So, we must try to view events dynamically, and not just through the literal bubble of today’s distractions: If Netanyahu and Defence Minister Gallant – consumed by the desire to avenge Saturday’s events – overreach, Israel may find itself in existential peril.
Israel is surrounded by tens of thousands of smart missiles and swarm drones. An attack on Hizbullah or Iran constitutes the ‘Red Pill’ for Israel. Will Netayahu, consumed with anger and panic, take a gamble? And if he, Gallant and Gantz reach for the Red Pill, might the roof fall in?
Alastair Crooke
I wrote last week that the root to the current U.S. conflict with Russia was the omission, at the end of WW2, of a written treaty setting out the boundary and definition of western ‘interests’, and pari passu, those of Russia cum China’s security and commercial interests in the Asian Heartland.
Everything was left vague and unwritten in the post-Cold war euphoria -so as to give the U.S. room to manoeuvre – which it took ‘in spades’. It manoeuvred to remilitarise Germany and to march NATO ever forward towards, and into, the heartland. As many had warned, this U.S. approach ultimately would mean war.
And sure enough, asymmetric ‘war fronts’ have been opened horizontally across many spheres with Russia’s Special Operation in Ukraine. Though ostensibly focussed on stymieing NATO’s stealth absorption of Ukraine, it also opened Russia’s main front – that of containing the NATO debouchment from penetrating further.
Today, all eyes are focussed on the widening ‘war’ in the Middle East. Many questions are asked, but the principal one is ‘Why?’
Here, we find the issues are eerily similar. At the end of WW2, the West wanted its European Jews to have a ‘homeland’, and so in 1947, Palestine was peremptorily divided between Jews and Arabs.
The predominant narrative in the West has been that the travails and wars that segued from that event – particularly today’s confrontation in Israel/Palestine – result simply from Arab States’ perverse inability to come to terms with the existence of the State of Israel. Many in the West see this as irrational at the least – or as a fundamental cultural flaw, at worst.
Well, as was the case in respect to the European post-war military situation, nothing was formally agreed in respect to Jews and Arabs living on the one plot of land. The 1993 Oslo Accords were an attempt at some agreement, but again everything was vague, and the crucially master security ‘key’ to the whole Accord rested wholly at the discretion of the Israelis.
Plainly, this was intended to give Israel maximum room for manoeuvre. More than that, it was intended that Israel should have the strategic ‘edge’ – not just the political ‘edge’, but the U.S. had pledged to ensure that Israel would have the military ‘edge’ over its neighbours too.
Put bluntly, the objective of bringing Arab States to accept Israel’s presence was never pursued, or else it was compelled by military and financial measures (Syria, Iraq, Lebanon and Iran). Except in the case of Egypt, through returning the Sanai to Cairo. The current iteration of the ‘Abraham normalisation’ (coming to terms with Israel) however, effectively throws the Palestinians ‘under the bus’ for the sake of Saudi compliance to normalization.
Just as NATO surging forward was intended to put Asia under the U.S. sway, so Greater Israeli’s cultural hegemony in the Middle East – it was believed in U.S. Beltway circles – would place the Middle East under western sway also.
Be seeing you
MCViewPoint 