Daily Times

Developments in the Middle East point unmistakably to the fact that work on the Greater Israel plan is continuing. Following President Doald Trump’s announcement regarding US policy on Golan Heights, it can be safely concluded that the so-called Arab Spring was planned and provoked, if not orchestrated, by Israel and its allies and was not a spontaneous occurence.

On March 25, the US president officially announced his government’s recognition of Israeli sovereignty over Golan Heights. The Syrian territory has been under Israeli occupation since the Six Day War of 1967. Prime Minister Netanyahu of Israel described the announcement as historic. He said: “Isreal won the Golan Heights in a just war of self-defence and the Jewish people’s roots in the Golan go back thousands of years.”

Earlier, on December 6, 2017, President Trump had formally recognized Jerusalem as Isreal’s capital and promised to move the American embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. Several countries have followed suit despite a majority in the United Nations General Assembly opposing it.

It is now clear that Israel is aggressively pursuing its grand plan and that America is lending it full diplomatic and military support. This is a clear violation of the United Nations Security Council Resolution 181, calling for the partition of Palestine into an Arab state on 43 per cent of the area and an Israeli state on 57 per cent of the area. Jerusalem is to remain sunder international control.

Israel had occupied more than over 70 of the area in 1948 with help from the United Kingdom and France in blatant violation of the UN resolution. The expansionist designs of the Jewish state, created through the Balfour Declaration of 1917 and later legitimized under UN Resolution 181, have long been apparent.

The Greater Israel plan, also known as the Yinon Plan, is meant to ensure regional military superiority for the state of Israel. It calls for Israel to reconfigure its geopolitical environment through the balkanization of the neighbouring Arab states

According to Theodore Herzl, the founding father of Zionism, “the area of the Jewish State stretches “from the Brook of Egypt to the Euphrates.” According to Rabbi Fischmann, “The Promised Land extends from the River of Egypt up to the Euphrates; it includes parts of Syria and Lebanon.”

The Greater Israel plan, also known as the Yinon Plan, is an Israeli strategy meant to ensure regional superiority. It calls for Israel to reconfigure its geo-political environment through the balkanization of the neighbouring Arab states into weak smaller entities.

The plan is based on two essential premises.

* Israel must become a regional power to ensure its survival; and

* it must effect the Arab states in the region to be divided into smaller and weaker countires.

How small these states can be depends on their ethnic/sectarian composition. Fragmentation of all Arab states into smaller units has been a recurrent theme.

Israeli strategists had viewed Iraq as the biggest strategic challenge from an Arab state. Iraq was thus marked to be the centerpiece in the balkanization of the Middle East and the Arab World. Israeli strategists are calling for the division of Iraq into a Kurdish state, a Shia Arab state and a Sunni Arab state.

The Atlantic Journal published in 2008 maps already published in US armed forces journals in 2006 that closely follow the Yinon Plan outline. Aside from a fragmented Iraq, the Yinon Plan calls for the division of Lebanon, Egypt, and Syria. It also calls for dissolution of several African countries including Egypt, Sudan and Libya.

To give effect to the plan for Greater Israel, the Zionists can benefit from the Shia-Sunni schism as well as ethnic conflicts in the Muslim world.

The Muslim Arab world today appears to be a house of cards. The 19 states arbitrarily carved out in the region all have significant sectarian and ethnic minorities hostile to the majorities.

Currently, the hostilty is more in evidence in the states east of Israel than in the west. Syria is fundamentally no different from Lebanon. The significant diffrence has been the strong military regime. The civil war has highlighted the severity of the differences between the Sunni majority and the Shi’ite Alawi ruling minority.

Iraq is no different. It has ethnic as well as sectarian differnces driving the hostility.

The Gulf principalities and Saudi Arabia face similar challenges. In Kuwait, the Kuwaitis constitute only a quarter of the population. In Bahrain and the UAE, Shi’ites are the majority but denied political power. The same is true of Oman and North Yemen. South Yemen, too, has a sizeable Shi’ite minority. In Saudi Arabia, half the population is foreign, primarily Egyptian and Yemenite.

Apart from the religious and ethnic fissures, the Arab world is divided economically. There is a yawning gap between the haves and the have-nots. Most of the Arabs have an average yearly income of 300 US dollars. This includes most of Egypt, the Maghreb countries (except for Libya) and Iraq.

In Lebanon the economy is falling to pieces. Syria is now in an even more grave situation. Egypt is the worst off with millions on the verge of hunger and half its labour force unemployed. Housing is scarce in this most densely populated area of the world. Except for the army, there is not a single efficient department in the governemnt. The state is in a permanent state of bankruptcy. It depends entirely on American assistance.

Given a Middle East divided along ethnic, religious, social and economic lines, the Zionists face no big hurdle to their plan for Greater Israel. Muslims of the greater Middle East should be mindful of the situation and understand that instability in their region is meant to pave the way for Greater Israel. They need to forge unity by putting their parochial interests aside.

The writer is a legal practitioner and columnist based in Quetta