Bin Laden and Bibi,
Together At Last
Israel’s alliance with al-Qaeda
By Justin Raimondo
March 16, 2015 "ICH"
- "AW"
- Remember the brouhaha
a few months ago when it was revealed
that fighters of the Nusra Front, the al
Qaeda affiliate in Syria, had seized
territory adjacent to Israel? The "let’s
intervene in Syria" crowd was up in arms:
this supposedly proved the absolute
necessity of going full-bore into the
region, with US bombing raids and
unrestrained support for "moderate"
jihadists out to overthrow Syrian strongman
Bashar al-Assad. After all, we can’t leave
our loyal ally, Israel, at the mercy of
Osama bin Laden’s heirs, can we?
As it turns out, however,
Nusra has left the Israelis alone – and,
indeed, it looks like there is a de facto
alliance between bin Laden’s boys and Bibi’s
bombardiers. As the Wall Street Journal
reports:
"Nusra Front, however,
hasn’t bothered Israel since seizing the
border area last summer – and some of its
severely wounded fighters are regularly
taken across the frontier fence to receive
treatment in Israeli hospitals."
We are told by the
Israelis that they don’t check the
identities of these injured fighters: "We
don’t ask who they are, we don’t do any
screening… Once the treatment is done, we
take them back to the border and they go on
their way," says one Israeli military
official. This from a country one can’t
enter
from the United States without an
extensive interrogation at the airport.
Like most reporting on
Israel, this story is chock full of
hasbara, with the disturbing news of
terrorist fighters treated in Israeli
hospitals leavened with a touching tale of a
young Syrian boy given a prosthetic arm due
to the beneficence of his Israeli hosts. Yet
this is overlaid with some darker overtones.
While reporter Yaroslav Trofimov is careful
to note "it would be a stretch to say that
the U.S. and Israel are backing different
sides in this war," he goes on to write:
"But there is clearly a
growing divergence in US and Israeli
approaches over who represents the biggest
danger – and who should be seen, if not as
an ally, at least as a lesser evil in the
regional crisis sparked by the dual
implosion of Syria and Iraq."
Indeed, Trofimov’s
reportage refutes his careful
qualifications. He points out that, while
leaving Nusra alone – its encampments are
"yards" away from a border that is a
frequent site of tours by Israeli
schoolchildren – the Israelis have begun
attacking Assad’s troops and their
Hezbollah allies. He also cites Amos Yadlin,
former chief of Israeli military
intelligence and a likely defense minister
if Bibi should lose the election, who avers:
"There is no doubt that
Hezbollah and Iran are the major threat to
Israel, much more than the radical Sunni
Islamists, who are also an enemy. Those
Sunni elements who control some two-thirds
to 90% of the border on the Golan aren’t
attacking Israel. This gives you some basis
to think that they understand who is their
real enemy – maybe it isn’t Israel."
This has always been the
Israeli perspective, no matter who sits in
the Prime Minister’s office. In a
2003 meeting with then undersecretary of
state John Bolton, Ariel Sharon made a point
of saying that, while the US should indeed
attack Iraq, "Israel was concerned about the
security threat posed by Iran, and stressed
that it was important to deal with Iran even
while American attention was focused on
Iraq." Israel is
clearly
taking a side in the religious civil war
wracking the Muslim world: while the Saudis
and the Gulf sheikdoms supply
weapons and money to Sunni jihadists
fighting for control of the Levant –
including not only Nusra but also ISIS – the
Israelis are bombing Assad and sending
injured jihadists back onto the battlefield.
None of this is very
surprising. Israel has never hesitated to
ally with the worst elements on earth in
order to advance what its leaders regard as
the Jewish state’s interests. From
South Africa’s apartheid regime to the
death squads of
Central and
South America, to the
Mujahideen-e-Khalq (MEK) – an
Iranian exile group of Marxist terrorists –
Israel has always given a helping hand to
whoever merits it according to their amoral
calculus. And as Israeli and American
interests began to radically diverge – a
process that has been
ongoing since the demise of the Soviet
Union – it makes perfect sense that they
should align with our worst enemies.
The conventional wisdom
that the 9/11 attacks showed there’s
no daylight between the US and Israel –
"We’re
all Israelis now!" exulted the Israel
Firsters before the smoke cleared over
Manhattan – was quite wrong. Netanyahu
told an audience at Bar Ilan University
"We are benefiting from one thing, and that
is the attack on the Twin Towers and
Pentagon, and the American struggle in
Iraq.” Al-Qaeda’s act, he averred, had
“swung American public opinion in our
favor."
Yet American opinion has
always been pro-Israel, with very
little sympathy for the Palestinians:
what Bibi meant was that the Israeli
strategic perspective – constantly pushing
for the US to fight its wars – was more
popular as the Bush administration began its
rampage across the Middle East.
However, this war fever
was necessarily of limited duration: once
the madness had worn off, and the backlash
against the post-9/11 hysteria began to roll
in, the US public turned against the War
Party. That’s when the long range impact of
the "war on terrorism" on the "special
relationship" between Washington and Tel
Aviv began to be felt.
It didn’t take long for
the "We’re all Israelis now" propaganda to
wear thin in Washington. For in order to
defeat radical Islamism it was necessary for
the US to split the jihadist base from the
leadership and dry up the pool of recruits
that were flocking to bin Laden’s banner.
Far from drawing away from the Muslim world,
it was more than ever important for
Washington to court it – and to eventually
take advantage of the Sunni-Shi’ite split in
favor of the latter.
We are seeing this today
in the war against ISIS, with Iranian-led
Iraqi Shi’ite troops
on the ground getting air support from
the US – and the Israelis helping the other
side, albeit as discreetly
as possible, along with their de facto
Saudi and Gulf state allies. The open
propaganda war now being waged by the
Israelis against their supposed American
allies is increasingly taking on a military
aspect in the battle for the Levant.
The Obama administration
is
determined to forge a deal with the
Iranians for the simple reason that it
cannot defeat the jihadists without
occupying not only Iraq but also Syria and
parts of Lebanon – a political, economic,
and military impossibility. The Israelis,
who see Iran as their
principal – indeed, only – rival for
regional hegemony are equally determined
that this must not come to pass. The
"special relationship," which has been
strained ever since
the latter part of George W. Bush’s
second term, has now reached the breaking
point. And this is going to be true no mater
who sits in the Oval Office.
Bibi is now playing the
only card he has left: the well-funded and
politically entrenched
Israel lobby, which could formerly make
or break politicians. Yet the power of this
lobby has necessarily diminished over the
years as the geopolitical realities of the
post-9/11 era set in.
On the intellectual front,
the publication of
The Israel Lobby, by leading foreign
policy "realists" John Mearsheimer and
Stephen Walt, set the tone for what was to
come. In exposing the key role played by
Israel’s fifth column in distorting the
making of American foreign policy – and
dragging us into the disastrous Iraq war
– the book broke the lobby’s monopoly on
elite opinion and set the stage for its
subsequent political defeats. The lobby’s
attempt to quash the nomination of Chuck
Hagel was not only
defeated, but the sheer nastiness of the
smear campaign aimed at him discredited the
Israel Firsters among key opinion-makers and
in Democratic party circles.
The final straw was Sen.
Tom Cotton’s "open letter" to Iran’s leaders
– which was really a letter to the American
people, telling them that in any conflict
between Washington and Tel Aviv GOP
hard-liners would side with the latter. The
backlash against this open attempt to
sabotage American diplomacy in the interests
of a foreign power provoked outraged cries
of "treason"
and calls for the 47 Senators to be charged
under the Logan Act. While Cotton’s letter
hardly falls under the restrictions imposed
by the Logan Act – and the call itself is a
dangerous not to mention stupid invocation
of the growing authoritarian impulse in
American politics – this kind of reaction is
telling. It shows that the American people
are waking up to the inordinate – and
inappropriate – influence wielded by the
Israeli government on our domestic political
scene, and that Bibi’s playing of this
particular card no longer trumps the
President’s hand.
And that’s a cause for
optimism. For the Israel lobby and the War
Party are, in many instances,
virtually identical. Diminish the power
of the former, and you have clogged the
engine of the latter. Which is not to say
the machinery that churns out endless war
propaganda has been silenced – far from it –
but it is getting more difficult to start
it, and, once started, it tends to stall.
Justin Raimondo is the
editorial director of Antiwar.com, and a
senior fellow at the Randolph Bourne
Institute. He is a contributing editor at
The American
Conservative, and writes a monthly
column for Chronicles. He is
the author of Reclaiming the
American Right: The Lost Legacy of the
Conservative Movement [Center for
Libertarian Studies, 1993; Intercollegiate
Studies Institute, 2000], and An
Enemy of the State: The Life of Murray N.
Rothbard
[Prometheus Books, 2000].