Yinon Plan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yinon_Plan
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Article published in February
1982 in the Hebrew journal Kivunim ("Directions")
entitled 'A Strategy for Israel in the 1980s'.[1] The article was penned
by Oded Yinon, reputedly a former advisor to Ariel
Sharon,[2] a former senior official
with the Israeli Foreign Ministry[3][4][5][6] and journalist for The Jerusalem Post.[7]
It is cited as an early
example of characterizing political projects in the Middle
East in terms of a logic of sectarian
divisions.[8] It has played a role in
both conflict resolution analysis by scholars who regard it as having
influenced the formulation of policies adopted by the American administration
under George W. Bush,[9] and also in conspiracy
theories according to which the article either predicted or planned major
political events in the Middle East since the 1980s, including the 2003 invasion of Iraq and the
overthrowing of Saddam Hussein, the Syrian
Civil War and the rise of the Islamic State. Conspiracy
theories further claim that the plan was introduced to the US by members of the
Israeli Institute for
Advanced Strategic and Political Studies in administration and that it
was adopted by the Bush administration following 9/11 (claimed
to be a Mossad false
flag) with the goal of furthering US interests in the region, while
simultaneously advancing the alleged Jewish dream of Greater
Israel "from the Nile to the Euphrates".[10]
Kivunim was a quarterly
periodical[11] dedicated to the study
of Judaism and Zionism which
appeared between 1978 and 1987,[12] and was published by
the World Zionist Organization's department
of Information in Jerusalem.[13]
Argument of the paper
Yinon argues that the world
was witnessing a new epoch in history without precedent, which required both
the development of a fresh perspective and an operational strategy to implement
it. The rationalist and humanist
foundations of Western
civilization were in a state of collapse.[14] The West was
disintegrating before the combined onslaught of the Soviet
Union and the Third World, a phenomenon he believed was accompanied
by an upsurge in anti-Semitism, all of which meant that Israel would
become the last safe haven for Jews to
seek refuge in.[15] The Muslim Arab world
circling Israel had been arbitrarily sliced up into 19 ethnically heterogeneous
states by imperial powers, France and Great Britain,[16] and was just a
'temporary house of cards put together by foreigners' - the notion that pan-Arabism was
a house of cards doomed to collapse had been already argued by Fouad
Ajami some years earlier[17] - composed of mutually
hostile ethnic minorities and majorities, that, once disintegrated into, in
Ahmad's interpretation, feudal tribal fiefdoms, would
no longer challenge Israel.[18] Centrifugal factors
would give rise to a dynamic of fragmentation that, while highly perilous,
would offer Israel opportunities it had failed to exploit in 1967.[16]
He then proceeds to analyze
the weaknesses of Arab countries, by citing what he perceives to be flaws in
their national and social structures, concluding that Israel should aim to
bring about the fragmentation of the Arab world into a mosaic of ethnic and confessional groupings.[5] 'Every kind of
inter-Arab confrontation,' he argued, would prove to be advantageous to Israel
in the short term.[19] He saw contemporary
events in Lebanon as a foreshadowing of future developments overall throughout
the Arab world. The upheavals would create a precedent for guiding Israeli
short-term and long-term strategies. Specifically, he asserted that the immediate
aim of policy should be the dissolution of the military capabilities of Arab
states east of Israel, while the primary long-term goal should work towards the
formation of unique areas defined in terms of ethnonational and religious identities.[20]
Blueprint for the Middle East
Egypt
Yinon thought the 1978 Camp David Accords, the peace agreement signed
by Menachem Begin and Anwar
Sadat, to be mistaken. One of Israel's aims for the 1980s would be, Yinon
claimed, the dismemberment of Egypt, a country he described as a
"corpse", in order to reestablish the status quo ante, when Israel had controlled
the Sinai Peninsula.[15] Yinon hoped to see the
formation of a Christian
Coptic state on Egypt's northern borders. Yinon pinned the
expectations on a rapid Israeli re-invasion of the Sinai triggered by a future
rupture by Egypt of the American-brokered terms of peace, something which,
under Hosni Mubarak, failed to eventuate.[19]
Jordan and the West Bank
In his account of Russian
foreign policy and the Arabs, Yevgeny
Primakov contextualizes Yinon's paper in terms of the content of what
former United States Ambassador
to the United Nations, George Ball, stated in testimony in August
before the U.S. Senate's Foreign Affairs
Committee. Ball, discussing the second
Israeli invasion of Lebanon[7] earlier in June,
referred to conversations with Ariel
Sharon, in which Sharon reportedly stated that his long-term strategy
consisted of "squeezing the Palestinians out of the West Bank..allowing
only enough of them to remain for work."[3] Yinon's paper suggested
that Israeli policy, both in war and peace, should aim for one objective: 'the
liquidation of Jordan' as ruled by the Hashemite
Kingdom, together with increased Palestinian migration from the West Bank into
eastern Jordan.[3][19] The dissolution of
Jordan, Yinon thought, would bring an end to the problem of the existence of
dense concentrations of Palestinians in
the Palestinian territories Israel had
conquered in the Six-Day War in 1967, allowing them to be spirited
away into that former kingdom's territory.[21]
Lebanon
See
also: FLLF and Kissinger plan in Lebanon
Yinon's paper fed an old
Lebanese conspiracy theory against its territorial
integrity going back to 1943, according to which the country was to be cantonized along ethno-nationalist lines. In particular during
the 1970s[22] the idea took wing and,
especially after civil war broke out in Lebanon in 1975, came to
be associated with the figure of Henry
Kissinger whose Middle East diplomacy was thought to be greatly
detrimental to Lebanese interests, and who was rumoured to be planning the
partition of Lebanon into two states.[23]
Iraq
Further
information: Israel–Kurdistan Region relations
Yinon considered Iraq, with
its oil wealth, to be Israel's greatest threat. He believed that the Iran–Iraq
War would split up Iraq, whose dissolution should be a strategic
Israeli aim, and he envisaged the emergence of three ethnic centres, of Shiites governing
from Basra,
the Sunni from Baghdad, and
the Kurds with
a capital in Mosul,
each area run along the lines of the administrative
divisions of the former Ottoman
Empire.[19]
Reactions
Contemporary reception
An English translation
by Israel Shahak soon appeared in the Journal of Palestine Studies.[24][25] Israel
Shahak in the foreword to his translation interpreted the plan as both
a fantasy and a faithful reflection of the strategy being developed by Ariel
Sharon and Rafael Eitan, and drew parallels with both the geopolitical
ideas that flourished in Germany from 1890 to 1933, later adopted by
Hitler and applied to Eastern
Europe,[26] and modern American neoconservative thinking,
which influenced Yinon, to gather from the sources cited in his notes.[27] It was, it has been
argued, Shahak's English translation which catapulted Yinon into the public
limelight.[9]
According to William
Haddad, the publication of the article caused a sensation at the time.[28] Haddad notes that the
American syndicated columnist Joseph
Kraft, a month later, echoed Yinon's ideas in an article that Syria would
implode into confessional fragments composed of Alawite, Druze and Sunni
communities were the country to be occupied after an Israeli invasion, and that
such an event should cause reverberations throughout the Arab world, resulting
in a reconfiguration of ethnic microstates guaranteed to introduce an era of peace.
The idea was dismissed at the time.[28] Yinon's article drew
several other responses, and was reviewed in Newsweek (26
July 1982, p. 32) and the Wall Street Journal (8 December
1982, p. 34).[29][30] Amos Elon reviewed
the essay for Haaretz and worried that American commentators on Israel
were turning a blind eye to the kind of irrational attitudes evinced by Yinon's
article. Those who did point out such tendencies within Israeli politics were
subjected to defamation.[15] David Waines, reviewing
the essay for the International Journal of
Middle East Studies, contextualized it in terms of two other works
appearing in the same year as Yinon's essay, a collection edited by Ibrahim Abu-Lughod and a book by Michael J.
Cohen on American, British and Zionist long-term regional policies, both
arguing such policies were dictated solely by a realpolitik insouciant
of Palestinian grievances. In the light of the immediate instance of Israel's
invasion of Lebanon in that same year, Waines concluded that all three
pieces created a 'grave apprehension about present and future developments in
the Middle East.'[31]
An article published in 1983
on the monthly publication of the Socialist
Organisation in Israel, Matzpen, claimed the article exposes
the minds behind Israel's foreign policy. To such claims, Yinon responded in an
interview to the anti-establishment, weekly newspaper "HaOlam
HaZeh", claiming he is not a fan or a friend of Israel's leaders
at the time, including Ariel Sharon and Menachem
Begin, nor does he supports them. Yinon also claimed that an article,
similar to his, was published in a left-wing newspaper of the Kibbutz
Movement Mi'Befnim.[32]
The French philosopher,
convert to Islam, and Holocaust
denier, Roger Garaudy, who was married to a Palestinian
woman, used the text the following year in the English version of his
book, L'Affaire Israël: le sionisme politique, to support his
argument that a mechanism was in place to drive Arabs out of what was defined
as Eretz Israel and disintegrate Arab countries.[33] Jordan's Prince Hassan bin Talal outlined its
contents in a book on peace prospects,[2] in 1984, as did
Christine Moss Helms in a Brookings Institution study.[34]
Later interpretations
Yehoshafat Harkabi appraised Yinon's
analysis of the weakness of Arab states as generally correct while expressing
doubts about the suggestion Israel should actively work towards their
dissolution. If their fragmentation is inevitable, he asked, why would it be
necessary for Israel to interfere?[35] Ralph
Schoenman argued that its divide
et īmpera principle followed 'the time-honoured imperial pattern'.[36]
Mordechai
Nisan, like Haddad, notes that it made waves, stirring both curiosity and
wrath, the latter since it fed into regional suspicions that Israel was intent
on "balkanizing" the neighbourhood. Nisan
thought the regional outcry both exaggerated and incredulous: Yinon's apparent
suggestion that Israel adopt an interventionist role to abet the fragmentation
of Arab states the author thought inevitable, he added, served to create an
impression that Israel was engaged in a sinister plot, when the views expressed
were Yinon's alone, and did not represent Israeli government policy.[37]
Ilan Peleg described it as 'an
authentic mirror of the thinking mode of the Israeli Right at the height of
Begin's rule.'[38] Noam
Chomsky made a more nuanced analysis of the historical context: the
views espoused by Yinon were to be dissociated from the official Zionist
mainstream outlook of that time, in embodying 'ideological and geopolitical
fantasies' that could be identified with the line developed by the
ultranationalist Tehiya political party, created in 1979. Nonetheless, an
argument could be made, he continues, that part of the mainstream of Labour
Zionism in his view had entertained similar ideas. Chomsky cites in
support of this David Ben-Gurion's strategy when the State of Israel was founded of
crushing Syria and the Transjordan, annexing southern Lebanon while
leaving its northern residue to Maronite
Christians, and bombing Egypt if it were to put up resistance. Chomsky
warned against complacency about these fringe ideas since, he argued: '(t)he
entire history of Zionism and later that of
Israel, particularly since 1967, is one of gradual shift towards the positions
of those formerly regarded as right-wing extremists.'[39]
Virginia
Tilley argues that there was a strong tension between the US as a
global hegemon relying on strong regional state systems, and Israel's interests
in a weak state system in the Middle East beyond its borders on the other hand.
In this context she cites Yinon's views as spelling out the latter logic, but
specifies that they were not quite unique at that time, since Ze'ev
Schiff writing in Haaretz in the same month, 5 February 1982, had
asserted that Israel's geostrategic interests would be best served by the
fragmentation of Iraq, for example, into a tripartite entity consisting of
Shiite and Sunni states hived off from a northern Kurdish reality.[40]
Linda S. Heard,
writing for Arab News in 2005, reviewed recent policies
under George W. Bush such as the war on
terror, and events in the Middle East from the Iran–Iraq
War to the Invasion of Iraq in 2003, and concluded:
There is one thing that we do
know. Oded Yinon's 1982 "Zionist Plan for the Middle East" is in
large part taking shape. Is this pure coincidence? Was Yinon a gifted psychic?
Perhaps! Alternatively, we in the West are victims of a long-held agenda not of
our making and without doubt not in our interests.[19]
In 2017, Ted Becker, former
Walter Meyer Professor of Law at New York University and Brian Polkinghorn,
distinguished professor of Conflict
Analysis and Dispute Resolution at Salisbury University, argued that Yinon's plan
was adopted and refined in a 1996 policy document entitled A Clean Break: A
New Strategy for Securing the Realm, written by a research group at the
Israeli-affiliated Institute for
Advanced Strategic and Political Studies in Washington. The group was
directed by Richard Perle, who, some years later, became one of
the key figures in the formulation of the Iraq War strategy adopted during the
administration of George W. Bush in 2003.[9]
Both Becker and Polkinhorn
admit that avowed enemies of Israel in the Middle East take the sequence of
events—Israel's occupation of the West Bank,
the Golan Heights, its encirclement of Gaza, the invasion of
Lebanon, its bombing of Iraq, airstrikes in Syria and its attempts at containing Iran's nuclear
capacities—when read in the light of the Yinon Plan and the Clean
break analysis, to be proof that Israel is engaged in a modern version
of The Great Game, with the backing of Zionist currents
in the American neoconservative and Christian fundamentalist movements.
They also conclude that Likud Party appears to have implemented both plans.[41]
Citations
1.
^ Yinon 1982b,
pp. 49–59: Estrategiah le-Yisrael bi-Shnot ha-Shmonim.
2.
^ Jump up to:a b Talal 1984,
p. 118.
3.
^ Jump up to:a b c Primakov
2009, p. 201.
4.
^ Legrain 2013,
p. 266, n.19.
5.
^ Jump up to:a b Masalha 2000,
p. 94.
6.
^ Feeley 2010,
p. 79.
7.
^ Jump up to:a b Sleiman 2014,
p. 94.
8.
^ Legrain 2013,
p. 266 n.19.
9.
^ Jump up to:a b c Becker
& Polkinghorn 2017, p. 148.
10.
^ Cohen
Tzemach 2016.
11.
^ Karmi 2007,
p. 27.
12.
^ Bernstein
2012, p. 13.
13.
^ Chomsky 1999,
p. 471 n.19.
14.
^ Yinon 1982b,
pp. 49–59.
15.
^ Jump up to:a b c Chomsky 1999,
p. 456.
16.
^ Jump up to:a b Labévière
2000, p. 206.
18.
^ Ahmad 2014,
p. 83.
19.
^ Jump up to:a b c d e Heard 2005.
20.
^ Tilley 2010,
pp. 107–108.
21.
^ Ahmad 2014,
p. 82.
22.
^ Sleiman 2014,
pp. 76–77.
23.
^ Sleiman 2014,
p. 77.
24.
^ Haddad 1985,
p. 116 n.18.
25.
^ Yinon 1982a,
pp. 209–214.
26.
^ Shahak
& Yinon 1982, p. v.
27.
^ Shahak
& Yinon 1982, pp. iii, v.
28.
^ Jump up to:a b Haddad 1985,
p. 104.
29.
^ Helms 1990,
p. 48.
30.
^ Peleg 2012,
p. 310 n.56.
31.
^ Waines 1984,
pp. 418–420.
32.
^ Matzpen 1983.
33.
^ Garaudy 1983,
p. 133.
34.
^ Helms 1984,
p. 54.
35.
^ Harkabi 1989,
p. 58.
36.
^ Schoenman
1988, pp. 103, 112–113.
37.
^ Nisan 2002,
pp. 275–276, 332 notes 14, 15.
38.
^ Peleg 2012,
p. 43.
39.
^ Chomsky 1999,
p. 456-457.
40.
^ Tilley 2010,
pp. 107–111, 250 note 19.
41. ^ Becker & Polkinghorn 2017, pp. 148–149.
