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Strategic deterioration in US-Israel ties means less hegemony: Analyst

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US relations with Israel are deteriorating rapidly and that means a decline in their hegemony inside the Middle East region, says an analyst.

The testy relationship between the United States and Israel appears to have hit new lows after a week of jibes over the Israeli settlement expansions which culminated Wednesday when a senior Obama administration official described Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as a “chickenshit.”

Washington has expressed frustration with an Israeli plan to build more than 1,000 settler units in the occupied Palestinian lands.

US State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki said that, “if Israel wants to live in a peaceful society, they need to take steps that will reduce tensions. Moving forward with this sort of action would be incompatible with the pursuit of peace.”

However, Netanyahu attacked the State Department, saying US officials were “detached from reality.”

“This latest spat, argument, between the Obama administration and the government of Netanyahu… is further example of the strategic deterioration in relationship between the United States and Israel,” said Kevin Ovenden, journalist and activist with the Stop the War Coalition in Britain.

Since 1967, Israel has been “a centerpiece of US imperial strategy in the Middle East,” he told Press TV on Wednesday.

“But in the course of the last twenty years,” Ovenden continued, “We’ve seen a growing tension between, if you like, watchdog of imperialist interests in the Middle East and the imperialist powers themselves, between Washington and Tel Aviv.”

The analyst noted that former president George W. Bush sought a “paper commitment from Tel Aviv to peace with the Palestinians” in order to sell the upcoming wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

And President Barack “Obama wants a similar agreement of verbal gymnastics from Tel Aviv for the same reason; he wants to use the ISIS crisis… to reinsert the US military inside the Middle East,” he added. “As he does that, he wants a cover and saying the US has got some kind of progress over the Palestinian problem as they say it.”

But the underlying logic of the Zionist entity is “the continued expansion of a virtually exclusive Jewish state at the expense of the Palestinians,” Ovenden said.

This Israeli “intransigence,” he said, presents an “absolutely critical dilemma facing ongoing US hegemony inside the region and Israel’s ability to act as the suzerain of US interests.”

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