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Israel's "New Pearl Harbor"

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by blueapples
Monday, Oct 16, 2023 - 12:00

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With turmoil enveloping Israel and Palestine unlike anything seen for generations, the already unstable geopolitical climate of the middle east finds itself in an even more precarious situation. As a ground invasion of the Gaza Strip by the Israel Defense Forces looms, the success of that military operation and its endgame is shrouded in as much uncertainty as what laid the foundation for the escalation of hostilities that led to it. With how chaotic hostilities between the IDF and Hamas have become, extracting the truth of what brought them to this crossroads is an all but impossible task. Any astute real time analysis is further hampered by a deluge of propaganda made to direct public opinion toward a preconceived conclusion. To make sense of that cacophony of disinformation, it is perhaps best to turn to lessons from history in an effort to achieve some semblance of an understanding about the events presently unfolding on the borders of the Gaza Strip.

While the figures driving history constantly change, one thing that does not is the dynamism that drives them. This makes the importance of having a well-versed understanding of history imperative to being able to extract analogs that can be used as tools to bring clarity to what unfolds in the present. In this latest example of a chaos emerging from the Middle East, one does not need to look much further than for the dynamic which drove another conflict in the region that began less than quarter of a century ago. As Israel embarks upon its own war on terror, the preface to the American fledged War On Terror provides a powerful basis of comparison that reminds us that the justifications for such conflicts are not as black and white as the combatants engaged in them would lead us to believe.

Instead, examining the ideologues crafting the narratives used to justify these actions paints a clearer picture of what drives the conflict. In present day Israel, that ideologue is Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. In the build up to the American War on Terror, that ideological brain trust was a group of neoconservative acolytes brought together in the hopes of achieving a shared mission. They comprised the Project For A New American Century, a neocon think tank which would ultimately serve as the architect of the war on terror, making its inception the realization of a preordained plan more than a reaction to radical Islamic terrorism. The means by which they fulfilled that agenda echoes on today as the Netanyahu regime looks to put its indelible imprint on history with its own war on terror by following the framework the PNAC put forth nearly 25 years ago.

The neoconservative brain trust behind the founding of the PNAC was the duo of William Kristol and Robert Kagan. PNAC was founded in the wake of the dissolve of the Soviet Union in the nascent post Cold War era where America's global geopolitical influence was listlessly meandering among the theaters of proxy wars it waged in the decades long dichotomy against communism. The vestiges of the Cold War left American foreign policy rather directionless compared to a previous era in which the nation's military industrial complex was bolstered by its soviet counterpart. In an effort to recalibrate the nation's foreign policy, 25 of the nation's leading neoconservative minds joined PNAC's ranks. Of those members, 10 would go on to serve in the administration of George W. Bush, including Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Deputy Secretary Of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, all under the direction of PNAC Director, deranged warhawk John Bolton.

"Hey guys, can I join too?!

From its inception, PNAC espoused what it termed a Neo-Reaganite foreign policy it sought to refine heading into the 2000 Presidential Election following the Republican Party's successive electoral defeats to democrat President Bill Clinton, whose neoliberal approach to foreign policy served as a foundation for his consecutive elections against republican opponents who lacked as clear of a vision as he had. Determined to learn from the weakness republicans showed in the 1992 and 1996 Presidential Elections so that they were not doomed to repeat those same mistakes in 2000, PNAC succinctly put forward its vision for America's role in the new millennium under republican leadership by authoring the seminal report Rebuilding America's Defenses: Strategy, Forces And Resources For A New Century.

The report served as a blueprint for revitalizing America's post Cold War military industrial complex from implementing perpetually bloated, deficit-driving military budgets through cultivating domestic policy making that would invigorate the public with a sense of faux-patriotic support that would view that excessive spending as a necessity for national security. What was absent sans the blueprint was the catalyst that would conjure that support. Steadfastly determined to rehash the conflict of the First Gulf War, PNAC knew that it would need to turn the tide of public opinion to garner support for its interventionist policy making. That transformation would depend on what it coined as a "New Pearl Harbor", i.e., a catastrophic event that would seismically shift the landscape of American politics in favor of realizing PNACs vision.



Inevitably, that "New Pearl Harbor" came when on September 11th, 2001, with the Bush administration comprised of many of PNAC'S members in office, the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon would serve as that very catalyst. Whether it was by happenstance of careful design is a point of contention that weighs heavy on the minds of analysts of the PNAC and critics of Bush-era neoconservatism alike. Whatever the underlying truth is shrouded by that polarizing debate, what is more clear is the idea that a blueprint using terrorism to replace the specter of communism had been laid in stone for any politician willing to opportunistically exploit tragedy to follow in pursuit of the realization of their pervasive ulterior motives.

The lexicon etched into the neoconservative doctrine by the PNAC reverberates to this very day. Most jarringly perhaps is the all but verbatim usage of the premise of a "New Pearl Harbor" in the rhetoric made by the Netanyahu Regime in its response to Hamas' latest attacks on Israel. That should come as no surprise as then-civilian Benjamin Netanyahu was an instrumental figure in effectuating the transition toward a new global order outlined by the PNAC. While the attacks on 9/11 provided the public sentiment necessary to support the launch of the War On Terror, extending that theater of war beyond Afghanistan and into nation building endeavors such as in Iraq was met with more reticence. Questions about the connection between Al Qaeda and the regime of Saddam Hussein were viewed as spurious at the best during the build up to the shock and awe campaign marking the US' invasion of Iraq. This skepticism prompted Netanyahu to testify before congress urging the US to depose Hussein, an action that he painted in the manichaeistic light of a fight between light and dark that framed America in its allies as a benevolent beacon of freedom conquering evil in the middle east. By echoing the lies of the PNAC brain trust that Saddam Hussein would possess nuclear weapons of mass destruction, Netanyahu inextricably linked his own aims to that of the neocon think thank.

However, that term alone is not the only foreboding analog between the vision of the PNAC and that of the Likud led Knesset. Like Al Qaeda, Saddam Hussein, and other terror groups like ISIS, the terrorism afflicting Israel at a time where Netanyahu looks to irrevocably change the landscape of the Israeli-Palestine political dichotomy, Hamas bears an eerily similar dynamic to the figureheads America pointed to as its villainous opposition during the height of the War on Terror. Just as Al Aqaeda and Saddam Hussein were propped up by the Bush-Reagan conservative leadership that swept over America for the whole of the 1980s during the faltering years of the Soviet Union, Hamas too was born our of the fruits of the labor of its now arch enemy Israel.

IDF Brigadier General Yitzhak Segev elucidated on this subverted history in describing how the Israeli government knowingly financed Islamic fundamentalists as a strategy to undermine peace talks with the more secularized Palestinian Liberation Organization. Fomenting radical and violent Islamic sects served as a means of fracturing any solidarity Palestinians could cultivate in their efforts to realize statehood and oppose the Israeli dominance subjugating them. During this era, Segev served as the Israeli Military Governor of the Gaza Strip, where he saw Israel's funding of radical groups to oppose the PLO effectively become the lifeblood that bore Hamas. Then, Hamas and groups of the same ilk served as controlled opposition against the PLO for Israel in an era that preceded the First Intifada and subsequent Oslo Accords. The intra-Islamic conflict allowed Israel to effective undermine the PLO from inside the walls of the Gaza Strip by creating chaos that would serve to render any effort of Palestinians to effectively galvanize against Israel futile.

Though tasked with the governorship of Gaza at the time of Hamas' origin, Segev is not the only Israeli official to look back at how the Islamic militant group came to be with great regret. A now retired Israeli official named Avner Cohen worked in Gaza during Segev's governance of the region, being tasked with managing religious affairs in the region until 1994. During Cohen's tenure in Gaza, he witnessed how Israeli operations fomented radical Islamic opposition to the PLO. Cohen recounted how the Israeli's nurtured a relationship with a cleric named Sheikh Ahmed Yassin who would become an intelligence asset used for destabilization operations against Palestinians. Yassin's influence in the founding of Hamas would be so influential that the militant group would refer to their well-known IED rocket propelled grenades as "Yassins" in homage to his fundamental role in creating the militant group.

At the time of these operations, Israel's rationale for funding Islamic extremism was vested in its view that the PLO itself was a terrorist organization. This only changed following the agreement of the Oslo Accords which saw the Yasser Arafat-led PLO formally recognize Israel as a state, conceding its right to exist in a drastic departure from the platform it held since his ascent to the helm of Palestinian nationalist coalition in the late 1960's. Arafat's moderation from that position was enabled by the nonconsecutive re-election of Yitzhak Rabin as the Prime Minister of Israel in 1992, who had last served in the role after succeeding Golda Meir in 1974. Rabin returned to the office of prime minister under the premise of advancing peace talks with the PLO in the wake of the First Intifada. While extending that olive branch was enough to influence Arafat and the PLO, it did little to change the ideology and end game of Hamas.

Unlike Hamas, the PLO took a particularly secular approach to the governance of Palestine and its relationship with Israel. As such, the agreement under the Oslo Accords only served to embolden the radicalism of Hamas' cause. While the landscape of relations between the PLO and Israel had drastically changed, the ramifications it would have on Hamas would propel the militant group into a position in which it would increasingly target Israel following its recognition and effective legitimization of the PLO by placing it at the helm of the Palestinian National Authority in control of the Gaza Strip created under the the Gaza-Jericho Agreement in 1994. Eventually, the formation of the PNA would come to be a vehicle that would remind Israel of the grave mistake it made by financing the foundation of Hamas when the militant group would win the Palestinian Legislative Election in 2006, taking what once was a vestige of an Israeli-controlled opposition against the PLO and turning it into the Jewish state's most formidable enemy in the Palestinian territories.

The inadvertent consequence of Hamas' ascent to the head of the PNA is parallel similar to that of the the Mujahideen factions funded by the United States during the Soviet-Afghan conflict becoming a direct enemy of the United States in the form of Al Qaeda. Subsequently, Hamas, like Al Quaeda did for the US, came to serve as a forward facing enemy of the Israeli people that the country's leadership could turn to as a villain which would shift focus away from the flawed internal machinations of the state that created that very enemy to begin with. In the wake of September 11th and the outrage following from the illegal invasion of Iraq, questions about the legitimacy of the Bush administration were immediately curtailed by the tried-and-true neocon tactic of accusing any criticism of the ruling establishment of enabling, if not outright being terrorists. That rhetoric would undermine any legitimate opposition by evoking a pathological response among the public in the interest of "national security", a phrase which the Bush administration would wield as if it gave them card blanche to erode the fundamental liberties given to the American people, giving way to expansive executive powers that balked in the face of the idea of a separation of powers.

That very dynamic is present in Israel and is no more profound than during the latest escalation of the conflict between the IDF and Hamas. Before the resurgence of that conflict, the most fervent opposition to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was not found in the Gaza Strip or West Bank, it was found in the streets of Israel itself. Since his ascent back to the office of prime minister for his 6th term, Netanyahu's government has become reviled by the people of Israel for its authoritarian tenants. Before Tel Aviv become the site of a warzone once again, the greatest chaos unfolding in the city and throughout the whole of Israel was the massive protests aimed against Netanyahu himself. These demonstrations came to be from opposition to proposed judicial reformed fledged by the Netanyahu regime that would put Israel's judiciary under his control in a manner not dissimilar to the liberties taken by the Bush administration with the passage of the Patriot Act and other legislation that emboldened its own regime. The intense outrage against Netanyahu's judicial reforms fell heavy on the prime minister's shoulders as even he was forced to temper his over zealousness in the wake of mass protests that saw those in the ranks of the IDF boycott their military service in response. In the fact of that adversity, Israel was becoming every bit as fractured as Palestine had been during the time of Hamas' founding, with factions seeking a war to usurp power from Netanyahu before he could irrevocably change the rule of law in Israel.

All too fortuitously, Hamas' latest attack on Israel comes at a time where the country was literally on the brink of civil war. Just weeks ago, Israelis found themselves pitted against Netanyahu and Likud in scenes sweeping through the streets of Israel that were reminiscent of the Arab Spring. Then, like clockwork, Israel's existential threat was able to emerge once more turning a fractured Israeli populous determined to topple an iconoclastic Netanyahu into one that was galvanized around him once again.

Another all too coincidental analog between Hamas' latest attack against Israel and that of America's "New Pearl Harbor" on 9/11 comes with the intelligence "failures" which preceded each incident. Before 9/11, the Bush administration had been regularly briefed about the possibility of Al Qaeda using commercial airliners to commit a terrorist attack as if the jihadists had translating the memo from Operation Northwoods into Arabic. That same narrative has emerged in Israel, where intelligence briefings warning of the onset of attacks from Hamas were reportedly ignored by the Netanyahu government as if the attacks were a reprisal of those planned during the Lavon Affair.

According to more via The Times of Israel:

"We have warned them an explosion of the situation is coming, and very soon, and it would be big. But they underestimated such warnings," the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he wasn’t authorized to discuss the content of sensitive intelligence discussions with the media, told The Associated Press.

Airing the dirty laundry about the Israeli intelligence's failure to heed the caution of these reports serves as a limited hangout of sorts, planting the seeds of a cognitive bias that the failure of officials to recognize the threat was a matter of negligence rather than evidence of a concerted effort to allow the attacks to happen to provide them with the catalyst the Netanyahu regime would need to advance its cause at a time where doing so at peacetime would have been unassailable. The same naivety fell swept across the minds of the American people in the early 2000's when the Bush administration's ignorance of warnings of terrorist attacks that all but predicted 9/11 were viewed as the president being asleep at the wheel instead of nefariously wanton abandonment of national security in order to provide the neocon acolytes in his administration with the "New Pearl Harbor" the PNAC so desperately hoped for in order to reshape the global political order in its own image.

In Israel, the Netanyahu regime finds itself with the same distinct advantage. The possibility of allowing Hamas to attack would provide a conflict enabling Netanyahu to assemble an emergency government that would imbue him with authority that would far exceed what he even sought previously be attempting to reshape the judiciary in Israel to be under his thumb. In doing so, the boldest of Netanyahu's aims, including the rampant settlement expansion which depended on those judicial reforms to begin with, are now within the realm of his control.

What keeps the possibility of that nefarious motive from being examined by the discerning eyes of the public is a carefully constructed rhetoric that takes any logical response to the events unfolding in Israel and thrusts it into the realm of impossibility. Instead, an emotional response is elicited by propagating narratives tailored to exploit the horror and tragedy of war, serving as a weapon wielded by the very warmongers driving the conflict used to manifest support for their malevolence. While the sheer complexity, sensitivity, and volatility of events unfolding in real time makes seeing through the facade woven into the fabric of public opinion by the powers that be a Heraclian labor, a careful examination of the dynamics that have driven historical events in the past shows a template that the present conflict fits all too well, perhaps too well to be attributed to sheer coincidence.

Contributor posts published on Zero Hedge do not necessarily represent the views and opinions of Zero Hedge, and are not selected, edited or screened by Zero Hedge editors.
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