Day: October 19, 2023
By
SEPTEMBER 12, 2017 21:19
This year marks the centenary of the founding of the Soviet Union, and with it the imposition of a communist dictatorship in Tsarist Russia and beyond. The totalitarian government that Vladimir Lenin and his party apparatchiks built is commonly associated with the terror of large-scale famine, police-state repression, gulags and assassinations. Yet, there is another noteworthy Soviet legacy: communist support for terrorist groups.Soviet aid to terrorist organizations was a staple of Moscow’s strategy against the West and its allies during the Cold War. At the roots of this sponsorship was a desire to portray the USSR and communism as the vanguard of “liberation” in an era that witnessed the disintegration of the British and French empires. That the Soviet Union itself had engaged in imperialism since shortly after its creation was an inconvenient truth to be whitewashed in communist propaganda.As analyst Nick Lockwood noted in The Atlantic in 2011, “Russia is the birthplace of modern terrorism,” with 19th century Russian nihilists and secret societies advocating a violent overthrow of Tsarist rule. Groups like the “People’s Will” murdered Tsarist officials and, in March 1881, Tsar Alexander II himself. Among its more infamous members was Alexander Ulyanov – Lenin’s older brother – who was executed by the state in 1887 for a planned assassination of Alexander’s son and successor.There was terrorism from the Russian far Right as well, with organizations like the Union of the Russian People having “compiled lists of current and former government officials to be assassinated,” as the historian Stephen Kotkin highlighted in Stalin: Paradoxes of Power.But it was the USSR and its communist allies who helped terrorism go global.According to The World Was Going Our Way: The KGB and the Battle for the Third World, a book by historian Christopher Andrew and the KGB operative turned defector Vasili Mitrokhin, the “unexpected surge” of international terrorism in the early 1970s coupled with the successful backing of Sandinista guerillas in Latin America “encouraged” Moscow to “consider the use of Palestinian terrorists as proxies in the Middle East and Europe.” By 1970, the KGB “began secret arms deliveries to the Marxist-Leninist Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP)” – a US-designated terrorist group. In addition to the PLFP, the Soviets, the East German Stasi, the Cuban General Intelligence Directorate (DGI), Romanian intelligence services, and other communist dictatorships gave funds, training and support to various leftist terrorist networks.THESE GROUPS, such as the Japanese Red Army, Italy’s Red Brigades, the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP) and various German organizations all “shared Marxist philosophies, a hatred of America” and “solidarity with the Palestinians,” Lockwood notes. On the latter point, the analyst pointed out: “Palestinian groups were enthusiastic participants in Soviet terror largesse.”This went hand in glove with the USSR’s propaganda campaign to tar Zionism, the belief in Jewish self-determination, as racism; a tool, it was said, of Western colonialist oppression.In this fashion, the communists that had imposed autocracy and enslaved billions could be painted as “liberators” of the Third World.Yasser Arafat, a founder of the Palestinian Fatah movement and future head of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and Palestinian Authority (PA), even received KGB training in east Moscow in the early 1960s, according to a Wall Street Journal article by Ion Mihai Pacepa, the head of the Foreign Intelligence Service of Romania before his defection to the United States in 1978.Together, communist-backed terrorist groups pioneered airplane hijackings and the purposeful targeting – including mass murder – of civilians. Indeed, General Alexander Sakharovsky, who headed the KGB’s First Chief Directorate that oversaw operations abroad, bragged in 1971: “Airplane hijacking is my own invention.”According to Andrew and Mitrokhin, the Soviets ceased supporting the PFLP in the late 1970s. Other groups, however, continued to receive support and other communist dictatorships – all trained and backed by the USSR – were happy to provide it.East Germany in particular was an avid proponent, as the American historian Jeffrey Herf documented in his important 2016 book Undeclared Wars with Israel. The country’s vicious and highly effective intelligence service, the Stasi, aided the PLO, among other groups, in carrying out “acts of war” and “international terrorism,” as its own records note. Herf points out that East Germany served as a “transit” and “training spot” for numerous terrorists and that the Stasi, concerned about Western condemnation should their trainees carry out attacks in the West, entered into a formal agreement with the PLO: committing terrorist attacks “anywhere else” was encouraged.The plane hijackings and massacres, such as occurred at the Lod Airport and the Munich Olympic Games in 1972, foretold much of what was to come – although the Berlin Wall and the Soviet Union fell more than two decades ago, the Soviet legacy of terrorism remains.Indeed, according to a September 9, 2011, US State Department cable, the Soviet-trained Cuban DGI allowed the Lebanese-based, US-designated terrorist group Hezbollah to establish “an operational base in Cuba, designed to support terrorist groups throughout Latin America.”In his “Lessons from the Moscow Uprising,” written more than a decade before seizing power, Lenin set the course, writing of his Bolsheviks: “We stand for terror – this should be frankly admitted.”He’s right.The writer is a Washington DC-based foreign affairs analyst. His views are his own.
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A view shows smoke in the Gaza Strip as seen from Israel’s border with the Gaza Strip, in southern Israel October 18, 2023. REUTERS/Amir Cohen Acquire Licensing Rights
DUBAI/WASHINGTON, Oct 18 (Reuters) – Israel is vowing to wipe out Hamas in a relentless onslaught on the Gaza Strip but has no obvious endgame in sight, with no clear plan for how to govern the ravaged Palestinian enclave even if it triumphs on the battlefield.
Codenamed “Operation Swords of Iron”, the military campaign will be unmatched in its ferocity and unlike anything Israel has carried out in Gaza in the past, according to eight regional and Western officials with knowledge of the conflict who declined to be named due to the sensitivity of the matter.
Israel has called up a record 360,000 reservists and has been bombarding the tiny enclave non-stop following Hamas’s assault on southern Israel on Oct. 7, which killed about 1,400 people, mostly civilians.
The immediate Israeli strategy, said three regional officials familiar with discussions between the U.S. and Middle Eastern leaders, is to destroy Gaza’s infrastructure, even at the cost of high civilian casualties, push the enclave’s people towards the Egyptian border and go after Hamas by blowing up the labyrinth of underground tunnels the group has built to conduct its operations.
Israeli officials have said that they don’t have a clear idea for what a post-war future might look like, though.
Some of U.S. President Joe Biden’s aides are concerned that while Israel may craft an effective plan to inflict lasting damage to Hamas, it has yet to formulate an exit strategy, a source in Washington familiar with the matter said.
Trips to Israel by Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin this past week had stressed the need to focus on the post-war plan for Gaza, the source added.
Arab officials are also alarmed that Israel hasn’t set out a clear plan for the future of the enclave, ruled by Hamas since 2006 and home to 2.3 million people.
“Israel doesn’t have an endgame for Gaza. Their strategy is to drop thousands of bombs, destroy everything and go in, but then what? They have no exit strategy for the day after,” said one regional security source.
An Israeli invasion has yet to start, but Gaza authorities say 3,500 Palestinians have already been killed by the aerial bombardment, around a third of them children – a larger death toll than in any previous conflict between Hamas and Israel.
Biden, on a visit to Israel on Wednesday, told Israelis that justice needed to be served to Hamas, though he cautioned that after the 9/11 attacks on New York, the U.S. had made mistakes.
The “vast majority of Palestinians are not Hamas”, he said. “Hamas does not represent the Palestinian people.”
Aaron David Miller, a Middle East expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said Biden’s visit would have given him a chance to press Israeli leader Benjamin Netanyahu to think through issues such as the proportional use of force and the longer-term plans for Gaza before any invasion.
‘CITY OF TUNNELS’
Israeli officials, including Netanyahu, have said they will wipe out Hamas in retribution for the Oct. 7 killings, the deadliest militant attack in Israel’s 75-year-old history.
What will follow is less defined.
“We are of course thinking and dealing with this, and this involves assessments and includes the National Security Council, the military and others about the end situation,” Israeli National Security Council director Tzachi Hanegbi told reporters on Tuesday. “We don’t know what this will be with certainty.”
“But what we do know is what there will not be,” he said, referring to Israel’s stated aim to eradicate Hamas.
This might be easier said than done.
“It’s an underground city of tunnels that make the Vietcong tunnels look like child’s play,” said the first regional source, referring to the Communist guerrilla force that defied U.S. troops in Vietnam. “They’re not going to end Hamas with tanks and firepower.”
Two regional military experts told Reuters that Hamas’s armed wing, the Ezzedine al-Qassam Brigades, has mobilised for an invasion, setting up anti-tank mines and booby-trapped explosive devices to ambush troops.
Israel’s coming offensive is set to be much bigger than past Gaza operations that Israeli officials had previously referred to as “mowing the grass”, degrading Hamas’s military capabilities but not eliminating it.
Israel has fought three previous conflicts with Hamas, in 2008-9, 2012 and 2014, and launched limited land invasions during two of those campaigns, but unlike today, Israel’s leaders never vowed to destroy Hamas once and for all.
In those three confrontations, just under 4,000 Palestinians and fewer than 100 Israelis died.
There is less optimism in Washington, though, that Israel will be able to completely destroy Hamas and U.S. officials see little chance that Israel will want to hold on to any Gaza territory or re-occupy it, the U.S. source said.
A more likely scenario, the person said, would be for Israeli forces to kill or capture as many Hamas members as they can, blow up tunnels and rocket workshops, then after Israeli casualties mount, look for a way to declare victory and exit.
CLOUDS OF WAR
The fear across the region is that the war will blow up beyond the confines of Gaza, with Lebanon’s Hezbollah and its backer Iran opening major new fronts in support of Hamas.
Iranian Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian warned of a possible “preemptive” action against Israel if it carried out its invasion of Gaza. He said last weekend that Iran would not watch from the sidelines if the U.S. failed to restrain Israel.
Arab leaders have told Blinken, who has been criss-crossing the region this past week, that while they condemn Hamas’s attack on Israel, they oppose collective punishment against ordinary Palestinians, which they fear will trigger regional unrest.
Popular anger will ratchet up across the region when the body count rises, they said.
Washington has sent an aircraft carrier strike group to the eastern Mediterranean and is concerned that Hezbollah might join the battle from Israel’s northern border. There has been no sign, however, that the U.S. military would then move from a deterrent posture to direct involvement.
The regional sources said Washington was proposing to re-energise the Palestinian Authority (PA), which lost control of Gaza to Hamas in 2007, although there is huge doubt whether the PA or any other authority would be able to govern the coastal enclave should Hamas be driven out.
Miller, a former U.S. Middle East negotiator, expressed deep skepticism about the potential for establishing a post-Hamas government to rule Gaza.
“I could paint you a picture more appropriate to a galaxy far, far away and not on planet Earth on how you could combine the U.N., the Palestinian Authority, the Saudis, the Egyptians, led by the U.S. marshalling the Europeans, to basically convert Gaza from an open-air prison to something much better,” he said.
In the meantime, calls for the creation of humanitarian corridors within Gaza and escape routes for Palestinian civilians have drawn a strong reaction from Arab neighbors.
They fear an Israeli invasion will spark a new permanent mass wave of displacement, a replay of the 1948 Israeli war of independence and 1967 Arab-Israeli war. Millions of Palestinians who were forced to flee then have remained stranded as refugees in the countries that hosted them.
Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi said he rejected the forced displacement of Palestinians from their land into the Sinai peninsula bordering Gaza, adding that any such move would turn the area into a base for attacks against Israel. He said Egyptians in their millions would protest against any such move.
East Jerusalem, captured by Israel in the 1967 war and then annexed, and Israeli settlement expansion across occupied territory are at the core of the conflict with Palestinians. Netanyahu has openly embraced the religious and radical far-right, promising to annex more land to be settled by Jews.
Hundreds of Palestinians have died in the West Bank since the start of the year in repeated clashes with Israeli soldiers and settlers, and there is widespread concern that the violence might engulf the territory as nearby Gaza burns.
“Whatever worst-case scenario you have, it will be worse,” a second regional source said about the potential for the conflict to spread beyond Gaza.
Aditional reporting by Humeyra Pamuk in Washington, Jonathan Saul in Jerusalem and Andrew Mills; Editing by Crispian Balmer, Pravin Char and Nick Macfie
Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.