By Jeremy Salt
Israel’s expansionist ambitions and the US’ unwavering support continue to drive the erasure of Palestine, raising the critical question: Can the US and Israel be stopped?
The creation of the state of Israel in 1948 physically split the Arab world in two for the first time in its history. The eastern mashriq (central Arab lands) on one side of the line and the western maghrib (north Africa) on the other.
Israel lies on the map like a flint dagger. Deliberately driven into the heart of the region, it is now being driven in deeper, towards fragmentation and the destruction of whatever is left of an Arab world. Palestine is the obstacle that has to be removed so these aims can be achieved.
In 2023, the slow genocide in Palestine was accelerated into one the world could see being committed every day. Gaza has been destroyed while on the West Bank, the occupation’s soldiers and settlers are wallowing in an orgy of death and destruction.
Almost all of Israel’s victims are unarmed, defenceless civilians, many of them children. Israelis shed rivers of tears for the two Bibas children, but not one for the 17,000 Palestinian children their military has murdered on the orders of the politicians, not against but overwhelmingly with the support of the people.
Recently deputy Knesset speaker Nissim Vaturi said that in Gaza, “the children and women should be separated and the [male] adults should be killed.” Others go further and want them all killed.
Israel has now blocked all aid into Gaza, including tents to protect families from the weather. Violating the ceasefire, and unilaterally imposing new conditions, Netanyahu says all Israeli captives must be released forthwith or Gaza will face consequences “you cannot imagine.”
His so-called ‘defence’ minister, Israel Katz, says “the gates of Gaza will be locked and the gates of hell will open.” As they already have been opened, presumably he means they will be opened wider. The ‘generals’ plan’ based on mass starvation has now been replaced by the ‘hell plan.’ Smotrich and Ben-Gvir want even water and electricity to be cut as part of this planned ‘hell.’ Trump has issued his own Hitlerian threat to the people of Gaza that if the captives are not released “you will be dead.”
The ‘international community’ has done nothing to stop Israel’s barbaric, cruel and sadistic rampage despite the finding of the ICJ (International Court of Justice) in January 2024 that the South African accusation of genocide was “plausible.”
In fact, doing nothing would actually be a giant step forward for the US, whose Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, has just authorized an ‘emergency grant’ to Israel of $4 billion worth of arms. The weapons include 35,000 2000lb (900kg) Mark 84 unguided bombs, according to the New York Times.
This is a completely mad state of affairs. No-one with a sane mind could conclude otherwise. When an axe murderer runs amuck on the street, bystanders call the police. They don’t hand him another axe so he can kill more people, which is effectively what the US is doing.
The words of Winston Churchill are worth remembering. Once an ardent supporter of Zionism, after the Lehi murder in 1944 of the British minister in Cairo, Lord Moyne, he had this to say: ”If our dreams for Zionism are to end in the smoke of assassins’ pistols and our labours for its future to produce only a new set of gangsters worthy of Nazi Germany, many like myself will have to reconsider the position we have maintained so consistently and so long in the past.”
Well, Churchill’s dreams did culminate in a ‘new set of gangsters’ but worse than any he could have imagined.
‘Greater Israel’ Redux
Having supported terrorist groups in the drive to overthrow the Syrian government, Israel is now using the HTS (Haya’t Tahrir al Sham) takeover of Damascus as the pretext to seize more Syrian land. In southern Syria its forces have penetrated 13 kms inside the Dara’a governorate and are consolidating their position there.
Israel says it will not allow armed forces to move south of Damascus and is threatening to invade Jaramana, which is actually a suburb of the city, under the pretext of wishing to protect the Druze community from ‘terrorists.’
It has broken the ceasefire signed with Lebanon, adding five new locations to territory seized during the long war with Hezbollah. In Gaza, it remains in occupation of the Philadelphi corridor along the Egyptian border, in violation of the 1978 Camp David accords that preceded the ‘peace’ treaty with Egypt.
It withdrew from Sinai because removing Egypt from frontline Arab states was worth the loss but as part of the ‘promised land,’ the Biblical claim to Sinai and beyond has never been renounced and can always be revived.
The Jewish state Herzl envisaged would extend ‘from the brook [the Nile] to the Euphrates.’ In July 1947 Rabbi Fischmann of the Jewish Agency told the UN’s Special Committee on Palestine that “the promised land extends from the river of Egypt up to the Euphrates [and] it includes parts of Syria and Iraq.
After Israel captured Sinai in 1956 Ben-Gurion exulted to the army: “You have brought us back to that decisive and exalted moment in our ancient history .. to that place where the law was given and where our people were commanded to be a chosen people .. you have stretched out your hand to King Solomon.”
He denied that Israel had attacked Egypt as “our forces were restricted to the Sinai peninsula,” Sinai obviously not belonging to Egypt.
That Israel would do what it wants irrespective of international law was amplified in 1955 by Israel’s first ‘prime minister,’ David Ben-Gurion. Agreeing with remarks made by Moshe Dayan, the army chief of staff, Ben-Gurion wrote that “this state has no international obligations, no economic problems: the question of peace is non-existent. It must calculate its steps narrow-mindedly and live by the sword. It must see the sword as the main and only instrument with which to keep its morale high.
“Towards this end it may – no it must – invent non-existent dangers and to do this it must adopt the method of provocation and retaliation. And above all let’s hope for a new war with the Arab countries so that we may finally acquire our space.”
In 1982, the Yinon plan to break up the Middle East into ethno-religious statelets was published in Kivunim, the journal of the department of information in the World Zionist Organization.
The author, Oded Yinon, a former official in the Israeli foreign ministry, worked his way across the map. In Egypt, he envisaged the establishment of a Coptic state while “regaining” the Sinai peninsula “with its present and potential resources” remained a political priority “obstructed” by the outcome of the ‘peace’ process.
Lebanon’s “total dissolution” into five provinces would serve as “a precedent for the entire Arab world,” including Syria, Iraq and the Arabian peninsula.
The Lebanese formula of five ‘autonomous’ Christian, Muslim and Druze regions would be repeated in Syria, which would have an Alawi state, two Muslim states (Damascus and Aleppo) and a Druze state. Unitary Iraq would be replaced with Kurdish, Sunni Muslim, and Shia statelets.
Yinon did not forget the opportunities offered by divisions in North Africa where Qadhafi ruled a country “which is sparsely populated and which cannot become a powerful nation.”
Under various rubrics, notably of the ‘Greater Middle East,’ the ‘Project for the New American Century (PNAC)’ and Netanyahu’s policy document, ‘A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm (1996), Yinon’s plan soon developed into a joint US-Israel list of countries to be dismantled and ‘rebuilt.’
Iraq had already been attacked in 1991 when it was invaded again by US-led forces in 2003.
The Americans drew up a constitution which privileged the Kurds and invited other ethno-religious groups to demand autonomy. Despite US intrigues, Iraq managed to remain standing as a unitary state.
To prevent the emergence of a strong unified state in Somalia, another country on the list, the US backed the Ethiopian invasion in 2006 with ground forces and air power. The result was chaos, the strengthening of Al Qaida on the Horn of Africa and the ultimate humiliation of US forces in the 1993 battle of Mogadishu, as depicted in the film ‘Blackhawk Down.’
In 2011 Libya was destroyed and Qadhafi murdered. The US then turned on Syria. Failing to secure UN Security Council support for the same ‘no fly’ resolution that had allowed it to attack Libya, it launched a proxy war on Syria in conjunction with the UK, European governments and its regional allies, with Turkey and Qatar taking the lead.
Theoretically against Al Qaida, State Department official Jake Sullivan admitted as early as February 2012 that “AQ [Al Qaida] is on our side in Syria.” In fact, all armed groups in Syria, despite their infighting, were ideological clones of Al Qaeda or the Islamic State. HTS was one of them.
In December 2023, exhausted by more than a decade of conflict, the Syrian government finally collapsed, in circumstances yet to be fully explained. Already partly occupied, Syria is now effectively partitioned between Turkey in the northwest, the US and the Kurds in the northeast and Israel in the south.
Israel has pressed home its advantage by destroying Syria’s military capacity to defend itself. In fact, far from wanting to defend Syria, the emir of Damascus, Ahmad al Shara’a, says he has “no intention of confronting Israel.”
If Israel wanted to capture Damascus tomorrow, it could do it, and no one should be surprised if one day it does, unless they have forgotten the occupation of Beirut in 1982.
Israeli intends to maintain military control over Gaza indefinitely. The West Bank is close to annexation. Lebanon remains under occupation in violation of the current ceasefire and under permanent threat of Israeli moves towards the Litani river if the opportunity arises or can be manufactured.
As an expansionist state since 1948, who will be targeted next by Israel? Where is the weak link in the chain that might break and give Israel its next opportunity? Could it be Jordan, where the population is 70 percent Palestinian? What if the king is forced by public outrage at the atrocities in Gaza and on the West Bank to scrap the 1994 ‘peace’ treaty with Israel? What if he is overthrown?
Such a situation would be rife with opportunities for Israel. After all, the east bank of the river is as much the birthright of the Jewish people as the west, in the eyes of the territorial maximalists.
Israelite tribes lived there in ancient times and the ‘iron wall’ revisionist theorist Vladimir Jabotinsky wrote a poem about it: “Two banks has the Jordan. This is ours and the other as well.” Netanyahu’s father was Jabotinsky’s secretary and ‘greater Israel’ is Netanyahu’s lodestar too.
In 1919 the Zionist delegation to the Paris peace conference noted that “the fertile plains east of the Jordan, since the earliest Biblical times, have been linked economically and politically with the land west of the Jordan. The country, which is now very sparsely populated in Roman times, supported a great population. It could now serve admirably for colonization on a large scale.”
Perhaps it won’t be Jordan but it will be somewhere. It is only a question of time and opportunity. The creation of Israel is not finished yet. The Zionist ‘dream’ remains to be fulfilled.
As the sword has worked very well, why would Israel want to lay it down, especially now, when it is in the strongest position in its history? There is no sign of a change for the better, only signs of changes for the worse. The US and Israel have now rejected an Arab League plan to rebuild Gaza with the Palestinians still in place. They remain determined to remove them.
Another critical hinge point has arrived in history. The Arab public is outraged but kings, emirs and presidents are hostages to Israel and the US in their own palaces. ‘Greater Israel’ and the ‘greater Middle East’ cannot be built while there is still a Palestine. It has to be eliminated. The US and Israel are applying themselves strenuously to this task. Can they be stopped? That is the question of the moment.
– Jeremy Salt taught at the University of Melbourne, at Bosporus University in Istanbul and Bilkent University in Ankara for many years, specializing in the modern history of the Middle East. Among his recent publications is his 2008 book, The Unmaking of the Middle East. A History of Western Disorder in Arab Lands (University of California Press) and The Last Ottoman Wars. The Human Cost 1877-1923 (University of Utah Press, 2019). He contributed this article to The Palestine Chronicle.
