Mondoweiss posted:

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The New York Times Magazine runs a long piece by Ronen Bergman, an Israeli journalist, saying Israel will attack Iran soon because it must. The piece is pushy: it contains the hope/promise that the U.S. will give a "flickering green light" to this attack, as it did to Israel's attack on Egypt that set off the 1967 War.

Why on earth should the U.S. do such a thing?

Bergman's "Israeli perspective," as he describes it, turns out to be a fearful one, and lacking in all proportion-- and offered by a journalist who has reportedly called Iran the world's "number one terrorist power." When will cooler heads prevail? This piece is highly reminiscent of Jeffrey Goldberg's piece in the Atlantic in 2010, envisioning an inevitable strike, and rationalizing it on the basis of Netanyahu's fears of another Holocaust, and saying the U.S. must be on board. Bergman:

After speaking with many senior Israeli leaders and chiefs of the military and the intelligence, I have come to believe that Israel will indeed strike Iran in 2012. Perhaps in the small and ever-diminishing window that is left, the United States will choose to intervene after all, but here, from the Israeli perspective, there is not much hope for that. Instead there is that peculiar Israeli mixture of fear — rooted in the sense that Israel is dependent on the tacit support of other nations to survive — and tenacity, the fierce conviction, right or wrong, that only the Israelis can ultimately defend themselves. --

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