August, 1988 over which time a million or more people died, countless numbers more were wounded and displaced, with America all the while inciting both sides to keep up the killing. It hoped to destroy both countries and then move in to pick up the pieces like it's been trying to do since in the Middle East and elsewhere with growing difficulty as not everyone likes our rules and some are even bold enough to renounce them.

Iran became a major US adversary after its 1979 revolution established the Islamic Republic in February, 1980. Since then, the two countries have had no diplomatic ties and relations between them have been frosty and uncertain at best with Washington only interested in normalization on its usual one-way dictated terms. They're the same kinds offered other developing states - we're "boss," surrender your sovereignty to ours, and accede to neoliberal market-based rules made in Washington that aren't negotiable. Iran refuses so it's public enemy number one topping the US target queue for regime change. Rule by extremist mullahs and reactors aren't the problems. They're just pretexts like all the phony intelligence about Iran destabilizing Iraq discussed below.

Despite a hopeless quagmire in Iraq, the Bush administration seems focused on further escalation notwithstanding the danger, near-impossible chance of success, and mounting opposition and anger to its agenda in the homeland. It's coming from the public on Iraq and even the Congress with some there getting twitchy enough to voice concern, though still far short of acting as they can and should with too many there twitching to fight, not quit. It's also heard in the highest ranks of power from both parties first circulated in the Jim Baker-led Iraq Study Group that reported its rumor-leaked findings December 6. It represented a clear rejection of Bush administration Iraq policies gone sour, a proposed rescue plan and effort to save his family name, and a scheme to restore US Middle East dominance, fast slipping away, and near past the point of no return by now from which there's likely none.

Despite its clout, its recommendations went unheeded, especially regarding engaging Iran and Syria to help bail Bush's Middle East fat out of its self-made fire. And nothing's changed in the wake of Washington's agreeing to include those countries' officials in initial and follow-up discussions on Iraq's security along with members of the Arab League, Organization of Islamic Unity, G 8 countries, and five permanent members of the Security Council.

The decision represents no softening of the US's position, and the administration likely will use the talks to repeat unproved claims Iranian elements support anti-American forces in Iraq, continue refusing broader diplomatic discussions unless Tehran stops enriching uranium which it won't nor should it be forced to or be punished for, and keep negotiating the way it always does - making ultimatums and accepting no compromise, meaning nothing will be resolved and tensions will only be further heightened. And if anyone doubts that's how things will unfold, the New York Times was front and center spelling it out. It reported any US discussions involving Iran and Syria won't be "from a position of weakness (so the administration intends) ratcheting up the confrontational talk (to show) the United States was in more of a driver's seat" and not planning to negotiate in good faith. No surprise.

The Bush administration's rejectionism has even deeper roots going back at least to a 2003 "grand bargain" offer from Iran - unreported, of course, in the corporate media. It was approved by Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, former President Mohammad Khatami and former Foreign Foreign Minister Kamal Kharrazi. Former Bush National Security Council official Flynt Leverett revealed it calling it a "serious proposal (he knew from multiple sources) went all the way up to former Secretary of State Colin Powell (who) 'couldn't sell it at the White House.' " It was part of a six year Bush administration pattern of rejecting all Iranian overtures with responses of ultimatums, threats and Washington-style bullying all framed to send the same message. Washington wants nothing less than regime change and may go to war for it.

Fast forward to today and the largely unreported testimony of former Carter administration National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee February 1. He highlighted it in an op ed piece in the Los Angeles Times February 11 calling "The war in Iraq....a historic strategic and moral calamity undertaken under false assumptions.... undermining America's global legitimacy (and) tarnishing America's moral credentials. (It's) driven by Manichean impulses and imperial hubris, it is intensifying regional instability." It's too bad he ignored the most damning fact of all - the Iraq and Afghan wars are both acts of illegal aggression the Nuremberg Tribunal called "the supreme international crime" and Nazis convicted of it were hanged. Don't expect a hint of that from a spear-carrying member of the empire in good standing.

Brzezinski did say the conflict is ominous for the national interest, and if the country stays bogged down in Iraq it's on track for a "likely head-on conflict with Iran and much of the Islamic world." He believes if it happens it will mean a "spreading and deepening (protracted) quagmire lasting 20 years or more and eventually ranging across Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan (causing) pervasive popular antagonism" and plunging the US into growing political isolation. He stated a "plausible scenario (for war with Iran) might be "some provocation in Iraq or a terrorist act (real or otherwise) blamed on Iran."

Brzezinski represents powerful interests using him as their influential spokesman. They want an end to policies gone sour they see harming "the national interest" meaning their own. He and they want "a significant change in direction" with a strategy to "end the occupation of Iraq" with a serious US commitment to "shape a regional security dialogue that includes all Iraq's neighbors including Iran and Syria and other major Muslim countries like Egypt and Pakistan." He's calling for an unambiguous "determination to leave Iraq in a reasonably short period of time," and believes the US should "activate a credible and energetic effort (to end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict without which) nationalist and fundamentalist passions (will eventually doom) any Arab regime (perceived supporting) US regional hegemony." Brzezinski sounded alarmist about the Bush administration's hostile intentions toward Iran, and his implications are clear. Washington's agenda is ominous and threatening the national interest. He denounced the scheme and pressed Congress to engage Iran, not attack it. His message so far is unheeded.

Brzezinski's influential voice was joined by Russian President Vladimir Putin's addressing the international security conference in Munich February 10. He stunned listeners with his harsh frankness accusing the US of endangering the world pursuing policies aimed at making it "one single master (in a) unipolar world." He went on saying "It has nothing in common with democracy (and the people) teaching us democracy (but) don't want to learn it themselves." He continued that US policy "overstepped its national borders in every way....in the economic, political and cultural policies it imposes on other nations."

He claimed the US is responsible for "a greater and greater disdain for the principles of international law (and) no one can feel that international law is like a stone wall that will protect them." He also accused the US of stimulating "an arms race (in an environment where) peace is not so reliable." He added "Unilateral actions have not resolved conflicts but have made them worse," and force should only be used when authorized as international law requires by the UN Security Council. He sounded an alarm gone unheard in the West that "Today we are witnessing an almost uncontained hyper use of force - military force.... that is plunging the world into an abyss of permanent conflicts (and) Finding a political settlement....becomes impossible." He further warned about the use of "space (or) high tech weapons" with implications of a new cold war, nuclear arms race and frightening possibility of devastating nuclear war that was unthinkable before the age of George Bush.

The Dominant Media React

As President of a major world power, Putin's comments went out to the world getting broad coverage, if only for a day or so, while Brzezinski's were largely and shamelessly ignored by the corrupted corporate media still carrying the administration's water and trumpeting its phony claims like verifiable gospel. It happened on February 11 in the New York Times as reported by correspondent James Glanz. His column breathed the scantiest hints of skepticism that smacked of the same kind of Judith Miller-type journalism about WMDs helping take the country to war with Iraq in 2003. He said the US military showed "their first public evidence of the contentious assertion that Iran supplies Shiite extremist groups in Iraq with some of the most lethal weapons in the war....used to kill more than 170 Americans in the past three years" with only hints about its reliability or the source presenting it having none.

He cited senior defense officials in Baghdad February 11 displaying "an array of mortar shells and rocket-propelled grenades with visible serial numbers (claimed to be directly linked) to Iranian arms factories." Without credible proof, they said "Iranian leaders had authorized smuggling those weapons into Iraq for use against Americans (basing their judgment) on general intelligence assessments (of the same kind used to justify attacking Iraq, meaning phony ones.) The specious Times report reeked of innuendos for what it lacked in hard proof about lethal weapons. They could have come from any source, manufactured anywhere, including by Pentagon contractors easily able to duplicate anything scattered around the country and on Iraqi streets for years after the Iranian conflict and now used by resistance fighters or anyone else who has them.

Typical Times saber rattling was at it again after Bush's inept February 14 news conference trumpeting his claim Iran was sending weapons to Iraq to undermine security and kill Americans while never looking more pathetic and awkward doing it. In "Times talk," reporters Stolberg and Santora stated "Mr. Bush's remarks amounted to his most specific accusation to date that Iran was undermining security in Iraq....(and he) dismissed as 'preposterous' the contention by some skeptics that the United States was drawing unwarranted conclusions about Iran's role." They barely questioned the president's nonsensical claim he's certain "the (paramilitary) Quds Force, a part of the government, has provided these sophisticated I.E.D's that have harmed our troops" that has as much credibility as those WMDs we had to fear along with that "mushroom shaped cloud" we couldn't afford to wait to see before acting.

Facts On the Ground Trump the Propaganda

Revealed facts on the ground in Iraq belie all Pentagon and administration phony assertions along with their shameless daily echoing on the Times front pages. The military couldn't even get its evidence straight in presenting an 81mm mortar shell Iran doesn't make, and the ones shown the media had fake markings in English for a Farsi-speaking country. It's also inconceivable Shia Iran would be fighting Iraq's Shia government it's allied with and aids. The US has been fighting an anti-Iranian Sunni resistance largely in al-Anbar province and the most violent parts of Baghdad. It stretches credibility to imagine Iran is arming its enemy that denounces Iraq's dominant Shia puppet government as a US pawn.

That hardly deters Washington claiming further solid evidence Iranian agents are involved in what the State Department calls "networks" (meaning Iranians) working with individuals and groups in Iraq sent there by the Iranian government without a shred of evidence to prove it. Even General Peter Pace, US Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman, dismisses the claim as unproved and further said during a February trip to the Pacific region there is "zero" chance of a US war with Iran.

He may be echoing the kind of sentiment the London Times reported February 25 that "highly placed defence and intelligence sources (say) Some of America's most senior commanders are prepared to resign (in protest) if the White House orders a military strike against Iran." The paper calls this type of high-level internal dissent unprecedented signifying great distaste and misgivings in the Pentagon for an attack on Iran. That's a sentiment even its Joint Chiefs Chairman may share as well as the six retired generals (and likely others) who publicly denounced the Pentagon's handling of the Iraq war last spring and the administration's incompetence overall.

Nonetheless, preparations for war go on that veteran journalist Seymour Hersh again wrote about in late February in the New Yorker magazine. According to Hersh's informed sources: "The Pentagon is continuing intensive planning for a possible bombing attack on Iran....at the direction of the President. (It includes) a contingency plan...that can be implemented (in) 24 hours....The Iran planning group (is assigned) to identify targets in Iran that may be involved in supplying or aiding militants in Iraq (on top of its previous focus to destroy) Iran's nuclear facilities and possible regime change." Hersh's report supplements others, like one from BBC, saying the US military is planning an all out "shock and awe" blitzkrieg on the country's nuclear facilities, military and infrastructure that may come in the spring that's now just days away.

A clear sign of that possibility is the huge naval buildup in the Gulf and Eastern Mediterranean with two heavily equipped and armed carrier groups in theater and a reported third en route either to replace one there or add to it. The combined task force in place is a formidable assemblage of 50 or more warships with nuclear weapons, hundreds of planes and contingents of Marines and Navy personnel.

The buildup is part of former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's plan for preemptive nuclear war specifically targeting Iran and North Korea. Earlier, Dick Cheney originated the idea when he served as GHW Bush's Defense Secretary in the early 1990s. Rumsfeld picked up the scheme in 2004 as authorized by the 2002 National Security Strategy proclaiming an official doctrine of preemptive or preventive war for the first time. From it he approved a top secret "Interim Global Strike Alert Order" for military readiness against hostile countries that included the nuclear option. He drew on CONPLAN (contingency/concept plan) 8022 completed in November 2003 detailing a plan to preemptively strike targets anywhere in the world judged a national security threat including hardened structures using tactical so-called low-yield nuclear bunker busters with Iran the apparent first target of choice. The Omaha-based US Strategic Command (StratCom) would run any operation if undertaken as it's the command center for the country's nuclear deterrent and overseas the military's nuclear arsenal.

All military branches have ready battle plans to implement against Iran under the name TIRANNT for Theater Iran Near Term. If an attack order comes, it can be launched from the assembled Naval task force in the region and/or by long-range US-based bombers and other warplanes and missiles strategically based in locations like Diego Garcia and elsewhere within striking distance of Iranian targets. It will be able to assault Iran round the clock for weeks against a claimed number of 1500 nuclear-related sites located at 18 main locations in the country. Also designated are thousands of strategic military and civilian targets including vital infrastructure, industrial sites, air, naval and ground force bases, missile facilities and always command-and-control centers with possible help from Israeli warplanes that might, in fact, initiate an attack with US forces then joining in to support their regional partner.

That kind of devious scheme could persuade Congress to go along never wanting to offend the Israeli Lobby that's been spoiling for a fight with Iran for years and now may get it horrifically with unimaginable consequences. They'll affect Israel and the US alike as well as spillover to unstable countries in the region like the Saudis, Egyptians, Jordanians and Lebanese and may be unsettling enough to unseat sitting rulers and governments replacing them with the kinds of fundamentalist regimes not likely to welcome US presence or influence in the region and intending to do something about it.

The Bush Roadmap to War with Iran

Reports circulated as early as last year and in 2005 that the Bush administration signed off on a "shock and awe" attack against Iran to destroy its perfectly legal commercial nuclear program that may involve using so-called "mini-nuke robust earth penetrator bunker-buster" weapons that won't be "mini" in their catastrophic effects if indeed used. These are powerful dangerous weapons. They can be made to any desired potency, would likely be from one-third to two-thirds as powerful as the Hiroshima bomb that destroyed an entire city, but could have far greater explosive capability that potentially will be catastrophic to the area struck and well beyond by radiation contamination alone.

Pentagon false and misleading reports about them claim they're "safe for civilians" because they penetrate the earth and explode underground. Test results prove otherwise showing when released from 40,000 feet a B61-11 nuclear earth-penetrator burrowed about 20 feet in the soil for a pre-explosion depth able to produce intense fallout over the area struck that's unremediable and would result in enough permanent surface contamination to be unsafe for human habitation. Nonetheless, weapons able to cause a nuclear holocaust are cleared for use real time along with conventional ones if a "shock and awe" attack is ordered against Iran or any other nation on the false and misleading pretext of protecting the national security only threatened by a rogue leadership at home willing to risk catastrophic mass destruction in pursuit of its insane and unachieveable imperial aims.

Not surprisingly, we have an eager partner in Israel straining at the leash to fulfill its long-term agenda to attack Iran alone (possible but doubtful) or along with its US ally that keeps getting reinforced by bellicose statements by its high officials like the one reported February 13 by ultra-right wing Strategic Affairs Minister Avigdor Lieberman. He commented in a radio interview that if necessary "We will have to face the Iranians alone, because Israel cannot remain with its arms folded, waiting for Iran to develop non-conventional (nuclear) weapons." Officials like Lieberman, current Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert and former prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu are dangerous men on the far right allied with others in government and the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) all dripping war talk that must be taken seriously from a nation dedicated to conflict and never shy about striking the first all out aggressive blow.

The same theme comes from a report published February 11 that vice-president Cheney's national security advisor, John Hannah (who replaced Lewis Libby just convicted of obstruction of justice, perjury and lying to the FBI), speaking for the Bush administration, considers 2007 "the year of Iran" saying a US attack is a real possibility. Hannah played a key role in the run-up to the Iraq war having written the first draft of Colin Powell's infamous pre-war speech to the Security Council citing bogus evidence. He also played a lead role putting out phony pre-war intelligence from Iraqi exiles. Now he's at the seat of power and must be taken seriously, especially since his boss barely disguises his aggressive posturing for war against the Iranian state he's wanted for 15 years or more.

They're both part of the high-level propaganda messaging similar to the lead-up to the Iraq war. It's aim is instill fear to make the administration's case that Iran poses serious threat enough to justify military action against it. It follows UN Resolutions 1696 in July demanding Iran suspend uranium enrichment by August 31, which it didn't, and 1737 in December imposing limited sanctions on Iran for not abiding by what the Security Council demanded in July. A second deadline passed putting the Iranian matter back in the Security Council to consider new sanctions be imposed and ratcheting things closer to a US attack as further events unfold.

And so the beat goes on with US oil reserves being stockpiled, Iranian diplomats apprehended in Iraq, the Pentagon and Israeli forces scheming together, the US military buildup in the Gulf and Eastern Mediterranean continuing, US ground forces moved to the Iran-Iraq border, Patriot missiles strategically installed in Israel and neighboring Arab states, a "surge" of up to 50,000 additional troops planned, and a change of commanders on the ground in Iraq made replacing less hawkish ones with others supporting the Bush war strategy.

They're part of the new Pentagon team under Defense Secretary Robert Gates who told the Senate Armed Services Committee the military needs to prepare for large-scale operations against countries like Russia, China, North Korea and Iran that reaffirms the administration's commitment to its "long war" Dick Cheney said won't end in our lifetime, but may end up shortening it. Clearly Iran is the next planned target, the dominant media echoes the threat, and Congress is just a talking-shop like always posturing as the gathering storm in the Gulf intensifies.

Published reports, citing credible sources, point to an attack on Iran by April by an administration on total expanded war footing with the president spoiling for a fight by goading Iran to react in response to his order to "seek out and destroy" (supposed) Iranian "networks" in Iraq. Bush minced no words in a radio interview saying "If Iran escalates its military action in Iraq (even though there's none)....we will respond firmly." Other officials joined the jingoistic chorus accusing Iran of involvement in sectarian violence practically signaling an upcoming attack that easily could follow a manufactured pretext if Iran fails to provide one on its own which it won't. It's never hard to do, and the infamous trumped up Gulf of Tonkin one in August, 1964 shows how easy it is to fool the public and get Congress to go along.

Iran could save us the trouble by responding to US provocations going on now for months by illegally flying unmanned aerial surveillance drones across its airspace and secretly placing special forces reconnaissance teams on the ground "to collect targeting data and to establish contact with anti-government ethnic minority groups" according to an earlier report by Seymour Hersh. So far, Iran hasn't taken the bait even though it knows what's happening and reportedly downed one or more intruding aircraft it has every legal right to do but is treading dangerously against an adversary looking for any pretext to pounce. It's leaders also knew what Washington was up to after being made a charter member of Bush's "Axis of Evil." In that status, it's blamed for the administration's failure in Iraq with false claims of arming the resistance and inciting violence.

War on Iran may, in fact, have already started, and two bombings in Southeastern Iranian Zahedan bordering Pakistan and Afghanistan the week of February 12 may have been one of its volleys. Arrests were made and a video seized according to provincial police chief Brigadier General Mohammad Ghafari. From it he claims the "rebels (have an) attachment to opposition groups and some countries' intelligence services such as America and Britain." An unnamed Iranian official also told the Islamic Republic News Agency one of those arrested confessed he was trained by English speakers, and the attack was part of US plans to provoke internal unrest.

While none of this conclusively proves US involvement, there's no secret Washington wants regime change, is actively stirring up internal ethnic and political opposition toward it, and reportedly is working with exiled Iranian leaders including the Mujahideen el-Khalq (MEK) Iranian opposition guerrilla cult the US State Department lists as a terrorist organization, but not apparently when it's on our side.

Full-scale war on Iran may just be a concocted terrorist attack away from starting the "shock and awe." There's no secret what's planned and none whatever that doing it will be another unprovoked, unwarranted act of preemptive illegal aggression only the US and Israel support. It's also no secret Iran is no pushover. It's no match for US and/or Israeli power, but it's got powerful weapons one writer says are "unstoppable" like Russian-built SS-N-22 Sunburn Missiles and more advanced SS-NX-26 Yakhont anti-ship ones designed to sink a US carrier that's a formidable weapon of war but not invulnerable. Iran also has Russian 29 Tor M-1 anti-missile systems and NATO-made Exocet and Chinese Silkworm anti-ship missiles that pack a punch and can sink our ships when launced from land, surface ships or submarines along with 300 or more warplanes, and a large ground force estimated at around 350,000.

US engaging Iran may now hinge on resolving the Washington power struggle between Bush administration neocons and more practical trilateralist types in the camp of Zbigniew Brzezinski, Jim Baker, and other powerful Washington figures including the president's father. It's also up to Congress to decide which side it's on and whether it will act or watch from the sidelines and risk nuclear war and its fallout. It may not be long finding out how events will unfold. Just the kind and level of rhetorical noise will tell who's winning with congressional inaction and media complicity so far giving the hawks a big advantage. Haven't we seen this script before, and isn't the likely ending clear, except this time the stakes are far greater and so is the risk to everyone on both sides.


Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago and can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net.

Also visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com and tune in online to hear The Steve Lendman News and Information Hour on The Micro Effect.com each Saturday at noon US central time.

'Racist' forced to withdraw bid for Israeli cabinet post

By Donald Macintyre in Jerusalem
Published: 01 March 2007

Avigdor Lieberman, leader of the most right-wing party in Israel's governing coalition, was forced last night to cancel his nomination of a colleague condemned as a "true racist" to the Tourism Ministry.

Mr Lieberman had faced mounting embarrassment over his choice of Esterina Tartman for the post of Tourism Minister after a series of damaging revelations about her eligibility for the job - or lack of it.

Ehud Olmert's Cabinet confirmed Ms Tartman's appointment on Sunday despite her having made what was widely construed as a racist attack on the appointment of the first Arab Muslim minister last month.

Saying that Ghaleb Majadale's promotion was "lowering the guillotine on Zionism" Ms Tartman, a Knesset member in the Yisrael Beiteinu party declared: "We need to burn this plague out of our midst and God willing, the Lord will help us with that." Her own party leader's harshly anti-Arab views did not deter Mr Olmert from making him a deputy prime minister in his coalition, and the most vigorous public opposition to her appointment at that stage was largely confined to the liberal left in Israeli politics and Arab politicians.

But doubts began to spread wider after the revelation by Channel Two television that Ms Hartman had received around £150,000 in social security benefits after producing a doctor's certificate that she was not able to work more than four hours a day because of a car accident a decade ago.

Then Yedhiot Ahronot revealed that two institutions from which she had claimed to have graduated with a "clear economics background" including a "master's in business administration", Hebrew University and Bar Ilan University, had no record of her having even enrolled. Instead it appears she has only a bachelor's degree from the rather less distinguished Israeli branch of the New York-based Touro College.

The Bank Yahav, where she claimed to have been a vice-president disobligingly disclosed that she had only been a deputy department head.

And the Israel Defence Forces even declined to confirm that Ms Hartman, a zealous army reservist, held an Israeli record for women in the military by having made 42 parachute jumps.

Mr Lieberman has now nominated a former senior policeman in his party, Yitzhak Aharonovitch, to the job.

Inside Israel’s apartheid state

Israel's mistreatment of its Arab minorities is part of a state program to combat what is perceived as an internal existential threat

By Reed Eurchuk

Israel's government recently appointed Avigdor Lieberman its Minister of External Threats, more accurately known as its Minister of Fear. Like countless authoritarian politicians before him, Lieberman employs the rhetoric of violent racist fantasies, blood identification, and fear of a threatening "other." Lieberman has called upon Israel to bomb the Aswan Dam to punish Egypt for supporting the PLO; he has called for the drowning of Palestinian prisoners held in the Israeli gulag; and he has suggested Arab-Israeli politicians should be shot if they speak with representatives of the governing Palestinian party, Hamas. How does such a throwback to brutish coarse fascism find a powerful place within Israel's government? How does a country portrayed in our media as a democratic, tolerant, open society throw up such a barbarian? As renowned Israeli historian Ilan Pappe recently said, "The problem with Avigdor Lieberman is not his own views, but the fact that he reflects what most Israeli Jews think."

What’s it like inside?

Israeli violence in Gaza, the West Bank, and southern Lebanon diverts our attention from life within Israel itself. The violence Israel imposes upon its neighbours originates from a society that defines itself on the basis of blood, religion, and military might. In Toward An Open Tomb, Michel Warschawski writes, "Systematic dehumanization of a colonized people inevitably leads to dehumanization of the colonizers and their society.” Warshawski points to rising intolerance, racism and violence within Israel as symptomatic of the violence Israel inflicts on its neighbours, especially the Palestinians of the West Bank and Gaza. His is one of a number of recent books written by Israelis that expose religious and race-based policies within Israel itself.

Susan Nathan moved to Israel from England under the ''right of return” guaranteed all Jews regardless of their place of birth. Shocked by the depth of segregation and discrimination within Israel, she set to work for the civil rights of the Israeli Arab population. In her book, The Other Side of Israel, she investigates and documents the structures in place within Israel that ensure Israeli Arabs do not have the same resources and opportunities available for them that Israeli Jews have.

The Israeli state does not serve all its citizens equally. Israel calls itself a "Jewish and democratic state," and its Jewish majority population receives services, opportunities, and privileges not available to its Palestinian, Druze, and Bedouin minorities, who comprise about 17% of the population living within Israel's pre-1967 boundaries. Israel appears more eager to help a Jew from North America to relocate to Israel than it is to attend to the medical, educational, water, or housing needs of its Arab populations. As Bernard Avishai wrote in an article in Harper's Magazine, when he immigrated to Israel in 1972, "All I had to do was prove myself a Jew by birth," and "I was given a virtually interest-free mortgage to buy an apartment" in occupied Palestine.

Land development: in the details

Avishai benefitted from a complicated land system unique to Israel. Much of the land within Israel is owned by the Jewish National Fund (JNF), a private organization whose charter explicitly forbids leasing or renting land to Israeli Arabs. Most of the rest of the land is managed by the Israel Lands Authority (ILA), but as Nathan explains, "even here the JNF is really pulling the strings. The [JNF] nominates half the members of the ILA's governing council, thereby determining the policies of the ILA too." So explicit ethnic and religious criteria limit Arab-Israeli access to land within Israel. Try to imagine a Canada where such criteria determined the right to purchase or use land. Is there any other word for such an arrangement other than racist?

And while a Jewish North American will get a lot of assistance to relocate to Israel, an Israeli of Arab descent, whose family could trace their lineage within Palestine to the distant past, finds roadblocks in his or her path to simply build a new addition on their own home. Nathan, who lives in an Arab village in Israel, gives a number of illustrations of how this discriminatory practice plays out. One of her neighbours "tried to get a building permit to build on family owned land. Planning authorities refused him, so he built a place anyway. Now to ward off demolition he is forced to pay heavy fines."

From the beginning

Again, this discrimination is legal under Israeli law; it is structured into the Israeli state. Nathan explains that, under the 1965 Planning and Building Law, "a master plan for all of Israel," "the state decided that . . . 123 Arab communities" and towns not on the list ceased to exist as far as the government was concerned. Nathan goes on, "In the case of every community they listed, Jewish and Arab, they set down a border for its development, what they called blue lines. In the case of Arab communities, these were drawn tightly around the houses, so there was no room left for development. In the case of Jewish communities, they were drawn loosely, so there was plenty of space for them to expand and develop." In 1967, the Knesset passed the Law of Agricultural Settlement that prohibited the subletting of the Jewish-owned land of the JNF to non-Jews. In his new book, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, Ilan Pappe gives a statistical measure of the results of these racist policies: "The Palestinian minority in Israel, seventeen per cent of the total population after ethnic cleansing, has been forced to make do with just three per cent of the land. They are allowed to build and live on only two per cent of the land; the remaining one per cent was defined as agricultural land which cannot be built upon. In other words, today 1.3 million people live on that two per cent."

Nathan cites statistics regarding educational funding for Arab versus Jewish students in Israel. In 2004, Israel's Central Bureau of Statistics published figures from 2001, which show that "[e]ach Arab student in Israel received resources (after teachers' salaries had been excluded) of 105 pounds a year, less than a quarter of the 485 pounds spent on Jewish pupils in secular state schools." Students at Jewish religious schools get even more money from the state. Some social welfare services are also prejudiced against Arab-Israelis because some of them are predicated on service in the military, which most Arab-Israelis are not allowed to join. Water resources are also monopolized for the Jewish majority to the detriment of the Arab minority.

In Blood and Religion, Jonathan Cook focuses on the mistreatment of Arab people living within Israel, but he emphasizes what he calls the "Battle of the Numbers." According to Cook, Israel's fear of its growing Arab population motivates much of its policy making. For example, a recent amendment to its Nationality Law of 1952, known as the Nationality and Entry into Israel Law, "discriminated against hundreds of Arab citizens recently married or preparing to marry a Palestinian from the occupied territories" as it effectively "banned marriages between Israelis and Palestinians." And Cook follows many others in saying Israel's recent evacuation of its colonists from Gaza had more to do with "disposing of an unwanted Palestinian population estimated at about 1.3 million, more than a quarter of all the Palestinians who fell under its rule." Demographic considerations, not a search for peace, led to the decision.

Zionism

Warschawski sees the root of Israel's racist society in its Zionist ideology. "For Zionists . . . the only normal society is an ethnically homogeneous society. Excluding those who are different [and] racism. . . are natural phenomena that express society's need to expel any alien element." Pappe would agree, and he locates this race-based ideology at the root of Zionism. He quotes a passage from the diary of Theodor Herzl, a father of Zionism, which states, "We shall endeavour to expel the poor population across the border unnoticed, procuring employment for it in the transit countries, but denying it any employment in our own country." And he quotes a public speech made by Israel's first Prime Minister, David Ben-Gurion: "If the Arabs in Israel form 40 per cent of the population, this is the end of the Jewish state. . . . But 20 per cent is also a problem. If the relationship with these 20 per cent becomes problematic, the state is entitled to employ extreme measures."

The cancer

The Israeli establishment's fear of its Palestinian minority continues to this day. Writing in the well-known Israeli liberal daily, Ha'aretz in 2002, and quoted in Cook's book, Israel's Moshe Ya'alon, Israel's military chief of staff during much of the second intifada, wrote that, "When you are attacked externally, you can see the attack, you are wounded. Cancer, on the other hand, is something internal. Therefore, I find it more disturbing, because here the diagnosis is critical . . . . My professional diagnosis is that there is a phenomenon here that constitutes an existential threat." So, for Ya'alon, the Israeli-Palestinian population is a threat, a “cancer” imperiling Israel's existence. It is in this context that Lieberman's threats of “voluntary transfer,” i.e., the further ethnic cleansing of Palestinians within Israel, must be taken seriously.

How Israel Enforces "Demographic Separation"

January 19, 2007

Carter Doesn't Tell the Half of It

By JONATHAN COOK

Nazareth

When I published my book Blood and Religion last year, I sought not only to explain what lay behind Israeli policies since the failed Camp David negotiations nearly seven years ago, including the disengagement from Gaza and the building of a wall across the West Bank, but I also offered a few suggestions about where Israel might head next.

Making predictions in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict might be considered a particularly dangerous form of hubris, but I could hardly have guessed how soon my fears would be realized.

One of the main forecasts of the book was that Palestinians on both sides of the Green Line -- those who currently enjoy Israeli citizenship and those who live as oppressed subjects of Israel’s occupation -- would soon find common cause as Israel tries to seal itself off from what it calls the Palestinian “demographic threat”: that is, the moment when Palestinians outnumber Jews in the land between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River.

I suggested that Israel’s greatest fear was ruling over a majority of Palestinians and being compared to apartheid South Africa, a fate that has possibly befallen it faster than I expected with the recent publication of Jimmy Carter’s book, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid. To avoid such a comparison, I argued, Israel was creating a “Jewish fortress”, separating -- at least demographically -- from Palestinians in the occupied territories by sealing off Gaza through a disengagement of its settler population and by building a 750km wall to annex large areas of the West Bank.

It was also closing off the last remaining avenue of a Right of Return for Palestinians by changing the law to make it all but impossible for Palestinians living in Israel to marry Palestinians in the occupied territories and thereby gain them citizenship.

The corollary of this Jewish fortress, I suggested, would be a sham Palestinian state, a series of disconnected ghettos that would prevent Palestinians from organizing effective resistance, non-violent or otherwise, but which would give the Israeli army an excuse to attack or invade whenever they chose, claiming that they were facing an “enemy state” in a conventional war.

Another benefit for Israel in imposing this arrangement would be that it could say all Palestinians who identified themselves as such -- whether in the occupied territories or inside Israel -- must now exercise their sovereign rights in the Palestinian state and renounce any claim on the Jewish state. The apartheid threat would be nullified.

I sketched out possible routes by which Israel could achieve this end:
* by redrawing the borders, using the wall, so that an area densely populated with Palestinian citizens of Israel known as the Little Triangle, which hugs the northern West Bank, would be sealed into the new pseudo-state;
* by continuing the process of corralling the Negev’s Bedouin farmers into urban reservations and then treating them as guest workers;
* by forcing Palestinian citizens living in the Galilee to pledge an oath of loyalty to Israel as a “Jewish and democratic state” or have their citizenship revoked;
* and by stripping Arab Knesset members of their right to stand for election.

When I made these forecasts, I suspected that many observers, even in the Palestinian solidarity movement, would find my ideas improbable. I could not have realized how fast events would overtake prediction.

The first sign came in October with the addition to the cabinet of Avigdor Lieberman, leader of a party that espouses the ethnic cleansing not only of Palestinians in the occupied territories (an unremarkable platform for an Israeli party) but of Palestinian citizens too, through land swaps that would exchange their areas for the illegal Jewish settlements in the West Bank.

Lieberman is not just any cabinet minister; he has been appointed deputy prime minister with responsibility for the “strategic threats” that face Israel. In that role, he will be able to determine what issues are to be considered threats and thereby shape the public agenda for next few years. The “problem” of Israel’s Palestinian citizens is certain to be high on his list.

Lieberman has been widely presented as a political maverick, akin to the notorious racist Rabbi Meir Kahane, whose Kach party was outlawed in the late 1980s. That is a gross misunderstanding: Lieberman is at the very heart of the country’s rightwing establishment and will almost certainly be a candidate for prime minister in future elections, as Israelis drift ever further to the right.

Unlike Kahane, Lieberman has cleverly remained within the Israeli political mainstream while pushing its agenda to the very limits of what it is currently possible to say. Kadima and Labor urgently want unilateral separation from the Palestinians but are shy to spell out, both to their own domestic constituency and the international community, what separation will entail.

Lieberman has no such qualms. He is unequivocal: if Israel is separating from the Palestinians in parts of the occupied territories, why not also separate from the 1.2 million Palestinians who through oversight rather than design ended up as citizens of a Jewish state in 1948? If Israel is to be a Jewish fortress, then, as he points out, it is illogical to leave Palestinians within the fortifications.

These arguments express the common mood among the Israeli public, one that has been cultivated since the eruption of the intifada in 2000 by endless talk among Israel’s political and military elites about “demographic separation”. Regular opinion polls show that about two-thirds of Israelis support transfer, either voluntary or forced, of Palestinian citizens from the state.

Recent polls also reveal how fashionable racism has become in Israel. A survey conducted last year showed that 68 per cent of Israeli Jews do not want to live next to a Palestinian citizen (and rarely have to, as segregation is largely enforced by the authorities), and 46 per cent would not want an Arab to visit their home.

A poll of students that was published last week suggests that racism is even stronger among young Jews. Three-quarters believed Palestinian citizens are uneducated, uncivilized and unclean, and a third are frightened of them. Richard Kupermintz of Haifa University, who conducted the survey more than two years ago, believes the responses would be even more extreme today.

Lieberman is simply riding the wave of such racism and pointing out the inevitable path separation must follow if it is to satisfy these kinds of prejudices. He may speak his mind more than his cabinet colleagues, but they too share his vision of the future. That is why only one minister, the dovish and principled Ophir Pines Paz of Labor, resigned over Ehud Olmert’s inclusion of Lieberman in the cabinet.

Contrast that response with the uproar caused by the Labor leader Amir Peretz’s appointment of the first Arab cabinet minister in Israel’s history. (A member of the small Druze community, which serves in the Israeli army, Salah Tarif, was briefly a minister without portfolio in Sharon’s first government.)

Raleb Majadele, a Muslim, is a senior member of the Labor party and a Zionist (what might be termed, in different circumstances, a self-hating Arab or an Uncle Tom), and yet his apppointment has broken an Israeli taboo: Arabs are not supposed to get too close to the centers of power.

Peretz’s decision was entirely cynical. He is under threat on all fronts -- from his coalition partners in Kadima and in Lieberman’s Yisrael Beitenu, and from within his own party -- and desperately needs the backing of Labor’s Arab party members. Majadele is the key, and that is why Peretz gave him a cabinet post, even if a marginal one: Minister of Science, Culture and Sport.

But the right is deeply unhappy at Majadele’s inclusion in the cabinet. Lieberman called Peretz unfit to be defense minister for making the appointment and demanded that Majadele pledge loyalty to Israel as a Jewish and democratic state. Lieberman’s party colleagues referred to the appointment as a “lethal blow to Zionism”.

A few Labor and Meretz MKs denounced these comments as racist. But more telling was the silence of Olmert and his Kadima party, as well as Binyamin Netanyhu’s Likud, at Lieberman’s outburst. The centre and right understand that Lieberman’s views about Majadele, and Palestinian citizens more generally, mirror those of most Israeli Jews and that it would be foolhardy to criticise him for expressing them -- let alone sack him.

In this game of “who is the truer Zionist”, Lieberman can only grow stronger against his former colleagues in Kadima and Likud. Because he is free to speak his and their minds, while they must keep quiet for appearance’s sake, he, not they, will win ever greater respect from the Israeli public.

Meanwhile, all the evidence suggests that Olmert and the current government will implement the policies being promoted by Lieberman, even if they are too timid to openly admit that is what they are doing.

Some of those policies are of the by-now familiar variety, such as the destruction of 21 Bedouin homes, half the village of Twayil, in the northern Negev last week. It was the second time in a month that the village had been razed by the Israeli security forces.

These kind of official attacks against the indigenous Bedouin -- who have been classified by the government as “squatters” on state lands -- are a regular occurrence, an attempt to force 70,000 Bedouin to leave their ancestral homes and relocate to deprived townships.

A more revealing development came this month, however, when it was reported in the Israeli media that the government is for the first time backing “loyalty” legislation that has been introduced privately by a Likud MK. Gilad Erdan’s bill would revoke the citizenship of Israelis who take part in “an act that constitutes a breach of loyalty to the state”, the latest in a string of proposals by Jewish MKs conditioning citizenship on loyalty to the Israeli state, defined in all these schemes very narrowly as a “Jewish and democratic” state.

Arab MKs, who reject an ethnic definition of Israel and demand instead that the country be reformed into a “state of all its citizens”, or a liberal democracy, are typically denounced as traitors.

Lieberman himself suggested just such a loyalty scheme for Palestinian citizens last month during a trip to Washington. He told American Jewish leaders: “He who is not ready to recognize Israel as a Jewish and Zionist state cannot be a citizen in the country.”

Erdan’s bill specifies acts of disloyalty that include visiting an “enemy state” -- which, in practice, means just about any Arab state. Most observers believe that, after Erdan’s bill has been redrafted by the Justice Ministry, it will be used primarily against the Arab MKs, who are looking increasingly beleaguered. Most have been repeatedly investigated by the Attorney-General for any comment in support of the Palestinians in the occupied territories or for visiting neighbouring Arab states. One, Azmi Bishara, has been put on trial twice for these offences.

Meanwhile, Jewish MKs have been allowed to make the most outrageous racist statements against Palestinian citizens, mostly unchallenged.

Former cabinet minister Effi Eitam, for example, said back in September: “The vast majority of West Bank Arabs must be deported ... We will have to make an additional decision, banning Israeli Arabs from the political system … We have cultivated a fifth column, a group of traitors of the first degree.” He was “warned” by the Attorney-General over his comments (though he has expressed similar views several times before), but remained unrepentant, calling the warning an attempt to “silence” him.

The leader of the opposition and former prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, the most popular politician in Israel according to polls, gave voice to equally racist sentiments this month when he stated that child allowance cuts he imposed as finance minister in 2002 had had a “positive” demographic effect by reducing the birth rate of Palestinian citizens.

Arab MKs, of course, do not enjoy such indulgence when they speak out, much more legitimately, in supporting their kin, the Palestinians of the West Bank and Gaza, who are suffering under Israel’s illegal occupation. Arab MK Ahmed Tibi, for example, was roundly condemned last week by the Jewish parties, including the most leftwing, Meretz, when he called on Fatah to “continue the struggle” to establish a Palestinian state.

However, the campaign of intimidation by the government and Jewish members of the Knesset has failed to silence the Arab MKs or stop them visiting neighboring states, which is why the pressure is being ramped up. If Erdan’s bill becomes law -- which seems possible with government backing -- then the Arab MKs and the minority they represent will either be cut off from the rest of the Arab world once again (as they were for the first two decades of Israel’s existence, when a military government was imposed on them) or threatened with the revocation of their citizenship for disloyalty (a move, it should be noted, that is illegal under international law).

It may not be too fanciful to see the current legislation eventually being extended to cover other “breaches of loyalty”, such as demanding democratic reforms of Israel or denying that a Jewish state is democratic. Technically, this is already the position as Israel’s election law makes it illegal for political parties, including Arab ones, to promote a platform that denies Israel’s existence as a “Jewish and democratic” state.

Soon Arab MKs and their constituents may also be liable to having their citizenship revoked for campaigning, as many currently do, for a state of all its citizens. That certainly is the view of the eminent Israeli historian Tom Segev, who argued in the wake of the government’s adoption of the bill: “In practice, the proposed law is liable to turn all Arabs into conditional citizens, after they have already become, in many respects, second-class citizens. Any attempt to formulate an alternative to the Zionist reality is liable to be interpreted as a ‘breach of faith’ and a pretext for stripping them of their citizenship.”

But it is unlikely to end there. I hesitate to make another prediction but, given the rapidity with which the others have been realized, it may be time to hazard yet another guess about where Israel is going next.

The other day I was at a checkpoint near Nablus, one of several that are being converted by Israel into what look suspiciously like international border crossings, even though they fall deep inside Palestinian territory.

I had heard that Palestinian citizens of Israel were being allowed to pass these checkpoints unhindered to enter cities like Nablus to see relatives. (These familial connections are a legacy of the 1948 war, when separated Palestinian refugees ended up on different sides of the Green Line, and also of marriages that were possible after 1967, when Israel occupied the West Bank and Gaza, making social and business contacts possible again.) But, when Palestinian citizens try to leave these cities via the checkpoints, they are invariably detained and issued letters by the Israeli authorities warning them that they will be tried if caught again visiting “enemy” areas.

In April last year, at a cabinet meeting at which the Israeli government agreed to expel Hamas MPs from Jerusalem to the West Bank, ministers discussed changing the classification of the Palestinian Authority from a “hostile entity” to the harsher category of an “enemy entity”. The move was rejected for the time being because, as one official told the Israeli media: “There are international legal implications in such a declaration, including closing off the border crossings, that we don't want to do yet.”

Is it too much to suspect that before long, after Israel has completed the West Bank wall and its “border” terminals, the Jewish state will classify visits by Palestinian citizens to relatives as “visiting an enemy state”? And will such visits be grounds for revoking citizenship, as they could be under Erdan’s bill if Palestinian citizens visit relatives in Syria or Lebanon?

Lieberman doubtless knows the answer already.

Jonathan Cook is a writer and journalist living in Nazareth, Israel. His book, Blood and Religion: The Unmasking of the Jewish and Democratic State, is published by Pluto Press. His website is www.jkcook.net