In These New Times

Cailean Bochanan

23rd November, 2012

Hamas leader Meshaal’s thanks to Iran for its crucial military support to Gaza is one of the most striking and unlikely responses to Israel’s failed offensive. Indeed, its the response that most underlines their failure. Israel would have sought to consolidate Hamas’ reorientation away from Syria and the Axis of Resistance and help to cohere a Muslim Brotherhood block amenable to Zionist and Western interests.

A CSIS study refers to just such a prospect of “an extraordinarily rare moment of political alignment between Israel, the United States, and the Sunni Muslim world”. The press appears already to have had their editorials written, the glowing tributes to Morsi, to a more amenable, mature Hamas and to Qatar as their paymasters and bringers of prosperity to war-weary Gazans. Obviously the military response enabled by Iran had not been factored in and must have come as a surprise. It appears to have totally altered the arithmetic, so much so that the “extraordinarily rare moment” passed like a mirage in the fevered minds of increasingly desperate hegemonists . The idea of a Palestinian movement opposed to the axis of resistance never was anything other than rank treachery since they, the Palestinians, would be the ultimate victims of the defeat of Syria, Iran or Hezbollah. It must therefore have given rise to intense dispute inside Hamas and it is reasonable to suppose that Israel sought to help resolve it with its guided missile systems with Al-Jabari at the top of the list as a recalcitrant unhappy with Hamas’ break from Assad and Meshaal the beneficiary.
But it was not to be and all eyes now return to Syria where an awful lot of people have staked their reputations on the overthrow of Assad. Like 11th September, 2001, 11th September, 2012 represented a sudden shift away from backing Islamic militants as a prime tool of US foreign policy. But shift to what? If it is to be the dumping of military personnel in Australia that sounds relatively out of harm’s way and could be the next best thing to just bringing them all home, their ultimate, ineluctable destiny. But,whatever Obama has in mind, a shift away from the Middle East and a pivot to Asia, he cannot tolerate the prospect of a victorious Assad before delirious crowds having rid his country of the scourge the West’s Jihadi irregulars. That would constitute defeat for him and all the others, like Cameron, Hollande and the European left in general, Erdogan, to say nothing of Hamas, who recklessly and with the most inopportune opportunism jumped on the “rebel” bandwagon. They must therefore at least keep the pot boiling and the illusion of “progress” alive. Where Obama nows fears to tread after Banghazigate others can take up the slack. Morsi’s hosting of the less menacing sounding,less Jihadist and more touchy-feely coalition of Syrian oppositionists whose name escapes me and who, Francois Hollande, in the finest traditions of Western democracy, was the first off the mark in naming, on behalf of the people of Syria, as nothing less than the sole legitimate representative of the said people of Syria, was one part of a strategy to keep the rebel murder-machine on track. Israel’s delivery of Gaza to Meshaal was the other part. But when it came to delivery it was Iranian systems which prevailed in a further set-back to the West’s nefarious plans for the region.