Will Cheney's Mideast Trip
Launch New Round of Wars?
by Dean Andromidas
Vice President Dick Cheney's visit to the Mideast, which begins in Israel on March 16, threatens to detonate a new phase of conflagration, at a time when the Middle East stands on the razor edge between another devastating war between Israel and its neighbors, and a peace process anchored on a negotiated agreement between Israel and Syria, which could put the region on a road to peace and development, as proposed by American statesman Lyndon LaRouche.
Cheney is expected to put impossible demands upon all the players in the region. He will tell the Israelis to make an agreement with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, while isolating Hamas, the power in Gaza from which rockets are being fired into Israel. He will demand that the Lebanese government of Fouad Siniora continue to isolate the opposition, especially Hezbollah. Most importantly, he will prevent Israel from negotiating an agreement with Syria, which would be the keystone to peace in the region. This alone will keep the region on a vector towards war.
Cheney is also expected to up the ante against Iran. Particularly since the sudden, forced early retirement of Adm. William "Fox" Fallon as commander-in-chief of the Central Command (CENTCOM) on March 11, the prospect of a U.S. military attack on Iran before the Bush Administration leaves office, is again looming very large. Cheney's promotion of a preventive military attack on Iran is almost universally recognized, particularly among patriotic U.S. military and intelligence circles, who have battled for the past two years to tie Cheney's hands, and run out the clock on the Bush Presidency, without another disastrous war.
What is less well understood is the fact that, in all his war maneuverings, Cheney has been operating as a thug for London-centered interests that are out to destroy the United States, far more than they are out to curb Iran's alleged nuclear weapons quest. It is the British, today, who are behind the various schemes to provoke permanent war in Southwest Asia, as part of a larger global drive for genocidal conflict. The ultimate goal is the destruction of the Westphalian nation-state system, and the extermination of a vast majority of the 6.5 billion human beings on the planet.
Permanent Religious War?
On March 7, a Palestinian gunman attacked the Mercaz Harav Yeshiva in Jerusalem, killing eight students; he was then killed by an armed student. No Palestinian or other group has claimed responsibility.
This is precisely the kind of incident which the British gamemasters would be inclined to use to detonate a permanent religious conflict in the area—as the background to the players involved indicates.
Mercaz Harav is not just any yeshiva. It stands at the center of the British-controlled radical messianic Zionist-nationalist movement, which was responsible for the assassination of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in 1995. It is feared the attack could be used to justify a provocation on Jerusalem's al-Haram al-Sharif, Islam's third holiest site, known by the Israelis as the Temple Mount. Such an attack, triggered by British gamemasters, could ignite an Arab-Israeli war. The other fear, is that Israeli messianic extremists could assassinate leading pro-peace political figures, even within the Olmert government.
The EIR Special Report "Who Is Sparking a Religious War in the Middle East?" issued in 2000, details the history of Mercaz Harav and its links to powerful freemasonic circles in Great Britain.
Mercaz Harav was founded in 1924 by Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook, who was a close collaborator of Vladimir Jabotinsky, founder of the fascist wing of the Zionist movement. Both were from Russia, and later lived in England, where they enjoyed sponsorship by leading British authorities. After World War I, Kook moved to Palestine, where he was installed by British colonial authorities as Chief Ashkenazi Rabbi, while Jabotinsky moved to Fascist Italy, where he enjoyed the sponsorship of Benito Mussolini. Under Kook, and later under his son, Rabbi Zvi Yehuda Kook, the yeshiva became the training center for several generations of the most radical messianic Zionists, including Rabbi Moshe Levinger, who was a spiritual guide to Yigal Amir, the assassin of Rabin. Its graduates founded the radical settlers movement Gush Emunim.
Mercaz Harav overlaps the fanatical Temple Mount Faithful, the organization which wants to destroy the mosques on the al-Haram al-Sharif, in order to rebuild Solomon's Temple. This entire apparatus is generously financially supported by Cheney's friends in the Christian Zionist movement in the United States, who hope the ensuing war will lead to Armageddon and their "rapture."
In a replay of the incitement that preceded the assassination of Rabin, Labor Party education minister and leading peace advocate Yuli Tamir was forced to flee for her life when she visited the yeshiva on March 9. The incident provoked Israeli National Infrastructure Minister Benjamin ben Eliezer to warn: "We've seen such things before, when Rabin was murdered, and apparently they haven't learned their lesson. Like then, the incitement now may lead to another political murder."
Israeli security forces have been put on alert for a possible attack on an important personage associated with al-Haram al-Sharif, or on the mosques themselves. Also, a group of right-wing rabbis have signed a statement calling for avenging the attack on the yeshiva, declaring, "Each and every one is required to imagine what the enemy is plotting to do to us, and to match it, measure for measure." In a thinly veiled attack on the government, the rabbis said it was necessary "to work to create a proper Jewish leadership," and quoted from the Book of Esther, saying that they look forward to the day when "Jews will congregate in their cities ... and strike those who wish upon them ill in those days at this time."
"In going to war," the rabbis write, according to the Israeli daily Ha'aretz, "the Cohen [priest] fills the people with motivation by giving [them] the knowledge that he is going to fight his enemies and he must not show compassion or mercy."
Talk to Hamas!
Another hotspot is the Gaza Strip, where Israel and Hamas, which governs the area, are in a dance of death. While Israel maintains a brutal economic siege, Palestinian militants launch home-made Kassam rockets, or more powerful Grad rockets, on neighboring Israeli towns and cities. Recent Israeli punitive military operations left more than 100 Palestinians dead in one bloody weekend.
The Olmert government is currently planning a military invasion and reoccupation of the Gaza Strip, with the purpose of overthrowing the Hamas government. The only thing holding the operation back is the extremely uninviting prolonged occupation of a region that is virtually one big refugee camp, of 1.5 million Palestinians. The prospect that the operation could trigger a wider war with the Palestinians of the West Bank, the Hezbollah in Lebanon, and even Syria, is even less inviting. Nonetheless, the Israelis are drafting contingency plans and making preparations for the possibility of exactly such a war.
This situation is the direct result of Cheney's anti-Hamas policy, which calls for fomenting civil war between President Abbas's Fatah faction and Hamas. This was underscored in a March 8 interview for the Council of Foreign Relations given by Henry Siegman, executive director of the American Jewish Congress and peace advocate, who denounced the Bush Administration's anti-Hamas policy.
"The notion that the Israeli government leaders and our own government have that it is possible to exclude Hamas from peace talks and have a successful result from those talks is a fantasy. It's not going to happen. The question is," Siegman said, "is it possible to persuade the United States and Israel's government to allow Hamas to participate in this process." Siegman went on to denounce the widely known fact that the Bush Administration had armed factions of Fatah, to overthrow the Hamas government. This backfired, leading to the ousting of Fatah, and of Abbas's authority from Gaza.
Echoing Siegman, Shlomo Ben Ami, a former Labor Party member of the Knesset and foreign minister, said to the New America Foundation in Washington on March 13, "You can't reach a settlement with the Palestinians by discarding totally the Syrians," because the Syrians have leverage over the Palestinians and can act as spoilers. Ben Ami pointed out that an agreement is only possible with the participation of Hamas, by reason of its 2006 election victory. Ben Ami also called for the release of Fatah leader Marwan Barghouti, who is imprisoned in Israel, because he has "revolutionary legitimacy" which is needed to "coopt Hamas" for a "legitimate deal."
Both Lyndon LaRouche and former U.S. Secretary of State James Baker III have called for Barghouti's release.
Ben Ami is joined by no less a personality than former Israeli Mossad chief Efraim Halevy, who also opposes Cheney's anti-Hamas policy. Halevy, who was close to slain Yitzhak Rabin, told the American weekly Mother Jones (Feb. 19) that the idea that Hamas is linked to al-Qaeda or controlled by Iran is not only wrong, but that Israel should be negotiating with Hamas, and the Bush Administration should stop its anti-Hamas policy, especially the already failed attempt to foment civil war between Fatah and Hamas.
