by Alastair Crooke, Strategic Culture:
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.
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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.
What lies behind the present outpouring of Palestinian violent resistance is precisely rooted in a converse understanding to that held in the Beltway.
The converse ‘reality’ is that, over the last decade, Israel has been departing further and further away from the foundations on which any sustainable regional peace might have been built. Israel, perversely, has been moving in the opposite direction – striking down the pillars by which a regional rapprochement might have been possible.
Netanyahu, over the last decade, has taken the Israeli electorate far to the Right, leveraging Iran as the Phantasm by which to frighten the public. (It was not always like that: After the 1979 Iranian Revolution, Israel had allied with Iran, against the Arab ‘near neighbourhood’).
Netanyahu also propagated ‘the message’ to his electorate that, thanks to the ‘success’ of the Abraham Accords, the world cares ‘zilch’ for the Palestinians. That they are “yesterday’s news”.
This performance has distracted the western world from understanding fully what radical ministers in Netanyahu’s government have been planning:
One key commitment of Netanyahu’s Cabinet colleagues is to build the Jewish (Third) Temple on Temple Mount, where al-Aqsa Mosque presently stands. Plainly put, this implies a commitment to demolish al-Aqsa and build a Judaic Temple in its stead.
The second key pledge is to found Israel on the biblical ‘Land of Israel’. Again, plainly put, this would dispossess Palestinians in the West Bank; as National Security Minister Ben Gvir made clear, they would face a choice: leave or live under subservience in a Jewish supremacist state.
The third is to institute Jewish law (Halakha) in the stead of secular law. This would divest non-Jews in Israel of their legal status.
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