Israeli Colonialism and Ethnic Fragmentation as Geo-Strategic Strategy

Not since WWII has there been a nation like Nazi Germany, that dominated its region and almost every state within it.  Israel is now such a country.  For decades, it has pursued a strategy of not just subjugation of front-line neighbors through military force, but of manipulating their internal politics by stoking ethnic and religious conflict; thereby fragmenting these nations and rendering them unable to mount resistance to it.

Germany, like Israel today, was a nation fully militarized and obsessed with territorial conquest and mass extermination of “undesirable” ethnic, religious and political groups.  While Israel invokes a messianist religious fervor to justify its conquest and genocide, Germany conjured a mystical-racial ideology as the basis for its own supremacism.

One of Israel’s chief strategies has been promoting ethnic conflict in order to weaken social cohesion.  A fragmented country cannot mount a coherent defense against Israeli hegemony.  This provides an opportunity for Israel to expand its territorial footprint (stealing the land of its rivals) and economic power as it has done in Lebanon, Syria and Palestine.

It conceals these goals under the guise of national security and defense against aggression.  Unfortunately, as we’ve seen in Gaza, the world buys this excuse refusing to examine it with any skepticism. How does slaughtering 80,000 Palestinians ensure national security? Unless Israel intends to do so by exterminating its enemy.

Indeed, this approach has been heartily and widely proposed by Israeli leaders.  Analysts and journalists have even suggested that the current genocide and other proposed plans calling for ethnic cleansing of Gaza’s population are part of such an eliminationist strategy.  In this, Israel is not far removed from Nazi Germany’s policy of mass extermination of European Jewry.

While Middle East experts have long documented Israel’s policy of manipulating internal forces to induce civil conflict in a particular country, few have addressed this as a systematic regional policy replicated repeatedly over an extended period of time.

Israel’s fomented Lebanese civil war

The earliest example of this strategy in action was the Lebanese civil war, in which religion-based political factions engaged in massacres of their opponents from 1975-1990.  During the same period, Israel infiltrated its agents into the country and they engineered a campaign of terror involving massive bombings of civilian areas and assassinations of figures associated with Sunni militias like Hezbollah and Amal.  They disguised their involvement by invoking a mock Lebanese militant group, which was a front for the Mossad and military intelligence.  It also employed the Maronite Christian minority and it military-wing, Phalange, as a buffer against the Lebanon-based PLO and the other forces mentioned above.  The Sabra-Shatilla massacre, in which Israeli forces facilitated the Phalangist attack against a Palestinian refugee camp, is a prime example.

Israel’s goal was to exploit and intensify this internal bloodletting in order to weaken its most potent enemy at the time, the PLO.  Eventually, this succeeded after it invaded Lebanon and forced the expulsion of the PLO from the country. Yet ironically, Israel’s 1982 invasion and subsequent 20-year occupation of southern Lebanon led to the rise of Hezbollah, which eventually became its chief enemy.  It’s an irony of history that events have come full circle. Today, the IDF once again occupies southern Lebanon, Yet this time, it has significantly weakened Hezbollah, which is offering no resistance.

In Syria, during its civil war it supported the al-Qaeda (later al-Nusra) militia which occupied the Syrian Golan.  It supplied the group with weapons and other technical equipment used to fight against regime forces.  After the Syrian resistance, allied with Israel’s enemy Turkey, toppled Assad, Israel invaded Syria and has occupied its territory ever since.  Currently, it is entrenched on a permanent basis, less than 20 miles from Damascus.

After Assad fell, Israel systematically destroyed every military site and capability he had. It did so to prevent this material from falling into the hands of the rebel forces who formed the new government.

Israel also cultivated an alliance with the southern Syria Druze, who serve as a bulwark against the ruling regime led by Ahmed al-Sharaa. It views him with suspicion, in part because he has succeeded in reuniting the country and retaking territory occupied for years by Kurdish forces.  As I wrote above: a united Arab state is a dangerous state.  One which much be sabotaged and fragmented to the extent possible.  That’s why Israel has continued bombing Syrian government forces, claiming it’s doing so to protect its Druze allies.  They in turn have abjured such support, which means the Israeli explanation lacks credibility. The truth is Israel seeks to fragment Syria society into ethnic and religious enclaves, each at war with each other.

Iran: promoting regime change via ethnic conflict

Anti-Iran think tankers in the west have begun promoting a strategy of breaking Iran up into statelets based on the enormous number of ethnic minorities including Baloch, Azeri, Kurd, Turkmen, Arab, etc. You can read this in the pages of right-wing publications like the Wall Street Journal, Foreign Policy and Foreign Affairs. And of course, former Israeli army intelligence officer and curent think tank hack, Mordechai Kedar, endorses this outcome enthusiastically.

Israel’s views its best strategic option is to foment discord and ethnic violence within Iran.  This would weaken and eventually topple the clerical government and break the country into territorial zones dominated by the various minorities.  This would be similar to the policy used in Syria, but on a much larger scale given Iran’s enormous size.  If successful, it would dismantle the country’s nuclear program, eliminate the Iranian Revolutionary Guards and Basij, and loosen the grasp of the clerics over Iranian society.  It is, as Hamlet once opined, “a consummation devoutly to be wished.”

But as usual, Israel focuses on its short-term interests without taking into account the long-term consequences of such a rupture in Iran–on the region, including itself. What if the remnants of the nuclear program fall into the hands of parties willing to employ it as a means of extortion or even use?  What if ethnic strife bleeds over into neighboring states like Pakistan, Afghanistan, Azerbaijan or Saudi Arabia?

I suppose Israel would argue that all of these scenarios would benefit it.  But what about the greater region or the world?  It has seen such genocidal slaughter in the Balkans, Rwanda, Congo, Cambodia, Myanmar, Iraq, etc.  It certainly would not be an outcome devoutly to be wished.

It might want to remember the experience the US had in arming the Taliban when they were our allies in fighting the Soviets.  After they succeeded in ridding the country of the occupiers, we became the Taliban’s fiercest enemy. They even used our own weapons to fight us.  Similarly, after Israeli intelligence played a major role in facilitating the founding of both Hamas and Hezbollah as buffers against the PLO, both movements became Israel’s most dangerous enemy, costing thousands of Israeli lives.

Israel’s anti-Hamas gangs

Israel has repeated this strategy in Gaza to counter Hamas, which is the primary political and military force there.  As it pursued genocide, it also cultivated and armed anti-Hamas militias which engaged in drug-dealing, looting and extortion of humanitarian aid, and outright killings of Palestinians at distribution sites.  After its forces were depleted by Israeli attack, the gangs have filled a vacuum with deadly consequences:

Israel’s support for these pop-up militias is extensive. It provides air support from drones, and shares intelligence, weapons, cigarettes and food, according to Israeli officials and military reservists. Some militia members have been airlifted to Israeli hospitals after sustaining injuries, the officials said.

…An Israeli military reservist…stationed in Gaza said he accompanied aid convoys supplying a militia in Rafah during the summer, which took place once a week late at night with the vehicle lights turned off. The aid and supplies included food, water, cigarettes and closed boxes with unknown contents that were placed in the vehicles by the Shin Bet security service, the reservist said.

The thugs even defied the Board of Peace, expressing disdain at the prospect of an international force assuming civil control from them and Hamas.  In this, they are pursuing their own interests in pillaging of Gaza. But they are also fulfilling Israel’s interest in dividing the enclave into warring factions. A country at war within cannot defend its interests against foreign enemies.

Israel did the same in southern Lebanon by forming the South Lebanese Army as a buffer against Hezbollah.  Israeli intelligence agents also facilitated the founding of both Hezbollah and Hamas in order to counter the influence of the PLO.

Ethnic fragmentation destabilizes the region and brings it to the brink of wider conflict.  But from Israel’s perspective it enables it to dominate the region, including its enemies.

Israel loves a strongman

There are countries which Israel does not need to sabotage. They are ruled by strongmen or dictators who exert total control over their populations. Israel trusts a dictator and distrusts democracy. Its populist nature enables anti-Israel forces to play a major role in society. That is a threat to Israel.  Strongmen eliminate that danger. That explains the good relations it maintains with Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Morocco and UAE.  Their rulers see more to gain from an alliance with Israel than to lose.  So they weigh the odds and place their bets on Israel.

But there is a strongman who defies the example above: Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. He exerts total control over his country. But he plots a notably hostile course regarding Israel.  He has regional ambitions and sees Turkey as a military and economic rival.

He’s made certain to control all the border territory between his country and Syria through proxies.  In doing so, he’s placed bets on different horses than Israel in terms of regional maneuvering: Erdogan was the major sponsor to the rebel forces which overthrew Assad. As such, he exerts tremendous influence and has become Israel’s chief regional rival.  It remains to be seen how this will play out given that al-Sharaa and his forces are attempting to unify the country under a single banner.  It has already come into conflict with Israel’s Druze proxies.  How far is Israel willing to go in a conflict with Erdogan’s Syria allies?  How will Turkey react if its interests are threatened there?

Qatar offers a different model of an independent regional actor which attempts to walk a fine line between Israel and its Arab brothers (and sisters).  It seeks to maintain good relations with all the major players on both sides.  It employs its enormous oil wealth supporting Palestine. It leverages its generosity to its patrons by assuming the role of mediator in some of the region’s worst conflicts.  It’s notably done this in collaboration with US negotiators seeking to end the Gaza genocide.  Separately and most notoriously, it sent Hamas hundreds of millions with the approval of Bibi Netanyahu. It’s ironic that a nation that seeks to bring peace and security to Israel through such mediation should be viewed by Israel’s ruling right-wing and its US apologists as supporting terrorism.  In fact, Qatar’s relations with Hamas were approved by Israel and the US.  It’s the ultimate in hypocrisy. But that is par for the course as far as it is concerned.