Maybe I’m in denial. Or maybe I’m naive. Even though I trust and respect Richard Silverstein, I don’t buy his latest leak: Bibi’s Secret War Plan. It’s the Israeli government’s newest psychological operation. 

Silverstein writes:

In the past few days, I received an Israeli briefing document outlining Israel’s war plans against Iran. The document was passed to me by a high-level Israeli source who received it from an IDF officer.

He goes on to explain that his source hopes “to expose the argument and plans” the Bibi-Barak duo are making behind the scenes.

You can read some of the details of what Silverstein and his leak call Bibi’s war plans on Silverstein’s blog. To sum it up, the thing basically reads like a trashy action novel–which bolsters Silverstein’s assessment that it is a “sales pitch for war.”

I don’t doubt that the document is real. I don’t doubt that it came from somewhere inside  the Israeli government. What I doubt is the veracity of Silverstein’s source’s claim that this document is being used to “persuade high-level Israeli officials.”

It’s not an attack that Bibi’s peddling. It’s the idea of one. And the people he’s really pitching it to is international community, via the media.

While Bibi might talk like a duck, he isn’t one. He has admitted that sanctions against Iran are working and he knows Israel will pay a huge political price for an attack on Iran. Bibi is a do-nothing, status-quo Prime Minister. He’s not going to make any big moves. And both peace and war are big moves.

That’s why the document, as Silverstein says, was shared with “selected journalists who are in the trusted inner media circle.” The media is simply a tool to achieve two things: 1) to pressure the international community into pressuring Iran to stop its nuclear program so that Israel can remain the region’s mightiest military power; 2) to divert international attention from the occupation of the Palestinian territories and the Syrian Golan Heights.

You see? I’ve even fallen prey to the trap. Rather than writing a post about the Israeli army’s raid on the Palestinian village Kufr Qaddoum, during which a minor was arrested; rather than writing about the Palestinian hunger strikers (yes, there are still Palestinians on hunger strike!); rather than writing about the fact that Arab farmers in the Israeli-occupied Syrian Golan Heights get one-fifth the amount of water than their Jewish counterparts (even though they pay taxes to the Israeli government); rather than writing about infuriating tax hikes and the outrageous cost of living; rather than writing about the fact that Israeli demolitions of Palestinian and Bedouin structures in the West Bank are at an all-time high (according to the latest numbers from the UN); rather than writing about any of that, I just wasted my time on Bibi’s massive game of “hold me back.”

UPDATE: It just keeps getting weirder. Apparently at least part of the text that Silverstein received first appeared on Fresh several days ago. Silverstein claims that he has the original document and that the text he received was quite different than the Fresh version which, Silverstein says, was “embellished.” The Fresh text, however, was published with the caveat that the scenario is “based on foreign and open sources only.”