More evidence that Israel supports ISIS and Jihadists in Syria

Islamic Fundamentalism is the Mirror Image of Zionist Fundamentalism

This blog has carried a number of articles on the symmetry between Israel’s ethno-religious fundamentalism with its messianic settlers and the growing ascendancy within Likud of those who believe in a Third Temple and the destruction of the Golden Mosque.  That symmetry meets its fulfilment in the Syrian civil war.

General Levy at the Herzliya security conference explaining why the  main enemy is not Iran but ISIS

Israel has a number of good reasons, from its perspective, to support both Al-Nusra, the Al Qaeda group which has recently rebranded itself as Jabhat Fatah al-Sham and ISIS.  Zionism is based on much the same racist and confessional ideology.  It has reproduced itself throughout the  Middle East.  ISIS and al-Nusra have long fed of the confessionalism and sectarianism that the Israeli state has created.  They also have a congruence of interests.

The Israeli military in particular has done little to hide its view that ISIS represents a useful factor in Iraqi and Syrian politics.  [see Israeli Military Make it Clear that They Support ISIS

Captured ISIS tank

Israel’s main enemy in the Middle East is Iran, which it sees as a regional competitor.  To Israeli strategists Iran, Syria and  Lebanon form the Shi’ite axis of evil.  It is not surprising therefore that Israel and Netanyahu look to ISIS and Sunni states like Saudi Arabia and Qatar as allies in the region.

It is quite clear that despite Israel’s claims that its support for al-Nusra was only humanitarian, tending its wounded fighters, the relationship is far deeper.  A moment’s thought would tell you that Israel’s denials of co-operation are lies and falsehoods.  Can you imagine that Israel would tend Hamas fighters!

Sunni Ahmed al-Rifai shrine near Tal Afar is bulldozed

The Jerusalem Post noted in New UN report reveals collaboration between Israel and Syrian rebels that 

‘a report from the UN Disengagement Observer Force (UNDOF) reveals that Israel has been working closely with Syrian rebels in the Golan Heights and have kept close contact over the past 18 months. The report was submitted to the UN Security Council at the beginning of the month.

The documents show that Israel has been doing more than simply treating wounded Syrian civilians in hospitals. This and a few past reports have described transfer of unspecified supplies from Israel to the Syrian rebels, and sightings of IDF soldiers meeting with the Syrian opposition east of the green zone, as well as incidents when Israeli soldiers opened up the fence to allow Syrians through who did not appear to be injured.’

But it’s not all a one way traffic.  According to Globes, Israeli business news, Israel is or was the largest oil customer of Isis. [SYRIA - We Should Bomb Those Who Finance Terror – The State of Israel]

Prince Bandar bin Sultan, former Ambassador to USA and Intelligence Chief - believed in using Al Nusra and ISIS

Israel long gave up denying that it was intimately involved in giving support to Al Nusral Fighters.  A number of articles documented this help.  [Israeli Lies About Support for Al Qaeda Fighters Exposed] and - Syrian Killed in Attack by Golani Druze Was Islamist Fighter, Not Civilian as IDF Claimed’

Fighters from the Isis group during a parade with a missile in Raqqa, Syria.

It was all revealed in Israel when Golani Druze attacked a military ambulance carrying two wounded Al-Nusra terrorists and killed one of them  [Druze attack Military Ambulance Carrying al-Qaeda Terrorists

Below is a recent article reporting an Israeli think tank as claiming that ISIS is a ‘useful tool’ to Israel’s military.

Tony Greenstein

So-called Islamic State “a useful tool” says Israeli think tank

This is not the first time that influential and powerful Israeli figures have argued in favour of using Islamic State as a way to indirectly attack Iran

Asa Winstanley

August 27, 2016

The director of a right-wing think tank at an Israeli university has spoken out against declared US intentions to destroy the so-called “Islamic State” group.

Professor Efraim Inbar argued in an article that Islamic State “can be a useful tool in undermining” Iran.

Inbar is director of the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies, and a professor at Bar-Ilan University, in Ramat Gan near Tel Aviv. He is a academic of some repute in western elite circles.

The Begin-Sadat centre has some form. Another one of its luminaries is Mordechai Kedar, an Israeli academic who once advocated rape as a weapon of war to be used against the families of alleged Palestinian attackers. Speaking to an Israeli radio show in 2014 he said, “the only thing that deters them is if they know that their sister or their mother will be raped in the event that they are caught. What can you do, that’s the culture in which we live.”

In a mind-bending series of utterly cynical and blood-thirsty leaps of logic, Inbar argues that Islamic State is the least-bad of a series of enemies in the region for Israel. Considering the fact that Islamic State has rarely (if ever) engaged in combat with Israel, there is a certain horrible logic to his claims.

“A weak IS is, counter-intuitively, preferable to a destroyed IS,” Inbar wrote. “The continuing existence of IS serves a strategic purpose. Why help the brutal Assad regime win the Syrian civil war?”

Inbar sees Iran, Syria and the Lebanese resistance group Hizballah as far greater enemies to Israel. Although Hizballah is now engaged in the brutal civil war in Syria on the side of the regime, it defeated Israeli occupations forces in two wars. First of all, in a long guerilla war to liberate the south of Lebanon. The result of that was Israel and its proxy forces being driven out under fire in 2000. Secondly, Hizballah fought Israel to a standstill during its brutal 2006 invasion of Lebanon.

Hizballah is a serious military force which (before its divisive intervention in the Syrian civil war) once commanded massive and cross-sectarian popular support all across the Arab world. It’s no wonder then that Israel would prefer to see its guns turned against targets other than Israel. “Hizballah … is being seriously taxed by the fight against” Islamic State, gloats Inbar.

And what of Islamic State crimes, which will no doubt continue and intensify if it is not militarily defeated? No matter, says Inbar: “the Western distaste for IS brutality and immorality should not obfuscate strategic clarity … stability is not a value in and of itself. It is desirable only if it serves our interests.”

These statements may be utterly morally reprehensible, but at least they have a certain frankness to them.

Iran of course, is deemed a threat to Israel. Its nuclear energy programme is at the heart of these claims, and hence Inbar agitates against the deal made with Iran in regard to this. Israel once collaborated with the US on cyberwarfare projects such as Stuxnet, which attacked and sabotaged Iran’s nuclear energy plants. But the real threat is Iran’s independence as a sovereign state – something neither the US global hegemon nor the Israeli regional hegemon wish to tolerate.

“The Obama administration has inflated the threat from IS in order to legitimize Iran as a ‘responsible’ actor that will, supposedly, fight IS in the Middle East,” claims Inbar. A rather odd and conspiratorial formulation considering that Iranian and Iranian-backed forces have been at war against Islamic State in both Syria and Iraq.

This is not the first time that influential and powerful Israeli figures have argued in favour of using Islamic State as a way to indirectly attack Iran. In January, the then defence minister Moshe Yaalon said at a conference that if he had to pick a side out of Iran and Islamic State in Syria: “I choose the Islamic State”. He argued that “our greatest enemy is the Iranian regime”.

At the same conference, former Israeli army commander Yoav Galant argued that “developing ties between Israel’s allies and enemies as they join forces to fight Islamic State pose a threat to Israel,” and that the de facto alliance between Iran and several Western countries fighting Islamic State in Syria and Iraq “creates new challenges for Israel.”

Their logic then, was very similar to Inbar’s. Michael Oren, former Israeli ambassador to the US, said in 2014 that Israel wants to “let the Sunni evil prevail” over the greater “evil” of Iran. Speaking in the context of a massacre of Iraqi soldiers, he seemed to argue that Israel should allow the “Islamic State” to win.

All in all, it is quite a similar strategy to Israel’s tacit alliance with the extremist group formally known as the Nusra Front – which was al-Qaeda’s formal Syrian affiliate until it spit in a recent re-branding exercise.