Israel getting ready to hit Iran?

Two Tzahal (Israel Defense Force) soldiers walk casually on the Golan Heights.

Recently the chief of staff of the Israel Defense Forces (Tzahal), Rav Aluf
Benny Gantz, demanded and got from the Knesset the authority to call up
22 battalions of reservists. Earlier this week he called up six of
them. Today, WND‘s G2 Bulletin said
where Gantz put them. He ordered “most” of them to the Camp David
Treaty Line between the Sinai and the Negev, and sent the rest to the
Golan Heights, southwest of Damascus.

The Golan Heights, especially the bluff that overlooks Damascus, has always been thick with Tzahal.
Last year, they repulsed several Syrian civilians who tried to knock
down the fence and cross the 1973 armistice line. But the Tzahal
haven’t invested the Negev as heavily. While Hosni Mubarak ran Egypt,
the Sinai-Negev border stayed quiet. Now Egypt is in turmoil. A
temporary military council runs Egypt now. That council has pulled
Egyptian troops back deep into the Sinai. This has left Bedouin and
Al-Qa’ida groups free to infiltrate the border and kill and maim Israelis on the Israel side.

So on its face, the Tzahal has good reason to reinforce the Negev. But the reasons might go further than worrying about the Sinai becoming lawless.

The Orot Rabin power station, south of Caesaria Maritima. Israel’s oil might make this obsolete. Photo: CNAV

Two weeks ago, an Egyptian company canceled
a 20-year deal to sell natural gas to Israel. That deal still had 13
years to run. But terrorists groups have blown up the Egypt-Israel gas
pipeline fourteen times since the Arab Spring. Now the Egyptians say
that Israel has failed to pay for its natural gas for four months
running. Israeli officials deny not paying its bill.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu insisted, on the day after Egypt turned off the gas, that Egypt acted out of nothing more than business reasons. But other officials spoke vaguely of bad “implications” for the Camp David Treaty. They probably mean that some candidates for President of Egypt have promised to break that treaty to get votes.
Officials at the Israeli company that bought the gas said that they
were thinking of suing the Egyptians or pressing them in some other way.

That was two weeks ago. No one has said a word since.

Israel was getting 40 percent of its natural gas through this
pipeline. The rest, presumably, comes from a vast new natural gas field
in the northeastern Mediterranean that Israel found
back in the winter of 2010. Hank Pellisier of the World Future Society
suggested in October of 2010 that Israel would have plenty of gas for
its own needs and perhaps even enough to export to Greece or Turkey.
That is, if its navy could protect those fields from attack.

The Orot Rabin plant
in Hadera, along the Coastal Road, can convert between coal and oil.
Israel now burns coal there, coal that it buys from Australia and South
Africa. (Israel also has three other power plants that burn coal.)

Finally, the Texas-based Zion Oil and Gas Company has prospected in northern Israel and the Jordan Valley for years. Thus far, they have yet to strike oil.

G2 Bulletin speculates that Israel might want to recapture
the Sinai to regain control of its oil wells. The Camp David Treaty
grants Israel the right of first refusal on oil from those wells. Egypt
agreed to this to get the Sinai back. (Israel captured it in the first
days of the Six-day War.) But now Egypt has canceled the gas deal, Will
they cancel the oil deal next?

But Israel has another, more pressing reason for concern: Iran.

The Islamic Republic of Iran has never made a secret of its hatred of
Israel or its contempt for diplomatic norms. “Iran won’t play the
international-relations game,” said an Army reserve major in 1980,
during the “Iran Hostage Crisis.” For years, Iran’s figurehead
President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, has vowed to “wipe Israel off the map.”
The real powers-that-be in Iran, the ayatollahs, have never once
censured him for talking that way.

Dwight Kehoe of Tea Party Advocacy Tracking Hub
(TPATH) said today that the Jewish state will not wait for the
Iranians to fire a missile at them, or to give a bomb to someone else to
do the same thing. They will strike Iran, and soon. (Arnaud de
Borchgrave said
earlier that Netanyahu feels that the American election campaign is the
perfect time to strike. In other words, he dares putative President
Barack H. Obama to criticize his country for trying to stop another
Holocaust.)

What say you? Follow the links, and decide: are we seeing the lead-up to the next Arab-Israeli War? Or maybe Ezekiel's (chh. 38-9) War?