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Israel’s decision to carve out a strip on the Syrian side of the Golan Heights – Syrian territory occupied and administered by Israel since 1967 – is hardly a new tactic: Israel did much the same in south Lebanon.

Following the conclusion of the 1982 Lebanon War and Operation Peace in Galilee (the Israeli invasion of Lebanon), the IDF was instructed by the Israeli government to maintain a “security zone” in Lebanon, ostensibly to prevent infiltration by the PLO. Israeli occupation of a 25 kilometer deep area inside the country and the brutality inflicted on civilians by the IDF and its proxy the South Lebanon Army resulted in the formation of Hezbollah.

Around 18,000 people were killed and 30,000 injured and between 500,000-800,000 made homeless in the first three months of the Israeli occupation. The IDF maintained the notorious Khiam prison where many Lebanese were held without trial and tortured.

Resistance by the Lebanese and Hezbollah’s low-intensity guerrilla warfare eventually resulted in Israel’s withdrawal from Lebanon. In 2000, Israel completed the withdrawal in compliance with UN Security Council Resolutions 425 and 426 requiring it to withdraw to internationally recognized borders.

Intimidating Syria

Israel’s action against Lebanon was part of a long-standing “effort to secure the balkanization and vassalization of Lebanon, the eradication of Palestinian nationalism, and the intimidation of Syria,” writes Naseer H. Aruri. He cites the writings of Moshe Sharett, the second Prime Minister of Israel, who documented deliberate Israeli acts of provocation, intended to generate Arab hostility and thus to create pretexts for armed action and territorial expansion. Sharett’s records document this policy of “sacred terrorism” and expose the myths of Israel’s “security needs” and the “Arab threat” that have been treated like self-evident truths from the creation of Israel to the present…

Livia Rokach, in her book on Sharett’s personal dairy, reveals a consistent effort by Israel to provoke Syria, beginning in the early 1950s and culminating in the occupation of the Golan in 1967, a move that resulted in the explusion of 130,000 Syrians.

“The Golan Heights serves as yet another reminder that the conflict on the ground is very different than the story Israel offers up to the world,” writes Mya Guarnieri. “The conflict isn’t about the Western world battling the Muslim world; it’s not a clash of cultures or a clash of values; the occupation isn’t a security measure, meant to protect Israel from ‘terrorists.’”

It is also about balkanizing and splintering the Arab and Muslim world, a plan not exclusive to Israel as a key component of its own territorial ambitions, but also used by the global elite who have employed the time-tested British “divide and conquer” strategy to “prevent collusion and maintain security dependence among the vassals, to keep tributaries pliant and protected, and to keep the barbarians from coming together,” as Zbigniew Brzezinski writes in The Grand Chessboard.

Israel’s Buffer Zone in Syria: Old Habits

“The purpose of the plan [to impose a buffer zone] is to ensure the safety of Israel’s Golan Heights and its northern region after the fall of the Assad regime in Syria,” Israel Defense reports today.

“If the Syrian instability persists, it seems that IDF forces will have to stay in the security zone that will be constructed for years,” said one of those close to those behind the plan that was submitted.

For Israel, the piecemeal conquest of Syria – and Lebanon before it – has little to do with “Syrian instability” manufactured in large part by external players (the CIA, Saudi Arabia and Qatar), but is rather an ongoing effort to dissolve Arab and Muslim states.

A Strategy for Israel in the 1980s, written by Oded Yinon, who was formerly attached to the Israeli Foreign Ministry, and published in Kivunim (Directions), the journal of the Department of Information of the World Zionist Organization, “reflects high-level thinking in the Israeli military and intelligence establishment,” writes Ralph Schoenman. The article “outlines a timetable for Israel to become the imperial regional power based upon the dissolution of the Arab states.”

Yinon described an effort to dissolve Lebanon, fragment Syria, go to war with Iran, target Iraq (mission accomplished), marginalize and weaken Egypt (now in process), undermine Saudi Arabia, and eventually depopulate the Occupied Territories.

The decision to carve out a new security zone in Syria – despite its abject failure to maintain one in Lebanon – reveals that it remains on a trajectory envisioned prior to the establishment of the Israeli state.

The United States will naturally support this violation of Syria’s national sovereignty – citing al-Qaeda and other manufactured threats – as it has supported nearly all of Israel’s efforts against its Arab and Muslim neighbors.

Birds of a feather, they say, after all fly together.