Israel's Success Amid Former Ottoman Empire's Toppled States

 Nadene Goldfoot                                                

The irony of the League of Nations' decisions on what to do with the Ottoman Empire's land and their decision to cut it into sections  has turned out 100% wrong.  They held back any help to the Jews in the creation of Israel and it has blossomed, while other states have fallen 100% flat. They managed to allow 80% of the Promised Jewish Homeland to be given to Abdullah for Jordan, and then split the 20% left of the Jewish section in half and gave that to the Palestinians.  

One of the countries was formerly known as Syria, and by 2015 was no more in reality.  Too much has happened to it since its outbreak of a Civil War in March 2011.  It had been a great threat to Israel with thousands of rockets pointed at her.  Syria as a state simply no longer exists and stopped in 2015.  Like they say, an egg made into an omelet will never be an egg again, and so, Syria hasn't become itself again.  We have a situation now between Syria and Iran, both against Israel.

Three other states  had  evaporated with Syria;  Iraq, Libya, and Yemen.  In their place are organizations and gangs with intervals and agendas that are sometimes contradictory and sometimes compatible.  Short-lived alliances have formed only to be soon dissolved.  

                                             

At the end of WWI, the allies won this terrible war of all wars, and inherited the Ottoman Empire, who were on the loser side. That was  held by Turkey for 400 years from 1517 to 1918.   The allies cut up the vast sections of the empire to keep it in manageable-sized states.

                                         

           Emir Feisal ibn Hussein (1885-1933)was their king assigned by the League of Nations.  He was the oldest son of Hussein, the Grand Emir and Sherif of Mecca,  and had led the Beduin Arabs against the Turks of the Ottoman Empire in WWI, and this was his payoff.  He was a 38th-generation direct descendant of Muhammad, as he belonged to the Hashemite family.  He was related to Abdullah, King of Jordan.  His agenda for his Arabs and the Arabs' agenda for themselves was not the same, so Feisal chose to run with them.  In 1933 he died from cancer.    

Iraq, was Mesopotamia before the war, and before that, called Babylonia.  How did it receive the name Iraq out of Mesopotamia?  On the 23, 1921, the British installed Feisal as king of Mesopotamia, permanently,  changing the official name of the country at that time to Iraq, an Arabic word which, Fromkin says, means “well-rooted country.” The first 11 chapters of Genesis are largely set in Mesopotamia. Eden is a Sumerian word meaning “steppe," and was a district in Sumer.  The Tower of Babel was in Babylon. The Hanging Gardens may have inspired the story of the Garden of Eden. According to Genesis Abraham and Cain and Abel and numerous other Biblical figures were born in Mesopotamia and the first cities founded after the flood were Babel (Babylon), Erech (Uruk), and Accad (Akkad) there.  It became a state on October 3, 1932. Emir Feisal ben Hussein was selected to be their king by the League of Nations from August 23,1921 to 1933. 

Syria was called Aram in the bible.  During the Seleucid period (312-64 BCE), the term Syria was introduced as Hellenistic designation for this region, but the native name (Aram) persisted in use among Arameans, up to the Arab conquest in the 7th century CE.  It became a state on October 24, 1945 when France's mandate from WWI was finished, and they were on their own by April 17, 1946.  Feisal was proclaimed King of the Arab Kingdom of Syria or Greater Syria in 1920.  

Libya : Prior to its independence in December 24, 1951, the territory comprising present-day Libya (Tripoli) had been a semi-independent province of the Ottoman Empire from 1711 to 1835, an Italian colony from 1912 until 1947, and was under British and French occupation from 1943 to 1951.  The Iran and Libya Sanctions Act of 1996 (ILSA) was a 1996 act of the United States Congress that imposed economic sanctions on firms doing business with Iran and Libya....

Yemen:  This country is the name of SW Arabia.  It became an independent state on May 22, 1990.  Five years of negotiations ensued, and ended with the signing of the Treaty of Daan on 9 October 1911, which led to Yemen becoming a vassal state of the Ottoman Empire.Dubai, United Arab Emirates — The U.S. Navy said it seized a large cache of assault rifles and ammunition being smuggled by a fishing ship from Iran likely bound for war-ravaged Yemen.

                                              

        Jerusalem in December's rain

Israel: Became a state on May 14, 1948.  David Ben-Gurion, leader of Mapai and head of the Jewish Agency, became Israel's first prime minister. The position became permanent on 8 March 1949, when the first government was formed.  Israel is a going concern.  While England allowed Arabs in, they kept Jews out, especially ones fleeing from Nazis.  It was a shameful act and England's bad. The Jewish history was born in ancient Israel, and the people have wanted to return for over 2,000 years.  Their destiny is to all return.  They have more reason than anyone to need their 2nd Israel.  Like Golda Meir has commented, "Israel has a secret weapon.  We have nowhere else to go".     

The League of Nations broke up the Ottoman Empire with the Sykes-Picot Agreement:

• The Sykes-Picot Agreement was a secret 1916 agreement between Great Britain and France, with Russia assenting, that defined their mutually agreed spheres of influence and control in Southwestern Asia, under control of the declining Ottoman Empire.
• The agreement allocated to Britain control of areas between the Mediterranean Sea and the River Jordan, Jordan, and southern Iraq;  France got control of southeastern Turkey, northern Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon; and Russia received Istanbul, the Turkish Straits, and Armenia.
• The agreement is seen by many as a turning point in Western and Arab relations, still mentioned when considering the region and its present-day conflicts.
• Many historians consider the borders created by the Sykes-Picot Agreement “artificial” and argue they have given rise to many conflicts in the region.  We can't argue with that, they have dissolved and are taken over by terrible people.  

The territory of the Syrian Arab Republic had extended over 185,000 square kilometers which is some 9 times more than Israel in the pre-June 1967 borders.  Half of it is desert. 

                                                      

President Bashar Assad is a member of an Alawite clan, supported in 2015 by Iran and Hezbollah. Also, the Lebanese Shi'ite Movement, supported by Iran, who is a Shi'ite country, controlled 20% of the territory, now, probably all of it.  Assad does have control of the capital, Damascus, the coastal strip which is predominantly populated by Alawites.  Alawites as and ethnic sect of Shi'ite Islam.  Asad in 2015 still held onto a small strip in the south adjoining the border with Jordan.  Assad's territory is called "Little Syria." 

Bringing Syria down has been "Islamic State-ISIS." They controlled 80,000 square kilometers (over 40%) of Assad's territory and its 7 million people, about 1/3 of the former total population.  However, lots of the land under ISIS now is just desert with Raqqa in the NE, their capital.                                     

                      ISIS in the act of beheading dissidents

Until 2011, ISIS was the  Iraqi branch of al-Qaida led by Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.  He had sent jihadi volunteers to Syria to fight the Assad regime when the civil war broke out. The war started in 2011, when Syrians, enraged by corruption and emboldened by a wave of "Arab Spring" protests across the region, took to the streets to demand democratic accountability for their leaders. ... The chaos of the war allowed ISIS, al Qaeda and other terror groups to seize more than 70% of Syria's territory.  The fighters were local Syrians, called the Nusra Front and put Syrian Islamist Abu Muhammad al-Julani in charge.  Al-Baghdadi'ss barbarism was too much for even al-Qaida's leader, Ayman al-Zawahiri,  who had replaced Osama bin Laden and gave himself the title of caliph, successor to the Prophet  Muhammad. 

Al-Julani, the Syrian rebels, remained loyal to al-Qaida and al-Zawahari. The 2 groups have joined to fight against Assad and other moderate Islamic groups and at times, each other!  The scene becomes a free-for-all.                                       

       ISIS Leader:  Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi

ISIS terrorizes people and enacts staged killings of its rivals in a whole gamut of barbaric practices, but has started to govern over people, too, by establishing courts of the 7th century style.  

The Nusra Front of Syria doesn't deal in governing. They and al-Qaida use terror attacks to wreak havoc whenever possible.   ISIS, the violent caliphate, has toppled the regimes of Syria, Libya and Iraq.

                                                  

Hezbollah, backed by Iran, was ingrained in the Golan's some 20,000 Druze who are still supporters of Assad in 2015. Iran's al-Quds Force was led by  General Qasem Soleimani who established a small "forward command" on the Syrian side of the border.  They've been attacking Israel from their vantage point.  Earlier, they had hired proxies to do this job from the Druse village of Hader.  In August 2015 Iran sponsored the Palestinian Islamic Jihad group (PIJ).They are in the West Bank and Gaza. They are committed to the creation of an Islamaic Palestinian state and the destruction of Israel through holy war.  The oppose pro-Western  Arab governments.    Israel has had to fight groups who have fired rockets at Israel from them.  Israel has had to kill a senior Iranian General and a few Hezbollah  senior operatives like Jihad Mughniyeh, the son of Hezbollah's Defense Minister, Imad, who was assassinated in 2008 in Damascus in a joint Mossad-CIA operation.  He was involved in terror plots against Israel.

Fast forward to the present day.  Iran's Ayatolla has Persian expansionist goals again, and finds that power will come if they topple Israel. Following Islamic Law, Iran has told the world of their intentions to destroy Israel, and they're already past the point of stopping their nuclear goals.  Now Israel has to concentrate on ending their method of delivering such a missile on Israel's soil. 

      Iran has 11 million soldiers.  In 2011, they had 545,000.  
 

The Iran–Israel proxy conflict, also known as the Iran–Israel proxy war or Iran–Israel Cold War, is an ongoing proxy war between Iran and Israel. The conflict involves threats and hostility by Iran's leaders against Israel, and their declared objective to dissolve the Jewish state by a popular referendum . Iran has provided funding, weapons and training to groups, including Lebanese Hezbollah, Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) both in the Gaza Strip, which have vowed and carried out attacks on Israel, and which have been designated terrorist organizations by many countries. Because of Iran’s hostility to Israel, Israel is also concerned by Iran's nuclear weapons program and missile program, and is seeking to downgrade Iran's allies and proxies, as well as preventing Iranian entrenchment in Syria, another sworn enemy of Israel.                                    

Strains emerged during talks this week after a short period of strong relations between a new Israeli government and new American one.  Golly, what timing!

 

Atta Kenare/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images, credit.

American negotiators have signaled that Iranians’ advancements in their nuclear program and their recent hard line in Vienna mean Tehran is not serious about a diplomatic agreement.   But the tougher line was also aimed at calming increasingly frustrated Israeli officials. Though they will not criticize the American president in public the way former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu did during the Obama administration, Israeli officials in private argue that the Iranians are advancing their nuclear program while betting that the United States, eager to diminish American commitments in the Middle East, will not abandon the Vienna talks for more forceful action. Israel expects a more direct stance.  

Update 4pmPT: Asked about a possible Israeli to attack Iran, the US official commented that he would not speak for Israel. which is “a sovereign state.”  The Biden administration clearly remains committed to diplomacy, while Israel maintains that Iran is playing for time to weaponize its nuclear program

Sullivan also travelled to Ramallah to meet Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas.

https://www.debka.com/mivzak/us-israel-gaps-on-iran-smaller-after-sullivan-visit-but-remain/

 

Resource:

The Jerusalem Report, September 21, 2015, p 14-15.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Syria

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faisal_I_of_Iraq_and_Syria

https://history.state.gov/countries/libya

https://courses.lumenlearning.com/boundless-worldhistory/chapter/partition-of-the-ottoman-empire/

https://factsanddetails.com/world/cat56/sub402/entry-6059.html

atimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1990-09-02-bk-1977-story.html#:~:text=23%2C%201921%2C%20the%20British%20installed,“well-rooted%20country.”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran%E2%80%93Israel_proxy_conflict

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran_and_Libya_Sanctions_Act