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.

Israel’s Lies Catch up With It – Now it’s helping Al Qaeda to Protect the Druze!

 Israel acknowledges it is helping Syrian rebel fighters

Defense minister says Jerusalem assists insurgents in exchange for promise Druze will be kept out of harm’s way

By Raphael Ahren June 29, 2015, 2:26 pm 10

Druze watching fighting over border

 When your whole existence is one long lie, it’s no surprise if your lies begin to catch up with you.   In my first article on collaboration between Israel and ISIS Israel Supports ISIS and Al Qaeda in Syria 

Syrian-rebels-in Idlib

I wrote about the arrest of Sedki al-Maket, a Druze living on the Golan Heights (which Israel illegally annexed from Syria) for exposing Israel’s duplicity. 

Sedki filmed Israel soldiers handing over boxes of ammunition to al-Nusra and this footage was given to the Syrian regime which broadcast it on TV.  I based this on an article from Richard Silversteine Israel Secretly Arrests Golani Druze, Accusing Him of Exposing Rebel-IDF Collaboration

Israeli military vehicle fired on

I also quoted from an article in Ha’aretz  in which a senior officer in the Northern Command was quoted as saying that ‘IDF Northern Command officer says he thinks the U.S.-led coalition intervened too early against the Sunni militants, and 'not necessarily in the right direction.' 

I also cited an article from the Jerusalem Post quoting the commander of the Syrian Armed forces Lt. General Ali Abdulla Ayoub that Israel working with ISIS and al-Qaida 

Aftermath of Israeli airstrike nr Damascus

There is no doubt that Israeli leaders and military were unhappy about the United State focussing on ISIS when in their eyes the enemy was Iran and what they called the Shi’ite Crescent.  This has become crystallised around the nuclear agreement that Obama is trying to negotiate with Iran.  During the Israeli election campaign, Netanyahu made an unprecedented attempt to undermine Obama by openly allying with his Republican critics by addressing Congress directly.

FSA fighters

The problem for the US is of course Iran is crucial to the defence of the Iraqi state.  Only the Shi’ite militias and their Iranian sponsor stands between an ISIS victory and the demise of the Iraqi state.  The Iraqi state has proved itself incapable of defeating ISIS for a whole series of reasons.  It’s army consists of thousands of ghost soldiers who don’t exist, many of those who do exist pay part of their salaries to officers in order not to have to actually take part in its activities, the supply of weapons and provisions to those who do fight often leaves a lot to be desired, it lacks motivation etc.  Iraq is a Shi’ite sectarian state that has failed to incorporate its Sunni citizens and has, in many cases, forced them into the tender hands of ISIS.  Until the US cuts its losses in Iraq it is caught between a rock and a hard place.

The same is true, to a lesser extent in Syria.  The ‘moderate’ armed opposition doesn’t exist and apart from the Kurds in the North, the anti-Assad coalition is made up of ISIS and al-Qaeda.  Israel is not unhappy about this, the US is unhappy but it unable to do a great deal    apart from bomb ISIS.  A strategy that is useless without forces on the ground.

Israel has always wanted to see a Syria divided into its confessional components.  The US may indeed settle for this but it is not happy about ISIS coming out on top, not least because the Saudi regime may be next on ISIS’s menu.

Tony Greenstein

Israel acknowledges it is helping Syrian rebel fighters

Defense minister says Jerusalem assists insurgents in exchange for promise Druze will be kept out of harm’s way

By Raphael Ahren June 29, 2015, 2:26 pm 10

Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon said Monday that Israel has been providing aid to Syrian rebels, thus keeping the Druze in Syria out of immediate danger. Israeli officials have previously balked at confirming on the record that the country has been helping forces that are fighting to overthrow Syrian President Bashar Assad.

During a briefing with Israel’s diplomatic correspondents at the IDF’s headquarters in Tel Aviv, Ya’alon said that Israel’s ongoing humanitarian assistance to Syrian rebel fighters, a source of growing conflict between Israel and its own Druze population, safeguards the minority population in Syria.

“We’ve assisted them under two conditions,” Ya’alon said of the Israeli medical aid to the Syrian rebels, some of whom are presumably fighting with al-Qaeda affiliate al-Nusra Front to topple Syrian President Bashar Assad. “That they don’t get too close to the border, and that they don’t touch the Druze.”

The Druze on Israel’s side of the Golan, Ya’alon charged, acted “irresponsibly” last week by attacking an Israeli ambulance carrying wounded Syrian rebel fighters. One person was killed and another wounded during what Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu termed a “lynching.” The person in the Israeli ambulance was not affiliated with the al-Nusra Front, and his death would provoke calls for revenge, Ya’alon asserted.

Israel has treated over 1,000 wounded Syrians in its hospitals since the onset of the civil war in 2011.

Israel will continue to act with sensitivity regarding the Druze, Ya’alon said. “On the other side — the rebels on the other side feel that we’re acting sensitively,” he said.

Israel has provided humanitarian assistance to wounded Syrian fighters located near the shared border since the civil war stated, the defense minister said. He said that such aid is extended under two conditions – that the fighters don’t let Islamic extremists to get close to the border, and that they don’t hurt the local Druze population.

An IDF ambulance that was attacked by Druze Israeli residents in the Golan Heights as it ferried Syrian war casualties for medical treatment in Israel, June 22, 2015. (Basel Awidat/Flash90)

Jerusalem’s policy vis-à-vis the Druze in Syria “is very complicated and sensitive,” Ya’alon said, adding that it is not in the rebels’ interest to publicize the fact that Israel assists them.

“Our general policy is that we’re not getting involved in the Syrian war,” he stressed, although there were certain red lines Israel would act to maintain, such as the smuggling of so-called game-changing weapons to Israel’s enemies.

”We will not tolerate any violation of our sovereignty or even accidental fire from Syria into our territory. We will act immediately to strike at those who plant explosives near the border or fire at us,” he declared.

Ya’alon also reiterated his position on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, repeating his belief that there will not be a permanent peace deal “in our generation.”

This, he said, was not because of any Israeli objection to Palestinian statehood, but rather due to the refusal of the Palestinian leadership to negotiate or make the necessary concessions.

Over the years, Jerusalem has taken several steps in a bid to renew the diplomatic process, including freezing settlement construction and releasing Palestinian terrorists, and has accepted in principle a US-brokered framework agreement, but Ramallah was and remains unwilling to negotiate earnestly, he said.

“The ball is not in our court,” Ya’alon declared. “There is much to do to advance issues, but whoever believes that with all kinds of pressure [from the international community] a permanent agreement can be imposed is mistaken.”

Rather than merely maintain the “status quo,” Ya’alon said, both sides could do much to find a “modus vivendi” to improve the lives of Palestinians living in the West Bank.

On the Iranian nuclear negotiations, Ya’alon said that he believes the world powers will sign a “bad” deal with Tehran, “if not this week then in the near future.”

The prospective agreement would not freeze Iran’s military nuclear program for a decade, as not a single facility would be closed and no centrifuges would be dismantled, he said.

“Even if there are inspections, they will only be in those facilities that the Iranian agree to,” he said, adding that Tehran has for decades managed to mislead inspectors, for instance by building a large secret enrichment facility in Qom.

“If this regime is emboldened by the sanctions relief [it is to receive as part of the deal, which will pump billions of dollars into the economy] before the 10-year period is over, then who will guarantee that they won’t try to break out to [reach for a bomb]?” he said.

Israel and the US differ fundamentally on the Iranian issue, he said. “They see Iran as a part of the solution; we see it as part of the problem.”

Israeli Lies About Support for Al Qaeda Fighters Exposed

Syrian Killed in Attack by Golani Druze Was Islamist Fighter, Not Civilian as IDF Claimed

by Richard Silverstein on June 26, 2015

in Mideast Peace

Munther Khalil - Al Qaeda terrorist Israel was conveying in ambulance, who was killed

This post expands on my original one reporting this incident.  Some of the material in it may look familiar to those who read the original post.  This one names, for the first time outside of Syrian sources, Munther Khalil, the Syrian Islamist killed by Golani Druze this week.  It also confirms that the IDF lied in claiming he was a civilian.

When Israel conquered the Golan in 1967, it launched a 50-year occupation of the Syrian Golan in which tens of thousands of Syrian Druze lived.  Though an armistice line now separates the Druze in Syrian and Israeli-occupied zones, both communities are deeply intertwined.  The sense of solidarity now, in the midst of a raging civil war, is no different than Diaspora Jews felt in 1967 before the war broke out.  Millions rallied around the world concerned about Israel’s fate.  Now the Druze in Israeli-held Golan are fearful for the fates of their brothers and sisters.

Israel's friends in al-Qaeda

Israel claims, falsely, that it is neutral in the Syrian civil war.  Unfortunately, the world media are taken in by this charade.  Israel intervenes regularly on behalf of the Syrian Islamist rebels.  The UN observed the IDF unloading supplies in boxes at the armistice fence, which were then picked up by Islamist fighters.  Al Monitor even reported that the IDF shells government positions inside Syria.  The Israelis meet regularly with al-Nusra commanders (who are affiliated with al-Qaeda) to offer intelligence.  A Syrian Druze videotaped one such meeting, which was aired on Syrian TV.  He was promptly secretly arrested by the Shabak.  The Israeli media was forbidden from reporting his name, Sedki al-Maket, thanks to a security gag order (I was the only journalist outside Syria who reported his name and story).

Netanyahu gives a pep talk to wounded al-Nusra terrorist

Israeli TV reported that Israel has built a camp for Syrian army deserters in Israeli occupied Golan.  Israel has also bombed Hezbollah and Iranian convoys inside Syria carrying advanced weaponry meant for the Lebanese front. It has assassinated several senior Iranian generals and Hezbollah commanders on Syrian soil as well.  It opposes Assad not so much for political or ideological reasons, but because the regime’s chief allies are Israel’s arch-nemeses, Iran and Hezbollah.

Israel's allies in al-Nusra

Israel’s alliance with Islamists makes for some strange bedfellows.  Prime Minister Netanyahu is the first to raise the rallying cry for western resistance to the tyranny of Islamism.  He regularly invokes the specter of the savagery of ISIS in counterpoint to the civilizing force of Israel.  But when it’s in Israel’s interest, it’s more than willing to make common cause with such forces.

Israeli soldiers stand on tanks in the Golan Heights

Not only is it hypocritical for Israel to join forces with Islamists; it’s likely that today’s allies will turn into tomorrow’s enemies.  Maariv journalist Jacki Hugi said it well:

…Jerusalem must ask itself some difficult questions: can its bet on the rebels pay off?  Or does stability on the northern border depend on the continuation of the regime?  Support for these sectarian groups carries many dangers.  Their trustworthiness fluctuates, as do the figures who lead them.  He who today will not act against Israel may change his spots [literally “shed his skin”] tomorrow.

…Israeli policy over the past few decades has been characterized by a series of bad bets.  At the end of the 1980s, it enabled Hamas to rise from the midst of Gaza’s Islamist groups.  It did this out of the flawed assumption that this was the proper way to weaken Fatah…As a result [Israel] created its own Trojan Horse [within Palestine].

With the IDF’s entrance [sic] into Lebanon in 1982, Israel disregarded the Shiites and rushed to ally itself with those it saw as the most powerful in the land: the Christians.  So it paved the way for Tehran to offer protection to the disadvantaged and enable the rise of Hezbollah.

Something very similar happened in Afghanistan when the mujahedeen were first our friends, and then morphed into the Taliban and became our sworn enemies.

So far, the Syrian Islamists have deliberately not targeted Israel.  This is no doubt due to the aid it offers them on the battlefield.  Further, al-Nusra knows that Hezbollah is Israel’s primary opponent.  The Lebanese militia constantly probes in this sector and mounts attacks against Israeli forces.  Al-Nusra doesn’t seek or need to compete with Hezbollah in that regard.  It would rather confine is efforts to the Syrian theater, than expand to attack Israel itself.

Recently, fighting on the Syrian side of Golan has heated up. There, the Druze villages have been largely loyal to the Assad regime over the decades.  When al-Nusra and FSA forces attacked Druze villages in northern Syria, killing 20 residents, those living on the Israeli-occupied side of the Golan became restive and angry.  They couldn’t sit back and watch as their cousins died at the hands of Islamists.

Not to mention that their religion, though an offshoot of Islam, is considered heretical by fundamentalist Islamists.  The Druze under threat rightly believe that they and their ancient religious traditions are in grave jeopardy.  Thus, Israel’s alliance with the al-Nusra front puts it diametrically at odds with the Golani Druze under Israeli Occupation.

In recent days, Israeli TV aired an interview (Hebrew, at the 2:00 mark) with a wounded Syrian fighter who was treated in Israel after being evacuated from the combat zone.  What he said raised the ire of the local Druze to the boiling point:

TV interview: “What would you do if you captured a Druze?” “It depends.”

In this context, the interview I mentioned above was a lightning bolt through the Druze community.  The interviewer asked the fighter (who was affiliated with the FSA):

Interviewer: [What would u do] if you caught an Alawite?

A: I would kill him

I: And if you caught a Druze?

A: It depends

I: And if you caught a Shiite?

A: I would kill the Shiite

This answer didn’t go down well among the Druze.  Sandwiched between this vow of murder directed at Syrian Alawites, the traditional Druze ally, is a temporizing claim that he might or might not kill a captured Druze.  This, with the backdrop of 20 Druze murdered only a few days earlier, was enough to mount a mini-revolt among Golani Druze.

Munther Khalil, Syrian Islamist fighter killed by Golani Druze

Israel regularly evacuates Islamist fighters wounded in the fighting against the regime in the region.  Angry local Druze intercepted an IDF ambulance carrying two wounded Syrians, whom the IDF claimed were civilians.  They beat the army medics, who were forced to flee.  They then beat one of the wounded Syrians to death and severely wounded the other, before the authorities intervened and rescued him.

Munther Khalil: the IDF’s Faux Syrian “Civilian”

Syrian Islamists calling themselves the Revolutionary Command Council in Quneitra and the Golan, published a Facebook memorial to the victim who was killed in the attack.  The page says in Arabic:

Munther Khalil – the wounded man who was killed by Druze people from  Majdal Shams in Israel

May Allah have mercy on you, and accept you as one of the Shahids

His picture features him brandishing a gun in full rebel garb.  He is clearly not a civilian.

Haaretz reporter Amos Harel also reports (Hebrew) that the two Syrians were Islamist rebels:

The two wounded were from one of the Syrian rebel organizations fighting in the heart of the Golan against the Syrian army.

The IDF lied in order to conceal its own contributing role in this tragic incident.  A common occurrence in such circumstances.

The Israeli military is aghast at the Druze attack, since it infringes on its right to meddle in Syrian internal affairs unmolested.  Defense minister Yaalon called the killing a “lynch.”  This is Israeli code for ‘Arab savagery.’  It is used to differentiate Israeli behavior, supposedly civilized and humane, from that of Palestinian (or Arab) militants.

In the case of the Golan killing, the IDF is attempting to paint the Golani Druze as uncivilized beasts when, in fact, they are legitimately angry at Israel’s new alliance with their enemies, the al-Nusra Front.  When Israel first occupied the Golan did it figure that the inhabitants would embrace the occupiers and become like them?  Did it give any thought to the views and interests of the occupied and how they differed from those of Israelis?  It’s doubtful.  Now they are paying the price for their obliviousness and for fifty years of military occupation of Syrian Druze.

The latter are now demanding that Israel intervene in the civil war to save their brethren under attack from al-Nusra.  This is the sort of insanely complex strategic dilemma that comes from playing with fire.  If Israel continues its “arrangement” with al-Nusra and the latter conquers Syrian Druze villages and imposes fundamentalist Islam replete with revenge killings and beheadings, then it risks igniting a tinderbox inside Israeli-occupied Golan.  If it takes the side of the Druze against al-Nusra it risks the leverage it has with the only viable force opposing Israel’s most dangerous enemies, Hezbollah and Iran.

When you play with matches, you’re bound to get burned.