explain to me how a war that was warned against by the government of israel is an israeli war
What I feel would help this make more sense is to understand the factions in the Israeli government. Basically there are two that matter. Those that believe that Israel can exist peacefully with its neighbours and those that don’t. This fact, in relation to Sharon and Netanyahu is explained quite succinctly in
this 2002 article:
Sharon, who has been running a centrist coalition, has been more moderate than his Likud rank and file would like. He accepts the inevitability of a Palestinian state and has refused to expel Arafat from the West Bank. Netanyahu rejects the idea of a Palestinian state. He proposes to exile Arafat, disarm the Palestinian police, invade and occupy the major Palestinian towns to root out Hamas, and quickly complete a security fence around the West Bank. He doesn’t go as far as the ultra-rightists who would expel all Palestinians from the West Bank, but he has grabbed the heart of Likud.
If you DO believe that peace is possible with Arabs like Sharon did, what you want is a wall of Sunni Arab states between you and Iran. Saddam, while very threatening to Israel was a bit of a paper tiger. But he kept the Iranians out of his neighbourhood by god.
Now, if you don’t believe that peace is possible with the Arabs (cough cough Netanyahu) your strategic calculus is completely different. Israelis of this persuasion want the Arab states to be completely balkanised and internally weakened. The idea is that weakening these states to the point where they can’t threaten Israel any longer mitigates strategic encirclement by forever enemies.
Should you wish to look into this matter yourself you’re in luck.
The theory of perpetual conflict and divide and conquer starts to come into its own in the early 80s. The first articulation of this line of thought can be found in the 1982 article known as “
The Yinon Plan”. It’s the first document I can find calling for balkanising the Arab states on religious grounds. It wasn’t a very detailed or specific policy and it reads more like the power fantasy of a Mossad Intelligence officer than a realistic strategy. What I personally find unrealistic about the Yinon plan is that it proposes a lot of things that Israel simply at that time didn’t have the resources to achieve on its own.
So here’s where it gets majorly juicy. Benjamin Netanyahu hired a neoconservative US think tank to basically write a corollary to the “Yinon Plan” called “
A Clean Break: a New Strategy for Securing the Realm”. The Wikipedia article will give you a brief overview of you don’t want to read the whole thing. But basically, it’s similar to the Yinon plan but it solves the problem of resources by using “shared values” to convince American politicians that Israel interests are American interests. It calls for Israel and America to majorly destabilise Iraq and Syria. Hmm.
Richard Perle, the guy who drafted this plan for Bibi was a literal advisor to George W. Bush. I wish I was kidding. So while it makes complete sense that Sharon wasn’t onboard with this, it’s not difficult to imagine that this was done at the behest of another Israeli altogether.
