Religious fundamentalists think that because God is on their side – more, that God has Chosen Them to be His People — they can leave it to Him to keep tabs on history, remember the lessons of the past, count the years, tote up the gains, costs,  and losses.   So long as God doesn’t issue any red alerts or insolvency notices during their prayers, when the Chosen People get up they can concentrate their minds and resources on preparing for the future. When the murder of a million or two Palestinians is the future which the Israelis and Americans are concentrating on now, it’s obvious that they and their God have not been re-reading the Melian Dialogue, if He did in the first place.

That’s Sections 84 to 116 of Book Five of Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War, which he wrote over twenty years of the war, from 431 to 411 BC, leaving off before Athens and its army were defeated and lost everything they thought they had won.

It was in 416 that the Athenian army laid a starvation siege to Melos; then when the Melians surrendered, the Athenians murdered every man and enslaved every woman and child. After that, the Athenian empire of Melos lasted just eleven years before the Athenians were driven off the island by a Spartan force the Hellenes had become too weak to resist. The German empire of the island didn’t murder as many; they were driven off after just two years, from 1943 to 1945.

What Thucydides has reproduced in his book is the argument for genocide if you think you are strong enough to get away with it.  

Its main point — the most remembered today of the lines from the book — is the Athenian declaration: “When these matters are discussed by practical people, the standard of justice depends on the equality of power to compel and that in fact the strong do what they have the power to do and the weak accept what they must.”  

This is what US President Joseph Biden and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu are insisting upon. It’s what Biden means to demonstrate with his fleets in the eastern Mediterranean, northern Red Sea, and the Persian Gulf.  

This is slaughter of everybody in Gaza because the Americans and the Israelis have the power,  for the time being.

Practical people is the phrase Thucydides put in the mouth of the Athenian side in the dialogue.

ATHENIANS

These days it means politicians running for election. They are Vladimir Putin in March 2024; Olaf Scholz in June 2024; Biden in November 2024; Rishi Sunak in January 2025; the French election is in 2027 but Emmanuel Macron cannot run for a third term. Netanyahu’s term is likely to run out as soon as the war against the Palestinians of Gaza ends. If all of them are dead or gone, Netanyahu may win.

The only certain winner on this list of practical people is Putin; he has now agreed with the Russian Army to concentrate their force against the US on the Ukrainian battlefield. The terms of this agreement can be found on, and also between, the lines of Putin’s speech of October 30.  Read between the lines here.  

In Thucydides’s reconstruction and dramatisation of the negotiations between the attacking and the defending sides,  the Melians acknowledged it was pointless appealing to commonly held ideas of justice, morality, and  fair play because the Athenians made clear they didn’t share them. Worse, the Athenians said they were convinced that only by demonstrating their superior force against the weaker Melians could they deter others, including their own critical and restive fellow citizens at home. “It is not so much your hostility that injures us,” the Athenians said. “It is rather the case that if we were on friendly terms with you, our subjects would regard that as a sign of weakness, whereas your hatred is a sign of our power.”

So the Melians tried arguing instead that there were common and shared political and economic interests which should spare them from the Athenians’ liquidation plan. “If yours and ours happen to coincide, we must try to persuade you of the fact. Is it not certain that you will make enemies of all states who are at present neutral, when they see what is happening here and naturally conclude that in the course of time you will attack them too?”

Forget it – there is only the present for you, leave the future to us, the Athenians replied. “This is no fair fight , with honour on one side and shame on the other. It is rather a question of saving your lives and not resisting those who are far too strong for you.”

Death-dealing is the power – for those who are victims, and even more for those who are witnesses. Hope for another outcome which the Melians expressed, “is by nature”, said the Athenians, “an expensive commodity, and those who are risking all on one cast find out what it means only when they are already ruined.”

The Melians tried the Chosen People line. That wasn’t because they were Semites, although  God had  sailed westward from ancient Palestine to make landfall on the island. The Phoenicians, a Semitic people but not a Jewish one, had established trading posts on Melos and intermarried with the Caucasian arrivals from Sparta, on the Hellenic mainland. The Athenians dismissed the theology – God, like history and warfare, chooses winners, not losers. “So far as the favour of the gods is concerned, we think we have as much right to that as you have,” the Melians were told. “Our opinion of the gods and our knowledge of men lead us to conclude that it is a general and necessary law of nature to rule whatever one can.”

The Melians then tried to argue that if they fought on for long enough, their ethnic allies, the Spartans, would come to their rescue, break the Athenian siege, defeat Athens. “Where danger is concerned,” came the Athenian reply, “the Spartans are not as a rule very venturesome.”

The force calculus would prevail on the Spartans, the Athenians were confident – Melos was too small and was surrounded, so a Spartan relief operation was out of the question. “What is looked for is a positive preponderance of power in action. And the Spartans pay attention to this point even more than others do.”

Inferiority wasn’t so dishonourable, the Athenians offered as they prepared to wind up the talks.  “There is nothing disgraceful in giving way to the greatest city in Hellas when she is offering you such reasonable terms – alliance on a tribute-paying basis and liberty to enjoy your own property…And when you are allowed to choose between war and safety…this is the safe rule – to stand up to one’s equals, to behave with deference to one’s superiors, and to treat one’s inferiors with moderation.”

MELIANS

The two sides then adjourned for internal consultations; later they returned to the table for the last round. The Melians said they had decided not to surrender their seven-hundred year old city state. “We put our trust in the fortune that the gods will send and which has saved us up to now, and in the help of men — that is of the Spartans; and so we shall try to save ourselves.” They added they were still open to negotiating terms of “a treaty which shall be agreeable to both you and us”. One condition was non-negotiable — the Athenians must “leave our country”.

The Athenian negotiators stood up. “As you have staked most on and trusted most in Spartans, luck, and hopes, so in all these you will find yourselves most deluded.”

The Athenian army built a new wall completely cutting off the Melians inside their city from the outside. Several months of siege followed while the Athenians withdrew their heavy forces to fight elsewhere. The Melians made sallies to capture food. Then the Athenians returned in force; but even then they didn’t risk a frontal assault. Instead, they bribed several Melians inside the city to betray the others. “As there was also some treachery from inside,” Thucydides concluded his account without more detail, “the Melians surrendered unconditionally to the Athenians, who put to death all the men of military age whom they took, and sold the women and children as slaves. Melos itself they took over for themselves, sending out later a colony of 500 men.” Book Five ends at this point.

That was almost two thousand five hundred years ago.

It’s near-certain that Biden and Netanyahu haven’t read the Melian Dialogue. If men like US Secretary of State Antony Blinken and National Security Adviser Jacob Sullivan were required to read the book during their undergraduate studies at Harvard and Yale, they have forgotten that after the genocide of the Melians, the Athenians were defeated – first their army and foreign empire, then their domestic democracy.

These practical men can hear the political clock ticking. They can’t hear the gods counting down.

By Patrick Lawrence / Original to ScheerPost

Diego Ramos, ScheerPost’s managing editor, forwarded me a video clip last week he thought I ought to see. Sending it under the subject line, “Disturbing trend in Israel,” my colleague must have reckoned I have not been sufficiently shocked by the events in Israel and Gaza since Hamas mounted an assault into southern Israel on October 7 and the Israeli Defense Forces began a purposely disproportionate response to the incursion—purposely disproportionate as a matter of official policy since David Ben–Gurion put it in place during his premiership in the 1950s. 

Diego did his disturbing work. The video he forwarded outdoes it all so far by provoking a disgust as profound as any I have ever felt. It features a number of scenes wherein Israelis record themselves sadistically ridiculing Palestinians in the most cravenly cruel manner. They imitate Palestinian children dying or starving. They apply racially offensive makeup. They laugh and dance while switching lights on and off and while ostentatiously drinking water from taps—this last to mock Gazans as Israel deprives them of power, potable water, food and much else.

And I am describing the children in these videos, ranging in age from, maybe, six or seven to somewhere in their teens or early twenties. The mothers stand behind them, smiling with approval and delight. Here is the video as posted by Al Jazeera English last Thursday. I have since seen several others like it.

By common agreement among many lawyers, scholars of international law, special rapporteurs, and the like—including Israelis in these fields—what we witness daily now is by all acceptable definitions a genocide. Whether or not Israel is committing war crimes by the hour is not even worth debating. But I am taken up now by the spectacle of human beings who have allowed themselves to be destroyed in the name of an ideology that proves every bit as racist as it was when, in 1975, the U.N. General Assembly declared Zionism to be so. Resolution 3379 was revoked in 1991; it should not have been.

I am reminded of what I learned years ago when studying the Japanese Imperial Army’s conduct in China and Korea before and during World War II and the long record of the Kempeitai, commonly known as Imperial Japan’s Thought Police. Victimizers, I came to conclude with conviction, are victims, too. This holds for the people in the videos I have recently viewed and for every Israeli wearing an IDF uniform. They have been stripped of all ordinary decency by the radical ideologues of “the Jewish state.” They can laugh or sneer or pull all the triggers they like: Their lives, too, have been destroyed. Look at the videos: The evidence of this is in every frame.  

“Nothing human disgusts me” is a line I remember well from The Night of the Iguana, the 1961 play by the superbly human Tennessee Williams. I hold to this thought (even while reading the foreign pages of The New York Times). What has happened to the people in the videos must disgust us. But what they suffer as victims could happen to all but the strongest among us. They are appalling specimens of humanity, but they are human. As we find our way to some morally, intellectually defensible high ground during the atrocities we witness daily, we need to bear this in mind.

And this, too: Those videos were not shot in isolation. They reflect a culture of racism, xenophobia, hatred, and—we see this now—sadism that has taken pride in itself for many years. These sentiments are instruments of the state, carefully cultivated. You may remember the videos shot at the time of the al–Aqsa crisis two years ago. Young Israelis in sparkling school uniforms or stylish clothes leapt up and down in a sort of frenzy in the streets of Jerusalem while shouting, “Death to all Arabs.” I read those images looking back and forward: They were the flowers of the Israeli state’s century of official indoctrination and a prelude to the videos coming out now.

Arnold Toynbee, the great if no longer fashionable historian, argued in his 12–volume “A Study of History” that civilizations rise when creative elites respond to new circumstances with imagination and courage, while they decline, in turn, not in consequence of external factors but due to spiritual collapses within. This is the Israel of Bibi Netanyahu, the Israel whose plan, we know by way of an official document leaked over the weekend, is to ethnic-cleanse Gaza and incorporate it into the Jewish state. Its leaders are brutes and—as the videos I reference show—they have destroyed Israel’s human spirit. 

I saw an interview Sunday with a Defense Department contractor who has visited Israel dozens of times over many years on DoD work. He recounted the steady decline in any belief in a peaceful settlement of the Israel–Palestine crisis that he has detected since 2007. For most Israelis, he observed, it is down to violence now. A headline in Monday’s editions of The Times, recording these changing desires and expectations: “I Don’t Have That Empathy. It’s Not Me Anymore.” This is the voice of a nation that has demolished itself in its attempts to destroy others. 

A couple of weeks ago in this space I published a commentary asserting that the two-state solution to the Israel–Palestine question is dead, and a single, secular state is the only way forward. I had some mail afterward to the effect that a one-state solution is too far from reality to think about. I will reply here that these readers have it upside-down. A one-state solution is now the only realistic idea worth considering. Until Israelis accept that they must live in a single nation wherein Palestinians dwell as equal citizens, there is no more future for them than there is for Palestinians. They, Israelis, will be condemned to live in a walled-off garrison state that will come to look ever more like a commodious version of the “open-air prison” we speak of when we speak of Gaza. 

“We are the people of the light, they are the people of darkness,” Netanyahu said in a much-remarked speech to the nation last Wednesday, “and light shall triumph over darkness.” This is the utterance of a destroyer—of people, of hope—a man who cannot find his way out of the Old Testament and nonsensically demands we live in it with him, a man who simply should not be leading anything in the 21st century. 

And we, we Americans, are urged daily to support the depravity into which this man leads Israel ever more deeply. Netanyahu’s depravity, Israel’s, must be ours, too. We are urged now to openly endorse war crimes and a genocide. And so we, too, are in consequence letting an apartheid state’s intentionally terrorizing campaign against Palestinians accelerate our none-too-sturdy nation into the kind of internal collapse Toynbee described as the dynamic of decline.

Across the country you find confrontations between those who argue in behalf of their consciences and those who censure, name-call, deplatform, or otherwise attempt to ruin them for not supporting open-and-shut murder. At the University of Pennsylvania, wealthy donors threaten to withhold their support if the administration does not come out in favor of this savagery. The Writers Guild of America West is under attack for similarly refraining. Artforum, the monthly chronicler of the gallery scene, fired its editor for signing an open letter calling for a ceasefire, whereupon collectors now threaten to “deaccession” the works of artists who also signed. Let us add to this a 71–year old man’s murder of a 6–year-old Palestinian boy near Chicago two weeks ago, an incident that left his mother in critical condition. 

These implicit defenses of systematic savagery must be dressed up, of course. And so America plunges into the disgracefully cynical argument that to oppose the Israeli operation in Gaza is anti–Semitic. The Chinese put their hands up to contribute to a ceasefire and talks toward an enduring settlement of one or another kind, but China is anti–Semitic because it has not condemned the Hamas assault. 

A museum bureaucrat named Sarah Lehat Blumenstein is now going after artists who signed the letter that got Artforum’s editor fired. She threatens them with “a deaccession plan to dimmish the artists’ status.” Explaining herself in an interview with The Times, she said her efforts reflect “a fear that rising anti–Semitism was endangering her right to exist.”

The ADL may wish to come after me for this one, such have things come to, but this statement proposes a patently ridiculous equivalence, albeit one emblematic of the post–October 7 climate. If you oppose the Israelis’ genocide operation and merely call for a ceasefire, some museum functionary is frightened that her life is under threat? I view this as more than a vulgar misuse of history and a contemptuous use of the victim card. This reflects a nation that no longer knows how to make sense of itself. 

I loved, in this connection, a piece The Times ran in last Saturday’s editions to dress up, as a matter of personal affection, what has to be the Biden regime’s worst policy failure to date. Joe Biden just loves Israel, Peter Baker, The Times’s White House correspondent, wants us to know, and we should understand this—and along the way accept his “unwavering support.” “Some confidants,” Baker then writes, “said that Mr. Biden’s Irish heritage makes him relate to the plight of historically marginalized people and that his own family tragedy connects him to the grief of those who have lost so much.”

Readers, take as much time as you wish lingering over this, among the most preposterous sentences written to explain U.S. policy since violence erupted October 7. 

We propose to ban the exercise of conscience, condemnations of the out-of-control violence of an openly racist nation. No, you cannot think that. No, you cannot say that. You must think and say this. We tell ourselves stories about what good, well-intended fellows are those who support atrocities. U.S. foreign policy has not for many decades had much to do with the ideals of Western civilization as we were taught to think of them. Now we whose taxes pay for policy are urged to come right out with it: Yes, we approve of war crimes, violence against noncombatants, ethnic cleansing. What is Israel costing us? Ourselves and our self-respect, our psychological coherence, our regard of history, our culture, our humanity. 

Israel, the U.S. and the rest of the West cannot bring themselves to acknowledge the grave, grave error of al–Nakba in 1948, when began the forcible removal of Palestinians from their land. See the Toynbee reference above: Nobody in power has the creativity, imagination, or confidence to confront the present as the consequence of this error and begin acting to correct it. And so Israel will continue to pull us in the wrong direction—or further in the wrong direction, I ought to say. I hope I am not around if ever Americans start in with the sadistic videos.

TO MY READERS. Independent publications and those who write for them reach a moment that is difficult and full of promise all at once. On one hand, we assume ever greater responsibilities in the face of mainstream media’s mounting derelictions. I take up this very topic in the commentary you have just read. On the other, we have found no sustaining revenue model and so must turn directly to our readers for support. I am committed to independent journalism for the duration: I see no other future for American media. But the path grows steeper, and as it does I need your help. This grows urgent now. If you are already a supporter, big thanks. If you aren’t, please, to sustain my continued contributions to ScheerPost and in recognition of the commitment to independent journalism I share with this superb publication, join in by subscribing to The Floutist, or via my Patreon account.

Patrick Lawrence

Patrick Lawrence, a correspondent abroad for many years, chiefly for the International Herald Tribune, is a media critic, essayist, author and lecturer. His most recent book is Time No Longer: Americans After the American Century. His web site is Patrick Lawrence. Support his work via his Patreon site. His Twitter account, @thefloutist, has been permanently censored without explanation.

by Livia Rokach, Third Edition

A study based on Moshe Sharett's Personal Diary, and other documents. Foreword by Noam Chomsky

Index and Foreword

 To all the Palestinian victims of Israel's unholy terrorism, whose sacrifice, suffering and ongoing struggle will yet prove to be the pangs of the rebirth of Palestine...

AAUG PRESS ASSOCIATION OF ARAB-AMERICAN UNIVERSITY GRADUATES, INC., Belmont, Massachusetts
 
First published in the United States of America by AAUG Press c1980, 1982, 1986 by the Association of Arab-American University Graduates, Inc. All rights reserved in the U.S. Published 1980. Third Edition 1986
 
Printed in the United States of America
 
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Rokach, Livia. lsrael's sacred terrorism. (AAUG information paper series: no. 23) ISBN 0-937694-70-3

Contents

• Foreword by Noam Chomsky

• Preface To This Edition

• Introduction

• Chapters

  1. Moshe Sharett and His Personal Diary
  2. Ben Gurion Goes to Sdeh Boker: Spiritual Retreat as a Tactic]
  3. Retaliation for War
  4. "A Historical Opportunity" to Occupy Southern Syria
  5. Let Us Create a Maronite State in Lebanon
  6. Sacred Terrorism
  7. The Lavon Affair: Terrorism to Coerce the West
  8. Nasser: Coexistence with Israel is Possible. Ben Gurion's Reply: Operation Gaza
  9. Disperse the Palestinian Refugees
  10. ... and Topple Nasser's Regime

• Appendices

  • Operation Kibya
  • And Then There was Kafr Qasim
  • "Soon the Singing Will Turn Into a Death Moan"
  • The Lavon Affair
  • Israeli Newspaper Reveals Government's Attempt to Stop Publication of Israel's Sacred Terrorism

• Notes

• • *

Foreword

HISTORY, particularly recent history, is characteristically presented to the general public within the framework of a doctrinal system based on certain fundamental dogmas. In the case of the totalitarian societies, the point is too obvious to require comment. The situation is more intriguing in societies that lack cruder forms of repression and ideological control. The United States, for example, is surely one of the least repressive societies of past or present history with respect to freedom of inquiry and expression. Yet only rarely will an analysis of crucial historical events reach a wide audience unless it conforms to certain doctrines of the faith.

"The United States always starts out with good intentions." With this ritual incantation, a liberal critic of American interventionism enters the area of permissible debate, of thinkable thoughts (in this case, William Pfaff, "Penalty of Interventionism," International Herald Tribune, February 1979). To accept the dogma, a person who is unable to tolerate more than a limited degree of internal contradiction must studiously avoid the documentary record, which is ample in a free society- for example, the record of high-level planning exhibited in the Pentagon Papers, particularly the record of the early years of U.S. involvement in the 1940s and early 1950s when the basic outlines of strategy were developed and formulated. Within the scholarly professions and the media the intelligentsia can generally be counted on to close ranks; they will refuse to submit to critical analysis the doctrines of the faith, prune the historical and documentary record so as to insulate these doctrines from examination, and proceed to present a version of history that is safely free from institutional critique or analysis. Occasional departures from orthodoxy are of little moment as long as they are confined to narrow circles that can be ignored, or dismissed as "irresponsible" or "naive" or "failing to comprehend the complexities of history," or otherwise identified with familiar code-words as beyond the pale.

Though relations between Israel and the United States have not been devoid of conflict, still there is no doubt that there has been, as is often said, a "special relationship." This is obvious at the material level, as measured by flow of capital and armaments, or as measured by diplomatic support, or by joint operations, as when Israel acted to defend crucial U.S. interests in the Middle Last at the time of the 1970 crisis involving Jordan, Syria and the Palestinians. The special relationship appears at the ideological level as well. Again with rare exceptions, one must adopt certain doctrines of the faith to enter the arena of debate, at least before any substantial segment of the public.

The basic doctrine is that Israel has been a hapless victim-of terrorism, of military attack, of implacable and irrational hatred. It is not uncommon for well-informed American political analysts to write that Israel has been attacked four times by its neighbors, including even 1956. Israel is sometimes chided for its response to terrorist attack, a reaction that is deemed wrong though understandable. The belief that Israel may have had a substantial role in initiating and perpetuating violence and conflict is expressed only far from the mainstream, as a general rule. In discussing the backgrounds of the 1956 war, Nadav Safran of Harvard University, in a work that is fairer than most, explains that Nasser "seemed bent on mobilizing Egypt's military resources and leading the Arab countries in an assault on Israel." The Israeli raid in Gaza in February 1955 was "retaliation" for the hanging of Israeli saboteurs in Egypt-it was only six years later, Safran claims, that it became known that they were indeed Israeli agents. The immediate background for the conflict is described in terms of fedayeen terror raids and Israeli retaliation. The terror organized by Egyptian intelligence "contributed significantly to Israel's decision to go to war in 1956 and was the principal reason for its refusal to evacuate the Gaza Strip" (Israel- The Embattled Ally, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1978).

To maintain such doctrines as these, or the analysis of alleged fact that conform to them, it is necessary scrupulously to avoid crucial documentation. Safran, in his 600-page study, makes no use of major sources such as the diaries that Livia Rokach reviews here, relevant parts of which had been made public in 1974, or the captured Egyptian documents published in Israel in 1975, or other sources that undermine these analyses (see footnotes 19, 20). Much the same is true of the mainstream scholarly literature and journalism fairly generally.

Moshe Sharett's diary, to which Livia Rokach's monograph is devoted, is undoubtedly a major documentary source. It remains outside of "official history"-that version of history that reaches more than a tiny audience of people unsatisfied by conventional doctrine. It is only reasonable to predict that this will remain true in the United States as long as the "special relationship" persists. If, on the other hand, Israel had been, say, an ally of the Soviet Union, then Sharett's revelations would quickly become common knowledge, just as no one would speak of the Egyptian attack on Israel in 1956.

In studying the process of policy formation in any state, it is common to find a rough division between relatively hard-line positions that urge the use of force and violence to attain state ends, and "softer" approaches that advocate diplomatic or commercial methods to attain the same objectives- a distinction between "the Prussians" and "the traders," to borrow terms that Michael Klare has suggested in his work on U.S. foreign policy. The goals are basically the same; the measures advocated differ, at least to a degree, a fact that may ultimately bear on the nature of the ends pursued. Sharett was an advocate of the "soft" approach. His defeat in internal Israeli politics reflected the ascendancy of the positions of Ben Gurion, Dayan and others who were not reluctant to use force to attain their goals. His diaries give a very revealing picture of the developing conflict, as he perceived it, and offer an illuminating insight into the early history of the state of Israel, with ramifications that reach to the present, and beyond. Livia Rokach has performed a valuable service in making this material readily available, for the first time, to those who are interested in discovering the real world that lies behind "official history."
 

Noam Chomsky, January 1, 1980

Preface

Preface to this edition

IN PURSUIT of its objectives of disseminating accurate information about the Middle East, the Association of Arab-American University Graduates, Inc. thought it in the public interest to publish this study, which analyzes Israeli-Arab relations in the late 1940s and 1950s in the light of the personal diary of Moshe Sharett. 1 Head of the Jewish Agency's Political Department from 1933 to 1948, Sharett became Israel's first foreign minister ( 1948 1956), under David Ben Gurion), and was prime minister in 1954 and 1955.

Since this book was first published five years ago, a number of occurrences have taken place that point up its enduring significance. Although this work deals primarily with events of the 1950s, it is of more than historical interest. Indeed, the information it provides makes it clear that the record of the past quarter century could easily have been predicted; the only novel quality is the ferocity with which the Zionist strategy of the fifties has been carried out in the decades that followed.No longer does the Zionist movement feel compelled to hide its true intentions. Its regional alliances with the Phalanges party and other right-wing elements in South Lebanon, and its special relationship with the United States, propel it like a juggernaut in pursuit of imperial goals.

The first edition of this book appeared when the Middle East and the United States were preoccupied with the Egyptian-Israeli negotiations that led to the 1978 Camp David Accords and the Egyptian-Israeli treaty of March 1 979, and with the Israeli Invasion of South Lebanon of March 1978. Subsequently,the Camp David formula not only has failed to produce the comprehensive settlement promised by President Jimmy Carter, it in fact contributed to a second Israeli invasion of Lebanon in, June 1982. By neutralizing Egypt, the Egyptian-Israeli treaty allowed Israel to proceed confidently with its plans to crush Palestinian resistance and obliterate the Palestinian national identity, with a view to perpetuating its occupation of the West Bank, Gaza Strip and Golan Heights. Today, the Palestine question is further from a peaceful and just resolution thin at any time in the past, while Lebanon continues to hemorrhage and to divide along sectarian lines.

The Camp David Accords, and the subsequent Reagan Plan introduced in September 1982, were grounded in flawed assumptions about lsrael's"security" and Arab threats to that security. Recent developments in the region have exposed the Reagan administration's complicity in the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon,2 which was calculated to produce results deemed beneficial both to American strategic interests and to Israeli expansionist goals. The interests of the Reagan administration and lsrael's Likud government coalesced around three objectives: the destruction of the Palestinian infrastructure in Lebanon, the redrawing of the political map in Lebanon, and the reduction of Syria to manageable proportions. Pax Americana and pax Israelica were to be realized through the campaign cynically dubbed "Peace for Galilee."

The 1982 "operation," as well as its predecessor, the "Litani Operation" of 1978, were part of the long-standing Zionist strategy for Lebanon and Palestine, which this transition of the Sharett diary illuminates. In fact,that strategy, formulated and applied during the 1950s, had been envisaged at least four decades earlier, and attempts to implement it are still being carried out three decades later. On November 6, 1918, a committee of British mandate officials and Zionist leaders put forth a suggested northern boundary for a Jewish Palestine "from the North Litani River up to Banias." In the following year, at the Paris peace conference, the Zionist movement proposed boundaries that would have included the Lebanese district of Bint Jubayl and all the territories up to the Litani River. The proposal emphasized the "vital importance of controlling all water resources up to their sources."

During the Paris conference, Chaim Weizmann and David Ben Gurion (who later became, respectively, lsrael's first president and first prime minister) attempted to persuade Patriarch Hayik, who headed the Lebanese delegation, to abandon South Lebanon in return for a promise of technical and financial assistance to develop the area to the north, which they hoped, would become a Christian state.

The Zionist military forces that invaded Palestine in 1948 also occupied part of the district of Marjayun and Bint Jubayl, and reached the vicinity of the Litani River, but were forced to withdraw under international pressure. Then, in 1954, the leaders of the newly established state of Israel renewed Zionist claims on Lebanese water when President Eisenhower's envoy Eric Johnston proposed a formula of sharing the Litani waters among Lebanon, Syria and Israel. Israel, in fact, threatened to use force against Lebanon to prevent the utilization of the Litani waters to develop South Lebanon.

While these threats were made during the period covered in the Sharett diary, consider what actually happened later, during the 1960s, '70s, '80s: In 1967, lsrael's war against three Arab states not only gave Israel possession of eastern Palestine (the West Bank), Gaza, the Sinai and the Syrian Golan Heights, but also enabled Israel to capture the headwaters of the Jordan and Manias rivers. In addition, Israel destroyed Jordan's East Ghor Canal and its Khaled Dam on the Yarmuk River, which flows into lsrael's Nahariva Pool. In the 1978 "Litani Operation," Israel established firm control over the Wazzani River, which flows into the Jordan, as well as almost the entire length of the Hasbani River. And in the 1982 "Operation Peace for Galilee," the entire length of the Litani River came under Israeli control."

The goal of profoundly altering water distribution in the region could be achieved only within the context of a vassal state in Lebanon with a puppet government, an endeavor about which the Sharett diary has much to say (p.22 ff.). In fact, Ben Gurion's plan, in 1954, to establish such a puppet governments plan enthusiastically endorsed by Moshe Dayan was finally put in motion nearly a quarter of a century later. Dayan's "officer" did indeed emerge, even bearing the same rank of "just a major" Major Sa'd Haddad,whom Israel encouraged to proclaim secession from Lebanon in April 1979.lsrael's defense minister, Ezer Weizmann, announced his government's support of Haddad's canton of "Free Lebanon": "I consider Haddad a Lebanese nationalist and as far as I know he wants Beirut to become the capital of a free independent Lebanon once more without interference from the Syrians or the Palestinians."4 Support for Haddad, and by implication for a Zionist-Phalangist alliance, was also voiced by right-wing Lebanese politicians. Stated Camille Chamoun, "We need such a Lebanese force to struggle in the South for the liberation of Lebanon, and not just a part of Lebanon, and Sa'd Haddad is not a traitor."

But the Zionist proxy "mini-state," which was set up in a border strip six miles wide and sixty miles long, was repudiated by the world community. A United Nations force, the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL), was mandated to help reestablish the authority of the central Lebanese government in the South. Israel, however, defied the relevant United Nations resolution (which was supported even by the Carter administration) and persisted in its support of Haddad. After a March 1981 agreement by the Syrian and Lebanese presidents to reassert - in cooperation with UNIFIL - the authority of the Beirut government in the South, Israel and Haddad's militia bombarded a UNIFIL position, killing three Nigerian soldiers (March 16, 1981).

Israel's destabilization of Lebanon, in pursuit of a Maronite-dominated client state, has taken several forms, ranging from extending the Camp David formula to Lebanon, to its full-scale invasion of 1982. With regard to imposing a Camp David solution on Lebanon, Menachem Begin made a statement to the Israeli parliament on May 7, 1979, inviting Lebanon to enter into negotiations with Israel on the basis of Syrian withdrawal and expulsion of the Palestinians from Lebanon. This proposal evoked an enthusiastic response from Bashir Gemayel, commander of the Phalangist Lebanese Forces, who told Beirut's Monday Morning on May 28, 1979:

"These principles are sound and should be accepted is the basis for any Lebanese endeavor to find a solution. . . . President Sadat accepted a similar proposal and he is now leading Egypt to an era of welfare and prosperity. When shall Lebanon be allowed the right to seek its own welfare?"

The elder Gemayel, Pierre, added:

"You shall say that I am defending Sadat as I defended Sa'd Haddad; my dear, I would be a coward and without honor if I did not defend my point of view" (Al-Safir, August 2, 1979)

Israel's aggression against Lebanon in 1982 was clearly designed to cement these alliances between Israel and the "Major" in the South and with the Gemayels and Chamouns to the North - all in an effort to secure the balkanization and vassalization of Lebanon, the eradication of Palestinian nationalism, and the intimidation of Syria. To attain these goals, Israeli leaders were willing to risk a wider regional war, and indeed to push the world to what is in every respect a "pre-nuclear" situation. This alone should give the American people cause for concern and action. In addition,the United States has provided Israel with the economic and military means to invade Lebanon, to bomb Baghdad, and to perpetuate the occupation of Palestine and of Syrian territory in clear violation of U.S. law, including the Arms Export Control Act of 1976 and the Israel-U.S. Mutual Defense Agreement of 1952.

The 1982 Israeli invasion so tipped the domestic balance in favor of Israel's Lebanese allies that the majority of Muslims, nationalists and other anti-Israel groups were left in a clearly submissive condition. The terms of the victor were dictated to the vanquished. lsrael's new ally,Bashir Gemayel, was to be president/viceroy of Lebanon, although according to noted American journalist Jonathan Randal, Bashir himself, who owed his presidency to Begin and Sharon, complained that these two treated him like a "vassal."'. The Shultz agreement of May 17, 1983 was to be Lebanon's Versailles, which would realize the long-standing Zionist dream described in the Sharett diaries a "Christian" state that would ally itself with Israel.

Despite the assassination of President-elect Bashir Gemayel before he could take office, initially matters developed in accordance with Israel's strategy for Lebanon. The negotiations, handled by civilians from the two countries' foreign ministries, appeared to be headed towards normalization along Camp David lines; Israel secured a liaison office in Beirut, the next thing to an embassy; the Phalanges party and its leader's son, Amin Gemayel, now the president of Lebanon, began to reshape the country in their own image. But it soon became clear that sectarian hegemony, sponsored by Israel and supported by the United States, was a poor substitute for even the antiquated confessional system of 1943. By fall 1983, Israeli troops were forced to withdraw to the Allah River. By February 1984, President Reagan ordered U.S. troops to withdraw, while Druze and Shiite fighters made a triumphant entry into Beirut (February 10,1984). President Amin Gemayel, who owed his presidency to the Israeli invasion, was forced under new political and military conditions to repudiate the Shultz agreement (March 1984) and to close Israel's "embassy" in Beirut (July of the same year).

Not only did the Israeli invasion of 1982 fail to achieve most of its objectives: It pushed the right-wing Lebanese Forces to a position that borders on fascism and renders reunification and reintegration a remote possibility. It has exacerbated the Lebanese civil war at an unbearable cost in human lives and property.

This human tragedy compels us to examine the Israeli rationale of "security," a rubric that has covered a curiously large number of Israeli violations of international law and human rights, recently and in the past. Why, we must ask, does Israel in the West Bank and Gaza Strip close universities, shoot students in classrooms and on the street, deport leaders, dismiss mayors, create colonial settlements and encourage terrorist acts by settlers all in the name of' "security?". Why, when confronted with massive popular resistance to its occupation of South Lebanon, did Israel react with the same "Iron Fist," initiating raids on villages, mass arrests of civilians, wide-scale destruction of homes and property, and assassinations even though this policy could only further alienate the population."

The personal diary of Moshe Sharett sheds light on this question by amply documenting the rationale and mechanics of lsrael's "Arab policy" in the late 1940s and the 1950s. The policy portrayed, in its most intimate particulars, is one of 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, when Israeli terrorism against Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, and against Palestinians and Lebanese in South Lebanon, has reached an intolerable level. It is becoming increasingly evident that the exceptional demographic and geographic alterations in Israeli society within the present generation have been brought about, not as the accidental results of the endeavor to guard "Israel's security" against an "Arab threat," but by a drive for lebensraum.

Referring to the terrorist bombings that crippled two prominent West Bank mayors and injured other civilians on June 2, 1980, William Browser, in an article for the New York Times (June 5, 1980), explained the apprehension of West Bank Palestinians: although military occupation is not new to them, Israeli terrorism-if that is what it was- is virtually without precedent in the last thirty years." It behooves Mr. Browser and the attentive public who reads the "news that's fit to print," to examine the many precedents amply documented and occasionally decried by a bewildered Israeli prime minister who worried about the moral deterioration in Israeli society in the 1950s that first prompted revenge as a "sacred" principle. In a passage quoted in Rokach's study, Sharett wrote:

"In the thirties we restrained the emotions of revenge. . . . Now, on the contrary, we justify the system of reprisal ... we have eliminated the mental and moral brake on this instinct and made it possible ... to uphold revenge as a moral value.... a sacred principle" (p. 33).

The undisguised satisfaction that the maiming of the two Palestinian mayors evoked among many Jewish settlers in the West Bank is reminiscent of the feeling in Israel in the 1950s that caused Sharett so much anguish, and challenged his conscience. In fact, the private armies now being organized by Jewish vigilante groups determined to keep the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip under permanent Israeli control, have openly advocated the removal of all Arabs from occupied Palestine. Although these ultra-nationalists consider former Prime Minister Menachem Begin and Foreign Minister Yitzhak Shamir (former members of the terrorist Irgun and Stern gangs) to have become patsies, fools and traitors, and although Begin condemned the attacks on the Palestinian mayors as "crimes of the worst kind," the fact remains that the settlers of Gush Emunim and Kach are carrying out the settlement policies of the Israeli government. This government provides them with the protection and economic benefits and equips them with legitimacy. By the same token, it ensures that their victims will be defenseless and powerless. The 1948 Deir Yassin massacre, committed by Begin's Irgun Zvei Leumi, and the June 2, 1980 bombing, committed by another vigilante group, are products of the same type of "sacred terrorism."

The thirty-two years that have lapsed in the interim have witnessed innumerable acts of Israeli terror: it hardly seems necessary to recall the aerial bombardment of vital civilian infrastructures in Egypt and Syria in the late 1960s,7 or the destruction of southern Lebanon in the 1970S and'80s, nor to mention the brutality with which the occupation regime treats the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, or the many assassinations of Palestinian intellectuals in various European capitals in the early 1970s.

A most disturbing phenomenon, which will continue to inhibit the prospects for Palestinian-Israeli coexistence, is the ascendancy of the radical right in Israel. Its orientation towards brute force, its attitude towards Arabs, and its contempt for debate and dissent, leave little room for coexistence. Justifications of acts of terrorism against Palestinian civilians are rampant among members of the political establishment and Jewish settlers. Israel's former Minister of Science and Energy, Yuval Neeman, Knesset member Haim Druckman, former chief of staff Raphael Eytan, and Sephardic chief Rabbi Mordechai Eliahu are on record justifying that kind of terrorism.8 In July 1985, Foreign Minister Yitzhak Shamir vowed to work for the early release of convicted Jewish terrorists, whom he described as "excellent people who made a mistake" (Jerusalem Post, July 12, 1985). The propensity for violence against Arabs has been clearly established in interviews of settlers, young and old, by Israeli and Western journalists.9

The radical right nowadays speaks outright of dispossession and deportation of Palestinians. Israeli sociologist Yoram Peri wrote in Daivar (May 11,1984) that while Defense Minister Arens and Foreign Minister Shamir speak of annexing the West Bank and Gaza and forging a "pluralistic" society, the extreme right advocates deportation, a term which, four years ago, no one would dare utter. "Hence," he wrote, "the proximity of the right to the Fascist conception of the State."

Another factor that inhibits coexistence is the cavalier manner in which members of the establishment claim sovereignty over the West Bank and Gaza. So contemptuous of the need to argue and convince was Foreign Minister Shamir, that his reply to a question of why Israel lay claims to those territories consisted of one word: "Because!" Israel's Chief Rabbi, Shlomo Goren, has remarked that in religious law retaining the occupied territories takes precedence over the duty to save life. Terms such as"Western Eretz Israel" and "Judea and Samaria," which are being used with more frequency and emphasis, represent a revival of the revisionist Zionist notion that the "land of Israel" also includes modern-day Jordan, and underline Israeli leaders' determination never to relinquish the illegally occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip.

The more the world tries to understand the situation in the Middle East,the more the Zionist organizations in the United States, acting in concert with Israel, try to fog it up. lsrael's wars against the Arabs in 1967 and 1982 obliterated its David image and confirmed it as the Goliath of the Middle East. No longer was it possible for the Israeli government to escape public scrutiny, despite all the immunity which it enjoys in the American public arena, as its forces, in the name of "security" for Israeli civilians, carried out the most ruthless aerial bombardment since Vietnam.The U.S. ambassador in Lebanon, whose government used its Security Council veto to protest lsrael's war gains in 1982, described their saturation bombing: "There is no pinpoint accuracy against targets in open spaces." The Canadian ambassador said lsrael's bombing "would make Berlin of 1944 look like a tea party. . it is truly a scene from Dante's Inferno." NBC's John Chancellor said: "I kept thinking of the bombing of Madrid during the Spanish Civil War. ..we are now dealing with an imperial Israel." Indeed, in their pure murderousness, given the frequent use of phosphorus and cluster bombs, the Israeli bombings of Beirut, an advanced form of state terrorism, far outstripped the attacks on Guernica, Coventry and Dresden.

Since this book was first published in 1980, the Zionist movement has responded to the growing criticism of Israeli violence in a hysterical manner. Surveillance, monitoring the activities of lsrael's critics in the media, churches and on the campus, intelligence gathering and blacklisting reminiscent of the McCarthy period in the United States, are among the tactics employed recently by Zionist organizations to stifle criticism of Israel. 10 Pinning the anti-Semitic label on critics his become the standard and easiest tactic to preempt rational discussion of public policy regarding Israel and to intimidate would-be critics. The list of victims includes such distinguished individuals as former Senator Charles Percy, the Reverend Jesse Jackson, former Under Secretary of State George Ball, former Congressman Paul Findley," and many other lesser known individuals who struggle against overwhelming odds to retain a job and secure their livelihood. Menachem Begin's famous remark after the Sabra and Shatila massacres, which defined criticism of Israel as "blood libel against the Jewish people," is a stark example of the trend to equate open criticism with anti-Semitism, even as Israel continues to have trade relations and military cooperation with the most notoriously anti-Semitic regimes in Central and South America." Israel's war against journalists was revealed in the legal suit against NBC's reporting of the 1982 invasion of Lebanon, 13 its repeated allegations that journalists who report news detrimental to Israel do so only in response to Arab "threats,"14 and in the killing of CBS crewmen in South Lebanon, who were covering the implementation of Israel's "Iron Fist" policy (March 21, 1985).

Other hysterical responses to increasing knowledge of the facts of the Middle Fast conflict have emerged in the writings of propagandists masquerading as scholars. Joan Peters's From Time Immemorial 13 turns history on its head by claiming that Jews did not replace native Palestinians, who were allegedly no more than illegal Arab immigrant workers who moved to "where they found work." The absurd and indefensible allegation that there were virtually no Arabs in Palestine prior to the Zionist influx, seems intended to provide a veneer of legitimacy for lsrael's increasingly violent efforts to make the myth that there is "no such thing as a Palestinian" a chilling reality.

The Zionist effort to stifle public debate of Israeli actions extended to the present study. After unsuccessful attempts by the Israeli establishment to suppress publication, in Hebrew, of the Sharett diary in Israel,attempts were made by threats of litigation and otherwise to suppress our publication of this study of the diary here in the United States. On April 11, 1980 the AAUG received communication from a well-known law firm in New York requesting in the "firmest manner possible" that we refrain from printing, publishing or otherwise reproducing portions of the diary. The law firm, acting on behalf of the family of the late Moshe Sharett and the Israeli publisher of the diary, threatened to "initiate prompt litigation in a Federal District Court" on the grounds of alleged violation of United States copyright laws.

Subsequently, the AAUG received a telegram from the Sharett family emphasizing that all rights would be vigorously protected if the association published "parts or all of Moshe Sharett's diaries." Anxious transoceanic calls were received by our office from the Israeli media. Our right to publish was questioned, but not on the legal grounds cited by the Sharett family and its legal counsel. Instead, we were hysterically accused of attempting to expose Israel via Sharett in a sensationalist manner. The Israeli newspaper Ma'ariv headlined a front-page story, "Israel's Haters in the U.S.A. translated with No Permission the Diaries of Moshe Sharett" (April 4, 1980). According to former Knesset member Uri Avneri, writing in Haolam Hazeh (September 23, 1980), the Israeli Foreign Ministry initially supported Moshe Sharett's son, Yaqov, who edited the Hebrew publication of the diary, in his attempt to suppress publication of Livia Rokach's study based on the diary. "But to his disappointment, the Foreign Office did not uphold its support for him. The Jerusalem politicians decided that pursuing a legal course in stopping the dissemination of the book would be a mistake of the first order, since this would give it much more publicity."

Needless to say, our accusers not only prejudged our book before its publication and cast aspersion on the organization and the individuals involved in its production; they also assumed that our publication was an unauthorized translation. In fact, the material quoted as verbatim translations from the Sharett diary or substantially paraphrased from that diary comprises only about one percent of the diary. Rokach's study utilizes excerpts from the Sharett diary to reinforce and illustrate her own thesis.

We are under no illusion that the challenge before us was predominantly legal. After all, what Sharett said in his diary, limited as it is to the Hebrew-speaking public, is very revealing; it constitutes an indictment of Zionism by the former prime minister of Israel, and dismantles many erroneous assumptions about the Arab-Israeli conflict. It refutes a three-decade-old dogma and emphasizes the need to reexamine the uncritical support Israel has enjoyed in the West for its policies toward the Arabs. Hence, the Israelis' need to suppress and censor, to withhold relevant and vital information from the public discourse on the Middle Fast. We are painfully reminded of similar attempts to conceal the fraudulent methods which the United States politico-military establishment employed in its pursuit of the war against the Vietnamese. The ability of the establishment to withhold the truth from the American public prolonged the Vietnam War and aggravated the social, economic, and human problems which resulted from that war. It will be hoped that the deceptive strategy of David Ben Gurion,which Moshe Sharett documented in his day-today record, will not be withheld forever from the American public, whose lives are materially affected by events in the Middle East. Thus, in our opinion, Israel's Sacred Terrorism has an indisputable significance in the formulation of a healthy and objective policy towards the Middle East.

It is our considered opinion that Sharett's Personal Diary, is a very important historical resource that sheds much light on Israel's policy towards the Arab world, particularly for all of us in the United States who have such a large stake in Middle Eastern developments and the eventual outcome of the conflict. Therefore, the use of Sharett's historical resource for scholarly study does not infringe the copyright laws.

We have taken particular precautions, however, to ensure that our selections have been translated accurately, have not been taken out of context and are not mitigated or contradicted by anything that Sharett wrote elsewhere in the diary. We are also certain that these selections satisfy the "fair use" criteria of United States copyright law:

1. The AALUG is a non-profit, educational organization, which is not publishing this study for commercial exploitation.
2. The nature of Moshe Sharett's diary relates materially to the "right of the public to know."
3. The amount of the copyrighted material reproduced in this publication amounts to no m ore than one percent of the whole.
4. The economic value of the original work would not suffer from the limited quotations included in our study.

We take comfort in the protection afforded by the First Amendment to the United States Constitution involving freedom of speech and the press and the companion "right of the public to know." The Pentagon Papers were revealed to the public after they had long lain unnoticed in the archives of the American military bureaucracy. The critical nature of their content warranted that they should have been unearthed much earlier than their dramatic appearance. Sharett's startling revelations must not be subjected to the same bureaucratic strangulation, or kept away from the English-reading public so that their usefulness as a factor in Middle East policy is nullified.

NASEER H. ARURI, AAUG Publications Committee November 1985 

Preface Notes

1. Moshe Sharett, Yoman Ishi (Personal Diary), edited by Yaqov Sharett (Tel Aviv: Ma'a 1979).
2. For example, upon his retirement in May 1985, U.S. Ambassador to Israel Samuel Lewis revealed that in December 1981 Israeli Defense Minister Ariel Sharon outlined his plans for the impending invasion to U.S. envoy Philip Habib (Washington Post, 24 May 1985).
3. See for example Thomas Stauffer, "Israel Calculates the Price of Peace: Money and Water," Christian Science Monitor, 13 January 1982, and "Israel's Water Needs May Erode Path to Peace in Region," Christian Science Monitor, 20 Januarv 1982; John Cooley, "Syria Links Pull-Out to Guaranteed Access to Water," Washington Post, 8 June 1983; and Leslie C. Schmida, "Israel's Drive for Water," Link, 17, 4 (November 1994).
4. Quoted in al-Nahar and al-Sa ir, 22 April 1979.
5. Quoted in The Isolationist-Israeli Alliance Is a Phenomenon that Threatens the Unity of Lebanon, presented at the World Congress for Solidarity with the Lebanese People, Paris, 16 18 June 1980 (Beirut: Information Bureau of the Lebanese National Movement, 1980), 9.
6. Jonathan C. Randal, Going All the Way: Christian Warlords, Israeli Adventurers, and the War in Lebanon (New York: Viking Press, 1983), 10-11.
7. In the late 1960s and the early 1970s, Israeli bombing reduced the Egyptian cities of Suez, Port Said and Ismailia to ghost towns. During the same period Israel carried out repeated air raids against Syria. Following the killing of eleven Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics in 1972, at least 200 people, almost all civilians, were killed in Israeli "reprisal" raids in Syria alone. David Hirst, The Gun and the Olive Branch (London: Futura, 1978), 251-252.
8. See articles by Yoram Peri in Davar, I I May 1984. Ya'acov Rahamim in Ma'ariv, 14 December 1983, and Mary Curtius, "Israeli Debate: Should Settlers Be Pardoned," Christian Science Monitor, 15 Julv 1985.
9. See, for example, Christian Science Monitor, 10 May 1984.
10. At its annual convention in 1984, the Middle East Studies Association called on the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and the Anti-Def'amation League of B'nai B'rith to "disavow and refrain from" blacklisting practices against scholars and students. For more information on efforts by supporters of Israel to quash open debate, see, for example, Naseer Aruri, "The Middle East on the U.S. Campus," Link, 18, 2 (May June 1985).
11. Former Congressman Findley documents the pervasive influence of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) in They Dare to Speak Out (Westport, Conn.: Lawrence Hill, 1985).
12. For a detailed analysis of lsrael's relations with Central American regimes, see Milton Jamail and Margo Gutierrez, It's No Secret: lsrael's Military, Involvement in Central America, forthcoming, AAUG. See also Israel Shahak, Israel's Global Role: Weapons.for Repression (Belmont, Mass.: AAUG, 1982)
13. In May 1994 a pro-Israel group known as Americans for a Safe Israel (AFSI) filed a petition with the Federal Communications Commission to deny renewal of licenses for station WNBC-TV in New York and seven other NBC affiliates, charging that NBC had presented one-sided coverage of the war in Lebanon. See Christian Science Monitor, 14 May 1984. AFSI also commissioned Professor Edward Alexander to write a study, which appeared under the title NBC's War In Lebanon: The Distorting Mirror (1983).
14. An example is Ze'ev Chafets, Double Vision: How the Press Distorts America's Media, of the Middle Last (New York: William Morrow, 1983). Chafets is former head of the Israeli press office in Jerusalem. American journalists have vigorously denied these allegations. (See, e.g., Charles Glass, ABC Beirut correspondent, in CPJ Update [published by the Committee to Protect Journalists], November December 1984).
15. New York: Harper and Row, 1984. For critical reviews of Peter'sbook, see Norman Finklestein, in In These Times, 5 11 September 1984, 12-13, Muhammad Hallaj, "From Time Immemorial: The Resurrection of a Myth," Link, 18, 1(January March 1985); and Ian Gilmour and David Gilmour, in Arab Studies Quarterly, 7, 2 3 (Spring/Summer 1985), 181-195.

AAUG Publications Committee, November 1985 

Introduction

POPULAR SUPPORT of Israel over the last quarter of a century has been based on a number of myths, the most Persistent of which has been the myth of lsrael's security, Implying the permanent existence of grave threats to the survival of Jewish society in Palestine, this myth has been carefully cultivated to evoke anxious images in public opinion to permit, and even encourage, the use of large amounts of public funds to sustain Israel militarily and economically. "Israel's security" is the official argument with which not only Israel but also the U.S. denies the right of self-determination in their own country to the Palestinian people. For the past three decades it has been accepted as a legitimate explanation for lsrael's violation of international resolutions calling for the return of the Palestinian people to their homes. Over the past thirteen years Israel has been allowed to evoke its security to justify its refusal to retreat from the Arab and Palestinian territories occupied in 1967. Security is still the pretext given by successive Israeli governments for widespread massacres of civilian populations in Lebanon, for expropriations of Arab lands, for the establishment of Jewish settlements in the occupied territories, for deportations, and for arbitrary detentions of political prisoners. Although the security of the Arab populations in the whole region has been repeatedly threatened over these years by overt and covert warfare, terrorist plots and subversive designs, and although UN resolutions demand the establishment of secure borders for all states in the region, so far only lsrael's security has been at the center of international discussion.

The persistence of the myth of Israel's security shows that there is considerable public belief in the so-called Arab commitment to eliminate the Jewish state. Most of the distinguished Western writers who present this case derive their arguments from Zionist versions of events in the late 1940s, at the time of the establishment of Israel, and in the mid-1950s, when Nasser came to power. They go on from these arguments to present Israel's so-called struggle for security and survival as a moral issue. The media often furnish politicians, who have other reasons for their political and military support of Israel, with the convenient issue of the West's moral commitment to Israel.

Other versions or approaches to the facts have more often than not been ignored. For example, recent disclosures by Nahum Goldmann (Le Monde Diplomatique, August 1979) have gone practically unnoticed. Goldmann, who for more than thirty years headed the pro-Zionist World .Jewish Congress, charges that the Arabs were not consulted about the partition of Palestine in 1947, and further that their willingness to negotiate a political compromise that might have prevented the 1948 war was vetoed and undermined by Ben Gurion before May 1948.

The recently published Personal Diary of Moshe Sharett (Yoman Ishi. Tel Aviv: Ma'ariv, 1979, in Hebrew) now offers a decisive and authoritative contribution to the demystification of the myth of lsrael's security and its security policies. Between 1933 and 1948 Sharett guided the foreign relations of the Zionist movement, as head of the Jewish Agency's Political Department, and from 1948 to 1956 he was lsrael's foreign minister. In 1954 and 1955 he was its prime minister as well. The following pages present extracts from Sharett's diary demonstrating the following points:

1. The Israeli political /military establishment never seriously believed in an Arab threat to the existence of Israel. On the contrary, it sought and applied every means to exacerbate the dilemma of the Arab regimes after the 1948 war. The Arab governments were extremely reluctant to engage in any military confrontation with Israel, yet in order to survive they needed to project to their populations and to the exiled Palestinians in their countries some kind of reaction to lsrael's aggressive policies and continuous acts of harassment. In other words, the Arab threat was an Israeli-invented myth which for internal and inter-Arab reasons the Arab regimes could not completely deny, though they constantly feared Israeli preparations for a new war.

2. The Israeli political/military establishment aimed at pushing the Arab states into military confrontations which the Israeli leaders were invariably certain of winning. The goal of these confrontations was to modify the balance of power in the region radically, transforming the Zionist state into the major power in the Middle East.

3. In order to achieve this strategic purpose the following tactics were used:

   a) Large- and small-scale military operations aimed at civilian populations across the armistice lines, especially in the Palestinian territories of the West Bank and Gaza, then respectively under the control of Jordan and Egypt. These operations had a double purpose: to terrorize the populations, and to create a permanent destabilization stemming from tensions between the Arab governments and the populations, who felt they were not adequately protected against Israeli aggression.
   b) Military operations against Arab military installations in border areas to undermine the morale of the armies and intensify the regimes' destabilization from inside their military structures.
   c) Covert terrorist operations in depth inside the Arab world, used for both espionage and to create fear, tension and instability.

4. lsrael's achievement of its strategic purpose was to be realized through the following means:
   a) New territorial conquests through war. Although the 1949-50 armistice agreements assigned to Israel a territory one-third larger than had the UN partition plan, the Israeli leadership was still not satisfied with the size of the state, the borders of which it had committed itself to respect on the international level. It sought to recover at least the borders of mandate Palestine. The territorial dimension was considered to be a vital factor in Israel's transformation into a regional power.
   b) Political as well as military efforts to bring about the liquidation of all Arab and Palestinian claims to Palestine through the dispersion of the Palestinian refugees of the 1947-49 war to faraway parts of the Arab world as well as outside the Arab world.
   c) Subversive operations designed to dismember the Arab world, defeat the Arab national movement, and create puppet regimes which would gravitate to the regional Israeli power.

In providing documentation on the above points, Sharett's Diary deals a deadly blow to a number of important interpretations which are still being presented as historical truths. Among these are the following items:

1. To this date the majority of scholars and analysts cite the nationalization of the Suez Canal as the chief motivation for the October 1956 war, It is thereby implied that the projected British and French aggression against Egypt provided Israel with an opportunity to achieve the termination of fedayeen attacks from across the armistice lines, and to settle its accounts with Nasser's regime, to which these attacks were attributed.
What Sharett tells us now is that a major war against Egypt aimed at the territorial conquest of Gaza and the Sinai was on the Israeli leadership's agenda at least as early as the autumn of 1953, almost a year before Nasser ousted Neguib and consolidated his leadership. It was agreed then that the international conditions for such a war would mature within a period of about three years. The Israeli military attack on Gaza in February 1955 was consciously undertaken as a preliminary act of war. A couple of months later a government decision to commence a war to conquer the Gaza Strip met with the strenuous opposition of the foreign minister, whose political liquidation was thereupon decided by the supporters of the war policy, headed by Ben Gurion. Had the prospect of the tripartite aggression not appeared on the horizon in later months, Israel would have gone on to attack Egypt according to its own plans, and, moreover, with U.S. consent.

2. The occupation by Israel of the West Bank and Gaza in 1967 has been described, and is still widely understood today, as an Israeli defensive action in the face of Arab threats. Sharett's Diary offers unequivocable evidence that the occupation of Gaza and also of the West Bank was part of lsrael's plans since the early fifties. American Zionist leaders were informed about these plans in 1954, In 1955, Jewish and Arab lives were sacrificed in a series of provocative attacks undertaken to create a pretext for the occupation of Jordanian territory. The chief obstacle postponing this occupation was Britain's residual presence in Jordan upholding the Hashemite throne.
3. The continuing, violent Israeli aggression in Lebanon still is being attributed, shamelessly, to Israeli security needs. In particular, Israeli spokesmen, echoed by Western media, try to explain lsrael's massive intervention in Lebanon and the Lebanese events in general, with the following historical arguments:
   a) In the struggle between Muslims and Christians, a conflict which would have broken out regardless of outside interference, Israel's role has been limited to the defense of the Christian minority.
   b) The presence of the Palestinian resistance, or in Israeli terminology, of Palestinian terrorism in that country required Israeli intervention.

Sharett's Diary, however, provides the entire documentation of how in 1954 Ben Gurion developed the diabolic plans to "Christianize" Lebanon, i.e., to invent and create from scratch the inter-Lebanese conflict, and of how a detailed blueprint for the partition and subordination of that country to Israel was elaborated by Israel more than fifteen years before the Palestinian presence became a political factor in Lebanon.

The use of terror and aggression to provoke or create the appearance of an Arab threat to lsrael's existence was summed up by the then "number two" of the Zionist state's hierarchy:

"I have been meditating on the long chain of false incidents and hostilities we have invented, and on the many clashes we have provoked which cost us so much blood, and on the violations of the law by our men-all of which brought grave disasters and determined the whole course of events and contributed to the security crisis".

 A week earlier, Moshe Dayan, then lsrael's chief of staff, explained why Israel needed to reject Any border security arrangements offered by the neighboring Arab States, or by the United Nations, as well as the formal security guarantees suggested by the United States. Such guarantees, he predicted, might "tie lsrael's hands." Presumably, that would render unjustifiable or even impossible those attacks and incursions across the armistice lines which through the mid- 1950s went under the euphemistic name of reprisal actions. These actions, Dayan said,

"are our vital lymph. They . . . . help us maintain a high tension among our population and in the army. . . in order to have young men go to the Negev we have to cry out that it is in danger". (26 May 1955, 102 1)

 The creation of a siege mentality in Israeli society was necessary to complement the prefabricated myth of the Arab threat. The two elements were intended to feed each other. Although Israeli society faced a serious risk of social and cultural disintegration under the impact of a mass immigration of Asian and North African Jews into the pre-state's ideologically homogeneous community, the purpose of the siege mentality was not so much that of attaining a defensive cohesiveness in Israel's Jewish society. It was calculated principally to "eliminate the moral brakes" required for a society to fully support a police which constituted a complete reversal of the collective ethical code on which its formal education was based and from which it was supposed to derive its vital strength. Of course, this ethical code had not been respected in the past either. Aggression and terrorism had been exercised by the Zionists before and during the 1947-48 war. The following testimony of a soldier who participated in the occupation of the Palestinian village of Duelma in 1948 is only the most recently disclosed of a long chain of evidence:

 Killed between 80 to 100 Arabs, women and children. To kill the children they fractured their heads with sticks. There was not one house without corpses. The men and women of the villages were pushed into houses without food or water. Then the saboteurs came to dynamite the houses. One commander ordered a soldier to bring two women into a house he was about to blow up. . . . Another soldier prided himself upon having raped an Arab woman before shooting her to death. Another Arab woman with her newborn baby was made to clean the place for a couple of days, and then they shot her and the baby. Educated and well-mannered commanders who were considered "good guys". . . became base murderers, and this not in the storm of battle, but as a method of expulsion and extermination. The fewer the Arabs who remain, the better. (quoted in Davar, 9 June 1979)

 But these episodes did not filter through to the society at large. The War of Independence was ritualized, on the contrary, as a miraculous victory of (Jewish) right against (Arab) might. Deir Yassin was (falsely) described by tile ruling Labor establishment as an isolated and even condemnable case, a product of the brutality of the minority lrgun group. Manuals, school textbooks, history books, anthologies and the media placidly glorified the moral quality of the war, the "Puritv of the weapons" used by the army, the Jewish ethos underlying the state.

 The security or reprisals policy of the 1950s represented, in this sense, a qualitative leap. The strategic designs were perceived, by the Israeli leaders themselves, is totally irrational in respect to the regional realities, and especially in respect to the international context to which Israel had formally committed itself. Therefore, the support required for it inside the country had to be total, i.e., emotional, almost instinctive, with no concessions to rationality and no moralistic cover. A strategic goal such as the transformation of Israel into a regional power inevitably presupposed the use of large-scale, open violence, and could not pretend even mythically to be achieved on the basis of the earlier moral superiority doctrine which, therefore, had to be replaced with a new one. Terrorism and "revenge" were now to be glorified as the new "moral. . . and even sacred" values of Israeli society. The resurgent militarism no longer needed the idealistic, socialist varnish of a Paimach: the military symbol was now Unit 101, led by Arik Sharon.

 The process of this cultural even more than political transition was not automatic. In fact, as Dayan admitted in the above quotation, much anxiety had to be generated to encourage it. The lives of Jewish victims also had to be sacrificed to create provocations justifying subsequent reprisals, especially in those periods in which the Arab governments succeeded in controlling the reactions of the harassed and enraged Arab border populations. A hammering, daily propaganda, controlled by the censors, was directed to feed the Israeli population with images of the monstrosity of the Enemy. More images showed that negotiated security arrangements with the Enemy could only be interpreted as a fatal proof of Israeli weakness.

 The final point of this process which Sharett watched in the 1950s was the election of Menachem Begin as prime minister in 1977. Sharett's Zionist perspective was based on a political/diplomatic alternative to the terror strategy of Ben Gurion and his followers. This, he thought, could consolidate the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine and perhaps enlarge it in the future, without major concessions to the surrounding Arab world. Sharett believed his goals could be achieved without disturbing the West. Indeed, he thought Israeli plans could be coordinated with the West's. He lucidly perceived as fascist the logic behind lsrael's security doctrine, and correctly evaluated its consequences of moral corruption on the internal level and increasing violence on the regional level. He opposed it, and was certainly its most illustrious victim. His defeat, however, was inevitable, because his dissent from the strategy was quantitative more than qualitative: on methods rather than substance; on the number, for example, of the victims of a given military action and only vaguely on the ideology behind such actions. Basically, in the light of his unflagging Zionist faith, he was as fascinated as repelled by the strategy, as envious of its immediate successes as he was worried over its longer range consequences and international repercussions for Zionism and Israel.

 The liquidation of his dissenting presence was considered indispensable to the realization of the Israeli political/military leadership's megalomaniac and criminal designs. His intrinsic weakness consisted in his seemingly rational hope that the so-called liberal West would prevent the implementation of his opponents' designs. He relied on the West rather than on the awakening of a local, popular conscience which he had the power and the information to provoke but which as a Zionist he could not and dared not do.

 On the contrary, notwithstanding his scruples and torments he almost invariably ended up collaborating with his adversaries, and with those elements in the security establishment who conspired against him, in the fabrication and diffusion of deliberately distorted versions of events and policies for domestic and international consumption.

 In a historical perspective Sharett's self-portrait as it emerges from his Personal Diary, thus also explains why no so-called moderate Zionist proposal is possible,and how any attempt to liberalize Zionism from the inside could not but-as has repeatedly been the case-end in defeat. A clear, lucid, coherent logic runs through the history of the past three decades. In the early fifties the bases were laid for constructing a state imbued with the principles of sacred terrorism against the surrounding Arab societies on the threshold of the eighties the same state is for the first time denounced by its own intellectuals as being tightly in the deadly grip of fascism.

 This may be just one more reason why Western journalists, scholars sand analysts may find themselves greatly embarrassed by the following document. These commentators still insist on upholding the presumed moral commitment of the West to what they obstinately continue to mystify is Israel's security. In this sense Sharett's Diary, is potentially devastating to Zionist propaganda as the Pentagon Papers were in regard to U.S. aggression in Vietnam.

CHAPTER 1: Moshe Sharett and His Personal Diary[](#Moshe Sharett and His Personal Diary)

Moshe Sharett and His Personal Diary

Moshe Sharett (Shertok) was born in Harsson, Russia, in 1894. He emigrated with his family his father was a fervent Zionist activist-to Palestine in 1906, at the age of twelve. The family settled in the Arab village of Ein Sinya, near Nablus. Later, Moshe, his brother and three sisters would describe that two-year period, during which they studied Arabic, played with the children of the village and learned fascinating stories from the village's elders as the happiest time of their lives. In 1908 the Shertok family moved to Tel Aviv, where Moshe entered the Hertselyah High School. At the outbreak of World War 1, he was conscripted into the Ottoman army, where he took an officer's course and then served as an officer, mostly in Syria. After the war, while the British Mandate was established in Palestine, he graduated from the London School of Economics, and shortly thereafter entered political activity in the ranks of Labor Zionism. He was a founding member of Mapai (Party of the Workers of Eretz Israel), and became chief editor of Davar, the daily organ of the Histadrut (the trade union federation dominated by Mapai). Later he was appointed as deputy to Haim Arlosorov, the head of the Jewish Agency's Political Department. After Arlosorov was murdered on a Tel Aviv beach in 1933, Sharett was appointed as his successor. The Chairman of the Jewish Agency at that time was David Ben Gurion. According to Sharett, the conflict with Ben Gurion which characterized their twenty-five years of close collaboration at the summit of the Zionist movement and the state of Israel, originated in suspicions on Ben Gurion's part that Sharett was loyal to Chaim Weizmann, the president of the World Zionist Organization. In the 1940s Ben Gurion accused Sharett, unjustly according to the latter, of collaborating with Weizmann to negotiate, with U.S. mediation, an agreement between the Zionist movement and the Emir Faisal of Saudi Arabia. Sharett claimed that in reality he contributed to the failure of those negotiations. But according to Dr. Nahum Goldmann, Sharett was again involved in 1947-48 with Goldmann in negotiations mediated by U.S. Secretary of State George Marshall, aimed at obtaining a political solution to the problem of the Zionist presence in Palestine, possibly leading to creating a Middle Eastern Confederation including a Zionist entity. The main negotiator on the Arab side was to be Egyptian Foreign Minister Nukrashi Pasha. These negotiations, which were expected to prevent the first Arab-Israeli war, would have meant postponing the date scheduled for the proclamation of the state of Israel by a few weeks. Ben Gurion vetoed the negotiations, rejected the postponement, and accused Sharett of being opposed to the creation of the state, an accusation he vehemently denied. Fundamentally, Ben Gurion's preference for the use of force, versus Sharett's preference for the diplomatic method to achieve the same goals, was the basis for the conflict between these two Zionist leaders, which lasted until Shtrett was ousted from the Israeli government in June 1956. Moshe Sharett died in Tel Aviv in 1965. The Personal Diary, which Moshe Sharett wrote from October 1953 to November 1956 covers the last years of his political activity as lsrael's first foreign minister, including the two years in which he replaced Ben Gurion as the prime minister. It then extends over the first fifteen months of the tormented inactivity following his political demise. Moshe Sharett stopped writing his diary in the middle of a phrase on November 29, 1957. His last notes identify one of his previous collaborators, considered a close personal and political friend, as one of the conspirators against him. The Diary, a 2,400 page document in eight volumes, contains the daily notes and aide-memoires in which Sharett recorded current events: personal, family, and party happenings, as well as national and international meetings of prime importance, conversations with his wife or other members of the family alongside administrative questions regarding his ministry and comments on cabinet meetings. The intimate nature of the Diary, together with the exceptionally authoritative position of its author, constitutes a rare guarantee of credibility. Unlike other memoirs which have come out of Israel in recent years, and which were written for publication, Sharett's Diary hardly can be suspected of distortion, self glorification or subjectively polemic intentions. It is not surprising at all, therefore, that Sharett's son and his family were subjected to immense pressures to refrain from publication, or at least to submit the document to Labor Party censorship. Sharett's son Ya'acov finally decided to publish the complete writings.

CHAPTER 2 Ben Gurion Goes to Sdeh Boker: Spiritual Retreat as a Tactic

Moshe Sharrett jotted the first of the daily notes in his personal diary on October 9, 1953. Shortly before that, Ben Gurion, who was prime minister and minister of defense, announced his intention to withdraw from government activities. Sharett, who had been second in command to Ben Gurion since the pre-state days, was slated to replace him as Israel's prime minister. He would also retain the foreign ministry.

To public opinion at large, Ben Gurion's intention to retire was presented grandly as a spiritual exercise, a measure capable of galvanizing Israeli and Jewish youth and necessary for leading the Zionist sheep back to the abandoned ideals of pioneering and settlement. In reality, while the state was spending millions of pounds on the construction of a "hut" for Ben Gurion in the kibbutz Sdeh Boker in Negev, and on related security and communications arrangements, the Old Man already knew, and informed his collaborators, that his absence from the government would last for two years. Behind the campaign idealizing his withdrawal was a scenario meticulously prepared by him and his men. Even then, just four years after the 1948-49 war, the security establishment was ready with plans for lsrael's territorial expansion. The armistice lines established in Rhodes, although traced so as to grant Israel over a third more than the territory allotted it by the UN partition resolution in 1947, were considered unsatisfactory by the army, which aspired to recover at least the boundaries of mandate Palestine. Ben Gurion had theorized already about the necessity for Israel to become the regional power in the Middle East. Toward the realization of this goal a strategy for the destabilization of the region also had been drawn: operatively, as we shall see, its pivot for the next quarter of a century was to be the political-military policy known under the false name of "retaliation." The international conditions for the implementation of this strategic design, though, had yet to be prepared.

Economic and military aid from the West, in particular, was an essential condition. At the same time, rapprochement between the West and the Arab world had to be prevented. Toward this aim, the West had to be persuaded that Israel would be its best bet in the region militarily, and this was another of the major objectives of the massive reprisal attacks launched across the borders by the Israeli army. At the same time, though, the West should not be alarmed prematurely about Israel's intentions, because it was not ready yet to support these Israeli aims. Ben Gurion's formal withdrawal, and his (formal) replacement by the "moderate" Sharett, was interpreted by international diplomacy as a sign that Israel was not headed for war. Since the launching of the reprisal actions, such a fear was prevalent in the Arab world.

In the short range, the Israeli design was aimed at slowing down the negotiations between Arab states which were pressing to be armed, and the West, which was reluctant to arm them. In the meantime, the idea that the military actions were intended for no purpose other than their declared one-protecting lsrael's civilian populations against guerrilla-type attacks from Arab territories -would gain in credibility under the premiership of Sharett, a man notoriously devoted to moderation and diplomacy. The myth of Israel's Security, aimed at generating a consensus, would have its strength enhanced to a greater extent in Ben Gurion's absence. Thus, he went off to Sdeh Boker, accompanied by the aura of a pioneer-saint, and Sharett prepared to take over, or so he thought. In fact, Ben Gurion was to keep control of the real channels of command.

Chapter 3 Retaliation for War

On October 11th, 1953, the foreign minister and would-be premier noted in his diary that he had been to see Ben Zvi, the president of the state:

Ben Zvi raised as usual some inspired questions ... such as do we have a chance to occupy the Sinai and how wonderful it would be if the Egyptians started an offensive which we could defeat and follow with an invasion of that desert. He was very disappointed when I told him that the Egyptians show no tendency to facilitate us in this occupation task through a provocative challenge on their side. (11 October 1953, 27)

The next day Ben Gurion informed Sharett that Pinhas Lavon, a staunch supporter of the retaliation policy, would succeed him as the minister of defense, and that he was about to nominate Moshe Dayan as the armed forces chief of staff.

I said immediately that Moshe Dayan is a soldier only at war time but during peace time he is a politician. The nomination means ":politicization": of the headquarters. The new Chief of' Staff's immense capacity for plotting and intrigue-making will yield many complications. Ben Gurion admitted to the truth of these definitions and even added that Dayan himself defined himself this way and sought to disqualify himself for the job, but never mind, it will be all right. I left with a sinking heart. (ibid., 29)

Sharett considered the international climate at that time to be unfavorable to Israel: the U.S. has just decided to supply arms to Syria and Iraq, and to arm Egypt soon after the signature of the Canal Zone Agreement. In addition, lsrael's constant violations of the UN demands that it cease diversion of the Jordan River and adhere to the Johnston Plan were causing increasing consternation in Western capitals. The West had cultivated the hope that an Arab-Israeli agreement on the diversion of the Jordan waters would, if reached and implemented, become the cornerstone for a wider agreement that would take the wind out of growing anti-Western nationalist tensions in the area.2 According to the UN observers' chief, Danish General Wagen Benike, ":the Israelis have worked and are still working on Arab lands. We [the Israelis] are changing the terrain strategically.": (15 October 1955, 39) This, Sharett comments, is really a shameful deed:

I inquired several times, and each time I was solemnly assured that no Arab land has been touched. After Benike told me ... that it was proved to him that our work was begun on Arab land ... I again interrogated Amir [head of the Water Works Dept.] who now admits the facts.... Thus I have been made to appear as a liar in front of the whole world! (31 October 1955, 32)

Fearing that an overdose of Israeli violence at this moment might precipitate a crisis with the West, Sharett tried to block the Kibya reprisal operation which had been endorsed by Ben Gurion on the eve of his departure for a vacation preceding his formal retreat. He pointed out that the minor border incident, which was to have served as a pretext for the planned attack on the West Bank village, had just been publicly condemned by Jordan, and that the Jordanian representatives in the mixed armistice commission had promised to see to it that similar incidents would not be repeated.

I told Lavon that this [attack] will be a grave error, and recalled, citing various precedents, that it was never proved that reprisal actions serve their declared purpose. Lavon smiled ... and kept to his own idea.... Ben Gurion, he said, didn't share my view. (14 October 1953, 37)

According to the first news from the other side, thirty houses have been demolished in one village. This reprisal is unprecedented in its dimensions and in the offensive power used. I walked up and down in my room, helpless and utterly depressed by my feeling of impotence. . . . I was simply horrified by the description in Radio Ramallah's broadcast of the destruction of the Arab village- Tens of houses have been razed to the soil and tens of people killed. I can imagine the storm that will break out tomorrow in the Arab and Western capitals. (15 October 1953, 39)

I must underline that when I opposed the action I didn't even remotely suspect such a bloodbath. I thought that I was opposing one of those actions which have become a routine in the past. Had I even remotely suspected that such a massacre was to be held, I would have raised real hell. (16 October 1953, 44)

Now the army wants to know how we [the foreign ministry] are going to explain the issue. In a joint meeting of army and foreign ministry officials Shmuel Bendor suggested that we say that the army had no part in the operation, but that the inhabitants of the border villages, infuriated by previous incidents and seeking revenge, operated on their own. Such a version will make us appear ridiculous: any child would say that this was a military operation. (16 October 1953)

Yehoshafat Harkabi [then Assistant Chief of Military Intelligence] reported movements of Jordanian troops from Transjordan to the West Bank in two directions ... from Irbid to the Nablus region and from Amman to Jerusalem. I thought that these movements did not indicate preparations for attack but [were] only preparations for aggression on our side. It is impossible that they did not get the impression that the bombing of Kibya means, if not a calculated plan to cause war, then at least willingness to have one starting as a consequence of the action. "Fati" said that according to Radio Ramallah 56 bodies have already been extracted from the ruins. (17 October 1955, 44 45)

At 3 P.m. Russel [U.S. Charge d'At'faires] and Milton Fried [U.S. Attache] came in ... Russel's face was gloomy. Kibya was "in the air" . . . I said I will not say a word to justify the attack on Kibya but I must warn against detaching this action from a chain of events and I blamed the uncontrolled situation on the helplessness or the lack on goodwill on the part of Jordan. From that point onwards I attacked U.S. policy as one of the factors which contributed to the encouragement of the Arabs and the isolation of Israel.... I have condemned the folly of the [U.S.] idea that we want war and all our actions in the South and in the North are directed exclusively to bring it about.... Russel asked ... if we shall disavow Kibya. I said that I cannot answer.... Katriel ("Salmon") [Israel's military attache in London] came up with the idea of a "diversion": the Kibya affair would attract all the attention unless we are able to invent some other dramatic issue. (17 October 1953, 45)

[In the cabinet meeting] I condemned the Kibya affair that exposed us in front of the whole world as a gang of blood-suckers, capable of mass massacres regardless, it seems, of whether their actions may lead to war. I warned that this stain will stick to us and will not be washed away for many years to come. . . . It was decided that a communique on Kibya will be published and Ben Gurion [back from his vacation for the occasion] was to write it. I insisted on including an expression of regret. Ben Gurion insisted on excluding any responsibility of the army (See Appendix 1): the civilian citizens of the border areas, enraged by the constant murders, have taken justice into their hands. After all [he said] the border settlements are full of arms and the settlers are ex-soldiers.... I said that no one in the world will believe such a story and we shall only expose ourselves as liars. But I couldn't seriously demand that the communique explicitly affirm the army's responsibility because this would have made it impossible to condemn the act and we will have ended up approving this monstrous bloodbath. (18 October 1953, 51)

For Sharett as well, the army was irreproachable. But then why blame the army when the decision had been taken on a political level? Beyond this, however, emerges a significant detail. Clearly, the security of the Israeli border population could hardly be more jeopardized than by attributing to them the responsibility for a bloodbath such as Kibya's. Encouraging an escalation of acts of revenge and further reprisals clearly had a cynical provocative intent, as did Lavon's smile when Sharett tried to convince him of the fatuousness of the relations in relation to their declared purpose. From the beginning, in fact, the retaliation policy was headed elsewhere: the stronger the tensions in the region, the more demoralized the Arab populations and destabilized the Arab regimes, the stronger the pressures for the transfer of the concentrations of Palestinian refugees from places near the border away into the interior of the Arab world-and the better it was for the preparation of the next war. In the meantime, the army could be kept in training. On October 19 a cabinet meeting was convened where:

Ben Gurion spoke for two and a half hours on the army's preparations for the second round ... [He] presented detailed figures on the growth of the military force of the Arab countries which (he said) will reach its peak in 1956. (19 October 1953, 54)

It was not a prophecy. This meant that Israel would wage war within that date. Sharett added:

As I listened ... I was thinking ... that we should proceed against the danger with non-military means: propose daring and concrete solutions for the Refugee problem through the payment of compensations, improve our relations with the powers, search ceaselessly for an understanding with Egypt.

This was certainly not what the Israeli security establishment was driving at. On October 26, 1953, a group of American Zionist leaders was lectured to, in Israel, by Colonel Matti Peled. The conclusions from that presentation, Sharett noted, were "implicitly clear":

One, that the army considers the present border with Jordan as absolutely unacceptable. Two, that the army is planning war in order to occupy the rest of Western Eretz Israel.4 (26 October 1953, 81)

Although formulated in very mild terms, the Security Council condemnation of Israel for the Kibya attack pushed Sharett to impose an embargo on reprisal actions unless he personally authorized them. For a while, no spectacular actions were undertaken, but minor, unauthorized Israeli incursions into the West Bank and Gaza continued to make civilian victims. The murder of a Jordanian doctor on the Bethlehem-Hebron road, which was reported by the press, raised the premier's suspicions, for example. Enraged, he learned that this, in fact, was Israeli work. This, and other similar investigations, were to fray the relations between the military and the prime minister. In January 1954, Dayan requested and obtained a meeting with all Mapai's ministers:

Moshe Dayan brought out one plan after the other for "direct action." The first what should be done to force open the blockade in the straits of Eilat. A ship flying the Israeli flag should he sent, and if the Egyptians will bomb it we should bomb the Egyptian base from the air, or [we should] conquer Ras-e-Naqueb or open our way from the south to the Gaza Strip up to the coast. There was a general uproar. I asked him, Do you realize this would mean war with Egypt? He said, of course. (31 January 1954, 331)

War with Egypt was to remain a major ambition of Israel's security establishment, but the time was not yet ripe. On February 25, Ben Gurion, himself put the brakes on his collaborators' impatience when he rejected Lavon's proposal "to go ahead immediately with the plan for the separation of the Gaza Strip from Egypt." The Old Man was determined to stick to his timetable. Now, Sharett noted later, "Ben Gurion suggested to concentrate on action against Syria." (27 February 1954, 377)

CHAPTER 4 "A Historical Opportunity to Occupy Southern Syria"

At the above cited meeting on January 31, 1954 Moshe Dayan went on to outline his war plans. Sharett's note for that day continues:

The second plan-action against the interference of the Syrians with our fishing in the Lake of Tiberias. . . .The third-if, due to internal problems in Syria, Iraq invades that country we should advance [militarily, into Syria] and realize a series of "faits accomplis." . . . The interesting conclusion to be drawn from all this regards the direction in which the new Chief of Staff is thinking. I am extremely worried. (31 January 1954, 332)

On February 25, 1954, Syrian troops stationed in Aleppo revolted against Adib Shishakly's regime.

After lunch Lavon took me aside and started trying to persuade me: This is the right moment to act this is the time to move forward and occupy the Syrian border positions beyond the Demilitarized Zone. Syria is disintegrating. A State with whom we signed an armistice agreement exists no more. Its government is about to fall and there is no other power in view. Moreover, Iraq has practically moved into Syria. This is an historical opportunity, we shouldn't miss it.

I was reluctant to approve such a blitz-plan and saw ourselves on the verge of an abyss of disastrous adventure. I asked if he suggests to act immediately and I was shocked when I realized that he does. I said that if indeed Iraq will move into Syria with its army it will be a revolutionary turn which will ... justify far reaching conclusions, but for the time being this is only a danger, not a fact. It is not even clear if Shishakly will fall: he may survive. We ought to wait before making any decision. He repeated that time was precious and we must act so as not to miss an opportunity which otherwise might be lost forever. Again I answered that under the circumstances right now I cannot approve any such action. Finally I said that next Saturday we would be meeting with Ben Gurion ... and we could consult him then on the matter. I saw that he was extremely displeased by the delay. However, he had no choice but to agree. (25 February 1954, 374)

The next day the Shishakly regime actually fell. The following day, February 27, Sharett was present at a meeting where Lavon and Dayan reported to Ben Gurion that what happened in Syria was - "a typical Iraqi action." The two proposed again that the Israeli army be put on the march. Ben Gurion, "electrified," agreed. Sharett reiterated his opposition, pointing to the certainty of a Security Council condemnation, the possibility of the use against Israel of the Tripartite Declaration of 1950, hence the probability of a "shameful failure" The three objected that "our entrance [into Syria] is justified in view of the situation in Syria. This is an act of defense of our border area." Sharett closed the discussion by insisting on the need for further discussion in the cabinet meeting, scheduled for the next morning:

Lavon's face wore a depressed expression. He understood this to be the end of the matter. (27 February 1954, 377)

On Sunday, February 28, the press reported that no Iraqi troops had entered Syria. The situation in Damascus was under the complete control of President Hashem Al Atassi. The cabinet approved Sharett's position and rejected Lavon's vehement appeal not to miss a historical opportunity. Lavon said "The U.S. is about to betray us and ally itself with the Arab world." We should "demonstrate our strength and indicate to the U.S. that our life depends on this so that they will not dare do anything against us." The premier's victory, however, was to be short-lived.

Until that time the Syrian-Israeli border presented no particular problems to the Israelis. When tensions developed, it was almost invariably due to Israeli provocations, such as the irrigation work on lands belonging to Arab farmers, which was condemned by the UN; or the use of military patrol boats against Syrian fishermen fishing in the Lake of Tiberias. No Syrian regime could afford to refrain from offering some minimum protection to its border citizens against Israeli attacks or the taking away of their livelihoods, but neither did the rulers of Damascus feel stable enough to wish to be dragged into a major conflict with their southern neighbor. Clashes were therefore minor, and essentially seasonal. No security arguments could be credibly invoked to justify an expansionist program, or any other aggression against Syria.

On December 12, 1954, however, a Syrian civilian plane was hijacked by Israeli war planes shortly after its takeoff, and forced to land at Lydda airport. Passengers and crew were detained and interrogated for two days, until stormy international protests forced the Israelis to release them. Furious, Sharett wrote to Lavon on December 22:

It must be clear to you that we had no justification whatsoever to seize the plane, and that once forced down we should have immediately released it and not held the passengers under interrogation for 48 hours. I have no reason to doubt the truth of the factual affirmation of the U.S. State Department that our action was without precedent in the history of international practice. ..... What shocks and worries me is the narrow-mindedness and the shortsightedness of our military leaders. They seem to presume that the State of Israel may or even must-behave in the realm of international relations according to the laws of the jungle. (22 December 1954, 607)

Sharett also protested to Lavon against the scandalous press campaign, which he suspected was inspired by the security establishment and which was aimed at convincing public opinion that the Syrian plane was stopped and forced down because it violated Israeli sovereignty and perhaps endangered its security. "As a result, the public does not understand why such a plane was released and naturally it concludes that we have here an unjustified concession on the part of the government" - (ibid.)

On December 11, the day before Israel set this world precedent for air piracy, five Israeli soldiers were captured inside Syrian territory while mounting wiretapping installations on the Syrian telephone network. A month later, on January 13, 1955, one of them committed suicide in prison. The official Israeli version is, once again, that the five had been abducted in Israeli territory, taken to Syria, and tortured. The result was a violent emotional upsurge in Israel, all the more so as this news arrived shortly after the condemnation in Cairo of members of an Israeli terrorist ring which had been described to public opinion as an anti-Jewish frame-up. The prime minister confided to his personal diary:

A young boy has been sacrificed for nothing.... Now they will say that his blood is on my hands. If I hadn't ordered the release of the Syrian plane [we would have had our hostages and] the Syrians could have been forced to free the five. The boy . . . would have been alive ... our soldiers have not been kidnapped in Israeli territory by Syrian invaders as the army spokesman announced .... They penetrated into Syria and not accidentally but in order to take care of a wiretapping installation, connected to a Syrian telephone line ... the young men were sent without any experienced person, they were not instructed what to do in case of failure and the result was that in the first interrogation they broke down and told the whole truth. . . . I have no doubt that the press and the Knesset will cry about torture. On the other hand, it is possible that the boy committed suicide because he broke down during the interrogation and only later he understood what a disaster he has brought upon his comrades and what he did to the state. Possibly his comrades tormented him afterwards. Anyway, his conscience probably caused him to take this terrible step. (3 January 1955, 649)

Isser [Harel, then Shin Bet chief] warned me of what may happen to me personally as a result of the suicide. A poisonous attack is being organized against me.... it is particularly necessary to take care of what is happening in the army and to prevent lawless riots. (14 January 1955, 653). It is clear that Dayan's intention ... is to get [Syrian] hostages in order to obtain the release of our prisoners in Damascus. He put it into his head that it is necessary to take hostages, and would not let go. (10 February 1955, 714)

Nineteen years later, Dayan, then minister of defense in Golda Meir's government, ordered his troops to move into a school, regardless of the danger to Israeli civilians including children, in Ma'alot, with the sole aim of preventing Palestinian guerrillas from obtaining, through the taking of hostages, the release of their Palestinian comrades jailed and tortured under the military occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. On that, as on other similar occasions, a virulent and poisonous Zionist campaign, widely echoed in the Western media, declared the Palestinian liberation movement's attempt to free prisoners by taking hostages as intolerable, barbaric, savage, murderous, and terrorist. When did these same media call Moshe Dayan a terrorist?

Israeli plots against Syria in the fifties were not only limited to expansionist and terrorist projects. On July 31, 1955, a senior foreign ministry aide, Gideon Raphael, reported to Sharett on a couple of "interesting meetings" he had held with Arab exiles in Europe. One of these was with ex-Syrian Premier Hosni Barazi:

Hosni wants to get back in power, and is ready to accept help from anyone: from Turkey, in exchange for Syria's future entrance into the Ankara-Baghdad pact; from the U. S., in exchange for Syria's future alliance with the West, with Israel, in exchange for a peace agreement. (31 July 1955, 1099)

Peace, however, was the last thing Israel was interested in. lsrael's support would require another price:

Meanwhile he says to us give-give: money for newspapers, money to buy off personalities, money to buy off political parties. Gideon [suggested to him that] . . . he himself is a big land owner, and why won't he get together a group of land owners, initiate a big plan of settling refugees.... Hosni listened, said it was a wonderful idea ... but only after he regains power, and until he regains power he needs a payment in advance. (31 July 1955, 1100)

A year later, a week before his final fall from the government, Sharett got a last report on Israel's subversive activities in Syria from his advisor on Arab affairs, "Josh" Palmon:

Our contacts with [Adib] Shishakly [the exiled Syrian dictator overthrown in 1954] have been strengthened. The guidelines for common action after his return to power (if he returns!) have been established. We have decided on guidelines to contact the U.S. in regard to this issue. (12 June 1956, 1430)

None of these "historical opportunities" regarding Syria actually materialized at that time, nor, however, did Israel ever abandon its plans to install a puppet regime in Damascus. But in Lebanon as well, the precise operational blueprints elaborated in 1954 waited two decades before being put into action.5

CHAPTER 5   Let Us Create A Maronite State in Lebanon

The February 27, 1954 meeting among Ben Gurion, Sharett, Lavon and Dayan has already been mentioned in connection with Israel's invasion plans of Egypt and Syria. In that same meeting a concrete proposal was outlined to disrupt Israel's most peaceful neighbor at that time, Lebanon. In this case, Israel's hegemonic ambitions did not even pretend to wear the phony fig leaf of security or defense.

Then he [Ben Gurion] passed on to another issue. This is the time, he said, to push Lebanon, that is, the Maronites in that country, to proclaim a Christian State. I said that this was nonsense. The Maronites are divided. The partisans of Christian separatism are weak and will dare do nothing. A Christian Lebanon would mean their giving up Tyre, Tripoli, the Beka'a. There is no force that could bring Lebanon back to its pre-World War I dimensions, and all the more so because in that case it would lose its economic raison-d'etre. Ben Gurion reacted furiously. He began to enumerate the historical justification for a restricted Christian Lebanon. If such a development were to take place, the Christian Powers would not dare oppose it. I claimed that there was no factor ready to create such a situation, and that if we were to push and encourage it on our own we would get ourselves into an adventure that will place shame on us. Here came a wave of insults regarding my lack of daring and my narrow-mindedness. We ought to send envoys and spend money. I said there was no money. The answer was that there is no such thing. The money must be found, if not in the Treasury then at the Jewish Agency! For such a project it is worthwhile throwing away one hundred thousand, half a million, a million dollars. When this happens a decisive change will take place in the Middle East, a new era will start. I got tired of struggling against a whirlwind. (27 February 1954, 377)

The next day Ben Gurion sent Sharett the following letter:

To Moshe Sharett The Prime Minister

Sdeh Boker February 27, 1954

Upon my withdrawal from the government I decided in my heart to desist from intervening and expressing my opinion on current political affairs so as not to make things difficult for the government in any way. And if you hadn't called on me, the three of you, yourself, Lavon and Dayan, I would not have, of my own accord, expressed an opinion on what is being done or what ought to be done. But as you called me, I deem it my duty to comply with your wishes, and especially with your own wish as Prime Minister. Therefore, I permit myself to go back to one issue which you did not approve of and discuss it again, and this is the issue of Lebanon.

.........It is clear that Lebanon is the weakest link in the Arab League. The other minorities in the Arab States are all Muslim, except for the Copts. But Egypt is the most compact and solid of the Arab States and the majority there consists of one solid block, of one race, religion and language, and the Christian minority does not seriously affect their political and national unity. Not so the Christians in Lebanon. They are a majority in the historical Lebanon and this majority has a tradition and a culture different from those of the other components of the League. Also within the wider borders (this was the worst mistake made by France when it extended the borders of Lebanon), the Muslims are not free to do as they wish, even if they are a majority there (and I don't know if they are, indeed, a majority) for fear of the Christians, The creation of a Christian State is therefore a natural act; it has historical roots and it will find support in wide circles in the Christian world, both Catholic and Protestant. In normal times this would be almost impossible. First and foremost because of the lack of initiative and courage of the Christians. But at times of confusion, or revolution or civil war, things take on another aspect, and even the weak declares himself to be a hero. Perhaps (there is never any certainty in politics) now is the time to bring about the creation of a Christian State in our neighborhood. Without our initiative and our vigorous aid this will not be done. It seems to me that this is the central duty - for at least one of the central duties, of our foreign policy. This means that time, energy and means ought to be invested in it and that we must act in all possible ways to bring about a radical change in Lebanon. Sasson ... and our other Arabists must be mobilized. If money is necessary, no amount of dollars should be spared, although the money may be spent in vain. We must concentrate all our efforts on this issue ........ This is a historical opportunity. Missing it will be unpardonable. There is no challenge against the World Powers in this ........Everything should be done, in my opinion, rapidly and at full steam.

The goal will not be reached of course, without a restriction of Lebanon's borders. But if we can find men in Lebanon and exiles from it who will be ready to mobilize for the creation of a Maronite state, extended borders and a large Muslim population will be of no use to them and this will not constitute a disturbing factor.

I don't know if we have people in Lebanon-but there are various ways in which the proposed experiment can be carried out.

D.B.G. (27 February 1954, 2397-2398)

Sharett responded a few weeks later:

Mr. David Ben Gurion March 18, 1954 Sdeh Boker.

.... A permanent assumption of mine is that if sometimes there is some reason to interfere from the outside in the internal affairs of some country in order to support a political movement inside it aiming toward some target it is only when that movement shows some independent activity which there is a chance to enhance and maybe to bring to success by encouragement and help from the outside. There is no point in trying to create from the outside a movement that does not exist at all inside ... it is impossible to inject life into a dead body.

As far as I know, in Lebanon today exists no movement aiming at transforming the country into a Christian State governed by the Maronite community....

This is not surprising. The transformation of Lebanon into a Christian State as a result of an outside initiative is unfeasible today . . . I don't exclude the possibility of accomplishing this goal in the wake of a wave of shocks that will sweep the Middle East . . . will destroy the present constellations and will form others. But in the present Lebanon, with its present territorial and demographic dimensions and its international relations, no serious initiative of the kind is imaginable.

The Christians do not constitute the majority in Lebanon. Nor are they a unified block, politically speaking or community-wise. The Orthodox minority in Lebanon tends to identify with their brethren in Syria. They will not be ready to go to war for a Christian Lebanon, that is for a Lebanon smaller than it is today, and detached from the Arab League. On the contrary, they would probably not be opposed to a Lebanon united to Syria, as this would contribute to strengthening their own community and the Orthodox community throughout the region .... In fact, there are more Orthodox Christians in Syria than in Lebanon, and the Orthodox in Syria and Lebanon together are more numerous than the Maronites.

As to the Maronites, the great majority among them has for years now supported those pragmatic political leaders of their community who have long since abandoned the dream of a Christian Lebanon, and put all their cards on a Christian-Muslim coalition in that country. These leaders have developed the consciousness that there is no chance for an isolated Maronite Lebanon and that the historical perspective of their community means a partnership with the Muslims in power, and in a membership of Lebanon in the League, hoping and believing that these factors can guarantee that the Lebanese Muslims will abandon their longings for a unification of Lebanon with Syria and will enhance the development among them of a feeling for Lebanese independence.

Therefore, the great majority of the Maronite community is liable to see in any attempt at raising the flag of territorial shrinking and Maronite power a dangerous attempt at subverting the status of their community, its security and even its very existence. Such an initiative would seem disastrous to them because it could tear apart the pattern of Christian-Muslim collaboration in the present Lebanon which was created through great efforts and sacrifices for an entire generation; because it would mean throwing the Lebanese Muslims into the Syrian embrace, and finally, because it would fatally bring about the historical disaster of an annexation of Lebanon to Syria and the annihilation of the former's personality through its dilution in a big Muslim state.

You may object that these arguments are irrelevant as the Plan is based on tearing away from Lebanon the Muslim provinces of Tyre, the Beka'a and Tripoli. But who can predict that these provinces will actually give up their ties to Lebanon and their political and economic connection to Beirut? Who can assure that the Arab League will be ready to give up the status that Lebanon's affiliation confers to it .......? Who will vouch that the bloody war that will inevitably explode as a result of such an attempt will be limited to Lebanon and not drag Syria into the battlefield immediately' Who can be sure that the Western Powers will look on as observers and will not intervene in the experiment before a Christian Lebanon will have been realized'? Who can guarantee that the Maronite leadership itself will not become aware of all the above considerations and will therefore back out of such a dangerous adventure'?

.... There are also decisive economic arguments against it. We are not discussing the issue in 1920/21 . . . but 30 years later. Mount Lebanon has meanwhile integrated into one organic unit with the coastal plane of Tyre and Sidon, the Valley of Baalbeck and the city of Tripoli. They are commercially and economically interdependent and inseparable. Mount Lebanon was not a self-sufficient unit even before World War 1. . . . The annexation of the three regions plus the city of Beirut to the Lebanese State has rendered possible the creation of a balanced economy. A return to the past would not just mean a surgical operation but also a disintegration leading to the end of Lebanon. . . .

I cannot imagine, even from this viewpoint alone, that any serious organization would collaborate with a plan that in my opinion would entail Lebanon's economic suicide.

When all this has been said, [I should add that] I would not have objected, and on the contrary I would have certainly been favorable to the idea, of actively aiding any manifestation of agitation in the Maronite community tending to strengthen its isolationist tendencies, even if there were no real chances of achieving the goals; I would have considered positive the very existence of such an agitation and the destabilization it could bring about, the trouble it would have caused the League, the diversion of attention from the Arab-Israeli complications that it would have caused, and the very kindling of a fire made up of impulses toward Christian independence. But what can I do when such an agitation is nonexistent? ... In the present condition, I am afraid that any attempt on our part would be considered as lightheartedness and superficiality or worse-as an adventurous speculation upon the well being and existence of others and a readiness to sacrifice their basic good for the benefit of a temporary tactical advantage for Israel.

Moreover, if this plan is not kept a secret but becomes known a danger which cannot be underestimated in the Middle Eastern circumstances-the damage which we shall suffer . . . would not be compensated even by an eventual success of the operation itself. . . .

M. S. (18 March 1954, 2398- 2400)

On April 24 a fleeting note in the Diary, informs us that "contacts with certain circles in Lebanon" had been discussed that day between the premier and some of his collaborators in the foreign ministry. The next time Lebanon is mentioned is on February 12, 1955: Neguib Sfeir, "an adventurer and a visionary" whom Sharett had known since 1920, had just paid a visit to the Israeli ambassador in Rome, Eliahu Sasson,........apparently on behalf of Lebanon's President Camille Chamoun. Lebanon would be ready to sign a separate peace if we accept the following three conditions: (a) guarantee Lebanon's borders; (b) come to Lebanon's aid if it is attacked by Syria; (c) buy Lebanon's agricultural surplus. Sasson ... suggested a meeting between himself and Chamoun during the latter's next visit to Rome. (12 February 1955, 723)

On May 16, during a joint meeting of senior officials of the defense and foreign affairs ministries, Ben Gurion again raised the demand that Israel do something about Lebanon. The moment was particularly propitious, he maintained, due to renewed tensions between Syria and Iraq, and internal trouble in Syria. Dayan immediately expressed his enthusiastic support:

According to him [Dayan] the only thing that's necessary is to find an officer, even just a Major. We should either win his heart or buy him with money, to make him agree to declare himself the savior of the Maronite population. Then the Israeli army will enter Lebanon, will occupy the necessary territory, and will create a Christian regime which will ally itself with Israel. The territory from the Litani southward will be totally annexed to Israel and everything will be all right. If we were to accept the advice of the Chief of Staff we would do it tomorrow, without awaiting a signal from Baghdad.

... I did not want to bicker with Ben Gurion. . in front of his officers and limited myself to saying that this might mean ... war between Israel and Syria.. . . At the same time I agreed to set up a joint commission composed of officials of the Foreign Affairs Ministry and the army to deal with Lebanese affairs. . . . [According to Ben Gurion] this commission should relate to the Prime Minister. (16 May 1954, 966)

The Chief of Staff supports a plan to hire a [Lebanese] officer who will agree to serve as a puppet so that the Israeli army may appear as responding to his appeal "to liberate Lebanon from its Muslim oppressors." This will of course be a crazy adventure.... We must try to prevent dangerous complications. The commission- must be charged with research tasks and prudent actions directed at encouraging Maronite circles who reject Muslim pressures and agree to lean on us. (28 May 1954, 1024)

The "prudent actions" continued. On September 22, a mysterious incident occurred. A bus was attacked in Galilee, near Safad. Two persons were killed and ten wounded. Even before an investigation could establish where the aggressors came from (and there were, at that moment, three contradictory hypotheses), Dayan demanded a reprisal action against Lebanon. A Lebanese village suspected to be the attackers' base had already been chosen. Its population would be evacuated in the night, its houses blown up. Sharett objected to Israel's opening a new front along a border which had been totally peaceful since 1948. But this was exactly what Dayan sought: the destabilization of Lebanon and the search for a forerunner to Major Sa'd Haddad who declared a Maronite state in 1979. The fulfillment of his disruptive plans would have found an ideal point of departure in this terrorist action.

Sharett, however, vetoed an immediate action. At this point the Israeli plot against Lebanon was suspended for other reasons. On October 1, 1955, the U.S. government, through the CIA, gave Israel the "green light" to attack Egypt. The energies of Israel's security establishment became wholly absorbed by the preparations for the war which would take place exactly one year later. In the summer of 1956, in preparation for the Sinai-Suez operation, the close military and political alliance with France was clinched. It would last practically until the eve of the 1967 war, and would prevent Israel, especially following De Gaulle's rise to power in France in 1957, from implementing its plans for the dismemberment of a country Paris considered as belonging to the French sphere of influence. Israeli bombings of South Lebanon, specifically intended to destabilize that country, were to start in 1968 after the 1967 war, after Dayan's nomination as defense minister in Levi Eshkol's cabinet, and after lsrael's definite transition from the alliance with France to that with the United States.6 From that moment on, this unholy alliance was to use every possible means constantly to escalate terrorist violence and political subversion in Lebanon, according to lsrael's blueprints of the fifties. All this, it is hardly necessary to recall, was hatched when no Palestinian guerrillas were remotely in view.7If anything, the difficulties Israel encountered throughout all these years in consummating its long-standing ambition to divide Lebanon and separate it from the Arab world constitute one more proof of the external and alien nature of these plots in respect to the authentic aspirations of the Lebanese people regardless of their religious faith.

CHAPTER 6  Sacred Terrorism

On March 17, 1954, a bus traveling from Eilat to Beersheba was attacked in Ma'aleh Ha'akrabim crossroads. Ten passengers were killed and four survived. According to Israeli army trackers, all traces of the perpetrators disappeared at a distance of ten kilometers from the Jordanian border, inside Israeli territory, due to the rocky nature of the terrain. One of the survivors, a sergeant responsible for security arrangements on the trip, testified that the attackers were "Bedouin." Another survivor, a woman, said they were "five men wearing long robes." The army, according to Sharett, "then dispatched some of its Arab informers to the village of Tel Tsafi, [on the Jordanian side of the border] opposite Sodom." Upon their return, the informers reported that "a group of 8- 10 persons had been seen crossing the borders westward [that day]" by Tel Tsafi villagers. Quite apart from the fact that it was customary, since time immemorial, for the area's nomad population to cross back and forth at that point, there must have been something much too strange about this story of informers and villagers offering evidence. Colonel Hutcheson, the American chairman of the mixed Jordanian-Israeli Armistice Commission, did not take it seriously. Summing up the Commission's inquiry, Colonel Hutcheson in fact officially announced that "from the testimonies of the survivors it is not proved that all the murderers were Arabs." (23 March 1954, 41 1)

Moreover, in a confidential report dated March 24, and addressed to General Benike, Hutcheson explicitly attributed the attack on the bus to terrorists intent on heightening the tensions in the area as well as on creating trouble for the present government. Thereupon the Israelis left the Armistice Commission in protest, and launched a worldwide campaign against "Arab terrorism" and "bloodthirsty hatred" of Jews. From his retreat in Sdeh Boker, Ben Gurion demanded that Israel occupy Jordanian territory and threatened to leave the Mapai party leadership if Sharett's policy were once again to have the upper hand. Lavon, too, pressed for action. On April 4, the premier wrote to Ben Gurion:

"I heard that after Ma'aleh Ha'akrabim you thought that we should occupy Jordanian territory. In my opinion such a step would have dragged us into a war with a Jordan supported by Britain, while the U.S. would have condemned us in front of the whole world and treated us as an aggressor. For Israel this could have meant disaster and perhaps destruction." (4 April 1954, 453)

Sharett attempted to avert military action. He told officials of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs that "we were all of the opinion that a retaliation for such a bloodshed will only weaken its horrible impression and will put us on the same level as the murderers on the other side. It would be better for us to use the Ma'aleh Ha'akrabim incident as a lever for a political attack on the Powers so that they will exercise unprecedented pressure on Jordan." He also pointed out that a retaliation would weaken the effect of the massive propaganda campaign which, he noted in his diary, should counter "the attention given by the American press to the Jordanian version . . . according to which the Ma'aleh Ha'akrabim massacre was committed by the Israelis." Not only in public but in his private notes, the prime minister declared his reluctance to believe this version.9

Deep down in his heart, however, Sharett too must have had his unconfessed doubts. He not only blocked the proposed military actions, but decided that Israel should refrain from complaining to the Security Council, i.e., from an international debate which he thought might be counterproductive. He felt he had acted wisely when Dayan, in the course of a conversation on April 23, let drop in passing that "he is not convinced that the Ma'aleh Ha'akrabim massacre was the work of an organized military gang." He later learned from the British journalist Jon Kimche that Dayan had said about Ma'aleh Ha'akrabim that "UN reports are often more accurate than ours. . . .." He wrote: "From another source I heard this week that Dayan said to Israeli journalists that it was not proved that the Ma'aleh Ha'akrabim gang was Jordanian- it is possible that it was local."

Of course, it didn't occur to Sharett to open an internal investigation in order to find out the truth. On the contrary, he insisted on the removal of Colonel Hutcheson from his post as a condition for Israel's return to the Armistice Commission. The military, though, were reluctant to give in to his veto on a new attack on the West Bank. Taking for a pretext not Ma'aleh Ha'akrabim but a subsequent minor incident in the Jerusalem corridor area, on the night of March 28 the army launched a massive attack on the village of Nahlin, near Bethlehem. Dozens of civilians were killed and wounded, the houses demolished, the village - another Palestinian village - completely destroyed.

"I said [to Teddy Kollek (then senior aide in the Prime Minister's Office, today mayor of Jerusalem) ]: here we are, back at the point of departure-are we headed for war or do we want to prevent war? According to Teddy the army leadership is imbued with war appetites .... [They are] completely blind to economic problems and to the complexities of international relations." (31 March 1954, 426)

Arab capitals, too, were persuaded that the Israeli escalation of self-provoked incidents, terrorism and renewed retaliation meant that Israel was preparing the ground for war. They, therefore, stationed military reinforcements along the borders and took strong measures to prevent any infiltration into Israel. This in turn worried the Israelis. "The situation along the borders is better than it has been for a long time and actually it is quite satisfactory," Dayan told a journalist friend who reported it to Sharett on May 17. A new and more subtle strategy of covert aggression was thereupon introduced by the Israeli army. Its aim: to bypass both the Arab security arrangements and Sharett's reluctance to authorize attacks across the border. Small patrols slipped into the West Bank and Gaza with precise directives to engage isolated Egyptian or Jordanian military patrols, or to penetrate into villages for sabotage or murder actions. Invariably, each such action was falsely described later by an official announcement as having occurred in Israeli territory. Once attacked, the military spokesman would explain, the patrol proceeded to pursue the aggressors into enemy territory. Almost daily actions of this kind, carried out by Arik Sharon's special paratroops, caused a great number of casualties. Regularly, the prime minister was left to guess how things really went. Between April and June he noted in his diary that he learned by chance, for example, of the coldblooded murder of a young Palestinian boy who happened to find himself in the Israeli patrol's way near his village in the West Bank. With regard to another incident he wrote:

"Finally I have discovered the secret official version on the Tel Tsafi action -two Arabs that we have sent attacked the Mukhtar who was supposedly said to have been involved in a theft, and killed his wife: in another incident a unit of ours crossed the border "by mistake-," in a third incident three of our soldiers were patrolling deep inside Jordanian territory, ran into the National Guard which opened fire (who will check?), returned fire and killed four. (31 May 1954, 523)

Hundreds of workers in Sodom know the truth and laugh at [the denial of the murder broadcast by] the Israeli radio and the Israeli government.

This situation endangers the life and the enterprise in Sodom.... Is the army allowed to act in that way according to its own whims and endanger such a vital enterprise? "(13 May 1954, 514)

On June 27 an Israeli paratrooper unit crossed the border, "by mistake," according to the official communique, 13 kilometers deep into the West Bank, where it attacked and seriously damaged the Jordanian army base of Azun, east of Qalqilia. "Uncivilized, here they go lying again in front of everybody," was Sharett's ingenious comment about the army spokesman's announcement.

What Sharett feared most was Western reaction. A number of U.S. expressions of alarm presented during those weeks to the Israeli government were registered in the premier's diary.

Reports by U.S. embassies in Arab capitals, studied in Washington, have produced in the State Department the conviction that an Israeli plan of retaliations, to be realized according to a pre-fixed timetable, exists, and that the goal is that of a steady escalation of the tension in the area in order to bring about a war. 10 American diplomacy is also convinced that it is lsrael's intention to sabotage the U.S. negotiations with Egypt, and also those with Iraq and Turkey, aimed at the establishment of pro-Western alliances. (14 April 1955)

This analysis was correct. It was reconfirmed in the following weeks by Israel's rejection of border security proposals previously accepted by Egypt, including the creation of mixed Israel-Egypt-UN patrols, and the mining of certain border areas. Such arrangements, Dayan affirmed, "will tie our hands." It would be confirmed further in July, when an Israeli terrorist ring charged with sabotaging Western institutions in Cairo and Alexandria was broken up by the Egyptian authorities.

Israeli border terrorism in its various forms was to continue unperturbed during the next two years, up to the very eve of the Sinai-Suez war, and, of course, beyond. Sharett noted an episode "of the worst type" in March 1955, immediately after the Gaza operation.

"The army informed Tkoa ... [responsible for Armistice Commission affairs in the Foreign Ministry] that last night a "private" revenge action was carried out following the killing of the young man and woman, Oded Wegmeister and Shoshana Hartsion, who went on a trip on their own around Ein Gedi [in Jordanian territory]. According to the army version a group of young men, including the girl's brother, Meir Hartsion ... crossed the border, attacked a group of Bedouin, and killed five of them. The army says it supposedly knew that such an initiative was being prepared and intended to prevent it, but according to its information the action was scheduled for tonight and the assumption was that there is time for preventive action, but the boys advanced the action and this is the reason that what happened-happened. Today,the Jordanians issued a completely different version: twenty Israeli soldiers committed the murders they attacked six Bedouin, killed five and left one alive and told him that this is an act of revenge for the couple ... so that he will tell others about it. The army spokesman tonight announced . . . that no army unit was involved in the operation....

This may be taken as a decisive proof that we have decided to pass on to a general bloody offensive on all fronts: yesterday Gaza, today something on the Jordanian border, tomorrow the Syrian DMZ, and so on. In the Cabinet meeting tomorrow, I will demand that the killers be put on trial as criminals. (5 March 1955, 816)

Ben Gurion [back in the government as Minister of Defense in the wake of the Lavon Affair] reported to the cabinet . . . how our four youngsters captured the Bedouin boys one by one, how they took them to the wadi, how they knifed them to death one after the other, and how they interrogated each one of them, before killing him, on the identity of the murderers of the boy and the girl and how they could not understand the answers to their questions, since they do not speak Arabic. The group was headed by Meir Hartsion from kibbutz Fin Harod.... They gave themselves up to the army and fully admitted what they have done.

Both Ben Gurion and I saw an advantage in trying them in a military court .... educationally it is desirable that the lengthy imprisonment to which they will be condemned will be given by a military court, since the army will not have any respect for a punishment coming from a civilian court.... In the evening the Minister of Justice and the General Prosecutor informed me that there is no legal way to turn them over to a military court. . . I contacted Ben Gurion and arranged that he will give instructions to the army to turn them over to the police. . . . By the way, Hartsion . . . and his three friends are paratrooper reservists. (6 March 1955, 817)

[While Purim festivities are being celebrated in the streets of Tel Aviv] The radio is broadcasting cheerful music . . . some of which expresses much talent, spiritual grace and longing for original beauty. I meditated on the substance and destiny of this People who is capable of subtle delicacy, of such deep love for people and of such honest aspiration for beauty and nobility, and at the same time cultivates among its best youth youngsters capable of calculated, coldblooded murder, by knifing the bodies of young defenseless Bedouin. Which of these two biblical souls will win over the other in this People? " (8 March 1955, 823)

"Finally the four have been consigned to the police but now they refuse to talk. . . . I phoned Ben Gurion. . . . ,It's their legitimate right," he said .... [He added] that their confession to the army cannot serve for their incrimination by a civilian court. From a juridical viewpoint this may be so, but from a public point of view this is a scandal. (10 March 1955, 828)

The police chief approached the Chief of Staff and asked if the army is willing to aid the police interrogation .... The Chief of Staff said that he will ask the Minister of Defense and then answered in his name that he does not agree to have an interrogation in the army ... it is clear that the army is covering up for the guys.

Isser [Har'el] senses that almost no one in the country condemns the youngsters who murdered the Bedouin. Public opinion is definitely on their side.

When I arrived in Tel Aviv an officer ... came to tell me that the whole revenge operation was organized with the active help of Arik Sharon, the commander of the paratroopers battalion." He had the four furnished with arms, food, equipment, had them driven with the unit's car part of the way and ordered that their retreat be secured by his patrols. The officer did not rule out that Dayan, too, knew of the operation in advance. Moreover, the four now refuse to talk upon an explicit order from Arik [Sharon], perhaps approved by Dayan. A campaign is being organized against me because I revealed their identity (to the press). Arik is shouting that I have exposed the men to revenge in the case that they will fall prisoners while fighting in the army at any future time. (11 March 1955, 834)

The four are ready to confess on the condition that they will be guaranteed an amnesty. (13 March 1955, 840)

In the thirties we restrained the emotions of revenge and we educated the public to consider revenge as an absolutely negative impulse. Now, on the contrary, we justify the system of reprisal out of pragmatic considerations .. . . we have eliminated the mental and moral brakes on this instinct and made it possible. . . to uphold revenge as a moral value. This notion is held by large parts of the public in general, the masses of youth in particular, but it has crystallized and reached the value of a sacred principle in [Sharon's] battalion which becomes the revenge instrument of the State." (31 March 1955, 840)

The British ambassador, Nichols, expressed . . . his surprise at the release of the four. According to him, Jordanians arrested the murderer of the couple in Ajur. ... What a contrast between their step and the shameful procedure adopted by us! ... Kesseh [the Secretary General of Mapai] learned from his son [a senior army officer] that the operation had been carried out with the full knowledge of the army, on all levels, including the Chief of Staff and in it were involved senior officers. (28 March 1955, 870)

At a meeting of Mapai's secretariat on January 11, 1961, six years later, Sharett returned to this haunting episode.

The phenomenon that has prevailed among us for years and years is that of insensitivity to acts of wrong ... to moral corruption.... For us, an act of wrong is in itself nothing serious, we wake up to it only if the threat of a crisis or a grave result the loss of a position, the loss of power or influence is involved. We don't have a moral approach to moral problems but a pragmatic approach to moral problems. . . . Once, Israeli soldiers murdered a number of Arabs for reasons of blind revenge ... and no conclusion was drawn from that, no one was demoted, no one was removed from office. Then there was Kafr Qasim* . . . those responsible have not drawn any conclusions. This, however, does not mean that public opinion, the army, the police, have drawn no conclusion, their conclusion was that Arab blood can be freely shed. And then came the amnesty for those of Kafr Qasim, and some conclusions could be drawn again, and I could go on like this. (11 January 1961, 769)

All this must bring about revulsion in the sense of justice and honesty in public opinion; it must make the State appear in the eyes of the world as a savage state that does not recognize the principles of justice as they have been established and accepted by contemporary society.

*See Appendix 2.

CHAPTER 7 The Lavon Affair: Terrorism to Coerce the West

ONE: Start immediate action to prevent or postpone Anglo-Egyptian Agreement. Objectives are: one, cultural and information centers; two, economic institutions; three, cars of British representatives and other Britons; four, whichever target whose sabotage could bring about a worsening of diplomatic relations. TWO. Inform us on possibilities of action in Canal Zone. THREE. Listen to us every day at 7 o'clock on wavelength G.

This coded cable was sent to the Israeli spy ring which had been planted in Egypt many months before it was activated in July 1954. The ring originally was to serve as a fifth column during the next war. The cable was preceded by oral instructions given by Colonel Benjamin Givii, head of Israel's military intelligence, to an officer headed for Cairo to join the ring. These instructions were:

[Our goal is] to break the West's confidence in the existing [Egyptian] regime .... The actions should cause arrests, demonstrations, and expressions of revenge. The Israeli origin should be totally covered while attention should be shifted to any other possible factor. The purpose is to prevent economic and military aid from the West to Egypt. The choice of the precise objectives to be sabotaged will be left to the men on the spot, who should evaluate the possible consequences of each action ... in terms of creating commotion and public disorders.13

These orders were carried out between July 2 and July 27, 1954, by the network which was composed of about ten Egyptian Jews under the command of Israeli agents. Negotiations were at their height between Cairo and London for the evacuation of the Canal Zone, and between Cairo and Washington for arms supplies and other aid in connection with a possible U.S.-Egyptian alliance. British and American cultural and informational centers, British-owned cinemas, but also Egyptian public buildings (such as post offices) were bombed in Cairo and Alexandria. Suspicion was shifted to the Muslim Brothers, opponents of Nasser's regime. The Israeli ring was finally discovered and broken up on July 27, when one of its members was caught after a bomb exploded in his pocket in Alexandria.

On that same date Sharett, who knew nothing about the ring, was informed of the facts, and he began to collect evidence on the responsibilities of defense ministry and army officials. He did nothing beyond this, however, until October 5, when Cairo officially announced the imminent trial of the arrested saboteurs. Sharett then fully supported the campaign launched by Israel to present the case as an anti-Jewish frame-up by the Egyptian regime. On December 13, two days after the trial opened in Cairo, the prime minister denounced in the Knesset "the plot ... and the show trial . . . against a group of Jews . . . victims of false accusations."* His party's paper, Davar, went as far as to accuse the Egyptian government of "a Nazi-inspired policy." Horror stories of confessions extracted from the accused under torture circulated in the Israeli and international media. Sharett knew all this to be untrue. "In reality," he wrote in his diary on January 2, 1955, "except for the first two days of their arrest, when there was some beating, the treatment of our men was absolutely decent and humane." But publicly, he kept silent did not himself join the massive anti-Nasser chorus. Even the members of the cabinet, the president of the state, not to speak of the press, were not officially informed until some time in February, when rumors exploded on each street corner in Israel. Then the true story came out, that the government propaganda had been false from beginning to end, that the terrorist ring was indeed planted in Egypt by the Israelis and the only frame-up in question was the one invented against Egypt by the Sharett administration.

*See Appendix 4.

By the time the trial was over-two of the accused were condemned to death and executed, eight were condemned to long terms of imprisonment, while the three Israeli commanders of the operation succeeded in fleeing from Egypt and the fourth committed suicide other important facts became known to the prime minister. The technical question of who actually gave the order to activate the ring on a certain date was not to be cleared up until six years later, when a fourth or fifth inquiry commission finally and definitely exonerated Lavon from that responsibility, and established that Dayan, Peres, Givli and other, minor, "security" aides had forged documents and falsified testimonies in order to bring about the incrimination of the minister of defense. In 1954-55, Sharett anticipated the findings of that commission, figuring that the entire leadership of the security establishment was guilty of the affair. For him, the question of who gave the order was secondary to the necessity of pronouncing a judgment on the ideology and politics of lsrael's terrorism. Therefore, while he had no doubts about the guilt of the Dayan-Peres-Givli clique, to him Lavon's political responsibility was also inescapable.

[People] ask me if I am convinced that "he gave the order?' . . . but let us assume that Givli has acted without instructions ... doesn't the moral responsibility lie all the same on Lavon, who has constantly preached for acts of madness and taught the army leadership the diabolic lesson of how to set the Middle East on fire, how to cause friction, cause bloody confrontations, sabotage targets and property of the Powers [and perform] acts of despair and suicide" (10, January 1955, 639)

At this point, Sharett could have changed the history of the Middle East. Had he spoken frankly and directly to public opinion, which was deeply troubled by the events in Egypt the arrests, the trial, the executions, the contradicting rumors, the climate of intrigue surrounding the "Affair," tearing up the mask of secrecy, denouncing those who were responsible, exposing his true convictions in regard to Israel's terroristic ideologies and orientations, proposing an alternative, he could have created for himself the conditions in which to use the formal powers that he possessed to make a radical housecleaning in the security establishment. The impact of such an act would have probably been considerable not only in Israel itself but also in the Arab world, especially in Egypt. The downfall of Lavon on one hand and of the Ben Gurionist gang, headed by Dayan and Peres, on the other hand might have blocked Ben Gurion's return to power, and in the longer range, the Sinai-Suez war. Events since then would have taken a different course. (14)

As it was, though, the prime minister had neither the courage nor the temperament required for such an action. Moreover, he always feared that his "moderate" convictions would expose him to accusations of defeatism by the activists of aggressive Zionism. Thus, he took cover behind a variety of pretexts aimed at justifying his passivity even to himself, while in his heart he knew that his objective compliance with the rules of the game imposed by his enemies would boomerang, in the end, against his own career. An open admission of the facts, he tormentedly argued, could be damaging to the people on trial in Cairo; or it could damage lsrael's image in the world; or it could bring about a split in the Mapai party, to whose leadership Lavon and Ben Gurion as well as he belonged, causing it to lose its majority in the next elections. Inevitably, he ended up entangled in the plots woven around him by the opposing factions in the government, the army and the party. By mid-February, he had no other choice but to acquiesce to the unspoken ultimatum of Ben Gurion's men and appeal to the Old Man to reenter the cabinet as minister of defense in Lavon's place.

By January 1955, Sharett was well aware that the "Affair" was being used by Lavon and his friends on one hand, the Ben Gurionists on the other, and such extremist pro-militarist factions as Ahdut Ha'avoda 15-to bring into the open the conflict between the "activist" line and the prime minister's "moderate" politics. He was informed also that Dayan was attempting to organize a coup d'etat and that Ben Gurion had given it his support. Other persons who had been approached (mainly from among Mapai's younger militants) had rejected the idea of a change of leadership through violence. 16 Dayan wanted to avoid at any cost being exposed by the investigation committee nominated by Sharett as one of those actually responsible for the "Affair." Lavon, on the other hand, threatened to commit suicide if the commission declared him guilty of having given the order.

Teddy [Kollek] painted a horrifying picture of the relations at the top of the security establishment. The Minister of Defense is completely isolated none of his collaborators speaks to him. During the inquiry, these collaborators [e.g., Peres, Dayan and a number of senior Ministry officials and army officers] plotted to blacken his name and trap him. They captured the man who came from abroad, [the commander of the unit in Egypt Avraham Zeidenberg, also known as "Paul Frank," "Flad," or "the third man"] who escaped from Egypt........ instructed him in detail how to answer, including how to lie to the investigators, and coordinated the testimonies so as to close the trap on Lavon. Teddy is convinced that Lavon must go immediately. Givli, too, must be dismissed, but Dayan, however, should not be touched for the time being, (9 ,January 1954, 637)

I would never have imagined that we could reach such a horrible state of poisoned relations, the unleashing of the basest instincts of hate and revenge and mutual deceit at the top of our most glorious Ministry [of Defense].

I walk around as a lunatic, horror-stricken and lost, completely helpless . .. . what should I do? What should I do? (10 January 1954, 639)

Isser [Harel, head of the Shin Bet, stung at the time because the "Affair" had been conducted by the military intelligence, without coordination with his organization] told me hair-raising stories about a conversation which Givli initiated with him proposing to abduct Egyptians not only from the Gaza Strip but also in Cyprus and Europe. He also proposed a crazy plan to blow up the Egyptian Embassy in Amman in case of death sentences in the Cairo trial. (14 January 1955, 654)

To Aharon Barkatt, then secretary general of Mapai, Sharett painted the following picture of Israel's security establishment:

Dayan was ready to hijack planes and kidnap [Arab] officers from trains, but he was shocked by Lavon's suggestion about the Gaza Strip. Maklef [who preceded Dayan as Chief of Staff] demanded a free hand to murder Shishakly but he was shaken when Lavon gave him a crazy order concerning the Syrian DMZ. (25 January 1955, 682)

He [Lavon] inspired and cultivated the negative adventuristic trend in the army and preached the doctrine that not the Arab countries but the Western Powers are the enemy, and the only way to deter them from their plots is through direct actions that will terrorize them. (26 January 1955, 685)

Peres shares the same ideology: he wants to frighten the West into supporting Israel's aims.

CHAPTER 8 Nasser: Coexistence with Israel is Possible.

Ben Gurion's Reply: Operation Gazat

Commenting on Israel's terrorist actions in Egypt, a U.S. embassy official in Cairo concluded on February 8, 1955 that "Sharett does not have control of the matters if such mad actions can be carried out."17

The State Department, the prime minister noted, feared subsequent Israeli provocations to sabotage U.S. relations with the Arab world following the signing of the Ankara-Baghdad pact. The American administration therefore attempted to move simultaneously in two directions in order to save what may be saved in the given situation: it placed pressure on Nasser to negotiate some kind of agreement with the Sharett government, and it offered the Zionist state a security pact. The Israeli premier noted that Kermit Roosevelt Jr. of the CIA was working on the creation of contacts between Israel and Egypt, and that he, Sharett, would nominate Yigael Yadin as his representative. (21 January 1955, 675)

[I met with] Roger Baldwin, the envoy of the U.S. League of Human Rights who visited Cairo.... Nasser talked to him about Israel, saying that he is not among those who want to throw Israel into the Mediterranean. He believes in coexistence with Israel and knows that negotiations will open some day.(25 January 1955, 680)

Cable from Eban. .. the U. S. is ready to sign an agreement with us whereby we shall make a commitment not to extend our borders by force, it will commit itself to come to our aid if we were attacked. (28 January 1955, 69 1)

Teddy [Kollek] brought a message from Isser's [head of the Security Services] men in Washington. The partners (the CIA) renew their suggestion for a meeting with Nasser, who does not regard the initiative of the meeting canceled because of the outcome of the trial .... He is as willing to meet us as before and the initiative is now up to Israel. (10 February 1955, 716)

[In regard to Washington's proposals for a U.S.-Israel security pact] I cabled Eban that we are willing to accept a clause which obliges us not to extend our borders by force, but we should in no way commit ourselves to desist from any hostile acts because this would mean closing the door on any possibility to carry out reprisal actions. (14 February 1955, 726)

This last phrase indicates that the news of the American proposals, and of possible negotiations between Sharett and Nasser had spread rapidly in the security establishment. The pressures on Sharett were stepped up. On February 17, Ben Gurion accepted the premier's invitation to return to the government as minister of defense. Quoting his landlady, Sharett noted on that day in his diary "that is the end of peace and quiet." Ten days later, in fact

Ben Gurion arrived.......with.......the Chief of Staff, who was carrying rolled up maps. I understood at once what would be the subject of the conversation.... The Chief of Staff's proposal was to hit an Egyptian army base at the entrance to the city of Gaza.... [He] estimated that the enemy losses would be about ten ... and that we have to be prepared for a few victims on our side. Ben Gurion insisted that the intention is not to kill but only to destroy buildings. if the Egyptians run away under the shock of the attack, there may be no bloodshed at all.

I approved the plan. The act of infiltration near Rehovot-30km from the border of the Gaza Strip-shocked the public and a lack of reaction is unacceptable.... In my heart I was sorry that the reprisal would be attributed [by the public] to Ben Gurion. After all, I did authorize a reprisal action ... when Ben Gurion was away from the government, and it was purely by chance that the operation did not take place. I would have approved this one, too, regardless of Ben Gurion being the Minister of Defense. (27 February 1955, 799-800)

I am shocked. The number [of Egyptian victims (39 dead and 30 wounded, including a 7-year-old boy,)] changes not only the dimensions of the operation but its very substance; it turns it into an event liable to cause grave political and military complications and dangers.... The army spokesman, on instructions from the Minister of Defense, delivered a false version to the press: a unit of ours, after having been attacked supposedly inside our territory, returned the fire and engaged a battle which later developed as it did. Who will believe us? ( I March 1955, 804)

It was the same old story: hit and run and try to fool the world-

The embassies should be instructed to condemn Egypt and not to be on the defensive.... Now there will be a general impression that while we cry out over our isolation and the dangers to our security, we initiate aggression and reveal ourselves as being bloodthirsty and aspiring to perpetrate mass massacres . . . it is possible that this outburst will be interpreted as the result of the army and the nation's outrage against the Powers' policy of ignoring the security of their state and will prevent the continuation of that policy to the bitter end. We, at least, have to make sure that this will be the common impression. . . . I dictated a briefing for the embassies .... It is desirable that the press should express the following: (a) Our public opinion had been agitated by the penetration of an Egyptian gang into a densely populated area and its attack on public transportation; (b) It seems that the clash developed into a serious battle as the exchange of fire was going on; (c) Egypt always claims that it is in a state of war with Israel which it demonstrates by acts such as blockade and murders and if there is a state of war, these are the results; (d) This event cannot be detached from the general background of the feeling of isolation which prevails in Israel in view of the West's alliances with the Arab states , . .. the most recent example of which is the Iraq-Turkey Pact whose anti-Israeli goals are particularly evident.

The last argument (d) needs very cautious handling in the sense that it should not be attributed to us and should be confided only to the most loyal [commentators] who must be warned not to appear inspired by our sources.

When I wrote these things [the instructions to the embassies] I still didn't know how crushing is the evidence-that was already published, refuting our official version. The huge amounts of arms and explosives, the tactics of the attack, the blocking and mining of the roads ... the precise coordination of the attack. Who would be foolish enough to believe that such a complicated operation could "develop" from a casual and sudden attack on an Israeli army unit by an Egyptian unit? . . .

I am tormented by thoughts as to whether this is not my greatest failure as Prime Minister. Who knows what will be the political and security consequence" (1 March 1955, 804-805)

One of the immediate and inevitable consequences was the following:

Yesterday . . . there was a conversation between [Salahl Gohar [the chief Egyptian representative to the mixed armistice commission] and [Joseph] Tkoa, The Egyptian representative informed [Tkoa] immediately that right after the previous meeting [which took place immediately following the Gaza attack] ... Nasser told him ... that he had had a personal contact with lsrael's Prime Minister and that there were good chances that things would develop in a positive way, but then came the attack on Gaza, and naturally now ... it's off.

Lawson [U.S. Ambassador] thinks that the reason for the warning and the threats [from Arab countries] is fear which has seized the Arab World due to Ben Gurion's comeback. The Gaza attack is interpreted as signaling a decision on our part to attack on all fronts. The Americans, too, are afraid that it will lead to a new conflagration in the Middle East which will blow up all their plans. Therefore, they wish to obtain from us a definite commitment that similar actions will not be repeated. (12 March 1955, 837)

But it was precisely to prevent a similar commitment that Ben Gurion rejoined the government, and he had no intention of changing his mind. On the contrary, on March 25, less than a month after the attack on Gaza, he proposed to the cabinet that Israel proceed to occupy the Gaza Strip, this time for good. The discussion lasted five whole days and ended with the ministers divided between the opponents of the proposal, headed by Sharett, and Ben Gurion's supporters. With five votes in favor, nine against it, and two abstentions, the plan was rejected, or perhaps simply postponed. The security pact offered by the U.S., however, had to be rejected, because-as Dayan explained in April 1955-"it would put handcuffs on our military freedom of action." He went into a detailed explanation on May 26, during a meeting with Israel's ambassadors in Washington (Abba Eban), Paris (Ya'acov Tsur) and London (Eliahu Eilat). The conversation was reported to Sharett later by Ya'acob Herzog and Gideon Raphael:

We do not need (Dayan said) a security pact with the U.S.: such a pact will only constitute an obstacle for us. We face no danger at all of an Arab advantage of force for the next 8-10 years. Even if they receive massive military aid from the West, we shall maintain our military superiority thanks to our infinitely greater capacity to assimilate new armaments. The security pact will only handcuff us and deny us the freedom of action which we need in the coming years. Reprisal actions which we couldn't carry out if we were tied to a security pact are our vital lymph ... they make it possible for us to maintain a high level of tension among our population and in the army. Without these actions we would have ceased to be a combative people and without the discipline of a combative people we are lost. We have to cry out that the Negev is in danger, so that young men will go there....

The conclusions from Dayan's words are clear: This State has no international obligations, no economic problems, the question of peace is nonexistent.... It must calculate its steps narrow-mindedly and live on its sword. It must see the sword as the main, if not the only, instrument with which to keep its morale high and to retain its moral tension. Toward this end it may, no-it must-invent dangers, and to do this it must adopt the method of provocation-and-revenge.. . . And above all -let us hope for a new war with the Arab countries, so that we may finally get rid of our troubles and acquire our space. (Such a slip of the tongue: Ben Gurion himself said that it would be worth while to pay an Arab a million pounds to start a war.) (26 May 1955, 1021)

On August 14, a U.S. Quaker leader, Elmer Jackson, on a visit to Jerusalem after a meeting in Cairo with Egyptian Foreign Minister Mahmoud Fawzi, told Sharett that Nasser was still interested in normalizing relations with Israel. On October 7, the Egyptian president himself said to New York Times special envoy Kenneth Love: "No Arab says today that we should destroy Israel."18 But Israel had already made its decisions. 19

CHAPTER 9 Disperse the Palestinian Refugees ....

One important reason for the insistence with which Israel pursued its retaliation policy was the desire of the Zionist ruling establishment to exert permanent pressure on the Arab states to remove the Palestinian refugees of the 1949 war from the proximity of the armistice lines, and to disperse them through the Arab world. This was not due, in the early fifties, to military considerations: as we have seen, and as Dayan's above quotation clearly demonstrates, the Israeli government was more interested in the heightening of border tensions than in their elimination. Furthermore, its lack of concern for the security of the Jewish border population was as cynical as its own promotion of a sensation of danger among the settlers through provocation and false propaganda. Moreover, in those years no organized Palestinian resistance movement existed. It was all too obvious that the low level of guerrilla-type activities permitted by the Arab regimes was intended more to reduce the tensions created inside their countries by the presence of the refugees, and to keep the issue on the agenda in the international arena, than to prepare for a war of liberation in Palestine.20 But the presence of the Palestinian refugees along the armistice lines in Gaza and the West Bank was not only a constant reminder of the illegitimacy of lsrael's territorial conquests in 1948-49 and of its violation of UN resolutions calling for repatriation, it was also a living, physical landmark along borders which Israel had no intention of accepting as definite limits to its territorial expansion. In other words, as long as masses of Palestinians were still concentrated on Palestinian soil, the Israeli rulers argued, there was both the risk of international pressure in support of their claim to return to their homes, and little likelihood for international permission for Israel to cancel the geopolitical concept of' Palestine entirely, substituting it with that of "Eretz-lsrael."

It must be underlined at this point that Sharett's position on the Palestinian question did not differ, except regarding the use of military methods to disperse them, from that of the "activists." He had totally rejected Count Bernadotte's repeated pleas in 1948 for a return of tile refugees to their homes (Folke Bernadotte To Jerusalem, London, 1951). A year later, he ridiculed the position of the General Zionist Party in favor of a Palestinian independent state in the West Bank and against an agreement with King Abdullah on the division of the West Bank between Israel and Jordan (Divrei, Haknesset, Jerusalem, 1949). In his Diary, there are numerous references to negotiations attempted by his senior aides at the foreign ministry with Arab representatives or exiles aimed at resettling the Palestinians in countries such as Libya, Syria or Iraq. (Among others, Mustafa Abdul Mun'im, Deputy Secretary General of the Arab League is quoted by Sharett on May 23, 1954, as having affirmed that "the refugees should be settled in the neighboring countries, or, if capital is available, in Sinai.") On June 30, 1954, Sharett met with two representatives of a Union of Palestinian Refugees, Aziz Shehadeh from Jaffa and Mahmud Yahia from Tantura, in regard to the payment of compensation. Finally, on May 28, 1955, Sharett's ideas on the question of the Palestinian refugees were unequivocally expressed in his instructions to lsrael's ambassadors in connection with the Security Pact offered to Israel by the U.S., which the foreign minister suspected might include some conditions: "There may be an attempt to reach peace by pressuring us to make concessions on the question of territory and the refugees. I warned [the ambassadors] against any thought of the possibility of returning a few tens of thousands of refugees, even at the price of peace." And this was the "liberal" Zionist leader who claimed to be an expert on Arab affairs because he had lived for two years, during his adolescence, in an Arab village in the West Bank; because he knew Arabic-, because he had lived in Syria during his military service in the Turkish army. On the whole, his attitude toward the Palestinians is well illustrated by a note in his Diary on November 15, 1953. It refers to a report made that day to the cabinet meeting by Colonel Yitzhak Shani, then chief military governor of the Arab minority in Israel. (As is obvious, those whom Sharett calls infiltrators were forcefully expelled Palestinian Arabs trying to return to their home villages or to reestablish contacts with their families who remained under Israeli rule.)

In the last three years [Shani reported] 20,000 infiltrators settled in Israel, in addition to 30,000 who returned immediately after the war.... Only because these 20,000 have not been given permanent documents has the brake been put on the flow of infiltration directed toward settlement. To abolish the military government would mean to open the border areas to undisturbed infiltration and to increasing penetration toward the interior of the country. Even as things are, around 19,000 Arabs in Galilee are in possession of permanent permits to move freely around but only to the West and the South and not toward the North and the East.... it is true that the troublesome problem of the evacuees must be liquidated through a permanent resettlement, but the evacuees firmly refuse to settle on land belonging to refugees who are on the other side of the border.... Even when stone houses are built for them, they refuse to settle in them if they are built on absentee land.... The Arabs who continue to live on their land enjoy advantages, since their production costs are much lower than those of the Jews. In addition they are exempt from spending money and engaging manpower for vigilance, as the infiltrators don't touch their property .... It may be assumed that after this lecture the "General Zionists" demand that the military government be abolished would finally be silenced. (15 November 1953, 150)

Throughout 1953-54 Sharett periodically referred in his diary to proposals made by Ben Gurion, Dayan, Lavon and others to present Egypt with an ultimatum: either it evacuates all the Palestinian refugees from Gaza and disperses them inside Egypt, or else. The description of the Cabinet discussion in the last week of March 1955 on Ben Gurion's demand for the occupation of Gaza, offers more details:

The Defense Minister's proposal is that Israel declare invalid the armistice agreement with Egypt, and thus resume its "right" to renew the (1948-49) war .... I have condemned the twisted logic in Ben Gurion's reliance on the violation of the armistice agreement by Egypt, in order to justify the declaration on our part that this agreement does not exist any move and thus we are allowed to resume the war.... Let us assume that there are 200,000 Arabs [in the Gaza Strip]. Let us assume that half of them will run or will be made to run to the Hebron Hills. Obviously they will run away without anything and shortly after they establish for themselves some stable environment, they will become again a riotous and homeless mob. It is easy to imagine the outrage and hate and bitterness and the desire for revenge that will animate them.... And we shall still have I 00,000 of them in the Strip, and it is easy to imagine what means we shall resort to in order to repress them and what waves of hatred we shall create again and what kind of headlines we shall receive in the international press. The first round would be: Israel aggressively invades the Gaza Strip. The second: Israel causes again the terrified flight of masses of Arab refugees. (27 March 1955, 865)

In yet another six-hour cabinet meeting Sharett continues his arguments:

What we succeeded in achieving in 1948, cannot be repeated whenever we desire it. Today we must accept our existing frontiers and try to relax the tensions with our neighbors to prepare the ground for peace and strengthen our relations with the Powers.... Finally I proved that the occupation of the Gaza Strip will not resolve any security problem, as the refugees will continue to constitute the same trouble, and even more so, as their hate will be rekindled by the atrocities that we shall cause them to suffer during the occupation. (29 March 1955, 873)

Ben Gurion's speech was full of anger against those who disagree with him and who are in his opinion incapable of seeing the fatal forecast and cannot understand that we can only be delivered by daring action, if it will be performed in time, before the opportunity is missed. . . . The problem of the refugees is indeed a pain in the neck, but nevertheless we shall chase them to Jordan. (ibid., 874-875)

CHAPTER 10 .... and Topple Nasser's Regime

At the same cabinet meeting Ben Gurion, according to Sharett's Diary,:

Tried to prove that Egypt aspires to dominate Africa, westwards to Morocco and southwards to South Africa where one day the blacks will get up and massacre the two million whites and then subject themselves to Egypt's moral authority.... Nasser, [he said] will probably not react to the occupation of the Gaza Strip because his regime is based solely on the army, and if he tries to fight back he will be defeated and his regime will collapse. The Arab States will probably not come to Nasser's aid anyway. Finally, the Western powers will not react ... militarily. England will not invade the Negev - "and if she will, we shall fight and throw her out in disgrace. . . ." Our force is in the accomplishment of facts -this is the only way for us to become a political factor which has to be taken into consideration. This is the right moment because the Arab world is divided and Egypt has not yet signed an agreement with the U.S. or England. (ibid.)

To prevent an alliance between the West and the Arab world, especially with the most important Arab country- Egypt-was (and was to remain) Israel's main goal. This had nothing to do with Israel's security. On the contrary, Ben Gurion's policy was directed at preventing guarantees from being imposed on the Zionist state by the U.S. . Such guarantees would necessarily imply the achievement of a minimum agreement between Israel and the Arab world (definition of the borders, a "face-saving" solution for the Palestinian refugees). The basic motivation was also clearly stated: the use of force was "the only way" for Israel to become a hegemonic power in the region, possibly in alliance with the West. Nasser had to be eliminated not because his regime constituted a danger for Israel, but because an alliance between the West and his prestigious leadership in the third world, and in the Middle East, would inevitably lead to a peace agreement which in turn would cause the Zionist state to be relativized as just one of the region's national societies.

That Nasser's regime did not constitute any danger to lsrael's existence was well known at the time to the Israelis. Sharett noted:

I expressed my doubts in regard to the [much publicized by Israel] growth of Egypt's military strength, seeing that this year all the energies of the [Egyptian] army have been absorbed in domestic conflicts and rivalries. . . . About 500 officers, among the best in the Egyptian forces, left the military services [after Nasser replaced Neguib] and passed to administrative and political activities. (30 March 1955)

But Israel's worldwide campaign had nothing whatever to do with the true facts:

Ben Gurion [in the cabinet meeting] declared that Nasser is the most dangerous enemy of Israel and is plotting to destroy her .... It is not clear where he gets this confidence that [enables him] to express [this] so definitely and decisively as if it were based on solid facts. (24 April 1955)

It was simply directed to mobilize international opinion against Egypt, and prepare a favorable ground for Israel's imminent military aggression. At the same time, however, Israeli officials were instructed to convince Western governments that the instability of Nasser's regime did not make it worthy of Western aid and support. As always when their end justified the means, lsrael's rulers were not at all concerned about the contradiction between their parallel campaigns. To prove Nasser's weakness they resorted to testimonies by Egyptians:

Gideon Raphael. .. reported on ... an interesting meeting with one of the major Egyptian capitalists, Aboud Pasha.... Aboud turned out to be a close friend of Nasser. It seems that he conserved and even strengthened his status under the new regime which is an enemy of capitalism.... According to Aboud, Nasser's position is unstable in his own ranks. He is constantly nervous and does not know whom to please first. The leadership of the group is divided and conflicts explode between the officers, each of whom leans on the support of a different corps -the air force, the navy, ground forces. The situation is very instable and it is difficult to know what will happen. (31 July 1955, 1 100)

As well as to new attempts at subversion:

I sat with Josh Palmon . . . to hear a report on the continuation of the negotiations with the leaders of the Sudanese Umma party.... One of them will visit Israel soon. Some more possibilities of developing commercial connections between us and them. It is necessary to detach Sudan from economic dependence upon Egypt, and from its sphere of influence.

We are maintaining contacts with Wafd [rightist, nationalist, anti-Nasser Party] exiles in London.(3 October 1955)

The Eisenhower administration seemed divided. State Department pro-Arab elements, according to Sharett, were still pressing for a Western-Arab alliance in the Middle East, and considered an agreement between Washington and Cairo essential to the security and stability of the region, in the words of Israel's foreign minister. But Israeli pressures were increasingly bearing fruit. After years of contacts and negotiations, Egyptian requests for defensive armaments resulted in no more than, as Mohammed Hassanein Heykal later disclosed, a personal present made to General Neguib in the form of a decorative pistol to wear at ceremonies, and this while Israel's military aggression was growing more brazen from day to day. No economic aid to speak of was reaching Egypt from the West. And John Foster Dulles' commitment to help Egypt in the construction of the Aswan Dam had faded into thin air. Cairo was humiliated, while Western verbal regrets after the devastating Israeli attack on Gaza did not seem to have affected in any way Israel's preparations for an all-out war. Ben Gurion made a public speech on August 8 in which he criticized Sharett's policy as being aimed only at pleasing the gentiles and pointed towards the destruction of the state. He announced that from now on the foreign minister's duty will be none else than to explain to the world the defense ministry's security policies. These factors contributed to extinguishing Cairo's last illusions. By the end of September 1955, Egypt signed an arms deal with Czechoslovakia intended to secure its survival and self-defense.

On October 1st

Teddy [Kollek] brought in a classified cable from Washington. Our "partner" named [in code] "Ben" [Kermit Roosevelt of the CIA] ... describes the terrible confusion prevailing in the State Department under the shock of the Nasser- Czech "i.e., Russian" deal. (Henry) Byroade and all the others who were in favor of U. S. support to Egypt lost their say completely. He adds: "We are surprised at your silence." When our man asked for the meaning of these words, and whether we are expected to go to war, the answer was: "if, when the Soviet arms arrive, you will hit Egypt no one will protest." (I October 1955, 1182)

In the cabinet meeting on October 3 at one stage Ben Gurion declared:

"if they really get Migs ... I will support their bombing! We can do it!" I understood that he read the cable from Washington. The wild seed has fallen on fertile ground. (3 October 1955)

Isser [Harel, Shin Bet chief] likewise concludes that the U.S. is hinting to us that as far as they are concerned, we have a free hand and God bless us if we act audaciously.... Now ... the U.S. is interested in toppling Nasser's regime, . . . but it does not dare at the moment to use the methods it adopted to topple the leftist government of Jacobo Arbeni in Guatemala [19541 and of Mossadegh in Iran [1953].... It prefers its work to be done by Israel.

Hence, Isser proposes seriously and pressingly ... that we carry out our plan for the occupation of the Gaza Strip now.... The situation is changed and there are other reasons which determine that it is "time to act." First the discovery of oil near the Strip ... its defense requires dominating the Strip-this alone is worih dealing with the troublesome question of the refugees. Second, Egypt's betrayal of the West. This fact eliminates the danger of an armed intervention of the Powers against us. (ibid., 1 186)

Precisely one year later Dayan's troops occupied the Gaza Strip, Sinai, and the Straits of Tiran and were arrayed along the shore of the Suez Canal to watch the spectacular French and British aerial bombardments of Ismailia and Suez, accompanied by the rapid landing of troops in the Canal Zone. Six months before, as a result of a personal decision of Ben Gurion, Sharett had been eliminated from the government. The premiership had been resumed by the Old Man in November 1955, one month after the U.S. "green light" for an Israeli invasion of Egypt. A vicious whisper campaign had been mounted, to present the foreign minister as incapable of obtaining for Israel the arms necessary for its defense. The atmosphere surrounding Sharett's departure is significant:

......[Around] the table [in the Cabinet meeting] they all sat in silence. None of my colleagues raised his head to look at me. No one got up to shake my hand, despite everything. It was as if all their merital capacities were paralyzed, as if the freedom of movement was banned from their bodies, the freedom of expression was taken away from their hearts and the freedom of independent action from their consciences. They sat heavy and staring in their silence. Thus I crossed the whole length of the meeting room, and left. ( 18 June 1956)

In the next months the U.S. authorized France to divert to Israel Mirage planes which were already earmarked for NATO. At the moment of the Suez offensive the U.S. feigned surprise, and even indignation. But it made a clear distinction between England and France, the beaten rivals in the inter-imperialist struggle for influence in the Middle East, and Israel. The immediate retreat of Britain and France from Egypt was requested by President Eisenhower within a matter of hours. Israel's withdrawal from Gaza and Sinai was pushed through only four months later and then only thanks to heavy Soviet pressure which threatened to submerge the West in unforeseen complications to world peace. Israel, with the CIA authorization in its pocket, was granted the mitigating circumstances of "security needs" in world opinion's judgment on that criminal war. The precedent had thus been set, and could only mean that the retreat from Gaza and Sinai was to be purely tactical, as the 1967 war later proved.

As a so-called moderate Zionist, Moshe Sharett's lifelong assumption had been that lsrael's survival would be impossible without the support of the West, but that Western so-called morality as well as Western objective interests in the Middle East would never allow the West to support a Jewish state which "behaves according to the laws of the jungle" and raises terrorism to the level of a sacred principle. To prominent Mapai leader David Hacohen, who declared himself convinced that the Israelis should behave in the Middle East as if they were crazy in order to terrorize the Arabs and blackmail the West, he replied: If we shall behave like madmen, we shall be treated as such-interned in a lunatic asylum and isolated from the world. But his adversaries proved him wrong, thereby dealing a crushing blow to his personality as well as to the very hypothesis of moderate Zionism. What they proved was that his supposedly rational assumption was not only fallacious but also unrealistic. In the final analysis the West, and in particular the U.S., let itself be frightened, or blackmailed, into supporting Israel's megalomanic ambitions, because an objective relationship of complicity already existed and because once pushed into the open this complicity proved capable of serving the cause of Western power politics in the region.21 Just as Zionism, based on the de-Palestinization and the Judaisation of Palestine, was intrinsically racist and immoral, thus the West, in reality, had no use for a Jewish state in the Middle East which did not behave according to the laws of the jungle, and whose terrorism could not be relied on as a major instrument for the oppression of the peoples of the region. There was a fatal but coherent logic in this newly acquired equation, which would determine the course of future events:

I go on repeating to myself:nowadays admit that you are the loser! They showed much more daring and dynamism ... they played with fire, and they won. Admit that the balance sheet of the Sinai war is positive. Moral evaluations apart, Israel's political importance in the world has grown enormously.... You remain alone. Only your son Coby is with you. The public, even your own public, does not share your position. On the contrary. . the public now turns even against its "masters" and its bitterness against the retreat [from Sinai and Gaza] is developing into a tendency to change the political balance in this country in favor of Begin. (4 April 1957)

APPENDIX 1  Operation Kibya

Ben Gurion's version of operation Kibya, broadcasted on Israeli Radio on 19 October 1953, as recorded by Davar, 20 October 1953.

( ... )The [Jewish] border settlers in Israel, mostly refugees, people from Arab countries and survivors from the Nazi concentration camps, have, for years, been the target of(. . .)murderous attacks and had shown a great restraint. Rightfully, they have demanded that their government protect their lives and the Israeli government gave them weapons and trained them to protect themselves.

But the armed forces from Transjordan did not stop their criminal acts, until [the people in] some of the border settlements lost their patience and after the murder of a mother and her two children in Yahud, they attacked, last week, the village of Kibya across the border, that was one of the main centers of the murderers' gangs. Every one of us regrets and suffers when blood is shed anywhere and nobody regrets more than the Israeli government the fact that innocent people were killed in the retaliation act in Kibya. But all the responsibility rests with the government of Transjordan that for many years tolerated and thus encouraged attacks of murder and robbery by armed powers in its country against the citizens of Israel.

The government of Israel strongly rejects the ridiculous and fantastic version, as if 600 soldiers participated [in the action] against Kibya. We had conducted a thorough check and found out that not even the smallest army unit was missing from its base on the night of the attack on Kibya.

APPENDIX 2   "And Then There Was Kafr Qasim..."

On the eve of the 1956 Sinai War, Israeli Brigadier Shadmi, the commander of a battalion on the Israeli-Jordanian border, ordered a night curfew imposed on the "minority" (Arab) villages under his command. These villages were inside the Israeli borders; thus, their inhabitants were Israeli citizens. According to the court records (Judgments of the District Court, The Military Prosecutor vs. Major Melinki, et. al.), Shadmi told the commander of a Frontier Guard unit, Major Melinki, that the curfew must be "extremely strict" and that "it would not be enough to arrest those who broke it they must be shot." He added: "A dead man (or according to other evidence 'a few men') is better than the complications of detention."

The court recordings continue:

He (Melinki) informed the assembled officers that the war had begun, that their units were now under the command of the Israeli Defense Army, and that their task was to impose the curfew in the minority villages from 1700 to 0600, after informing the Mukhtars to this effect at 1630. With regard to the observation of the curfew, Melinki emphasized that it was forbidden to harm inhabitants who stayed in their homes, but that anyone found outside his home (or, according to other witnesses, anyone leaving his home, or anyone breaking the curfew) should be shot dead. He added that there were to be no arrests, and that if a number of people were killed in the night (according to other witnesses: it was desirable that a number of people should be killed as) this would facilitate the imposition of the curfew during succeeding nights.

......... While he was outlining this series of orders, Major Melinki allowed the officers to ask him questions. Lieutenant Franknanthal asked him "What do we do with the dead?" (or, according to other witnesses "with the wounded?") Melinki replied: "Take no notice of them" (or, according to other evidence: "They must not be removed," or, according to a third witness: "There will not be any wounded.") Arieh Menches, a section leader, then asked "What about women and children?" to which Melinki replied "No sentimentality" (according to another witness: "They are to be treated like anyone else-, the curfew covers them too.") Menches then asked a second question: "What about people returning from their work?" Here Alexandroni tried to intervene, but Melinki silenced him, and answered: "They are to be treated like anyone else" (according to another witness, he added: "it will be just too bad for them, as the Commander said.")

In the minutes of the meeting which were taken down and signed by Melinki a short time after he signed the series of orders, the following appears:

....As from today, at 1700 hours, curfew shall be imposed in the minority villages until 0600 hours, and all who disobey this order will be shot dead.

After this psychological preparation, and the instructions given to the policemen-soldiers to "shoot to kill all who broke the curfew," the unit went out to the village of Kafr Qasim to start its work:

The first to be shot at the western entrance to the village were four quarrymen returning on bicycles from the places where they worked near Petah Tiqva and Ras al-Ain. A short time after the curfew began these four workmen came round the bend in the road pushing their bicycles. When they had gone some ten to fifteen meters along the road towards the school, they were shot from behind at close range, from the left. Two of the four (Ahmad Mahmud Freij and Ali Othman Taha, both 30 years old) were killed outright. The third (Muhammad Mahmud Freij, brother of Ahmad Freij) was wounded in the thigh and the forearm, while the fourth, Abdullah Samir Badir, escaped by throwing himself to the ground. The bicycle of the wounded man, Ahmad, fell on him and covered his body, and he managed to lie motionless throughout the bloody incidents that took place around him. Eventually he crawled into an olive grove and lay under an olive tree until morning. Abdullah was shot at again when he rolled from the road to the sidewalk, whereupon he sighed and pretended to he dead. After the two subsequent massacres, which took place beside him, he hid himself among a flock of sheep, whose shepherd had been killed, and escaped into the village with the flock. . . .

A short time after this killing a shepherd and his twelve year old son came back from the pasture with their flock. They approached the bend along the road from the Jewish colony of Masha. The flock went along the road as far as the village school, the shepherd throwing stones at sheep that had strayed to turn them back on to the Masha road. Two or three soldiers, standing by the bend, opened fire at close range on the shepherd and his son and killed them. Their names were Othman Abdullah Issa, aged 30, and his son Fathi Othman Abdullah Issa, aged twelve.

Note: The translation of the court proceedings appeared in The Arabs in Israel by Sabri Jiyris (Monthly Review, 1976). Jiyris sums up: "In the first hour of the curfew, between 5 and 6 PM, the men of the Israeli Frontier Guard killed forty-seven Arab citizens in Kafr Qasim."

APPENDIX 3  "Soon the Singing Will Turn Into A Death Moan"

The following is excerpted from Meir Har-Tzion's Diary, published by Levin-Epstein, Ltd., Tel Aviv, 1969. It describes an Israeli raid in Gaza during the early 1950s.

The wide, dry riverbed glitters in the moonlight. We advance, carefully, along the mountain slope. Several houses can be seen. Bushes and shrubbery sway in the breeze, casting their shadows on the ground. In the distance we can see three lights and hear the sounds of Arab music coming out of the homes immersed in darkness. We split up into three groups of four men each. Two groups make their way to the immense refugee camp to the south of our position. The other group marches towards the lonely house in the flat area north of Wadi Gaza. We march forward, trampling over green fields, wading through water canals as the moon bathes us in its scintillating light. Soon, however, the silence will be shattered by bullets, explosions, and the screams of those who are now sleeping peacefully. We advance quickly and enter one of the houses "Mann Haatha?" (Arabic for "Who's there?")

We leap towards the voices. Fearing and trembling, two Arabs are standing up against the wall of the building. They try to escape. I open fire. An ear piercing scream fills the air. One man falls to the ground, while his friend continues to run. Now we must act we have no time to lose. We make our way from house to house as the Arabs scramble about in confusion. Machine guns rattle, their noise mixed with a terrible howling. We reach the main thoroughfare of the camp. The mob of fleeing Arabs grows larger. The other group attacks from the opposite direction. The thunder of hand grenades echoes in the distance. We receive an order to retreat. The attack has come to an end.

On the following morning, the headlines will read: "The refugee camp of Al-Burj near Gaza was attacked. The camp has been serving as a base for infiltrators into Israeli territory. 'Twenty people were killed and another twenty were wounded."

.. . . A telephone line blocks our way. We cut it and continue. A narrow path leads along the slope of a hill. The column marches forward in silence. Stop! A few rocks roll down the hill. I catch sight of a man surveying the silence. I cock my rifle. Gibly crawls over to me, "Har, for God's sake, a knife!!" His clenched teeth glitter in the dark and his whole body is tight, his mind alert, "For God's sake," . . . I put my tommy down and unsheath my machete. We crawl towards the lone figure as he begins to sing a trilled Arab tune. Soon the singing will turn into a death moan. I am shaking, every muscle in my body is tense. This is my first experience with this type of weapon. Will I be able to do it?

We draw closer. There he stands, only a few meters in front of us. We leap. Gibly grabs him and I plunge the knife deep into his back. The blood pours over his striped cotton shirt. With not a second to lose, I react instinctively and stab him again. The body groans, struggles and then becomes quiet and still.

From an interview with Meir Har-Tzion, Ha'aretz weekly supplement, 9 November 1965:

"Pangs of conscience? No. Why should I have any?" The man's blue eyes open wide in amazement. "It's easy to kill a man with a rifle. You press the trigger and that's that. But a knife, why, that's something else-that's a real fight. Even if you are successful, you come close to death. The enemy's blade is as close as the air. It's a fantastic feeling. You realize you're a man."

APPENDIX 4  The Lavon Affair

Moshe Sharett's public version of "The Lavon Affair" in his statement to lsrael's Parliament (Divrei Ha-Knesset, the 514th meeting, 13 December 1954):

Honorable Chairman, members of the Knesset. The trial that started two days ago in Egypt against 13 Jews is disturbing everybody and brings about an emotional turmoil and deep bitterness in the country [Israel] and in the whole Jewish world. Indeed, it must cause concern and anxiety in the hearts of all justice-seeking people around the universe. The Committee for Foreign Affairs and Security has alreadv dealt and will further deal with this serious issue. But at this stage I feel obliged to make a short announcement. In my speech in the Knesset on November 15 1 said "The uncontrolled behavior of' Egypt . . . does not indicate . . . that its leadership . . . is seeking moderate approaches and peace. How far Egypt is from this spirit [of moderation and peace] can be learned from the plot woven in Alexandria, the show-trial which is being organized there against a group of Jews who became victims of false accusations of espionage, and who, it seems, are being threatened and tortured in order to extract from them confessions in imaginary crimes." This gloomy assumption was verified and was revealed to be a cruel and shocking fact, by the declaration of the accused Victorin Ninyo in the military court in Cairo that was published this morning. [According to this declaration] she was tortured during the interrogation which preceded the trial and by that torture they extracted from her false confessions to crimes which did not happen. The government of Israel strongly protests this practice, which revives in the Middle East the methods used by the Inquisition in the Middle Ages. The government of Israel strongly rejects the false accusations of the general Egyptian prosecution, which relegates to the Israeli authorities horrible deeds and diabolic conspiracies against the security and the international relations of Egypt. From this stand we have protested many times in the past persecution and false accusations of Jews in various countries. We see in the innocent Jews accused by the Egyptian authorities of such severe crimes, victims of vicious hostility to the State of Israel and the Jewish people. If their crime is being Zionist and devoted to Israel, millions of Jews around the world share this crime. We do not think that the rulers of Egypt should be interested in being responsible for shedding Jewish blood. We call upon all those who believe in peace, stability and human relations among nations to prevent fatal injustice.

APPENDIX 5  Israeli Newspaper Reveals Government's Attempt to Stop Publication of Israel's Sacred Terrorism

Following are major excerpts from an article by Israeli Member of the Knesset Uri Avneri, published in Hoalam Hazeh, September 23, 1980, entitled "Sharett's Diary for the Arabs." The booklet uses quotations from Sharett's diary to illuminate eight affairs which took place during the fifties. Livia Rokach did clean work. All her quotations are real. She did not ever take them out of context, nor did she quote them in a way that contradicts the intention of the diary writer. To any person who is familiar with Israeli propaganda, such quotations may have a stunning effect . . . Through the use of selective excerpts from Sharett's diary, her historical research deals in detail with the following affairs:

1.Retaliation activities Quotations from Sharett show that these activities were never carried out in revenge or retaliation, as the were presented to be, but that they were the product of the premeditated policies of David Ben Gurion and Moshe Dayan. These policies aimed at heating the borders, as a preparation for war, and as a pretext to vacate and disperse Palestinian refugees who lived in camps close to the borders. Quotations from Sharett's book also reveal that President Yitzhak Ben Zvi hoped for an Egyptian attack to justify lsrael's occupation of half of Sinai. Sharett reveals, furthermore, that the incidents on the Syrian border were also a result of an Israeli initiative. Sharett details at length the reasons behind the blood-bath committed by the 101 unit, under the command of Arik Sharon, in the village of Kibya, where fifty-six innocent Arab villagers were killed. He also recites how the government decided to publish a false communique, in which this event was portrayed as a partisan action carried out by civilian "settlers."

2.The plan for the occupation of Southern Syria Sharett reveals that Ben Gurion, Dayan and Pinhas Lavon requested in February 1954 to exploit the toppling of the Syrian dictator, Adib Shishakly, by occupying southern Syria and annexing it to Israel. They also requested to buy a Syrian officer who would acquire power in Damascus and establish a pro-Israel puppet government. These things seem more actual today in light of the deteriorating position of Hafez al-Assad and Israeli declarations in this regard.

3.The intention to partition Lebanon Sharett reveals that already in February 1954 Ben Gurion proposed a large Israeli operation to dismember the Lebanese state and to establish a Maronite-Christian state in one of its parts. Extended discussions were held as a result. Ben Gurion explicated the plan at length in a letter to Sharett, and Sharett answered in a long letter in which he opposed the plan vehemently, Ben Gurion was ready to invest large sums in bribing Christian leaders in Lebanon. Sharett also revealed that the chief of staff supported the plan of buying a Lebanese army officer who would be used as a puppet, and who would make it seem that the intervention of the Israeli army would be in response to his call for the liberation of Lebanon from Muslim subjugation. In the eyes of today's reader this plan seems an accurate blueprint for what took place in Lebanon after that- the civil war, the establishment of the Maronite enclave of Major Sa'd Haddad and labeling it "free Lebanon."

4.The Har-Tzion Affair Sharett recites how Meir Har-Tzion of the 101 Unit murdered with his own hands five innocent Bedouin youth in revenge for the killing of his sister who crossed the Jordanian border during one of her hikes. Sharett recites, further, how Arik Sharon and Moshe Dayan covered over this abhorrent act, and how Ben Gurion foiled his decision to bring Har-Tzion and his friends to justice.

5.The Lavon Affair Sharett describes at length the nasty business in Egypt. Livia Rokach appended to the book in which Sharett reveals the truth about the affair his own lies-filled speech in the Knesset in which he claimed that the accusations against those indicted in the Cairo trials were motivated by blood libel and antisemitism. The Israeli reader who read the excerpts from Sharett's diary which were serialized in Maariv, or even the eight volumes of the diary themselves cannot be shocked by these revelations, in spite of their severity. However, the impact of such a publication abroad is bound to be sharper. Indeed, the lack of legal intervention by the Israeli Foreign Office prevented a wide spread dissemination of the booklet. The Arab-American organization that published the booklet does not have the means required to disseminate it widely, especially when faced with the conspiracy of silence imposed by the pro-Israel American media ....

NOTES

1. In his Diary Sharett reports consultations with the Israeli ambassador to Brazil, David Shealtiel, concerning the settlement in that country, of half a million Palestinian refugees - one hundred thousand "in the first stage." Sharett expresses enthusiasm for the project.

2. Negotiations on the implementation of a UN-approved plan for the division of Jordan River water among Israel, Syria and Jordan were conducted at the time by President Eisenhower's special envoy Erric Johnston, Israel, however, was rapidly nearing the completion of its own deviation project. No agreement was ever concluded.

3. In September 1979, following the publication of Sharett's Diary, an Israeli citizen on a radio debate asked Arik Sharon about the massacre, in which sixty nine civilians were killed. Sharon, who personally commanded the Kibya action, and who was a loyal member of Mapai in the 1950s, according to Sharett, is today the minister in the Begin government responsible for the colonization of the West Bank and Gaza. A report on this radio discussion in the Histadrut Labor Party newspaper Davar, of 14 September 1979, gives the following comments:

The responsibility for the killing of 69 civilians in Kibya, according to Sharon, falls on the victims themselves. At that time the Arab population was used to the Army's reaching just the edge of the village, dynamiting just one house , and leaving. Therefore, the people stayed in their houses. Thus, any attempt to claim that in Kibya there was a cold-blooded action to murder women and children should be described as a completely unfounded accusation.

Sharon decided personally to give an energetic character to that action. He instructed that 600 kilograms of explosives be taken along. Forty -five houses in the village were marked to be blown up, among which was the school. The task force did not know that people were hiding in the cellars and the upper floors. The houses were blown up after a superficial examination of the ground floor alone. This is why the number of victims was so high.

Kibya was, according to all evidence, a tragic error. A more cautious commander may, have avoided it. Had Arik Sharon changed for the better since, he would have now said that he was sorry. He did not.

Davar editorialist Nahum Barnea ostensibly attacks Sharon, but in fact he obviously tends to excuse the murderous operation. Kibya was no "tragic error" but a deliberate crime, as the context of Sharon's story proves. Before going into action, Sharett's soldiers, moreover. were given a dramatic description of a previous incident in Yahud (an Arab village repopulated with Israeli Jews) in which a woman was killed. Yahud served as a pretext for the Kibya attack, although it was known that Kibya had no other relation to the earlier episode. Clearly, the intention was to incite the soldiers emotionally to exterminate the greatest possible number of civilians and have no qualms about the killing of women and children. Significantly, upon his return from Kibya, Sharon reported the number of victims to have been ten to twelve: "We counted only the military dead, the soldiers of the Jordanian Region's garrison," he said in the above broadcast.

4. At that time Israel was literally flooding the world with propaganda in which it catastrophically pictured itself as threatened in its daily existence by growing Arab power. It is also significant that the above disclosures were made confidentially to American Zionist leaders, who thus became involved in Israel's two-faced strategy. The use of the term "Western Eretz Israel" is particularly illuminating. It implies that, in contrast with their official statements at that time, the concept of' an "Eastern Eretz Israel" (i.e., Jordan) has never been eliminated from the political vocabulary of the Israeli leadership.

5. See Ha'aretz of' 29 June 1979, commenting on a recent wave of terrorist actions in Syria attributed to the Muslim Brothers: "If Syria assumes its Sunni character again, as it was prior to the rise of the Ba'ath and the Alawites to power, new and varied opportunities may open up to Israel, Lebanon and the whole Middle Fast. In view of such a possibility, Israel must keep vigilant and alert: It must not an opportunity which might be unrepeatable". A quarter of a century later, The same formula is being used. In general, a close refilling of the Israeli press through 1979 suggests that Israel is again deploying efforts in various directions to bring about the fall[ of Assad's regime, and to install a Damascus regime which would go along with Israeli policies. "Israel is aiming at installing a Sadat in Damascus," one Israeli political figure told us in September 1979.

6. This is not to say, obviously, that no alliance between Israel and the US existed prior to 1967. Through the fifties collaboration was particularly close between Israel's special services and the CIA. It is certainly not accidental that following the Israeli leadership's outlining of plans to disrupt Lebanon, the U.S. according to CIA director William Colby in testimony to the Senate Subcommittee on Refugees in July, 1976- "supplied arms in the fifties to Christians in Lebanon in the framework of the use of religious and ethnic minorities in the fight against communism". However, starting in the summer of 1956, and going well into the sixties, Israel was dependent on France for arms supplies and could not have acted openly against France's wishes. The end of France's colonial war against Algeria and De Gaulle's growing impatience with Israel's arrogance led to the termination of the French-Israeli special relationship in 1967, and to its substitution by the exclusive U.S.-Israel one.

7. Israel's systematic genocide in Lebanon for over a decade, which has recently reached a degree of cynical brutality unequaled in contemporary history outside of U.S. action in Indochina, bears no justification in any case. In the light of the documentation we have presented, Israel's pretense of acting in self defense and in defense of Lebanon's Christians against PLO terror becomes even more ridiculous as well as outrageous. This pretense is all too often supported by Western media and governments. Undoubtedly, lsrael's permanent representative to the UN, Yehuda Blum, counts cynically on the ignorance of the general public when he says: "Lebanon's fundamental problems date back many years. The situation in the South should be considered only a byproduct and a symptom of those problems" (The Nation,15 September 1979). This is how, he describes Israel's direct massacre of civilian populations and the other daily attacks, devastation and torture, carried out with U.S.-made arms and under Israeli protection by Israel's isolationist Maronite puppets commanded by Major Sa'd Haddad.

8. Sharett hinted that the report was clandestinely intercepted by the Israelis. He also aired the possibility that Hutcheson intended to refer to elements from the Irgun, acting against his government and then rejected this hypothesis. In this connection it is interesting to recall that in a debate in the Knesset (Divrei Haknesset Hashnya, p. 654) on January 25, 1955, a Herut spokesman, Arie Altmann, attacked the government for its "weaknesses" and added: "If the government will not comply with its duties in the security field, don't be surprised if one day you will be confronted with the surprising phenomena of private initiatives, and not one initiative, but a very complex and ramified one..... ". In his Mistraim Ve'Haa Fedayeen (see note 20) Ehud Ya'ari mentions the existence at that time of a terrorist group operating in border areas under the name of "Tadmor Group" of which, he says, "no details are yet available." These disclosures suggest that a close cooperation existed at that time, on an operative-clandestine level, between the pre-state terrorist Zionist organizations the Irgun and the Stern gang, which were officially dissolved in 1948 but in fact continued to act militarily and regular army or "security" units such as the paratroopers corps and Sharon's Unit 101. The latter, Ya'ari recalls, "operated its own unpublicized 'infiltrations' into the Gaza Strip........accomplishing actions such as the attack on the refugee camp at Al Burj, near Gaza, on August 31, 1953." Further research on this subject might reveal that the extent of the acts of aggressive provocations by Israeli forces across the armistice lines were much vaster than has ever been known publicly. However, the most important aspect of these relations lies in their political significance, which offers a completely new key to the interpretation of the history of the Zionist state. In fact, they constitute a decisive refutation of the accepted thesis according to which a distinct division, marked by ideological, political and pragmatic antagonisms, existed at least up to 1965 between labor Zionism and the so-called "irrational Zionism" of Revisionist origin.

9. Israel launched a particularly virulent campaign about Ma'aleh Ha'akrabim, and renewed the campaign at the time of, and as a justification of, the 1956 attack on Egypt.

10. The euphemistic use of the term "retaliation" in the context of actions to be realized according to a pre-fixed plan corresponds to Dayan's description of' the "reprisal" policy. Reminiscent of notorious euphemisms from the Vietnam war ("pacification", "neutralization", "Vietnamization"), the term has been used until recently to describe lsrael's massacres in Lebanon.

11. Today Sharon is minister of agriculture in Begin's government, and responsible for the colonization of the West Bank and Gaza. He was commander of the notorious "Unit 101," which engaged in actions against civilian populations across the armistice lines. In a recent radio debate (see note 3 above), Sharon was asked about this episode. "As to Meir Hartsion," Sharon said, "I want to say: it is unfortunate that there are no more men like him, with his loyalty, his love for the country, and his contribution to raise the combat level of the Israeli army. It is shameful that a man who fought, and fought for you too, you call him a murderer". Davar, 14 September 1979)

12. It must be noted that the term "terrorism" was not in vogue at that time. Sharett, in fact, uses the word "revenge" and "blind revenge." It is clear that he was groping for a word that would correspond exactly to today's use of"terrorism."

13. Both texts are reproduced from the Acts of the Olshan-Dori lnquiry Commission of the "Affair," annexed to the Diary, pages 659, 664, respectively.

14. In a letter to Ben Gurion dated March 6, 1961 Sharett confirmed: "Why did I refuse then to approve the firing of Peres? Because his removal at that period would have been interpreted as an admission that the leadership of lsrael's security establishment was responsible for the savage actions in Cairo" (p. 789). In general, very little is known outside Israel about the "Affair" and its complicated ramifications and implications which have profoundly corroded and influenced Israel's political life for years. It is therefore understandable that even an excellent reporter such as David Hirst could be misled to think that Lavon shared Sharett's moderate line ( The Gun and the Olive Branch, London: Futura Publications, 1976). In fact Lavon was an ardent "activist" who missed no occasion to preach the use of violence and this was why Ben Gurion, when leaving for Sdeh Boker, left him in charge of "his" defense ministry. Later, however, Ben Gurion began to suspect that through his activist zeal, Lavon also sought to supplant him at the head of the security establishment. Thus, a complicated rivalry involving these two members of Mapai's leadership as well, as for their own reasons and ambitions, Ben Gurion's younger heirs, especially Peres and Dayan, became interwoven in the intrigues to which the "Affair" had given rise.

15. Ahdut Ha'avoda, whose best known leaders were Yigal Allon and Israel Galili, united with Mapai to form the Labor Party in the sixties.

16. The history of the attempts to organize coups d'etat in Israel is also little known outside its borders. In 1957 one such attempt was plotted by a group of officers who wished to prevent the retreat from Gaza and Sinai, which Ben Gurion had reluctantly accepted under heavy international pressure. In late May 1967, it was under the threat of a military coup that Premier Levi Fishkol co-opted opposition Knesset member Moshe Dayan into his government as minister of defense, thereby definitely acquiescing in the army's decision to go to war.

17. This comment was made by Lewis Jones, an embassy aide in Cairo, who Sharett says "is considered a personal friend of Nahum Goldman and Teddy Kollek ,and is well known to us for his fair attitude to Israel." Jones also expressed the opinion that Israeli protests against the Cairo sentences should not be taken too seriously: "Even if there will be a hanging [death sentence] it would not be a disaster [for the Israelis] ... since it will probably help [the Israelis] to collect more money in the US." 18 February 1955, p. 712)

18. (7 October 1955, p. 1197). See also Kenneth Love, Suez (McGraw-Hill, 1969). Sharett here told the story of how a previous news agency dispatch on the interview with Love, attributed to Nasser the phrase "we should destroy Israel." Sharett couldn't believe this to be true, and he professed to have been relieved when the correction of what was reported as a "telex transmission error" arrived, confirming his own view of Nasser's conciliatory policies.

19. A detailed comparison of the above realities with, among others, the account and analysis of the events of that period as provided by Naday Safran in his Israel-The Embattled Ally (Cambridge: Harvard University Press. 1978) would throw a significant light on the falsifications that continue to permeate a certain Zionist- inspired historiography to this day. According to Saf'ran, Nasser's attitude shifted in 1955 "from one of apparent moderation to one that seemed bent on ... leading the Arab States in an assault on lsrael" and the "apparent willingness of the Arab States to accept Jewish State" changed in the mid-fifties to a "commitment to eliminate that State," (See also note 20.)

20. See Abu Iyad, Palestinians Sans Patrie (Paris: n.p., 1979) and Ehud Ya'ari, Mitsraim Ve'Ha Fedayeen (Givat Haviva, 1975). The first, by one of the leading figures of Fatah, provides a direct account, from personal experience, of the Egyptian repression of the attempts by the Palestinian refugees in Gaza to organize resistance cells. The second consists of a collection of documents captured by the Israeli intelligence during the 1956 and 1967 wars in Gaza, Sinai and the West Bank, which demonstrate the efforts by the Egyptian and Jordanian governments to suppress any infiltration to Israel, control the borders, and repress the demands by the population for adequate defense measures to protect them against Israeli incursions, including the demand for a distribution of arms. The following constitute the main points in the evidence contained in Ya'ari's documents:

-At the end of 1953, the Egyptian administration of Gaza reported to the War Ministry in Cairo on arrests of infiltrators and actions to block their access routes to the border. At that same time police and army troops were employed in refugee camps attacked by Israel to disperse demonstrators asking for arms and protesting plans to settle Palestinian refugees in an area near Al Arish. A special civil guard force was created at the end of 1953 to control the Palestinian refugee camps. In 1954 this force was reinforced. In that year, the Egyptian representative in the Mixed Armistice Commission replied to a complaint by Israeli representative Arie Shalev in regard to infiltrations: "We are not sending them, and as far as we are concerned, you can kill them." "There is not one single Egyptian document [among those captured and examined] that speaks positively of infiltrations or sabotage actions. On the contrary, they all reflect an official policy of suppression and energetic directives to this effect," according to Ya'ari's conclusion. This has been confirmed also from other sources:

General E. L. M. Burns, who was the head of the UN Observers Corps in the Middle East, reported in his book Between Arab and Israeli (London: n.p., 1962) that Nasser told him in November 1954 that he wanted calm to reign in the Gaza Strip.

Keith Wheelock, in his Nasser's New Egypt (London: n.p., 1960) wrote that it was "clear that the Egyptian government wishes to avoid fighting along the border, if only because the great plan for internal development left very limited resources for a reinforcement of the Egyptian army."

Among the documents presented by Ya'ari there is also a memorandum of a meeting held at the office of the Egyptian governor of the Gaza Strip, Yussef Al Agrudi, on January 29, 1955, one month before the Israeli attack on Gaza, in which the following measures aimed at controlling the border were decided among the rest :

Prohibition of traffic from sunset to dawn in the area east of the Gaza-Rafah road, including the refugee camp of Jebelyiah.

An order to open fire on any infiltrator. All the mukhtars (village chief) were required to report persons missing from their villages or tribes. Warnings were to be issued through the media against infiltration. A detention camp was to be set up for persons suspected of infiltration against whom no sufficient evidence existed to bring them to trial.

Distribution of food rations to refugees who did not appear personally to receive the rations would be stopped.

According to Ya'ari, finally:

The Israeli army attack on Gaza on February 28, 1 955 was ... a decisive turning point in the relations between Israel and Egypt. Nasser as well as many Western diplomats and analysts have spoken of it as a turning point in Cairo's policies. Nasser himself explained on innumerable occasions that the attack was the moment of truth in which he understood there was no chance for the [conciliatory] line adopted by Egypt until then. He finally perceived the dimensions of the Israeli problem. and therefore appealed for Soviet armaments . . . .

The Gaza action occurred at a moment of relative tranquility following the enforcement of repressive measures decided on by the Egyptian administration in the Strip. Hence, the explanation for Ben Gurion's decision to order the attack ... is to be sought elsewhere.

The Israeli attack on Gaza unleashed huge demonstrations in the Strip and clashes between the local population and the Egyptian army. Due to further Israeli provocations the protests continued, and in May the Egyptian government was forced to consent to the activities of fedayeen units for sabotage actions in Israel. These units were, however, placed under the strict control of the Egyptian army so that their activity could again be limited several months later. "In any case," is Ya'ari's conclusion, "there is no doubt that the appearance of Fedayeen under direct Egyptian guidance was a phenomenon which emerged following-the Israeli attack on Gaza."

It is worth mentioning here that the documents presented by Ya'ari also include detailed information on two terrorist actions undertaken by Israeli intelligence in July 1956. In both cases senior Egyptian officers were killed by explosive packages, disguised as books. In the first case, the victim was Lt. General Mustafa Hafez, the commander of Egyptian intelligence in the Gaza Strip. Hafez emerges from the documents as a man who opposed infiltrations into Israel as well as the inclusion of Palestinians in the Civil Guard. In fact in a forged version of the circumstances of his assassination, Israel tried to attribute the murder to a settling of accounts on behalf of outraged refugees, having obviously reason to believe that this version would be accepted as credible. The other victim was the Egyptian military attache in Amman, according to Ya'ari, Hafez's collaborator in the recruitment of Fedayeen and their infiltration into Israel from Jordanian territory. Ya'ari states that on the basis of the documents in his possession, the contradiction in the description of Hafez's role remains unsolved. The episodes, however, conform to Sharett's conviction in regard to the unrestrained use of terrorism by Israel's security establishment.

On the other hand, Sharett's Diary confirms beyond any doubt that lsrael's security establishment strongly opposed all border security arrangements proposed by Egypt, Jordan or the UN.

A UN-Egyptian proposal that mixed Egyptian-Israeli-UN patrols operate along the borders to prevent infiltration and mining came to Dayan's knowledge, Sharett noted. The chief of staff exploded with rage. "But I don't want the UN to prevent mining". Obviously, he considered the deterrent effect of the mixed patrols proposal on Israeli incursions into the Strip (see note 8) as more damaging to Israel's security than the occasional infiltrations from the Strip into Israel. In fact, Ben Gurion rejected the proposal] on the grounds that it "will tie our hands"

21. See Noam Chomsky in The Nation, 22-29 July,1978, pp. 83-88 for a review of five books on US.-Israeli relations, and his article "Civilized Terrorism" in Seven Days, July 1976, pp 22-23.

John Mearsheimer, the eminent political scientist who has warned for years that NATO’s Ukraine policy would lead to disaster, joins Aaron Maté to assess the state of the Ukraine proxy war and the dangers ahead.

Guest: John Mearsheimer. R. Wendell Harrison Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago.

Read “The Darkness Ahead: Where The Ukraine War Is Headed” by John Mearsheimer

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TRANSCRIPT

AARON MATÉ: Welcome to Pushback. I’m Aaron Maté. Joining me is John Mearsheimer. He is R. Wendell Harrison Distinguished Service Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago, now writing on Substack. Professor Mearsheimer, thanks so much for joining me.

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: It’s my pleasure to be here, Aaron.

AARON MATÉ: I want to get your response to this from The Wall Street Journal. This just came out, and it says this about the state of Ukraine’s wildly hyped counteroffensive and the Western efforts to encourage it. It says this, quote, “When Ukraine launched its big counteroffensive this spring, Western military officials knew Kiev didn’t have all the training or weapons—from shells to warplanes—that it needed to dislodge Russian forces. But they hoped Ukrainian courage and resourcefulness would carry the day. They haven’t.” Unquote.

So, that’s from The Wall Street Journal, basically admitting that the West pushed Ukraine into this counteroffensive, knowing that Ukraine did not have what it needed to come anywhere close to success. I’m just wondering, having long predicted that this US effort to drive Ukraine into NATO, turn Ukraine into a NATO proxy, would lead to Ukraine’s decimation. Your response to this candid admission in this establishment news outlet.

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: Well, it seems to me that anybody who knows anything about military tactics and strategy had to understand that there was hardly any chance that the Ukrainian counteroffensive would succeed. I mean, there were just so many factors that were arrayed against the Ukrainians that it was almost impossible for them to make any significant progress. Nevertheless, the West encouraged them, pushed them hard to launch this offensive. In fact, we wanted them to launch the offensive in the spring, and you sort of say to yourself, ‘What’s going on here?’ This is like encouraging them to launch a suicidal offensive which is completely counterproductive. Wouldn’t it make much more sense for them to remain on the defensive, at least for the time being? But I think what was going on here was that the West is very fearful that time is running out, that if the Ukrainians don’t show some significant success on the battlefield in the year 2023, public support for the war will dry up and the Ukrainians will lose—and the West will lose. So, I think what happened here is that we pushed very hard for this offensive, knowing that there was a slim chance at best that it would succeed.

AARON MATÉ: In that same vein, we also integrated Ukraine as a de facto proxy of NATO without formally promising it—or without formally giving it—NATO membership, and that was a major factor in this, in Russia’s invasion to begin with.

But then you have this recent NATO Summit in Lithuania, and I’m wondering your take on this. At the end of the summit, the pledge that was given to Ukraine, it seems to me that it actually made future NATO membership for Ukraine even more distant than it was when it was first promised back in 2008. Because this time the final communique—and this was apparently done at the behest of the US—said that we will admit Ukraine when allies agree and when conditions are met, but it didn’t specify what those conditions are. And so accordingly, it seems to me that Ukraine is even further away from NATO than it was back when it was first promised back in 2008. I’m wondering if you agree with that assessment, and what you make of this very vague pledge from NATO.

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: I agree with what you said, but I’d take it a step further. The Secretary General of NATO, Jens Stoltenberg, made it very clear that Ukraine would not be admitted into NATO until it had prevailed in the conflict. In other words, Ukraine has to win the war before it can be brought into the alliance. Well, Ukraine is not going to win the war, and therefore, Ukraine is not going to be brought into the alliance.

This war is going to go on for a long time. Even if you get a cold peace, it will linger right below the surface and there will be an ever-present danger that a hot war will break out. And in those circumstances, I find it hard to imagine the United States or any West European country agreeing to bring Ukraine into NATO. And the simple reason is that if you bring Ukraine into NATO in the midst of a conflict, you are in effect committing NATO to defending with military force Ukraine on the battlefield. And that’s a situation we don’t want. We do not want NATO boots on the ground, or to be more specific, we don’t want American boots on the ground. So, it makes perfect sense for Stoltenberg to say that Ukraine has to win. In fact, Ukraine has to win a decisive victory over the Russians within the borders of Ukraine. That is not going to happen, in my opinion, and therefore, as you were saying, Ukraine is not going to become part of NATO.

AARON MATÉ: So, given that, I mean, do you think it’s fair to speculate that the US policy in Ukraine was even more cynical than it appeared? Because basically this war was largely fought because the US refused to agree to neutrality for Ukraine, saying that, ‘Well, we have an open door for NATO; we don’t take people’s membership off of the table.’ But yet, when given the opportunity, the US won’t commit to granting Ukraine a road map to joining NATO, which leads me to conclude that, possibly, what if the aim was never to actually admit Ukraine into NATO but just use the future pledge of NATO membership to de facto turn Ukraine into a NATO proxy, without the obligation, the part of the US and its allies, to actually defend it?

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: It’s possible that’s true. It’s hard to say without a lot more evidence.

I have a slightly different view. I don’t think it was so much cynicism. I think it was stupidity. I think you can’t underestimate just how foolish the West is when it comes to the whole question of Ukraine—and all sorts of other issues as well. But I think that the West believed—and here we’re talking mainly about the United States—that if a war did break out between Ukraine and Russia, that the West plus Ukraine would prevail, that the Russians would be defeated. I believe we thought that was the case.

If you look at the run-up to the war in early 2022, what’s really striking to me is that it was quite clear that war was at least a serious possibility, yet the United States and the West more generally did virtually nothing to prevent the war. If anything, we egged the Russians on. And I find this hard to imagine. What was going on here? And I think that we believed that if a war broke out, we had trained up the Ukrainians and armed the Ukrainians up enough that they would hold their own on the battlefield. Number one. And number two, I think, we felt the magic weapon was sanctions, that we’d finished the Russians off with sanctions, and the Ukrainians would end up defeating the Russians, and they would then be in a position where we could admit them into NATO. That is what I think is going on. I don’t think it’s really a case of cynicism as you portray it. It may be. Again, this is an empirical question. We just need a heck of a lot more evidence to see whether your interpretation is correct or mine is. But my sense is, this is worse than a crime. This is a blunder, to put it in [French diplomat] Talleyrand’s famous rhetoric.> Visit source: grayzone.com

AARON MATÉ: On the issue of the sanctions, it was recently reported that Russia had a milestone in selling its oil above the price cap that the US and its allies tried to impose on the price of Russian oil. Why do you think the US sanctions policy has not worked, and did that surprise you? Did you expect Russia to take more of a hit than it has?

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: I thought it would take more of a hit than it has. I think the Russians themselves thought that. That’s my sense from sort of keeping abreast of this conflict. I think the Russians have done better than they even expected, and certainly better than I expected. But my view, Aaron, is that even if we had been more successful with the sanctions, we would not have brought the Russians to their knees. We would not have ended up inflicting a significant defeat on them. And the reason is very simple.

The Russians believe that they’re facing an existential threat in Ukraine, and when you’re facing an existential threat, or you think you’re facing an existential threat, you’re willing to absorb huge amounts of pain to make sure that you’re not defeated on the battlefield. So, I think the sanctions were doomed from the beginning. I think when you look carefully at what has happened since then, it’s quite clear that the Russians were in an excellent position to beat the sanctions, by and large. And it shouldn’t have been surprising to anyone who spent a lot of time studying how sanctions work, that it was not going to do much against a country like Russia, which was so rich in natural resources and had all sorts of potential trading partners that could replace the ones that it lost in the West. I certainly don’t fit in that category as an expert on sanctions, but I would imagine that people who study this issue carefully understood that it was going to be of limited utility against the Russians. And it certainly has been.

This, by the way, was a major miscalculation, I believe, on the West’s part. In the literature in the West on the war, if you read the mainstream media carefully, people like to dwell on Putin’s miscalculations, and they completely ignore the West’s miscalculations. But I think if you look at our behavior in the run-up to the war and what has subsequently been happening in the conflict, it’s quite clear that we miscalculated in a big way.

AARON MATÉ: On the point, let me ask you to respond to what Secretary of State Anthony Blinken recently said on CNN. He’s talking about what he says are Putin’s objectives in Ukraine, and he says Putin has already lost.

Anthony Blinken: In terms of what Russia sought to achieve, what Putin sought to achieve, they’ve already failed, they’ve already lost. The objective was to erase Ukraine from the map, to eliminate its independence, its sovereignty, to subsume it into Russia. That failed a long time ago.

AARON MATÉ: That’s Anthony Blinken, Professor Mearsheimer. Do you think those were Putin’s objectives in Ukraine?

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: No. I mean, it’s the conventional wisdom in the West, for sure, that these were Putin’s aims. But as I have said on countless occasions, there is no evidence. Let me emphasize here: zero evidence to support the claim that Putin was bent on conquering all of Ukraine and incorporating it into a Greater Russia. You can say that a million times, but it’s simply not true. Because there is no evidence that Putin had any interest in conquering all of Ukraine and that he believed when he invaded Ukraine on February 24, 2022, that that is what he was going to try to do.

But that just takes care of his intentions. You also have to look at his capabilities. The idea that that small force, that small Russian force that went into Ukraine in February 2022 could conquer all of the country is a laughable argument. To conquer all of Ukraine, the Russians would have needed an army that had a couple million men in it. This is a huge piece of real estate. When the Germans went into Poland in 1939—and remember when the Germans went into Poland in 1939, the Soviets went in a few weeks later, so, the two countries, Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union were a tag team against Poland. Nevertheless, the Poles… I mean the Germans invaded Poland with roughly 1.5 million men.

The Russians had at most 190,000 men when they invaded Ukraine in February 2022. No way they had the capability to conquer the country. And they didn’t try to conquer the country. And again, as I said, Putin’s intentions were manifestly clear before the war that he had no interest in conquering Ukraine. He fully understood that conquering that whole country would be like swallowing a porcupine.

AARON MATÉ: And if you compare the Russian invasion of Ukraine to how the US went into Baghdad 2003, the first thing they do is attack the capital. They try to knock out the head of government, Saddam Hussein.

Russia obviously didn’t do that. There were no missile strikes on the presidential office in Kiev, no missile strikes on basic infrastructure, and the railroads even left intact, even though those railroads supply military equipment. But what Putin did get, though, in those early stages was negotiations, which apparently went somewhere to the point of a tentative deal reached between Ukraine and Russia, in which Russia would have withdrawn to its pre-invasion lines and Ukraine would have basically pledged neutrality.

We know from various reports that the West stood in the way. Boris Johnson reportedly came over, told Zelensky that, ‘If you sign a deal with Russia, we’re not going to back you up with security guarantees.’ Putin recently produced a document when he was speaking before some African leaders that he said was signed by Ukraine, and he also accused the West of sabotaging this deal. Based on the evidence you’ve seen, do you think that’s a fair rendering of events, that there was a serious deal reached but the West stood in the way?

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: Couple of points. I think there was a potential deal. Whether it could have been worked out had the West not interfered remains to be seen. There’re some very complicated issues that had to be resolved here, and they weren’t fully resolved in the negotiations at Istanbul. So, I would say it was a potential deal; it had real promise, for sure.

I do think that the West moved in, the British and the Americans, to sabotage the negotiations, because as I said earlier, Aaron, I think that we felt we could defeat the Russians. When those negotiations were taking place in March, at that juncture it looked like the Ukrainians were holding their own on the battlefield, and that simple fact coupled with our belief in sanctions made us think we had the Russians right where we wanted them, and the last thing we wanted was a deal. This was time to inflict a significant defeat on Russia, so I think that’s what was going on.

Now, just to go back to what you said about Putin’s goals going into Ukraine, I think you’re exactly right, that he was not interested in conquering Ukraine, as I said. What he wanted to do was coerce the Ukrainians into coming to the negotiating table and working out a deal. That’s what he wanted. He did not even want to incorporate the Donbass into a Greater Russia. He understood that would be a giant headache. He preferred to leave the Donbass inside of Ukraine. But what happened here is that the West moved in when it looked like a possible deal was there to be had, and the West made sure that the Ukrainians walked away from the negotiations and that the war went on. And here we are today.

AARON MATÉ: A major goal of Russia is, it seems to me, on top of getting Ukraine to commit to neutrality, to not joining NATO, was to get Ukraine to implement the Minsk Accords—the deal that it had signed back in 2015 to end the war in the Donbass. And I’m wondering what you make of the admissions that have come out since Russia invaded, from NATO leaders like Angela Merkel of Germany and François Hollande of France, who helped broker the Minsk Accords, where they said—and this mirrors what Ukrainian leaders like [Petro] Poroshenko said, too—that Minsk wasn’t intended to actually make peace; it was intended to buy time for Ukraine to build up its military to fight the Russian-backed rebels in the east of Ukraine and Russia itself. Do you buy that from Merkel and Hollande, or do you think they’re maybe just trying to save face and reject criticism from hawks who believe that their efforts to try to broker peace and end the war on the Donbass somehow enabled Russia and Putin?

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: It’s really hard to know what to think, for sure. I mean, the fact is that Hollande, Poroshenko, and Angela Merkel have all said very clearly that they were not serious at the time about negotiating some sort of settlement in accordance with the Minsk II guidelines. If they say that, it would seem to me to be true. Is it really the case that they’re all lying now to cover up their past behavior so that they don’t damage their reputations in the West? I guess that’s possible. I don’t know how you would prove one way or the other where the truth lies. But my tendency in these situations is to believe what people say, and if Angela Merkel tells me that she was just pretending in the Minsk negotiations because she wanted to help arm up the Ukrainians, I tend to believe her. But maybe she’s not telling the truth. Who knows for sure?

AARON MATÉ: And going back to what you said earlier, about how the US did nothing to prevent this war and in some ways may have even egged it on before February 2022, given that the Biden Administration refused to address Russia’s core concerns of NATO expansion and the NATO military infrastructure surrounding Russia, which Russia and its draft treaties that it had submitted in December 2021 proposed, that NATO basically roll back its NATO military infrastructure around Russia to pre-1997 lines. Given that, the Biden Administration pretty much refused to discuss any of that with maybe some minor exceptions, from a realist perspective, is there any room now for the Biden Administration to go back on that and to actually discuss the issues that it wouldn’t discuss prior to the invasion? And if they won’t discuss those issues, then what kind of future are we looking at?

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: Well, let me make a quick point. I think your description of the American position in December 2021 and in the run-up to the war in February 2022 is correct. But it’s also important to emphasize—and people in the West don’t want to hear it, but it is true—that the Russians were desperate to avoid a conflict. The idea that Putin was chomping at the bit to invade Ukraine so he could make it part of Greater Russia, it’s just not a serious argument. The Russians did not want a war, and they did, I believe, everything possible to avoid a war. They just couldn’t get the Americans to play ball with them. The Americans were unwilling to negotiate in a serious way. Period. End of story.

Now, what can we do today? In effect you’re asking whether we can go back to where we were before the war broke out, or maybe even where we were in March 2022, shortly after the war broke out, when the negotiations in Istanbul were ongoing. I think we are well past the point where we can work out any kind of meaningful deal. I think that first of all, both sides are so deeply committed to winning at this point in time that it’s hard to imagine them negotiating any kind of meaningful peace agreement. Both sides can win and both sides are committed to winning, so negotiating the deal now at the general level is, I think, not possible.

But when you get into the details, the Russians are bent on keeping the territory that they have now conquered, and I believe the Russians are intent on conquering more country, more of Ukraine. The Russians want to make sure that Ukraine ends up as a dysfunctional rump state and cannot become a viable member of NATO at any time in the future. So, I think that what the Russians will end up doing is cleaving off a huge chunk of Ukrainian territory, and then going to great lengths to keep Ukraine in a terrible—both economic and political—situation. They’ll do everything they can to continue strangling the Ukrainian economy, because they do not want Ukraine to be in a position where it becomes a viable member of the Western alliance. So, the idea that the Russians would now agree to give up the territory that they’ve conquered and pull back to the borders that existed in February of 2022, I think is almost unthinkable.

Now, you may say they would do this if Ukraine became a neutral state, it gave up its aspirations to become a part of NATO. First of all, I don’t think that Ukraine is anytime soon going to agree to become a neutral state. It’s going to want some sort of security guarantee, and the only group of countries that can provide that security guarantee are NATO countries. So, it’s hard to see that bond between Ukraine and NATO being completely severed.

Furthermore, the Russians are going to worry about the fact that Ukraine will one day say, ‘We’re neutral,’ and then the next day they’ll change their mind and form some sort of alliance with the West, and the end result is the Russians will have given up all that territory and Ukraine will no longer be neutral. So, I think from a Russian point of view what makes sense is just to conquer a lot of territory in Ukraine and make sure you turn Ukraine into a dysfunctional rump state. I hate to say this because it portrays such a dark future for Ukraine and also for international relations more generally, but I think the mess that we have created here, the disaster we have created here, cannot be underestimated in terms of its scope.

AARON MATÉ: There was a recent acknowledgment in The New York Times from NATO officials that pretty much said the same thing, that their policy, they acknowledge, incentivizes Russia to continue the war and take more territory. I’ll read you the passage.

They’re talking about the US policy of rejecting any territorial deal with Russia inside Ukraine, and also this policy of leaving an open door for Ukraine to join NATO. This is what The New York Times says, quote, “…as several American and European officials acknowledged during the Vilnius summit,”—the NATO Summit in Lithuania—”such commitments make it all the more difficult to begin any real cease-fire or armistice negotiations. And promises of Ukraine’s eventual accession to NATO—after the war is over—create a strong incentive for Moscow to hang onto any Ukrainian territory it can and to keep the conflict alive.”

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: That’s exactly right. But that raises the question, why don’t Western leaders change the policy regarding bringing Ukraine into the alliance?

I mean, they’re exactly right, and if you go back to what caused this war, the principal cause of this war, as the evidence makes perfectly clear, is the idea that we were going to bring Ukraine into NATO. And if we had abandoned that policy before February 2022, we probably wouldn’t have a war today. Then once the war starts, we keep doubling down on bringing Ukraine into NATO. We’ve refused to give up on that. But the end result is, that just incentivizes the Russians more and more to make sure that that never happens, or if it happens, Ukraine is a dysfunctional rump state.

So, we are playing—we, meaning the West—are playing a key role here in incentivizing the Russians to destroy Ukraine. It makes absolutely no sense to me from a strategic point of view or from a moral point of view. You think of the death and destruction that’s being wrought in Ukraine, and you think that this could have easily been avoided. It makes you sick to your stomach just to contemplate it all.

AARON MATÉ: What do you make of US policy so far when it comes to weaponry? There’s been so many times where the Biden Administration says publicly that certain weapons are not going to Ukraine, but then later on they relent and send those weapons, and now it looks like F-16s will be the latest on that list. And by contrast, recently John Kirchhofer, who is with the US Defense Intelligence Agency, said that unlike what Biden and Blinken are saying, he said the war is at a stalemate. And he also said that none of these heavy weapons are going to make a difference to allow Ukraine to break through.

John Kirchhofer: Certainly, we are at a bit of a stalemate. We do see incremental gains by Ukraine as they commit to this counteroffensive over the summer, but we haven’t seen anything to really help them break through, for example, to drive to the Crimea. It’s interesting to me, we tend to focus on some of the munitions that we, the West, provides to Ukraine as they fight this out, and we look at some of them as holy grails as they play out. So, if you think of HIMARS, certainly that led to some sensational tactical events. And then you see the Storm Shadow missile doing the same thing, and now we’re talking about dual purpose improved conventional munitions or cluster bombs. None of these, unfortunately, are the holy grail that Ukraine is looking forward to, that I think will allow them in the near term to break through.

AARON MATÉ: So, you have that being acknowledged by somebody with the Defense Intelligence Agency. But that doesn’t seem to have entered the thinking of the White House, which keeps sort of slowly drip-feeding these heavy weapons systems that had previously been taken off of the table.

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: Well, I think there’s no question that we’re desperate here. You used the word ‘stalemate.’ In a way it’s a stalemate. If you focus on how much territory each side has conquered, it looks like a stalemate. But I don’t look at territory conquered as the key indicator of what’s going on in this war.

In a war of attrition like this, the key indicator is the casualty exchange rate. That’s what you want to pay attention to. You want to focus on how many people each side has available to draft, to put in the military, and then you want to focus on the casualty exchange rate. And, in my opinion, the casualty exchange rate decisively favors the Russians who also happen to have many more people than the Ukrainians do. This is a disastrous situation for Ukraine. It makes it almost impossible for Ukraine to win this war, and it makes it likely that the Russians will prevail.

So, the question is, if you’re the West, how do you rectify this situation? What do you do to keep the Ukrainians in the fight? And you want to remember here that the Russians have a formidable industrial base, and they have lots of military equipment—lots of heavy equipment, lots of artillery, lots of tanks. They have assembly lines that are churning out lots of equipment. The Ukrainians have hardly any assembly lines at all; they’re completely dependent on the West for weaponry.

So, the question then becomes, what can we give them? And there’re real limits to what we have, right? We don’t have that much more artillery to give them. So, it’s no surprise that therefore we’re giving them cluster munitions. It’s no surprise that in recent months we’ve emphasized giving them tanks when what they really needed was artillery. So, you see, we’re in a pickle here, in that we’ve picked a fight with a country that has a huge industrial base that can produce lots of weaponry, and our ally—the country that’s doing the fighting for us, the dirty work on the battlefield—does not have weaponry of its own, so we have to supply it. And again, we have real limits to what we can give them.

So, what’s going on is that we give them HIMAR missiles, and everybody says this is the magic weapon, it’s going to rectify the casualty exchange ratio, it’s going to help the Ukrainians prevail on the battlefield. That proves not to be the case, right? And then we start talking about giving them sophisticated tanks. We give them sophisticated tanks, be they Leopard 2s, Challengers, or what have you, and they’re supposed to be the magic weapons. And that doesn’t work out. Then we talk about training nine brigades and creating a Panzer Forest that can punch through the Russian defenses, to do to the Russians what the Germans did to the French in 1940. And, of course, on June 4th of this year the Ukrainians launched their counteroffensive, and they used a lot of those NATO-trained and -armed troops—and it didn’t work. They didn’t even get to the first defensive lines of the Russian forces. They ended up fighting in the gray zone and suffering huge casualties.

So, what’s the solution? Well, we’ve got to give them F-16s and we’ve got to give them ATACMS [Army Tactical Missile Systems, long-range guided missiles], and if we give them that, that will reverse the balance of power between these combatants, reverse the casualty exchange ratio, and the Ukrainians will end up prevailing on the battlefield.

This is a pipe dream. It’s hard to believe that people in the Pentagon who study war for a living believe that F-16s or ATACMS are going to change the balance of power on the battlefield. They are doing this in large part because we have to do something, and this is really all we can do. So, we can’t quit, we got to stay in the fight, we got to continue to arm the Ukrainians. This is the only game in town. So, what we’re doing here, giving them weapons that we can publicly say and then the media can repeat it, that these are war-winning weapons, and once the Ukrainians get these weapons and learn how to use them, once they learn how to fly F-16s, the balance of power will be rectified, and we’ll live happily ever after.

Again, this is not going to happen. The Ukrainians are in deep trouble. We have led them down the primrose path, and there is nothing we can do at this point in time to rectify that situation.

AARON MATÉ: Well, speaking of which, that was your famous warning back in 2015, that the West is leading Ukraine down the primrose path and, according to you, the end result is that Ukraine is going to get wrecked.

John Mearsheimer: What’s going on here is that the West is leading Ukraine down the primrose path, and the end result is that Ukraine is going to get wrecked. And I believe that the policy that I’m advocating, which is neutralizing Ukraine and then building it up economically and getting it out of the competition between Russia on one side and NATO on the other side, is the best thing that could happen to the Ukrainians.

AARON MATÉ: This was your warning back in 2015. Why were you so confident of this? What made you so sure that this was the inevitable path?

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: Well, I thought it was very clear when the crisis first broke out in February 2014. Remember the crisis breaks out on February 22, 2014, and at that point in time it’s clear that the Russians view Ukraine in NATO as an existential threat. They make no bones about that. And furthermore, it’s clear that if we persist to try to bring Ukraine into NATO, if we persist to try to make Ukraine a Western bulwark on Russia’s borders, that the Russians will destroy Ukraine, they’ll wreck Ukraine. They make that clear at the time.

So, that’s in 2014, and then if you look at what happens from 2014 up till 2022, when the war breaks out, when it goes from being a crisis to a war, if you look at what happens then, the Russians make it clear, at point after point, that Ukraine in NATO is an existential threat, but what do we do? We double down at every turn. We continue to commit ourselves more forcefully each year to bringing Ukraine into NATO. And my view in the very beginning was that this was going to lead to disaster.

Now, a lot of people like to portray my views as anomalous. I’m one of a handful of people, folks like me, Jeffrey Sachs, Steve Cohen [Stephen F. Cohen], who make these kinds of arguments. But if you think about it, back in the 1990s, when the subject of NATO expansion was being debated, there were a large number of very prominent members of the foreign policy establishment who said that NATO expansion would end up in disaster. This included people like George Kennan, William Perry—who at the time was the Secretary of Defense.

AARON MATÉ: He almost resigned, he says.

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: Pardon?

AARON MATÉ: He almost resigned, he says, over the issue of NATO expansion. When Clinton expanded NATO, he said he considered resigning, I believe.

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: Yes, that’s exactly right. And, by the way, there was widespread opposition to NATO expansion inside the Pentagon at that point in time. And all this is to say that those people were right.

And one of my favorite examples is Angela Merkel. When the decision was made in April 2008 at the Bucharest Summit—the Bucharest NATO Summit—to bring Ukraine into NATO, Angela Merkel and Nicholas Sarkozy, who was then the French leader, both of them were adamantly opposed to bringing Ukraine into NATO. This is when the trouble started, April 2008. Angela Merkel was bitterly opposed, and she subsequently said that the reason that she was opposed was that she understood that Putin would interpret it as a declaration of war. Just think about that. Angela Merkel said that in 2008, when she opposed the idea of bringing Ukraine—and Georgia, by the way—into NATO, she opposed it. She opposed it because she understood that Putin would interpret it as a declaration of war. So, there are a lot of people besides Jeff Sachs, Steve Cohen, and John Mearsheimer who understood that this whole crusade to expand NATO eastward was going to end up in disaster.

AARON MATÉ: Let me ask you a personal question. You were friends with Steve Cohen, who I knew very well. He was a hero of mine and a friend. I’m wondering, it seems to me that since his passing [in 2020] and since the Ukraine War escalated with Russia’s invasion, you should have taken his place as Enemy Number One in the US academy in terms of someone willing to speak out and counter the establishment point of view. I’m just wondering whether you agree with that, and whether it’s given you any more empathy for Stephen, and what that’s been like for you, and what you make of the space for debate and how it compares to previous controversial issues that you’ve spoken out on. You’re very critical of the Israel Lobby. You spoke out against the Iraq War, how all that compares to the climate we’re in today.

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: Well, just to talk about Steve Cohen for a minute, I think Steve was out front on this issue before I was. He was out front on the issue before 2014, when the crisis broke out. That’s when I first got involved. I wrote a well-known piece in Foreign Affairs in 2014 that said the crisis which broke out in February that year was the West’s fault, but Steve had been making the argument before I came into the game. And then he and I were involved in a number of different events where we were on the same side, making the same argument. And then, of course, Steve passed, and his presence in this debate is greatly missed, for sure. I think you could say that people like me and people like Jeff Sachs are in effect replacing Steve, where we’re making the arguments that he made for a long time. So, I think there is a lot of truth in that.

Now, with regard to your question about how receptive people are today to hearing the argument that I have to make or that Jeff Sachs has to make, where the argument that Steve was making when he was alive, I think there’s no question that it is more difficult to be heard today than it was when the Iraq War, for example, took place in 2003. I was deeply opposed to the Iraq War in a very public way, in late 2002 and up until March 2003, when the war started. And it was tough to make a case against the war in public in those days. It was tough to be heard, but it is much tougher to be heard today. The climate is much more Orwellian.

And I would note, by the way, Aaron, that Steve, who I talked to obviously about these issues a lot when he was still alive, told me on more than one occasion that during the Cold War, when he would sometimes make arguments that one might categorize as pro-Soviet or sympathetic to the Soviet position, it was much easier then to be heard in the mainstream media, in places like The New York Times, for example, than it was in 2014 or 2016 in The New York Times. The cone of silence here is really quite remarkable. The extent to which people like Steve, people like Jeff Sachs, and people like me have sort of [been] kept out of the mainstream media is really quite remarkable. We have a conventional wisdom here, and the mainstream media is committed to policing the marketplace to make sure that people who disagree with that conventional wisdom are not heard, or if they are heard their arguments are perverted or countered immediately. It’s a terrible situation. It’s not the way life is supposed to work in a liberal democracy. You have to have some semblance of a marketplace of ideas if you want to have smart policies, because the fact is that governments often times do stupid things, or they pursue policies that look like they’re correct at the time but prove to be disastrous, and you want to have lots of people who disagree with those policies having an opportunity to voice their opinions before the policy is launched and after the policy is launched. But in this day and age, that’s very difficult to do, and that’s very depressing and distressing.

AARON MATÉ: Turning back to the battlefield today, are you at all concerned about a new front opening up? There’s recently been some heated rhetoric between Russia and Poland, Putin warning Poland not to attack Belarus, Belarus now hosting Wagner fighters and some of them talking about going back into Ukraine, or maybe opening up a new front with Poland. What do you make of all that talk, and does it possibly threaten a new front opening up, or is that overblown?

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: Well, that’s just one possible front. Another front is the Black Sea. It’s quite clear that the Russians are now moving towards blockading Ukrainian ports on the Black Sea, and the potential for conflict there is real. Then there’s the whole question of Moldova, and there’s all sorts of talk about a possible conflict there. Then there is the Baltic Sea. The Russians care greatly about the Baltic Sea because it’s the only way they can get to Kaliningrad. And if you look at all of the countries besides Russia that surround the Baltic Sea, they are now all NATO members now that Sweden and Finland have been brought into the alliance. If you look at the Arctic, looking down the road, the Arctic makes me very nervous. There are eight countries that are physically located in the Arctic. One is Russia, of course. The other seven are all NATO members now that Finland and Sweden are in the alliance. And with the ice melting and all sorts of questions about control of water and territory coming into play up there, the potential for conflict is very real. And the Russians and NATO are bumping into each other.

So, you have the Arctic, the Baltic Sea, Moldova, the Black Sea, and then the issue that you raised, which, at this point in time appears to be the one of most concern, and that is Poland coming into the war mainly in Belarusia. There’s also the question of what happens if Polish troops enter into western Ukraine. [Alexander] Lukashenko, who, of course, is the leader of Belarus, has made the argument that this is basically unacceptable to the Belarusians, so one can imagine a situation where Poland comes into western Ukraine and the Belarusians end up in a fight, and the Russians end up in a fight with the Poles in western Ukraine. I’m not saying that’s likely, but it’s possible.

And then if you look at the Polish-Belarusian border, as you pointed out, there are Wagner forces very close to that border, and not surprisingly the Poles have moved up their own forces to make sure that the Wagner forces don’t do anything against Poland. So, you have Wagner forces and Polish forces eyeball-to-eyeball on the Belarusian-Polish border. This is not a good situation. Who knows what the chain of command looks like with [Yevgeny]Prigozhin, who’s in charge of those Wagner forces, as best we can tell. So, there’s just all sorts of potential for trouble here.

And the general point I like to make is that we’re not going to get a meaningful peace agreement between Ukraine and the West on one side and the Russians on the other side. The best we can hope for is a cold peace, and a cold peace where the Russians are constantly looking for opportunities to improve their position, and the Ukrainians and the West are constantly looking for opportunities to improve their position. In both cases this means taking advantage of the other side. When you get into a cold peace, where both sides are operating that way, the potential for escalation and returning to a hot war is great. And you want to think about that in the context of the different possible fronts where war could break out that we were just discussing. There’s just a lot of potential for escalation in this area of the world. So, I think the situation between Russia on one side and the West on the other side, and of course Ukraine, is going to be very dangerous for a long time to come.

AARON MATÉ: Finally, Russia has already annexed four Ukrainian oblasts during its invasion, on top of Crimea in 2014. You mentioned earlier that you think Russia wants to take more territory. Where do you think Russia would be satisfied stopping its incursions? Where do you think its territorial ambitions end?

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: Well, on a very general level, Aaron, I think it’s important to understand that the Russians will want to take territory if they can do it militarily, and that remains to be seen. If they can do it militarily, they’ll want to take territory that has lots of Russian speakers and ethnic Russians in them. This is why I think they’ll take Odessa if they can, and Kharkiv if they can, and two other oblasts as well. But I think they will stay away from the oblasts or the areas of Ukraine that have lots of ethnic Ukrainians, because the resistance to a Russian occupation will be enormous. So, I think the demography of Ukraine limits how much territory the Russians can take.

Furthermore, I think military capability limits how much of Ukraine that they can take—that they don’t have the military capability to take all of it. And I think they’ll have to actually increase the size of the existing Russian army if they’re going to take the four oblasts. This includes Kharkiv and Odessa that are to the west of the four oblasts that they now control. But I think that they will try to take those eight oblasts, plus Crimea. Those eight oblasts, they already control four and they’ve taken Crimea; that represents about 23 percent of Ukrainian territory, before 2014. If they take the additional four oblasts to the west of the four they now have annexed, that will represent about 43 percent of Ukrainian territory that will have fallen into the hands of the Russians. And that I think will leave the Russians in a position where they are dealing with a Ukraine that is a truly dysfunctional state.

I hate to say that this is the likely outcome because it’s a such a terrible outcome from Ukraine’s point of view, but I think in all honesty that that is where this war is headed. I think the Russians are now playing hardball, where, as I said to you before, well past the situation that existed in March of 2022, or certainly in the period before the war broke out in February of 2022, where it’s possible to imagine a situation where the Russians pulled out of Ukraine in return for Ukrainian neutrality. Those days are gone, and a Russia that’s playing hardball is a Russia that’s going to conquer more territory if it can and do everything it can to wreck Ukraine.

AARON MATÉ: One more question, because we haven’t discussed this issue yet and it’s existential, and that’s the nuclear threat. There was a recent article by a Russian namedSergei Karaganov, who was an academic with the Russian Council on Foreign and Defense Policy. He’s said to be close to Putin. And I don’t know if you caught this essay, but he basically said that Russia needs to adopt a more bellicose nuclear posture, needs to embrace the use of First Use, and even threaten to use it in Ukraine in order to sufficiently scare the West. I don’t know if you caught that essay, but if you did, what did you make of it? And overall, is the nuclear threat, the threat of nuclear war something that you think is still a possibility when it comes to this war itself?

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: Well, I think that nuclear war is most likely if the Russians are losing. If the Russians are losing, if the Ukrainian military is rolling up Russian forces in eastern and southern Ukraine, and the sanctions are working and the Russians are on the verge of being knocked out of the ranks of the great powers, in that situation I think it’s likely that the Russians would turn to nuclear weapons, and they would use those nuclear weapons in Ukraine. They would not dare use them against NATO, but they would turn to nuclear weapons. I think, given the fact that the Russians are not losing and, if anything, are winning, therefore the likelihood of nuclear war is greatly reduced. I don’t want to say it’s been taken off the table for one second, but I think as long as the Russians are on the upside of the battle, not on the downside, the likelihood of nuclear use is very low.

Now, with regard to the Karaganov article, I read that to say that the Russians are likely to prevail, but to use rhetoric I’ve used, it’s going to be an ugly victory. I think he understands that the Russians are not going to win a decisive victory. They’re not going to end up with a neutral Ukraine, and they’re not going to end up in a situation where the West backs off. I think that Karaganov understands that even if the Russians capture more territory, and even if they turn Ukraine into a dysfunctional rump state, that you’re going to get at best a cold peace that’s going to be very dangerous. I referred to this in my Substack article as an ugly victory. And I think what he is basically saying is that it’s not clear that’s acceptable to the Russians over the long term. It’s not clear that Russia can afford to live in such circumstances over the long term. And if Russia were to use nuclear weapons, it might be a way of sending a wake-up message to the West. It might be a way of telling the West that they have to back off.

In other words, what’s going on here is Karaganov is talking about using nuclear weapons for coercive purposes. He’s interested in limited nuclear use for the purpose of getting the West to back off, getting the West to change its behavior and put an end to this ugly victory, and allow the Russians to have some sort of meaningful victory and to help create some sort of meaningful peace agreement. I think that he is right. The Russians at best can win an ugly victory. I think it’s just important to understand that. He senses, I think, quite correctly, the Russians are not going to win a decisive defeat. There’s no real happy ending to this story, that’s what he’s saying. And he’s saying that’s probably not acceptable, and we’ve got to figure out a way to move beyond a cold peace, and nuclear coercion may be a way to do that.

Now, is that an argument that’s likely to sell? I think it’s impossible to say, because we don’t know exactly what an ugly victory will look like, number one. Number two, we don’t know who will be in control in Russia in the future, who will have his or her finger on the trigger in Moscow when this ugly victory is becoming almost intolerable, and we certainly don’t know whether that person would be bold enough to countenance using nuclear weapons.

Is that possible, that someone might countenance using nuclear weapons, because Russia is in an intolerable situation? Yes, it’s one, but it’s an ugly victory, and that’s not acceptable. It is possible. I think there’s a non-trivial chance that there’ll be someone like Sergei Karaganov in power and who will think about using nuclear weapons. I bet that that will not happen, but who knows for sure? As you well know, it’s incredibly difficult to predict the future, especially when you’re talking about scenarios like that. But I think that’s what’s going on here—and again this just highlights how much trouble we’re in, no matter how this war turns out. As I said before, if the Russians are losing, I mean, they’re seriously losing the war, that’s where nuclear use is likely. And what Karaganov is saying is, even if we win it’s going to be an ugly victory and we may have to use nuclear weapons anyway. You want to think about where that leaves us.

And then there’s the whole question of, if Ukraine is really losing, let’s assume that the Ukrainian military cracks, let’s assume that the beating that it’s taking leads to a situation like the one that faced the French army in the spring of 1917—this is when the French army cracked, it’s when the French army mutinied—let’s assume that that happens, and the Ukrainians are on the run. Again, I’m not saying that’s going to happen, but it is a possibility. What is NATO going to do? Are we going to accept the situation where Ukraine is being defeated on the battlefield in a serious way by the Russians? I’m not so sure. And it may be possible in those circumstances that NATO will come into the fight. It may be possible that the Poles decide that they alone have to come into the fight, and once the Poles come into the fight in a very important way, that may bring us into the fight, and then you have a great power war involving the United States on one side and the Russians on the other. Again, I’m not saying this is likely, but it is a possibility. What we are doing here is, we’re spinning out plausible scenarios as to how this war can play out over time. And almost all the scenarios that one comes up with have an unhappy ending. Again, this just shows what a huge mistake we made not trying to settle this conflict before February 24, 2022.

AARON MATÉ: Well, based on this answer alone, I can see why you called one of your most recent pieces “The Darkness Ahead: Where the Ukraine War is Headed.” Very apt. John Mearsheimer, thank you so much for joining me.

John Mearsheimer is the R. Wendell Harrison Distinguished Service Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago, now writing on Substack.

Professor Mearsheimer, thanks so much.

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: It was my pleasure. Thank you for having me, Aaron.

On this day, 12 August, in 1939, British-French-Soviet military talks began in Leningrad. The British delegation was headed by an obscure admiral and the French by an obscure general; they had taken five days to get there by boat. The Soviet delegation was headed by the Defence Minister and the Chief of the General Staff. At the first meeting the Soviet side said it was there to negotiate a real agreement to combine against Hitler; what were they authorised to do? To talk said the Frenchman, let me get back to London said the Brit. A couple of days later London said he was there to talk. Not an auspicious beginning.

About a year after Hitler took power, Moscow realised Hitler was coming for it and everybody else. At Stalin’s direction, the Foreign Minister, Maksim Litvinov, starting pushing “collective security”: everybody who was threatened by Hitler should get together to resist him. Obviously, the three principal powers, Britain, France and the USSR, would be the leaders, but Poland, Romania, Hungary, Czechoslovakia were all on Hitler’s hitlist. Alone they would be eaten one by one, only united could they stop Hitler.

Litvinov didn’t have much success: he did get a treaty with France in 1935 but it turned out to have little content in practice. Meanwhile Poland, vitally important to any anti-Hitler scheme because it lay between the USSR and Germany, signed the very first non-aggression pact with Hitler in 1934 and collaborated in the carve-up of Czechoslovakia in 1938. Washington rejected overtures in 1934. The UK signed a naval agreement with Germany in 1935. Litvinov kept trying, and people like Winston Churchill agreed, but the Munich agreement of September 1938 pretty well killed it off. Without Britain, France or Poland, it couldn’t be done.

The fuse was burning: in March 1939 Berlin tore up the Munich agreement and dismembered the rest of Czechoslovakia; in April it denounced the Polish pact. Litvinov got Stalin’s agreement for one last try. Even though Stalin replaced Litvinov with Vyacheslav Molotov, he was still hopeful enough to send his two top military people to meet the Anglo-French delegation when it finally got there. But what hope was there for a collective anti-Hitler alliance if the only result from years of trying was a low-level delegation with no negotiation powers and lethargic time appreciation? Evidently nothing would be coming from London or Paris or Warsaw. A low-level Anglo-French mission in, say, 1935 would have been a base to build on but in late summer 1939 it was absurd.

If you were Stalin, what would you do when your Plan A is dead? You know war is coming, you believe Hitler when he says his aim is to seize lebensraum to the east. Your potential allies don’t get it. What would you do?

While London and Paris dither and Warsaw dreams dreams (what dreams? Hitler just tore up the non-aggression pact you were counting on: you’re next) Hitler strikes. How about a non-aggression pact? Stalin seizes the chance, the agreement is immediately signed. Stalin knows perfectly well that Hitler is going to attack the USSR and so he starts to grab as much territory to the west as he can and put off the day as long as possible.

In a couple of weeks you will see a whole bunch of op-eds saying that those two evil BFFs got together to do the dirty on Poland and start the war. You won’t see any mention of the failed Soviet collective security attempt. Why not? Well, the authors probably haven’t heard about it (lots of things have gone down the memory hole) and, if they had, it would spoil the propaganda value of their rant about wicked Russia.

FURTHER READING. I knew this happened because AJP Taylor’s Origins of the Second World War was a set text in my university days and he mentions it. But the man who’s really done the big work on it today is the Canadian historian Michael Jabara Carley. Here’s an interview with him that covers the bigger picture and his trilogy about to be published, an essay on what I call Stalin’s Plan A, and a book 1939: The Alliance That Never Was and the Coming of World War II. Every now and again the corporate media forgets to forget it: “Stalin ‘planned to send a million troops to stop Hitler if Britain and France agreed pact'”.

(By the way, while the West has pretty much forgotten this, you can be sure that Moscow hasn’t.)

Not Putin! Zelensky. https://t.co/VKqfvB8zRx" / Twitter

Hubris consists in believing that a contrived narrative can, in and of itself, bring victory. It is a fantasy that has swept through the West – most emphatically since the 17th century. Recently, the Daily Telegraph published a ridiculous nine minute video purporting to show that ‘narratives win wars’, and that set-backs in the battlespace are incidentals: What matters is to have a thread of unitary narrative articulated, both vertically and horizontally, throughout the spectrum – from the special forces’ soldier in the field through to the pinnacle of the political apex.

The gist of it is that ‘we’ (the West) have compelling a narrative, whilst Russia’s is ‘clunky’ – ‘Us winning therefore, is inevitable’.

It is easy to scoff, but nonetheless we can recognise in it a certain substance (even if that substance is an invention). Narrative is now how western élites imagine the world. Whether it is the pandemic emergency, the climate or Ukraine ‘emergencies’ – all are re-defined as ‘wars’. All are ‘wars’ that are to be fought with a unitary imposed narrative of ‘winning’, against which all contrarian opinion is forbidden.

The obvious flaw to this hubris is that it requires you to be at war with reality. At first, the public are confused, but as the lies proliferate, and lie is layered upon lie, the narrative separates further and further from touched reality, even as mists of dishonesty continue to swathe themselves loosely around it. Public scepticism sets in. Narratives about the ‘why’ of inflation; whether the economy be healthy or not; or why we must go to war with Russia, begin to fray.

Western élites have ‘bet their shirts’ on maximum control of ‘media platforms’, absolute messaging conformity and ruthless repression of protest as their blueprint for a continued hold in power.

Yet, against the odds, the MSM is losing its hold over the U.S. audience. Polls show growing distrust of the U.S. MSM. When Tucker Carlson’s first ‘anti-message’ Twitter show appeared, the noise of tectonic plates grinding against each other was unmissable, as more than 100 million (one in three) Americans listened to iconoclasm.

The weakness to this new ‘liberal’ authoritarianism is that its key narrative myths can get busted. One just has; slowly, people begin to speak reality.

Ukraine: How do you win an unwinnable war? Well, the élite answer has been through narrative. By insisting against reality that Ukraine is winning, and Russia is ‘cracking’. But such hubris eventually is busted by facts on the ground. Even the western ruling classes can see their demand for a successful Ukrainian offensive has flopped. At the end, military facts are more powerful than political waffle: One side is destroyed, its many dead become the tragic ‘agency’ to upending dogma.

“We will be in a position to extend an invitation to Ukraine to join the Alliance when Allies agree and conditions are met … [however] unless Ukraine wins this war, there’s no membership issue to be discussed at all” – Jens Stoltenberg’s statement at Vilnius. Thus, after urging Kiev to throw more (hundreds of thousands) of its men into the jaws of death to justify NATO membership, the latter turns its back on its protégé. It was, after all, an unwinnable war from the beginning.

The hubris, at one level, lay in NATO’s pitting of its alleged ‘superior’ military doctrine and weapons versus that of a deprecated, Soviet-style, hide-bound, Russian military rigidity – and ‘incompetence’.

But military facts on the ground have exposed the western doctrine as hubris – with Ukrainian forces decimated, and its NATO weaponry lying in smoking ruins. It was NATO that insisted on re-enacting the Battle of 73 Easting (from the Iraqi desert, but now translated into Ukraine).

In Iraq, the ‘armoured fist’ punched easily into Iraqi tank formations: It was indeed a thrusting ‘fist’ that knocked the Iraqi opposition ‘for six’. But, as the U.S. commander at that tank battle (Colonel Macgregor), frankly admits, its outcome against a de-motivated opposition largely was fortuitous.

Nonetheless ‘73 Easting’ is a NATO myth, turned into the general doctrine for the Ukrainian forces – a doctrine structured around Iraq’s unique circumstance.

The hubris – in line with the Daily Telegraph video – however, ascends vertically to impose the unitary narrative of a coming western ‘win’ onto the Russian political sphere too. It is an old, old story that Russia is military weak, politically fragile, and prone to fissure. Conor Gallagher has shown with ample quotes that it was exactly the same story in World War 2, reflecting a similar western underestimation of Russia – combined with a gross overestimation of their own capabilities.

The fundamental problem with ‘delusion’ is that the exit from it (if it occurs at all) moves at a much slower pace than events. The mismatch can define future outcomes.

It may be in the Team Biden interest now to oversee an orderly NATO withdrawal from Ukraine – such that it avoids becoming another Kabul debacle.

For that to happen, Team Biden needs Russia to accept a ceasefire. And here lies the (the largely overlooked) flaw to that strategy: It simply is not in the Russian interest to ‘freeze’ the situation. Again, the assumption that Putin would ‘jump’ at the western offer of a ceasefire is hubristic thinking: The two adversaries are not frozen in the basic meaning of the term – as in a conflict in which neither side has been able to prevail over the other, and are stuck.

Put simply, whereas Ukraine structurally hovers at the brink of implosion, Russia, by contrast, is fully plenipotent: It has large, fresh forces; it dominates the airspace; and has near domination of the electromagnetic airspace. But the more fundamental objection to a ceasefire is that Moscow wants the present Kiev collective gone, and NATO’s weapons off the battle field.

So, here is the rub: Biden has an election, and so it would suit the Democratic campaign needs to have an ‘orderly wind-down’. The Ukraine war has exposed too many wider American logistic deficiencies. But Russia has its’ interests, too.

Europe is the party most trapped by ‘delusion’ – starting from the point at which they threw themselves unreservedly into the Biden ‘camp’. The Ukraine narrative broke at Vilnius. But the amour propre of certain EU leaders puts them at war with reality. They want to continue to feed Ukraine into the grinder – to persist in the fantasy of ‘total win’: “There is no other way than a total win – and to get rid of Putin … We have to take all risks for that. No compromise is possible, no compromise”.

The EU Political Class have made so many disastrous decisions in deference to U.S. strategy – decisions that go directly against Europeans’ own economic and security interests – that they are very afraid.

If the reaction of some of these leaders seems disproportionate and unrealistic (“There is no other way than a total win – and to get rid of Putin”) – it is because this ‘war’ touches on a deeper motivations. It reflects existential fears of an unravelling of the western meta-narrative that will take down both its hegemony, and the western financial structure with it.

The western meta-narrative “from Plato to NATO, is one of superior ideas and practices whose origins lie in ancient Greece, and have since been refined, extended, and transmitted down the ages (through the Renaissance, the scientific revolution and other supposedly uniquely western developments), so that we in the west today are the lucky inheritors of a superior cultural DNA”.

This is what the narrators of the Daily Telegraph video probably had at the back of their minds when they insist that ‘Our narrative wins wars’. Their hubris resides in the implicit presumption: that the West somehow always wins – is destined to prevail – because it is the recipient of this privileged genealogy.

Of course, outside of general understanding, it is accepted that notions of ‘a coherent West’ has been invented, repurposed and put to use in different times and places. In her new book, The West, classical archaeologist Naoíse Mac Sweeney takes issue with the ‘master myth’ by pointing out that it was only “with the expansion of European overseas imperialism over the seventeenth century, that a more coherent idea of the West began to emerge – one being deployed as a conceptual tool to draw the distinction between the type of people who could legitimately be colonised, and those who could legitimately be colonizers”.

With the invention of the West came the invention of Western history – an elevated and exclusive lineage that provided an historical justification for the Western domination. According to the English jurist and philosopher Francis Bacon, there were only three periods of learning and civilization in human history: “one among the Greeks, the second among the Romans, and the last among us, that is to say, the nations of Western Europe”.

The deeper fear of western political leaders therefore – complicit in the knowledge that the ‘Narrative’ is a fiction that we tell ourselves, despite knowing that it is factually false – is that our era has been made increasingly and dangerously contingent on this meta-myth.

They quake, not just at a ‘Russia empowered’, but rather at the prospect the new multi-polar order led by Putin and Xi that is sweeping the globe will tear down the myth of Western Civilisation.

I have frequently noted that Russian President Vladimir Putin is not the Stalin or Hitler of today. He is not an irrational, radical, bloodthirsty dictator or imperialist. Nor is he a liberal, democratic republican. Rather, Putin is a moderate authoritarian leader, who will democratize or authoritarianize dependent on what is beneficial for social and political stability, state integrity, and preservation of his and his allies’ hold on power. He is a balancer, who weighs and counterbalances various political forces rather than crushing them. The latter choice is made only when there is no other way to protect the cardinal goals mentioned above. This is true for Putin’s conduct of both domestic and foreign affairs. Putin always tries to find the golden mean, a fair compromise in any dispute between Russia and other states, between himself and other forces comprising the Russian elite clans, and between competing groups. These orientations were on display in the way Putin dealt with Wagner chief Yevgenii Prigozhin’s armed revolt against the top military brass, in particular Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu and Chief of the General Staff of the Russian Armed Forces Valerii Gerasimov.

Rather than crushing the rebellion immediately, which would have been relatively easy for the Russian army to accomplish, Putin hoped and sought to avoid ‘major bloodshed’ in a way similar to the way Mikhail Gorbachev rejected the January 1991 Baltic coups attempted by Soviet Party-state loyalists against the secessionist Baltic republics. This was one of the final straws that drove the Party-state to direct a coup against Gorbachev himself seven months later in Moscow—a coup Putin played no small in helping to quell in St. Petersburg. Putin’s political career in a reunifying Germany, a collapsing Soviet state, and the disorderly Yeltsin years of organized crime violence and the Chechen war familiarized Putin with the dangers of rebellion—a lesson he had long ago drawn from his reading of the 1917 Russian Revolution and the treasonous role played by Vladimir Lenin and the Bolsheviks during World War I.

Now Putin was facing a far more ticklish situation than that of January 1991 but not as global yet as that of the August coup, no less 1917. The situation can be described as the following. A long-time acquaintance and political ally had betrayed his direct subordinates in the military chain of command – the two top military officials in the Russian state, Shoigu and Gerasimov – and two key pillars of both Putin’s political power and the most important operation in Putin’s political lifetime. There was the risk that had Prigozhin’s march proceeded much longer or actual large-scale conflict exploded inside Russia that morale at the front would have plummeted, risking the success of the special military operation. Moreover, the ‘special military operation’ (SVO) or war in Ukraine provoked by NATO expansion will determine whether the new Russian state – one Putin has spent nearly three decades rebuilding – will survive in its present form and how Putin will go down in history.

In this high-tension situation laced with the sense of personal and political betrayal how did Putin respond? He did not panic, he did not overreact, he methodically employed a sound strategy to keep the crisis from escalating into massive domestic military battle with some, not great, but some potential to spread and even devolve into civil war, depending on his and others’ next steps after a major battle around Serpukhov. He deployed the stick and the carrot, he posed a threat and took the way out. He positioned forces both in Serpukhov and along the other main artery leading to Moscow from the south where some 5,000 Wagner forces were moving on the capitol. He then issued a televised address in which he designated Prigozhin a traitor threatening the Russian state’s stability in a time of war. In other words, Prigozhin could make no mistake in concluding that should he continue the rebellion, he (and his forces) would face certain death or lifetime imprisonment (there is no death penalty in Russia) and go down in history as a modern day Mazepa or Tsarevich Aleksei, both of whom betrayed Russia under Peter the Great by going over to the side of the Swedes and Hapsburgs, respectively. In this situation Prigozhin had little choice but to accept the exit Putin agreed to—his exile to Belarus rather than arrest, trial, and prison for he and his Wagner forces.

Putting aside the risks involved in allowing Prigozhin and Wagner to remain free and intact, albeit trapped abroad, we are told that Belarusian President Aleksandr Lukashenka phoned Putin and proposed this way out from the crisis. However, it cannot be excluded that it was Putin who phoned Lukashenka, who Putin knows is a friend of Prigozhin of even greater duration and who might be willing to help his friend Prigozhin out of the bind he got himself into. Remember Putin needed an off ramp as desperately as Prigozhin. If it was Lukashenka who phoned Putin and proposed the way out, Putin theoretically could have rejected it. Certainly, a less discerning and balanced leader might have. But Putin is not that leader, and this was not theory. The moderate, careful, and methodical Putin who seeks to avoid extremes in solutions and outcomes was the Russian leader in a very real situation.

Despite Putin’s balanced leadership in this crisis, there can be no doubt that in certain, mostly ultra-nationalist, hardline circles, he has lost some of his authority. Prigozhin was popular among them, and Putin did not allow him to reveal an even uglier side that surely would have come out if the crisis would have ever devolved into a wider rebellion or civil war and Prigozhin came to believe he should and could succeed in seizing power. For these radical circles and perhaps even among others, Prigozhin remains a hero. His survival and potential revival in Belarus, which has shown some ability to destabilize, remains something Putin (and Lukashenka) will have to keep an eye on, as his most recent statements are not repentant (https://t.me/Prigozhin_hat/3815). For the present, Putin emerges from the crisis somewhat tainted politically. Hardliners and less discerning Russians will ask why he did not crush Prigozhin or address Prigozhin’s complaints. Others will rightly say that Prigozhin and his revolt are a consequence of Putin’s ill-advised patronage and tolerance of Prigozhin.

Indeed, Putin tried yesterday and today to shore up solidarity between state and society and inside the state, convening and addressing an assembly of security forces as a show of unity and loyalty to him, the state, and the law. First, last night he gave a short address thanking the people and soldiers under arms for unity and support for the state and its president in the face of the potential instability posed by Prigozhin’s march (www.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/71528). That the people’s support is his central concern at this point and more generally is reflected by the fact that this address remained first on the official Kremlin site of the Russian president even after subsequent address were made today (see below), breaking the usual chronological order of videos and news on the site (www.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/71528). Should Putin’s popularity fall below 50 percent and with his aging, there might be some in his inner circle who would be willing to send him into retirement should such crises or debacles at the front become routine. Thus, Putin also checked in with the leaders of the seven main ‘siloviki’ (organs of coercion and law enforcement) departments the same day in a mostly closed meeting devote, according to Putin, to addressing issues related to the recent days’ events, including likely domestic political stability and implications for foreign affairs and the war (www.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/71530). Present was Defense Minister Shoigu, who might be a little concerned reasonably about the recategorization of the criminal case opened against Prigozhin as an “intraelite conflict,” investigation of such a case could determine or be arranged to put forth a conclusion that Shoigu was perhaps in some way also responsible for the conflict, leading to his dismissal a few months down the road.

This morning Putin addressed briefly an assembly of units of the military, National Guard, FSB, MVD, and FSO troops and officers praising their unity and support of the state and social order during the revolt, “standing in the way of troubles (smuta) that inevitably would have led to chaos” and having “ defended the constitutional order, the life, security and freedom of our citizens, saved our homeland from disturbances, and actually stopped a civil war. After a minute of silence for the some 20 pilots killed in fighting the advancing Wagner rebels, he emphasized: “Your determination and courage, as well as the consolidation of the entire Russian society, played a huge, decisive role in stabilizing the situation.” (www.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/71533). A few hours later he addressed a select group of what appeared to be young unit commanders, seemingly pilots, to thank them for their service. In the process, he underscored the state’s financing of both Wagner and Prigozhin’s catering company ‘Concord’, while implying that Prigozhin, whom he identified as “the owner” of Wagner and Concord, may have stolen some of those funds, which he said would now be investigated (www.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/71535). Analysts and Russian citizens might ask themselves what Putin and other members of his government knew about Prigozhin’s misuse of funds earlier and when did they know it.

Despite the bad residue and stain on Putin’s authority left by the Wagner revolt, any objective analysis of his handling of it has to conclude that Putin managed the crisis capably, calmly, carefully, and conservatively. He made no rash moves, demonstrating a desire to save lives rather than exact revenge and found a moderate, peaceful solution to a conflict fraught with potential for great bloodshed. If only NATO had been as judicious and balanced from 1995-2023, then we might have seen the great bloodshed that has resulted in Ukraine since 2014.

The USSR collapsed in on itself, not from the war in Afghanistan (1979-89), but from the Chernobyl disaster (April 26, 1989). The Soviets suddenly realized that the state was no longer in control. The members of the Warsaw Pact, whom Leonid Brezhnev had made vassals, revolted. The churches, the Communist Youth and the gays of East Germany brought down the Berlin Wall [1]. Not only did the USSR not react, but also it abandoned its allies outside Europe, especially Cuba. The First Secretary of the party, Mikhail Gorbachev, turned from a reformer into a liquidator. The USSR broke up, creating many new independent states. Then it was a descent into hell. A few "New Russians" appropriated the collective assets and waged a machine-gun war in the streets of Moscow and St. Petersburg. Production collapsed. It became difficult to find food in many Russian regions. Life expectancy dropped sharply by about 15 years. The fall was so sharp that no one thought the country would recover quickly.

At the same time, the United States imagined what it could do without a rival. President George H. Bush Sr. addressed a full Congress on September 11, 1990, and floated the idea of a "New World Order. He had just staged a war in the Gulf that almost every state in the world joined. Even before the dissolution of the USSR, the United States had become the hyperpower that no one contests [2]. The Straussian Paul Wolfowitz elaborated a doctrine aimed at preventing the emergence of a new competitor, which would take the place of the Soviet Union. He unhesitatingly designated the political project of François Mitterrand and Helmut Köhl, the European Union, as the enemy to be destroyed. The European Union was flawed from the start, with the obligation to bring in all the Warsaw Pact states and the former USSR until its institutions became unworkable and the Maastricht Treaty stipulated that Washington would defend the EU.

The Pentagon was so sure that it no longer had an adversary that it demobilized one million men once Iraq was crushed. The research and development units of the armies were disbanded. President Bush Sr. believed that this was the last war and that an era of prosperity was beginning.

Although no one threatens the supremacy of the US, it feels that its internal balance is fragile. Their jobs have been relocated and their economy is based more on the internationalization of their currency, the dollar, than on the wealth they produce.

In 2001, the Straussians organized the September 11 attacks [3] and adopted the Rusmfeld/Cebrowski doctrine [4]. They suspended fundamental freedoms at home with the USA Patriot Act and wage an "endless war" that ravaged the "wider Middle East".

Russia, however, did not see it that way. In a speech given on February 11, 2007 at the Munich Security Conference [5], President Vladimir Putin denounced the Bush New World Order as "unipolar". According to him, it would be more accurate to describe it as "monopolistic". He notes that far from bringing peace, it sowed misfortune.

During the subprime crisis, the Russian intellectual Igor Panarin, who was working for the secret service at the time, studied the hypothesis that the dollar would collapse and the US population would be divided along ethnic lines, so that the country would eventually break up [6]. His work was wrongly interpreted as a replica of the hypothesis of the Frenchwoman Helène Carrère d’Encausse, who envisaged a break-up of the Soviet Union, also on an ethnic basis. None of this happened, nor was my hypothesis that the "American empire" would not survive the "Soviet empire" verified.

So what did happen?

In the 15 years since the Munich speech, Russia’s priority has been to rebuild its power. In 2012, it promised to protect Syria from Anglo-Saxon-backed jihadists (the so-called "Arab Spring"), but waited two years before intervening. When it came out of the shadows, it had plenty of new weapons. On the battlefield, it learned how to use them and trained its personnel, which it renewed every six months. Although Vladimir Putin, in his Munich speech, named Brazil, India and China as his privileged partners in building a multipolar world, he waited a long time before sealing a privileged relationship with Beijing. China, which is still partly developing, is putting a lot of demographic pressure on Russian Siberia, but it has understood that, in order to get out of the "monopoly dictatorship," it must be Russia’s ally. Both countries have suffered from the West and have experienced their lies. They have no future without each other.

Western defeat in Ukraine should be an eye-opener for the United States. The tensions examined by Igor Panarin are resurfacing. The attacks of September 11 and the "endless war" will have been nothing more than a diversion. They gave the "American empire" a reprieve, but nothing more.

In the 35 years since the collapse of the USSR, the United States has wrongly convinced itself that it has defeated its rival. In reality, it was the Soviets themselves who overthrew it. They believed that the Russians would need a century to recover from their mistakes. In fact, they have become the world’s leading military power. The United States has succeeded in subjugating Western and Central Europe, but today it must confront all the states it has bullied, led by Russia and China.

During this period, the Republicans and Democrats have given way to two new currents of thought: the Jacksonians around Donald Trump and the Wokists, puritans without God. We are currently witnessing an intensification of population movements in the USA. Electoral specialists note that many Americans are leaving the Woke regions and joining the Jacksonians [7]. Moving companies report that their clients are leaving large cities for smaller ones where life is cheaper and more pleasant. However, they all note that their customers increasingly cite a new motive: they are moving to join family members. This explanation is consistent with what Colin Woodard observed a decade ago [8]: U.S. citizens are clustering by community of origin. Real estate developers are observing the multiplication of gated communities. Their clients are grouping together with people like themselves, having inherited the same culture and belonging to the same social class. They often worry about the rise of insecurity and talk about a possible civil war.

Let’s not be blind. All empires are mortal. So is the "American empire".

[1] « À l’Est : la Révolution Gay », par Didier Marie, Rebel (France), Réseau Voltaire, 1er mars 1993.

[2] “Bush’s Strategic Doctrine”, by Thierry Meyssan, Voltaire Network, 9 July 2004.

[3] “Everything points to Thierry Meyssan being right today”, by Thierry Meyssan, Translation Roger Lagassé, Voltaire Network, 3 September 2021.

[4] “The Rumsfeld/Cebrowski doctrine”, by Thierry Meyssan, Translation Roger Lagassé, Voltaire Network, 25 May 2021.

[5] “The unipolar governance is illegal and immoral”, by Vladimir Putin, Voltaire Network, 11 February 2007.

[6] The crash of the dollar and the disintegration of the USA (only in Russian), Igor Panarin (2008).

[7] «On the move», Jennifer Harper, The Washington Times, April 14, 2023.

[8] American nations : a history of the eleven rival regional cultures of North America, Colin Woodard, Penguin Group (2011).

The Jewish radicals have waited decades to reach office. They have the numbers now, and are loath to let this window of opportunity slip their hands.

• 

  Both Sides in the Region Now See ‘Big War’ as Possible

Events in the Middle East have been moving fast -- a ‘decade of change’ has been compressed into barely a few months: A world-shaping Entente has been sealed between Putin and Xi Jinping; China has mediated an accord between Iran and Saudi Arabia. President Raisi will meet King Salman after Eid; serious ceasefire talks have begun in Yemen. China, and Russia, have persuaded Turkey and Saudi to rehabilitate President Assad; the Syrian FM has visited Riyadh. Saudi Arabia has shifted towards China; OPEC+ has shrunk crude supplies. And everywhere from the Global South to the Middle East, the US dollar as a trading currency is being dropped in favour of national currencies. 

A new paradigm is consolidating.

At the geo-political plane, the humpty-dumpty of western hegemony in the Region has fallen from the wall and lies shattered on the ground. All the ‘king’s (neo-con) men’ will not put humpty together again.

And, at another higher plane, an axis of voices across the region (on Al-Quds day) spoke compellingly, and with one united voice, that the Israeli ‘egg’ had better be careful, lest it fall and break, too.

The Israeli security establishment -- albeit in coded terms -- sees the prospect in a matching dark vein. Moshe Yaalon, a former defence minister, recently said that the ‘radicals’ within the Israeli government want a ‘big war’; and when "Israel" wants a war, it usually gets one; and that war will come on the back of the Palestinian issue, Yaalon suggested. ‘Coincidentally’, Israeli military Intelligence says the same:  chances of ‘real war’ this coming year will spike.

Put simply, events in "Israel" are no longer in any one person’s ‘control’. The ‘newly’ empowered forces of Settler Zionist zealotry and of the religious Right to enact ‘Israel’ on the ‘Land of Israel’ are not about to ‘vanish’ the scene. They are pursuing no rational Enlightenment geo-political project, but the ‘Will of Yahweh’. And that constitutes an altogether different dynamic.

The Jewish radicals have waited decades to reach office. They have the numbers now, and are loath to let this window of opportunity slip their hands.

The US is putting enormous pressure on PM, Netanyahu, to abandon the Judicial ‘Reform’, which however constitutes the key-stone undergirding the whole ‘Land of Israel’ edifice: A project that is predicated upon ‘re-taking’ all of the West Bank from Palestinian ‘hands’. An enterprise that has the potential to shake the region to its very core -- and to trigger war.

It is an enterprise into which, the Israeli Right suspects, and the Supreme Court very well could insert a ‘wrench’. And they would be right.   

President Biden however, needs a Middle East ‘conflict’ on top of the war in Ukraine, at this juncture, like a ‘hole in the head’. Former PM Sharon was prescient some two decades ago in foreseeing that US power in the Region would wane and that the US ultimately would prove powerless to block "Israel" from ‘seizing’ the biblical Land of "Israel". That insight probably has become actualised in this precise ‘moment’.  

It is possible of course that Netanyahu will try to back down. The PM often has preferred caution. But realistically, can he retreat?

He is hostage to his coalition partners – should he wish to avoid jail – from which only his present government line-up can shield him. Absent that protection, court proceedings inevitably will result.   There is no sign of other coalition partners willing to partner with Netanyahu -- almost at any price.

It is not difficult to understand the origins to the radical Mizrahi intransigence over the Supreme Court. Those favouring a Jewish state, rather than a (secular) balanced ‘democratic’ state, have the numbers. They had them in the 2019 election cycle. The Haredim, the national-religious, and Mizrahim should have had enough votes to secure 61 Knesset seats (a majority). 

But over the course of four election campaigns, the ‘Right’ failed to materialise their majority -- as the Palestinian Arabs Knesset members entered the coalition-forming game to block the Right (which includes the Mizrahim) from capitalising on their numerical superiority.  

Minister Smotrich wrote at the time in a Facebook post that were this situation to persist, the Right would forever remain a minority.

It is the desire for ensuring the majority achieves power that lies behind the agenda to neuter the Supreme Court and expel Arab parties from the Knesset. Then -- and only then -- can the Ashkenazi secular-liberal Establishment be overcome (in this perspective), and a Jewish State on the biblical Land of "Israel" be instantiated.

If that State also happens to be ‘democratic’, that’s okay -- but any democratic attribute would be entirely subsidiary to its ‘Jewishness’.

The question posed at this point is: Is the collective West nearing the end of a cycle? Or are we still in mid-cycle? And is this a four-generational mini-cycle, or an epochal point of inflection?

Is Russo-Chinese Entente and the global tectonic discontent with the ‘Rules Order’ – on the heels of a long trajectory of catastrophes from Viet Nam, through Iraq to Ukraine – sufficient to move the West on to the next stage of cyclical change from apex to disillusionment, retrenchment and eventual stabilisation? Or not?

A major inflection point is typically a period in history when all the negative components from the outgoing era ‘come into play’ – all at once, and all together; and when an anxious ruling class resorts to widespread repression.

Elements of such crises of inflection are today everywhere present: Deep schism in the U.S.; mass protest in France, and across Europe. A crisis in Israel. Faltering economies; and the threat of some, as yet undefined, financial crisis chilling the air.

Yet, anger erupts at the very suggestion that the West is in difficulties; that its ‘moment in the sun’ must give place to others,and to other cultures’ ways of doing things. The consequence to such a moment of epochal ‘in-betweeness’ has been characterised historically by the irruption of disorder, the breakdown of ethical norms, and the loss of a grip on what is real: Black becomes white; right becomes wrong; up becomes down.

That’s where we are – in the grip of western élite anxiety and a desperation to keep the ‘old machinery’s’ wheels spinning; its ratchets loudly opening and closing, and its levers clanging into, and out of place – all to give the impression of forward motion when, in truth, practically all of western energy is consumed in simply keeping the mechanism noisily aloft, and not crashing to an irreversible, dysfunctional stop.

So, this is the paradigm that governs western politics today: Doubling-down on the Rules Order with no strategic blueprint of what it is supposed to achieve – in fact no blueprint at all, except for ‘fingers crossed’ that something beneficial for the West will emerge, ex machina. The various foreign policy ‘narratives’ (Taiwan, Ukraine, Iran, Israel) contain little of substance. They are all clever linguistics; appeals to emotion, and with no real substance.

All this is hard to assimilate for those living in the non-West. For they do not come face-to-face with western Europe’s repeat re-anactment of the French Revolution’s iconic secular, egalitarian reform of human society – with ‘the specific timbre, flavour and ideology’ shifting, according to prevailing historic conditions.

Other nations unafflicted by this ideology (i.e., effectively the non-West) find it perplexing. The West’s culture war barely touches cultures outside its own. Yet, paradoxically, it dominates global geo-politics – for now.

Today’s ‘flavour’ is termed ‘our’ liberal democracy – the ‘our’ signifying its link to a set of precepts that defies clear definition or nomenclature; but one, that from the 1970s, has drifted into a radical enmity towards the traditional European and American cultural legacy.

What is singular about the present re-enactment is that whereas the French Revolution was about achieving class equality;ending the division between aristocracy and their vassals, liberalism today represents a modification of ideology” that U.S. writer Christopher Rufo suggests, “says that we want to categorize people based on group identity and then equalize outcomes across every axis – predominantly the economic axis, health axis, employment axis, criminal justice axis—and then formalize and enforce a general levelling”.

They want absolute democratic levelling of every societal discrepancy – reaching even, back into history, to historic discrimination and inequalities; and to have history re-written to highlight such ancient practice so that they can be routed out through enforced reverse discrimination.

What has this to do with foreign policy? Well, pretty well everything (so long as ‘our’ liberalism) retains its capture of the western institutional framework.

Bear this background in mind when thinking of the western political class’s reaction to events, say, in the Middle East, or in Ukraine. Although the cognitive élite contends that they are tolerant, inclusive, and pluralistic, they will not accept the moral legitimacy of their opponents. That is why in the U.S. – where the Cultural War is most developed – the language deployed by its foreign policy practitioners is so intemperate and inflammatory towards non-compliant states.

The point here is that, as Professor Frank Furedi has emphasised, the contemporary ‘timbre’ is one no longer merely adversarial, but unremittingly hegemonic. It is not a ‘turn’. It is a rupture: The determination to displace other sets of values by a western inspired ‘Rules-Based Order’.

Being a ‘liberal’ (in this strictly narrow sense) isn’t something you ‘do’; it is what you ‘are’. You think ‘right thoughts’ and utter ‘right speak’. Persuasion and compromise reflect only moral weakness in this vision. Ask the U.S. neocons!

We are used to hearing western officials talk about the ‘Rules-Based Order’ and the Multi-Polar System as rivals in a new global framework of intense ‘competition’. That however, would be to misconceive the nature of the ‘liberal’ project. They are not rivals: There cannot be ‘rivals’; they can only be recalcitrant other societies that have refused the analysis and the need to root out all cultural and psychological structures of inequity from their own domains. (Hence, China is hounded on its alleged deficiency in respect to the Uyghurs).

The cognitive privilege of ‘awareness’ is what lies behind the western ‘doubling-down’ on imposing a global Rules-BasedOrder: No compromise. The moral enterprise is more intent on its elevated moral station than on coming to terms with or managing, say, a defeat in Ukraine.

Just yesterday, the Bank of America in London was forced to cut short a two-day, online conference on geopolitics; andapologised to attendees following the outrage expressed at a speaker’s comments that were deemed ‘pro-Russian’ by some attendees.

What was said? Professor Nicolai Petro’s remarks at the session where he said: “Under any scenario, Ukraine would be the overwhelming loser in the war: Its industrial capacity devastated … and its population shrunk as people departed to look for employment abroad. If this is what is meant by removing Ukraine’s capacity to wage war against Russia, then it [Russia] will have won”. Professor Petro added that the U.S. government had no interest in a ceasefire, as it had the most to gain from a prolonged conflict.

No compromise is allowed. To speak thus, to inhabit the western moral high ground creating ‘villains’, clearly is more important than coming to terms with reality. Professor Petro’s comments were condemned as “rolling through Moscow’s talking points”.

Yet, these cultural revolutionaries face a pitfall, Christopher Rufo writes,

“Theirs is actually, not an easy task. This is very difficult, and, in fact, I think is somewhat impossible. If you look at even the Chinese Cultural Revolution in the 1960s … They had a program of economic and social levelling that was more totalitarian and more drastic than anything that had ever happened in the past. [Yet] after the Revolution collapsed, after the period of retrenchment, social scientists looked at the data and discovered that a generation later, those initial inequalities had stabilized … The point is that forced levelling is very elusive. It’s very difficult to achieve, even when you are doing it at the tip of a spear or at the point of a gun.

The levelling project being essentially nihilistic becomes captured by the destructive side of the revolution – its authors so absorbed with dismantling structures that they do not attend to the need to think policies through, before launching into them. The latter are not adept at doing politics: at making politics ‘work’.

Thus, discontent at the welling string of western foreign policy flops grows. Crises multiply, both in number and across different societal dimensions. Perhaps, we are closening to a point of beginning to move through the cycle – toward disillusionment, retrenchment, and stabilization; the prerequisite step to catharsis and ultimate renewal. Yet, it would be a mistake to underestimate the longevity and tenacity of the western revolutionary impulse.

“The revolution does not operate as an explicit political movement. It operates laterally through the bureaucracy and it filters its revolutionary language through the language of the therapeutic, the language of the pedagogical, or the language of the corporate HR department”, Professor Furedi writes. “And then, it establishes power anti-democratically, bypassing the democratic structure: using this manipulative and soft language – to continue the revolution from within the institutions.”

Alastair Crooke

Before coming to Kiev, President Joe Biden sought assurances from Russia that it would not bomb his special train.

The first anniversary of the East-West military confrontation in Ukraine was an opportunity for the West to convince its people that they were "on the right side of history" and that their victory was "inevitable."

None of this is surprising. It is normal for governments to communicate about their activities. Except that here the information is lies by omission and the comments are propaganda. This is such a reversal of reality that one wonders whether the defeated of the Second World War have not come to power in Kiev today.

Russia’s illegal, unjustifiable and unprovoked war

All Western interventions claim that we condemn the "illegal, unjustifiable and unprovoked war of Russia" [1]. This is factually wrong.

Let’s leave aside the qualification of "unjustifiable". It refers to an indecent moral position. No war is just. Every war is the acknowledgement, not of a fault, but of a failure. Let us examine the qualifier "unprovoked".

According to Russian diplomacy, the problem began with the 2014 US-Canadian operation and the overthrow of the democratically elected Ukrainian president, Viktor Yanukovych, in violation of Ukrainian sovereignty and thus the UN Charter. There is no denying that Washington was instrumental in this so-called "revolution of dignity": the then Assistant Secretary of State for Europe and Eurasia, Victoria Nuland, posted herself at the head of the coup plotters.

According to Chinese diplomacy, which has just published two documents on the subject, one should not stop at this operation, but go back to the "Orange Revolution" of 2004, also organized by the United States, to see the first violation of Ukrainian sovereignty and the United Nations Charter. Obviously, if Russia does not mention it, it is because it also played a role in it, which it did not do in 2014.

The Western public is so shocked by the ease with which the United States manipulates mobs and overthrows governments that it is no longer aware of the seriousness of these events. From the overthrow of Mohammad Mossadegh in Iran in 1953 to the overthrow of Serge Sarkissian in Armenia in 2018, it has become accustomed to forced regime changes. Whether the deposed leaders were good or bad should not matter. What is unbearable and inadmissible is that a foreign state organized their overthrow by masking its action behind a few national opponents. These are acts of war, without military intervention.

Facts are stubborn. The war in Ukraine was caused by the violations of Ukrainian sovereignty in 2004 and 2014. These violations were followed by an eight-year civil war.

Nor is war illegal under international law. The UN Charter does not prohibit the use of war. The Security Council even has the possibility of declaring war (articles 39 to 51). This time the particularity is that it opposes permanent members of the Council.

Russia co-signed the Minsk Agreements to end the civil war. However, not having been born yesterday, it understood from the start that the West did not want peace, but war. So she had the Minsk Agreements endorsed by Security Council Resolution 2202, five days after their conclusion, and then forced the Russian oligarch Konstantin Malofeyev to withdraw his men from the Ukrainian Donbass. It attached to the resolution a statement by the presidents of France, Ukraine and Russia, as well as the German chancellor, guaranteeing the implementation of these texts. These four signatories committed their countries.

– Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko declared in the following days that there was no question of giving anything up, but rather of punishing the inhabitants of Donbass.
– Former Chancellor Angela Merkel told Die Zeit [[2](#nb2 ""Hatten Sie gedacht, ich komme mit Pferdeschwanz?", Tina Hildebrandt und (...)")] that she only wanted to buy time so that NATO could arm the authorities in Kiev. She unknowingly clarified her statement in a discussion with a provocateur she believed to be former President Poroshenko.
– Former President Francois Hollande confirmed in Kyiv Independent the words of Mrs. Merkel [3].
– That left Russia, which implemented a special military operation on February 24, 2022 under its "responsibility to protect". To say that its intervention is illegal is to say, for example, that France’s intervention during the genocide in Rwanda was also illegal and that the massacre should have been allowed to continue.

Emails from Russian President Vladimir Putin’s special adviser Vladislav Surkov, which have just been revealed by the Ukrainian side, only confirm this process. In the years that followed, Russia helped the Ukrainian republics of Donbass prepare intellectually for independence. This interference was illegal. It was in response to the equally illegal interference of the United States, which armed not Ukraine but the Ukrainian "integral nationalists. The war had already begun, but Ukrainians exclusively conducted it. It resulted in 20,000 deaths in 8 years. The West and Russia intervened only indirectly.

It is important to understand that by pretending to negotiate peace, Angela Merkel and François Hollande have committed the worst of crimes. Indeed, according to the Nuremberg Tribunal, "crimes against peace" are even more serious than those "against humanity". They are not the cause of this or that massacre, but of the war itself. This is why the chairman of the Duma, Vyacheslav Volodin, has called for the convening of a new Nuremberg Tribunal to try Angela Merkel and François Hollande [4]. The Western press has not relayed this call, which shows us the gulf between the two perceptions of the conflict.

The order of the International Court of Justice of March 16, 2022 stated, as a precautionary measure, that "the Russian Federation must immediately suspend the military operations which it began on February 24, 2022 on the territory of Ukraine" (ref: A/77/4, paragraphs 189 to 197). Moscow did not comply, considering that the Court had been asked about the requirement of genocide perpetrated by Kiev against its own population and not about the military operation to protect the Ukrainian population.

For its part, the United Nations General Assembly has adopted several resolutions, the latest of which is A/ES-11/L.7, of February 23, 2023. The text "Reiterates its demand that the Russian Federation immediately, completely and unconditionally withdraw all its military forces from Ukrainian territory within the internationally recognized borders of the country, and calls for a cessation of hostilities.

Neither of these texts declares the Russian intervention "illegal. They order or demand that the Russian army withdraw. 141 of 193 states consider that Russia should stop its intervention. Some of them think it is illegal, but most of them think it is "no longer necessary" and is causing unnecessary suffering. This is not the same thing at all.

States have a different point of view than jurists. International law can only sanction what exists. States must protect their citizens from the conflicts that are brewing, before it is too late to respond. That is why the Kremlin did not comply with the UN General Assembly. It did not withdraw from the battlefield. Indeed, it has watched for eight years as NATO has armed Ukraine and prepared for this war. It knows that the Pentagon is preparing a second round in Transnistria [5] and must protect its population from this second operation. Just as it chose the date of its intervention in Ukraine on the basis of information indicating an imminent attack by Kiev on the Donbass, which was only confirmed later [6], so ot is deciding today to liberate the whole of Novorossia, including Odessa. This is legally unacceptable as long as the proof of the Western shenanigans is not provided, but it is already necessary from the point of view of its responsibility.

Clearly, these two ways of thinking have not escaped the notice of observers. Judging that Russian intervention is no longer necessary must be distinguished from supporting the West. That is why only 39 out of 191 states participate in Western sanctions and send weapons to Ukraine.

Ukraine is a "democracy"

The second message from Western leaders is that Ukraine is a "democracy". Apart from the fact that this word has no meaning at a time when the middle classes are disappearing and income disparities have become greater than at any other time in human history, moving away from the egalitarian ideal, Ukraine is anything but a "democracy.

Its constitution is the only racist one in the world. It states in Article 16 that "Preserving the genetic heritage of the Ukrainian people is the responsibility of the state", a passage written by Slava Stetsko, the widow of the Ukrainian Nazi prime minister.

This is the subject that makes people angry. At least since 1994, "full nationalists" (not to be confused with "nationalists"), i.e., people who claim to follow the ideology of Dmytro Dontsov and the work of Stepan Bandera, have held high positions in the Ukrainian state [7]. In fact, this ideology has become more radical over time. It did not have the same meaning during the First World War as during the Second. Nevertheless, Dmytro Dontsov was, from 1942 on, one of the designers of the "final solution of the Jewish and Gypsy questions". He was the administrator of the organ of the Third Reich in charge of murdering millions of people because of their ethnic origin, the Reinhard Heydrich Institute in Prague. Stepan Bandera was the military leader of the Ukrainian Nazis. He commanded numerous pogroms and massacres. Contrary to what his successors claim, he was never interned in a concentration camp, but under house arrest in the suburbs of Berlin, at the headquarters of the concentration camp administration. He ended the war leading the Ukrainian troops under the direct orders of the Führer Adolf Hitler.

One year after the beginning of the Russian military intervention, full nationalist and Nazi symbols are visible everywhere in Ukraine. Forward journalist Lev Golinkin, who has started an inventory of all monuments to criminals involved in Nazi crimes all over the world, has compiled an amazing list of such monuments in Ukraine [8]. According to him, almost all of them are after the 2014 coup. Therefore, it must be admitted that the coup authorities do claim to be "integral nationalism", not simply "nationalism". And for those who doubt that the Jewish President Zelensky celebrates the Nazis, two weeks ago he awarded the "Edelweiss title of honor" to the 10th separate mountain assault brigade in reference to the Nazi 1st mountain division that "liberated" (sic) Kiev, Stalino, the Dnieper crossings and Kharkov [9].

Few Western personalities have agreed with the words of President Vladimir Putin and his Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov on this subject [10]. However, Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett and his Defense Minister, General Benny Gantz, have repeatedly stated that Ukraine must comply with Moscow’s injunctions at least on this point: Kiev must destroy all Nazi symbols it displays. It is because Kiev refuses to do so that Israel does not deliver weapons to it: no Israeli weapons will be handed over to the successors of the mass murderers of Jews. This position may of course change with the coalition government of Benjamin Netanyahu, himself an heir to Vladimir Jabotinsky’s "revisionist Zionists" who formed an alliance with the "integral nationalists" against the Soviets.

The current policy of the government of Volodymyr Zelensky is incomprehensible. On the one hand, the democratic institutions are functioning, on the other hand, not only are the integral nationalists being celebrated everywhere, but the opposition political parties and the Orthodox Church under the jurisdiction of the Moscow Patriarchate have been banned; millions of books have been destroyed because they were written or printed in Russia; 6 million Ukrainians have been declared "collaborators of the Russian invader" and the personalities who support them are being assassinated.

Introduction

Recently, there is a lot of talk about where the escalating spiral will end. Will it conclude in World War III? Will there be a nuclear war? What are the determining factors? And what would indicate World War III is imminent? I'll go through these questions in detail from a strategic perspective.

But, before I do, I'd like to write another short dedication to an author and analyst, that I value very much. I'm talking about Andrei Raevsky, better known under his pseudonym “The Vineyard Saker”. I've read his blog regularly since 2015, and before that for years occasionally. I learned in this time a lot from him with regards to strategic and comprehensive thinking. This is what he does wonderfully. Unfortunately, but understandably, he decided to stop maintaining and writing his blog. Thank you, Andrei, for everything, for recommending my blog and for all the analysis I/we have been able to read for years and even decades. All the best for you and your family, going forwards.

So, will there be a third world war? I would say yes, with absolute certainty. But there are a few questions left that need to be clarified before we start to panic. I personally, currently, see no need for panic. Yet. But about which questions do I speak? About the following:

• When will WW3 break out?

• Under which circumstances?

• Which alliances will participate?

• Where will the main battlefield be?

• Ultimately: Will the big three powers directly clash on a large scale against each other?

I don't have answers to these questions. But you can see that these are strategic questions, not operational questions, such as those we are currently considering in Ukraine. I don't think that the operational questions, whether 100 tanks will be supplied to Ukraine, or even 200 fighter jets, will decide anything about the likelihood of World War III.

What I hope to do here is to help readers develop their strategic thinking so that they can see past the short-sighted operational questions I mentioned before.

Preconditions

We at BMA developed a strategic and operational picture that is still valid. In fact, we can say that from my last operational update, there is nothing to add. I can go even further. I see now, step by step, all the major and well-known podcast analysts jumping on my train. All are now talking instead of big arrows, of methodical grinding on several theatres, to put as much pressure as needed on the Ukrainians so they can collapse. That's perfectly fine for me.

For people, that haven't read my analysis yet, I strongly recommend reading the following articles in this sequence:

1. Analysis of Phase 3 of the war

2. Roles of Artemovsk (Bakhmut), Belarus, Poland and Odessa

3. BMA prediction about the Russian offensive

4. Some backgrounds, why we don't expect “Big Arrow” offensives

Further weapon shipments

Let's start with weapon shipments. We will see later in this article, that I assume, that the war has escalated far more than both sides would have ever thought. From my personal standpoint, I assume, and it could have been observed in my former articles, that Russia planned with escalations up to the destruction of the third iteration of the “Ukrainian” army.

• First iteration:

  Destruction of the initial Ukrainian army. (Until April 2022)

• Second iteration:

  Destruction of the Ukrainian army, equipped with Western light equipment, designed to buffer off Russia, until the “third iteration” has been trained and equipped abroad. The second iteration had been defeated until the end of July 2022.

• Third iteration:

  Soldiers trained abroad and equipped with all the weapons, that countries with old Soviet stockpiles could have spared.

  Destroyed at the day, General Gerasimov took over command of the SMO. 11th of January 2023.

• Fourth iteration:

  This army is currently in the making and is already partially fed into the battle to prevent the frontlines from collapsing. Which exactly is their purpose. To keep the battle (Scorched Earth) up as long as physically possible.

  This army consists of two components, which should make sure, that this goal will be achieved.

  1. Professional army:

  People that are mobilised since a few months and trained abroad, will make the professional part of this army. These are mainly “ideologically confused, highly motivated” people. There is also one single word for this.

  They will be trained on new western weapons and equipment. There is a high probability, that the initial plan, a few months ago, has been, to use them for another offensive, to produce another “defeat” for the Russians before the total collapse of Ukraine. But as it looks, the events have been faster.

  There certainly is no room any longer for any kind of offensives. This units will most likely be used for operational mobile defence. In other words, they will be used, where it hurts the most, to slow down the collapse. See BMA's five theatres. The big question is, will this army be used wisely on the West side of the Dnieper in a mobile way, to inflict the most possible damage to the Russians, or will it simply be fed into the Donbass meatgrinder and be buried along with the Ukrainian state?

  2. Forced conscript army:

  As far as I can remotely judge it, I have the feeling that all “ideologically confused highly motivated Ukrainians” are “depleted” or in the process of being depleted within the fourth iteration fire brigade. See above.

  One of the reasons of course is, that the government's propaganda, that the Ukrainian army had almost no losses, has fallen apart. It is now very well known within Ukraine that everyone who is drafted will either die, be seriously wounded or, in the best case, become a Russian POW.

  There won't be anything else left, because one of the goals of the Russians is the full physical annihilation of the Ukrainian army. Which will be achieved until summer 2023. Until then everyone will be dead, wounded or captured. There may be some hardcore “ideologically confused and highly motivated” people that continue fighting, but they will only act on their own, not as part of an organized military.

  Having said that, we can come back to the conscripts. Since no one wants to die for a lost cause (they know now that it is over and only the dying is left to be done), Ukrainian men are now hiding or otherwise trying to evade the draft. There are now mobile “conscription” teams scouring every city to catch men under any circumstances. The goal of depleting every able-bodied male Ukrainian is still active.

  Well, these unmotivated people, to put it mildly, will be thrown into trenches to buy time. They have no other prospects than to either be killed or, if they are lucky, captured by the Russians.

This is the fourth iteration of the Ukrainian army. The last stand, so to say. One component should buy time by trading blood, the other component should inflict damage on Russia.

This is the last iteration. There are no more human resources left, after this “Volkssturm” mobilisation, to carry on the fight. As I pointed out several times, Ukraine will experience this collapse by summer 2023.

What does it have to do with further weapon deliveries?

Well, the war can only be continued if these last Ukrainians have armoured vehicles. The “confused” Ukrainians are still believing in a victory with Western equipment. They wouldn't continue the fight or charge Russian positions on their bare feet, without armoured assistance.

The following circumstances apply:

• The whole Soviet stock of NATO and Ukraine is depleted.

• The biggest part of the Ukrainian manpower is depleted.

So, a new “Frankenstein” army is being built with all kinds of NATO stuff, to keep the Ukrainians motivated to die for the West. Frankenstein, because it is an incompatible mix of everything, that has no battle value without combined arms ability.

Considering the current state of the Ukrainian army, nothing can help. In fact, it doesn't matter anymore what the West is delivering. It has zero impact on the outcome of the war. It is only a motivator and enabler for the Ukrainians to keep up the fight, until the last “mobilizable” men are killed or captured. It will fully achieve its goal.

Moreover, it will mean far more dead Russians, since the prolongation of the war means far more dead Russians. Which is NOT good.

Red lines

What about red lines? There are red lines indeed. But I don't think that Russia is measuring them by the amount and quality of tanks or planes, that are being sent by the West.

I'm personally convinced that the red lines were agreed by Sergei Naryshkin and William Burns in Ankara on November 14, 2022. And these red lines, from my point of view, concern the control and security of territory after the war.

In fact, I assume that all kinds of weapon deliveries would be “tolerated”, but not with pleasure, by the Russians, as long as there is no risk of lost territory. And Ukraine as a whole, except for places that could be negotiated away to other countries, is being considered as Russian territory.

Why is it accepted? The Ukrainian army is mostly defeated. Russia is fighting against the fourth and last iteration. The best people are already dead or have fled. And there is another major reason. I will cover it in the chapter “Wounded animal”.

The last point, I want to cover in this chapter is Germany. Germany of course is being forced to send its tanks to Ukraine. It will have no military consequences, but the calculation is, that Russia would escalate and break up relations with Germany for all times, because of history. The United States desperately wants to destroy the relations between Germany and Russia forever. So, Germany would depend on America and wouldn't benefit from the new BRICS/SCO-oriented multipolar world order.

Here are some personal thoughts and assumptions:

• Germany wants Ukraine to collapse ASAP, so they come out of the hellish situation, on which they are forced in, by America.

• Russia knows this and keeps backchannel doors open to Germany to manage the transition away from the American grip. I assume the tank deliveries won't change much if there are no further escalations. However, if NATO troops are part of the escalations, we are in WW3.

The West

The West is currently in sharp decline. Economically, militarily and politically.

Nevertheless, we mustn't forget, that the West has been the dominant power for decades. So, of course, it accumulated a lot of wealth and a large military. And now we come to the problem. Russia, more or less, openly worked on implementing the new multipolar world order around BRICS and the SCO. The Americans were aware of this. At the same time, the American empire, carrying on the work of other empires before it, has been working for the destruction of Russia. Therefore, the strategy to turn all former allies and Soviet States around Russia against them and then trigger the internal collapse in Russia.

Well, both Russia and America activated their corresponding plans in 2022. Everyone wants something, but only one side will prevail. Who wins in Ukraine will achieve its geopolitical goals. At least, that's what the parties believe. As of now, it should be clear to the politicians and secret services of all Western states, that it is over. Ukraine will soon fall, and with it, the single-polar American-centric world order.

Russia won't be destroyed.

Goals

What now? Well, the Americans know very well about their fate since their plan in Ukraine failed. Which doesn't need to be the end of the USA. They can become normal and powerful members of the future multipolar world order. Sitting at the table with the other great powers. I think, there are two possible outcomes.

1. Exactly this scenario. America becomes a “normal” multipolar power at the table with others. A single new world system emerges, which is controlled by an organisation and not by states. Either a new kind of UN/League of Nations, or a fundamental reconstruction of the UN and purge of “Western” “influence” and “Influencer”. Hence, the “De-Westernification” of the world.

2. America could decide, to stay an “opposite-pole”, against the multipolar world order. Then we would have two systems at the same time, competing against each other. The rest of the West and the BRICS/SCO states, competing and struggling for the contested bloc-free markets, until there is no bloc-free nation left.

Unfortunately, I assume, that option two will prevail. Which is the worse option for the world and humankind.

What are the goals of such an America (The West)?

• Completely draining power from all its colonies and making them completely dependent on themselves. To secure markets and territory, for the future struggle against the powers of the Heartland. At the same time weakening the Heartland, since Europe is an integral part of it, with a huge potential, if managed correctly.

• The depletion of the weapon stocks of Europe has the positive side effect that all these weapons will need to be replenished. Since the industrial production costs rose sky-high, for example, because of the blowing up of the gas pipelines (what a coincidence) and many other self-defeating reasons, Europe will struggle to reproduce these stocks themselves. The rationale is, that they will come to America and beg for “cheap” weapons.

In fact, America is raping Europe and is forcing them to come back to them and beg for more. Perversion. Or how does Scott Ritter say? Odious!

Wounded animal

Most likely the West didn't expect that the war would develop as it did. I wrote several times about it. First, they expected that Ukraine would fall within days and then they would organize a guerrilla war. Then, after they saw that Russia was not waging a strategic doctrinal offensive but a SMO, they thought, the West will win.

But none of it is true. Neither did Russia win within days, nor will it lose. In fact, it is defeating the West, its armies and economies in Ukraine. Who would have thought that?

America knows very well what its new role will be, so they are preparing for it by making Europe totally dependent on them, deindustrializing it and draining it for the next decade. Not only Europe, but all other colonies as well, including Canada, Australia, Japan, South Korea, etc.

Here is the problem. Since America is well aware of its impending downfall from a superpower to a normal but powerful nation, it struggles with a certain syndrome. When everything is well, all are happy and are competing to claim the success for themselves. When things go south, then the opposite applies. Everyone tries to blame the other. Which is currently the case in America. I will write a separate article about America. So, I'll go here quickly over it.

There is not one single power that is determining the course of the United States. The ruling oligarchy (the politicians are only “sponsored executioners” of the oligarchy) doesn't know exactly which way to go. There are powers that want to choose option 1, away from the empire and towards multipolarity and there are also powers who don't want to go down without a fight. Unfortunately, the majority of the establishment or oligarchy are supporters of the second option. And here we are. America is acting exactly as a wounded wild animal. It is biting, fighting and scratching everyone around it. Which is extremely dangerous for humankind. One mistake, and everyone dies.

This is what we see in Ukraine. Now, everything short of nuclear weapons will be delivered, what could be handled by the few capable Ukrainians left. And it would be idiotic by Russia to make a big deal out of it. It will be managed. Escalation management. Yes, a few thousand Russians more will die. Or if you count the Ukrainians as Russians, a few tens or hundreds of thousands more. But still, the world will survive.

It is up to Russia and the other civilized people to handle the rage of this wounded animal and contain it, so we won't need to use nuclear weapons or kick-off WW3. That's why Russia is taking many hard punches, without responding.

Challenge

The challenge is for Russia to win the war in Ukraine without escalating too much, to not trigger any reactions from the West, that could still trigger WW3, over Ukraine.

Currently there is no potential for such an escalation if we consider only the Ukrainian and the Russian army. The Ukrainian Army is soon (by the end of the summer 2023) gone. But the Americans could decide to sacrifice the European armies against Russia as another proxy force. Without American involvement.

It is not impossible, even though I think that the probability is very low.

Think of Polish and other European countries sending own troops to defend Western Ukraine, Odessa or Kiev.

People don't want it? There is not such a mood? There are no weapons? Who cares?

Create enough false flag operations within the EU and NATO, activate a large media campaign and you will have fanatical Europeans cheering for war and volunteering to march on Moscow.

Such a scenario needs to be avoided. It is called “escalation management”.

Why did I write that Americans would use the Europeans as a proxy force? Well, Europe is no longer interesting for America. They are pivoting to the new hot spot for trade, Asia. Europe is done. It can be used like a used condom, to further weaken Russia. Throwing old stuff and human waves against the Russians is creating losses for Russia. Both, in people and economically. Learn about opportunity costs. These are costs or revenues, that you did not achieve since you chose to do something less favourable. Hence, Russia could prosper by developing trade and relationships with the “New World”. But instead, it would need to fully mobilize and put a huge part of its resources, money and welfare into the military and war. While other market actors are exploiting the absence of Russia on the world markets.

Horror scenario? Yes, but I don't believe that it will materialize.

Indicators

But we need to discuss it. We are talking about a wounded wild animal. Its actions are totally unpredictable. And it is always doubling down. So, nothing can be excluded. We should be aware of it. And that's why I decided to write down some important indicators, which would indicate, that a threshold has been crossed, where there is no return.

• Overt or covert mobilisation efforts within the big European countries.

• Overt or covert transition to a wartime economy/production within the big European countries.

• If the number of mobilized troops of Russia exceeds more than one and a half million men. I'm talking only about the mobilized. Not about the already standing conscript and professional peacetime army.

• Calmness of Vladimir Putin is gone for a longer time. In fact, he would be visually very angry and his rhetoric would reach levels, never seen before. See his behaviour from November 2021 until February 2022, for a small version of what we would see.

• Active and official participation of NATO troops in hostilities against Russia.

• Officially breaking off relations between Russia and major NATO countries. Withdrawing of diplomatic missions and personnel, etc.

• Total severing of all economic relations.

• Russia withdrawing from many not-crucial markets without visible reasons.

• Russia withdrawing from Syria.

• Overt or covert full mobilisation in Russia.

• Withdrawal of the Americans from important and major regions without a clear reason. Say, a sudden withdrawal of the Americans from the Middle East, including its navy. The Americans would try to bring as much equipment and as many troops as possible out of harm's way before the Russian barrages start to hit American bases worldwide.

Important factors

As I said. I want to be honest, I think, and this is only my assumption\ߪ It is too late for triggering WW3:

• The Ukrainian human potential is almost gone. And soon it WILL BE GONE.

• The Europeans have been demilitarized. And they will be demilitarized further until this is over. There is not much which could be used to actually fight the Russians.

• The Americans would withdraw its equipment to America or Asia. This is an important region. Europe lost its significance, and with it, the obligation to NATO.

• Article 5 says that the allies should consult on whether and how to support the member under attack. The decision of the single member states could be to send medical equipment or simply to do nothing. This applies to America as well. America wouldn't do much for Eastern European states. And it certainly would NOT fight Russia over them. I'm not yet sure, about central and west Europe, since America will need them, for reindustrializing over their resources and industries.

• Until this war is over, NATO will only be four letters on a piece of paper. To be honest, I didn't expect it that way. I will point out my assumption, how NATO could be dismembered, in the “strategic outlook” chapter. But as it turns out, the NATO military branch will soon be done and gone. Left will be a club of people, that are meeting regularly to issue some threats out of a parallel universe in the direction of Russia. As I said, I'll go deeper into this later.

I want you all to keep in mind, what the ultimate goal of Russia is. Russia's ultimate goal is to secure its strategic security in the western direction, by forcing the West to accept the new draft treaty for European security. Either voluntarily or by force. Force can be military, economic or revolutionary. Don't forget that part. In case of failure, we all are simply going to die. \&#D83D;\&#DE0A; I pointed out the process and the reasons in detail in my analysis of Phase 3.

As I pointed out in the quoted article, who is cheering for Russia to lose, is cheering for his own death.

The lynchpin \ߝ Odessa

The strategic lynchpin, whether there will be a Ukraine, going forward, or not, is Odessa. With Odessa, Ukraine could sustain some kind of economy, by accessing the Black Sea. Probably it would be enough, to continue an existence as a classic American failed state, like Libya and some others that I won't name so as to not insult the people living there.

If Russia takes Odessa, or defeats the Ukrainian army somewhere else, so that Odessa could no longer be defended, then the war is over. Odessa is more important to Ukraine than Kiev itself.

Odessa is also one of the strategic goals, named by President Vladimir Putin, before he started the SMO. One of these goals is to bring justice to what happened in Odessa in 2014, when some fifty Russians were burned to death by Ukrainian nationalists. It is a personal goal of Vladimir Putin to take the city and seek justice for these deaths. Here are more reasons:

• It is a strategic city. Without it, there could never be something like “Ukraine” again. It wouldn't be economically sustainable.

• It would give Russia the control of a big part of the Black Sea. In fact, Russia's dominance in the Black Sea couldn't be contested anymore. Not only not from the Sea, but also not from the land or air.

• Russia would have a deep outpost within the east flank of NATO, which is crucial. Think of radars, air bases, air defences, missile bases, fleet bases, marshalling grounds, etc.

• Odessa is a Russian city. Not just any Russian city. It is a highly important Russian city. It was built by a very popular Russian emperor, Katherine the Great. Moreover, it is a hero city. (See WW2 hero cities).

• Ukraine and the West will never accept peace with Russia as long as Russia holds territory that the West claims as well, such as Kherson, Crimea, etc. If the Russians would leave Odessa to Ukraine, under some kind of treaty, there would always be the danger that Ukraine rearms and uses Odessa and its access to the Black Sea to harm Russia. As we all know, and Russia knows even more, the West breaks ALL treaties that it signs.

• Odessa is the last step before Russia can reunify with Transnistria. This is a problem which certainly needs to be solved. And it needs to be solved now. And it will be solved now.

In fact, you can take these arguments and flipside them, then you have the reasons, why NATO (America) has a strategic interest to take Odessa. The arguments are essentially similar to these, why the West desperately wants to have Crimea. To be straightforward. Crimea and Odessa are by far more important to the West than Kiev or any other region of Ukraine. That's why we always hear the talk about an offensive against Crimea. The question is, will the West have a strategic advantage against Russia or will Russia have a strategic advantage against NATO. The answer is obvious.

Considering all this, there is no chance in the world that Russia won't take Odessa. No matter what agreements would be proposed, or what treaties, or whatever. Maybe there was a moment where it would have been possible. In Phase 1. MAYBE still in Phase 2. But since August 2022, all this is gone. There has been too much sacrifice to not go all the way through. In fact, it would be a huge insult in the face of all people, that died on the Russian side, both civilian and military.

Nevertheless, there will be an Odessa moment. The moment, when it is clear to everyone, that Odessa can't be defended. I'll give you here an incomplete list of cases, that could be considered as an “Odessa moment”:

• Siege of Odessa.

• Collapse of Ukrainian armed forces.

• Collapse of the Ukrainian state.

• Complete destruction of the Ukrainian army.

• Complete surrender of the Ukrainian army.

• Cutting Odessa off, further north. E.g., Transnistria.

• An approach to Odessa by the Russian army with no troops left to defend it from the South.

This will be the most dangerous moment in the war. It is the moment where the West will need to decide whether it will surrender Ukraine or double down and intervene with Western troops. This is essentially the question over whether WW3 will happen or not.

Whatever decision the West might take, it is insignificant for Russia, for the aforementioned reasons. Russia would take it, no matter what the escalation threat of the West would be. Even if it would mean the end of the human race. There is no scenario where Russia would not take Odessa and the world would not go up in flames. None whatsoever.

Chickens in Odessa

And here we come to the problem. I described this scenario already in one of my operational updates. See here.

The Americans have the habit to go into a place and claim it forever, only through their presence. The rationale is, that if they are there, no-one would ever dare to contest that. For example, to avoid WW3.

This is essentially true, and it works well, all over the world. See Serbia (our province, Kosovo) and East-Syria. Of course, there are many more examples. I call it the “Chicken game”.

Now, why has the 101st airborne division of the US Army been deployed to Eastern Europe? To Romania? My personal assumption is that they stay idle for the Odessa moment. If the Odessa moment happens, the US government (better, the US oligarchy) will have the opportunity, to move the 101st into Odessa.

Why would they do that? The 101st is unable to fend off a Russian attack. It potentially could buy time until the US is able to mobilize a large force in Romania to relieve them. The truth is that such a force doesn't exist and couldn't relieve anything. Nowadays, Russia has conventional deep strike abilities with hypersonic missiles that are unstoppable. The whole European rear is not defendable. The Americans are not idiots, and their military planners know this.

So why the 101st? Well, they can be quickly deployed with helicopters and create facts on the ground. In fact, create a big “chicken game” right in Odessa. This would create two problems for the Russians:

1. If now the Russians attack Odessa and the American troops, then they would have triggered WW3 from the Western perspective. This is mainly for the civilian audience worldwide to measure how a world war has started and how it could have been avoided. No one will ask why the Americans have moved in after the first missiles start flying. They might ask who shot first, but it doesn't matter. All would die anyway in nuclear fire.

2. As I pointed out already above, Odessa is a crucial and wonderful historical city for Russia. In fact, Russia doesn't want to fight in such cities, to preserve them. If the Americans would move in, Russia would be forced to destroy Odessa, to get them out of there. Again, it doesn't matter anymore at such a point.

Will this “Chicken Plan” be activated by the Americans? I really don't know. If they assume that Russia would back down if they move in, then it could happen. But such information would be wrong and the escalation would start. I personally don't believe yet, judging by the political climate, that it would be triggered. But this assessment could change anytime. For now, I don't want to issue any warnings.

Provided that such a “Chicken Plan” would be triggered by the Americans, there is still the question, which strategy the Russians would choose to get them out of there. Here are some possibilities:

• There could be a very short timeframe for a diplomatic solution, but none that would leave Odessa in Western hands. More likely, some kind of geopolitical trade somewhere else to preserve humanity. By short, I mean no longer than 48 hours. The Russian army can't wait for American armoured brigades/divisions to marshal in Romania to feed them into Ukraine to relieve the paratroopers (101st) in Odessa.

• A direct attack on Odessa by simply levelling it to the ground with everything inside, to not give the Americans time to catch up to their paratroopers. A painful solution.

• Increasing the pain dial for America all over the world to force them to voluntarily withdraw. Hence, sinking the US Navy (which could be triggered anytime by Russia with her long-range hypersonic missiles), bombing all the poorly protected US bases worldwide, with a focus on manpower and equipment and the destruction of the whole NATO infrastructure in Europe with standoff weapons.

There is nothing that could be done against it, since there is currently no technology that can shoot down hypersonic missiles. This strategy is only limited by the number of available missiles. I'm not sure how many of these have been produced to date.

You see, it would be much preferable if the West simply accepts the return of a Russian city to Russia. I want to be straightforward. I don't want to see either an Odessa moment or a Russian attempt to expel the chickens.

One more remark. Scott Ritter also is referring frequently to the “Odessa moment”. I only want to highlight that we have here a similar concept, but it is not the same. As you surely have figured out on your own.

Strategic outlook

Basics

In this chapter I want to present a few strategic considerations.

Poland and its options

I think first there were considerations to intervene directly in Western Ukraine through Poland. Not to fight the Russians, but to secure territory. And I also think that President Putin made it crystal clear in one of his early speeches during the war, that such actions would trigger lightning responses. Most likely he was talking about a hypersonic rain over Poland. These intentions died down afterwards. Nevertheless, it seems that Poland is still eager to seize some parts of Ukraine that Poland considers former Polish territories.

This, of course, is an interesting fact.

Why?

Well, Russia wants to force the West to implement the new draft treaty for European security. Hence, to push back NATO influence and military infrastructure in Eastern Europe. In former articles, I presented the economic axes which could trigger a European political collapse. Here, I'm going to present some strategies on a geopolitical scale.

Poland is openly talking about taking former Polish territories. Russia is highlighting this fact in the media. Even Dimitry Medvedev often highlights it on his Telegram channel. But apart from highlighting it, there don't seem to be many objections. In fact, I believe, that it would have some advantages for Russia, if Poland would indeed take the Lvov oblast. First, see the map.

Russia could indeed allow Poland to take the Lviv oblast marked above. It is an oblast that is highly committed to and associated with Stepan Bandera ideology. They are deeply anti-Russian and one would struggle to call them Russians or former Russians. In fact, taking, appeasing, and governing it would be a burden to Russia. It will be a burden for Poland as well, but they want it. \&#D83D;\&#DE0A;

The big advantage is not about governing or appeasing it. No, the big advantage is that it would trigger major tensions within the EU and NATO, especially between Poland and the other major EU countries, Germany, France, and Italy. I remember a comment from the German chancellor Olaf Scholz in 2022. Reportedly, he privately said to the Poles that if they insist on reparation payments from Germany, that Germany could remember about former German territories that are currently part of Poland. If Poland takes Lviv, then this dispute would escalate.

Tensions in the EU and NATO absolutely contribute to the implementation of the new draft treaty for European security. Not voluntarily, but by diplomatic force. \&#D83D;\&#DE0A; So, I truly could imagine that such a move could take place if the Polish really want it, but in agreement with Russia, not against Russia's will.

Here we come to two major constraints:

1. The oblasts north of Lvov mustn't be touched by Poland. These are buffer and security zones for Belarus.

2. The oblasts to the south of Lvov also mustn't be touched by Poland. These are the geopolitical gates to the Eastern European states. So, to say, land bridges through states, that are not controlled by the West. West Ukraine (to be done), Hungary (will break free as soon as the land bridge is established) and Serbia (the same).

If Poland were to claim these territories, there would be a lightning response by President Putin. I think the message was clear to Poland.

I explained it already in my analysis of Phase 3. It is possible that West Ukraine (minus Lvov) won't join Russia. Who knows? But it certainly will be taken, demilitarized and denazified. Afterwards, it could be released in some kind of pseudo-independence, with Russian military bases on its territory, to secure this state. But this “pseudo-independent country” would be crucial because it would be Russia's gate to Eastern Europe. Its landbridge.

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Hungary, Serbia and the end of NATO

And here we come straight to these landbridges and trade routes.

Before I begin, I just want to remind you about my articles “Economics and Empires 1” and “Economics and Empires 2”.  Essentially, Serbia and Hungary currently are being held hostage by the West. Since they are landlocked countries that are also hostages to America, but more submissive hostages than other European nations, Serbia and Hungary can't develop independent foreign politics or foreign trade. If they don't do what they are told, many things can happen to them apart from military action:

• Blackmailing

• Intimidation

• Blockade of trade routes

• Denial of critical supplies

• Closure of air space

And all this without openly admitting it, but by inventing reasons. The West loves to use Croatia for trade restrictions against Serbia into the European direction. Croatia then invents some reasons why Serbian lorries aren't allowed to drive through Croatia. And similar stuff.

That's the reason why Serbia has been forced these many years to say that it wants to join the EU, even though the people don't. Such fealty is required by the West, to not press Serbia down again.

And here comes the war in Ukraine and “West-Ukraine” into play. If Russia manages to secure the landbridge to Hungary in Western Ukraine, then the whole house of cards built on blackmailing Eastern Ukraine falls apart. Russia would have through Hungary, which faces problems like Serbia's even though Hungary is part of the EU and NATO, direct access to Serbia.

It would allow Serbia and Hungary to freely choose with whom they want to trade and have relations. Hence, the whole heartland would be open to these countries. And with it the SCO and BRICS states. The West couldn't threaten these countries any longer with blocking them from trade and supplies, and if military threats are employed, Russia could deploy troops or provide unlimited military assistance through the corridor.

However, I could imagine troops only in Serbia because it is a brother state. This would be a huge part of the solution for the Kosovo problem, which is a Western-occupied province of Serbia. Today, NATO can threaten Serbia with bombing in the case that Serbia is protecting its citizens in Kosovo. If Serbia would have direct land and air access to Russia, things would be completely different. Apart from that, Russia left the imperial path with the Soviet Union, which is good! Russia won't spend blood and money to maintain a remote empire anymore.

Exactly this would be the death of both the EU and NATO. Why? Look at my second map.

• The black lines are the new main trade routes with the initial “breakaway” countries, Serbia and Hungary. They in fact are waiting for these routes to be opened. As long as they aren't open, both countries need to endure massive intimidation by the West.

• The red lines represent potential new trade routes between Russia (BRICS/SCO) and single Eastern European countries. When these nations see how Serbia and Hungary can develop independent policy and trade, ever more European countries would join this model and break free from the Western influence/blackmailing/colonialism. As soon this begins to unravel, it would be the end of NATO and the EU. Combine this with the economic pressure, due to the self-sanctions and to Poland's possible seizure of Lvov, and NATO and the EU is finished. Of course, no one should imagine that such a centrifugal process would be finished overnight. We are talking about a few years.

You see no lines to Romania? Well, Romania is by far the most submissive colony without a single bit of an own will. I don't know how much it could free itself, even with land access to Russia.

You might want to argue that some of these countries (Croatia, Greece etc.) already have access to the sea. Yes, but they have no land access to Russia. In theory, they could do independent trade. But in case of military escalation, they would be on their own without the landbridge to Russia.

Russia's steamroller

There is something we mustn't forget. Russia is not yet mobilized in any reasonable sense. I'm not talking about full mobilization. Russia isn't even partially mobilized yet. But remember one thing: if the West would force Russia to switch its economy to a full war economy, her society also goes into full war mood and if her losses mount over a reasonable number, then the West will get what it got after Napoleon and Hitler. A Russian society, army and war machine that can't be simply “switched off” after it reconquers Ukraine. If you have a million or even two-million-man army standing on the Polish border, then this army will do what their ancestors did. They will march to Berlin or even beyond and put an end to the new threat to Russian statehood.

We haven't reached this point yet. And if there won't be an escalation which would include western troops IN Ukraine, we won't ever reach this point. Nevertheless, if the West would escalate with Western troops in Ukraine, this point could be reached easily.

As NATO is currently demilitarising itself on a large scale and soon will only exist as four letters on a piece of paper, you can imagine what will stop the Russian army on its way to Berlin. Nothing.

Is Russia powerful enough to do that? This question is totally insignificant. Remember what happens if Russia loses militarily. Given the state of NATO, there is not much they could do against such an event if Russia fights doctrinally. In Ukraine, there is a civil war between Russians. President Putin said repeatedly that he still considerers the Ukrainians as brothers and Russians. That's the reason he takes care that the civilians suffer as least as possible within such a war environment. You should not even try to think about it what weapons and strategies would be applied against a hostile nation like Poland or (fill in the blank). Certainly not a slow grinding to only destroy the enemy army.

Nor does it matter how loudly people would scream “ARTICLE 5”. This is not a magic spell, that would make the Russian army vanish. You think there would be a nuclear retaliation by the United States? Nope! Europe is a used condom for the Americans. The new cool guys are in Asia. America will never ever put itself at risk for a used condom. Pardon, for Europe.

Again, I don't see such a scenario happening. But nothing is certain.

Now we are coming closer to my conclusion.

China

Initially I said that there will be a WW3. And yes, I think there will be a WW3. But I doubt, at least for now, that it will be triggered in Europe. And I also doubt that its main battlefield will be in Europe. Although there will be a battle in Europe.

The big battle of our time will be in Asia and in the pacific. And not today but in 2030. The battle will be about throwing the United States out of a region where it doesn't belong. China is preparing two strategies.

1. The best-case scenario for the world would be if BRICS and the SCO bring the American imperial economy down, in such a way, that it couldn't sustain its empire and network of military bases any longer. Thereby it would withdraw under an economic and social collapse from its bases abroad. Don't get me wrong. I do not wish the American people their downfall. Absolutely not! I like Americans (the people, not the imperial parasite) as much as I do anyone else. I wish for the American people, that your country comes out stronger through the hard times that are ahead. That you manage to become a normal nation among others and that every single American becomes prosperous. This with normal trade relations with other nations, without the need to bomb them to get good trade conditions.

2. Option two is war. Therefore, China is currently building the biggest military the world has ever seen. But it is not ready yet in terms of quantity or professionalism/experience. But it certainly will be, within the next few years, 2030 at the latest. Russia, currently pinning down the empire in Europe and depleting it, is the biggest gift China can get. That's why China will do what it can to sustain this status. Therefore, China is helping Russia to circumvent most of the sanctions.

   And Russia is more than returning the favour. She is buying time for China with her blood as a side effect of her existential struggle against NATO.

   Well, I will stop here, since I'm planning to write a separate article about the struggle in the Pacific region. But please keep the following in mind. I can make more or less accurate predictions for the timeframe of one year (operational). I can explain the shape, probabilities and boundaries of a strategy, which covers up to three years. The actual implementation could look completely different. And everything one writes, including myself, that would make predictions for a time after three years (vision), simply writes fairy tales.

   Nevertheless, I'll try to write such a fairy tale about the Pacific region in another article. But I'll mark it as an assumption and also as one possible scenario between infinite possible scenarios. Hence, you'll need to consider it to learn backgrounds but apart from that you should take it with a grain of salt.

Conclusion

Okay, we reached the end of the article. I'll try to sum it up and make a conclusion.

The question that this article seeks to answer is about the prospect of a World War developing from the Ukraine crisis. I see a probability of 90% that the Ukraine war will not evolve into a World War. Unfortunately, 90% is still far from certain! There is still a possibility that the West will try to push proxy forces (Poland, Romania, Germany?) into Ukraine to create a bigger “local”/continental conflict, while the Americans focus on Asia. Here we are at 5%. And above that, there is a probability of 5% that the United States will directly intervene (See Odessa moment, etc.), which certainly would evolve into an instant World War.

• Peace after Ukrainian army is defeated (90%)

• Developing war between Russia and European proxies within Ukraine/Europe (5%)

• American intervention &emdassh; World War 3 (5%).

That is, of course, still too high. We are talking about the human race.

Indeed, there are two major determining factors which will decide whether there will be an escalation or not:

The “Odessa moment” and the “Western Ukraine” moment.

• Odessa moment:

  The West will try to do what it can to avoid giving Odessa to the Russians. This is for strategic military considerations. If the Russians have it, they will have a strategic advantage and leverage over NATO. If NATO has it, the same applies to NATO against Russia.

• “Western Ukraine” moment:

  Here we are talking about Russia's land access to Hungary and thereby to Serbia. Essentially, if Russia gets it, NATO and the EU is done. History. Not instantly, but within a reasonable number of years.

I can only leave you here and say that when one of these moments are imminent, start praying to whomever you are praying to.

Nevertheless, I want to end this article on a positive note. Since I AM positive. Everything depends on the decisions of the oligarchs in the United States. Are they willing to let Ukraine go or not when they are threatened with global annihilation? These guys are not idiots. Sure, they want to possess power over others, but in the event of a nuclear war, they and their children will possess nothing. Exactly as everyone else.

Even though they seem to have no reverse gear and always doubling down, in this particular case I assume that they would do the right thing and vacate Ukraine. Why is there still a possibility of 10% of escalation? Well, Russia (BRICS) is engaged in escalation management, to provide a safe way for the Americans to transition into a normal state.

And here we come to the fact that not even the Americans and their oligarchs can control everything. It is possible that a crazy group of people, either within America or within Europe, could suddenly do something extremely stupid when they feel that the end is near. Think of Poles or the Baltic statelets or some extremely crazy American neoconservatives. The good thing is that I don't give more than a 10% chance to such an idiotic chain of events.

NewsGuard, the media rating agency, alleges that Consortium News has published “false content” by reporting that there was a U.S.-backed coup in Ukraine in 2014 and that ne0-Nazis have significant influence in the country. NewsGuard took issue with a:

“February 2022 article ‘Ukraine: Guides to Reflection,’ [which] asserted, ‘Hence, the inflation of Russian behavior in Ukraine (where Washington organized a coup against a democratically elected government because we disliked its political complexion) … .’

It then wrote:

“The U.S. supported the Maidan revolution that ousted then-Ukraine President Viktor Yanikovych (sic) in 2014 — including a December 2013 visit by John McCain to Kyiv in support of protesters — but there is no evidence that the U.S. ‘organized’ a ‘coup.’ Instead, it has the markings of a popular uprising, precipitated by widely covered protests against Yanukovych’s decision to suspend preparations for the signing of an association and free-trade agreement with the European Union.”

Viktor Yanukovych was democratically elected as president of Ukraine in 2010 in an election certified by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, a fact not mentioned in NewsGuard’s writings on the change of government in Ukraine. Even though Yanukovych agreed to an EU political settlement and early elections, violence forced him to flee from the capital on Feb. 21, 2014. Reporting that the neo-Nazi Right Sector was at the forefront of the violent overthrow, The New York Times (NewsGuard green check) wrote earlier that day:

“Dmytro Yarosh, the leader of Right Sector, a coalition of hard-line nationalist groups, reacted defiantly to news of the settlement, drawing more cheers from the crowd.

‘The agreements that were reached do not correspond to our aspirations,’ he said. ‘Right Sector will not lay down arms. Right Sector will not lift the blockade of a single administrative building until our main demand is met — the resignation of Yanukovych.’ He added that he and his supporters were ‘ready to take responsibility for the further development of the revolution.’ The crowd shouted: ‘Good! Good!’

A study on the violence used to overthrow the government, by Prof. Serhiy Kudelia, a political scientist at Baylor University, says the overthrow succeeded because of “the embeddedness of violent groups” in a non-violent protest. The violence began on Dec. 1, 2013 when these violent groups attacked police with “iron chains, flares, stones and petrol bombs” and tried to ram a bulldozer through police lines. The police viciously fought back that day.

As the International Business Times (IBT) (green check) wrote about these groups at the time:

“According to a member of anti-fascist Union Ukraine, a group that monitors and fights fascism in Ukraine, ‘There are lots of nationalists here [EuroMaidan] including Nazis. They came from all over Ukraine, and they make up about 30% of protesters.

Different groups [of anarchists] came together for a meeting on the Maidan. While they were meeting, a group of Nazis came in a larger group, they had axes and baseball bats and sticks, helmets, they said it was their territory. They called the anarchists things like Jews, blacks, communists. There weren’t even any communists, that was just an insult. The anarchists weren’t expecting this and they left. People with other political views can’t stay in certain places, they aren’t tolerated,’ a member of the group continued.”

The violence by far-right groups was evidently condoned by Sen. John McCain who expressed his support for the uprising by addressing the Maidan crowd later that month. Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland and then U.S. ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt visited the square after the violence had broken out.

NewsGuard’s account of the events of Feb. 21, 2014 says that even though Yanukovych agreed to the early elections, “angry protestors demanded Yanukovych’s immediate resignation,” and he fled on that day after “hundreds of police guarding government buildings abandoned their posts.” NewsGuard then says “protestors took control of several government buildings the next day.”

Government Buildings Seized

Protestors occupied Kiev’s City Hall, replete with Confederate flag. (YouTube)

But protestors had already seized government buildings as early as December 2013. On Jan. 24 protestors broke into the Agriculture Ministry building in Kiev and occupied it. On the same day barricades were set up near the presidential headquarters. Government buildings in the west of the country had also been occupied. The Guardian (green check) reported on Jan. 24:

“There were dramatic developments in the west of the country on Thursday as hundreds of people forced their way into the office of the regional governor in the city of Lviv, and forced him to sign a resignation letter. Oleh Salo, a Yanukovych appointee in a city where support for the president is in the low single digits, later said he signed the letter under duress and was rescinding his resignation.

Thousands also stormed regional administration headquarters in Rivne on Thursday, breaking down doors and demanding the release of people detained in the unrest there, Unian news agency reported. In the town of Cherkasy, 125 miles south of Kiev, about 1,000 protesters took over the first two floors of the main administration building and lit fires outside the building.

Similar action took place in Ternopil, Ivano-Frankivsk and Khmelnytsky in western and central Ukraine, as well as parts of the north-east, the Party of the Regions said.”

Protestors had begun occupying Kiev City Hall in December, with a portrait of Ukraine’s World War II fascist leader Stepan Bandera hanging from the rafters. On the night of Feb. 21, the leader of the Neo-fascist Right Sector, Andriy Parubiy, announced that the Verkhovna Rada (parliament), the Presidential Administration, the Cabinet of Ministers and the Ministry of Internal Affairs had all come under control of the protestors.

Therefore NewsGuard has published “false content” by reporting that government buildings were occupied the day after Yanukovych fled the capital. It should print a correction.

On the day after Yanukovych fled, the Rada voted without the presence of Yanukovych’s party — the largest in the country — to impeach him after the fact of his violent overthrow. NewsGuard omitted the key fact that the impeachment vote was tainted by the absence of Yanukovych’s party and that the impeachment became largely irrelevant after violence forced him to flee the capital.

Democratically-elected leaders are removed by electoral defeat, impeachment or votes of no confidence, not by violence. NewsGuard writes that “hundreds of police guarding government buildings abandoned their posts” on the day Yanukovych was forced out, but doesn’t say why. As Jacobin (NewsGuard green check) magazine reports:

“Whatever one thinks of the Maidan protests, the increasing violence of those involved was key to their ultimate victory. In response to a brutal police crackdown, protesters began fighting with chains, sticks, stones, petrol bombs, even a bulldozer — and, eventually, firearms, all culminating in what was effectively an armed battle in February, which left thirteen police officers and nearly fifty protesters dead. The police ‘could no longer defend themselves’ from protesters’ attacks,’ writes political scientist Sergiy Kudelia, causing them to retreat, and precipitating Yanukovych’s exit.”

NewsGuard calls the events a “revolution,” yet revolutions in history have typically been against monarchs or dictators, not against democratically-elected leaders. For instance, the 1776 American Revolution, the 1789 French Revolution, the 1917 Russian Revolution, the 1952 Egyptian Revolution, the 1979 Iranian Revolution and countless others were against monarchs. Coups have been against both elected and non-elected leaders. Revolutions change political systems, usually from monarchies to republics. Ukraine’s political system was not changed, only its leader.

As a reader, Adrian E.. commented below on this article:

“When a movement that is supported by about half the population and opposed by about half the population violently overthrows a democratically elected government, this may be given different names (e.g. coup), but it is certainly not a “popular revolution”.

The Maydan movement was never supported by more than about half the Ukrainian population. It was supported by a vast majority in Western Ukraine, by very few people in the East and South of the country, with people more evenly split in the center/North. This clearly was not a case of a government that had lost public support to such a degree that there was a general consensus that it should resign. It was the case of one political camp representing about half the country that had lost the last elections imposing its will with brutal deadly violence.”

By any measure, Yanukovych’s ouster was an unconstitutional change in government. His “impeachment” without his party present for the vote came after government buildings had been seized and after violence drove him from the capital.

Circumstantial Evidence

McCain addressing crowd in Kiev, Dec. 15, 2013. (U.S. Senate/Office of Chris Murphy/Wikimedia Commons)

In its version of these events, NewsGuard only refers to circumstantial evidence of the coup, interpreting it as U.S. “support” for a “revolution” against a democratically-elected president.

NewsGuard fails to point out that McCain, Sen. Christopher Murphy (D-CT) as well as Nuland appeared on stage in the Maidan with Oleh Tyahnybok, leader of the Neo-fascist Svoboda Party, formerly known as the Social National Party.

NewsGuard does not consider how such events would be seen in the United States if a senior Russian foreign ministry official, two leading Russian lawmakers and Russia’s ambassador to the U.S. appeared on stage with a far-right American leader to address a crowd on the Washington Mall seeking to oust an elected U.S. president. If that president were overthrown violently, would Americans think it was a Russian-backed coup?

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NewsGuard discusses Nuland’s 2013 speech in which she revealed that since 1991 the U.S. had spent $5 billion to help bring about Ukraine’s “aspirations.” What it fails to point out is that U.S. aspirations were to turn Ukraine towards the West and away from Russia. And the U.S. had work to do.

In a 2008 poll, 17 years after this U.S. effort began, and the year in which the U.S. said Ukraine would one day join NATO, 50 percent of Ukrainians actually opposed NATO membership against just 24.3 percent who favored it. A 2010 Gallup poll showed that 40 percent of Ukrainians viewed NATO as more threat than protector. Just 17 percent had the opposite view. So building up civil society through U.S.-funded NGOs to favor the West was the U.S. challenge.

NewsGuard does not mention that part of the $5 billion the U.S. spent was to help organize protests. There was genuine popular dissatisfaction with Yanukovych that the NED nurtured and trained. Jacobin reported of the 2014 events:

“US officials, unhappy with the scuttled EU deal, saw a similar chance in the Maidan protests. Just two months before they broke out, the NED’s then president, pointing to Yanukovych’s European outreach, wrote that ‘the opportunities are considerable, and there are important ways Washington could help.’

In practice, this meant funding groups like New Citizen, which the Financial Times reported ‘played a big role in getting the protest up and running,’ led by a pro-EU opposition figure. Journalist Mark Ames discovered the organization had received hundreds of thousands of dollars from US democracy promotion initiatives.”

Writing in Consortium News six days after Yanukovych’s ouster, Parry reported that over the previous year, the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), which funds NGOs in countries the U.S. targets for regime change, had bankrolled 65 projects in Ukraine totaling more than $20 million. Parry called it “a shadow political structure of media and activist groups that could be deployed to stir up unrest when the Ukrainian government didn’t act as desired.”

The NED, on Feb. 25, the day after the Russian invasion, deleted all projects in Ukraine it funded, which are archived here. The NED meddled in Ukrainian politics in 2004 in the so-called Orange Revolution. The Washington Post (green check) wrote in 1991 that what the C.I.A. once did in secret — destabilizing and overthrowing regimes — the NED was now doing openly.

C.I.A. or NED-led coups are never made up out of whole cloth. The U.S. works with genuine opposition movements within a country, sometimes popular uprisings, to finance, train and direct them. The U.S. has a long history of overthrowing foreign governments, the most infamous examples being Iran in 1953, Guatemala in 1954, and Chile in 1973.

In September 2013, before the Maidan uprising began, long-time NED head Carl Gerhsman called Ukraine “the biggest prize” in a Washington Post op-ed piece, and warned that “Russians, too, face a choice, and Putin may find himself on the losing end not just in the near abroad but within Russia itself.”

In 2016 he said the NED has been involved in Ukraine since the 1980s and he praised the “overthrow of Yanukovych.”

Nuland-Pyatt Tape Omitted

Most significantly, NewsGuard’s attempt to refute U.S. involvement in the coup omits the 2014 intercepted and leaked telephone call between Nuland and Pyatt, the then U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, in which the two discuss who will make up the new government weeks before Yanukovych was overthrown.

On the leaked tape, Nuland and Pyatt talk about “midwifing” a new government; Vice President Joe Biden’s role, and setting up meetings with Ukrainian politicians to make it happen. Nuland says the prime minister should be Arseniy Yatsenyuk, and indeed he became prime minister after the coup.

At the time, the BBC (green check) wrote of the leak: “The US says that it is working with all sides in the crisis to reach a peaceful solution, noting that ‘ultimately it is up to the Ukrainian people to decide their future’. However this transcript suggests that the US has very clear ideas about what the outcome should be and is striving to achieve these goals.”

The U.S. State Department never denied the authenticity of the video, and even issued an apology to the European Union after Nuland is heard on the tape saying, “Fuck the EU.” Mainstream media at the time focused almost exclusively on that off-color remark as a distraction from the greater significance of U.S. interference in Ukraine’s internal affairs.

Why did Nuland say, “Fuck the EU”? At the time she said it, France, Germany and Poland were working for the EU on a political settlement with Russia to the Maidan crisis that would leave Yanukovych in power.

Indeed the E.U. brokered a deal with Yanukovych, who agreed to early elections by December 2014, a restoration of the 2004 Constitution and an amnesty for all protestors, clearing the way for no one to be held responsible for the violent ouster. Yanukovych announced the agreement, with E.U. officials at his side in Kiev, on Feb. 21, 2014. Later that day he was violently driven from power.

Leaving the historic role of the NED and the essential Nuland-Pyatt conversation out of its reporting is an omission of evidence by NewsGuard, typical of corporate media. Omitting crucial elements of a story changes its meaning and in this case undermines NewsGuard’s account of the events of 2014.

This is an excellent example of why Parry started Consortium News: to report on crucial information that corporate media sometimes purposely and deceptively leave out to change the meaning of a story. NewsGuard should correct its story about the coup, not Consortium News. NewsGuard invites readers to request corrections by emailing them at corrections@newsguardtech.com.

Likely Reasons for the Coup

U.S. enabled Yeltsin’s 1996 reelection.

Wall Street and Washington swept in after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 under a pliable Boris Yeltsin (who received direct U.S. help to win re-election in 1996) to asset-strip the formerly state-owned industries, enrich themselves and a new class of oligarchs and impoverish the former Soviet people.

The ascension of Vladimir Putin to power on New Year’s Eve 1999 gradually began to curb U.S. influence in post-Soviet Russia, especially after Putin’s 2007 Munich Security Conference speech, in which he blasted U.S. unilateral aggression, especially in Iraq.

Eventually Putin restored sovereignty over much of the Russian economy, turning Washington and Wall Street against him. (As President Joe Biden has now made clear on more than one occasion, the U.S. aim is to overthrow him.)

In his 1997 book, The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives, former U.S. national security adviser ZbigniewBrzezinski wrote:

“Ukraine, a new and important space on the Eurasian chessboard, is a geopolitical pivot because its very existence as an independent country helps to transform Russia. Without Ukraine, Russia ceases to be a Eurasian empire. Russia without Ukraine can still strive for imperial status, but it would then become a predominantly Asian imperial state.”

Thus U.S. “primacy,” or world dominance, which still drives Washington, is not possible without control of Eurasia, as Brzezinski argued, and that’s not possible without control of Ukraine by pushing Russia out (U.S. takeover of Ukraine in the 2014 coup) and dominating Moscow as it did when this was written in the 1990s.

Deep Western involvement in Ukrainian politics and economy never ended from those early post-Soviet days. When Yanukovych acted legally (the Rada authorized it) to reject the European Union association agreement in favor of a Russian economic package on better terms, it threatened to curtail Western economic involvement. Yanukovych became a marked man.

Yanukovych had already made Russian an official language, he had rejected NATO membership, and reversed his pro-Western predecessor’s move to glorify Nazi collaborators. Yanukovych’s predecessor, President Viktor Yuschenko, had made Ukraine’s World War II-era fascist leader Stepan Bandera a “Hero of Ukraine.”

There was genuine popular dissatisfaction among mostly Western Ukrainians with Yanukovych, which intensified and became violent after he rejected the EU deal. Within months he was overthrown.

After the Coup

The U.S.-installed government in Kiev outlawed political parties, including the Communist Party, and stripped Russian as an official language. Yanukovych’s Party of the Regions was banned in several oblasts and eventually collapsed. An American citizen became finance minister and Vice President Joe Biden became Barack Obama’s virtual viceroy in Ukraine.

Videos have emerged of Biden giving instructions to the nominal president at the time, Petro Poroshenko. By his own admission, Biden forced the resignation of Viktor Shokin, Ukraine’s prosecutor general.

Shokin testified under oath that he was about to investigate Burisma Holdings, the company on which the vice president’s son was given a lucrative board membership just months after the U.S.-backed coup.

Biden, other U.S. officials, and the media at the time lied that Shokin was removed because he was corrupt. State Dept. memos released this year and published by Just the News (green-check) actually praise Shokin for his anti-corruption work. The question of whether the leader of a foreign nation has the right to remove another country’s prosecutor was buried.

Eight days after nearly 50 anti-coup protestors in Odessa were burned to death on May 2, 2014 by far-right counter-protestors dominated by Right Sector, the coup-resisting provinces of Luhansk and Donetsk in the Donbass region declared independence from Ukraine. Russia began assisting them and, after a visit to Kiev by then C.I.A. Director John Brennan, Poroshenko launched a war against the separatists that lasted eight years, killing thousands of civilians, until Russia intervened in the civil conflict in February.

After the coup, NATO began arming, training and conducting exercises with the Ukrainian military, turning it into a de facto NATO member. These were not just the interests of part of Ukraine that were being served, but those of powerful foreign actors. It was akin to a 19th century-style colonial takeover of a country.

Joe Lauria is editor-in-chief of Consortium News and a former U.N. correspondent for The Wall Street Journal, Boston Globe, and numerous other newspapers, including The Montreal Gazette and The Star of Johannesburg. He was an investigative reporter for the Sunday Times of London, a financial reporter for Bloomberg News and began his professional work as a 19-year old stringer for The New York Times. He can be reached at joelauria@consortiumnews.com and followed on Twitter @unjoe

In Part 1, we discussed the historical background of Technocracy Inc. that briefly found popularity in the US in the 1930s during the turmoil of the Great Depression. Technocracy was rooted in socioeconomic theories that focused upon the efficient management of society by experts (technocrats). This idea briefly held the public’s attention during a period of sustained recession, mass unemployment and growing poverty.

The technological capabilities required for the energy surveillance grid, essential for the operation of a Technate (a technocratic society), were far beyond the practical reach of 1930s America. Consequently, for that and other reasons, public interest in the seemingly preposterous idea of technocracy soon subsided.

However, in recent decades, many influential policy strategists—most notably Zbigniew Brzezinski and Henry Kissinger—and private philanthropic foundations, such as the Rockefeller Foundation, recognised that advances in digital technology would eventually make a Technate feasible. As founding and leading members of the Trilateral Commission, a policy “think tank,” they saw China as a potential test bed for technocracy.

We will now consider their efforts to create the world’s first Technate in China.

These articles build upon the research found in my 2021 publication Pseudopandemic, which is freely available to my blog subscribers.

Why China?

In the West we often have difficulty understanding or even conceptualising Chinese mores. We tend to see the world in our own terms and are able to describe it only in reference to the principles and philosophical concepts that we are familiar with. Perhaps we forget that the Western perspective is not the only one in the world.

For example, as pointed out by students of the Chinese political philosophy of tianxia, there is no ontological tradition in China. In the Chinese philosophical mind, the question is not “What is this thing” but “What path does this thing suggest?”

Datong lies at the heart of “the Great Way,” first described in the Liyun chapter of the “Book of Rites” (the Liji), written more than 2,000 years ago. Recounting the teachings of Confucius, the chapter depicted a utopian society of the ancient past this way:

When the Great Way was practised, the world was shared by all alike. The worthy and the able were promoted to office and men practised good faith and lived in affection. Therefore they did not regard as parents only their own parents, or as sons only their own sons.

The “Rites” (or “li”) are the formal etiquette and behavioural conduct that underpin Chinese social order. Li also compasses the ceremony and rituals that reinforce normative standards.

Datong, which can be translated as “the Great Unity,” represents the central political and moral philosophy of the ideal Chinese society. In datong, everyone respects “the li” and is imbued with the Confucian virtue of “ren.” This love and benevolence (ren) is founded in human empathy. It first manifests within the family but extends to the whole of society.

Datong implies a society where the most able and virtuous lead, with ren foremost in their hearts and minds. All resources are shared equitably for the common good. In the Liyun chapter, the expression “the world is shared by all alike” is written as “tianxia weigong.” This can be translated as “all under Heaven is held in common” or “all under Heaven is publicly held.”

There is no place for private property in datong, because communities meet the needs of all. There is no conflict of interest. The Great Way is one of “Universal Harmony.”

The opening passage of the Liyun chapter also described xiaokang, the “lesser prosperity,” in which society still maintained li and ren but differed from datong in an important regard:

The world is the possession of private families. Each regards as parents only his own parents, as sons only his own sons; goods and labour are employed for selfish ends.

While datong describes a world where resources are “shared by all alike,” in xiaokang resources are in “the possession of private families.” Xiaokang was not seen as opposed to datong but rather on the path toward it, for li and ren were still observed. But there is a warning in the Liyun chapter that private property and the control of resources by private interests present a risk:

Therefore intrigue and plotting come about and men take up arms.

Kang Youwei

Kang Youwei’s book “Datong shu” (The Great Commonwealth) was published posthumously in 1935. Kang wrote it as a series of lecture notes, the earliest dating to 1884. Rather than view datong only as a lost utopia, Kang proposed datong as a future society that could be constructed. He viewed ren as the path toward establishing the common good for all, attainable by eliminating suffering and creating happiness.

Kang noted that ren was applicable not only to humanity but to the universe and all within it, and he called this “jen.” Jen gave rise, he said, to creation and to the establishment of universal order. Therefore, order should be based upon the same principle of the “compassionate mind.”

He drew upon the work of the Confucian scholar He Xiu, whose Gongyang theory of history described sociopolitical development as a path consisting of incremental, progressive stages. Kang built upon Gongyang’s work to plot a course toward the Great Unity.

In essence, Kang suggested that society could be reverse-engineered to achieve datong in the future. He identified “nine boundaries” of human suffering that needed to be deconstructed in order to reach datong. He said that datong could be attained once nation-states, social class, racism, sexism, families, private property, injustice, environmental destruction, and poverty (the result of social inequality and oppression) were abolished.

“Sages” or “persons of jen” would be needed to lead, Kang maintained. He acknowledged that the sages had to operate in the social, economic and political circumstances of their day and that the resultant laws and institutions might be oppressive and cause suffering. Therefore, the objective of the “person of jen” (sage) should be to reform the laws and organisations of the state with a view to eradicating the nine boundaries of suffering.

With the abolition of the nation state, Kang’s proposed path toward the Great Way extended far beyond China. He favoured a global society where a world government would rule over a planet that was divided into regional districts.

In this global society, there would be no class or private property, and all would strive to deliver the common good and benefit everyone. Specifically, all resources would be deployed for the benefit and happiness of all. Public institutions, not families, would raise children. And the children would be trained to become citizens who would provide free services, such as health care and education, for all.

The only distinction between people would be the badges of honour worn by those deemed to have great ren, or knowledge—that is, the sages. Ultimately, once datong exists, there would be complete harmony with nature, which in turn would mean that all human beings are vegetarians and that euthanasia would be practised with ren, for the common good.

The ideology of datong, as Kang expounded it, and the hope of following the Great Way have strongly influenced Chinese political philosophy throughout the 20th and 21st centuries. Xi Jinping has been heard on numerous occasions to repeat the phrase, “When the Great Way prevails, the world is for everyone.”

Seen from the Chinese philosophical perspective, the best anyone can hope for today is xiaokang. Thus, xiaokang sages must be free to reform the institutions of the state on the path toward removing the nine boundaries, achieving datong and leading the Great Way.

There are many parallels between this path and the socioeconomic theory underpinning technocracy. For those who wished to establish a global technate, China was a natural choice for their pilot project.

Technocracy Inc.

Understanding Technocracy

While there is a lot of debate about the extent of “legitimate” technocratic governance in the West’s supposedly liberal representative democracies, governance is just one aspect of technocracy. In other words, technocratic governance alone is not technocracy.

As discussed previously, a technocracy is a “governance of function.” The overarching goal is to run the whole of society as efficiently as possible. The Technocracy Inc. Study Course states:

The basic unit of this organization is the Functional Sequence. A Functional Sequence is one of the larger industrial or social units, the various parts of which are related one to the other in a direct functional sequence. Thus among the major Industrial Sequences we have transportation (railroads, waterways, airways, highways and pipe lines); communication (mail, telephone, telegraph, radio and television); agriculture (farming, ranching, dairying, etc.); and the major industrial units such as textiles, iron and steel, etc. Among the Service Sequences are education (this would embrace the complete training of the younger generation), and public health (medicine, dentistry, public hygiene, and all hospitals and pharmaceutical plants as well as institutions for defectives).

Each “Functional Sequence” is overseen by a directorate. For example, the Distribution Sequence collects all the data gathered from the “Energy Certificates,” which are allocated to the citizens to be exchanged for goods and services. The “Price System” is abolished. There is no private property. The entire Technate is controlled by one body: Continental Control.

Like Kang’s “sages,” and in a fashion similar to guidance of the population toward the Great Way, a technocracy creates a rigid hierarchical structure to ensure that all are working for the common good. In the language of technocracy, the citizen contributes toward the appropriate service function.

Effectively, this creates a pyramid-like sociopolitical structure:

The personnel of all Functional Sequences will pyramid on the basis of ability to the head of each department within the Sequence, and the resultant general staff of each Sequence will be a part of the Continental Control. A government of function! The Continental Director, as the name implies, is the chief executive of the entire social mechanism. On his immediate staff are the Directors of the Armed Forces, the Foreign Relations, the Continental Research, and the Social Relations and Area Control. [. . .] The Continental Director is chosen from among the members of the Continental Control by the Continental Control. Due to the fact that this Control is composed of only some 100 or so members, all of whom know each other well, there is no one better fitted to make this choice than they.

Class is abolished in technocracy. Child care is provided by the Technate. Rather than having “great ren,” the general staff of the Technate are said to possess “peck-rights.” That is, they are the most suited to be at the top of the pyramid because a “governance of function” works most efficiently when “the right man is in the right place” to serve the common good.

Like the ideas presented in “Datong shu,” the intention of technocracy is essentially altruistic. The small cluster of engineers, economists, sociologists and other academics brought together by the Rockefellers and Howard Scott wanted to construct a society that would deliver “lives of abundance” to all.

It must be admitted that the Technocracy Inc. Study Course made some valid criticisms of a number of social problems. Unfortunately, the offered solution of a Technate is both arrogant and naïve.

It assumes, much as does the notion of a Great Way, that authority can be exercised by some human beings over other human beings for the common good. Further, it imagines that there is some social or political mechanism that can produce leaders who are omniscient and capable of defining what that “common good” is.

Both datong and technocracy would require human nature to undergo a fundamental transformation. Avarice, malevolence, narcissism, psychopathy and every other deleterious failing would need to be expunged from humanity. Until they are, power will continue to be sought by those who want to control others. The most ruthless among us will ultimately succeed—often not because they are the most suited but because they are prepared to do what others won’t in order to gain the power they crave. This situation will persist for as long as we believe that someone or some organisation needs to have absolute authority over our lives in order for us to be able to cooperate effectively.

To imagine that concentrating all power in the hands of a tiny, select band of experts or sages will solve the problems caused by the unscrupulous and frequently violent and immoral use of authority is ridiculous. You can’t fix a kakistocracy by investing more power in the “kakistocrats.”

For the global public-private partnership (G3P), which operates a compartmentalised, hierarchical, pyramid-like power structure, the most enticing aspect of technocracy is the extreme centralisation of power and authority over vast swaths of the humanity. That is why, as soon as technological development permitted and the opportunity arose, the G3P set about assisting the development of a Technate in China.

Technate: governance of function

Infiltrating China

The formal story of Henry Kissinger’s “secret” 1971 discussions with Chinese Premier Chou En-lai—officially acknowledged in 2001—is that US President Richard Nixon sent Kissinger to normalise relationships with the Chinese government as a counterbalance to the Soviet Union. What is mentioned less frequently, though, is Kissinger’s relationship with the Rockefellers.

In 1956, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund commissioned Kissinger to convene its Special Studies Panels. The panels investigated emerging global challenges and trends and suggested how US foreign policy might adapt to meet them. In the 1961 publication of the six panel reports, Prospect for America (subtitled “The problems and opportunities confronting American democracy—in foreign policy, in military preparedness, in education, in social and economic affairs”), the Rockefeller Brothers Fund outlined how public-private partnership would be key to this projected future:

Corporations, whose operations extend through many nations[,] [. . .] through which a considerable and essential part of the world’s economic activities is carried on, must be able to compose diversities, adjust conflicts of interest, and adapt their operations to the needs of the country in which they operate. In doing so they represent a further example of multinational solutions to common problems.

The authors of these reports regarded private finance as essential not only for developing international markets but also for guiding the social and political development of the target nation:

Rapid economic growth can be achieved only if local savings and public foreign investment are supplemented by an increasing inflow of private foreign investment. Such investment performs two key functions: it adds to the capital resources of the host nation and it is the chief mechanism through which the managerial and technical skills and the creative and catalytic quality can contribute to economic development in less developed areas. [. . .] Private philanthropic capital can also play an important role in economic development.

The panels that provided the analysis for Prospect for America were convened in the aftermath of McCarthyism. They needed to appeal to a US polity still obsessed with the perceived threat of international communism. Thus, the reports eulogise so-called democracy throughout.

However, there are numerous indications that the Rockefeller foreign policy strategists were willing to diplomatically suggest alternatives:

The American pattern of private enterprise and voluntary association is not the only mold for a free society.

It is clear that these strategists sought to both exploit the differences between nation-states for their development potential and amplify the importance of global issues as a means of uniting nations, regardless of their model of government, under a system of global governance. They considered scientific and technological development one way to do just that:

In the field of science, international cooperation on a world scale is most readily achievable. [. . .] [T]he United States should, therefore, seek to develop a series of agreements, looking toward the stimulation of scientific interchange and the fostering of scientific progress on a world scale. [. . .] The Communist nations should be invited to participate.

The panels, which effectively formed a temporary Rockefeller-funded think tank, were not opposed to colonialism on moral grounds but they highlighted its tactical flaws. Inherent in their critique of colonialism was an acknowledgement that alleged democratic values have nothing to do with hard-nosed geopolitics or with expansive foreign policy ambitions:

While colonialism exacted a human and political toll, it also represented one of the greatest conversions in history. As the ideals of the British, French and American revolutions became diffused, partly through the very spread of colonialism, the seeds were sown for the destruction of colonialism itself. The more successful the teachings of the colonial powers, the more untenable grew their position. Almost without exception, the leaders of independence movements fought their rulers in terms of the rulers’ own beliefs. They asked them to live up to their own principles.

The Rockefellers, being one of the leading families at the head of the G3P’s compartmentalised hierarchy, had worked with the Chinese authorities for generations. John D. Rockefeller Sr. was trading kerosene in China in 1863. The family’s philanthropic foundation had long fostered strong ties with the Chinese government. For example, it helped advance the use of Western allopathic medicine in China by establishing the Peking Union Medical College (PUMC) and by making other philanthropic investments.

It’s safe to say that the Rockefellers were knowledgeable and enthusiastic supporters of the Chinese government. Not surprisingly, they were also knowledgeable and enthusiastic supporters of the technocracy movement in the US, maintaining their keen interest in it despite its lack of public support. They understood the potential of social engineering to create a governance of function (a Technate):

Changes in technology have always been a major cause of change in government, economic relations and social institutions. But technological innovation is no longer the work of isolated, ingenious inventors; it is the product of organised scientific enterprise and is constant, insistent and accelerating. One of its notable effects is upon the tempo of social change itself, which is enormously quicker than it has been, and which subjects every inhabitant of a technological society to its pressures. Technological innovation thus poses a series of issues with which our society will have to deal. [. . .] The growth of technological society has changed the traditional society in which men have enjoyed freedom. Large and complex organisations have become the order of the day. [. . .] Programs for the preservation and strengthening of individual freedom must assume the existence and the inevitability of such organisations.

The Rockefellers had a nuanced appreciation of the potential for technological development to act as the catalyst for change. Despite the report’s primary focus on the US relationship with the Soviet Union, the Rockefellers obviously recognised the ripe opportunities in China:

It [China] has a rapidly growing population, a shortage of resources, and a fanatical ideology. Around a large part of its perimeter exists “soft” situations, making infiltration, subversion, and outright conquest seem easy or inviting prospects. The present relations between Soviet Russia and Red China [. . .] may not always be drawn together by common interests. [. . .] We must avoid, wherever possible, courses that seem to drive China closer to the Soviets.

As founders of the Trilateral Commission, the Rockefellers’ and their fellow Trilateralists’ goal was to infiltrate China by extending the hand of cooperative friendship through public-private investment in technological and thus financial and economic development. The Sino-Soviet split was seemingly the window of opportunity they wished to lever open.

China’s society, its political history and government structure was already amenable to the introduction of technocracy, as it was to communism. The Trilateralists were apparently eager to avoid the mistakes of Western colonialists, who extolled the democratic ideals and associated legal concepts which had come back to bite them. These ideals were, in any event, antithetical to the Trilateralists’ project.

Assisting China

Following Mao’s death in 1976, Deng Xiaoping rose to power, becoming the Paramount Leader of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in 1978. Just two weeks after assuming power, on January 1, 1979, he became the first communist Chinese leader to conduct a formal state visit to the US.

He was received with full state honours by the administration of Jimmy Carter, whose National Security advisor was Trilateralist Zbigniew Brzezinski—and who was himself a Trilateralist.

Deng Xiaoping immediately set about instigating a series of social and economic reforms, which were called “reform and opening up” in China and “the opening up of China” in the West.

Deng was one of a group of eight high-ranking Chinese officials who had survived the brutal repressions of cultural revolution. The reverently named “Eight Immortals” were credited with turning the Chinese economy from an unstable mess, riven with extreme poverty, into the thriving economic engine it is today.

Despite the hopes of datong, and far from being the sages that Kang Youwei dreamed of, the sons and daughters of the Eight Immortals, who are collectively known as the Princelings, hoovered up China’s state assets to effectively create a new dynasty, just as corrupt as its predecessors. Such is the nature of kakistocracy.

The scale and pace of the economic transformation in such a vast country would have been impossible without the considerable inward investment and the transfer of technology which China received from the G3P. This G3P investment was the initial source of China’s economic growth miracle. In late 2019, The World Economic Forum (WEF) reported:

High levels of government spending and foreign investment have enabled China to roughly double the size of its economy every eight years since the introduction of economic reforms in 1979.

CITIC (China International Trust & Investment Corp, renamed CITIC Group) was effectively China’s state–run investment arm. Kissinger’s visit to China had opened up investment banking opportunities for Rockefeller’s Chase Group (Chase Manhattan Bank at the time.) In June 1980, CITIC Chairman Rong Yiren attended a meeting with David Rockefeller and the representatives of 300 Fortune 500 companies in the Chase Manhattan offices in New York.

The purpose of the meeting between CITIC and the G3P representatives was:

[To] identify and define those areas of the Chinese economy most susceptible to American technology and capital infusion.

Kissinger and Rong reportedly established an investment company, with Trilateralist Kissinger appointed as a special advisor to CITIC. The initial phase of China’s economic transformation consisted of banking reforms that allowed much greater Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) in China.

FDIs aren’t just capital investments. They typically come with a transfer or sharing of expertise, technology and even workforce. Common types of FDIs are mergers, acquisitions, management services and logistical and manufacturing agreements.

From the mid 1980s onwards the G3P began to pour into Beijing’s Central Business District (CBD). By 2009 there were 114 Western companies with a substantial presence and established investments in Beijing and beyond. By 2020 there were 238 Fortune 500 companies in Beijing. Today, Beijing CBD (called the Functional Area) now houses the regional headquarters of 105 multinational corporations and more than 4,000 foreign-invested enterprises. The CBD is one of six “high-end industrial functional areas in Beijing.”

According to Chinese state media, between 1983 and 1991 FDI in China went from a value of $920 million to $4.37 billion. By 2019 total FDI had risen to more than $2.1 trillion. At the same time, the transition economy of China, just like many other economies, rapidly expanded its money supply.

All of this monopoly money, a mixture of FDI and domestic (digital) currency printing, fuelled the economic and technological development of China. In exchange for access to its market, the Chinese government required that investors sign so-called Forced Technology Transfer (FTT) agreements. Simultaneously, the Western mainstream media (MSM) began constantly pushing the notion of the “rising threat” of China and frequently accused China of alleged industrial espionage and “technology theft.“

Like so much propaganda aimed at Western populations by their MSM, these charges were just a fabrication. In truth, no one was forcing anyone to transfer technology to China. In fact, Trilateralists like President Bill Clinton went to considerable lengths to make sure China could get hold of the technology, including military technology, it needed.

In 1994 the Clinton administration scrapped Cold War export controls, thereby enabling more sensitive technology to be transferred to China. Claiming that they would not allow defence technology, such as supercomputer or potential uranium enrichment technology, to go to China (or Russia), they soon lifted this restriction via a work-around that shifed oversight from the departments of State and Defense to the Department of Commerce.

One only has to look at the near identical design of US and Chinese defence systems and weaponry to see that a massive amount of “sensitive” technology is common to both countries. The asinine explanation we are given is that this is all the result of Chinese espionage, even though the US government has amended legislation to make such transfers possible.

The Israeli government and Israeli defence contractors have consistently acted as facilitators for the transfer of the most sensitive Western defence and surveillance technology to China. As soon as “reform and opening up” began in 1979, Israeli multibillionaire—then a humble billionaire—Saul Eisenberg flew a delegation of defence contractors to arrange military supply contracts with the Chinese government.

While the West’s MSM parrots the intelligence agencies’ overwhelmingly baseless claims that China represents an “immense threat,” the US government and others have maintained deep defence ties with the Israeli government for generations. In the full and certain knowledge that Israel is passing defence technology to China, the US and other NATO allies continue to provide Israel with the latest defence technology.

Occasionally a story surfaces claiming that Washingtion is “angered” by this habitual practice. If we look beyond the propaganda, the fables simply reaffirm that which is blatantly obvious. The Israeli government, its defence contractor and tech corporation partners, have consistently acted as a conduit for the transfer of “sensitive” defence, fintech, surveillance and communication technology from the West to China. Between 1992 and 2017 the volume of overall trade between Israel and China multiplied 200 times over.

Another Western propagandist myth is that China has “stolen” jobs from Western economies. While it is true that manufacturers took advantage of cheaper labour costs in China, leading to job losses in the West, the practice of offshoring jobs had been ongoing for decades. Companies are in the business of maximising profits for shareholders and staying competitive. No one was forcing Western corporations to offshore. It was simply an economic expediency, largely the consequence of G3P efforts to modernise China’s economy.

Often the focus of G3P investment in China has been Research and Development (R&D). In 1994 China ranked 30th in terms of US overseas R&D investment; by 2000 it was 11th. Between 1994 to 2001 multinational corporation (MNC) investment in China quadrupled. As a ratio of overseas R&D investment, the G3P were providing thrice the amount of “technology infusion” into China compared to anywhere else.

While the pseudopandemic sharpened the decline in total global FDI, that figure continued to rise in China. The 4% increase of FDI in China in 2020 saw it temporarily surpass the US as the world’s leading recipient of direct investment. In 2020, while FDI in other advanced economies collapsed, China benefited from FDI valued at $163 billion.

In addition to the huge growth stimulus pumped into the Chinese economy over the last four decades, a significant number of foreign/Chinese industrial R&D alliances were established. These were separate business organizations that targeted specific research or technological development projects. They were formed through collaboration between academic and scientific research establishments, NGOs, government institutions and private enterprise.

Between 1990 and 2001 the US government established 105 such alliances. In the same time period, Japan had the second largest number of R&D partnership alliances (26), followed by Germany (15), the UK (14), Singapore (12), and Canada (11). The overwhelming majority of these R&D collaborations operated in China.

From 2001, to the financial crash in 2008, both FDI in R&D and China’s own R&D investment really took off. While the explosive pace of FDI growth slowed from 2010 onward, by 2016 China’s own outward foreign investment had surpassed the FDI it received. That was an astounding economic turnaround in less than 40 years. A 2019 report by the World Bank stated:

China’s spending on research and development (R&D) rose to 2.18 percent of GDP in 2018, up from 1.4 percent in 2007[.] [. . .] Its spending on R&D accounts for around 20 percent of the world total, second only to the United States. Its number of patents granted annually for inventions increased from 68,000 in 2007 to 420,000 in 2017, the highest in the world. [. . .] China is also a hotbed for venture capital in search of the next technology. [. . .] China has evolved from being a net importer of FDI to a net exporter. [. . .] China remains an attractive destination for foreign investments due to its large domestic market. Foreign enterprises such as BASF, BMW, Siemens, and Tesla have recently announced new or expanded investments in China.

A focus of apparent Western concern has been China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). This enormous infrastructure project, known in China as One Belt, One Road, or OBOR, is establishing a network of modern trade routes across Eurasia, linking Asia, Africa, Europe, South East Asia and Australasia, easing both international trade and, in particular, Chinese exports.

Beyond China’s borders there are 140 countries involved in the BRI to one degree or another. In its 2018 research paper looking at FDI in a BRI-related project, the World Bank referred to those countries directly involved in its construction as BRI nations. China’s own investment in BRI nations has grown, but the majority of its FDI goes to non-BRI nations. These, according to the World Bank, are nations that are not inviolved in the BRI.

China is the leading single nation investor in BRI nations but it does not account for the bulk of total investment. China took the lead after the 2008 financial crisis saw non-BRI nations (such as the US and the UK) pull back on their FDI deals in BRI nations. The investment from the non-BRI nations picked up again as quantitative easing (money printing) monetary policies in Western countries took effect post-2010.

The World Bank reported:

The majority of BRI countries’ [those who are part of the One Belt, One Road project] FDI inflow comes from non-BRI countries.

That is to say, BRI nations—Italy, Saudi Arabia, Austria, New Zealand, South Korea and Singapore, etc.—are net recipients of FDI from non-BRI nations, such as the US, UK, France and Germany.

The majority of the investment, expertise and technology that is building the BRI infrastructure comes from the non-BRI G3P partners. The notion that Western politicians, corporations and financial institutions are worried about the Belt and Road Initiative is just an MSM story. In reality, they are working hard to construct it in partnership with China.

Shanghai CBD

China: The World’s First Technate

China has developed an overt system dedicated to the social engineering of society. As noted in Part 1, the definition of technocracy is:

The science of social engineering, the scientific operation of the entire social mechanism to produce and distribute goods and services to the entire population.

The focus of technocracy is to direct the population to maximise the efficiency of all “functions” of society, primarily through control of the allocation of resources.

Published in 2014, the State Council Notice for planning a Social Credit System (SCS) outlined the Chinese government’s rationale for its social credit system:

The social credit system is an important component of the Socialist market economy system and the social governance system; [. . .] its foundation is a complete network covering the credit records of all members of society and the credit infrastructure; [. . .] its reward and punishment mechanisms are incentivizing trustworthiness and restricting untrustworthiness. [. . .] The establishment of a social credit system is an important foundation for comprehensively implementing the scientific viewpoint of development. [. . .] Accelerating and advancing the establishment of the social credit system is an important precondition for promoting the optimized allocation of resources.

This is a description of pure technocracy.

Western commentators often focus upon the technological aspects of China’s social credit system. China certainly operates a dystopian surveillance society, but this complements the social credit system which, as the name suggests, is an overarching system for “implementing the scientific viewpoint of development.”

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) reported that the supposedly “terrifying system doesn’t exist” in China:

[T]he system that the central government has been slowly working on is a mix of attempts to regulate the financial credit industry, enable government agencies to share data with each other, and promote state-sanctioned moral values.

MIT and its funding partners, such as the Rockefeller Foundation, have consistently highlighted the potential merits of the social credit system (SCS). When reading that material, we must separate the rhetoric of the engineers of the social credit system from its practical application.

Like the Great Way or technocracy or communism, the political philosophy underpinning the social credit system is presented by its advocates as progressive, humanitarian and benign. Naturally, the people who impose this system would also need to be progressive, humanitarian and benign, right?

Yet, while the social credit system is effectively a massive bureaucracy, combining the digital sharing of information with legislation and various paper-shuffling exercises, there are many aspects of it that are extremely concerning. For one thing, it creates a public-private partnership that, by rewarding good behaviour, fosters public faith in the mechanisms of the state. For another, it punishes those who aren’t duly faithful.

The SCS removes access to “privileges” from people who have broken the law and even from those who haven’t. The concept of Joint Disciplinary Action in the SCS introduces the idea that, if found “untrustworthy,” a citizen or organisation so labelled will face broader social consequences, from having their right to fly removed to restricting their ability to book “high-class” tickets on trains to impeding their employment or business opportunities.

The SCS sets up a blacklist for those deemed to have committed “misdeeds.” Thus far it has predominantly punished those who have failed to pay court fines or those considered bad debtors.

Chinese state media have praised the courts’ partnership with tech giants like Sesame Credit—the credit-scoring system of the Alibaba Group subsidiary Ant Financial. Chinese government data, gathered from the courts and elsewhere, has been combined with private data, gathered from social media, for the purpose of lowering the financial credit score of millions of people who have been “blacklisted.”

Public humiliation and shaming are commonly used to change the blacklisted’s behaviour. The Supreme Court maintains a database of “discredited individuals” (laolai). Tech companies like TikTok, owned by Chinese company ByteDance Ltd., publish laolai lists from the publicly available data to inform its users which companies and individuals have been “discredited.”

Technology enhances the social credit system. To register a SIM cards and new SMART phones, Chinese users must by law use face scan technology. This biometric data then informs China’s already extensive and rapidly expanding national network of facial recognition cameras. The surveillance grid, allowing entry to everything from bus depots to safari parks, is integrating with alleged emotion-recognition technology to assess an individual’s mood and “predict” their behaviour.

China’s internet is highly regulated via the “Measures on the Administration of Internet Information Services.” The government prohibits news bloggers from commenting on any policies or political developments without a license from the Cyberspace Adminstration of China (CAC).

Again, this system operates as a public-private partnership. There are eight licensed Internet Service Providers (ISPs) in China registered with the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT), but censorship largely occurs through the state’s partnership with fintech companies and social media platforms. The censorship is overseen by the Internet Information Office.

The Chinese have to register their personal details to use the popular social media platforms. The independent sale of SIM cards and network adapters is prohibited; the cards and adapters require similar registration upon purchase and prior to use. The Chinese authorities can block foreign websites, restricting citizens access to information from outside China, and it is a crime for anyone to facilitate the illegal flow of prohibited information into China. The Chinese authorities have effectively created the crime of information-smuggling.

Beyond inciting crimes or advocating violence or terrorism, Article 12 of China’s Cybersecurity Law outlines the other types of information that Chinese people are not permitted to share:

[Users] must not use the Internet to engage in activities endangering national security, national honour, and national interests; they must not incite subversion of national sovereignty, overturn the socialist system, incite separatism, break national unity, [. . .] create or disseminate false information to disrupt the economic or social order, or information that infringes on the reputation, privacy, intellectual property or other lawful rights and interests of others, and other such acts.

In other words, no one is permitted to question the state in China. This doesn’t stop the people from doing so, but the associated risks are high. Political dissidents can certainly expect to be censored by the social media platforms, and prison sentences are a distinct possibility for those who speak out too vociferously.

Among the major geopolitical powers, China is leading in the development of Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC). CBDC is “programmable money” and the issuer can insert “smart contracts” to control what can be bought, where it can be used and who can use it.

Bo Li, the former Deputy Governor of the Bank of China and the current Deputy Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), speaking at the Central Bank Digital Currencies for Financial Inclusion: Risks and Rewards symposium, clarified smart contracts further:

CBDC can allow government agencies and private sector players to program [CBDC] to create smart-contracts, to allow targetted policy functions. For example[,] welfare payments [. . .], consumptions coupons, [. . .] food stamps. By programming, CBDC money can be precisely targeted [to] what kind of [things] people can own, and what kind of use [for which] this money can be utilised. For example, [. . .] for food.

At the 2022 World Economic Forum’s Davos gathering, the president of the Chinese Alibaba Group, J. Michael Evans, announced that the global tech corporation would soon roll out its personal “carbon footprint tracker.”

He said:

We’re developing, through technology, an ability for consumers to measure their own carbon footprint [. . .] That’s where they’re travelling, how they are travelling, what are they eating, what are they consuming on the platform. [. . .] So, individual carbon footprint tracker, stay tuned! We don’t have it operational yet, but this is something we’re working on.

During the initial COVID-19 lockdowns, China’s government required all businesses and public services to install Covid status app scanners, connected to the internet. In order to access shops, restaurants, libraries, hospitals, etc., and to move between the newly created urban “zones,” the Chinese have to use their Covid app. In conjunction with the SIM and SMART phone registration requirements, combined with the biometric facial recognition technology, the public movements of the urban Chinese can be tracked 24/7 in real time by China’s public-private partnership.

The foundations for “the scientific operation of the entire social mechanism” have already been built in China. One of the major cities conducting some of its business in CBDC is Shanghai. In Shanghai’s Pudong “smart city” district, an AI integrated monitoring system is able to access the feeds from 290,000 surveillance cameras. The deputy director of the smart city, Sheng Denden, explained the systems value to the Chinese government:

For the government, this is a tool for more efficient administration in the city.

China is not communist. It is a technocracy. It is the world’s first Technate.

The China Blame Game

As we have already discussed, the idea that Western governments are “opposed” to China’s government is frankly ridiculous. This is not to suggest that there aren’t tensions, but these spring from competition not trenchant animosity. China’s government, and its tech giant partners, are as much a part of G3P as any other nation. The propaganda, from both the West and the Communist Party of China, serves as a surface narrative designed to divide and rule the global population, and to exert control over the respective domestic populations.

The Trilateralists who worked tirelessly to ensure that China was able to construct a Technate are seemingly proud of their claimed achievements. In 2001, Hedley Donovan, one of the founding members of the Trilateral Commission alongside Brzezinski and the Rockefellers, wrote:

It’s no exaggeration to describe the current regime as a technocracy. [. . .] You might say that technocratic politics is a natural fit with the Chinese political culture. [. . .] During the 1980s, technocracy as a concept was much talked about, especially in the context of so-called ‘Neo-Authoritarianism.’ [. . .] The basic beliefs and assumptions of the technocrats were laid out quite plainly: Social and economic problems were akin to engineering problems and could be understood, addressed, and eventually solved as such. [. . .] Scientism underlies the post-Mao technocracy, and it is the orthodoxy against which heresies are measured.

The self-congratulation was largely misplaced. That China’s government developed a Technate owes more to that nation’s circumstances and political and social history and belief systems than it does to the ambitions of the Trilateralists.

Technocracy is intended to be a sociopolitical system where individual rights are sacrificed to communitarianism. This is contrary to the Western liberal tradition. Technocracy represented less of a culture shock to the Chinese people. Certainly this fact was another impetus for the Trilateralists to pilot technocracy in China.

Just as we in the West generally believe in individual liberty and freedom from the state, so the Chinese people largely hold that the state should strive to rule with ren along the path to the Great Way and equality for all. In both cases, the people continue to be deceived and disappointed by the “kakistocrats,” who clearly have no intention of living up to any of those principles or expectations.

The mass and widespread Chinese demonstrations against the human cost of the government’s harsh Covid lockdown measures shows that the people are not willing to simply allow the state to do whatever it likes. While isolated protests in China are not unusual, the scale and coordination of these protests are testament to the Chinese people’s determination to resist oppression.

The Western investment in Chinese technocracy was made with a view to developing a global system, not one restricted to China. From the surveillance network and social credit to censorship and social control using CBDC, having seen what can be achieved in China, Western governments are busy trying to impose exactly the same model of technocracy upon their own people.

The Western political class cannot help but openly admire China’s technocracy. The only difference is that China’s system is publicly discussed—although rarely acknowledged as “technocracy” by name—while the rapidly emerging technocracy in the West is denied and concealed.

The G3P is ostensibly colonising Western populations yet remains eager to avoid the errors of 19th century colonialists. The Rockefellers’ research in the late 1950s highlighted the need to first justify the necessary destruction of democratic values—something all Western governments are working hard to do.

For its part, the Chinese government has had its own reasons for allowing technocracy to flourish. Technocracy fits well with China’s domestic policy ambitions. That said, there is no reason to think that the Chinese government ever intended to “export” technocracy to other nations.

Technocracy is being installed globally. This suits China’s oligarchy, accustomed as it is to operating a Technate. The Chinese government has no reason to stand in the way of the global adoption of technocracy. It is merely aligned with the global transformation, not leading it.

China’s government is not forcing other nations to adopt technocracy. Rather, all governments are collaborating to that end.

The Chinese people are not our enemy, and China is not a foe to be fought. We, the people of the Earth, are all under attack by our own G3P governments.

We are being rapidly transitioned into a new system of centralised, authoritarian global governance. This system is designed to be a technocracy, and, as such, it is truly totalitarian.

Totalitarianism is a form of government that attempts to assert total control over the lives of its citizens. It is characterized by strong central rule that attempts to control and direct all aspects of citizens’ lives through coercion and repression. It does not permit individual freedom. Traditional social institutions and organizations are discouraged and suppressed. As a result, citizens succumb to being merged into a single unified movement. Totalitarian states typically pursue a special goal to the exclusion of all other goals. They direct all resources toward the attainment of that goal, regardless of the cost.

In the case of today’s totalitarian system, technocracy, that “special” goal is called “sustainable development.” In the pursuit of that goal, no cost, either financial or humanitarian, is too great.

Technocrats insist that sustainable development is the way we can successfully tackle the alleged “climate crisis” facing our planet. In reality, their charge that humans are causing climate change is simply an excuse for implementing sustainable development. It is through the technocrats’ global policy commitment to 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) that technocracy is being installed.

A technocratic society is referred to as a “Technate.” In this two-part article, we will explore the world’s first Technate: China. We will look at how this system was constructed in China, who was behind it, and why technocracy is now being foisted upon all of humanity.

Global Technocratic Governance

In order for technocrats to roll out their vision of a global technocracy, they need to be in control of everything at the global level. In other words, authority has to be consolidated and centralized at the top of the pyramid of power. To achieve this goal, most of the world’s governments and intergovernmental organisations and multinational corporations have collaborated to form a global public-private partnership (G3P).

The G3P network has been knit together throughout the 20th and 21st centuries for the purpose of constructing a single system of global governance. For it is only through global governance that technocrats can distribute their influence worldwide. They count on the top government officials of each nation-state to convert their 17 SDGs into national policy commitments.

Many components of global technocratic governance have already been established.

For instance:

• The World Health Organisation (WHO) now delivers global governance of public health.
• The World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) metes out global access to technological development.
• The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) coordinates economic policies between nation-states.
• The World Trade Organisation (WTO) monitors and controls global trade through the international agreements it oversees.
• The Bank For International Settlements (BIS) coordinates global monetary policy and the flow of capital.
• The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) steers the direction of education, academia, the sciences and cultural development.
• Other UN bodies are responsible for the seizure of the global commons and the “financialisation” of nature—through natural asset companies and other mechanisms. These goals are nearing completion.

The 17 SDGs are primarily controlled by the UN Development Programme and the UN Environment Programme—UNDP and UNEP, respectively.

Meanwhile, the necessary global scientific consensus on climate change is centrally administered—and the appropriate research funding streams allocated—by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

The powerful individuals who are pushing the G3P project forward include a motley crew of mass polluters, robber barons, land grabbers and the world’s leading exponents of worker exploitation, market manipulation, monetary extortion (usury) and oppression. They form what would otherwise be considered a criminal cartel, but they have greenwashed their reputations through their publicly proclaimed commitment to so-called “sustainable development.”

Though often referred to as “the elite,” a more fitting description of this collection of thieves is “the parasite class.”

The G3P has managed to convince billions of citizens around the world that it is committed to sustainable, “net zero” environmentalism and that its foremost desire is to “save the planet.”

In truth, though, the G3P is all about empowering global governance and enforcing technocracy upon humanity through the SDGs and associated policy agendas.

Regardless of what you think about the causes of climate change or the level of risk climate change presents, SDGs do nothing to address it. Rather, they are designed to serve only the G3P partners and their selfish interests.

In order to requisition, commodify, audit and ultimately divide up the Earth’s resources among themselves, the stakeholder capitalists who are at the heart of the G3P also need technocratic control of humans everywhere. Thus, even when the bulk of humanity finally figures out what has happened, technocracy will enable the G3P to shut down all resistance through literal population control.

Under this control, every human being will be individually monitored by Artificial Intelligence (AI) networks that will punish or reward them, depending upon their behaviour.

“How will the G3P get away with taking away human rights worldwide?” you may ask. The justifications for our enslavement have already been set in place: Biosecurity risks and environmental devastation that will result if we don’t obey our global overlords are the two main excuses. We have already seen these two excuses used in the pseudopandemic and the fake climate scare.

Much like the quack pseudo-science of eugenics, which many G3P “thought leaders” seem to believe, Technocracy, Inc., a movement spawned in the early 1900s, was the social science certainty of its day. Although it subsequently faded from public consciousness, technocracy, like eugenics, it is still avidly pursued by the G3P’s hierarchy. Most people don’t recognize technocracy in their lives because it has been purposely compartamentalised—that is, kept out of sight.

Technocracy

In 1911, Frederick Winslow Taylor, who was arguably the world’s first management consultant, published The Principles of Scientific Management.

Taylor’s work came at the culmination of the Progressive Era in the United States. This was a period marked by political activism of the middle class, who sought to address the underlying social problems, as they saw them, of excessive industrialisation, immigration and political corruption. “Taylorism,” fixated on the imminent exhaustion of natural resources and advocating efficient “scientific management systems,” was in the spirit of the age.

Taylor wrote:

In the past the man has been first; in the future the system must be first. [. . .] The best management is a true science, resting upon clearly defined laws, rules, and principles. [. . . ] The fundamental principles of scientific management are applicable to all kinds of human activities, from our simplest individual acts to the work of our great corporations.

Taylorism advocated science-driven efficiency reforms across society. An efficient system should not be run by politicians or religious leaders but by “experts,” such as engineers, scientists, logistical experts, economists and other academics. The focus, according to Taylorism, should always be on systemic efficiency and the proper use of precious resources, including labour.

Thorstein Veblen

Though Taylor was influenced by Social Darwinism, he was not a eugenicist. However, his ideas were adopted by eugenicists, for they “fitted” with eugenicists’ belief in their unassailable right to rule.

Just as eugenicists—who are inherently technocrats—could optimise and control the human population, so could they employ experts to make socioeconomic and industrial systems more efficient. They could promote these systems as beneficial to “the public good” while at the same time consolidating their own power and reaping a greater financial harvest from a more efficient industrialised society.

Taylor’s principles of scientific management chimed with the theories of economist and sociologist Thorstein Veblen. The latter proposed that economic activity wasn’t just a function of supply and demand, utility, value and so forth, but that economic activity also evolved with society and was thus shaped by psychological, sociological and anthropological influences.

Both Taylor and Veblen focused upon improving the efficiency of industrial and manufacturing processes. But they also recognised that their theories could be extended to the wider social context. Not surprisingly, it was the more expansive application of their ideas that beguiled the parasite class.

Veblen famously spoke of “conspicuous consumption”—a description of how the affluent displayed their social standing through their ability to engage in pursuits and buy items that were essentially purposeless and wasteful. This “conspicuous leisure” and “consumption” cascaded down through the class structure, as those aspiring to signal their own status emulated the wealthy.

He argued that this excess was a major contributor to unacceptable resource waste and inefficiency. A consumer society, he thought, ultimately produced more goods and services than it needed simply to meet the artificial demand created by extravagant social climbers.

In short, Veblen was strongly opposed to this inefficient use of resources, which he blamed on the “business classes” and financiers. Though he valued their contribution to the industrial age, he felt they were no longer capable of managing modern industrial society.

Initially, Veblen argued that the workers must therefore be the architects of the necessary social change that would create economic and industrial reform. Later, in the Engineers and the Price System, he shifted his focus away from workers towards technocratic engineers as the drivers of change.

He called for a thorough analysis of the institutions that maintained social stability. Once that analysis was understood, he opined, those with technological expertise should reform the institutions and thereby engineer society and improve efficiency. Veblen referred to these social change agents as a “soviet of technicians.”

In 1919, Veblen became a co-founder of the John D. Rockefeller-funded private research university in New York called the New School for Social Research. From there he create the Technical Alliance, a fledgling technocratic organisation composed of scientists and engineers—including, notably, Howard Scott.

Howard Scott

Scott didn’t like Veblen’s description of a “soviet of technicians” and reportedly called it “a cockeyed thing.” He saw that the term’s association with communism wasn’t welcome from a PR perspective and felt it undermined what he was trying to achieve with the technocracy movement.

Veblen’s involvement with the Technical Alliance was relatively brief, and some have suggested that his contribution to technocracy was minimal, accrediting Scott as the great mind behind it. Regardless of the extent of Veblen’s personal involvement in the movement, though, his socioeconomic theories permeate technocracy.

In 1933, the Technical Alliance reformed after an enforced hiatus that was prompted by Scott’s exposure as a fraudster (he had falsified his engineering credentials). The group renamed itself Technocracy Inc.

Despite his public humiliation, Scott was a skilled orator and remained the spokesman for Technocracy Inc. He worked with, among others, M. King Hubbert, who would later become globally renowned for his vague and generally inaccurate “peak oil” theory.

Scott and Hubbert collaborated to write The Technocracy Inc. study course, a formal introduction of technocracy to the world. At the time, their proposals were technologically impossible to achieve, so sounded crazy.

Hubbert wrote:

Technocracy finds that the production and distribution of an abundance of physical wealth on a Continental scale for the use of all Continental citizens can only be accomplished by a Continental technological control, a governance of function, a Technate.

There’s the word used in the opening of this article: Technate.

The Technate, to Hubbert and Scott, was a technocratic society envisaged to encompass the North American continent. It would be administered by a central planning body formed of scientists, engineers and other suitably qualified technocrats. They believed technocracy would require a new monetary system based upon a calculation of the Technate’s total energy usage. People would be allocated an equal share of the corresponding “energy certificates” (as a form of currency) denominated in units of energy (Joule or erg, etc.):

[I]ncome is granted to the public in the form of energy certificates. [. . .] They are issued individually to every adult of the entire population. [. . .] The record of one’s income and its rate of expenditure is kept by the Distribution Sequence, [the envisaged ledger of transactions] [. . .] so that it is a simple matter at any time for the Distribution Sequence to ascertain the state of an unknown customer’s balance. [. . .] Energy Certificates also contain the following additional information about the person to whom issued: whether he has not yet begun his period of service, is now performing service, or is retired [where service to the Technate is rewarded with Energy Certificates] [. . .] sex [that is, gender], [. . .] the geographical area in which he resides, and [. . .] job at which he works.

They envisioned a new price system, with all commodities and goods valued according to the energy cost of their production. Purchases made with “energy certificates” would then be reported back to the appropriate department of the technocratic central planning committee. The transactions would be catalogued and analysed, enabling the central planners to precisely calculate the rolling energy balance—the balance between energy production and consumption—for the entire Technate.

In order for this system to work, all consumers’ energy expenditure (including all daily transactions) would need to be recorded in real time; the national inventory of net energy production and consumption would have to be constantly updated, around the clock; and a registry of every commodity and product needed to be scrupulously maintained, with every individual living in the Technate allocated a personal energy account. This would be updated to record their energy usage and personal net energy balance.
We are being rapidly transitioned into a new system of centralised, authoritarian global governance. This system is designed to be a technocracy, and, as such, it is truly totalitarian.

Totalitarianism is a form of government that attempts to assert total control over the lives of its citizens. It is characterized by strong central rule that attempts to control and direct all aspects of citizens’ lives through coercion and repression. It does not permit individual freedom. Traditional social institutions and organizations are discouraged and suppressed. As a result, citizens succumb to being merged into a single unified movement. Totalitarian states typically pursue a special goal to the exclusion of all other goals. They direct all resources toward the attainment of that goal, regardless of the cost.

In the case of today’s totalitarian system, technocracy, that “special” goal is called “sustainable development.” In the pursuit of that goal, no cost, either financial or humanitarian, is too great.

Technocrats insist that sustainable development is the way we can successfully tackle the alleged “climate crisis” facing our planet. In reality, their charge that humans are causing climate change is simply an excuse for implementing sustainable development. It is through the technocrats’ global policy commitment to 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) that technocracy is being installed.

A technocratic society is referred to as a “Technate.” In this two-part article, we will explore the world’s first Technate: China. We will look at how this system was constructed in China, who was behind it, and why technocracy is now being foisted upon all of humanity.

Hubbert and Scott made it clear that, for technocracy to work, an all-pervasive energy surveillance grid would be required. All citizens would be individually identified on the grid and every aspect of their daily lives monitored and controlled by the technocratic central planners.

Technocracy, as we can see, is a totalitarian form of surveillance-based, centralised, authoritarian governance that abolishes national sovereignty and political parties. Freedoms and rights are replaced with a duty to behave in the interest of a common good, as defined by the technocrats. All decisions about production, allocation of resources, technological innovation and economic activity are controlled by a technocracy of experts (Veblen’s “soviet of technicians”).

In 1938, in Technocrat Magazine Vol. 3 No. 4 (to give its technocratic specification), technocracy was described as:

The science of social engineering, the scientific operation of the entire social mechanism to produce and distribute goods and services to the entire population.

For the parasite class and its G3P stakeholder partners, technocracy was obviously an irresistible idea. Technocracy potentially enables the precise engineering of society through the control of resources and energy through the mechanism of a linked, centrally planned and monitored economic and monetary system.

Or, as the Technocracy Inc. Study Course puts it:

The significance of this, from the point of view of knowledge of what is going on in the social system, and of social control, can best be appreciated when one surveys the whole system in perspective. First, one single organization is manning and operating the whole social mechanism. This same organization not only produces but distributes all goods and services. Hence a uniform system of record-keeping exists for the entire social operation, and all records of production and distribution clear to one central headquarters.

To control everything, the only thing that members of the parasite class would need to do is whisper in the ear of a few hand-picked technocrats. There would be no need to corrupt politicians or orchestrate international crises anymore.

While in the 1930s the Technate was an impracticable proposition, it was still something to inspire the G3P and a goal toward which it has been assiduously working.

Scott Speaking at a Technocracy inc. Rally

The Technocratic Opportunity

Understanding that technological development would eventually enable the Technate to be realised, in 1970 Professor Zbigniew Brzezinski (1928–2017) wrote Between Two Ages: America’s Role In The Technetronic Era. At the time, Brzezinski was a professor of political science at Columbia University, where Scott had first met Hubbert in 1932. He had already been an advisor to both the Kennedy and Johnson presidential campaigns and would later become National Security Advisor to President Jimmy Carter (1977–1981).

Brzezinski was a significant influence on late-20th-century US foreign policy, far beyond his years in the Carter administration. Though he was the Democrat counterpart to Republican Henry Kissinger, Brzezinski was a centrist whose deep dislike of the Soviet Union often placed him on the right of Kissinger on related issues. He supported the Vietnam War and was instrumental in “Operation Cyclone,” which saw the United States arm, train and equip Islamist extremists in Afghanistan.

He was a member of numerous policy think tanks, including the Council on Foreign Relations, the Center for Strategic and International Studies, and Le Cercle. And he was a regular attendee at the annual parasite class soiree, the Bilderberg conference. In 1973, Brzezinski and David Rockefeller formed the Trilateral Commission, a policy think tank with members from the US, Europe and Japan.

In short, Brzezinski was very much part of the Deep State milieu and the G3P.

Zbigniew Brzezinski (March 28, 1928 – May 26, 2017)

Between Two Ages is a geopolitical analysis and practical set of policy recommendations born from Brzezinski’s view that digital technology would transform society, culture, politics and the global balance of political power. It also provides us with a clear view of the mindset of the parasite class.

Brzezinski didn’t reference technocracy directly. Perhaps he was wary of its rather sketchy reputation following Scott’s disgrace. However, he did describe it in detail throughout the book. For example, he wrote:

Technological adaptation would involve the transformation of the bureaucratic dogmatic party into a party of technocrats. Primary emphasis would be on scientific expertise, efficiency, and discipline. [. . .] [T]he party would be composed of scientific experts, trained in the latest techniques, capable of relying on cybernetics and computers for social control.

He theorised about what he called the “Technetronic Age” and offered a vision of the near future from the perspective of the 1970s. He predicted that the “Technetronic Age” would arise out of the Technetronic Revolution—the “Third Revolution” to follow the Industrial Revolution. Klaus Schwab, founder of the World Economic Forum, would later call it the Fourth Industrial Revolution.

Brzezinski also wrote:

The post industrial society is becoming a ‘technetronic’ society: a society that is shaped culturally, psychologically, socially, and economically by the impact of technology and electronics—particularly in the area of computers and communications.

He then went on to describe what he thought life in the Technetronic Age would be like for ordinary men, women and their families. He foretold how political and industrial control would be replaced by psychological control mechanisms, such as the cult of personality, and that these new control mechanisms would steer humans towards behaviour change. Our lives, he predicted, would be managed through computing power and, in the parlance of today, led by science:

Both the growing capacity for the instant calculation of the most complex interactions and the increasing availability of biochemical means of human control augment the potential scope of consciously chosen direction. [. . .] Masses are organized in the industrial society by trade unions and political parties and unified by relatively simple and somewhat ideological programs. [. . .] In the technetronic society the trend seems to be toward aggregating the individual support of millions of unorganized citizens, who are easily within the reach of magnetic and attractive personalities, and effectively exploiting the latest communication techniques to manipulate emotions and control reason.

He also explained how technology would enable extensive behaviour modification and manipulation of the population. He foresaw (suggested) how this modification and manipulation could be weaponised:

It may be possible—and tempting—to exploit for strategic political purposes the fruits of research on the brain and on human behavior. [. . .] [O]ne could develop a system that would seriously impair the brain performance of very large populations in selected regions over an extended period.

Zbigniew Brzezinski wrote enthusiastically, through a paper-thin veil of caution, about how a “global scientific elite” could not only use extreme, all-pervasive propaganda and economic and political manipulation to determine the direction of society but could also exploit technology and behavioural science to genetically alter and brainwash the population.

Describing the form of this society and the potential for technocratic control, he wrote:

Such a society would be dominated by an elite whose claim to political power would rest on allegedly superior scientific know how. Unhindered by the restraints of traditional liberal values, this elite would not hesitate to achieve its political ends by using the latest modern techniques for influencing public behavior and keeping society under close surveillance and control.

He claimed that the “Technetronic Age” he described was inevitable. Therefore, he asserted, the future of the United States (and the planet) must be centrally planned. These planners would eventually displace “the lawyer as the key social legislator and manipulator.”

Brzezinski warned that other nations—he meant the Soviet Union, which he hated—wouldn’t hesitate to embark on this dark social engineering path. Therefore, he urged, US geopolitical strategists needed to be the first to develop this network of planners—aka, technocracy. This would be done, Brzezinski wrote, by fusing government with academia and private corporations: the G3P.

His Between Two Ages made it clear that political parties would become increasingly irrelevant, replaced by regional structures pursuing “urban, professional, and other interests.” These could be used to “provide the focus for political action.” The author understood the potential for this localised, technocratic administrative system:

In the technetronic age the greater availability of means permits the definition of more attainable ends, thus making for a less doctrinaire and a more effective relationship between ‘what is’ and ‘what ought to be.’

He also suggested a redefinition of freedom. Liberty would be achieved through centrally planned public commitment to social and economic equality. The “public good” was thus defined by the technocrats.

The positive potential of the third American revolution lies in its promise to link liberty with equality, according to Brzezinski.

Brzezinski recognised that it would be impossible to impose world government directly. Rather it should be gradually constructed through a system of global governance comprised of treaties, bilateral agreements and intergovernmental organisations:

Though the objective of shaping a community of the developed nations is less ambitious than the goal of world government, it is more attainable. [. . .] It [global governance] attempts to create a new framework for international affairs not by exploiting these divisions [between nation-states] but rather by striving to preserve and create openings for reconciliation.

One “opening” that he was particularly interested in was China. Tensions between Russia and China had continued to rumble on, and, as Brzezinski wrote in Between Two Ages, they had spilled over into a border conflict. He saw that the Sino-Soviet split had created an opportunity to shape China’s modernisation:

In China the Sino Soviet conflict has already accelerated the inescapable Sinification of Chinese communism. That conflict shattered the revolution’s universal perspective and—perhaps even more important— detached Chinese modernization from its commitment to the Soviet model. Hence, whatever happens in the short run, in years to come Chinese development will probably increasingly share the experience of other nations in the process of modernization. This may both dilute the regime’s ideological tenacity and lead to more eclectic experimentation in shaping the Chinese road to modernity.

These ideas were firmly in Brzezinski’s mind when he and committed eugenicist David Rockefeller, whose family had been bankrolling technocratic initiatives for more than 50 years, first convened the Trilateral Commission. The two were eventually joined by other so-called “thought leaders”—namely, population control expert Henry Kissinger, Club of Rome environmentalist Gro Harlem Brundtland, US presidents (Bill Clinton, for one) and Council on Foreign Relations head Richard Haass, who more recently wrote World Order 2.0.

Rockefeller (left) and Brzezinski

Constructing The Technate In China

Mao Zedong’s “Great Leap Forward” saw 40 million people brutalised and starved to death in just three horrific years (1959–1961). Apologists claim this was all a terrible mistake. But it was nothing of the kind.

In the certain knowledge that food supplies were running out, in 1958 Mao insisted that “to distribute resources evenly will only ruin the Great Leap Forward.” Later the same year, he asserted:

When there is not enough to eat, people starve to death. It is better to let half the people die so that others can eat their fill.

In his zeal to create a communist utopia, Mao presided over a system that seized food from starving millions and exported it to fund his political reforms and support his determination to rapidly industrialise the economy. It wasn’t an error or an unfortunate oversight. While many were so terrified that they submitted fake reports of surpluses that didn’t exist, it is clear that the leadership of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) knew exactly what the human costs were. They just didn’t care.

Mao and Rockefeller’s view of the Great Leap Forward

Nor did David Rockefeller, as evidenced by his 1973 op-ed for The New York Times. He and his Chase Group banking empire delegation had visited Maoist China. In his account of the trip, Rockefeller dismissed the mass murder of millions as “whatever.” It was only the product of genocide that Rockefeller was interested in:

One is impressed immediately by the sense of national harmony. [. . .] There is a very real and pervasive dedication to Chairman Mao and Maoist principles. Whatever the price of the Chinese revolution it has obviously succeeded, not only in producing a more efficient administration, but also in fostering. [. . .] a community of purpose.

The Trilateralist Rockefeller could see the opportunity the Chinese dictatorship presented the parasite class. In full agreement with Brzezinski, he wrote:

Too often the true significance and potential of our new relationship with China has been obscured. [. . .] In fact, of course, we are experiencing a much more fundamental phenomenon. [. . .] The Chinese, for their part, are faced with altering a primarily inward focus. [. . .] We, for our part, are faced with the realization that we have largely ignored a country with one-fourth of the world’s population.

The “we” Rockefeller referred to was not us. He meant the G3P and his fellow “stakeholder capitalists” and Trilateralists.

The totalitarian order he saw in China impressed him, as he had hoped it would. Not that Rockefeller was the only Trilateralist to see the technocratic possibilities in China. So did others, naturally, for the sheer scale of the market was an enticing prospect, and the promise of the “Technetronic Age” raised the real potential to build the world’s first Technate.

Completely discounting the appalling loss of human life, Rockefeller wrote:

The social experiment in China under Chairman Mao’s leadership is one of the most important and successful in human history. How extensively China opens up and how the world reacts to the social innovation [. . .] is certain to have a profound impact upon the future of many nations.

A look at the Great Leap Forward

The G3P’s task was to crack open the Chinese market while supporting the country’s ongoing totalitarian rule. China would need help with its economic development and technical support to build the technological infrastructure necessary for technocracy to work. This process had already begun, but with Rockefeller, Brzezinski, Kissinger and other Trilateralists committed to the cause, the target of constructing a Technate was firmly in the Trilateral Commission’s sights.

The Trilateralists set about assisting China to develop both economically and technologically, while remaining careful to avoid applying too much pressure for political reform. Totalitarianism was a system they supported and wanted to exploit. In their 1978 Paper No. 15 on East-West Relations, they suggested:

To grant China favourable conditions in economic relations is definitely in the political interest of the West. [. . .] [T]here seems to exist sufficient ways for aiding China in acceptable forms with advanced civilian technology.

In the same paper, the Trilateralists announced that they weren’t entirely averse to helping China modernise its military capability, though they stressed this should be only for defensive purposes.

They accepted that a modern, militarised China might turn to expansionism and seek to regain territory it historically claimed as its own—in particular, Taiwan. They judged this was a reasonable risk to take.

They were playing the great game. Human lives—except their own and the lives of their families, of course—were of no concern.

In Part 2 we will look at how they set about constructing the world’s first Technate in China.

Please note: This research is available in my book – Pseudopandemic

While we react with fear to the resurgence of fascist, Nazi or Japanese imperial groups, we fail to see that it was not these ideologies that provoked World War, but the alliance of rulers ready for the worst. The same configuration is about to be repeated with other groups. In a few months, if we do not react now, a Third World War may be possible.

The Second World War can serve as a lesson to us. It did not appear in a serene sky. It was not a battle of the Good guys against the Bad guys. It was just triggered by an unforeseen gathering of forces capable of destroying everything.

After the economic crisis of 1929, the whole world was convinced, and rightly so, that the capitalism of that time was over. The Soviet Union alone offered an alternative, Bolshevism. Soon the United States came up with a second alternative, the structural reforms of the New Deal, and then Italy promoted a third alternative, fascism. The great Anglo-Saxon capitalists chose to support a new regime, close to fascism, Nazism. They thought that Germany would attack the USSR, thus preserving their interests threatened by both Bolshevik collectivisations and US economic reforms. However, nothing worked out as planned, since Italy, Germany and Japan formed the Axis with their own logic and the war was not started against the Soviets, but against the great fortunes that prepared it.

In the collective imagination, we do not hold responsible the great Anglo-Saxon capitalists who supported Nazism at its beginning. On the contrary, we remember the British and American people as having participated in the victory.

From this experience we must learn that the most skilful plans can escape their promoters. Peace was threatened by the alliance of three very different regimes, Fascism, Nazism and Hakkō ichiu. None of the international relations scholars and other geopoliticians of the time foresaw this union. All of them, without exception, were wrong.

What these three ideologies had in common was that they wanted to change the world order without regard to the human consequences of their actions. This does not mean that their opponents were democratic and peaceful, far from it, but only that they refrained from exterminating entire peoples.

Let’s not mistake the adversary. We must be very vigilant, not to a particular type of political regime, but to the fact that states governed by men capable of the worst ever unite. The current danger is neither fascism, nor Nazism, nor Hakkō ichiu, three ideologies marked by their time and which do not correspond to anything today. What we must protect ourselves from, above all, is a global alliance between ideologies capable of the worst.

This is exactly what is about to happen: the current leaders of the US State Department, the government in Kiev and the next government in Tel Aviv have no limits. The union of the "Straussians", the Ukrainian "integral" nationalists and the Israeli "revisionist Zionists" can, without any qualms, plunge the world into a Third World War. Fortunately, the CIA does not share their ideas, the government in Kiev is constrained by Russian military intervention, and the Israeli Prime Minister’s coalition has not yet formed its government.

Professor Leo Strauss (1899-1973). Although he wrote extensively on natural law and Jewish philosophy, he left nothing about his political conceptions, which he reserved for certain of his students. Numerous testimonies have made his "oral" thought known to us.

The U.S. "Straussians”

This small group of about a hundred people controls the foreign policy of the United States, including the Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, his deputy, Victoria Nuland, and the National Security Advisor, Jacob Sullivan.

It is in line with the thinking of the Jewish philosopher Leo Strauss "Russia declares war on the Straussians” for whom democracies showed their weaknesses during the 1930s. The only way to ensure that the next anti-Semitic regime does not massacre them is for the Jews to set up their own dictatorship; to be on the side of the hammer and not of the nail.

The "Straussians" have already shown what they are capable of by organizing the 9/11 attacks and by launching various wars to destroy the "wider Middle East".

It is amazing that, despite the controversies that tore the US ruling class apart during the Bush Jr. administration, most of today’s politicians are unaware of who the Straussians are.

The poet Dmytro Dontsov (1883-1973). He created a mythology that inspired millions of Ukrainians to fight the Russians. A secret agent of the Second and Third German Reichs, he participated in the supervision of the extermination of Jews and Gypsies in Europe as administrator of the Reinhard Heydrich Institute, before being whitewashed by the Anglo-Saxon secret services.

The Ukrainian "integral nationalists”

This is a group comprising hundreds of thousands of people, perhaps millions. It originated in the First World War, but solidified during the interwar period, the Second World War and the Cold War “Who are the Ukrainian integral nationalists ?”.

They identify with the poet and criminal against humanity Dmytro Dontsov. They see themselves as Vikings ready to fight the last battle against evil, that is, according to them, against Russian civilization.

The term "integral nationalist" should not be misleading. Dontsov chose it in reference to the thought of the Frenchman Charles Maurras. Dontsov was never a patriot, nor a nationalist in the classical sense. He never defended either the Ukrainian people or the Ukrainian land. On the contrary.

The Ukrainian "integral nationalists" have, since 1919, shown what they are capable of. They have murdered more than 4 million of their fellow citizens, including 1.6 million Jews. Since 2014, they have waged a civil war that has cost the lives of about 20,000 of their fellow citizens. They also, in 1921, amputated their land from Galicia and Volhynia to pay in advance the Polish army against the USSR.

They made an alliance with the Straussians, in 2000, during a big congress in Washington, where the Straussian Paul Wolfowitz was the guest of honor.
It is very dangerous to claim, as NATO does, that the "integral nationalists" are marginal in Ukraine. Certainly, in the spirit of this organization, it is only a question of discrediting Russia’s discourse and mobilizing for Ukraine. But these people are now murdering, without trial, those of their fellow citizens who find themselves in Russian culture.

It is particularly dangerous to participate in the delirium of the "integral nationalists" as the Bundestag has just done by adopting a resolution on the "Holodomor", i.e. the "genocide by hunger". The famine of 1932-33 was by no means caused by the Soviets in general, nor by Joseph Stalin in particular. It affected many other regions of the USSR than Ukraine. It is a climatic catastrophe. Moreover, in Ukraine itself, it did not affect the cities, but only the countryside because the Soviets decided to manage this shortage by feeding the workers rather than the peasants. To give credence to the myth of a planned genocide is to encourage anti-Russian hatred as the Nazis once encouraged anti-Jewish hatred.

Vladimir Jabotinsky (1880-1940), founder of the Jewish Legion, then of the Irgun. He called for Israel to extend over the entire British Mandate territory, i.e. over the current State of Israel, the Palestinian Territories and the Kingdom of Jordan.

Israeli "revisionist Zionists”

The "revisionist Zionists" represent about 2 million Israelis. They have managed to form a parliamentary majority by uniting several political parties behind Benjamin Netanyahu.
They claim to be inspired by the Ukrainian Vladimir Jabotinsky, the man who claimed that Palestine is "a land without a people, for a people without a land". In other words, Palestinian Arabs do not exist. They have no rights and must be expelled from their homes.

In September 1921, Jabotinsky formed a secret alliance with the Ukrainian "integral nationalist" anti-Semites, the first link in the developing Axis. This union aroused the indignation of the entire Jewish diaspora and Jabotinsky was expelled from the World Zionist Organization. In October 1937, Jabotinsky formed a new alliance with the anti-Semites of Marshal Rydz-Smigly, number 2 in Poland behind Józef Piłsudski. He was again rejected by the Jewish diaspora.

At the very beginning of World War II, Jabotinsky chose Bension Netanyahu, Benjamin’s father, as his private secretary.

It is appalling that, 75 years after the establishment of the State of Israel, most people continue to lump together different, and often opposing, views solely on the basis of the religion of those who profess them.

Revisionist Zionism" is the opposite of the Zionism of Nahum Goldman and the World Jewish Congress. It has no concern for the Jewish people and has therefore not hesitated to form alliances with anti-Semitic armed forces.

The "revisionist Zionists", including Menahem Beguin and Ariel Sharon, have shown what they are capable of with the Nakba; the forced expulsion of the majority of the Arab population of Palestine in 1948. It is this crime, whose memory haunts both Arabs and Israelis, that makes peace in Palestine impossible to this day.

Benjamin Netanyahu formed an alliance with the Straussians in 2003 at a large closed-door congress in Jerusalem «Sommet historique pour sceller l’Alliance des guerriers de Dieu». Since the election of Volodymyr Zelensky, of whom he has become a personal friend, Netanyahu has also renewed Jabotinsky’s alliance with the "integral nationalists".

The Axis is constituted.

The common ideology of the new Axis

Just as Italian Fascism, German Nazism, and Japanese Hakkō ichiu had little to do with each other, so did the Straussians, the "integral nationalists," and the "revisionist Zionists" think differently and pursue distinct goals. Only the Nazis were so anti-Semitic as to seek to kill an entire people. The fascists despised the Jews, but did not seek to exterminate them. The Japanese never engaged in this hatred and even protected the Jews in their own country and in the territories they occupied. In the same way, today if the "integral nationalists" are obsessively against Russian culture and wish to kill all Russians, men, women and children, the Straussians despise them without wishing to exterminate them, and the "revisionist Zionists" pursue other objectives.

Each of these three isolated groups represents a danger to specific populations, but all three together threaten all of humanity. They share a cult of violence and power. They have shown that they can engage in wars of extermination. All three consider that their time has come. However, not only do they have to overcome their internal oppositions, but their axis is still uncertain. For example, the Straussians have just warned the "revisionist Zionists" about the possible expansion of Jewish settlements in the Palestinian territories.

Recently, I argued that Russia was provoked into beginning the ‘special military operation’ (SMO) by a series of events stretching from initial NATO claims of its goal to expand to Ukraine, NATO-Ukrainian cooperation, the Western-cultivated and ex post facto fully supported Maidan revolt (despite the neofascist Ukrainian element’s false flag snipers terrorist attack) to which Putin responded by annexing Crimea, Western support for Kiev’s attack on Donbass (including civilians), deeper Western and NATO involvement in Ukraine, Kiev’s failure to implement its obligations under the Minsk Donbass peace accords, and much else [see Gordon M. Hahn, Ukraine Over the Edge: Russia, the West and the ‘New Cold War’ (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland Books, 2018); https://gordonhahn.com/2022/02/24/coercive-diplomacy-phase-2-war-and-iron-curtain-descended/; https://gordonhahn.com/2016/01/21/report-the-russian-american-reset-nato-expansion-and-the-making-of-the-ukrainian-crisis/; https://gordonhahn.com/2016/03/09/the-real-snipers-massacre-ukraine-february-2014-updatedrevised-working-paper/; and https://www.academia.edu/37784742/Shooting_of_Maidan_Protesters_from_Maidan_Controlled_Locations_Video_Appendix_C_2018_?email_work_card=title%5D. As far as I am concerned, the ‘West/NATO expansion provoked the Ukrainian crisis and war’ is an incontrovertible fact.

More recently, I also argued, Putin decided to call off coercive diplomacy begun in spring 2021 and escalated in autumn through January 2021 by massing tropps at the Ukrainian border, when the West rejected Moscow’s appeals to end NATO expansion and sign a draft treaty on security agreements for Kiev and a European security architecture (https://gordonhahn.com/2022/01/31/putins-coercive-diplomacy/). The West’s rejection was accompanied by a major escalation in the Ukrainian military attacks along the Donbass line of contact and a threat by Ukrainian President Volodomyr Zelenskiy to abandon the Budapest Memorandum, implying an attempt to acquire nuclear weapons (https://gordonhahn.com/2022/02/24/coercive-diplomacy-phase-2-war-and-iron-curtain-descended/). Zelensky said at the annual meeting of the Munich Security Conference on February 19, 2022: “I, as president, will do it for the first time. But Ukraine and I are doing it for the last time. I am launching consultations within the framework of the Budapest Memorandum. The Minister of Foreign Affairs has been asked to convene them. If they do not happen again or if their results do not guarantee the security of our country, Ukraine will have the right to think that the Budapest Memorandum is not working and that all the comprehensive decisions of 1994 are being questioned” (“Speech by Volodymyr Zelenskyy at the 58th Munich Security Conference”, by Volodymyr Zelensky, Voltaire Network, 19 February 2022). The Munich conference is attended by all the leaders of the NATO alliance and other parties interested in European security issues, and yet not one Western leader questioned the appropriateness of what would be a violation not just of the Budapest Memorandum but of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. That these immediate provocations were a direct cause of Putin’s decision to begin the SMO is not possible to prove, but the thesis is highly plausible if not likely a fact. Putin responded to Zelenskiy’s nuclear demache, saying that the only thing Ukraine needs is a uranium enrichment system, but this technical issue “is not an insoluble problem” for Ukraine, especially given the support Kiev enjoys from some nuclear powers (www.aa.com.tr/en/asia-pacific/putin-says-minsk-agreement-on-ukraine-exists-no-more/2510573). Incidentally, this is not only pertinent to Putin’s February decision but also provides some context for the struggle surrounding the Zaporozhe Nuclear Power Plant.

Now new evidence suggests that perhaps, perhaps, the West and Kiev intentionally or not engaged in additional provocations that prompted Putin’s SMO on 24 February 2022. For example, former President Petro Poroshenko has suggested that Kiev never intended to follow through on the Minsk accords and sought only to buy time for Ukraine to strengthen its military through training and weapons supplied by the West for an offensive to take back Donbass and Crimea. In a June interview to Radio Free Europe’s Ukrainian language service and the German Deutsche Welle, former Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko said the Minsk accords were intended to “delay the war” and “create powerful armed forces”: “Our goal was to, first, stop the threat, or at least to delay the war – to secure eight years to restore economic growth and create powerful armed forces” (www.bignewsnetwork.com/news/272589263/minsk-deal-was-used-to-buy-time-ukraines-poroshenko). Then in an August 2022 interview advisor to Zelenskiy and his Office of the President of Ukraine, Aleksei Arestovich revealed that in December 2021 the Ukrainian armed forces deployed additional troops to the Donbass contact line under the cover of a training exercise “despite the damage (the deployment) did to the economy” (https://t.me/UkraineHumanRightsAbuses/8504). Perhaps this is what led Zelenskiy to tell the Ukrainian tntelligence services a month before Putin’s SMO began the following: “”We have learned to deter and counter external aggression quite effectively. I am convinced that the time has come to move to offensive actions to defend our national interests” (www.president.gov.ua/en/news/zovnishnya-rozvidka-vidigraye-vazhlivu-rol-u-protidiyi-zagro-72517). Then throw into the mix the aforementioned exponential increase in firing across the contact line undertaken by Ukrainian forces first and Zelenskiy’s threat to pursue nuclear capability.

I am saying ‘provoked Putin intentionally or not’ because we do not know what Moscow knew about these new deployments. Moscow did claim that Ukraine was preparing an attack on Donbass, especially after the SMO began, even claiming that it discovered documents proving Kiev was planning an attack. But it remains unclear whether these Russian claims pertain to the newly revealed secret depoloyment. Certainly, Moscow would had Donbass and Ukraine crawling with intelligence operatives and well-covered with electronic and satellite data collection and would likely have observed the ‘secret’ deployment. Then the issue might be whether Kiev and/or the West wanted Moscow to uncover the deployment, so as to provoke Putin into attacking. Or perhaps they did not want this, but Russian intelligence nevertheless did discover it, which along with other immediate challenges noted above prompted Putin’s decision to begin the SMO.

If the provocation theory is correct than it would also be correct that the West wanted Putin to invade, and if that is so then it would be logical that the West would want the war to continue. We now know that the West directly intervened with Zelenskiy to prevent Russia and Ukraine from finalizing a tentative agreement that would have ended the war in April. A recent article in the establishment flafship foreign policy journal Foreign Affairs written by two rusologists with deep ties to the ruling Democrat Party-state revealed this: “According to multiple former senior U.S. officials we spoke with, in April 2022, Russian and Ukrainian negotiators appeared to have tentatively agreed on the outlines of a negotiated interim settlement: Russia would withdraw to its position on February 23, when it controlled part of the Donbas region and all of Crimea, and in exchange, Ukraine would promise not to seek NATO membership and instead receive security guarantees from a number of countries” (https://archive.ph/kxfbG and https://raheemkassam.substack.com/p/russia-and-ukraine-came-to-peace?fbclid=IwAR0n03z7v-tJOjIOFC4_eXZCjvzyJbwzcgjycFbFigo9a9LV_FOA439_o74). This is one piece of evidence that the West wants the war to continue. NATO expansion and weakening Russia trump international security and Ukrainians’ well-being. The West’s massive supply of weapons, intelligence, military expertise, training, strategic planning, and financial support and Washington’s and Brussels’s lack of any effort in the diplomatic sphere to encourage negotiations further demonstrate that the West wants the war to continue.

At the same time, there is reason to believe that Zelenskiy himself may have been manipulated by the West, there is a new video circulating that shows French President Emmanuel Macron in discussion over the phone with Zelenskiy as the Russian invasion began on February 24th. Zelenskiy can be heard pleading with Macron to organize US President Joe Bden and European leaders to make a phone call to Putin and urge him to stop the military action, claiming that if this is done, then Putin “will stop” (https://t.me/stranaua/62507). On the other hand, Zelenskiy’s suspicions regarding Biden’s and other US officials’ claims of an imminent invasion and reports that Russia engaged in a massive bribery and recruiting campaign among Ukrainians before the war, which would have almost certainly led to some reporting the effort to the authorities and tipping off the possibility of a Russian invasion suggest that the Ukrainian leadership should have been well aware of the likelihood of an attack. Yet Zelenskiy showed no desire to negotiate with Putin on the key issues Moscow sought to have addressed: NATO expansion, direct talks between Kiev and the Donbass, the incomplete Minsk peace process, and so on.

In sum, there is some reason to believe that the escalation of the Donbass war ordered by Putin in February has a more interesting pre-history and causal chain than might be assumed even those who understand that Putin did not wake up one morning and decide to seize Ukraine in some master plan to ‘reestablish the Soviet Union’ and other such delusions. At any rate, the new war’s start needs more investigation and its origins are likely only to be revealed many years from now.

About the Author

Gordon M. Hahn, Ph.D., is an Expert Analyst at Corr Analytics, http://www.canalyt.com and a Senior Researcher at the Center for Terrorism and Intelligence Studies (CETIS), Akribis Group, www.cetisresearch.org. Websites: Russian and Eurasian Politics, gordonhahn.com and gordonhahn.academia.edu

Dr. Hahn is the author of the new book: Russian Tselostnost’: Wholeness in Russian Thought, Culture, History, and Politics (Europe Books, 2022). He has authored five previous, well-received books: The Russian Dilemma: Security, Vigilance, and Relations with the West from Ivan III to Putin (McFarland, 2021); Ukraine Over the Edge: Russia, the West, and the “New Cold War” (McFarland, 2018); The Caucasus Emirate Mujahedin: Global Jihadism in Russia’s North Caucasus and Beyond (McFarland, 2014), Russia’s Islamic Threat (Yale University Press, 2007), and Russia’s Revolution From Above: Reform, Transition and Revolution in the Fall of the Soviet Communist Regime, 1985-2000 (Transaction, 2002). He also has published numerous think tank reports, academic articles, analyses, and commentaries in both English and Russian language media.

Dr. Hahn taught at Boston, American, Stanford, San Jose State, and San Francisco State Universities and as a Fulbright Scholar at Saint Petersburg State University, Russia and was a senior associate and visiting fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, the Kennan Institute in Washington DC, and the Hoover Institution.

Some readers have commented in direct emails to me that they have taken comfort from my writings insofar as I have been a moderate voice, avoiding alarmism over the often troublesome daily news in and around the Russian war with Ukraine, or more properly speaking today, Russia’s proxy war with NATO in and about Ukraine.

For this very reason, I hesitated whether to share with readers the deep pessimism that overcame me a couple of days ago over our chances of avoiding nuclear Armageddon. This followed my watching the latest Solovyov political talk show on Russian state television. I have used this show regularly as a litmus test of the mood of Russian social and political elites: that mood has turned black.

Whereas in the past, going back six months or more, I had reported on the open contempt which leading and highly responsible Russian academics from university circles and think tanks were showing for the American political leadership in their statements on the political talk shows, this contempt has moved into an actionable phase, by which I mean that serious, God-fearing Russians are so furious with the rubbish propaganda coming out of Washington, repeated with bullhorns in Europe that if given the chance they would personally “press the button” and unleash nuclear attacks on the United States and Britain, in that order notwithstanding the possibility, even probability of a return strike, which, however enfeebled, would be devastating to their own country. That is to say, deterrence as a policy is fast losing its psychological impact on the Russian side of the argument.

Whatever the words of the Biden Administration about nuclear war being ‘off the table,’ America’s aggressive and threatening behavior, including the ongoing ‘training in nuclear weapons’ currently going on in Europe under U.S. direction, has made rational and very serious Russians ready to give it a try.

One of the most sober-minded international affairs experts to appear on the Solovyov show, Yevgeny Satanovsky, president of the Institute of the Near East think tank, contained his rage with some difficulty, saying only that while he had once held some sympathy for the United States, he would see its utter destruction now with little regret; he left no mention where his feet are pointed when he added that he could say no more on air for fear that he will be censored and his words removed from the video.

For these reasons, I have given to this essay addressed to the Collective West, and in particular to the fomenters of world disorder in Washington and London, a title that fits the current situation. 

As we have seen from even before the launch of the ‘special military operation,’ Russian talk programs identify by name individuals in the Biden team whose outstanding stupidity, obtuseness and rank ignorance they find unbearable, with the likes of Antony Blinken, Jake Sullivan and Lloyd Austin among those coming in for special mention. We are left with the impression that when Biden calls in his advisers to the Oval Office, he, senile dimwit that he is, is the bright light in the room. The Russians conclude from this that they have no one to negotiate with.

Now the naming of idiots in high places carries over to all discussion of European Union and British leaders. The denunciation of incompetence, rank stupidity and, yes, neo-colonialist or fascist mindsets among European leaders was well reflected in the latest Solovyov show. The most discussed whipping boy was the EU’s commissioner on external action, Josep Borrell, who seems to be speaking to the world daily and acknowledges no limits on what he may proclaim, as if it were official EU policy in defense as well as diplomacy.

The Solovyov show put up on screen a brief video recording of Borrell expounding smugly on Europe’s privileged position as ‘a garden of liberal democracy, good economic prospects and social solidarity’ which is surrounded by ‘the jungle.’  That jungle reference fits in well, Solovyov remarked, with the colonialist mindset of Rudyard Kipling and is deeply offensive to the Rest of the World, of which Russia is a part. More to the point, Borrell was also notorious in Russia this past week for his statement that any use by Russia of nuclear weapons in Ukraine would be met by a massive non-nuclear attack from Europe which would ‘annihilate’ the Russian army. However, Borrell was not alone in the stocks: other European leaders who were decried for their stupid policies this past week included German Chancellor Olaf Scholz and French President Emanuel Macron.

So you have no bomb shelter? Then, as the Russians said decades ago, it is high time to throw a bed sheet over your shoulders and slowly walk to the nearest cemetery.

One of the two latest fake news stories being disseminated simultaneously and ubiquitously in Western major media this past week is that Russia is considering using against Ukraine ‘tactical nuclear weapons,’ meaning warheads with a destructive force equivalent to the Hiroshima-Nagasaki bombs mounted on cruise or medium range ballistic missiles.  Our print and electronic media speculate on the numbers of warheads Russia currently possesses (2,000 or more), as if that would make any difference in an assault on Ukraine.

Rubbish say the Russians on Solovyov’s show: we have no need of nuclear arms to finish off the Ukrainians. The only nuclear forces we would deploy in the current situation are strategic arms, and they are directed against….Washington with the help of the Sarmat and Poseidon delivery systems.

The other major fake news disseminated massively by Western media in recent days was the allegation that the Russians are seeking to freeze the Ukrainians to death by their strikes against power generation infrastructure. Images of Stalingrad were evoked by our broadcasters. A similar freeze is said to be inflicted on Western Europe by the cut-off of Russian energy supplies to the EU.

More rubbish say the panelists on the Solovyov program. The attack on the electricity grid in Ukraine is not directed against civilians per se; it is intended to halt rail deliveries of advanced weapons systems and munitions coming into Ukraine at the Polish border and being moved by train to the fronts in the east and south of the country.  Without these inputs, the Ukrainian army will be kaput and the war can come to an early conclusion with the capitulation of Kiev.  As regards the EU, whatever chill out may be coming this winter is due solely to the unprofessional and ignorant decisions of the Commission on imports of Russian hydrocarbons that have been blindly followed by the Member States without due consideration of consequences for their own populations.

The Collective West speaks of ‘sham’ referendums in the four Ukrainian oblasts that have now been reintegrated into (or annexed by, depending on your politics) the Russian Federation. In this spirit, in the middle of the past week the United Nations General Assembly overwhelmingly approved a U.S. sponsored resolution refusing to recognize the legality of this annexation. Among those who voted against Russia were such prominent ‘friendly states’ as Serbia and Hungary. One hundred forty states voted with the United States; four states, including the pariah regimes in Venezuela and North Korea, joined Russia in voting ‘nyet,’ and thirty-five states abstained.

The United States trumpeted this victory at the UN over the mischievous and rules-breaking Russians. EU chief of diplomacy Borrell was also gloating, though he expressed regret that 20% of the member states had not voted for the resolution.

The Russians, for their part, insist that this vote was a sham, given the carrots and sticks that U.S. and European diplomats used to get the results desired. Blackmail of all kinds was applied, say the Russians. Morever, the number of states in each tally tells only part of the story: among the 35 abstaining countries were India and China, which between them alone account for 35% of humanity.

Meanwhile, over in Europe, on the next day the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe meeting in Strasbourg adopted a resolution condemning Russia for its alleged aggression against Ukraine with a bill of particulars several pages long and including a call for the 46 member states to declare Russia a ‘terrorist state’ as Zelensky had requested of them. The vote as published was said to be 99 for the resolution, 1 opposed.  No mention was made in the announcement of vote results that the actual number of deputies in PACE is 306. The point was not missed by the Solovyov panel, who here too cried ‘foul.’

Putting aside these two votes that garnered so much attention in the propagandistic Western media, there were other international developments bearing on the relative standing of Russia in the global community which Western media chose to ignore, but Russia media, featured prominently. 

I think in particular of the three days of summitry in Astana, the capital of Kazakhstan. The first of these gatherings brought together 27 heads of state from across Asia, running from Israel and Palestine, Qatar and the Emirates in the west to Korea in the east. Let us remember that a goodly number of the participants were from countries that voted against Russia in the UN General Assembly. Their presence in Astana gave the lie to the notion that they were expelling Russia from polite society.

The key personality at the meeting of 27 was clearly Vladimir Putin. Film footage on Russian television showed him in animated conversation with these leaders in group and bilateral formats. Of these the most significant was likely the face-to-face with Turkish president Erdogan, during which the two discussed immediate steps to implement the Russian proposal that a new pipeline be added to Turk Stream so as to greatly increase possibilities for delivering gas to Europe by this southern route through the Balkans. In this concept, Turkey will become a major gas hub, which represents fulfillment of a long-held dream by the Turkish leader.

In its capacity as hub, Turkey would be able to mix Russian gas with flows from Azerbaijan and possibly later from Turkmenistan, so that the product sold as a Turkish export would be bullet proof against American or European sanctions. The additional line could probably be laid down within a year, that is to say, more quickly than the problematic repairs to the damaged Nord Stream 1 pipelines.

The next day in Astana, another summit was held between leaders of the Community of Independent States. This reduced circle of members was also of great importance insofar as it confirms Russia’s standing as facilitator of diplomatic solutions between member states experiencing armed conflict with one another, the Azeris and Armenians being first in line. And the final summit, among the leaders of Central Asian republics with Russia had yet another important agenda:  agreeing security measures to defend against spillover into their region of the developing civil war in Afghanistan, where the U.S. and Britain are aiding extremist groups seeking to overthrow Taliban rule. From the body language of leaders, it would seem that Putin’s ear was much in demand. Relations with Kazakhstan leader Tokaev appeared to be solid once again after a trying period of several months earlier in the year.

In considering the meaning of these gatherings, I think that a remark made several days ago on another Solovyov show and with regard to the decision of the Saudis and Gulf States to snub the insistent demands of Biden that oil production be raised: the decision to make common cause with Russia came not out of pity for the weak but out of Realism, namely the assessment that Russia will win the military contest with NATO/Ukraine.  These rulers in Opec, like the rulers who came to Astana this past week, back winners not prospective losers.

If I may draw any positive conclusions from the otherwise bleak analysis in the foregoing, they are that Russia is successfully resisting massive U.S. and E.U. pressures, and that the world is realigning before our eyes in a more multi-polar and democratic direction.  And yet, the fears of miscalculations on one side or another in this tense and unparalleled contest mean Armageddon constantly threatens in the background.

Dear readers, to my great regret, I am once again duty bound to walk the streets bearing the sign ‘The End of the World is Nigh’.

I watched the news digest program Sixty Minutes yesterday on Russian state television’s smotrim.ru platform. Before turning the microphone over to the panelists in talk show format, the first 30 minutes of the show presented a hair-raising video montage of excerpts from US, German, European, British news  reporting about dirty bomb accusations, about the current exercises of the aircraft carrier George Bush Sr. in the Eastern Med and its loud message to Mr Putin about nuclear attack capabilities, about the 2400 American ground assault troops just delivered to Romania and placed at the border with Moldova, ready to move in there and, one may safely assume, to continue up into Ukraine to face off with Russians around Odessa – Nikolaev at a moment’s notice.    Well, the impression of this pending escalation was overwhelmingly that we are on the cusp of the war to end all wars.  The US is game for it, whatever Biden mutters to the contrary reading from his teleprompter. The Russians are game for it.  And so here we go!

On a less dramatic note but one from the same musical composition, I have just felt obliged to add a Postscript to my last essay on Rushi Sunak, noting that I was wrong about the kind of marching orders he has from the City of London:  while he replaced most of the Truss cabinet ministers, he has retained Ben Wallace at Defense. Note that  Wallace is calling for large increases in defense spending to support Britain’s contribution to the Ukrainian armed forces at the same time that Sunak is about to wield the knife on social services in the name of a balanced budget and austerity in times of inflation. The Sunak premiership will not last a year, assuming we have a year ahead of us before all hell breaks loose.  He shares with Macron a background in working for US international bankers and the fact of being the youngest head of government in his respective country in two centuries.  He also apparently shares the status of political lightweight, but unlike Macron, his position is very fragile because of British constitutional practices. I say that these developments fall in line with the general musical composition, because they show that the marching orders he had received from those who installed him in power, the City of London, are as ideologically driven as the newspaper they all read daily, the viciously anti-Russian Financial Times. And so I conclude that in the U.K., too, Capital is as removed from the real world as the lightweight and incompetent politicians who rule over us on the Continent.

What I cannot understand is how India, China and other big, serious players on the world stage do not take note that the rising escalation in the Russia-NATO confrontation and the lurch towards nuclear exchange will mean the end of life on the planet, their lives as well as ours.  Why are they all silent?  And where is the United Nations before the looming Armageddon? When General Assembly votes are dictated by one global hegemon and its lackeys, the U.N.’s relevance to keeping the peace is vitiated.

The avoidable tragedy of WWI is something that is foremost in my thoughts every time I stay in my Pushkin apartment outside Petersburg.  We live 200 meters away from an entrance to the Catherine Palace park and less than a kilometer from the separate palace which Nicholas II used as a family home. Each time there I wonder to myself  how they could have been so foolish as to throw European civilization to the winds, and, as regards the tsarist family, to throw away their own lives.    Now I see similar foolishness daily watching the news, whether it is Russian news or Western mainstream broadcasters. I see the growing likelihood of our collective suicide in the weeks if not months before us.

Among patriotic Russians, there has long been a lot of criticism about the way the ‘special military operation’ in Ukraine has been waged. People say that Putin has been too soft on the Ukrainians, that he should have destroyed the energy infrastructure in the first days of March, without waiting seven months and allowing the escalation to reach its present critical point.  However, that is to ignore the political dimension of war making. And it is to ignore the reality that public opinion is a major restraint on what its President can or cannot do, irrespective of constitutional provisions and supposed authoritarianism at the top.

The Russian public was not ready to accept an all-out war on Ukraine in February. The personal, familial and historic ties binding the Russian and Ukrainian peoples together were simply too strong. Russians, including those in power, could hold out the hope that once the campaign ended, the sides would kiss and make up.  It took all this time, it took the crossing of all Russian red lines in terms of attacks on the Russian homeland by artillery and rockets from across the border with Ukraine, it took the destruction of the Nord Stream pipelines and the terrorist attack on the Kerch bridge for the Russian people to be psychologically prepared to murder Ukrainians by the tens of thousands of soldiers on the battlefield as you do in any normal war and to inflict great hardships on the civilian population.

However, the Kremlin cannot be let off so easily for its share of the blame as the world teeters towards nuclear war.  I find it incredible that the professional intelligence analyst Vladimir Putin, whom all of our biographers describe only in relation to his KGB career, could have allowed himself to be so misled by his own intelligence advisers about Ukrainian capabilities and intentions before he decided to go in and denazify, demilitarize Ukraine on 24 February. That was a miscalculation of colossal proportions that resulted in serious military setbacks in the opening weeks of the war, which in turn emboldened United States and NATO decision-makers to go for the jugular and finally ‘take out’ Russia. I will say no more.