For Netanyahu, a strategic alliance with the Gulf has always been about more than just grabbing the occupied territories. It is central to his vision of an unreformed, maximalist, ethnic supremacist, Israeli state secure in the Middle East, serving as a regional hegemon alongside US global power.
Every Israeli prime minister understands that a military entanglement with Hezbollah, Lebanon’s armed Shia movement, is a dangerous wager, especially during an election campaign. So why is Benjamin Netanyahu risking a dangerous clash on Israel's northern border?
US recognition of Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights will prove a boon for Israel's right, which has been clamouring to annex vast areas of the West Bank and thereby drive a final nail into the coffin of the two-state solution.
The announcement of an Egypt-brokered reconciliation agreement between Fatah and Hamas raised hopes that a decade of bitter feuding between the rival Palestinian factions may finally come to an end. The early conclusion of the talks in Cairo hinted at how much pressure both sides were under to make progress.
Israel's support for the Kurdish independence referendum was not surprising. The unravelling of Britain and France’s century-old map of the region would lead to chaos of the kind that a strong, nuclear-armed Israel could richly exploit. Not least, yet more bedlam would push the Palestinian cause even further down the international community’s list of priorities.
Renewed moves towards reconciliation between Hamas and Fatah are being hailed by PA officials as a victory for Abbas after he imposed harsh sanctions on Gaza over the summer to punish Hamas. But experts argue that the drive for unity puts Hamas - not Abbas - in the driving seat, by helping it find a way out of regional isolation.
The forest fires that ravaged Israel over the weekend inadvertently drew attention to the deeper goal of Netanyahu's "muezzin bill". For many Israelis, the call to prayer threatens the contrived "European idyll" created after 1948 by a programme of planting thick pine forests – creating a fire hazard – over hundreds of Palestinian villages Israel destroyed after it had expelled their inhabitants.
If revenge is a dish best served cold, then Meir Dagan must have relished his retribution on Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu – it was delivered from beyond the grave. In damning posthumous remarks, the former Mossad chief described Netanyahu as a man trapped in self-delusion, and “the worst manager I knew". Their falling out centred on Netanyahu’s belligerent posturing over Iran.
Benjamin Netanyahu took advantage of a meeting this week with Barack Obama – their first in 13 months – to suggest it was time the US president recognised Israel's illegal annexation of the Golan. Though he did not mention it, Netanyahu's motives may have included the fact that last month US oil firm Genie announced it had found reserves there with the potential to produce "billions of barrels”.
Image: Shmuley Boteach image for his New York Times ad, which he says thye paper insisted he change
Netanyahu’s depiction of Hamas and ISIS, or Islamic State, as “branches of the same poisonous tree” is a travesty of the truth.
