A war of rhetoric is going on in the Gulf. Mahmoud Ahmedinejad has earned more ears than he deserves while the real threats emanating from Israel, the only undeclared nuclear power of the region, have largely gone unnoticed in international circles.

Former Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu talking to the Yediot Aharonot newspaper last month said "I view the development of the Iranian nuclear (programme) as a paramount threat and as a real danger to the future of the state of Israel." He demanded of the Israeli government to act in the spirit of the late premier Menachem Begin, who ordered an air-strike on Iraq's Osirak nuclear reactor in 1981.

He said, "Israel needs to do everything to prevent Iran from developing a nuclear threat against it." To counter the threat, Iran, on the other hand, issued through its foreign office a statement matching the Israelis in rhetoric and vitriol. It warned Israel of heavy consequences if its nuclear installations were attacked.

"The Islamic republic is a tough target and there would be heavy consequences," said Ali Larijani, secretary of Iran's Supreme National Security Council, close on the heels of Netanyahu's demand. Matters came to a boil when a couple of months ago President Ahmedinijad said that if the Europeans had treated the Jews badly, they had to compensate them at their own expense, not at the expense of the region.

He had also baldly stated that Israel should be removed from the map of the Middle East. He meant that if Germany and Austria believed Jews were massacred during World War II, the state of Israel should have been established on their soil.

Iran was merely announcing its long held stand on Israel and there was nothing new in the remarks of Dr Ahmedinejad. They were largely for domestic consumption and were not meant to destabilise the region by orchestrating the drums of war, which they are being seen as doing by many lobbies in the West.

In the background of the nuclear negotiations going on between Iran and the IAEA and between Iran and the EU3 nexus, such declara-tions may be construed undiplomatic, especially coming from the president of a country. However, the world understands that Israel and its surrounding states have never acceded to diplomatic niceties in the past and the exchange of vitriol between Israel and its neighbours has been a usual recurrence. The world at large may well believe that Iran might perhaps be overly harsh to a tiny, wronged state in the region. However, the facts belie any such
perception.

Firstly, the tiny state is not tiny at all. It is, in fact, virtually the fifty-second state of the USA. For the last ten years, it has been the largest aid recipient from Washington. With this massive aid from the US, Israel has built institutions and developed its society, albeit at the cost of millions of Palestinians. That aid that should have been directed to poorer countries in Africa, Latin America and Asia, instead of enriching the already affluent sections of Israeli society.

There is yet another dimension to the war of words.. We need to analyse whether the threat is real or imagined.

Israel has a history of taking arbitrary action that endangers peace in the region. It irreparably attacked and destroyed the Iraqi nuclear installations in 1981 with on the behest of the US and the major capitals in the West. Quite repeatedly, it has launched ground assaults on Lebanon and through Mossad has consistently tried to destabilise Lebanese governments.

Arbitrarily it has maintained a corridor on the Israeli-Lebanese border inside Lebanon against all international norms in order to defy Lebanese territorial integrity on the flimsy grounds of Israeli security. Its agents have always been active in Syria and it is still holding on to the Golan Heights and has always been adamant not to discuss the Syrian security issue and withdraw from Syrian areas it captured during the 1967 and 1971 wars with its neighbours.

With the Hashemite kingdom of Jordan, it has the relationship of a divorced  wife: it wants to keep it under its cloak without acknowledg-ing its own responsibilities towards millions of Palestinians living in makeshift camps in a country that is heavily dependent on foreign aid.

On the other hand, since the 1979 revolution in Iran the country has just been stating its policy on Israel and has never taken any step to destabilise the country or endanger its security. Iran's stand on Israel has largely been academic.

It has not only been challenging the legitimacy of the state, rather calling in  question the veracity of the very episode whose  propaga-tion had brought about the idea of the creation of Israel in the Middle East. Many believe that the massacre of Jews in the Second World War shook the West's conscience leading to the creation of a nation state as a haven for the displaced and dispossessed Jews of the world. This is not strictly true.

The roots of the creation of Israel can be traced back to the Balfour Declaration prepared in March 1916 and issued in November 1917, during World War I, by the British statesman Arthur James Balfour, then foreign secretary in the cabinet of prime minister David Lloyd George. The document expressed the British government's approval of Zionism with the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people. The letter committed the British government to making the "best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object"

The Zionists got a blank cheque and they have been enchasing it prodigiously by playing on the West's prejudice and bias against Palestinians and Islam. No one should twist facts to give a shot in the arm to Zionism. The difference between Jews and Zionists should also be maintained. Iran's vitriol is not directed against Jews; it is against the Zionists. Currently Israel is under the influence of Zionist zealots who like other extremists will do any damage to humanity and human institutions in the name of religion.

If Israel indulges in any adventurism in the Gulf, America and its thinking, God-fearing Christians must be careful not be dragged into a fire not of their making.