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Israel's strategic plan in the Middle East

Barrister Harun Ur Rashid
ISRAEL considers Iran the greatest enemy in the Middle East after Saddam Hussein was apprehended and executed with the help of die Bush administration. Iran's disapproval of the existence of Israel is also well known by several statements in public of the Iranian President.
Israel suspects diat within two to five years Iran will have nuclear weapons although die UN IAEA considers Iran's manufacturing of new grade uranium is still a long way unless IAEA inspectors are expelled from Iran and Iran withdraws front the TYeaty of Non-Proliferation of 1970 to which Iran is a party (Israel, India and Pakistan are not).
Israel believes that if Iran manufactures nuclear weapons, the edge diat Israel has in the balance of power in the Middle East will be upset. Israel wants US to strike Iran's nuclear reactor sites militarily but the US has been reluctant under the Bush administration to give a green signal to it. Because if Iran is attacked, Iran would target the US soldiers deployed in Iraq.
Meanwhile the Obama administration gave signals that it would like to have a dialogue widi Iran and it is reported diat Iran agrees with it widi "no conditions." In the new climate Israel will have to accept that it no longer can bully the countries in the Middle East block.
Against the background, Israel has two strategies: (a) Israel goes alone to destroy the nuclear sites in Iran as it did Iraq's site in Osirak in 1981 and (b) Israel builds strategic defense against Iran's missile attacks.
As said earlier, the first option cannot be implemented because Israel has been restrained by the Bush administration to go alone to destroy Iran’s nuclear sites. Therefore Israel has gone to build its strategy for defense against Iran's missile attack
US base in Israel
It is reported that almost unnoticed, Israel and the Bush administration had signed a deal over the summer to station an early-warning missile radar system, staffed with US military personnel, in Israel's Negev desert.
The media described the Joint Tactical Ground Station, which brings Israel
under the US protective umbrella against missile attacks, as a "parting gift” from President Bush as he prepared to leave office.
The site that is likely to become America's first permanent base on Israeli soil was apparently not easily agreed by Israeli defense officials. Aware of the country's vulnerability to missile strikes,
they have been trying to develop their own defenses so far without success against the varying threats posed by Palestinian Qassam rockets, Hezbollah's Katyushas, and Iran and Syria's more sophisticated arsenal.
In finally accepting that it has to rely on the US shield, Israel may have answered the Middle East's biggest question for its
security.
The local media reported that the early-warning station would limit Israel’s freedom to attack Iran since it would be tire prime target for a retaliatory strike, endangering the lives of US personnel. Or as the Haaretz newspaper noted, Israeli officials viewed the radar system "as a signal of Washington's opposition to an Israeli strike on Iran's nuclear program”.
Although ostensibly, the warm relations between Israel and the US are unchanged, in reality recent events are forcing a reluctant Israel to submit to the increasingly cool embrace ofWashington.
Tel Aviv has long seen itself as a military ally of the US, largely sharing and assisting in the realization of Washington's strategic objectives. But it has also prized a degree of independence, especially the right to pursue Its own agenda in the Middle East.
Difference between the US and Israel on policy in the Middle East
For some time, the key point of difference between the two has been over the benefits of “stability" in the region. US planners have promoted regional calm as a way of maintaining American control over the flow of oil. In practice, this has meant keeping the Arab people and Arab nationalism in check by bolstering reliable authoritarian rulers.
In contrast, Israel has preferred instability, believing that weak and fractious neighbours can be more easily manipulated. A series of invasions of Lebanon to accentuate ethnic divisions there and the fueling of civil war in the occupied Palestinian territories have been the template for Israel's wider regional vision.
The implicit tension in the Israeli-US alliance surfaced with the ascendance of the neo-cons under President George W. Bush, who argued that Washington's agenda should be synonymous with Israel's. The US occupation and dismemberment of Iraq was the White House's application of the Israeli doctrine. The
neo-cons' partial fall from grace began with Israel's failure to crush Hezbollah in Lebanon more than two years ago. In the immediate wake of the war, there was much discussion in Israel about how such a high profile failure might damage the country's standing in the eyes of its US sponsor.
Iran is emerging as a regional superpower supporting most obviously Hamas and Hezbollah. Israel, on the other hand, is losing ground as the radar base is revealed. It can no longer impose its own agenda or build alliances on its own terms. Its strength is becoming increasingly, and transparently, dependent on US approval.
Israel's new plan instead of two-state solution
The most immediate and tangible effects of the political environment in the .Middle East will be felt by the Palestinians. Just as before, Israel needs a long-term solution to the Palestinian problem, but cannot concede on the creation of a viable Palestinian state.
Now, however, it no longer has the luxury of biding its time as it dispossesses the Palestinians. It needs to find a solution before an Iranian bomb and an evermore confident Hamas and Hezbollah force a settlement on Palestine not to its liking.
Israel is therefore engaging in a frenzy of West Bank settlement building up six times a year ago not seen since Oslo.
Its leaders are increasingly thinking of “peace” terms that, passing over the heads of the Palestinians, will be directed at their neighbours in Jordan and Egypt. An Israeli solution requires a further entrenchment of the physical and political divisions between the two “halves" of the occupied territories, with control over the Palestinian parts of the West Bank handed eventually to Jordan and Gaza to Egypt
The author is fonr^r Bang'adesh Ambassador to the UN, Geneva.