The last Israeli aggression against the Gaza Strip claimed the lives of at least 1,350 Palestinians.
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Israel is preparing for all-out war on multiple fronts that include Iran, Syria and Lebanon, a senior military commander claims.
Israeli army Home Front Command Major General Yair Golan said Sunday that Tel Aviv is preparing for “all possible scenarios”, indicating that one such scenario would be to fight a simultaneous war against Iran, Syria and Lebanon.
The confirmation comes as US President Barack Obama seeks “new beginnings” with its arch-rival Iran. The US offer has been met with world praise but with fury in Tel Aviv.
Israeli media outlets late on Sunday began propagating wild scenarios that Iran is using the Lebanese Hezbollah to recruit Palestinian fighters to carry out terror attacks on Israel.
Citing anonymous sources, the reports began to surface after Tel Aviv countered an alleged bombing attempt outside a shopping mall in the northern city of Haifa.
“We are treating the attempted attack in Haifa with great gravity. A huge disaster was prevented by a miracle,” Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert told a weekly cabinet meeting after the bomb was defused on Sunday.
Israel has long accused Iran of arming Hezbollah and Palestinian groups via Syria, in an attempt to demonize the two Muslim countries.
Tel Aviv also accuses Tehran of developing nuclear weaponry — a charge denied by the UN nuclear watchdog.
At a conference held in Tel Aviv, Golan also confirmed the likeliness of Israel staging another military confrontation against Hamas in the Gaza Strip.
Although Israel does not consider rocket attacks from Gaza as a serious threat, there is the possibility of “dangerous” missile attacks by other countries, he said.
He failed to elaborate how such missile attacks would relate to Gaza.
His remarks came as reports claim that the soon-to-be Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has plans for “a major military conflict in the coming months.”
The commander also revealed that Tel Aviv will install new warning systems across Israel in preparation for its war plans.
The last Israeli-waged war on the Gaza Strip, which began on December 27, killed at least 1,350 Palestinians and wounded more than 5,450 others in the densely-populated sliver.
The aggression was the last in a series of operations carried out by the Israeli forces against the natives of the land since occupying Palestine in 1948.
Dr Paul Craig Roberts | American Free Press
PEOPLE IN THE UNITED STATES and abroad are hoping that President Obama will end America’s illegal wars, halt America’s support for Israel’s massacre of Lebanese and Palestinians, and punish, instead of reward, the shyster banksters whose fraudulent financial instruments have destroyed economies and imposed massive sufferings on people all over the world. If Obama’s appointments are an indication, all of these hopeful people are going to be disappointed.
James Petras examines Obama’s foreign policy appointments and finds the largest collection of Zionist militarists outside of Israel.
Petras concludes that Obama’s “diplomatic” team has Iran in its sights, and hostility that meshes with Israel’s own intent. Not realizing that a member of the press had been mistakenly invited to a selected audience, the Israeli ambassador to Australia said that Israel’s attack on Gaza was a dress rehearsal for a major attack on Iran. Benjamin Netanyahu, the expected winner of Israel’s March elections, has again declared that Israel will not permit Iran to have a nuclear energy program as it would provide the basis for developing nuclear weapons.
It makes no sense for Israel to baldly state its intention to attack Iran if Israel does not mean it. What if the Iranians believe the Israelis and decide to strike first with their long-range missiles?
Obama’s economic appointments are just as discouraging. Obama chose as his treasury secretary Timothy Geithner, the man who helped Bush’s treasury secretary, Hank Paulson, engineer the $700 billion dollar rip-off of the U.S. taxpayer, money that was gifted to the crooked banksters who destroyed Americans’ pensions, jobs and health care coverage.
These banksters, and the negligent federal regulators who enabled them, should be put in prison, not handed hundreds of billions of dollars.
Instead, Obama has appointed one of the chief orchestrators of the rip-off to the helm of the Treasury. Obama’s National Economic Council is just as depressing. Clinton’s Treasury Secretary, Larry Summers, is its head. Summers recently declared that he had no inkling that a financial crisis was about to hit. Why did Obama put a person without a clue in charge?
Summers’s colleagues are just as bad. Obama has appointed Diana Farrell, lead author of a phony study that claimed offshoring of American jobs is a win-win game for Americans, as deputy director of the National Economic Council. Farrell is affiliated with McKinsey & Company, a firm that helps American corporations offshore their operations.
In his book, Outsourcing America, economist Ron Hira tore Farrell’s McKinsey report to shreds. Why not appoint Ron Hira and Nouriel Roubina, who predicted the crisis, to the National Economic Council?
With Israel’s most fervent American allies whispering in one ear and banksters and offshoring propagandists whispering in the other, how can President Obama fulfill any of the hopes that people have?
The discouraging fact is that even when faced with crisis in the economy and in foreign policy, the American political system is incapable of producing any leadership. Here we are in the worst economic crisis in a lifetime, perhaps in our history, and on the brink of war in Pakistan and Iran while escalating the war in Afghanistan, and all we get is a government made up of the very people who have brought us to these crises.
Just as the Bushites could not admit the failure of their man, the Obamacons will not be able to admit the failure of their man.
The era of American leadership has passed. America’s shyster financial system has brought economic crisis to the world. America’s wars of aggression are seen as serving no purpose except the enrichment of the military industries associated with Dick Cheney. The world is looking elsewhere for leadership.
Vladimir Putin made a play for this role at Davos, where his speech at the opening ceremony was the most intelligent speech of the event.
Putin reminded the World Economic Forum that “just a year ago, American delegates speaking from this rostrum emphasized the U.S. economy’s fundamental stability and its cloudless prospects. Today, investment banks, the pride of Wall Street, have virtually ceased to exist. In just 12 months, they have posted losses exceeding the profits they made in the last 25 years.”
Putin made his case that the existing financial system based on the U.S. dollar and American financial hegemony has failed. Putin said that a secure world requires cooperation that requires trust. He made it clear that the Americans have proven that they cannot be trusted.
Nationally syndicated columnist, Paul Craig Roberts, Ph.D., a former editor at The Wall Street Journal, is the author of several books. He has been associated with the Hoover Institution, and the Institute for Political Economy and from 1981 to 1982 served as assistant secretary of the treasury for economic policy.
We have the power
Why we must act to help the people of Gaza, urges JEREMY CORBYN.
SIX HUNDRED dead and 2,500 injured is the current price of Israel’s 11-day onslaught on Gaza. Its blood-stained assault is the culmination of the abject failure of Western strategy in the Middle East since 2005.
That was the year in which the first democratic elections in Palestine for the presidency and assembly were supposed to mark a step on the road towards the recognition of Palestine as an an independent state, with the complete withdrawal by Israel from Gaza and a partial withdrawal in the West Bank.
But the result didn’t go to plan.
While Palestinians elected Fatah’s Mahmoud Abbas as president, they handed Hamas a parliamentary majority.
Israel’s response was swift. It rounded up 74 parliamentarians and threw them in jail. Today, 40 remain in custody without charge or any prospect of a trial.
The US and EU, meanwhile, promoted economic and political support for the West Bank while allowing Israel to continue its blockade of Gaza unhindered. It joined Tel Aviv in ritual condemnation of the Hamas leadership.
A ceasefire agreed between Hamas and Israel was respected by the Islamist movement until Israel carried out a major offensive in the West Bank. When Tel Aviv failed to end its siege of Gaza as agreed, the ceasefire was again broken by Hamas.
Normally 450 lorries a day enter the strip bearing essential supplies to sustain Gaza’s 1.5 million population. Under the Israeli blockade, this fell to fewer than 80 lorries a day, helping to create the humanitarian disaster now unfolding in the strip.
Much has been made of attacks using home-made rockets upon Israel and their military impact has been greatly exaggerated. Obviously, it is wrong that they should be fired and that any casualties should be caused. But these attacks are no excuse for 600 air raids and an orgy of killing.
Israel has flouted every UN resolution ever passed concerning the rights of Palestinian people. It has constructed a wall that has been declared illegal by the World Court and it has forced collective punishment on the people of Gaza by controlling all travel and by denying access to the basic necessities of life.
The Israelis are led by President Shimon Peres, a man addicted to office irrespective of the policies of the administration in which he is serving, and the squabbling twins of Ehud Barak and Tzipi Livni. They are engaged in a macabre competition to see who can be the most brutal towards the Palestinian people. Theirs is a crude electoral game played with an eye on elections for prime minister next month.
Meanwhile, Benjamin Netanyahu is waiting in the wings. He has a proven record of killing far more people than this and is ready to do battle.
The EU has called for a ceasefire and issued various statements suggesting that Israel ought to halt the bombardment of Gaza as it is wholly disproportionate to the alleged cause for their actions.
However, at no stage has the EU even suggested that there could be any political or diplomatic reaction to Israel’s behaviour. The current bilateral trade agreement between Israel and the EU is due to be upgraded. If Israel is granted associated status, in the past a step on the road towards full EU membership, it will gain even greater access to EU trade and aid.
If any other country anywhere else in the world had behaved in the way that Israel has in the past 11 days, never mind the past 60 years, it would be roundly condemned by every government.
But there is an unspoken bottom line that Israel need fear no retribution for its actions. The US administration has not even called for a ceasefire. George W Bush and Condoleezza Rice have fallen neatly in line with Israel’s depiction that this is a war of equals. Yet this supposed war of equals is being waged by a nuclear-armed power against a largely unarmed Gazan population.
The US, with the support of the British government, has ensured through its security council veto that there has been no ceasefire call from the UN.
Another security council meeting takes place today in New York. The very least that it could do is condemn Israel for the huge loss of civilian life, including the bombing of a UN school in Gaza yesterday, which has reportedly killed at least 40 people.
Next Monday, Foreign Secretary David Miliband will report to the House of Commons on the British government’s participation in the various EU efforts to bring about a ceasefire.
But will he recognise that ordinary public opinion in Britain has been steadily moving in favour of the rights of Palestinian people?
There has been an avalanche of support for the victims of Israel’s behaviour. Support for Jews for Justice for Palestinians has increased, as has the participation of people in demonstrations such as the massive march through London last Sunday and the daily demonstrations at the US embassy.
Ordinary people have been emailing, phoning and faxing their MPs to demand action as they are bombarded with daily images of the carnage in Gaza. Support for Israel in Parliament has been steadily reducing and is now much more limited than in the past.
Not only is the continued oppression of Palestinians appalling for the individuals concerned but it can only lay the foundations for greater conflict in the future.
The time is long past for the rest of the world to unreservedly condemn Israel’s behaviour.
The increasingly militant hardline leadership in Israel must be isolated.
This time, the plight of the Palestinian people will not wait as they are dying in their hundreds and starving in their thousands.
The neighbouring governments that have so far failed to open the crossing points or effectively condemn Israel will soon be feeling the wrath of popular opinion in their own communities.
We often feel a sense of helplessness in these situations. But we can apply force to the political process in Britain and join in the massive numbers of protests and street demonstrations that are being held every day.
For the people of Palestine, in Gaza and the West Bank, it means more than we can know.
There is a national demonstration in London this Saturday January 10. Assemble 12.30pm at Hyde Park Corner. Visit www.palestinecampaign.org for more information on this and other actions.
Peace and Justice Post 
Netanyahu says Gazans will overthrow Hamas
July 29, 2009Middle East Online, First Published 2009-07-29
Calling for a coup against Palestinian democracy?
Hardline Israeli PM predicts overthrow of Palestinian democracy as Gazans suffer under Israeli siege.
TEL AVIV – Hardline Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Tuesday predicted the people of the Gaza Strip will one day overthrow the democratically elected Hamas movement.
Israel, which wants to crush any Palestinian liberation movement, responded to Hamas’s win in the elections with sanctions, and almost completely blockaded the impoverished coastal strip after Hamas seized power in 2007, although a ‘lighter’ siege had already existed before.
Human rights groups, both international and Israeli, slammed Israel’s siege of Gaza, branding it “collective punishment.”
There are 1.5 million inhabitants in the Israeli-besieged.
A group of international lawyers and human rights activists had also accused Israel of committing “genocide” through its crippling blockade of the Strip.
“If the Palestinians could, they would overthrow Hamas and believe me one day they will,” Netanyahu said at the National Security Academy’s graduation ceremony.
Netanyahu, himself accused of being a radical Jew, accused Hamas of being part of radical Islam.
“Eventually, radical Islam will be defeated by the global information revolution, the freedom to spread ideas and with the help of technology.”
“This won’t happen immediately, but it will happen. The only thing that could delay or disrupt radical Islam’s demise is the possibility that (radicals) will obtain nuclear arms,” he said, in a reference to Iran.
The hardline Israeli PM, who is accused of seeking to starve 1.5 million people to death, made remarks about Palestinian internal affairs.
“By making the Palestinians of Gaza wear a veil, the Hamas regime is not doing much to make itself popular,” Netanyahu was quoted by YNetnews website as saying.
On Sunday, Palestinian officials said Hamas has ordered women lawyers to wear a headscarf while in court.
Israel’s war on Gaza killed nearly 1,400 Palestinians, mainly civilians, and wounded 5,450 others.
The war also left tens of thousands of houses destroyed, while their residents remained homeless.
Gaza is still considered under Israeli occupation as Israel controls air, sea and land access to the Strip.
The Rafah crossing with Egypt, Gaza’s sole border crossing that bypasses Israel, rarely opens as Egypt is under immense US and Israeli pressure to keep the crossing shut.
Fatah has little administrative say in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, and has no power in Arab east Jerusalem, both of which were illegally occupied by Israel in 1967.
Israel also currently occupies the Lebanese Shabaa Farms and the Syrian Golan Heights.
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Tags:Benjamin Netanyahu, Egypt and Rafa crossing, Fatah in West Bank, Hamas movement, HR groups, Israel's war on Gaza, Israeli siege of Gaza
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