MICHAEL HUDSON: Well, you say Israel, but it’s actually Israel in the United States. And all this has happened right after Netanyahu came to Congress and met in Washington with the Democratic Party leaders and then with Trump. So I think it’s really the policy of the neocons. They’ve worked hand in hand. And I’ve known these people for over 50 years.

I worked with Netanyahu’s advisor, Uzi Arad, for a number of years at the Hudson Institute. We made trips around the world together, arguing. And I know what their ideas and ideology are. And it really is not only apartheid, but the feeling that if Israel doesn’t kill the Palestinians, the Palestinians will kill the Israelis in retaliation for what the Israelis are doing to them. And so once you hurt the Palestinians, that makes you think very much like what America thinks with Iran.

Well, we look at what we’ve done to Iran. They must hate us. Therefore, they’re going to do something about us. Therefore, we’re going to attack them.

So I think that the neocons in Washington believe that war is going to be inevitable. America is fighting for control of the Near East because the Near East controls the oil. And American foreign policy has been based on control of food supplies from American farms and control of the oil trade, because if you can control the oil trade, you can turn off people’s electricity, their heating, and their power. And power use for workers is the root of productivity.

And the way that the military thinks—and again, I’ve worked with them for years—is the timing, that, are we in a better position now than we will be next year or not. And I think the American military realizes that Russia and China and the other Eurasian countries are getting together. The American ability to fight militarily is going down. And to the military, that means if we don’t have war now and wait till next year in the future, we’ll be less and less and less able to win.

Well, the reality is they’re going to lose wherever they go, unless there’s atomic war and the chessboard is thrown over. And I think their feeling is the Americans are doing everything they can, from Ukraine to Israel to Iran, to try to stir up a retaliation so that they can then say, ah, we’re under attack, we’re purely defending ourselves, and once you tell your population and your voters this is a war for defense, as the Nazis know, you can always get a—as Goebbels said, you can always get a population on your side if you say it’s for defense.

So I’m very worried that the neocons are going to say there will never be a better or at least a less worse time to go to war in the Near East than right now. That seems to be what is leading the trigger, and even the military has said every way that they’ve gamed out the military sequence there, America loses. They’re not going to lose as bad now as they will in the future. And this is very dangerous, given the whole mindset that they have, and the mindset that they have to control the Near East, or else the rest of the world will not be neoliberalized.

It’s really—we’re at a civilizational split. What kind of society and what kind of economy will the world have? Will it be a neoliberalized, privatized economy, or will it be, I hesitate to say socialized, let’s just say a progressive, real kind of democracy economy?

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https://www.unz.com/mhudson/israel-just-crossed-hezbollah-and-irans-red-line-wwiii-looms/