A Palestinian student takes cover behind a makeshift barrier during clashes with Israeli soldiers for the second consecutive day as they protest against the ongoing Israeli offensive on the Gaza Strip in the West Bank town of Betunia on November 18, 2012.

By Gordon Duff and Press TV

“Israel also attacked Gaza in 2008 prior to elections. Now elections are coming again and it is doing the same thing. I am calling on Netanyahu. We are not in 2008. We are in 2012 and conditions are different than 2008. Make your calculations correctly.

I am calling on Israel and Gaza to provide a cease-fire immediately, within 24 hours. Extending the situation will not bring anything to either side.

While Israel is attacking and sabotaging the peace, there will be no security or stability for any country in the region.

The party using disproportionate force is obvious; humanity will not forgive this if sovereign countries defend injustice under the guise of preserving Israel and its security.

This hypocrisy should end. These double standards should end.

I had a telephone conversation with U.S. President Barack Obama and Russian President Vladimir Putin on the issue. I asked them to convince Israel and to give an important assurance. Israel did not accord with the previous Cairo ceasefire agreement, and I told them that this could not be repeated again.”

Israel is currently facing its biggest military challenge in decades. No, not from Hamas, but rather locating the 75,000 reservists recently called up for active service. With over 50% of Israeli’s now refusing compulsory military service, Israel now depends on its reserves, poorly trained, undisciplined, but well armed, courtesy of the American taxpayer.
Israel still maintains two divisions that are, by American standards, combat ready, but no more than that. Years of sniping at civilians in Gaza from guard towers or dropping cluster bombs on unarmed Palestinians has not been able to erase the memory of the 2006 incursion into Lebanon and the lessons Israel may well be reminded of again.Fewer than 300 Hezbollah fighters using modern shoulder mounted weapons destroyed Israeli tanks and helicopters with ease.

Israel claims they faced an army of 25,000. What you will find is that all news of the Israeli humiliation in Lebanon and their retaliatory frenzy that resulted in bombing civilian neighborhoods in Beirut have been wiped from history, the Internet and, to some, “the sands of time.”

Not all have forgotten.

Gaza and international law

Every day, weapons are being shipped into Gaza, through Egypt, weapons from every Islamic nation other than the “puppet Gulf States.”

The Avalon Project at the Yale Law School describes blockades as legal only so long as they can be effective. The concept of the Gaza blockade is now in direct contravention of all relevant international conventions.

Since the blockade of Gaza requires the full and absolute cooperation of the Egyptian government, cooperation that has obviously ended, currently Israel’s blockade is now classified as a “paper blockade” and has no legal standing.

The Camp David Accords of 1979 were never intended to allow the creation of an apartheid state or for Gaza to become an open-air prison.

The accords, intended to create a lasting framework for peace also clearly established a criteria for renewed conflict.

Today, that conflict could involve nations from Tunis to Jakarta.

Military reality

Exposing the hypocrisy of Israel’s “Iron Dome” or “Iron Yamuka” air defense system requires elementary arithmetic skills, something obviously beyond the typical “international investigative journalist” of the “pop culture media.”

One of the “stealth voices” of Israel’s “fog of war” deception program within the United States is the Daily Beast, a Newsweek “on line” publication owned by Jane Harmon, an Israeli hoping to be nominated to replace Secretary Clinton.

Friends of Harmon and Netanyahu are orchestrating the attacks on Ambassador Susan Rice, the frontrunner for that position, making wild conspiratorial accusations in what has become a “witch hunt” reminiscent of America’s HUAC (House Un-American Activities Committee) fiasco of the 1950s.

Harmon’s publication, considered “liberal and progressive,” stated the following today:

The actual basis of the “Iron Dome system is the PAC-3 or “Patriot 3” missile system, an advanced system capable of tracking incoming ballistic missiles in addition to American AEGIS destroyers which were to be “posted” off the Israeli cost.The naval contingent, as some may note, is not only “not there,” but not “on the way there” either.

Israel also builds a domestic system capable of limited interception of short-range missiles, 1980s technology “with lipstick.”

The missiles the Rafael system were designed to intercept are the former Soviet “Vietnam Era” Grad missiles such as those used in Afghanistan against American airbases, not those Hamas is using which possess nearly half the range of the German V2 rockets used against London during World War II.

Hiding this fact from the public is what media assets, who publish unverified press releases from Israel as fact, have done to help prolong a conflict an informed Israeli population would reconsider.

Israel is intercepting some missiles fired by Hamas, but they are using their American supplied Patriot 3 batteries to do it.

Continual claims are made that Israel’s “Iron Dome” system missiles are expensive at $50,000 each. Their actual cost, for missiles that successfully intercept less than 25% of the time, is more like $125,000.

Real “high probability” intercepts are done by the American missiles.

As Hamas has fired, at this writing, over 1200 missiles into Israel, many of them M-75 long range rockets capable of reaching beyond Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, missiles Israel openly admits it never planned for, it is also only logical to admit that claims of intercepts are equally inaccurate.

What does an American missile cost? Here is what Global Research says on that, comparing the PAC-3 to the PAC-2, a missile far more advanced than the Israeli “Tamir.”

When we looked for the details as promised, following the links provided, we received error messages. The reality behind the “Iron Dome” is best described as “smoke and mirrors.”

The real cost of defending Israel from retribution for their bombing of the civilian population of Gaza is in the hundreds of millions of dollars.

Israel, using American money of course, is spending an average of five million dollars on everything that comes out of Gaza, from the “bottle rockets” that cost a few dollars to the long-range M 75 missiles that are able to strike any target in Israel.

The key, of course, is the lying.

The Iron Dome uses American missiles designed to intercept ICBMs, not small artillery rockets used in salvo.

It is not just an economy of scale; it is the nature of the mission. If a Patriot 3 launcher with four missiles is emptied, costing millions of dollars, on two Hamas “kitchen sink” rockets a third of an “iron dome” battery is out of service until resupplied and rearmed.

The “domestic” systems, touted to the press are simply there for “cover and deception.”

The actual system itself has been overwhelmed from the first.

With 900 rockets fired initially and all subject to attempted intercept, Israel has spent its entire missile inventory 20 times over.

This means Israel is utterly incapable of responding to any sustained missile attack.

Thus, the issue isn’t whether Israel is hitting 100% of rockets fired but that they fire on only one in ten rockets launched from Gaza.

How armed is Gaza?

America has given Israel an excellent air force with advanced fighters. Israeli pilots are well trained. They have to be.

They bomb their own people every day and have been doing so for years.

There is now reason to believe that a significant number of advanced MANPAD (shoulder fired) air defense missiles enter Gaza each hour.

The outpouring of support for groups defending the beleaguered population of Gaza may well have opened the armories of more than one newly freed Islamic state in defense of their brothers.

Advanced bombing systems in the F-16 combined with counter-measures can defeat such systems “most of the time” but obviously failed with an Israeli F-16 was shot down over Gaza this week.

Israel also had an armed drone downed, a major escalation that makes a ground attack on Gaza potentially more costly.

If two MANPAD’s are in Gaza, are there a hundred or a thousand? Though shooting down an F 16 may be difficult but not impossible, downing Israeli helicopters is relatively simple and intelligence sources indicate that Kornet missiles, effective against most armoured vehicles, helicopters and troop concentrations are plentiful.

In order to counteract this level of resistance, it would be necessary to withdraw Israel’s top divisions from the Golan Heights where they are currently engaged in daily exchanges with Syria.

This leaves “second and third tier” units which are more likely to suffer far higher casualties or, worse still, break and run as was seen in Lebanon in 2006.

Being a “junk yard dog” used to be easy when only Israel had “teeth.”

Conclusion

Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan was correct in his assessment that this is no longer “2008.” Israel’s actions in Gaza are radicalizing Egypt, destabilizing Saudi Arabia and the Persian Gulf States and will quicken the end of Jordan’s servile kleptocracy.

What will be left is Israel, dependent on India, flanked between Pakistan and China, dependent on Britain, France and Germany, nations buried in debt crisis and instability and dependent on the United States, a nation increasingly aware that Israel’s “knife” has been in her back for decades.