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The Syrian war, Israel, Hezbollah and the US-Iran romance: Is Israel
changing its view on the war?
https://mkaradjis.wordpress.com/2015/02/24/the-syrian-war-israel-hezbollah-and-the-us-iran-romance-is-israel-changing-its-view-on-the-war/
By Michael Karadjis
In recent months, Israeli occupation forces in Syria’s Golan Heights
have launched a number of attacks on either Syrian regime or allied
Hezbollah military forces in the region, adding to a more sporadic
stream of attacks since mid-2013.
Given that countless Israeli politicians, military leaders, intelligence
officials and other strategists and spokespeople have continually
stressed, since the onset of the Syrian conflict, that they saw the
maintenance of the regime of Bashar Assad as preferable to any of the
alternatives on offer – as I have documented in great detail at
https://mkaradjis.wordpress.com/2014/01/03/israel-and-the-syrian-war/ –
the recent spate of Israeli attacks raises the question of whether
Israel has changed its position and now favours the defeat of Assad.
Likewise, if for much of the war Israel has pointedly done nothing of
even a limited nature that could have helped the Syrian rebellion – as
Noam Chomsky has shown (http://lb.boell.org/web/113-1317.html) – the
question raised after the recent (January 2015) Israel-Hezbollah clash
in southern Syria, combined with the greater role being played by
Hezbollah in the Syrian conflict in that region bordering the Golan, is
whether Israel is likely to enter the war, even on a small-scale level,
ostensibly on the side of the Syrian rebels to help them defeat
Hezbollah.
Geopolitics and oppression
Before continuing, I want to first underline that I reject the
“geo-political anti-imperialist” line of analysis which sees the actual
people’s struggles, even great struggles, liberation movements and
revolutions, as nothing but proxies of great powers who deserve one’s
support, or otherwise, depending on which imperialist or capitalist
powers are allegedly giving some support, for their own reasons. Support
for the historic Palestinian movement for national liberation and return
and for the momentous struggle of the Syrian people against a tyranny
which has launched one of the most violent counterrevolutionary wars in
recent history, should be fundamental starting points for anyone on the
left who professes to be concerned with justice and to oppose
oppression. Therefore, if this article discusses “geopolitics,” it is
from the point of view of understanding the rationale for the often
contradictory actions of powerful capitalist states (in this case mostly
Israel) and does not at all concern our level of support for the
revolutionary masses.
By the same token, the question of Israel does assume a special
importance in relation to Syria, both due to it being an illegal
occupier of Syrian territory in the Golan, and due to its role as the
historic oppressor and dispossessor of the Palestinian people, creating
a huge moral dilemma for Arabic peoples if they are forced up against
the wall enough to accept Israeli support. In fact, for the most part,
the mutual solidarity of the ordinary Syrian and Palestinian peoples has
been rather prominent throughout this 4-year struggle, and the
spontaneous support to Syrian people suffering regime terror by the
Palestinian refugees in Yarmouk camp, who live cheek by jowl with poor
Syrians in that region and are often extended family, and the resulting
genocidal 2-year siege of Yarmouk by the regime, has been a high point
of this (if a low point for many of the so-called Palestinian
“leaders”). Two recent articles consisting of interviews with a number
of Yarmouk Palestinians are excellent reading on this issue
(https://syriafreedomforever.wordpress.com/2015/02/12/voices-of-yarmouk-syria-and-palestine-a-common-struggle/
and http://mondoweiss.net/2015/02/words-residents-yarmouk).
The argument
Here I will argue here that these pin-prick Israeli attacks have been
essentially irrelevant to the Syrian war, but that does not necessarily
mean that there have been no changes, which have resulted from changes
within the conflict itself. I will also argue that it is extremely
unlikely that Israel will change its policy, in any major way, of not
intervening in the war, but like all analysts, I have no crystal ball.
Rather, by examining what Israel’s interests are, I believe the policy
of non-intervention (and at base, the continued opposition to any
decisive victory of the Syrian revolution) follows logically; at the
same time however, an examination of how far the changes on the ground
have come will help us understand what Israel may be after if it did
intervene in a more significant way.
Three main issues need to be examined in terms of what may have changed
on the ground.
Firstly, the continuation of the war itself, and therefore of Assad’s
actual long-term loss of control of important areas of his country,
reduces what precisely was always Assad’s advantage to Israel, ie, the
control that a ruthless dictatorship was able to exercise gave it the
ability, for 40 years, to act as guard for the Israeli occupation of
Golan. Will this force Israel to look for plans B and C for who and how
to guard its occupation?
Second, while Israel, like the imperialist world as a whole, wants to
see the defeat the Syrian revolution, we may look at the question of
whether the armed forces arising out of the revolution in the south,
near the Israeli border, have been so weakened, have their backs to the
wall so hard, that on the one hand they pose no real threat of
revolutionary victory, while on the other Israel may be able to
opportunistically use them, in their desperation, to turn them into
something they never have been, a new “South Lebanon Army”, an Israeli
puppet force to keep either Nusra, or Hezbollah, away from the border.
Finally, the growing importance of Iran and Hezbollah to the very
survival of Assad’s regime, which some argue has reached the point of
Iranian colonisation of the regime; Israel has a different view of Iran
and Hezbollah to its view of the Assad regime itself. How far has this
come and how decisively would that change Israel’s view of the war?
However, this final point raises the further issue of what really is
behind Israel’s furious verbal obsession with Iran, something which I
will argue is also not as straightforward as is often presented.
Full:
https://mkaradjis.wordpress.com/2015/02/24/the-syrian-war-israel-hezbollah-and-the-us-iran-romance-is-israel-changing-its-view-on-the-war/
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