Iran, Syria foment hate for Israel

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Updated: June 18, 2011 12:24AM

One should always be suspicious of coincidences in the Middle East. A case in point is the weekend’s mass Palestinian assault on Israel’s borders with Syria, Lebanon and the Gaza Strip. It strains credulity to believe that it was a mere coincidence that this outbreak came at the moment Syria is crushing a revolt against the four-decade reign of the Assad family.

Ever since Israel’s victory over the armies of Arab states in 1948, Arab regimes have flayed the Jewish state in their media, mosques and schools to divert attention from their corrupt governments, their suppression of dissent and their failure to deliver economic prosperity. The mid-May anniversary of Israel’s independence, or “nakba” (catastrophe) as it’s termed in the tradition of Arab hate, has often served as a focus of demonstrations, sometimes described as spontaneous but usually carried out under the veil of government sponsorship.

This year’s events escalated with mass marches to breach Israel’s borders. In Syria’s case, this meant ground near the Golan Heights, captured by Israel in the 1967 war. Damascus exercises an iron fist over access to this area, so the weekend confrontations could not have occurred without at least the acquiescence, and most likely, the instigation of the embattled regime of President Bashir Assad.

The other big assaults were against border positions by Lebanon and Gaza. Southern Lebanon is in the vise of Hezbollah, a terrorist organization that provoked a war with Israel in 2006, and one armed by Damascus. Gaza is ruled by Hamas, also a terrorist force with long-time ties to Syria and with its headquarters in the Syrian capital.

Another common thread running through all of this is Iran, a state sponsor of terrorism whose president openly advocates “wiping Israel off the map.” Tehran is Assad’s closest ally and a backer of Hezbollah and Hamas. A new U.N. report, being blocked from release by Russia, accuses Iran of supplying weapons to Syria to be sent along to Lebanese and Palestinian terrorists.

Iran is exploiting the Arab Spring uprisings against governments hostile to Tehran to try to spread the hegemony of revolutionary Islamist Iran across the Middle East. It should be noted that these uprisings have been exclusively focused on grievances against governments and improving the everyday lives of Arabs, with Israel rarely if ever mentioned in the street protests.

It’s not surprising that Iran is coming to the aid of Assad to divert attention from his murderous suppression of his own people by helping him resort to the tried and true tactic of fanning the flames of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.

That this may resonate across the Mideast reflects several factors. The revolts have unleashed Islamist parties, the most organized political movements in Arab countries despite years of suppression by secular dictators; Islamist organizations are relentless foes of Israel. Though Israel hasn’t been a factor in the revolts, the effect of decades of state-promoted hate persists and is open to exploitation. The region remains vulnerable to fatal sectarian animosities as demonstrated by recent clashes between Muslims and Coptic Christians in Cairo.

Still, the Israel Defense Forces got it right in declaring that the “fingerprints of Iranian provocation” are all over the weekend’s events and the regrettable loss of lives (more of them from Lebanese gunfire than Israeli). Agents of Iran, Syria, Hezbollah and Hamas no doubt amplified, if they did not start, the Facebook campaign for a “third intifada” or uprising against Israel. And just last week the revolutionary council of Fatah — the umbrella organization over the Palestinian Authority, whose President Mahmoud Abbas is supposedly a peace partner for Israel — urged an escalation of “popular resistance” against Israel. This came only weeks after Fatah announced a reconciliation with Iran-backed Hamas. A coincidence? Hardly.