Israel’s expansionism
Rashed Rahman
In the convoluted and strife-ridden terrain of the Middle East, one fact remains constant and easily discernible. This is the Zionist entity Israel’s constantly being on the lookout for opportunities to feed its unlimited appetite for expansionism since its creation in 1948. In that founding year, Israel blatantly violated the UN Partition Plan for Palestine, intended to provide two states, Israel and Palestine, to accommodate the mixed populace as a result of the British Mandate authorities conniving at illegal Jewish migration to the so-called ‘Promised Land’. It perpetrated the Naqba (Catastrophe) to expel thousands of Palestinians from territories designated as Palestinian by the UN Plan. So even the unjust Partition of Palestine (a shift of culpability by the West for the Holocaust onto innocent Palestinian shoulders) was not adhered to by the Zionist settler colonialists. Then in 1956 Israel joined Britain and France (the Mandate powers in the region between WWI and WWII and arguably the authors of all the mischief perpetrated against the Arabs as a whole) in attacking Egypt to try and wrest back from Nasser’s nationalisation of the Suez Canal that critical passageway for the world’s trade. Unfortunately for this evil trio, the new dominant western power, the US, vetoed their plans in the interests of its newfound desire for global hegemony in the aftermath of WWII and even in the early days of the Cold War. In 1967, Israel launched a surprise attack against its Arab neighbours, Egypt, Syria and Jordan, destroying their air forces on the ground and seizing Sinai, the Golan Heights and the West Bank (including Jerusalem, the historic site of religious wars such as the Crusades). Since then, Sinai (the Gaza Strip excepted) was returned to Egypt after Anwar Sadat made peace with Israel following the indecisive 1973 war, annexed the Golan Heights and is currently in the process of carrying out a genocide in Gaza and a creeping annexation in the West Bank through militant, armed Israeli settlers, backed by the Israeli army.
As if all this were not enough, Israel has been playing a sinister, expansionist role in post-Assad Syria. Ahmed al-Sharaa’s government that came to power in Syria as the culmination of the 14-year civil war in Syria, given its past al Qaeda roots and current religious fundamentalist character, carried within it the real possibility of not only not being able to weld a united country out of the ruins, but in fact becoming the main factor in impending conflict with the religious and ethnic minorities in Syria. Sure enough, the Sunni fundamentalist Hay’at Tahrir al Sham party of al-Sharaa has clashed with the Alawite minority (to which Assad’s elite belonged) in March 2025 on the Syrian coast that left about 1,600 people dead. Another outbreak of violence outside Damascus in May killed more than 100 people, mostly Druze. The current round of conflict in Suweida in southern Syria began about a week ago with an exchange of attacks and kidnappings between Sunni Bedouin tribes and Druze militias, who practice a secretive religion rooted in Ismaili Islam. Since the new government came to power in December 2024, a collection of Druze militias had secured Suweida and refused to integrate their forces into the new national army, an objective the Syrian government has been actively pursuing to bring the fractured militias scene under control.
As the unrest in Suweida worsened, the government deployed military forces in the area to quell the conflict. But Druze militia leaders, deeply distrustful of the new Islamist authorities, believed these forces were coming to attack them. They then mobilised to repel the incoming government forces, escalating the fighting and in the process, yielding a harvest of over 1,000 people killed, many thousand wounded, 80,000 displaced. The evidence for the bloodbath was the piles of dead and wounded in Suweida’s hospitals, whom an overstretched medical structure could barely see to. At this point, using the plight of the Druze minority as a cover (the Druze are also a minority in Israel, integrated closely with its military and security infrastructure), Israel bombed south Syria and the Syrian military’s Damascus Headquarters. Al-Sharaa withdrew his forces in the face of this Israeli assault, which threatened to blow up into a war with Israel. The US then intervened, persuading Israel to cut al-Sharaa (their ‘newly found’ ally) some slack, which allowed him to take advantage of Tel Aviv’s ‘generous offer’ of redeployment in Suweida for just two days to separate the warring militias and enforce a tenuous peace. One wonders how long this peace will last if the Syrian military once more is forced to retreat by Israeli pressure.
What is Israel’s objective in this complicated conflict? To be noted: apart from the annexed Golan Heights, Israel has, since the fall of Assad, set up 10 bases inside Syrian territory abutting the Golan Heights. Not only that, it has dictated to Damascus that south Syria is to remain free of Syrian military forces. No doubt the game plan is that in the name of ‘rescuing’ their dearly beloved Druze minority in Syria, Israel is just waiting to pounce on southern Syria to gobble up more territory. Given this expansionist history, can one hope for anything except conflict so long as Israel continues to exist with the unfettered support and help of the US-led West?
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