Jose de Sousa Saramago, a Portuguese poet and the winner of the 1998 Nobel Prize in Literature, wrote: “Not everything is as it seems, and not everything that seems is. Between being and seeming there is always a point of agreement, as if being and seeming were two inclined planes that converge and become one. There is a slope and the possibility of sliding down that slope, and when that happens, one reaches a point at which being and seeming meet.”

The current Iran war and the reasons for it are well described by Saramago’s (1922-2010) observations.

When looking at why the US president made the decision to invade Iran, the commonly held theory is that while it is true that Iran has been threatening both the US and Israel ever since the Mullahs came to power in 1979, it was Netanyahu’s constant pushing that convinced Trump to take the plunge.

There is no question that Netanyahu, as he said a day after Iran’s supreme leader Ali Khamenei was killed in a wave of US-Israeli strikes, that his close ties with Washington had enabled Israel to “do what I have long aspired to do for 40 years: to strike the terrorist regime decisively.”  Of course, the anti-Israel media jumped on that as proof that it was Netanyahu’s prodding that started this war and that was what convinced Trump to attack.

However, not everything is as it seems, and not everything that seems is.  For the record, this is how Israel has felt about Iran ever since the constant mantra of the Iranian regime has been “Death to Israel…Death to America.”  But it is totally unreasonable and illogical to take the position that Israel, a country of 10 million people, so small that its name does not even fit into the country’s map on most globes, could convince the leader of a........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)