Israel's dangerous expansionism is now the clear and present danger

The Herald Scotland

4 days ago

That much was evident again during a speech in February when Israeli defence minister Israel Katz told how he had asked the country's military commanders what the main lesson was from the Hamas attack of October 7, 2023.
'They said we will no longer allow radical organisations to exist near [[Israel]]'s borders, whether in Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, or near the settlements. And that is now our policy,' Katz's speech went on to recount the military chiefs as saying.
But the truth of the matter is that this has always been Israel's policy, and at the heart of such a military doctrine lies the belief that territorial depth offers lasting security. Or, to put this another way, security through expansionism has forever been a core tenet of the Israeli military playbook. That said, rarely has the country and its government been as determinedly expansionist as it is today.
Writing recently in the Financial Times (FT), the Saudi author and commentator Ali Shihabi described Israel's current pursuit of more territory as one 'cloaked in the language of security and religious entitlement'. By 'entitlement' Shihabi is, of course, referring to the biblical idea of a 'Greater Israel' that many of the religious zealots and right-wingers that comprise prime minister Benyamin Netanyahu's coalition government envisage in Gaza, the occupied West Bank and beyond.
Whether Netanyahu himself is fully aligned with his cabinet over ambitions for a 'Greater Israel' remains open to conjecture, but what's in no doubt is that Israel is now pushing back its borders like never before.
In Gaza this past week, reports of an intensification in the demolition of buildings underscores what many observers see as Israel's long-term plan to move the Palestinian population out and fully control Gaza's post-war space. In the occupied West Bank, meanwhile, Israel's illegal settlement expansion and annexing of territory goes on apace. Further afield, the past week also saw Israel doubling down militarily on both Syria and Lebanon.
In Syria, Israel continues to take territorial advantage of the country's political fragility in the wake of the overthrow of Bashar al- Assad's regime.
(Image: The Washington Post via Getty Images)
FAR BEYOND THE LINE
FOR months, the Israeli military have been assimilating the Druze residents of the Golan Heights, venturing territorially far beyond the line where their predecessors stopped during the conquest of this mountainous plateau Israel has occupied since 1967.
Since the ousting of Assad last December, Israel has struck Syria hundreds of times, and invaded and occupied about 155 square miles of its territory.
Last Wednesday, Israel launched air strikes on Syria's capital, Damascus. It also hit Syrian government forces in the south in an operation it says was aimed at protecting the Druze minority group caught up in clashes with Bedouin tribes in Syria's southern province of Sweida close to the Israeli border.
But Netanyahu's claim that Israel is simply giving the Druze – one million of whom are are spread across the region including in Israel – a helping hand simply doesn't wash with many Middle East analysts.'It's pure opportunism,' Alon Pinkas, a former Israeli ambassador and consul general in New York, told Al Jazeera.
'Of course, it's nice to pretend that we're helping our friends the Druze in the same way as we never helped our other friends, the Kurds,' he said, referring to another regional ethnic group.
Pinkas is not alone in his assessment that Israel doesn't want to see a unified Syria with a strong central government controlled by Ahmed al-Sharaa's fledgling presidency. Like other observers, Pinkas maintains that Netanyahu would far rather see 'a weak central government dealing with areas controlled by the Kurds (in the north) and the Druze and Bedouin in the south.'
'Basically, if Syria remains un-unified, Israel can do what it wants in its south,' he added, underlining yet again the perceived importance of territorial depth offering lasting security.
Few doubt the sectarian violence that has gripped Syria's Sweida province these past days has underscored the country's fragility and presented al-Shaara with his most significant crisis yet. For his part, Netanyahu reiterated that Israel will continue to use military means to enforce its two red lines in Syria – the demilitarisation of the area south of Damascus, near Israel's border, and the protection of the country's Druze minority there.
The most extremist members of Netanyahu's government, meanwhile, continue to make clear that Israel's intention is to go much further. Only a few months ago, Israeli finance minister Bezalel Smotrich declared that Israel would not stop fighting until Syria was partitioned and hundreds of thousands of Palestinians had been expelled from Gaza into third countries.
'With God's help and the valour of your comrades-in-arms who continue to fight even now, we will end this campaign when Syria is dismantled, Hezbollah is severely beaten, Iran is stripped of its nuclear threat, Gaza is cleansed of Hamas and hundreds of thousands of Gazans are on their way out of it to other countries,' Smotrich declared during a pre-Memorial Day speech in the West Bank.Divide the country?
DIVIDE THE COUNTRY
ACCORDING to the Times of [[Israel]], Smotrich's comment about dividing Syria came just days after a US Republican congressman Marlin Stutzman told the newspaper that al-Sharaa had expressed 'openness' to normalising relations with Jerusalem and cautioned against efforts to divide the country.
'The first (concern) – which I felt was most important to him – was that Israel may have a plan to divide up the nation of Syria into… multiple parts. That was something that he was very opposed to,' Stutzman recalled.
The plan again, according to the Times of Israel, appeared to be a reference to the lobbying Israel has reportedly been doing in Washington for the US to buck al-Sharaa's fledgling government in favour of establishing a decentralised series of autonomous ethnic regions, with the southern one bordering Israel being demilitarised.Going by last week's flare-up between Israel and Syria, that issue of partitioning Syria and creating a demilitarised southern area appears to be still on the cards as far as Netanyahu is concerned.
This weekend, relations took a slightly more positive turn, however, after hostilities between the two sides were quelled on Friday by the announcement of a ceasefire.
Israeli officials confirmed that 'due to the ongoing instability' they had agreed to allow Syrian forces limited access to the Sweida area over the next few days. But even with this ceasefire in place the situation remains incredibly volatile, and al-Sharaa could now in effect be forced to either cede ambitions to reassert state control over southern Syria, undermining his attempts to unify the country, or risk an even greater confrontation with Israel.
Israel's laying down of territorial markers in Syria is just the latest example of what some analysts says is a policy of pushing a dangerous expansionism in the region. With the Israeli air force bombing Beirut and the Bekaa Valley in Lebanon, as well as the Syrian capital Damascus from which its infantry troops are now stationed a mere 40 minutes away, never has Israel engaged in such prolonged conflict on so many battlefronts.
All this, too, before taking into consideration its recent onslaught on targets across Iran. With every day that passes Netanyahu, it seems, raises the stakes even further while increasingly disregarding the occasional overtures from Washington to rein in Israel's military actions as was the case in Syria last week.
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EXPANSION STRATEGY
TO get a fuller picture of the scale and intensity of Israel's expansionist strategy at the moment it's worth considering recent mapping compiled by the independent non-profit think tank the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project (ACLED).
According to a recent analysis of its data, it shows that between October 7, 2023 – the date of the Hamas attack on Israel – and just before Israel attacked Iran on June 13, Israel has carried out nearly 35,000 recorded attacks across five countries: the occupied Palestinian territory, Lebanon, Syria, Yemen and Iran.These attacks include air and drone strikes, shelling and missile attacks, remote explosives, and property destruction.
The majority of attacks have been on Palestinian territory with at least 18,235 recorded incidents, followed by Lebanon (15,520), Syria (616), Iran (58) and Yemen (39). Detailing ACLED's research, the broadcaster Al Jazeera noted that while the bulk of Israel's attacks have concentrated on nearby Gaza, the occupied West Bank and Lebanon, its military operations have also reached far beyond its immediate borders.Over the past six months, Israeli forces have launched more than 200 air, drone or artillery attacks across Syria, averaging an assault roughly every three to four days, according to ACLED.
In Gaza, meanwhile, reports last week confirmed that Israel has stepped up the demolition of buildings across Gaza with entire towns and suburbs levelled in the past few weeks.
Heavy machinery has played a central role in this destruction operated both by soldiers and civilians, reports indicate.Civilians operating heavy machinery in Gaza can earn as much as $9,000 per month, according to reports in the TheMarker, a Hebrew-language daily business newspaper.
According to newspaper, a trained heavy equipment operator can earn approximately 1,200 shekels (£270) per day, drawn from the 5,000 shekels (£1,118) the Israeli ministry of defence pays daily to the equipment's owner.'At first I did it for the money. Then for revenge. The work there is very hard and unpleasant,' one heavy equipment operator told TheMarker. 'The army doesn't operate smartly, it just wants to destroy as much as possible and doesn't care about anything.'
Gaza's demolitions, many of them buildings that have already been destroyed or damaged by Israel's military onslaught, is seen by observers as part of a longer post-war plan to control, contain, or disperse what remains of Gaza's civilian Palestinian population and prepare the way for the territory's use for settlement expansion and commercial use. In the occupied West Bank, meanwhile, Israel is applying many of the tactics used in its war on Gaza to seize and control territory there.
According to an analysis by the British research group Forensic Architecture, Israel has used building demolitions, armoured bulldozers, and air strikes to establish a permanent military presence in areas such as Jenin, Nur Shams and Tulkarem refugee camps.
Satellite imagery shows widespread destruction, with entire neighbourhoods flattened and roads reconfigured to facilitate troop movements and surveillance. The United Nations estimates that these operations have displaced at least 40,000 Palestinians.
As Israel's expansionist strategy intensifies, many regional observers say it is simply fuelling chaos and stoking up a future widening regional conflict.
Martin Gak is an Argentinian Jewish journalist based in Germany who is of the view that Israel's territorial ambitions are 'much bigger than the theological design of greater Israel'. In a recent interview, Gak drew parallels with the way Israel is now operating in the Middle East using tactics similar to those of Russia.
He said: 'If you look at Gaza, if you look at what happened in southern Lebanon, the images should be very reminiscent of Grozny in the second Chechen war… so I think that what we're seeing is a Russian playbook of complete destruction,' Gak told Turkish media.
ISRAEL'S GAIN?
OTHER regional observers like the Saudi commentator Shihabi recently posed the question in the FT as to what does Israel truly gain from this relentless push to expand its borders?
'The cost is staggering: deepening international isolation, increasing threats to the global Jewish community, psychological trauma within a constantly targeted Israeli society, and the further destabilisation of an already volatile region,' Shihabi concluded.
Like other Middle East watchers, Shihabi is firmly of the view that more territory is not the answer to Israel's security problems and that 'the future is being held hostage by zealots who value conquest over co-existence'.
While it might have been initially framed as an 'incursion' to eradicate Hamas and rescue the nearly 250 hostages seized on October 7, Israel's Gaza 'operation' has since moved into an entirely new and much wider military realm. It's one, too, for which it has been given virtual carte blanche by the US and Western countries to prosecute. Until that stops, Israel's dangerous expansionist ambitions will almost certainly continue to fuel an escalation in conflict across the Middle East.
The days of framing such a military strategy as being driven by 'existential need' have gone. Israel, as many rightfully argue, is the real regional threat now.