Lo and behold … Obama will get his man, after 240,000 deaths, 4 million refugees [UNHRC registered] aiming to reach western Europe and 7.6 million displaced persons inside Syria. The neocon wet dream to take Syria out of the Iranian axis of proxies threatening Israel has become the greatest human tragedy of the 21st century. Shame on the imperial powers France, UK and the US.
○ Syria report: more than half of those uprooted from their homes are children
Indeed, don’t cross Obama or he will destroy you with sanctions and the economic might of the United States. No need for boots on the ground, let the poor souls on the ground suffer which has been Israel’s repugnant policy for decades. Times have changed for the worse since Vietnam and the views of George McGovern. The last global protest against war was in 2003 before the invasion and occupation of Iraq by George Bush and Tony Blair. It has changed the Labor Party and perhaps we’ll witness a backlash when party members elect Jeremy Corbyn as its new leader.
○ Turkey joins Qatari bid to broker Israel-Hamas deal | Times of Israel – April 2015 |
‘Hamas-Israel deal imminent,’ to the dismay of Palestinian factions | Times of Israel |
Hamas is about to sign a “comprehensive” agreement with Israel for the lifting of an eight-year blockade placed on the Gaza Strip in return for a long-term ceasefire, a senior Turkish official said on Sunday.
But the agreement is facing domestic opposition from without, as Palestinian factions consider it a potential danger to the political unity of Gaza and the West Bank as stipulated by the Oslo Accords.
In an interview with Hamas daily al-Resalah, Yasin Aktay, an adviser to Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu and deputy chairman of the ruling Justice and Development Party, said that Hamas’s political leader Khaled Mashaal came to Ankara last week to update the Turkish leadership on the details of an agreement reached with Israel and mediated by former British prime minister Tony Blair.
Details of the imminent agreement, reported first by London-based daily al-Hayat on Thursday, have begun to emerge on Hamas news outlets as well over the weekend. According to the reports, Gaza will be allowed to import merchandise through a “floating port” located 3 kilometers (1.8 miles) off the coast. An intermediary port will be established in Cyprus, where all Gaza-bound merchandise will be scrutinized by NATO representatives.
…
Israeli Arabic-language website al-Masdar [controlled by The Israel Project] reported on Sunday that Hamas’s leadership held a meeting in Gaza on Friday, specifying the deal’s details. According to al-Masdar’s unnamed Hamas source, Israel has also agreed to allow in thousands of Gazan day laborers through the Erez crossing in return for Hamas’s agreement to stop launching rockets into Israel and digging subterranean attack tunnels underneath the border for a period of at least eight years.
Will Israel join Turkey-Saudi coalition? | Al-Monitor |
The cold shoulder that Erdogan received during his visit to Iran only served to cement the relationship between Turkey and Saudi Arabia. Cengiz Candar wrote for Al-Monitor that Saudi King Salman bin Abdul-Aziz Al Saud, who assumed the throne after the death of King Abdullah earlier this year, is deeply concerned about Iran’s expansionist and nuclear ambitions, and would like to form a Sunni axis to confront it. Of course, Turkey would play a prominent role in such an alliance.
When differences of opinion erupted between Erdogan and the late Saudi King Abdullah (over the ousting of Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi), it was Qatar that acted to appease the spirits. The brokering efforts and involvement created a trilateral Sunni axis, composed of Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar, against the Shiite axis of Iran, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, Hezbollah and the Houthis in Yemen. The first goal defined by the new Sunni axis was the ousting of Assad, considered also in Israel as a local Iranian front and as being under the ayatollahs’ command. With this goal in mind, the members of the Sunni axis have been openly assisting Sunni organizations that are battling Assad in Syria (those who are not affiliated with the Islamic State), such as Jabhat al-Nusra.
A senior Israeli security official who spoke on condition of anonymity said that the recent spate of attacks in the Israeli Golan Heights’ sector originated exclusively in those territories under Assad’s control. According to that security official, these attacks are “an Iranian effort to use `proxies’ against us.” He claimed that no attacks had been launched against Israel from territories controlled by Jabhat al-Nusra or the Free Syrian Army, both of which are fighting against Assad, and there is an agreement that Israel will not interfere with their activities against the Syrian president.
The security source refused to divulge how messages are exchanged between the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) and those forces fighting against Assad in the Syrian Golan Heights, but the source did confirm that official lines of communication between Israel and Turkey on these matters have been severed. The problem is that when it comes to common geostrategic interests, there is more overlap between Jerusalem and Turkey than ever before. That is why security sources in Israel are unanimous that the restoration of diplomatic ties between the two countries is more important than ever.
Those parties who believe that Israel has made more than its fair share of concessions to Ankara cite the warm reception that the Turkish government has afforded to Hamas officials in its territory. On the other hand, in the absence of direct and efficient lines of communication between the two countries, Turkey has no real interest in cutting off ties with Hamas. In other words, Israel’s protests are falling on deaf ears.
Netanyahu responds to Erdogan’s provocations | Al-Monitor – Jan. 20, 2015 |
IDF Takes Control (Tacitly) of Syrian Golan | Tikun Olam |
Earlier in my reporting on the Syrian civil war, I sketched out what I thought was Israel’s strategy in containing or managing the conflict there. In the past, Israel had learned to live with a Syria governed by a strongman-authoritarian system (the Assad family). It enjoyed the same relationship with Egypt’s Mubarak and Jordan’s Hussein-Abdullah dynasty. It even has excellent, though covert relations with the House of Saud.
With the war and dissolution of central power, Israel now moved to a preferred model of a weak, dysfunctional Syrian state. Either one with warring rebel factions killing each other; or, if Assad could not be felled, a state divided up into ethnic cantons. One of those cantons would be the Golan. Israel, I maintained, intended to carve out a buffer zone much as it did in southern Lebanon after its 1982 invasion. At the time I wrote this, there wasn’t nearly as much evidence to support this plan as there is now. I pointed then to a FoxNews report showing Israeli special forces returning from liaison with what a confidential Israeli source told me was local Syrian Druze rebels.
In past months, evidence to support Israel’s intensive intervention on behalf of the Syrian Islamist rebels has grown exponentially. The latest is a report by Yediot Achronot’s military correspondent, Alex Fishman. He writes today in Israel is up to its neck in Syria:
… Ever since most of the Syrian Army was driven back from the border area and its positions were taken by radical Islamic organization such as Jabhat al-Nusra, there has not been a single incident of a Jihadi group attacking Israel. This seems to indicate that Israel has total control – intelligence and operational – over both sides of the border.
Last week, Israel invaded Syrian sovereignty in a targeted assassination of an Iranian Revolutionary Guard general, a senior Hezbollah commander and the son of Imad Mugniyeh, the latter earlier murdered by a Mossad bomb in Damascus [A joint operation with the CIA in 2008]. Even worse, it is now lying about the nature of the attack in order to deflect blame and pre-emptively blame Iran and Hezbollah for any retaliatory action they may take against Israel. The IDF is claiming it didn’t know such high level targets were in the convoy attacked:
“We did not expect the outcome in terms of the stature of those killed – certainly not the Iranian general. We thought we were hitting an enemy field unit that was on its way to carry out an attack on us at the frontier fence.”
“We got the alert, we spotted the vehicle, identified it was an enemy vehicle and took the shot. We saw this as a limited tactical operation.”
Israel Assassinates Syrian General | Tikun Olam – May 2014 |
IDF Unit 8200 provided “intelligence” to substantiate Ghouta gas attack was likely ordered by Assad’s generals – indication of Sunni led false-flag attack to get Obama to destroy Assad’s defenses around Damascus in August 2013. Reminded me of the joint Saudi-Israeli Beirut bombing of the colonne with Lebanon’s PM Hariri to put blame on Syria’s Assad. US has been at least complacent and very likely complicit in the cover-up of the assassination during the Bush years.
From my earlier diary – Turks and Sauds to Install Sunni Terror in Damascus, Syria [May 2015].
