President Donald Trump’s withdrawal of US troops from a crucial area of the Turkey-Syria border, widely seen as an abandonment of America’s Kurdish allies there, has reinforced the resonance of a series of “emergency” warnings issued by Israeli leaders in the days leading up to Wednesday’s solemn Yom Kippur.
Israel’s concern, as Channel 13’s military analyst Or Heller put it on Wednesday night, is that “Trump’s isolationism” will encourage Iran to do what it did to Saudi Arabia’s oil facilities last month: attack.
When the new Knesset was sworn in last Thursday, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu warned that Israel was facing a dire challenge from an increasingly emboldened Iran. “This isn’t spin, it’s not a whim, this is not ‘Netanyahu trying to scare us,’” he insisted. “Anyone who knows the situation knows that Iran is getting stronger and is attacking around the world, saying clearly, ‘Israel will disappear.’ They believe it, they are working toward it, we need to take them seriously. That reality obligates us to act. Remember my words and heed them.”
More understatedly but along the same lines, President Reuven Rivlin warned that same day that Israel currently had security needs “the likes of which we have not known for many years.”
And Netanyahu’s former defense minister, now rival, Avigdor Liberman, on Saturday cited a “national emergency,” in today’s Israel, including “security threats from south, north and further away.”
In terms of the practical consequence of Trump’s withdrawal, a US troop departure eases Iran’s path to growing control in Syria, and helps facilitate its relentless effort to establish a corridor of military control from Tehran to Beirut.
In a speech aired on Iranian television on Monday, Qassem Soleimani, commander of the Quds Force of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, the man responsible for the regime’s expansionist military activities overseas boasted that Iran has now created “territorial continuity” by connecting Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon. Despite efforts by “the Zionist regime” and the US to stop it, he said, Iran “has expanded the resistance from a geographical territory of 2,000 square kilometers in southern Lebanon to a territory of half a million square kilometers.”
No comments:
Post a Comment