The Israeli Agenda and the Scorecard of the Zionist Power Configuration for 2008
Tuesday, March 4, 2008 at 02:03PM By James Petras -- author of The Power of Israel in the U.S.
The strategy of the Jewish state is the complete Zionization of Palestine, the takeover of land, water, offshore gas (estimated to be worth $4 billion dollars) and other economic resources and the total dispossession of the Palestinian people. Tel Aviv’s tactics have included daily military assaults, giant walls ghettoizing entire Palestinian towns, military outposts and controls undermining commerce and production to force bankruptcy, poverty, severe deprivation and population flight. The second priority of the Israeli colonial state is to bolster the Jewish state’s political and military supremacy in the Middle East, using preposterous arguments of ‘survival’ and ‘existential threats’. The key postulate of Israeli Middle East policy is to destroy or intimidate the principle adversaries of its Zionization of Palestine and its expansionist Middle East policy. In pursuit of that policy, it invaded southern Lebanon to destroy Hezbollah, bombing neighborhoods and critical infrastructure in Beirut and other cities, bombed Syria as a provocation.
Earlier the Israeli state played a major role in directing the ZPC in formulating US war policy toward destroying Iraq as a viable nation. Recently Israel, through the ZPC in the US, has engaged in a comprehensive, intense and highly charged political, diplomatic, economic and military campaign to isolate and ultimately destroy the Islamic Republic of Iran.
For months, US President George W Bush and General David Petraeus have been touting the program of recruiting tens of thousands of Sunnis into US-financed "Awakening Councils" as a master stroke of Iraq strategy which has weakened al-Qaeda in Iraq and helped reduce sectarian conflict through "bottom-up reconciliation". 
The Al Deira Hotel, in Gaza City, is a haven of calm in a land beset by poverty, fear, and violence. In the middle of December 2007, I sit in the hotel’s airy restaurant, its windows open to the Mediterranean, and listen to a slight, bearded man named Mazen Asad abu Dan describe the suffering he endured 11 months before at the hands of his fellow Palestinians. Abu Dan, 28, is a member of Hamas, the Iranian-backed Islamist organization that has been designated a terrorist group by the United States, but I have a good reason for taking him at his word: I’ve seen the video.
For President Bush, who expresses disdain for e-mail, the White House system of electronic record-keeping is a good match. 
A vaccine preservative may have contributed to a case of autism, the federal government conceded after years of denying a link.
Gold, silver, platinum and palladium may be the best-performing financial assets this year as inflation and slowing growth erode the value of the world's major currencies, bonds and stocks. 
Two U.S. missiles hit a house in southern Somalia on Monday, according to local officials, in a strike Washington said was directed at "known terrorists". It was the fourth U.S. air strike in 14 months on Somalia, where Washington believes local Islamist insurgents are giving shelter to wanted al Qaeda figures. "We launched a deliberate strike against a suspected bed-down of known terrorists," a senior U.S. official, who declined to be named, told Reuters in Washington.
Israel vowed to press its campaign against militants in the Gaza Strip on Sunday despite an international outcry over the deadly onslaught that prompted even the moderate Palestinian leadership to cut off all peace talks.
Reacting to Pentagon plans to stage its first death-penalty trial, the American Bar Association has written President Bush, again, protesting the war court at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.
Inside the stout federal courthouse of this 
An attorney for six 
The increasing deployment of gun-toting 
President Bush said last week that telecommunications companies that helped government wiretapping efforts need protection from "class-action plaintiff attorneys" who see a "financial gravy train" ahead. Democrats and privacy groups responded by accusing the Bush administration of trying to shut down the lawsuits to hide evidence of illegal acts.
Women's participation in post-conflict nation-building is an important ingredient in achieving an equitable, peaceful and more prosperous society, according to a RAND Corporation study. 
