Peter Sterry 21st Century Wire Geopolitics and ethnic cleansing is often a staged affair. The current show of force by Israel, lording over a million and a half residents trapped in their Palestinian poverty cesspit, is no different.  Not a week went by after the US election before Israel got the green light from Washington to go for the jugular in Gaza. Indeed, 21st Century Wire predicted before the US election that tensions would flair up and the White House would once again return shoulder to shoulder with Tel Aviv – once the US candidates had finished with America’s favourite Punch ‘n Judy puppet show cum national high school election. To make matters even worse, Israel never managed to squeeze a peace table into their 2012 gov’t budget, again. Hamas are apparently at it again, firing their industrial sized Roman Candles across the border, as the Israelis – in proportionate fashion, have naturally retaliated with F16 air strikes and a ground invasion that will likely transform Gaza from being the pile of rubble it is today, into a pile of dust tomorrow. Meanwhile, the US media is plastered with diatribes about Israelis having to endure the horror of having “only 15 seconds to get into an air raid shelter”. There is something very staged about these rocket attacks from Hamas – time will hopefully flush out the full truth, perhaps Israel still has its links into Hamas – an organisation which was actually started by Israel in 1976 (that’s a fact, look it up). On the surface of the current slaughter in Palestine - aside from the usual sadistic beating administered by Israel’s IDF onto the Jewish state’s indigenous Arab captives, it’s still not totally clear what Tel Aviv will achieve other than a bit of nationalistic, albeit racist blood sport, once their impressive pillar of smoke clears. What is the real end game for this exercise? With all eyes on Gaza, this would be an ideal time for Israel to secure some additional land in the form of some new security zone, or ‘buffer zone’. Chief on this list of course, are new illegal settlements, dotted along the various regions, including Gaza land lost by Jewish settlers in 2005. Settlements will increase – that’s almost a given. But what else? Look for Israel to go for some territory – possibly in the much sought after Golan Heights region in Syria – currently a softer than normal target. South Lebanon is probably off the menu at present, as Hezbollah is too strong and too well organised for Israel to have another go. 2006 presumably did not go so well for the IDF, a bit of an embarrassment on the ground, Israeli soldiers aren’t what they used to be. As we speak, there’s at least 100,000 would-be Israeli soldiers who are laying low, growing their dreads in places like Goa, Chang Mai in Thailand, Sumatra, Costa Rica, Ibiza, Belize and Notting Hill Gate, all hoping to avoid doing their military service at this rather inconvenient moment. Until those conscripts resurface from all of the full moon parties, send in the Druze! The best acquisition for Israel however – within the Hegelian dialect realm of problem, reaction, solution, would be to steal a chunk of the Sinai in Egypt along the Palestinian Gaza border. It’s a perfect opportunity to rewrite the aging agreement with Egypt, particularly if escalation goes overboard in Gaza, and especially if the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt are blamed for trafficking weapons and fighters over Egypt’s Sinai border through a series of dreaded “terror tunnels”. A perfect storm as they say. It will be interesting to see what Israel manages to achieve in terms of hard assets, after all the Palestinian bodies are counted and all the tired rhetoric about ’Israel’s right to defend itself’ is finished splashing through the usual western media and political channels. “We must defend ourselves – and we need to appropriate a bit more land to do it!” We sincerely hope that this (below) isn’t their road map to peace…

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