December 12,
2024
In the famous
lines of Tacitus, Roman historian, “To ravage, to slaughter, to usurp under
false titles, they call empire; and where they make a desert, they call it
peace.”
A boy carries an unexploded Rocket
Propelled Grenade (RPG) at the site of the previous evening's Israeli
airstrike that targeted shipments of weapons that belonged to Syrian
government forces in Qamishli, in mainly Kurdish northeastern Syria, on
December 10, 2024. The UN special envoy for Syria called on Israel on
December 10 to halt its military movements and bombardments in Syria,
after a war monitor reported 300 air strikes since the fall of president
Bashar al-Assad. (Photo by DELIL SOULEIMAN/ (Photo by Delil Souleiman / AFP via Getty Images)
In our age, it
is Israel and the U.S. that make a desert and call it peace.
The story is
simple. In stark violation of international law, Israeli Prime Minister
Benjamin Netanyahu and his ministers claim the right to rule over seven million
Palestinian Arabs. When Israel’s occupation of Palestinian lands leads to
militant resistance, Israel labels the resistance “terrorism” and calls on the
U.S. to overthrow the Middle East governments that back the “terrorists.” The
U.S., under the sway of the Israel Lobby, goes to war on Israel’s behalf.
The fall of
Syria this week is the culmination of the Israel-U.S. campaign against Syria
that goes back to 1996 with Netanyahu’s arrival to office as Prime Minister.
The Israel-U.S. war on Syria escalated in 2011 and 2012, when Barack Obama
covertly tasked the CIA with the overthrow of the Syrian Government in
Operation Timber Sycamore. That effort finally came to “fruition” this week,
after more than 300,000 deaths in the Syrian war since 2011.
Syria’s fall
came swiftly because of more than a decade of crushing economic sanctions, the
burdens of war, the U.S. seizure of Syria’s oil, Russia’s priorities regarding
the conflict in Ukraine, and most immediately, Israel’s attacks on Hezbollah,
which was the key military backstop to the Syrian Government. No doubt Assad
often misplayed his own hand and faced severe internal discontent, but his
regime was targeted for collapse for decades by the U.S. and Israel.
Since 2011, the
Israel-U.S. perpetual war on Syria, including bombing, jihadists, economic
sanctions, U.S. seizure of Syria’s oil fields, and more, has sunk the Syrian
people into misery.
Before the
U.S.-Israel campaign to overthrow Assad began in earnest in 2011, Syria was a
functioning, growing middle-income country. In January 2009, the IMF Executive
Board had this to say:
Executive Directors welcomed Syria’s
strong macroeconomic performance in recent years, as manifested in the rapid
non-oil GDP growth, comfortable level of foreign reserves, and low and
declining government debt. This performance reflected both robust regional
demand and the authorities’ reform efforts to shift toward a more market- based
economy.
Since 2011, the
Israel-U.S. perpetual war on Syria, including bombing, jihadists, economic
sanctions, U.S. seizure of Syria’s oil fields, and more, has sunk the Syrian
people into misery.
In the immediate
two days following the collapse of the government, Israel conducted about 480
strikes across Syria, and completely destroyed the Syrian fleet in Latakia.
Pursuing his expansionist agenda, Prime Minister Netanyahu illegally claimed
control over the demilitarized buffer zone in the Golan Heights and declared
that the Golan Heights will be a part of the State of Israel “for eternity.”
Netanyahu’s
ambition to transform the region through war, which dates back almost three
decades, is playing out in front of our eyes. In a press conference on December
9th, the Israeli prime minister boasted of an “absolute victory,” justifying
the on-going genocide in Gaza and escalating violence throughout the region:
I ask you, just think, if we had acceded
to those who told us time and again: '"The war must be stopped"– we
would not have entered Rafah, we would not have seized the Philadelphia
Corridor, we would not have eliminated Sinwar, we would not have surprised our
enemies in Lebanon and the entire world in a daring operation-stratagem, we
would not have eliminated Nasrallah, we would not have destroyed Hezbollah's
underground network, and we would not have exposed Iran's weakness. The
operations that we have carried out since the beginning of the war are
dismantling the axis brick by brick.
The long history
of Israel’s campaign to overthrow the Syrian Government is not widely
understood, yet the documentary record is clear. Israel’s war on Syria began
with U.S. and Israeli neoconservatives in 1996, who fashioned a “Clean Break”
strategy for the Middle East for Netanyahu as he came to office. The core of
the “clean break” strategy called for the Israel (and the US) to reject “land
for peace,” the idea that Israel would withdraw from the occupied Palestinian
lands in return for peace. Instead, Israel would retain the occupied
Palestinian lands, rule over the Palestinian people in an Apartheid state,
step-by-step ethnically cleanse the state, and enforce so-called “peace for
peace” by overthrowing neighboring governments that resisted Israel’s land
claims.
The long history
of Israel’s campaign to overthrow the Syrian Government is not widely
understood, yet the documentary record is clear.
The Clean Break
strategy asserts, “Our claim to the land—to which we have clung for hope for
2000 years—is legitimate and noble,” and goes on to state, “Syria challenges
Israel on Lebanese soil. An effective approach, and one with which American can
sympathize, would be if Israel seized the strategic initiative along its
northern borders by engaging Hizballah, Syria, and Iran, as the principal
agents of aggression in Lebanon…”
In his 1996 book
Fighting Terrorism, Netanyahu set out the new strategy. Israel would not fight
the terrorists; it would fight the states that support the terrorists. More
accurately, it would get the US to do Israel’s fighting for it. As he
elaborated in 2001:
The first and most crucial thing to
understand is this: There is no international terrorism without the support of
sovereign states.… Take away all this state support, and the entire scaffolding
of international terrorism will collapse into dust.
Netanyahu’s
strategy was integrated into U.S. foreign policy. Taking out Syria was always a
key part of the plan. This was confirmed to General Wesley Clark after 9/11. He
was told, during a visit at the Pentagon, that “we’re going to attack and
destroy the governments in seven countries in five years—we’re going to start
with Iraq, and then we’re going to move to Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia,
Sudan and Iran.” Iraq would be first, then Syria, and the rest. (Netanyahu’s
campaign for the Iraq War is spelled out in detail in Dennis Fritz’s new book,
Deadly Betrayal. The role of the Israel Lobby is spelled out in Ilan Pappé’s
new book, Lobbying for Zionism on Both Sides of the Atlantic). The insurgency
that hit U.S. troops in Iraq set back the five-year timeline, but did not
change the basic strategy.
The U.S. has by
now led or sponsored wars against Iraq (invasion in 2003), Lebanon (U.S.
funding and arming Israel), Libya (NATO bombing in 2011), Syria (CIA operation
during 2010’s), Sudan (supporting rebels to break Sudan apart in 2011), and
Somalia (backing Ethiopia’s invasion in 2006). A prospective U.S. war with
Iran, ardently sought by Israel, is still pending.
Strange as it
might seem, the CIA has repeatedly backed Islamist Jihadists to fight these
wars, and jihadists have just toppled the Syrian regime. The CIA, after all,
helped to create al-Qaeda in the first place by training, arming, and financing
the Mujahideen in Afghanistan from the late 1970s onward. Yes, Osama bin Laden
later turned on the U.S., but his movement was a U.S. creation all the same.
Ironically, as Seymour Hersh confirms, it was Assad’s intelligence that “tipped
off the U.S. to an impending Al Qaeda bombing attack on the headquarters of the
U.S. Navy’s Fifth Fleet.”
Operation Timber
Sycamore was a billion-dollar CIA covert program launched by Obama to overthrow
Bashar al-Assad. The CIA funded, trained, and provided intelligence to radical
and extreme Islamist groups. The CIA effort also involved a “rat line” to run weapons
from Libya (attacked by NATO in 2011) to the jihadists in Syria. In 2014,
Seymour Hersh described the operation in his piece “The Red Line and the Rat
Line”:
“A highly classified annex to the
report, not made public, described a secret agreement reached in early 2012
between the Obama and Erdoğan administrations. It pertained to the rat line. By
the terms of the agreement, funding came from Turkey, as well as Saudi Arabia
and Qatar; the CIA, with the support of MI6, was responsible for getting arms
from Gaddafi’s arsenals into Syria.”
Soon after the
launch of Timber Sycamore, in March 2013, at a joint conference by President
Obama and Prime Minister Netanyahu at the White House, Obama said: “With
respect to Syria, the United States continues to work with allies and friends
and the Syrian opposition to hasten the end of Assad’s rule.”
To the
U.S.-Israeli Zionist mentality, a call for negotiation by an adversary is taken
as a sign of weakness of the adversary. Those who call for negotiations on the
other side typically end up dead—murdered by Israel or U.S. assets. We’ve seen
this play out recently in Lebanon. The Lebanese Foreign Minister confirmed that
Hassan Nasrallah, Former Secretary-General of Hezbollah had agreed to a
ceasefire with Israel days before his assassination. Hezbollah’s willingness to
accept a peace agreement according to the Arab-Islamic world’s wishes of a
two-state solution is long-standing. Similarly, instead of negotiating to end
the war in Gaza, Israel assassinated Hamas’ political chief, Ismail Haniyeh, in
Tehran.
To the
U.S.-Israeli Zionist mentality, a call for negotiation by an adversary is taken
as a sign of weakness of the adversary.
Similarly in
Syria, instead of allowing for a political solution to emerge, the U.S. opposed
the peace process multiple times. In 2012, the UN had negotiated a peace
agreement in Syria that was blocked by the Americans, who demanded that Assad
must go on the first day of the peace agreement. The U.S. wanted regime change,
not peace. In September 2024, Netanyahu addressed the General Assembly with a
map of the Middle East divided between “Blessing” and “Curse,” with Lebanon,
Syria, Iraq, and Iran as part of Netanyahu’s curse. The real curse is Israel’s
path of mayhem and war, which has now engulfed Lebanon and Syria, with
Netayahu’s fervent hope to draw the U.S. into war with Iran as well.
The U.S. and
Israel are high-fiving that they have successfully wrecked yet another
adversary of Israel and defender of the Palestinian cause, with Netanyahu
claiming “credit for starting the historic process.” Most likely Syria will now
succumb to continued war among the many armed protagonists, as has happened in
the previous U.S.-Israeli regime-change operations.
In short,
American interference, at the behest of Netanyahu’s Israel, has left the Middle
East in ruins, with over a million dead and open wars raging in Libya, Sudan,
Somalia, Lebanon, Syria, and Palestine, and with Iran on the brink of a nuclear
arsenal, being pushed against its own inclinations to this eventuality.
All this is in
the service of a profoundly unjust cause: to deny Palestinians their political
rights in the service of Zionist extremism based on the 7th century BCE Book of
Joshua. Remarkably, according to that text—one relied on by Israel’s own
religious zealots—the Israelites were not even the original inhabitants of the
land. Rather, according the text, God instructs Joshua and his warriors to
commit multiple genocides to conquer the land.
Against this
backdrop, the Arab-Islamic nations and indeed almost all of the world have
repeatedly united in the call for a two-state solution and peace between Israel
and Palestine.
Instead of the
two-state solution, Israel and the U.S. have made a desert and called it peace.
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