US Ambassador John Bolton is a neoconservative who supports Likud policies in Israel. He did not dedicate his tenure at the UN to deal with pressing issues like Global warming, Korea, China, or Latin America but has always been more interested in advancing his Zionist interests. This is not because Bolton loves the Israeli people but rather to advance political elite interests even if at the expense of people in the Middle East. These interests are backed by strong lobbies that put fear and trepidation in the hearts of many.

Early Zionists stated that they would rather be "feared" than loved. But fear of a ruthless Zionist lobby was not uinversal (for examples, see the book published in the 1970s by Congressman Paul Findley titled "They Dare to Speak Out"). The aggressive adventures of this lobby helped erode its power (of fear) just as the aggressive military adventures helped erode the aura of invincibility of the well-funded Israeli military.

Israel's is the strongest army in the Middle East, guaranteed to remain superior to any combination of armies around it by US guarantees and billions of dollars in military aid annually. Israel is even ranked as fourth in military power among all 200-plus nations of the world.

That the Zionist army was shown to be fallible and weak against a small resistance movement leads to a huge psychological shift with far reaching implications for other sacred cows of Zionism. It may even be decisive in finally retiring that destructive ideology.

After significant arm-twisting (also known as US diplomacy), Bolton was able to maintain in the UN resolution a call on Hizballah to stop all operations while calling on Israel to stop only "offensive military operations." Of course, as every Israeli elementary school kid knows, as every major US media dutifully reports, and as every Israeli politician and diplomat always emphasize, Israel never engages in "offensive military operations." Aren’t all Israeli actions "defensive"? The Israeli army is even intentionally named IDF (Israel Defense Forces). As such this provision is not just a loophole but more like a road through which Israeli tanks and US supplied F-16s, armed with cluster bombs, could rumble through (now that the US government speeded their delivery). But overconfidence and a belief in racial or religious superiority provide the Achilles heel of both Zionism and US foreign policy in the Middle East.

Even before Israel was established they wrote and executed plans for aggression and transfer of Palestinians. Zionists hasbara (propaganda) publicly declared only "defensive wars" while creating and maintaining the largest post-WWII refugee population in the world (now nearly 6 million Palestinians are refugees or displaced people). The pre-Israel Zionist militias began their ethnic cleansing of Palestinian villages and towns several months before Israel was established and the Arab "armies invaded" in May 1948 to supposedly liquidate the nascent Jewish state.

We now know through declassified Israeli documents the reality of what transpired. Books by Israeli historians like Avi Shlaim, Ilan Pappe, Tom Segev, and even Zionists like Benny Morris, document the history of Plan Dalet, the "transfer committee"; Ben Gurion’s orders to cleanse the cities of Rample and Lydda (now Lod) and many other acts. In fact, Israel initiated all wars involving its neighbors with the exception of 1973 (and that was a war by Egypt and Syria not on Israel but on Israeli forces stationed illegally in Syrian and Egyptian lands -- Sinai and Golan).

In 1956, Israel, with help of France and England, initiated a war of aggression and occupied the Egyptian Sinai for a while, until President Eisenhauer wisely forced Israel to back down. After strengthening the Israel lobby in Washington, Israel launched the war of 1967, again claiming preemption and threats to its existence. But a number of easily available quotes from Israeli leaders prove otherwise.

For example Israeli General Matityahu Peled stated: "The thesis that the danger of genocide was hanging over us in June 1967 and that Israel was fighting for its physical existence is only bluff, which was born and developed after the war. . . . To pretend that the Egyptian forces massed on our frontiers were in a position to threaten the existence of Israel constitutes an insult not only to the intelligence of anyone capable of analyzing this sort of situation, but above all an insult to the Zahal Israeli army" (Ha'aretz, 19 March 1972).

The invasions of Lebanon (and there were several by Israeli forces before this latest aggression) have all been similarly justified as "preemptive" or "self defense" despite an overwhelming body of evidence otherwise. One can claim self-defense and security in such broad and mythological terms (as Israel does routinely) so that even the ethnic cleansing of 70 percent of the native Palestinians (Christians and Muslims) and the 33 massacres committed between 1947 and 1949 are explained away.

Zionists use the power of propaganda (based on victimhood) combined with aggressive attacks on their self-declared enemies to cover up theft of Arab lands and natural resources. This strategy was applied both in the Middle East and in gathering support in the West.

Moshe Dayan, Israeli Defense Minister during the 1967 war, admitted in a 1976 interview that it was about land: "Eighty percent of the incidents worked like this: We would send tractors to plow in an area of little use, in a demilitarized zone, knowing ahead of time that the Syrians would shoot. If they didn't start shooting, we would tell the tractors to advance until the Syrians would get aggravated and start shooting. We used artillery and later the air force became involved." Dayan recalled that during the war, settlers from the north lobbied the Israeli Prime Minister Levi Eshkol, to convince him to seize the land for their use: "They didn't even try to hide their lust for that soil. That's what guided them".

Yet, waters of the Litani River in Lebanon and the fertile lands of the Golan are less coveted than other "Erez Yisrael" lands in geographic/historic Palestine. That is why it was considered a bargain to get Bush to approve "unilateral disengagement" from the desert strip of Gaza with its 1.3 million Palestinians (most of them refugees) and to get him to approve the expansion of settlements on top of the Western and Eastern water aquifers of the Palestinian West Bank.

History teaches us that colonial powers always attempted to use low level and "manageable" conflicts to maintain hegemony (sometimes successfully but often not). Unless gernocide is used (as happened with Native Americans and Australians), the colonized people prevail far more commonly than the colonizers like to admit.

The latest attack on Lebanon did show that Israel can unleash significant destructive power but also showed two other more important facts: the limits of military power and the destructive grip of pro-Zionist forces on US foreign policy. (I do not use "pro-Israel" because I consider support for militarized and colonial Zionism to be contrary to Israeli and American public interests). Fear is a two way street and it is not sufficient to exert brute power and intimidation to engender fear. Over the years, Lebanese and Palestinians have learned to fear less and less. In doing so they also inspired people around the world.

Twenty-seven years ago when I first came to the US, there was hardly any criticism of Zionism or Israel outside narrow intellectual circles. Now the criticism is so pervasive that it can’t be ignored (hard as the Zionist lobbyists who are the gatekeepers of many mainstream media try). Just this Saturday, some 30,000 activists demonstrated in Washington, DC, against Israeli and American policies with regards to Palestine and Lebanon. The Internet is buzzing with information despite hundreds of millions of dollars worth of Zionist PR being spent to shield the public from knowing the truth. Hence the logarithmic growth of the divestment and boycott movement and the logarithmic growth of activism for Palestine.

The psychological projection of Zionist illnesses on others is only one of the symptoms of a deeply disturbed political ideology (witness the use of terms like Islamo-fascists, accusing Palestinians and Lebanese of exaggerating their tragedies, claiming that people resisting simply hate the Jews, etc.). But it is fear that they rely on more than anything else. Jews who oppose Zionism are ostracized as "self-hating Jews" and any anti-Zionist is simply hounded as "anti-Semitic" sic.

Many US politicians are pushed and "bought" (literally and figuratively, carrots and sticks) and vote billions of our taxes to Israel even as it violates International law and engages in war crimes and crimes against humanity. But we have to remember that politicians are usually the last to catch on to trends. This was the case with ending US war on Vietnam, with civil rights, with the right of women to vote, with ending US support for apartheid South Africa and many other momentous historical transformations. We are in the midst of such a historical shift and it seems to be (as in all historical transformations) beginning with a psychological shift to not fear Zionists or Zionism. This means the road ahead will be clearer though not necessarily easier. We note that history shows that such racist movements (Nazism, Apartheid, etc.) get most violent just before their downfall.

I predicted a while back that Lebanese and Palestinians remaining in Palestine (a largely defenseless population) will bear the brunt of this last and gasping efforts by the Zionist military machine to hang on to illegitimate state power. Israeli elite leaders such as Olmert call this stage hafrada (separation) and it is to be far worse than the Apartheid regime’s creation of Bantustans in South Africa.

I also predict increased terrorizing of American and British citizens by Israeli and CIA operatives (in what they term "PSYOPS"). These will be modeled after Zionist bombings in Iraq and Cairo in the 1940s and1950s (e.g. the Lavon Affair). I predict more US peace activists to be targeted. But I am even more certain than ever before that these various nefarious schemes will fail here just as they failed in other situations (Algeria, Vietnam, South Africa). That failure will be the best news for all people of the Middle East (especially Palestinians and Israelis), even for those who are still suffering from the Zionist delusions.