As Binyamin Netanyahu enters his final term as Likud leader, he will likely be remembered merely as a pale emulation of his predecessor, Ariel Sharon [image left]. The exception being that Netanyahu has not quite earned the degree of opprobrium from the international community as that accorded to the late, failed commander of the Christian militia who carried out the bloody massacre at the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps, in 1982, when under his control, and who subsequently provoked the Second Intifada at the Al-Aqsa Mosque.

But Netanyahu is still looked at with some revulsion by many in the Diaspora who see him as the misguided disciple of the out-dated, revisionist-Zionist policies that claim all of the Occupied Palestinian Territories as the property of the Israeli state and who has consequently engendered anti-Semitic feeling over much of Europe and the world to a degree not seen since the 1930s.

That has been the greatest blow to World Jewry from a politician who has made no provision whatsoever for the future of the Israeli state, or of the Diaspora, who will have to withstand the inevitable consequences of the hatred that Likud’s right-wing policies have engendered within indigenous Arab communities throughout the Middle East.

The myopic view of this ‘Jabotinsky’ Zionist dogma is a tragedy for both Jew and Arab alike and will likely end in a final conflict that will make the Jewish state of 1948-(2025?) a mere footnote in future Middle East historiography.

It has been a unique opportunity that has tragically been squandered by a cohort of ambitious politicians who, in the end, cared more for personal power than the future welfare of their own community; the Jewish Diaspora and the ethics of Judaism.

What could have been a miracle of co-operative endeavour between immigrant Jew and indigenous Arab, has culminated in a fortified, American-armed, Western militarised enclave in the Muslim Middle East that has achieved the distinction of becoming the epicentre of hatred from those it has occupied and abused for over half a century.

In addition, of course, to being a nuclear-armed state outside the provisions of the NPT and not subject to any inspection by the IAEA but, nevertheless and astonishingly, allowed free trade access to European markets.

(c) EUNewsdesk April 2016 London