this post was submitted on 29 Sep 2024
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Credit...Richard Drew/Associated Press But if you looked closely at Bibi’s “Curse” map, it showed Israel — but no borders with Gaza and the Israeli-occupied West Bank (as if it had already been annexed — the goal of this Israeli government). And that is the rub. The story Bibi wants to tell the world is that Iran and its proxies are the main obstacle to the world of inclusion stretching from Europe, through the Middle East over to the Asian-Pacific. I beg to differ. The keystone to this whole alliance is a Saudi-Israel normalization based on reconciliation between Israel and moderate Palestinians. If Israel now moved ahead and opened a dialogue on two states for two peoples with a reformed Palestinian Authority, which has already accepted the Oslo peace treaty, it would be the diplomatic knockout blow that would accompany and solidify the military knockout blow Israel just delivered to Hezbollah and Hamas. It would totally isolate the forces of “resistance” in the region and take away their phony shield — that they are the defenders of the Palestinian cause. Nothing would rattle Iran, Hamas, Hezbollah and Russia — even China — more. But to do that Netanyahu would have to take a political risk even greater than the military risk he just took in killing the leadership of Hezbollah, a.k.a. “The Party of God.” Netanyahu would have to break with the Israeli “Party of God" — the coalition of far-right Jewish settler supremacists and messianists who want Israel to permanently control all the territory from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean, with no border lines in between — just like on Bibi’s U.N. map. Those parties keep Bibi in power, so he would need to replace them with Israeli centrist parties, which I know would collaborate with him on such a move. So there you have the big challenge of the day: The struggle between the world of inclusion and the world of resistance comes down to many things, but none more — today — than Netanyahu’s willingness to follow up his blow to the “Party of God” in Lebanon by dealing a similar political blow to the “Party of God” in Israel.
Ah, so Israel wants "from the river to the sea, Israel will be free"
Neat turn of events.