Steve Lendman: Is Israel Spoiling for Another Fight?

Throughout its history, Israel preemptively attacked Palestinians and regional neighbors, boldly even sinking our American USS Liberty, despite the fact that we are the only state in the world who have to endure our brutal clients' temper tantrums. Until his death, Edward Said passionately defended Palestinian rights. He accused Israel of turning Palestine into an isolated prison, suffocating an entire population, impoverishing and slaughtering them, blaming them for its own state state terror, and creating a wasteland of destruction and human misery. Moreover, he said Israeli regimes sanctioned torture, targeted assassinations, and mass killings as official policy, besides committing every imaginable human indignity and degradation against people for their faith, ethnicity and presence. As a result, Israel perpetuates a never ending cycle of violence and destruction, planning to end "the Palestinian problem," calling courage and resistance "terrorism", offering nothing in return for outrageous demands, and pursuing dominating pacification disguised as "peace". Journalist Henry Siegman once called it "the most spectacular deception in modern diplomatic history". Gideon Levy calls it "an unborn baby", saying there's "never been an Israeli peace camp". How can there be, when decades of Israeli leaders called peace process negotiations "a useful fiction". For example, Moshe Ya'alon, former IDF chief of staff and current Vice Prime Minister and Minister of Strategic Affairs, believes Jews have an "unassailable right to settle anywhere, particularly here, in the land of the Bible." Earlier, he mocked the peace process, saying it's used politically "to sear deep into the consciousness of the Palestinians that they are a defeated people." Former Defense Minister Moshe Dayan called the Occupied West bank "permanent," and current Prime Minister Netanyahu earlier said the peace process is "a waste of time", while planning new confrontations to prove it.