From Occupied Palestine

Apocalypse near
MERAV YUDILOVITCH
Ynetnews, 4 August 2006 [Yediot Aharonoth]

Last week, a group of renowned intellectuals published an open letter blaming Israel for escalating the conflict in the Middle East. The letter, which mainly referred to the alignment of forces between Israel and the Palestinian Authority, caused a lot of anger among Ynet and Ynetnews readers, particularly due to its claim that the Israeli policy's political aim is to eliminate the Palestinian nation.

The Israel Lobby
JOHN MEARSHEIMER and STEPHEN WALT
London Review of Books: vol 28 no 6, 23 March 2006

[academic paper, footnoted: Harvard School of Government RWP06-011]

For the past several decades, and especially since the Six-Day War in 1967, the centrepiece of US Middle Eastern policy has been its relationship with Israel. The combination of unwavering support for Israel and the related effort to spread 'democracy' throughout the region has inflamed Arab and Islamic opinion and jeopardised not only US security but that of much of the rest of the world. This situation has no equal in American political history. Why has the US been willing to set aside its own security and that of many of its allies in order to advance the interests of another state? One might assume that the bond between the two countries was based on shared strategic interests or compelling moral imperatives, but neither explanation can account for the remarkable level of material and diplomatic support that the US provides.

The Israel Lobby, part II
JOHN MEARSHEIMER and STEPHEN WALT
London Review of Books: Vol. 28 No. 6, 23 March 2006

[Read entire article]

continued from part I ...

By the mid-1990s there was considerable dissatisfaction with dual containment, because it made the United States the mortal enemy of two countries that hated each other, and forced Washington to bear the burden of containing both. But it was a strategy the Lobby favoured and worked actively in Congress to preserve. Pressed by AIPAC and other pro-Israel forces, Clinton toughened up the policy in the spring of 1995 by imposing an economic embargo on Iran. But AIPAC and the others wanted more. The result was the 1996 Iran and Libya Sanctions Act, which imposed sanctions on any foreign companies investing more than $40 million to develop petroleum resources in Iran or Libya. As Ze'ev Schiff, the military correspondent of Ha'aretz, noted at the time, 'Israel is but a tiny element in the big scheme, but one should not conclude that it cannot influence those within the Beltway.'

Brothers in arms - Israel's secret pact with Pretoria
CHRIS McGREAL
Guardian, 7 February 2006

During the second world war the future South African prime minister John Vorster was interned as a Nazi sympathiser. Three decades later he was being feted in Jerusalem. In the second part of his remarkable special report, Chris McGreal investigates the clandestine alliance between Israel and the apartheid regime, cemented with the ultimate gift of friendship - A-bomb technology

The ominous backlash of an attack against Iran
DAVID HIRST
Daily Star, 13 September 2004

When U.S. President George W. Bush first identified the two Middle East members of his "axis of evil," Iran clearly ranked as a far more formidable adversary than Saddam Hussein's Iraq.

Plan B
SEYMOUR M. HERSH
The New Yorker, 21 June 2004

In July, 2003, two months after President Bush declared victory in Iraq, the war, far from winding down, reached a critical point. Israel, which had been among the war's most enthusiastic supporters, began warning the Administration that the American-led occupation would face a heightened insurgency — a campaign of bombings and assassinations — later that summer. Israeli intelligence assets in Iraq were reporting that the insurgents had the support of Iranian intelligence operatives and other foreign fighters, who were crossing the unprotected border between Iran and Iraq at will. The Israelis urged the United States to seal the nine-hundred-mile-long border, at whatever cost.

Whistle-blower: 'I feared brain-washing... They were out to destroy my personality'
DONALD MacINTYRE
Independent, 25 April 2004

Nuclear whistle-blower Mordechai Vanunu was convinced during his long years of imprisonment that his jailers were out to brainwash him.

The terrible secret
URI AVNERY
Gush Shalom, 24 April 2004

In the darkness of a cinema, a woman's voice: "Hey! Take your hands off! Not you! YOU!"

This old joke illustrates the American policy regarding nuclear armaments in the Middle East. "Hey, you there, Iraq and Iran and Libya, stop it! Not YOU, Israel!"

The danger of nuclear arms was the main pretext for the invasion of Iraq. Iran is threatened in order to compel it to stop its nuclear efforts. Libya has surrendered and is dismantling its nuclear installations.

Nuclear hero's 'crime' was making us safer
DANIEL ELLSBERG
Los Angeles Times, 21 April 2004

Mordechai Vanunu is the preeminent hero of the nuclear era. He consciously risked all he had in life to warn his own country and the world of the true extent of the nuclear danger facing us. And he paid the full price, a burden in many ways worse than death, for his heroic act — for doing exactly what he should have done and what others should be doing.

The man who knew too much
ROBERT FISK
Independent, 23 March 2004

He was drugged, kidnapped and locked up for 18 years after revealing Israel's nuclear secrets to the world. Next month Mordechai Vanunu is finally set to be released, but just how much freedom will he be allowed? Robert Fisk reports

Any Israeli who bought the 16 February edition of the daily newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth would have believed that a truly wicked man was about to be released from Ashkelon prison. Each time a suicide bomber blew himself up, the prisoner would celebrate. Worse still, said the paper, the inmate - once a keeper of Israel's nuclear secrets - wants to endanger his country further after his release. "He told me," a former prisoner was quoted as saying, "that he has additional material and that he will reveal secrets..."