Palestine & Lebanon: ""everything" must be done either to lever "moderates" into power, or prevent them from losing power.."

Alastair Crooke, in AsiaTimes, here

"...It is a narrative that has served Israel's wider interests in garnering legitimacy for the Israeli campaign against Iran, and in dichotomizing the region into Westernized "moderates" and Islamist "extremists"....

At one level, Europeans may say they have been working diligently to pursue an Israeli-Palestinian solution, but their actions suggest the opposite - that they have been more concerned to deliver a knock-out blow to the camp of global "extremism". Pursuing such irreconcilable ends has only succeeded both in stripping their protege Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas of any popular legitimacy and in closing the path of political participation to Hamas....

Stage one was to weaken Hamas; stage two to insert an armed international force into Gaza; and stage three was for Abbas' British and United States-trained special forces to return to Gaza and resume control of the Gaza Strip. It is standard colonial technique..."