Irã, Israel e a bomba nuclear

The Economist explica: "... No one bears greater responsibility for the trap Israel finds itself in today than Mr Netanyahu. As prime minister in the late 1990s, he did more than any other Israeli leader to destroy the peace process. Illegal land grabs by settlers were tolerated and quietly encouraged in the confused expectation that they would aid territorial negotiations. Violent clashes and provocations erupted whenever the peace process seemed on the verge of concrete steps forward; the most charitable spin would be that the Israelis failed to exercise the restraint they might have shown in retaliating against Palestinian terrorism, had they been truly interested in progress towards a two-state solution. Mr Netanyahu believed that the Oslo peace agreements were a mirage, and his government's actions in the late 1990s helped make it true.
Having trapped themselves in a death struggle with Palestinians that they cannot acknowledge or untangle, Israelis have psychologically displaced the source of their anxiety onto a more distant target: Iran.
Leia mais

Most empires are not built by way of a conscious, planned, systematic execution of a policy of territorial expansion. Gorenberg, a journalist in Jerusalem, examines the evolution of the Israeli policy of settlement of the territories conquered in the Six Days' War, of 1967. He convincingly illustrates that the policy was the result of myriad small decisions and actions by both major and minor players on the Israeli political, military, and religious landscapes. At no time could one speak of a clear, coherent, and constant government policy that contemplated massive settlement and eternal control of these territories. Rather, Gorenberg describes a series of spasmodic efforts, sometimes led by religious zealots, sometimes led by secular, left-leaning Zionists, and sometimes by military pragmatists. At times the government encouraged these movements; at other times, the government seemed a semiparalyzed bystander. It was only with the fall of the Labor Party and the emergence of the Likud under Menachem Begin, in 1977, that settlement and retention of the West Bank and Gaza were crystallized as government policy. Given recent developments in both Israeli- and Palestinian-controlled areas, this is a timely, vital, and even riveting analysis of how the current territorial and ethnic Gordian knot developed. Jay Freeman Mais