James Petras has written a great piece describing the calculations now in play. He astutely describes what the Israeli strategists, and hopefully all of us, have learned from this catastrophe in Gaza.

Israel’s military victory in Gaza is a dress rehearsal for a full-scale military assault on Iran. In the course of their Gaza extermination campaign, Israeli political and military strategists gained a great deal of vital information about: (1) the levels of complicity and impotence of European, North American and Arab states; (2) the high degree and depth of material and political support obtainable from the United States government in pulverizing adversaries; (3) the high degree of internal support among the Jewish electorate for even the most brutal killing fields; (4) the massive unquestioning backing of an offensive war from all the biggest and most politically influential and wealthiest Jewish-Zionist organizations in the US and Western Europe; (5) the weakness and ineffectiveness of the United Nations and the incapacity of the entire range of humanitarian organizations to limit Israel’s extermination campaign directed at destroying the very existence of an entire people; (6) the unconditional backing of the entire mass media and news agencies in the US and most of the mass media in Europe and the rest of the world; (7) the willingness of the liberal critics to equally blame the victims of extermination and the exterminators for the ‘violence’, thus neutralizing any effective consequential condemnation of the Israeli state; and (8) the adaptation of practically all the journalists, writers, academics and politicians to the entire euphemistic vocabulary of the Israeli propaganda office.

They took their war machine for a spin, and it works great. He concludes that they will overreach after Netanyahu gets elected, unleashing the attack on Iran and triggering WW III.

Just a couple of points to keep in mind, for those inclined to view this as some far-off problem in the Middle East:

• The Arab world considers the United States fully complicit in Israel’s behavior, which we are, because we pay for Israel’s war machine and block all attempts to control Israel. So if/when Israel attacks Iran, it will immediately become our problem.
• A broader war in the Middle East will immediately collapse what’s left of our economy. Within hours the price of oil will skyrocket. Within days shipments will grind to a halt and store shelves will be cleared. Chaos and Martial Law are guaranteed within a week.
• Iran, Russia, and Syria all have the means to retaliate. These are not unarmed populations like the Palestinians. Our military will suffer tremendous losses, as explained here by Scott Ritter. And you can click through to the Lord Stirling link if you really want to wet your pants, because this could easily degenerate into biowarfare against the US population.

So there’s that. One would think that the US military commanders want nothing to do with this craziness. One would think that Obama wants nothing to do with this craziness. But since nobody says what they really think because they’re so busy grovelling at Israel’s feet, we can have no confidence that common sense and a simple desire for self-preservation will prevail.

Furthermore, Israel has for decades been playing headgames with the world, dangling their “secret” nuclear weapons over everybody’s head and threatening to use them unless an unending supply of conventional weapons were provided.

Although nuclear weapons were viewed as the ultimate guarantor of Israeli security, as early as the 1960s the country avoided building its military around them, instead pursuing absolute conventional superiority so as to forestall a last resort nuclear engagement.^[12] Nevertheless, during the Cold War one major use of the nuclear threat was to convince the United States to support Israel with conventional weapons sales to prevent it from using its nuclear weapons and possibly sparking a world nuclear war.^[13]

Another use of the weapons was to discourage the former Soviet Union, which Israel regarded as its greatest enemy, from arming and aiding Arab nations. Israel went on nuclear alert during the 1973 Yom Kippur War, threatening to use nuclear weapons against Egypt, to encourage the United States to supply weapons to it and discourage the Soviet Union from interfering.^[14] No nation has attacked Israel since 1973, though some have supported terrorist attacks on it.^[15]

Seymour Hersh writes that once a coalition of right-wing political parties made Menachen Begin Prime Minister in 1977, the goal of Israel’s Samson Option began to change from deterrence only to also using “Israeli might to redraw the political map of the Middle East.”^[16] Israel Shahak, an Israeli critic of its policies, claims: “Israel clearly prepares itself to seek overtly a hegemony over the entire Middle East…without hesitating to use for the purpose all means available, including nuclear ones.“^[17]

The political parties, which united in 1988 as the Likud Party, shared the goal of expanding the state of Israel to the Israeli-occupied territories.^[18] Ariel Sharon, who was named Minister of Defense in 1981, publicly proclaimed that “his major goals included the overthrow of King Hussein of Jordan and the transformation of that country into a Palestinian state, to which Palestinian refugees would be ‘transferred’ or driven.” Sharon put his allies in charge of Israeli intelligence and Israel’s nuclear weapons.^[19]

Because of the Soviet Union’s support for Arab nations, Begin immediately “gave orders to target more Soviet cities” for nuclear attack, which necessitated better targeting information.^[20] Israel increased its espionage efforts, including by convicted spy Jonathan Pollard, in order to obtain nuclear targeting information on Soviet cities.^[21]

Treacherous, much? So you see, Israel has been using these nuclear weapons that is supposedly doesn’t even have all along. And to this day, especially to this day, they threaten to really, actually use the weapons.

In 1998 Israeli defense analyst Zeev Schiff opined in Haaretz: “Off-the-cuff Israeli nuclear threats have become a problem, even before the onset of the Iraqi crisis.”^[22] David Hirst notes that “The threatening of wild, irrational violence, in response to political pressure, has been an Israeli impulse from the very earliest days.” and “Israel will remain at least as likely a candidate as Iran, and a far more enduring one, for the role of ‘nuclear-crazy’ state.”^[23] Some “Samson Option” threats seem to be directed against nations which have not attacked Israel. Ariel Sharon has said: “We are much more important than (Americans) think. We can take the middle east with us whenever we go.”^[24] and “No longer ‘Masada Option’ - now ‘Samson Option.’”^[25] A “former Israeli govt official” with “first hand knowledge of his government’s nuclear weapons program” told Seymour Hersh: “You Americans screwed us” for not supporting Israel in its 1956 war with Egypt. “We can still remember the smell of Auschwitz and Treblinka. Next time we’ll take all of you with us.”^[26]

Whether one thinks the Israelis are huffing and puffing and bluffing or not, the fact remains that they have many times stated their willingness to do something so spiteful that it can scarcely be imagined. If there’s one thing people should have learned by now, it’s that we must not suffer from a failure of imagination. You must let your mind grasp these facts about Israel — FACTS — about what Israel has actually done, about what Israeli leaders have actually said, about how the Israeli people actually feel as they prepare to elect the war-monger Netanyahu, and you must not refuse to line up those dots and connect them and recognize the pattern which forms before our eyes — just because you don’t want to imagine that it could actually be true.

That kind of failure of imagination can cost many lives. Perhaps millions of lives. Perhaps even your own life. It feels like time grows short for people to understand the predicament.