Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (Photo: AP)
To deflect the global attention from the unexpected military and diplomatic embarrassment suffered at the hands of Iran, the Zionists in Israel and the United States turned on the heat on war-ravaged Gaza as well as Syria, a defenceless country yet to come out of chaos. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu after having miserably failed to prevent the destruction from Iranian hypersonic missiles of its defence ministry and the most prestigious centre of research, Weizmann Institute of Science as well as industrial, military and intelligence infrastructure, has opened a new front in Syria, whose interim President Ahmed al-Sharaa reportedly fled from Damascus to take refuge in Idlib near Turkish border.
At the same time, his war cabinet, on August 7, amidst strong opposition from within and the army chief of staff, decided to expand the operation in Gaza. The big poser is: what have the Israeli Defence Forces been doing in the last 22 months?
Had these fresh operations not been undertaken in the name of saving Druze in Syria and rescuing hostages from Hamas in Gaza the world would have started debating the devastation heavily-censored Israel had suffered during the 12 days of intense Iranian bombardment and the failure of the US to tame Tehran, though the latter targeted its base in Qatar. At the same time, when peace returns to the region, it will cost Netanyahu his chair, as he has been under pressure to resign following corruption charges levelled much before the October 7, 2023 Hamas attack.
Never in its 77 years of history had the Zionist entity undergone such pain, and its Western masters rendered it so helpless. Even the US President Donald Trump conceded at the NATO Summit just after the war ended that Israel got hit very hard by Iran.
The announcement by France and later Britain to recognise Palestine within a month of the end of the Iran-Israel war is, in fact, an admission to the changing ground reality. They are now getting convinced that Israel may further not be able to carry out the dirty work assigned to it by them in the Middle East. Even Evangelists in the US, the greatest champions of Zionism, are becoming increasingly uneasy as the war with Hamas, Hezbollah, Houthis, and finally Iran has taken a heavy toll on lives and weapons.
The United States and Israel, more than Turkey, had facilitated the victory of Ahmed al-Sharaa’s Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham in December last year. The West had a clear-cut plan in the Levant, after it failed to eliminate Hamas and Hezbollah. Eight months later, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan–who had backed the Syrian National Army, a different outfit and his Arab friends are clueless and struggling to find their strategy for Syria. It left up much much-maligned Iran to denounce this naked aggression.
When Israel accepted the cease-fire with Hezbollah in Lebanon on November 26 last its Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that his government is doing so because the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) needed a breather and that there was a delay in the supply of weapons and ammunition. Never in the four wars fought with the combined armies of Arab countries has Israel had to make this acknowledgement.
The Jewish Power Party, a prominent coalition partner in the Netanyahu government, strongly criticised the cease-fire. Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir voted against it and said that it was not a victory for Israel. His cabinet colleague of the same Jewish Power Party, Amihai Eliyahu (Heritage Minister) said that the cease-fire was agreed by Benjamin Netanyahu “under duress” following the country’s failure to defeat Hezbollah.
According to the Times of Israel, a survey done in Israel immediately after the fighting ended on the Lebanese front, 19 percent of Israelis believe that Hezbollah had won the war, while only 20 percent feel that Israel had won, and 50 per cent are of the view that there was no clear victor. Eleven per cent did not respond.
Besides, only 20 percent of voters of the ruling Likud Party-led coalition approved the ceasefire.
Against this massive disillusionment in Israel, in the rest of the world, a new narrative was spread, that is, Hezbollah had been badly defeated in the battle, and that is why it left Hamas in a lurch. It was also propagated that Iran was more interested in expanding the Shia influence rather than taking on Israel.
But the hi-tech war, which took place between June 13 and 24, cancelled out all the nefarious propaganda deliberately spread in the Sunni world. What later emerged is that the Shia-dominated Azerbaijan reportedly allowed Israeli drones to enter Iran from its side. Azerbaijan is the main supplier of oil to Israel through Turkey, which on its part, had tried to capitalise on the Syrian crisis in December last. It is another thing that now Ankara is finding itself sidelined from this theatre. The peace with the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) is its only achievement. It was thought that the US-backed Kurdish group Syrian Democratic Forces, would join hands with al-Sharaa in Damascus. But the scenario has changed as the interim President of Syria does not seem to be the master of the country.
In the post-Bashar al-Assad Syria, the situation has further worsened. According to the August 7 report of the UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, 9,889 people have lost their lives in the last eight months of bloodshed in the country. Out of this, 7,449 are civilians.
On the other hand, notwithstanding destruction and loss of top military generals and scientists in the initial days of war, Iran had emerged as a powerful country. Contrary to this, Ankara is perhaps now realising how wrong it was to tacitly join hands with Israel and the US to provoke the rebels to revolt at this point.
If only 20% of Israelis believed that their country won the battle against Hezbollah, just imagine how few would have felt that they won against Iran.
Interestingly, there was overwhelming support within Israel to strike Iran before and even during the early phase of the 12-day war, but hardly any such survey came out after the massive Iranian retaliation, which virtually silenced everyone. The Zionist state and its Western masters know the impact of any disclosure of negative public opinion about war with Iran, as they want to create an impression that they have emerged victorious.
With the advantage of hindsight, one can say that it was the worst time chosen by rebels in Syria to stage a revolt late last year. This can be equated with the Arab rebellion against Ottoman Turks in 1916, that is just months after the humiliating defeat suffered by the Allied armies in December 1915 at the hands of Turks in Gallipoli.
Similarly, in December 1916, many Arabs supported the revolt of Sharif Husain bin Ali of Makkah against the Ottoman Empire. The argument put forward then was almost the same as now against the outgoing despot of Syria, Bashar al-Assad.
The Arabs then got so blinded against the Turks that they got trapped in the well-laid and meticulously executed plan of the British. Lawrence of Arabia, an Arabic-speaking British spy, played a pivotal role in fomenting and leading the insurrection. The Arab population from Hejaz to Syria and Palestine supported the invading British and French armies in their occupation of the entire region. The Arabs rudely woke up when, on November 2, 1917, came the Balfour Declaration calling for the creation of a Jewish state, which ultimately became a reality on May 14, 1948.
The Turkish soldiers were either killed or handed over to the Allied army, who, in the initial phase of World War I (1914-18), had suffered defeats on several fronts.
The Arabs revolted because they were opposed to the subjugation of the non-Arab Ottomans. But like now in Syria, once again the very timing of this revolt was intriguing as it took place just after the humiliating rout of the British-led Allied army at the hands of the Turks in Gallipoli in late 1915.
That was the turning point of history. Ever since then, the Palestinians and many other Arabs have been paying the price of this act of Husain bin Ali.
Exactly 108 years later, Bashar was bailed out with the help of Russia as a compromise with other players after his army collapsed. Incidentally, the revolt in Syria not only coincided with the ceasefire between Israel and Hezbollah, but also took place just a fortnight after the November 12 meeting between Erdogan and Assad in Riyadh on the occasion of the Extraordinary Summit of the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation on the Gaza situation. Incidentally, Syria was inducted into the OIC.
What had been cooked up between Erdogan and Assad in Riyadh is a different matter. The reality is that the situation in Syria has further worsened. It gave a breather to Israel and the West, which had, for the first time, lost the aura of invincibility.
This post was last modified on August 12, 2025 6:36 pm