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Israel Faces 'Catastrophe' Ahead
Just a few weeks ago, in his last days (this go around) as a Likud-government Foreign Minister, Shimon Peres let out of the bag just how potentially catastrophic the near future could be for Israel. This awareness is what prompted Generals Rabin, and then Barak, to try desperately to push the Palestinians into some kind of apartheid-style 'Palestinian State' (popularly known as 'the Oslo Peace Process') in which they would be forced to renouce the conflict with Israel. And this kind of awareness is what is pushing the Israelis at this moment in history to in turn push the Americans to take control of the region through force of arms and declare that all Muslim and Arab states must not be allowed to develop weapons of mass destruction or they will either be 'disarmed' or 'regime changed'. Meanwhile, the policies propelling the very 'catastrophe' of which Peres warned -- and he is much harsher and ominous in private than he ever is in public -- are being even more vigorously pursued by the current Israeli government, now controlled more than ever in Israel's short history by a fanatical neo-fascist right-wing government likely to further increase its hold on power with the new election next month.
Peres: Blindness of extreme right could bring catastrophe
Within three years, the Middle East could turn into an arena of nuclear, biological and chemical weapons, which because of the blindness of Israel's extreme right-wing could bring catastrophe upon Israel, Foreign Minister Shimon Peres told the Knesset yesterday.
"You are bringing Israel to a point from which there is no escape," Peres said of the opposition of the far-right to diplomatic contacts with the Arabs.
Reacting angrily to MK Zvi Hendel's remark that had he lived, Yitzhak Rabin would have pressed for canceling the Oslo peace agreements, Peres said of the Israeli-Palestinian accords, "I don't regret them, I am proud of them, and Rabin would have stood here just like me!"
To Hendel's catcalls, Peres said of Rabin, whose 1995 assassination is being commemorated today, "I knew him better than you, and [unlike you] he had courage and had no demagoguery in him."
Peres also attacked the rabbis of the Yesha council settler movement, who this week issued calls advising soldiers against "evacuating their brothers" on illegal settlement outposts.
| Mid-East Realities | www.middleeast.org |
| Source: http://www.middleeast.org/articles/2002/12/787.htm |