It is a provocative headline: “Israel braces for July war with up to five enemies.” If we are to believe Israeli military intelligence chief Maj. Gen. Amos Yadlin, this attack will be launched by Iran, Syria, Hizbullah, Hamas and, of course, “al-Qaeda,” the database. “Each of these adversaries is capable of sparking a war in the summer,” Yadlin told the World Tribune. In other words, Israel is capable of attacking one or all of these “adversaries,” as Israel has a notorious history of attacking its neighbors under contrived pretense.

Few remember the words of the Irgun terrorist Menachem Begin, later Israeli prime minister—as Israelis, much like Americans, prefer to be led by terrorists and war criminals—who admitted in 1982 “that Israel had fought three wars in which it had a ‘choice,’ meaning Israel started the wars,” according to Donald Neff, writing for the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs.

Here is Begin’s quote in full: “In June 1967, we had a choice. The Egyptian army concentrations in the Sinai approaches do not prove that [Egyptian President] Nasser was really about to attack us. We must be honest with ourselves. We decided to attack him.”

As Livia Rokach writes in the introduction to Israel’s Sacred Terrorism, based on the memoirs of Moshe Sharett, the former Israeli prime minister, the “Israeli political/military establishment aimed at pushing the Arab states into military confrontations which the Israeli leaders were invariably certain of winning. The goal of these confrontations was to modify the balance of power in the region radically, transforming the Zionist state into the major power in the Middle East.” In order to realize this modification of power, Israel engaged in “military operations aimed at civilian populations across the armistice lines,” in particular against a defenseless Palestinian population, but also against Israel’s Arab neighbors, and these “operations [were] designed to dismember the Arab world, defeat the Arab national movement, and create puppet regimes which would gravitate to the regional Israeli power.”

“A clear, lucid, coherent logic runs through the history of the past three decades,” Rokach wrote in the 1980s. “In the early fifties the bases were laid for constructing a state imbued with the principles of sacred terrorism against the surrounding Arab societies on the threshold of the eighties the same state is for the first time denounced by its own intellectuals as being tightly in the deadly grip of fascism.”

“Lebanon was the model, prepared for its role by the Israelis for thirty years, as the Sharett diaries revealed,” explains Ralph Schoenman in his book, the Hidden History of Zionism. “It is the expansionist compulsion set forth by Herzl and Ben Gurion even as it is the logical extension of the Sharett diaries. The dissolution of Lebanon was proposed in 1919, planned in 1936, launched in 1954 and realized in 1982.” Schoenman cites Oded Yinon’s A Strategy for Israel in the 1980s, a document that “outlines a timetable for Israel to become the imperial regional power based upon the dissolution of the Arab states.”

In regard to Syria, Israeli peace activist Uri Avnery tells us the Zionist state created a convenient myth in order to escalate hostilities and thus steal land. “According to legend, the Syrians exploited their control of heights overlooking the Israeli villages in the valley below them. Again and again the evil Syrians (the Syrians were always ‘evil’) terrorized the helpless kibbutzim by shelling. This myth, which was believed by practically all Israelis at the time, served as a justification for the occupation of the Golan Heights and their annexation by Israel. Even now, foreign visitors are brought to an observation post on the Golan Heights and shown the defenseless kibbutzim down below.”

The truth, which has been exposed since then, was a bit different: Sharon used to instruct the kibbutzniks to go to their shelters, and then he would send an armored tractor into the demilitarized zone. Predictably, the Syrians shot at it. The Israeli artillery, just waiting for its cue, then opened up a massive bombardment of the Syrian positions. There were dozens of such “incidents.”

Earlier this month, Jan Muhren, a Dutch UN observer stationed interchangeably at the Golan Heights and the West Bank in 1966-67, told a Dutch current affairs program “neither Jordan nor Syria had any intention to start a war with Israel,” according to Monsters and Critics. Muhren said “Israel was not under siege by Arab countries preceding the Six-Day War … and that the Jewish state provoked most border incidents as part of its strategy to annex more land,” that is to say steal land at gunpoint, most notably from Syria, although the “war” resulted in the theft of Gaza and the West Bank from Egypt and Jordan respectively. As well, Israel grabbed the Sinai Peninsula from Egypt.

Once again, Israel is not “under siege by Arab countries,” or Hezbollah, Hamas, and the fantastical “al-Qaeda” for that matter, and yet we are told each “of these adversaries is capable of sparking a war in the summer.” Israeli officials, according to the World Tribune, “said Iran has direct influence over Syria, Hizbullah and Hamas. He said Al Qaida has increasingly come under Iranian influence and was being used by Iran and Syria in such countries as Iraq, Jordan and Lebanon.” In short, the Israeli “security myth” documented by Livia Rokach in the 1980s and in the current era buttressed by ludicrous fairy tales, is alive and well. Under such a “security” pretense, never examined by the corporate media, we can expect Israel, or more likely the United States, under an AIPAC and neocon zombie trance for some time now, to attack Iran and Syria, possibly next month, certainly before the Commander Guy leaves office.

Iraq was attacked and 750,000 Iraqis slaughtered in the name of “Israeli security,” that is to say Israeli hegemony. “Why would Iraq attack America or use nuclear weapons against us? I’ll tell you what I think the real threat (is) and actually has been since 1990—it’s the threat against Israel,” Philip Zelikow, Bush insider and former executive director of the nine eleven whitewash commission, told a crowd at the University of Virginia on September 10, 2002, according to Emad Mekay, writing for the IPS-Inter Press Service. Naturally, the corporate media completely ignored Zelikow’s comments.

As should be expected, the Likudniks and American neocons will demand, in the wake of Israel’s defeat to Hezbollah last summer, another go, this time making certain to accomplish their goals. Meyrav Wurmser, the Israeli married to the neocon David Wurmser, admitted as much last December. “Hizbullah defeated Israel in the war. This is the first war Israel lost,” she told Yedioth Internet. “I know this will annoy many of your readers… But the anger is over the fact that Israel did not fight against the Syrians. Instead of Israel fighting against Hizbullah, many parts of the American administration believe that Israel should have fought against the real enemy, which is Syria and not Hizbullah.” Wurmser, of course, is talking about the neocon part of the administration, the part that has control of American foreign policy. Iran, naturally, figures prominently on the target list as well. If the Israeli Likudniks and the American neocons have their way, Israel will have a second go this summer.