[ This post is pure opinion. If you have a different one, post it. Don't waste energy trying to get a reactive response from this opinion holder. ]
OK, here's what this latest Israeli outrage looks like to me. It looks as if the Israeli leadership is panicky because the Old Guard has lost both power and credibility in the U.S., and a bunch of New People With Unknown Priorities are coming in and they are incredibly worried about what those Unknown Priorities might be. The Old Guard was dependable. They were neocons and Christian fundies who wanted, more than anything else, for the conflict between Israel and other Arab nations to continue. The neocons wanted this because the conflict kept putting money in their pockets from kickbacks they got from defense contractors. The fundies wanted it to continue because they fer- vently hope for the End Days, and think that Israel is the key to bringing them about. All of this meant lots and lots and lots of U.S. money and weapons being poured into Israel, and a continuation of the status quo. Now comes this schwarze, and we don't know what he will do with regard to the status quo. So. What to do? Well, one thing we could do is to mount an unconscion- ably massive attack on the Gaza strip, kill hundreds if not thousands of people, and claim that it was "justified" because some rockets that killed no one in Israel were fired from that territory. Yeah, that's the ticket. It's win-win for Israel. While the attacks are going on, we get to cripple Hamas and kill a lot of its leaders. But that's just the minor payoff, a kind of side benefit. The *main* benefit is going to be the reaction of the Arab world in the next few months. They're going to be outraged (as was our intention) and mount a series of "reprisal" attacks against Israel. Sure, these reprisals are going to kill a bunch of our own citizens, but that's a small price to pay for being able to pretend to be the victims of these attacks during the first few months of the Obama administration. We can play the Victim Card again and claim that the Arabs all hate us, and try to shape Yet Another American Administration into being a tool of Israel. Obama won't want to spend his first few months in office disappointing all the status quo voters who have blindly supported Israel all these years, so he'll have to "fall in line" and blindly support us the way his predecessors have. And the whole time we can sit back and play the Victim Card and say, "Hey, *we* are not the ones doing this. See...it's this Hamas suicide bomber over here and this Palestinian attack squad over there. They're the *real* culprits in all of this." And if someone in the press dares to point out that we started "all this," we can just play the AntiSemitism Card against the people saying it. It's worked on the stupid American public for 60 years now, so there's no reason to believe it won't work again.
