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Stability for our enemies
[Arutz 7] - Since the 1990s, the dominant view in Israel’s national security community has been that Israel’s top priority in relation to the Palestinians is to maintain the stability of their leadership. This is the case in relation to both the Fatah-controlled Palestinian Authority in Judea and Samaria and the Hamas regime in Gaza.

The rationale behind this view is that despite their hostility, if the regimes lose control things will be worse for Israel, which will have to take over, at great cost in lives and international stature. In other words, it’s either Fatah and Hamas or the Israel Defense Forces. And Israel’s security establishment prefers the former.

...Israel’s security community isn’t alone in its preference for stability—even at the cost of strengthening enemies. Their American colleagues are in the same cognitive boat. The place where the Americans have been pushing this position most strongly in recent years is in Lebanon. Following the Second Lebanon War in 2006, despite the direct assistance both the Lebanese government and the Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF) provided Hezbollah in its war against Israel, the Bush administration massively expanded U.S. civilian and military assistance to the Lebanese government and the LAF. Obama expanded the aid packages still further. And despite opposition from some quarters of the Trump administration, the Pentagon insists on maintaining the assistance.

...The counterproductive nature of the shared preference of the Israeli and U.S. security elites for stability above all was exposed with brutal clarity by the civil war in Syria.

For decades both Israeli and American security authorities supported the Assad regime in Syria. As they still argue with regard to the Palestinians and the Lebanese, the experts insisted that the Assad tyranny was better than any alternative. True, both Hafez Assad and his son and heir Bashar Assad sponsored terrorism and developed weapons of mass destruction. True, under their rule, Syria served and continues to serve as a Russian and Iranian satellite and a hub for global terrorism.

...Israel was not harmed by the destabilization of the Assad dynasty. It was empowered. Assad couldn’t back Hezbollah strikes against Israel when he needed them in Syria to protect him. So the civil war in Syria reduced the prospect of a Hezbollah strike on Israel to an unprecedented low.

Then there were the Syrians themselves. It worked out that once the people began rising up against their oppressor, they were eager to reach out to Israel. Even as Israel maintained an official position of complete impartiality in the war in Syria, and deployed no forces across its border, the Syrians themselves were willing to reward Israel’s humanitarian assistance with significant intelligence assistance.

According to multiple reports and sources, today, nine years after the war broke out, Syria is an open book for Israeli intelligence. And thanks to Israel’s intelligence prowess in Syria, it has gained unprecedented intelligence gathering capabilities throughout the Arab world and in Iran.

...Thanks to the Israeli security community’s slavish devotion to stability, neither Hamas nor Fatah need to concern themselves with internal dissent. Rather than rebel against their Fatah and Hamas overlords, (and turn towards Israel), the various Palestinian factions maintain themselves by joining their regimes in attacking Israel. It’s the only game in town. Were the P.A. and the Hamas regime to collapse, the dynamic would change. And as has been the case in Syria, the Palestinians’ choices would change.

Although it is easy to understand the allure of stability, relations with enemy regimes are inherently unstable and today more than ever, our world is unstable. Our enemies are either collapsing or on the brink of collapse. No Israeli interest is served by saving them.

And no American interest in the broader ME. You don't need their f#cking oil anymore. Let them break into a hundred warring tribal coalitions.
Posted by: g(r)omgoru 2020-07-26
http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=577980