The current Iraqi uprising started with the burnt American corpses hanging from a bridge outside Fallujah. The killers of the Americans claimed vengance for the death of Hamas leader Sheik Yassin at the hands of the Israelis. Now the Israelis have assassinated Sheik Yassin's replacement. I wonder if the Iraqis will notice?

Hamas leader Rantissi killed in IAF strike in Gaza City

Hamas leader Abdel Aziz Rantisi was killed in an Israeli helicopter missile strike on his car Saturday evening. Two other people were killed in the strike, witnesses said. A burned, destroyed car was left on the road near Rantisi's house and one badly burned body was removed from the car by paramedics. Witnesses said there were three people in the car at the time. Palestinians ran into the street following the strike and called for revenge. Rantisi was the newly-appointed head of the militant group in Gaza, following the assassination of Hamas founder and spiritual leader Sheikh Ahmed Yassin in a similar Israeli strike last month. He one of the most hard-line members of the militant movement, which rejects all compromise with Israel and calls for the destruction of the state. Israel had previously tried to kill Rantisi in a helicopter strike on his car on June 10. In a retaliatory attack the next day, 16 Israelis were killed in a Hamas suicide bombing in Jerusalem.

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How many Israelis and Americans will die because of this? Shall we send thank you cards to Sharon?

[Update: 1:10 PM]
Daily Kos mentioned this article in relation to Rantisi's assassination. It's a Salon article so you have to watch an ad. Do so. It's important for the reason mentioned at Daily Kos:

If you haven't seen it, Juan Cole has an article about the relationship between Iraq and Israel re US standing in the Arab world and linkage of policy.

Turning into Israel?
Outraged by President Bush's embrace of Ariel Sharon and the bloody U.S. assault on Fallujah, the Arab world is linking America's occupation with Israel's. That's ominous.
by Juan Cole

One year after Baghdad fell to victorious U.S. troops, the Americans had to conquer the country all over again. The great rebellion of April 2004 expelled the U.S. from much of the capital, humiliated coalition allies, cut supply and communications lines to the south, and revealed a reservoir of popular hatred for the U.S. among both some Sunni Arabs in Fallujah and some Shiites in the cities. But perhaps the most ominous development for the U.S. was that the events tied together two occupations and two intifadas, or popular uprisings -- Iraq and Palestine. In his press conference of April 13, President Bush gave several reasons for cracking down on Iraqi insurgents. He said their motivation was the same as those who set off bombs in Jerusalem; he tied them to the murder of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, executed by al-Qaida in part for being Jewish. He also cited Shiite radical Muqtada al-Sadr's support for the Palestinian Hamas organization and the Lebanese Shiite Hezbollah party. He gave as one reason for having gone to war against Saddam Hussein the former dictator's support for Palestinian terrorists. In this speech, he presented the Iraq war and its violent aftermath as an extension of the Israeli struggle to subjugate the Palestinians and Hezbollah. Before the war, Bush connected nonexistent dots between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaida. Now he and his neoconservative brain trust are mapping the Iraq conflict onto the Likud Party agenda in Palestine. This time, however, it's a self-fulfilling prophecy -- and one that will have devastating repercussions for U.S. interests in both Iraq and the entire Arab world.

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While I'm at it, I might as well add this article that describes the world Sharon and Bush have in mind for us. Something to look forward to.

Inside the bubble
Late last year, the award-winning novelist Linda Grant moved to Tel Aviv for four months. How could people bear to live there, she wanted to know, amid daily reports of violence, corruption and despair? What she discovered was a society in a state of profound denial - and the horrifying possibility that there may be no solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict

Every morning in Tel Aviv, I walked down the street, bought my copy of Ha'aretz from the Australian newsagent and marathon runner, Paul Smith ("Doesn't sound very Jewish, does it?"), went into a small cafe, was served my cappuccino by Ma'or, the skinny-hipped surfer dude whose mother came from Turkey and whose father was from Spain, and I opened, with trepidation, my newspaper. It was an excruciating experience. In story after story Israel emerged as a society in which every institution of the state was in a dire condition, at best incompetent, at worst corrupt, only a few tattered scraps left of the early high ideals of Zionism. Members of the Knesset, ministers, party leaders, prime ministers and generals were routinely exposed as liars and crooks; the army were lying, the police were lying, the government was lying. Soldiers spoke to me of a "mental scratch" - a psychological scar as a result of serving in the army of occupation. A woman who did her army service during the first intifada told me how she was inducted with boys from high school, and saw them cross what Israelis call a "red line" - holding a gun to the head of a terrified child, humiliating a Palestinian teacher at a checkpoint, killing an unarmed civilian. "When they came home the red line stayed crossed, they began to treat their girlfriends and wives that way, then their own children," she said. "And these were people I thought I knew, people I'd grown up with." [...] After four months in Israel, and hundreds of hours of conversations, I found not a scrap of evidence that Jewish Israelis will ever agree to a peace deal that will result in them becoming, within a generation or two, a minority dependent on the good-will of a Palestinian majority in a region without democracy or any real human rights. As the novelist David Grossman told me, "There is not enough reassurance in the galaxy for Israelis." In an interview with Ha'aretz in August 2000, Edward Said was asked what would happen to the Jews if they became a minority in a single state: "It worries me a great deal," he said. "The question of what is going to be the fate of the Jews is very difficult for me. I really don't know. It worries me." I also know what some Palestinian friends tell me, that the right of return is deeply embedded in the Palestinian soul and can never be given up, that no leader can sign an agreement on their behalf which would settle it with a cheque instead. What I know about Jewish Israelis, they know about Palestinians. If they are right, then we might have to face the nightmare that the war between the two peoples cannot be concluded, there is no deal that can ever be signed that will not give way, almost at once, to the resumption of the struggle. No US administration, however even-handed, can settle the dispute, or even impose a settlement, over land that can neither be shared nor divided. I left Israel burdened by a sense of horror. A 10-month-old Israeli baby, Netta, sat in her mother's arms on the other side of the aeroplane aisle, smiling and gurgling and oblivious to the heavy storm winds we were passing through as we attempted to land in London. I looked at her and, imagining her future, wondered if it would turn out that there were no solutions, only consequences, all of them tragedies. The most important word in Hebrew is balagan : Oy, a balagan ! What a mess.

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  thanks to Aron's Israel Peace Weblog

What a mess, indeed.

I'm on a roll. Here is Mike Golby's look at the Israeli based US Middle East policy. Mike, by the way, is Our Man in South Africa.

U.S. and Israel Form Unholy Alliance
Middle-Eastern and Asian Fragmentation Key to U.S. Global Strategy

MacAskill is one of countless journalists stuck in a groove that says the U.S. seeks a peaceful transition to 'democracy' in Iraq. It wants no such thing. It has gone in to smash the country, carbonise people who get in its way, render the place ungovernable, divvy it up, occupy it for years and profit hugely from its wealth. Echoing Rebuilding America's Defenses, a September 2000 PNAC strategy document, the Bush Administration's September 2002 National Security Strategy Report calls for a permanent American military presence and domination, through an imperialist Pax Americana, around the world, particularly in the Persian Gulf. Presenting the views of Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Lewis Libby, Paul Wolfowitz, Jeb Bush and business interests including Lockheed-Martin and Cheney's Halliburton, the PNAC states: "The United States has for decades sought to play a more permanent role in Gulf regional security. While the unresolved conflict with Iraq provides the immediate justification, the need for a substantial American military presence in the Gulf transcends the issue of the regime of Saddam Hussein." Need more? This is the stuff of apartheid South Africa. The Nationalists were past masters at the old 'divide and rule' strategy. They used it at every level of government and in every organ of civil society. Israel has used it most successfully to slaughter Palestinians and filthy anti-Semitic foreigners, and it is now being put to effective use by the United States. 'Divide and rule', applied by the National Party, became so entrenched in South African thought it struck me only last night that other societies might be new to its double-dealing, underhand and deadly duplicity. For many years, I've taken for granted an awareness of its use in hobbling the Palestinian cause. The U.S. goal in the region is to smash all dissent by setting neighbour on neighbour. It will exploit any social, religious, and ethnic differences it can find to foster massacres, terror, gangsterism, a fresh market for new guns and anarchy. MacAskill's article is blithely oblivious to this. The U.S. seeks fragmentation or atomisation rather than a threatening stability. Why else would the U.S. bring in Iraqi National Congress leader and international gangster, Ahmed Chalabi? Sentenced in absentia to 22-years in prison for a $200 million banking scam that threatened the Jordanian economy, the U.S. do not expect Chalabi to succeed. They need him as a front. The U.S. does not want secular states of the type built, against overwhelming odds and with uncommon brutality, by Saddam Hussein. Chalabi is a face of convenience, a short-term puppet with a healthy bank balance, no scruples whatsoever, and zero future.

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Sleep well. Sharon is looking out after us.