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Comment by ecshafer | Hacker News Reader

The wonderful book "Rise and Kill First" is a history of Israeli assassinations, with their policy of going after the "head of the snake". There are some interesting sections on how Israel used assassination to inhibit missile programs in the Middle East, including Egypt. Its a pretty easy read despite being long.

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Not much of an achievement when you can't hit back without the Western world responding.

Not many people know this but it was not Cuba, Korea, Vietnam or Berlin that got NATO closest to WW3. It was Israel. For the USSR the Jews in the desert were just another proxy war sideshow for Europe it was non negotiable.

The historical record shows that Arab war planners consistently depended on the West stepping in to restrain Israel. This was something that Nasser and the other Arab states in the 67 and 73 war explicitly talked about. This remains a core consideration of Arab actors in the region in their prosecutions of various hostilities against Israel.

And here comes trump, getting duped by israel over and over again. Very fitting explanation of the middle east.

On the other hand, the USSR was literally deployed on the ground during the war of attrition and shot at Israelis. So you can also blame Egypt/the USSR

More wonderful yet is Seymour Hersh's Samson Option, outlining how Israeli spies hijacked America's intelligence agencies to support this double-standard. Those agents provided the necessary diplomatic cover for Israel to make their initial incursions into satellite intelligence and nuclear weaponry, which started the strategic imbalance that would endanger civilians in the Levant for decades to come. You can see shadows of the same US/Israel relationship in the China/Iran axis, wherein China's intelligence agencies successfully launder support for humanitarian crises like Gaza, while strategically bolstering Iran with air defenses and satellite intelligence.

Hersh's best work since unveiling Abu Ghraib. Highly recommend it over the super-spy biographies, especially since Hersh didn't have to go through Israel's Military Censor like Bergman did.

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