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<font size="1"><a href="https://www.palestinechronicle.com/the-assassins-creed-murder-as-israeli-state-policy/">https://www.palestinechronicle.com/the-assassins-creed-murder-as-israeli-state-policy/</a>
</font><h1 class="gmail-reader-title">The Assassin's Creed: Murder as Israeli State Policy</h1>
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<div class="gmail-reader-estimated-time" dir="ltr">November 30, 2020<br></div>
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<img src="https://www.palestinechronicle.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/Fakhrizadeh-image-678x455.jpg" alt="" title="Fakhrizadeh-image" style="margin-right: 25px;" width="440" height="295">
Top Iranian scientist, Mohsen Fakhrizadeh. (Image: Courtesy Al-Mayadeen)
<p><strong>By <a href="https://www.palestinechronicle.com/writers/jeremy-salt" title="Display all articles for Jeremy Salt">Jeremy Salt</a></strong></p><blockquote><p><em>“If our dreams for Zionism are not to end in the smoke of assassins’ pistols</em></p>
<p><em> and our labor for its future to produce only a new set of gangsters worthy </em></p>
<p><em>of Nazi Germany, many like myself will have to reconsider the position we </em></p>
<p><em>have maintained for so long in the past.”</em></p>
<p><em> — <a href="https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/sir-winston-churchill-zionist-hero-8277918.html">Winston Churchill</a>,
November 1944, from his address to the House of Commons on the murder
of Britain’s Resident Minister in the Middle East, Lord Moyne, by two
members of the zionist terrorist organization, Lehi</em></p></blockquote>
<p><span>Israel’s crimes against Iran in the past decade include the
sabotage through the Stuxnet virus of the centrifuges in its nuclear
development program, the killing through missile attack of its militia
members in Syria, the sabotage of its Natanz nuclear plant in July this
year and the murder in recent years of five of its leading nuclear
scientists, most recently, a few days ago, Mohsen Fakhrizadeh.</span></p>
<p><span>Each of these attacks would have been carried out with at least
the approval of the US government, if not the active involvement at
some level of both the US and its puppet Iranian terrorist organization,
the MEK (Mujahedin e-Khalq). In reverse, Israel would have been
closely involved in the US assassination of Qasim Suleimani in Iraq in
January this year. </span></p>
<p><span>These murders might be state operations but are no different in
their brazen nature, their illegality and their brutality from hits
organized by Mafia gangs. In the case of Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, a
distinguished physicist, he was apparently dragged from his car during
the attack and finished off in the middle of the road. The crime was so
heinous that even voices usually hostile to Iran (including the </span><span>New York Times</span><span> and former CIA director John Brennan) were appalled.</span></p>
<p><span>Each of these attacks is a casus belli for war. Two can play at
this game, which means that by these attacks, Israel is virtually
inviting the assassination of its own political leaders and military
commanders, or its senior representatives abroad. That Iran does not
strike back, in the same way, is not necessarily a sign that it does not
have the capacity to organize such retaliation. Apart from the
criminality and violations of international law that such actions
represent, Iran is never going to strike back at a time of Israel’s
choosing.</span></p>
<p><span>Nevertheless, the government is under pressure from its own
people to deal with a devastating counter-blow, not necessarily against
individuals but against Israeli infrastructure such as the port at
Haifa. Each of these provocations pushes Iran closer to the edge, as
intended by Israel. The repeated refusal of the government to respond
is being criticized in Iran as a sign of weakness, as the more Israel
gets away with the more it will try to get away with. </span></p>
<p><span>At the same time, even though Israel is responsible, an Iranian
reprisal would trigger off a large-scale military response by Israel
and a full-scale war that no one in their right mind would want. It is a
further sign of the moral void at their center that Netanyahu and many
of the fanatics around him do want such a war and are prepared to drop
bombs on live nuclear reactors to achieve their aims.</span></p>
<p><span>The general view seems to be that Israel did this so Biden
would not be able to sign back on to the Joint Comprehensive Plan of
Action (JCPOA) nuclear agreement from which Trump withdrew the US in
2018. That may be so, but Netanyahu might have calculated that this
latest savagery would be the final spark igniting the war he has wanted
for years. Either of these outcomes would suit him.</span></p>
<p><span>There are always parallels in history and for Israel’s attempts
to provoke an open war with Iran, one parallel would be Israel’s
attempts to draw Egypt’s President Gamal Abd al Nasser into war in 1967.
This was no ‘preemptive’ war but another war of choice. 1948 was the
first, because only through war could the zionists seize Palestine, at
least most of it. 1967 was the second launched to destroy Egypt’s armed
forces, to destroy Nasser’s Arab world leadership, and to occupy the
rest of Palestine. </span></p>
<p><span>It was strikingly successful. All Palestine ended up under
occupation and the Egyptian military was shattered. Nasir’s pan Arab
leadership was not destroyed but gravely weakened by Egypt’s failure to
see the war coming and defend itself.</span></p>
<p><span>Just as Israel has been trying to draw Iran into the open
through the assassination of its scientists and the sabotage of its
nuclear plants, so in the year before the 1967 war it set out to draw
Nasser into the open through provocations along the Syrian armistice
line. These took the form of incursions by armored tractors into the
DMZ, triggering off shelling by the Syrian army and then air attacks by
Israel. </span></p>
<p><span>Although Israel was determined to destroy any Arab nationalist
government and to destroy Arab nationalism itself, the main target of
these provocations was Nasser. He was the foremost Arab champion and
Israel wanted him where it could get at him. It knew that sooner or he
would have to respond to its provocations on the Syrian front by taking
action on the Egyptian front.</span></p>
<p><span>When Israel shot down six Syrian planes in April 1967, the ball
started to roll. Israeli politicians talked of going further than ever
before, of teaching Syria a lesson, and even of invading Syria and
occupying Damascus, 15 years ahead of its invasion of Lebanon and
occupation of Beirut. </span></p>
<p><span>By the second week of May, war was regarded as inevitable.
Nasser moved troops and tanks into Sinai and called for the withdrawal
of the UN Emergency Force (UNEF) from the armistice line. Although
Israel was the aggressor in the 1956 war, UNEF forces were inside Egypt
because Israel refused to accept them on its side of the armistice line
and as usual, it got its way. </span></p>
<p><span>On May 22, Nasser closed the Straits of Tiran, the entrance
point to the Gulf of Aqaba, but without actually blocking them to
Israeli shipping. Under pressure, however, to stand up to the Israelis,
he had moved the final piece on the board that set the stage for war. </span></p>
<p><span>Israel repeated the rhetoric of 1948. İt was again being
threatened with extermination and annihilation at the hands of an Arab
‘ring of steel.’ In fact, it knew, and so did the CIA, that it would
easily defeat any Arab army or combination of Arab armies. Behind the
panic deliberately set in motion among the Israeli population, the
generals could not wait to get going. They vowed to be on the banks on
the Suez Canal within a week. This was an opportunity – one they had
created – that Israel could not afford to miss. The military would
deliver a knockout blow: according to Yigal Allon, “There is not the
slightest doubt about the outcome of this war and each of its stages.”</span></p>
<p><span>And so it turned out to be. On the Arab side, there is not the
slightest doubt that Nasser did not want war. His threats were those of
the Arab champion and his intended audience the Arab world, but behind
the scenes, he was looking for a way out of the crisis into which he had
been maneuvered. An Egyptian delegation led by Vice-President Zakaria
Muhi Al-Din was due to fly into Washington on June 7 for talks to begin
the following day on bringing the crisis to an end. However, on June 5,
with the window of the opportunity for war about to close, Israel
attacked.</span></p>
<p><span>There is symmetry in all of these wars. Israel plays the role
of the victim even while preparing to attack. In 1948 Chaim Weizmann
talked of extermination while assuring the Americans behind the scenes
that the Arab armies counted for nothing. Israel’s arrogance was checked
in the first week of the 1973 war, with humiliation at the hands of
Hizbullah waiting in 2000 and 2006. Yet if there is a learning curve
Israel does not see it, an example of what long ago US Senator J.
William Fulbright called the “arrogance of power.”</span></p>
<p><span>Israel applies the same tactics at the micro as well as the
macro level. On the West Bank and Gaza, it murders and massacres, and
when there is a Palestinian response it has its rationale for more
crushing blows. On the West Bank, this usually takes the form of
enlarging settlements or building new ones. </span></p>
<p><span>From the Zionist point of view, this has been a good year.
Following the establishment of diplomatic relations with Israel by the
UAE and Bahrain, the UAE has gone as far as blocking entry visas to the
citizens of a dozen Muslim countries while allowing Israelis visa-free
entry. Talks in Saudi Arabia between Netanyahu and Muhammad bin Salman –
apparently arranged without the knowledge of the king – open the way to
the establishment of diplomatic relations, although for the time being
this is not expected. MBS can give Israel most of what it wants without
needing to come into the open, and as the nominal custodian of the two
holy places, such a move would enrage Muslims around the world, with
explosive consequences possible at the time of the hajj.</span></p>
<p><span>Israel’s strategic advances also include the commercial,
military and strategic relationship it is establishing in the eastern
Mediterranean with Greece and the Greek government of southern Cyprus,
which has already allowed Israeli military units to train on the island
because of the similarity of the topography to southern Lebanon.
Successfully playing off fears of Iran in the Gulf, Israel plays off
Greek rivalry with Turkey in the eastern Mediterranean. </span></p>
<p><span>Able to attack from the very center of the central Arab lands –
occupied Palestine – Israel is now steadily moving into a position that
will eventually enable it to threaten Arab states and Iran from the
periphery, from the gulf in the southwest and from the northeastern
corner of the Mediterranean. It has pushed these doors open and on the
basis of all its past behavior, it will keep pushing until it gets what
it wants.</span></p>
<p><span>The assassination of Mohsen Fakhrizadeh has antecedents dating
back to the barrel bomb murders in Palestinian markets in the 1930s, the
assassination of Lord Moyne in Cairo on November 6, 1944, the blowing
up of the King David Hotel in 1946, the assassination of Count Folke
Bernadotte in 1948 and the massacres and destruction that have marked
the zionist presence in the Middle East ever since.</span></p>
<p><span>Whether the enemy is a state, an organization or an
individual, the enemy must be destroyed. The standing refusal of the
international ‘community’ to punish Israel for any of these crimes only
encourages the zionist state to go still further.</span></p>
<p><span>Speaking to the House of Commons after the murder of Lord Moyne, Churchill, a strong advocate of Zionism all along, <a>remarked</a>
that “If there to be any hope of a peaceful and successful future for
Zionism these wicked activities must cease and those responsible for
them must be destroyed root and branch.” </span><span>These wicked
activities have never ceased, those responsible for them have never been
destroyed root and branch, the smoke of the assassins’ pistols now
hangs over an entire region and Zionism has produced generations of
criminals fully worthy of Nazi Germany. </span></p>
<p><span>No state can endlessly endure Israel’s provocations. Iran and
Hezbollah are playing the long game, compared to Netanyahu’s greed for
instant satisfaction but at some point, there will be a limit to what
they can endure and then there will be war, possibly if not probably the
most devastating in the modern history of the Middle East. What will
the international ‘community’ say then? It will be far too late to
regret that it should have done something to stop Israel earlier.</span></p>
<p><i><span>– Jeremy Salt taught at the University of Melbourne, at
Bosporus University in Istanbul and Bilkent University in Ankara for
many years, specializing in the modern history of the Middle East. Among
his recent publications is his 2008 book, The Unmaking of the Middle
East. A History of Western Disorder in Arab Lands (University of
California Press). He contributed this article to The Palestine
Chronicle.</span></i></p>
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