He that passeth by, and meddleth with strife not his own, is like one that taketh a dog by the ears. (Proverbs 26:17)

In the ongoing Breaking Israel News poll, which asks “Should the US use military force against Syria?”, 68% of BIN readers have expressed their opposition to American intervention in the war-torn country.

Despite Israeli officials being ordered by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to not make any official public statements on Syria, Israeli minister Tzipi Livni called on the United Nations on Wednesday, to stop talking and start acting.

“The UN, whose motto from day one has been ‘never again,’ must intervene,” said Livni, speaking at a convention of the Israel Bar Association in Herzliya. “It’s not enough to make moving speeches. It must fight for the values with deeds as well. The events in Syria must be destroyed while they’re still small.”

The only other minister to defy Netanyahu’s decree was Housing Minister Uri Ariel (Jewish Home), complaining bitterly in an Army Radio interview last week that Assad was a cowardly murderer “who needs to be taken care of, already.” He then earned a slap on the hand by Netanyahu, who told him at the cabinet table that attacking the president of the United States did not serve Israel’s “security interests.”

Livni and Ariel’s statements are not in line with the sentiments of the majority of the Israeli public, who are more concerned about a reprisal attack on the Holy Land, as well as assisting the Syrian rebels who are backed by Al-Qaeda.

According to The Times of Israel, the CIA began supplying the rebels with arms approximately two weeks ago.

In light of the Obama’s most recent speech to the American people, an attack on Syrian President Bashar Assad seems farther than ever. In his speech, Obama backtracked on his previous declaration that Assad had crossed an American “red line” by using chemical weapons against his own people.

According to the Times, earlier this week, US Secretary of State John Kerry, in an apparent offhand remark, suggested that direct US military intervention could be averted if Syria agreed to place all of its chemical weapons under international control. Russia, which has long been an ally of the Assad regime, pitched the idea to Syria, whose foreign minister, Walid Moallem, welcomed the proposal.

The initiative prompted Obama to announce that he would be putting on the back burner plans to appeal to US lawmakers for approval for a military strike.

In a New York Times op-ed on Sunday, Russian President Vladimir Putin. According to The Times of Israel, Putin penned that a potential strike by the US against the Bashar Assad regime would create more victims and could spread the conflict beyond Syria as well as “unleash a new wave of terrorism,” wrote the Russian leader.

“It could undermine multilateral efforts to resolve the Iranian nuclear problem and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and further destabilize the Middle East and North Africa.”

He said that a US strike, without the unanimous consent of the UN Security Council, “could throw the entire system of international law and order out of balance.”

Putin repeated his contention that there is every reason to believe that Syrian rebels, not Assad’s government, were responsible for a poison gas attack on a Damascus suburb in August that, Washington says, killed 1,429 people. Opposition forces may have perpetrated the attacks “to provoke intervention by their powerful foreign patrons,” he said.

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