Wednesday 6 March 2024

The Yinon Plan is not important, but Israel wants to be surrounded by failed states and with US help has partly achieved this goal

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Ten days after declaring the existence of the State of Israel, David Ben-Gurion told the Jewish army's general staff: “We must immediately destroy Ramle and Lod. ... We must organize Eliyahu’s brigade to direct it against Jenin in preparation for the Jordan Valley. ... Maklef needs to receive reinforcements and his role is the conquest of southern Lebanon, with the aid of bombing Tyre, Sidon and Beirut. ... Yigal Allon must attack in Syria from the east and from the north. ... We must establish a Christian state whose southern border will be the Litani. We will forge an alliance with it. When we break the strength of the [Arab] Legion and bomb Amman we will eliminate Transjordan too, and then Syria falls. And if Egypt still dares to fight, we will bomb Port Said, Alexandria and Cairo.”

Israel did some of those things eventually. 

You sometimes see anti-Zionists (Gilad Aztmon is an example) talking about the Yinon Plan. This refers to an article 
by a very obscure person called Oded Yinon, published in February 1982 in the World Zionist organisation's journal Kivunim ("Directions"), entitled A Strategy for Israel in the 1980s. 

In it he argued that the Arab countries that encircled Israel were a 'temporary house of cards put together by foreigners'  and once they disintegrated Arabs would no longer be a threat to Israel. Israel should try to engineer their disintegration. 

He did not argue for Israeli expansion.

It seems to have made a big stir for a short time but now is spoken about only by people hostile to Netanyahu or Zionism or Israel. 

Yinon and his plan are of no importance in themselves but the logic of his arguments was and is valid. 

Israel rightly wants to be surrounded by failed states and this presumably is why Benjamin Netanyahu has urged the USA to make war on Iraq, Syria and Iran.

I remind you that only the election of Donald Trump prevented the Hillary Clinton administration achieving regime change in Syria.

Yinon wanted the dismemberment of Egypt, a Christian Coptic state established on the Israeli border and the destruction of Jordan. He considered Iraq, with its oil, to be Israel's greatest threat. He thought that the Iran–Iraq War would split up Iraq, which should be a strategic Israeli aim, and he envisaged the emergence of Shiites governing from Basra, the Sunnis from Baghdad, and the Kurds with a capital in Mosul.

Wikipedia sa
ys, 'According to William Haddad, the publication of the article caused a sensation at the time. Haddad notes that the American syndicated columnist Joseph Kraft, a month later, echoed Yinon's ideas in an article that Syria would implode into confessional fragments composed of Alawite, Druze and Sunni communities were the country to be occupied after an Israeli invasion, and that such an event should cause reverberations throughout the Arab world, resulting in a reconfiguration of ethnic microstates guaranteed to introduce an era of peace. The idea was dismissed at the time.'


Wikipedia informs us that the former Russian Prime Minister Yevgeny Primakov in his 2009 book Russia and the Arabs: Behind the Scenes in the Middle East from the Cold War to the Present mentions the Yinon Plan. In connection with this he says that the former United States Ambassador to the United Nations George Ball told the U.S. Senate's Foreign Affairs Committee in 1982 that Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon told him that his long-term strategy consisted of "squeezing the Palestinians out of the West Bank, allowing only enough of them to remain for work". 

That is interesting.

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