Kicking off in Israel

[Kiwias]

Os, you might be the world's biggest pain in the arse* on rugby matters, but I genuinely appreciate the detail you're willing to bring to these threads, regardless of the facile one liners you're getting in response. It can be so easy to just pick a side and start making the truth entirely secondary to being "right", and while you don't hide your own biases and political leanings, it's good to see some people are able to look more dispassionately at events and try and capture some of the nuance that makes these places so fucking complicated.

Absolutely this. I learn far more from reading Os's posts than in the regular media.

[Sandstorm]

Nah, sounds implausible Ox as these people all support the Religion of Peace in the Middle East.

[JM2K6]

And on the flip side you have posts like that

I suppose you do need a lot of noise to really make you appreciate the signal

[Calculon]

Genuinely think that Israeli brains have melted in recent times. They just can't find a way not to make the wrong decision time and again.

Said it before but there are a lot of similarities between Israel and Russia. They both annex other people's land claiming security concerns, which they then need to expand further because the new frontier is also "unpeaceful".

You have to say, it's all worked out rather well for Israel.

Israel's done well, Turkey even more so. Friendly government in Damascus. If theres is some stabilty in Syria, Turkey are in an excelent position to take advantage of any commercial opportunities. Their position and prestige has increased over and at the expense of at their centuries old rivals, the Persians and Russians. They've strenghtened their hand over the Russians in their various conflics and rivalries in Africa. There's an opportunity for the millions of Syrian refugees in Turkey to return to Syria, and to say the Syrian refugees are not popular in Turkey is a bit of an understatement, at least in my experience when I worked there.

By contrast Iran, Hezbollah and Hamas haven't had such a good time recently

[Uncle fester]

Dividing the open prison into cells or preparing it for settlements?

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cp8x324vr0mo

[C69]

Said it before but there are a lot of similarities between Israel and Russia. They both annex other people's land claiming security concerns, which they then need to expand further because the new frontier is also "unpeaceful".

You have to say, it's all worked out rather well for Israel.

Israel's done well, Turkey even more so. Friendly government in Damascus. If theres is some stabilty in Syria, Turkey are in an excelent position to take advantage of any commercial opportunities. Their position and prestige has increased over and at the expense of at their centuries old rivals, the Persians and Russians. They've strenghtened their hand over the Russians in their various conflics and rivalries in Africa. There's an opportunity for the millions of Syrian refugees in Turkey to return to Syria, and to say the Syrian refugees are not popular in Turkey is a bit of an understatement, at least in my experience when I worked there.

By contrast Iran, Hezbollah and Hamas haven't had such a good time recently

You do realise that by continuing to bomb the shit out of Syria, Israel is destabilising the country at a time of jeopardy. Perhaps the new government will take umbrage at this and retaliate in kind so that they can stop foreign forces killing their people.

[_Os_]

I suspect what Israel wants is a chaotic broken shithole.

Western reporting has mostly ignored Israel's strategic bombing campaign of Syria, I suspect because some conclusions start become impossible to fit into an "Israel = good" editorial line.

Nationalist movements like Zionism that have gone on a journey, leave a large written record detailing ideas and strategy. It's nothing like Western politics. If you do some research and an idea keeps being echoed and refined, then it's part of that nationalist movement.

The Yinon Plan (1982) predates Clean Break (1996) it can be read here. It argues against the 1979 peace treaty with Egypt (which removed Israeli settlements from the Sinai and returned it to Egypt) and instead argues for colonial/apartheid style divide and rule. It calls for the breaking of Egypt/Lebanon/Syria/Jordan/Iraq. It doesn't anticipate the strength of non-state actors and only views strength as coming from a nuclear armed state. Some quotes:

"The Arab Moslem world, therefore, is not the major strategic problem which we shall face in the Eighties, despite the fact that it carries the main threat against Israel, due to its growing military might. This world, with its ethnic minorities, its factions and internal crises, which is astonishingly self-destructive, as we can see in Lebanon, in non-Arab Iran and now also in Syria, is unable to deal successfully with its fundamental problems and does not therefore constitute a real threat against the State of Israel in the long run, but only in the short run where its immediate military power has great import. In the long run, this world will be unable to exist within its present framework in the areas around us without having to go through genuine revolutionary changes. The Moslem Arab World is built like a temporary house of cards put together by foreigners (France and Britain in the Nineteen Twenties), without the wishes and desires of the inhabitants having been taken into account. It was arbitrarily divided into 19 states, all made of combinations of minorites and ethnic groups which are hostile to one another, so that every Arab Moslem state nowadays faces ethnic social destruction from within, and in some a civil war is already raging."

"Egypt, in its present domestic political picture, is already a corpse, all the more so if we take into account the growing Moslem-Christian rift. Breaking Egypt down territorially into distinct geographical regions is the political aim of Israel in the Nineteen Eighties on its Western front.

Egypt is divided and torn apart into many foci of authority. If Egypt falls apart, countries like Libya, Sudan or even the more distant states will not continue to exist in their present form and will join the downfall and dissolution of Egypt. The vision of a Christian Coptic State in Upper Egypt alongside a number of weak states with very localized power and without a centralized government as to date, is the key to a historical development which was only set back by the peace agreement but which seems inevitable in the long run."

"Lebanon’s total dissolution into five provinces serves as a precendent for the entire Arab world including Egypt, Syria, Iraq and the Arabian peninsula and is already following that track. The dissolution of Syria and Iraq later on into ethnically or religiously unqiue areas such as in Lebanon, is Israel’s primary target on the Eastern front in the long run, while the dissolution of the military power of those states serves as the primary short term target. Syria will fall apart, in accordance with its ethnic and religious structure, into several states such as in present day Lebanon, so that there will be a Shi’ite Alawi state along its coast, a Sunni state in the Aleppo area, another Sunni state in Damascus hostile to its northern neighbor, and the Druzes who will set up a state, maybe even in our Golan, and certainly in the Hauran and in northern Jordan. This state of affairs will be the guarantee for peace and security in the area in the long run, and that aim is already within our reach today."

"Iraq, rich in oil on the one hand and internally torn on the other, is guaranteed as a candidate for Israel’s targets. Its dissolution is even more important for us than that of Syria. Iraq is stronger than Syria. In the short run it is Iraqi power which constitutes the greatest threat to Israel. An Iraqi-lranian war will tear Iraq apart and cause its downfall at home even before it is able to organize a struggle on a wide front against us. Every kind of inter-Arab confrontation will assist us in the short run and will shorten the way to the more important aim of breaking up Iraq into denominations as in Syria and in Lebanon. In Iraq, a division into provinces along ethnic/religious lines as in Syria during Ottoman times is possible. So, three (or more) states will exist around the three major cities: Basra, Baghdad and Mosul, and Shi’ite areas in the south will separate from the Sunni and Kurdish north."

"Israel’s policy, both in war and in peace, ought to be directed at the liquidation of Jordan under the present regime and the transfer of power to the Palestinian majority. Changing the regime east of the river will also cause the termination of the problem of the territories densely populated with Arabs west of the Jordan. Whether in war or under conditions of peace, emigration from the territories and economic demographic freeze in them, are the guarantees for the coming change on both banks of the river, and we ought to be active in order to accelerate this process in the nearest future."

At the time this thinking was on the far-right fringe of Zionism, through Netanyahu it has come to dominate Israeli thinking. The idea that Syria being a chaotic shithole provides Israel a "guarantee for peace and security in the area in the long run", comes from this. That's why we're seeing celebrations from Israelis which don't make much sense.

The obvious point being, the last 40 years have shown the situation with Egypt (peace treaty, agreed border) has been far better for Israel than the situation with Lebanon (invasions and settlers claiming they own it). But ideas develop a life of their own, from Wiki:

In 2017, Ted Becker, former Walter Meyer Professor of Law at New York University and Brian Polkinghorn, distinguished professor of Conflict Analysis and Dispute Resolution at Salisbury University, argued that Yinon's plan was adopted and refined in a 1996 policy document entitled A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm, written by a research group at the Israeli-affiliated Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies in Washington. The group was directed by Richard Perle, who, some years later, became one of the key figures in the formulation of the Iraq War strategy adopted during the administration of George W. Bush in 2003.

[Uncle fester]

This has been a while coming but fück em.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/live/ ... dApp_Other