The miracle of the Iranian missile shipment

It's been a busy week for Benjamin Netanyahu. The Israeli PM has spent a few days in America, addressing the AIPAC loyalists, having meetings in Washington, and generally rallying all who will listen to the Likudnik vision first handed down by Moses all those millenia ago.

It's been a tough sell. Like it or not, BDS is gaining traction. Talks with the Palestinians may not be going anywhere, but the mere fact of talks is severely discomforting for Netanyahu. And then there are the Iranians.

You'd think that Netanyahu's turn at the UN last year, with that spiffy nuke schematic as a teaching aid, would have convinced the world once and for all of the message the PM has been shouting from the rooftops for well over twenty years now; that the Iranians are mere months from a bomb!

But instead of bombing the evil Iranian empire to ratshit, Obama opens a dialogue with them?!

Yes, these have been dark days indeed...

And then, just  as things are at their darkest, with a stroke of impeccable timing, the Almighty arranges to have the Israeli Navy stumble upon a shipment of Iranian missiles destined for Gaza!

WHAT A MIRACLE!

The world once again witnesses the perfidy of the Persians. Talking nice in Vienna about nukes while shipping Syrian missiles to the Palestinians to rain down on innocent Israeli civilians...  And the Palestinians are no less duplicitous, talking two state solution while secretly planning the elimination of the other state.

Were these missiles to fall into the hands of the Gaza rocketeers they could hit Tel Aviv!

It's a compelling story. Unfortunately it has more holes in it than the last Gaza farmer to wander too close to the fence.

Lets look at a map:



In the first place, that's one hell of a long trip to make just so Gaza militants can fire rockets at Tel Aviv. If the the goal of the Iranian terror-masterminds is to hit Tel Aviv with missiles, the missiles allegedly seized could do that from the Lebanese border. They could be delivered in an afternoon by truck instead of this months-long odyssey by sea.

Secondly, the Lebanese border is effectively controlled by Iranian ally Hezbollah, who already have plenty of missiles according to the highest levels of IDF intelligence. They could readily hit Tel Aviv anytime the mood seized them. No circuitous shipping extravaganza required. In fact, given the hundreds of thousands already in their possession, they wouldn't seem to have any urgent need for more, but this fact would undermine the story's "we have saved Tel Aviv from a terrorist missile attack" fear factor.

Finally, relations between Iran and Hamas have been less than cordial for the past couple of years. They are effectively fighting on opposite sides in the Syria conflict. The idea that Iran would be shipping weapons to its enemies is just foolishness.

So maybe it wasn't a miracle from up high after all, but just a well-timed PR stunt to discredit Iran.

There are any number of more plausible destinations for those rockets; anti-government rebels in Egypt or Saudi Arabia or rebel groups on the African side of the Red Sea just to name a couple of more obvious ones.

But it's a beautiful story, and the AIPAC faithful are gonna love it.