Why Israel (Secretly) Loves the Islamic State

Boundaries of the Islamic State (ISIL or ISIS or the Caliphate) shift from day to day. Currently most of the Islamic State territory is a good day's drive from northern Israel, about 350 miles. But pockets of Islamic State control are already within a few miles of Israel, or at least the Golan Heights (illegally and apparently permanently occupied by Israel), according to the Carter Center map that tracks the Syrian conflict:



The bottom left of the map touches Israel. Lebanon is to the east, Turkey to the north, and Jordan below the long slant at the bottom.

While many people in the world are upset at the to-date triumphs of the Islamic State, Israel is not. Here, by Israel, I mean the typically ultra-orthodox, nationalist Jews who have controlled the government for some time now. There are still many Jews in Israel that believe in human rights for all peoples, they just have been marginalized over time.

The Islamic State fits perfectly into the National Zionist Zeitgeist Ideology (NZZI) narrative. Zionists like to pretend that Palestine was empty, more or less, before they arrived. The existence of large numbers of Palestinian survivors of the Holocaust of 1948 has always been an embarrassment. Extremist Zionists have always advocated a Greater Israel with various boundaries, but typically including everything south of Turkey and north of Mecca, to be taken in bites, of course.

The Islamic State appears to Americans and Europeans to have no redeeming qualities. ISIS are ultra-orthodox Islamists hell bent on taking over the world and willing to kill anyone who disagrees with them, even other Sunni Islamic sects. Unlike the Palestinians, who traditionally were either moderates or secular, and the PLO, which was Marxist and therefore atheist, the Islamic State has no appeal to anyone outside its own camp.

The Islamic State is the Israeli caricature of Palestinians, Arabs and Islam made into reality.

So if the Islamic State takes over Syria, the Israelis can dust off the old war plans for the capture of Damascus. No one would stop their fighting ISIS, and the people of Damascus might actually welcome them. At first.

If the Islamic State takes Syria it will also take Lebanon and Jordan. Then Greater Israel is just a matter of eating, digesting, and eating again. Enough area can be left to the Islamic State to make it a permanent global threat that justified anything Israel does, including to the Palestinians within its borders.

For the Israelis and Islamic State, it is a win-win situation. Of course, as Hitler learned when he tried to create Greater Germany, things don't always go according to plan.

Hitler and the problems of National Self-determination

"The most believing Protestant could stand in the ranks of our movement next to the most believing Catholic, without ever having to come into the slightest conflict of conscience to his religious obligations." - Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf

The idea of national self-determination is closely linked to American President Woodrow Wilson and the post-World War I peace settlements. Nations are conceived of along ethnic, linguistic, racial and cultural lines. National self-determination provides that each group of people who constitute a definable nation has the right to their own national government.

The Democratic Party lauds Woodrow Wilson as a great President, a man of progressive (liberal) ideals who was also a man of peace and yet led the U.S. to its first great international war victory. A closer examination reveals a more complex picture, in which Wilson, a college professor turned politician, was a conservative racist who turned against his own idea of national self-determination as soon as he saw its global consequences, which did not sit well with his Aryan, racist agenda.

[Who's lying to you Litmus Test: if Woodrow Wilson was not a racist, why did racism remain legal in the U.S. after he had two terms as President?]

As I write this, ethnic and religious conflicts continue to escalate. Israel is bombing parts of Palestine it made into reservations for the natives when it got tired of its ethnic cleansing chore. Kurds are asserting their rights to recognition as a nation. The lines drawn by Wilson's colonial-era pals of the British, French, Dutch, and Belgian empires are still not working, largely due to their failure to correspond to natural national boundaries.

But there is another important consideration: the negative consequences of stressing ethnic cultures, religion, and nationalism.

After World War I Poland was created from former parts of Germany (and a bit of Russia). There was a substantial German-speaking population within the new Poland. The new Austria was German speaking, Roman Catholic, and highly anti-semitic.

Meanwhile, a lot of other cultural nations thought they should have the same rights as the Poles. Famously, Ho Chi Minh demanded independence for Vietnam, but he represented just one of hundreds of nations seeking self-determination. The Brits and French gave the right to self-determination to exactly one nation within their empires between World War I and World War II (the Republic of Ireland, but Britain kept Northern Ireland). The lesson was clear: only losers in wars might get dismembered into smaller nations with borders drawn on ethnic lines.

It should not be surprising that Hitler's Germany had strange allies in World War II (some in hostile neutrality, like Ireland). In almost every colony of the British, French, Belgian, and Dutch empires there were groups hoping Hitler would win, and in many cases fighting against the British or French.

While Britain won the war (and the French empire was re-instated), the cost was so high it was unable to maintain much of its empire afterwards. National revolutions, often led by Communists, lined up much more of the world along lines of national self-determination.

Many of the new nations had sub-nations within them. Vietnam had Roman Catholics and Buddhists who did not like communism or each other. India had many sub-nations that had be be invaded by Mahatma Gandhi's tanks to persuade them that they were not to be allowed to exercise their own rights to self-determination. Most African nations had multiple rival tribal or clan groups arbitrarily thrown together.

And a whole bunch of European Jews who survived the Holocaust decided they needed a land of their own, the land their ancestors had abandoned almost two thousand years earlier. They invaded Palestine, kicked out most other Palestinians, and set up a racist state they call Israel.

The United States of America, for all of its legendary past faults (genocide, racism, etc.), meanwhile has developed a new model. I just call it the Modern state. It is not based on race or religion, though there is nationalism. It is based on ideals tempered with pragmatism: liberty of conscience, a semblance of equality under the law, and pragmatic good government: good roads, fair schools, and not too much air pollution, even a bit of a social safety net, as long as taxes are not too high.

But this modern America had advantages in developing. Not just a lot of resources that were easily stolen from the natives, but a population (excepting black slaves) who came here more or less voluntarily at an exceptional time in history. At a time when people were questioning revealed religions like Christianity and Islam. At a time when Republics were a reality and were moving in the direction of becoming Democracies. And when agricultural and industrial revolutions were getting underway that would raise the standards of living for almost everyone.

I believe people have a right to self-determination, but I believe they should be cautious with that right. The Nazis determined that no Jews, atheists, or communists would be allowed to live in Germany. Then they decided to greatly enlarge Germany. That is not the example I am hoping other nations will follow.

When a people has been deprived of their own nation for a long time, and has been treated poorly by the nation(s) they inhabit, I think they might benefit from setting up as a nation-state. Thus I favor Kurdish and Palestinian states, among others. But ... I hope they are modern states, or turn into modern states. I hope the people choose to join the modern world, with modern values: equality and justice for all. Not states based on religious or ethnic tests.

When there is equality and justice for all, it does not matter which government rules us, nor which ethnic group we descend from or identify with.

It is sad that America's leaders after World War II (mirroring the equally culpable leaders of the U.S.S.R.) sought to create a new commercial-imperial global system run from Washington D.C. America's making enemies so readily, and imposing our will when possible with bombs, assassinations, rigged elections and embargoes, marred our international image and robbed our modern system of moral authority (as did discrimination in the U.S. against non-whites, until around 1970).

Adolf Hitler was not a self-made man. Germany, Austria and Turkey surrendered at the end of World War I, after Woodrow Wilson and his allies had promised a just peace. Instead the defeated Central Powers  were treated to dismemberment and economic pillage. Hitler blamed this "stab in the back" on Jews and communists, and an angry nation elevated him to power. Nor were the Zionists who fought to create Israel in Palestine self-made: they were Hitler's creation. Hamas, in turn, was created by the Israeli Zionists.

We need the opposite chain-reaction. Self-determination based on nationalism or religion is not necessarily bad, but it is just as dangerous as imperialism. I hope when people assert their right to self-determination, they determine that they want equality and justice for all humans, not a new round of sectarian conflict.

ISIS Surprise, Dynamics of

ISIS (Islamic State of Iraq and Syria) looks like it took the U.S. intelligence community by surprise. You would think the CIA and other intelligence services would have seen this coming. But, looking at past failures of intelligence and analysis, I don't think the CIA is much at fault (purely on intelligence gathering and analysis. The ethics of imperialism are another matter, which I write about frequently, but not in this particular story).

The historical analogy that leaps to mind is the rapid collapse of the Chiang Kai-shek regime in China during the years following the end of World War II. In retrospect everyone, including Chiang, should have seen it coming. So why was it (the rapidity) such a surprise (even, to a large extent, to the Chinese Communist Party, which expected a much longer civil war to be required to take power)?

In both cases, the rising power was stronger than appearances led people to believe. More important, the existing power was weaker, to the point of being a sham.

ISIS does not have the long history that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) had by 1946. Nor did it have, in say 2012, the base areas that the CCP had. But there are some similar characteristics.

ISIS is driven by radical Islam, which apparently is quite the motivator of men. The CCP was driven by a Chinese version of Marxism, later called Maoism, which also was very motivational.

External factors helped both groups. China had been invaded by Japan, but had been in chaos long before the Japanese decided to risk their lives to try to "restore order." Similarly Iraq had been invaded by the United States (USA), also allegedly to create a democratic, peaceful order there.

The government as run by Chiang Kai-shek was incompetent and corrupt, in many cases amounting to little more than the rule of warlords. Most Chinese felt oppressed by the "Nationalist" government, and had heard the CCP governed base areas were far better off. While the government of Iraq has support in some sectors, particularly among the Shia sects, among the Sunni sects there has long been a belief that the government is an enemy.

In the most obvious parallel, the United States armed and financed Chiang Kai-shek, as it still arms and finances the Iraq government.

The Chiang regime might have gone on ruling China incompetently had it not been for the emergence of the CCP, with its high levels of skill at both governance and war.

Apparently ISIS also has a great deal of competence at governance and war. ISIS leaders may be ultra-conservative Sunni Islam, until recently affiliated with Al Qaeda, but about two years ago they began to prioritize finances and governance. Ascetics themselves, they gained popular support by redistributing wealth to the common people, much like the CCP and the New Deal Democrats in the USA. They also used their taxing power to build up a well-trained army, and apparently to bribe both tribal leaders and many members of the Iraq army.

It is said, perhaps with some exaggeration, that Chiang's troops were defeated with the very U.S. weapons that were supposed to solidify his regime. The troops did not like the way they were treated, so they just went over the the Red Army, taking Chiang's shiny new U.S. manufactured weapons with them.

I doubt ISIS can take over all of Iraq, and I doubt they want to. By unifying the Sunni portions of Iraq and Syria they might create a new, viable state. If the lines had been drawn that way when the Ottoman Empire was defeated in World War I, a lot of trouble might have been saved. Instead the French, British and American empires drew lines in the sand for their own convenience, creating the modern states (not really nations) of Lebanon, Palestine, Jordan, Syria and Iraq.

Perhaps the Kurds will finally get their own nation. Given Woodrow Wilson's pious, if hypocritical, yammering about national self-determination after World War I, again a lot of trouble could have been saved by just doing it then.

But of course the imperialist powers, the U.S. more so than Britain and France, do not want rational borders in the Middle East. They want a weak Middle East, and that requires lumping together Shiites and Sunnis, so that they will fight each other and be U.S. puppets, rather than gaining true independence and equality within the world community

The current version of Iraq is not yet done. A democratic and united Iraq could still emerge, but it will be a lot harder now. The government of Iraq has more popular support than the Nationalist Chinese government ever did (Chiang never risked having an election, for instance). Also, ISIS may alienate the very people who welcome them today. It would not be the first time in history that has happened.