Once again, Israel is pushing the Middle East to the brink of war, with predictably disastrous consequences. In recent days, Israeli leaders markedly escalated their war of words against Iran. A leading Israeli cabinet minister was quoted on Friday, 6 June as saying, �attacking Iran will be unavoidable.�

Similarly, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, just back from a meeting with George W. Bush in Washington, sounded almost euphoric when he spoke of an �American-Israeli consensus on the need to stop Iran�s nuclear program by whatever means necessary.�

Needless to say, an Israeli or American-Israeli attack on Iran would be a blatant and unprovoked aggression on a sovereign nation. It would also plunge the world into an unpredictable phase of violence and turbulence, with deep and far-reaching ramifications.

Iran, although hostile to Israel because of the latter�s Nazi-like occupation of Palestine and oppression of the Palestinian people, has never attacked Israel.

True, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad often makes stupid and irresponsible rhetorical remarks about wiping Israel off the map, thus giving the Zionist regime ample hasbara ammunition to incite and blackmail the West into boycotting and isolating the Iranian republic. However, Ahmadinejad himself and other Iranian officials have made it abundantly clear that Iran is not against Jews or Judaism, but rather against Zionism, an inherently racist and manifestly criminal ideology based on mass murder and ethnic cleansing.

This seems a plausible explanation because if Ahmadinejad were truly hostile to Jews or Judaism, let alone if he harbored genocidal designs against the Jewish people, as the Zionist propaganda machine keeps telling us, he would start with tens of thousands of Iranian Jewish citizens who enjoy religious and civil freedoms and are represented in the Iranian parliament.

Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi propaganda minister said, �If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.� This is exactly the maxim being adopted by Zionist leaders who are spreading lies, disinformation and half-truths about Iran in order to get the madman in Washington, D.C., and his gang of neocons and war criminals to attack another Muslim country on Israel�s behalf.

Iran is a dignified country that respects itself and values its independence. It adamantly refuses to be at America�s beck and call and rejects the Western rationale that the Nazi holocaust against Jews during WWII justifies the dispossession and destruction of the Palestinian people at the hands of Zionist Jews.

Iran, despite all the disinformation to the contrary, is not really against peace between Israel and the Palestinian people. However, Iran, mainly because of moral considerations, can�t accept the perpetuation of Palestinian suffering and dispossession through the creation of a deformed and truncated Palestinian �state� on less than 20 percent of the Palestinian homeland while allowing the apartheid Israeli regime to keep the rest of the spoils of theft. In other words, Iran says that ethnic cleansing must never be allowed to triumph.

Well, isn�t that compatible with the views of most men and women of honesty and conscience all over the globe?

Nonetheless, the main Israeli motive behind its hostility to Iran stems from Israeli worries that a technologically advanced and militarily strong Iran might pose a credible challenge to Israel�s strategic supremacy in the region.

Israel is believed to possess hundreds of nuclear warheads, ready with delivery systems, in addition to a huge arsenal of state-of-the-art of American weapons of death. Israel also tightly controls American politics, policies, political parties and media, especially the so-called agenda-setters.

Indeed, one exaggerates very little by saying that the United States of America is subservient to Israel and that American politicians, including members of Congress and the Senate as well as presidential candidates are more answerable to the Jewish lobby, especially AIPAC, than they are to their own American constituents.

The recent speech by the presumptive Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama during AIPAC�s convention last week is very telling. It proves once again that the international Zionist cartel, of which AIPAC constitutes the American chapter, tightly controls the American political discourse and that any American politician who dares speak his or her mind about Israel�s slow-motion genocide of Palestinians or more recently about America�s relations with the Muslim world, will be committing political suicide.

So, how can an essentially Third World country like Iran possibly pose a real threat to nuclear Israel that is backed by the only superpower in the world, its guardian-ally, the United States?

Besides, Iran has a natural right to harness nuclear technology, even for military purposes. Indeed, if Israel had the right to possess and stockpile hundreds of nuclear warheads, that are being trained at Muslim cities such as Cairo, Istanbul, Tehran and Damascus and probably Mecca and Medina as well, why on earth would Muslim states such as Iran, Egypt and Saudi Arabia not have such a right?

After all, are Jewish nuclear bombs kosher? Are they altruistic? Are they innocuous?

I am not and will never be a fan of nuclear weapons or any other weapons of mass destruction. And I think the invention of these ugly tools of mass extinction represented the lowest point in human morality if only because these weapons are capable of annihilating the human race.

Having said that, however, I believe that a situation where certain states are allowed to possess the nuclear technology (and nuclear weapons) while others are not is inherently unjust and unacceptable.

This situation allows criminal states like Israel to coerce and bully other states and other peoples and even blackmail the entire world. It allows Israel to bomb Tunis, Baghdad, Syria and threaten to bomb the Egyptian Aswan Dam and then tell the helpless victims �hit me back if you dare.�

Hence, Israel must bring itself to understand that this situation where Israel keeps bullying hundreds of millions of Muslims by brandishing her nuclear bombs in their faces and telling them �hit me back if you dare� is intolerable and unacceptable, to say the least.

Muslims around the world are watching helplessly the despicable treatment Israel is meting out to the Palestinians. And in their hearts and minds they realize that if they don�t acquire military strength, or at least enough of it to deter Israel�s genocidal whims, their turn will eventually come because Israel�s ambitions go far beyond Gaza and the West Bank.

Don�t tell me I am exaggerating. A state that dropped 3 million cluster bomblets on Lebanon two years ago is capable of carrying out the unthinkable, especially in light of the fact that the main capitals of Europe and North America are more or less Israeli-occupied territories.

This is a message that not only Iran ought to understand and internalize. Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Syria, and even Turkey must also get busy.

In a jungle where strength respects strength, one has to be a tiger, a fox or a venomous cunning snake in order to survive.

This article was originally published in Palestine Think Tank.