Grinding the DC rumour mill

I have received some very complimentary letters about my 22 July column, the one dealing with the plight of a Palestinian female doctor in Gaza. I will not mention the names because they were, after all, private messages. You know who you are and I thank you. And now for the bad news: my Washington spies report that the Israeli invasion of Lebanon was planned on 17 and 18 June of this year, between the former Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Likud Knesset member Natan Sharansky, and US Veep Dick Cheney. Basically, the assault on Lebanon was stage-managed between the government of Israel and the neocons in the Bush administration, those nice guys who have given us Afghanistan, Iraq and who now threaten Syria and Iran. Netanyahu and Sharansky laid the groundwork, as they say.

Easy to say, you might say. The internet, which incidentally I don’t read, is full of conspiracy theories. And DC’s rumour mill is as vibrant as Paris Hilton’s sex life. But consider this. Israel looks as if it pre-planned the attack when it denied entry to the West Bank to Palestinians holding US passports. The denial of entry to Palestinian–Americans was a violation of both the Geneva Convention and the Oslo Accords. But the fix was in. Israeli planners, after all, know how to play Palestinian extremists like the proverbial fiddle. Israel’s border exercise inside Lebanon immediately following — and the subsequent kidnapping of two Israeli soldiers — provided the pretext for the attack on Gaza and Lebanon. We know the rest.

Netanyahu, who had some interesting things to say to Allister Heath in these here pages last week, was the author of ‘Clean Break’, a white paper written in 1996 by him and other militant Zionists such as Richard Perle and Douglas Feith.