"Zionism Is Making Us Stupid" - The Russian Relationship With Israel From The Soviets To Putin

8/11/2019 “Zionism is Making Us Stupid”: The Russian Relationship with Israel from the Soviets to Putin
“Zionism is Making Us Stupid”: The

Russian Relationship with Israel from
the Soviets to Putin
Kyle W. Orton Follow
Dec 12, 2018 · 50 min read
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Russian President Vladimir Putin during a wreath-laying
ceremony at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Moscow, 9 May 2018 [source]
INTRODUCTION
The core argument to this essay is two-fold. First, that the Russian government cannot
assist Israel, or the broader West, in containing the Iranian revolution in the Middle East.
Specifically, Russia is unable to evict Iran’s troops from Syria. Second, Moscow has no
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interest in countering Iran; its own position rests on Iranian power and it will therefore
continue fortifying an agenda that aims to push the West out and eliminate Israel.
The collapse of various efforts to publish this essay since late July/early August, and my
own laggardness, have combined to produce one advantage: the evidence for this thesis
is now much more copious. Indeed, after recent events it becomes rather harder to make
the contrary case. Even Israeli officials have — just in the last few weeks — begun to
doubt their prior certainty that they have a special understanding with the Russians that
the Europeans and Americans simply don’t comprehend, guaranteeing Jerusalem’s
freedom of action against Iran in Syria. The Israelis now tend to speak of a “turn” in
Moscow’s behaviour, but the reality is otherwise.
Moscow’s posture has been, in its essentials, continuous since shortly after the
foundation of the Jewish state. Whatever the subjective views of individuals within the
current Russian leadership about Israeli security concerns, the Russian state is in a
strategic partnership with an Iranian regime pledged to Israel’s destruction, and this is
hardly a new situation. The Kremlin and its satellites waged an undeclared war against
Israel from the 1950s onward, since which time the Middle East governments and
terrorist groups most active in the long effort to extinguish Israel have been able to count
on support from Moscow.
THE SOVIET UNION AND THE FOUNDING OF ISRAEL

The Soviet Union recognised Israel immediately. Moscow played up its role in defeating
the Nazis as part of its political outreach to the nascent Jewish state. It is often pointed
out that the Soviet Union also provided crucial military help, through its Czechoslovak
puppet regime, to the Zionists during the war of independence. This is true. The
intention of the Soviets in doing this, however, was to expel the British and to foster “a
situation which was certain to provoke conflict in Palestine and great unrest throughout
the Arab world, thus necessitating Soviet intervention to maintain order”. This kind of
cynical behaviour, creating problems in order to solve them, was standard tradecraft for
the Soviet Union right down to the end.
Vasili Mitrokhin, the archivist who spent twenty years transcribing KGB files he knew
might never see the light of day, managed to defect just after the end of the Cold War and
bring his incredible trove with him. These files, written up in a book co-authored with
Christopher Andrew, The World War Going Our Way, tell the story of the Soviet approach
to Israel, Zionism, and Jews domestically — issues the KGB, the actual driving force of
much foreign and eventually domestic policy in the Soviet Empire, regarded as
inextricably linked.
The Mitrokhin Archive shows that nearly as soon as Israel had secured her survival, the
Soviet regime turned against her and by the early 1950s the sentiment was returned. The
Israeli government publicly opposed Soviet aggression in Korea, for example. The KGB
residency in Israel, Mitrokhin and Andrew note, “blamed the ‘[anti-Soviet] hysteria’ on
the Israeli government’s desire both to convince the United States that it could count on
Israeli support for its ‘aggressive plans’ and ‘continue to use Israel as a centre of
espionage in the countries of the socialist camp’.” What the residency could not say, since
it would have led to their execution, was what was blatantly obvious: Israeli public
opinion soured on the Soviet Union because of Moscow’s antisemitic policies.
In January 1948, the Soviet tyrant Joseph Stalin had Solomon Mikhoels murdered.
Mikhoels was a Yiddish actor and prominent member of the Jewish Anti-Fascist
Committee (JAC), which had done so much work to raise the standing of the Soviet
Union in the West during the war with Adolf Hitler. JAC had proposed that Soviet Jewry
be allowed to reconstitute itself in Crimea; the peninsula had been emptied of Tatars by
Stalin anyway, and Jews could hardly live comfortably in the former Nazi-occupied
zones where their neighours had collaborated in an attempt at their extirpation. Stalin
viewed it as a plot to establish a secessionist Jewish homeland that would be used as a
base for American imperialism.
Using the Crimea plot pretext and other imaginary reasons, the rest of the JAC was
arrested in late 1948; the leaders were charged with treason and tortured in custody for
three years until they were shot in August 1952. In November that year, a hysterical
show trial of Jews in the government of Czechoslovakia centred around Rudolf Slansky
took place and eleven defendants were hanged in Prague the next month. A wide-scale
purge of Jews from official positions took place in the Captive Nations. In the
background, the so-called Doctors’ Case had been building since 1951 that aimed at the
Jews of the Soviet Union itself.
The Soviet media in January 1953 broadcast details of an extraordinary scheme by a

group of “saboteur-doctors” who “had as their goal shortening the lives of leaders of the
Soviet Union by means of medical sabotage.” It was said these “killer doctors” had
already murdered Aleksandr Shcherbakov, a founder of the Soviet Writers’ Union, who
drank himself to death in May 1945, and Andrei Zhdanov, the heir-apparent to Stalin
who died in August 1948. The “filthy face of this Zionist spy organization” was now
exposed, said Pravda, as were the “Anglo-American war mongers” that stood behind the
plot. In June 1951, the MGB, as the secret police were named, turned inward after a
nine-month campaign against Jews in the bureaucracy, arresting its chief, Viktor
Abakumov, the deputy of the investigative division, L.L. Shvartzman, and several other
senior Jews in the MGB. These arrests were now linked to the Doctors’ Case.
In February 1953, with the Israeli public incensed after the judicial massacre in
Czechoslovakia and the evident preparations for worse in the Soviet Union, the Soviet
Embassy in Tel Aviv was bombed, leading to the suspension of all diplomatic relations for
five months.
What exactly the Soviets had planned for the Jews under their rule remains a subject of
contention.
When Soviet dissident Alexander Solzhenitsyn published The Gulag Archipelago in the
West in the early 1970s, describing conditions in the Soviet slave labour camps, he noted
that his best information said Stalin had intended hang the “doctor-murderers” in Red
Square after a show trial at the beginning of March 1953, triggering an anti-Jewish
pogrom. “At this point,” noted Solzhenitsyn, Stalin “would intervene generously to save
the Jews” by deporting them to Siberia, where they could be worked to death.
In Stalin’s Last Crime, Jonathan Brent and Vladimir Naumova bring to light a letter,
intended to be printed after the condemned doctors had been executed. Prominent
Soviet Jews would sign the letter, demanding punishment for the Jewish plotters. The
movement of Soviet Jewry to the East would spare them the Russian people’s wrath and
isolate them from further Zionist-imperialist propaganda. The authors note that the
Soviet regime had begun construction of “special camps” in Komi, Kazakhstan, and
Irkutsk.
Boris Smolar’s book, Soviet Jewry Today and Tomorrow, notes that Stalin was felled by a
massive stroke on 1 March 1953 — Purim, as it happened — apparently brought on after
Vyacheslav Molotov (the formal head of government) and Kliment Voroshilov (the
formal head of state) “dared to oppose, openly and strongly, his proposal” for deporting
the Jews to the East. Stalin died on 5 March.
The uniqueness of the Holocaust is often viewed as providing at least a tincture of moral
difference between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. It appears that the final thing
on Stalin’s mind was to abolish even this distinction.
THE EARLY COLD WAR

In the late 1940s and early 1950s, Jews from the Soviet Bloc were permitted to make
aliya to Israel fairly freely. Part of this was doubtless as a means of fulfilling Stalin’s
program of getting rid of the Jews in the Soviet Empire and part was, as the Mitrokhin
Archive makes clear, so that the KGB could smuggle agents into the new state. The
Soviets had the further advantage that Israel was a more open state than its neighbours,
and therefore permitted an openly Moscow-line party, the United Workers’ Party
(MAPAM), whose leadership was filled with Soviet agents like Aharon Cohen, Yaakov
Riftin, Moshe Sneh, and Yisrael Beer, to operate — something the Soviet Union’s own
allies in Syria, Egypt, and Iraq never allowed.
Even so, the Soviets ran into immediate problems. Mitrokhin highlights two reasons for
this.
First, many of those Jewish émigrés who had pledged themselves to the Soviets before
travelling to Israel cut contact with the Centre once they were in the country. Some were
pushed away in the shadow of the Doctors’ Plot; others were drawn to Zionism, and only
the true believers in Moscow were left in confusion about nationalism out-competing
Communism in this way. Second, Israel had extremely competent security services.
MAPAM was kept under close watch and the damage it could do largely neutralized. The
one breach in Israeli intelligence, Ze’ev Avni, born Wolf Goldstein, who managed to
infiltrate MOSSAD, was combed out relatively quickly, uncovered and arrested in April
1956. As Mitrokhin and Andrew document, the fact that Israel’s pre-emptive strike in
June 1967 was a “complete surprise” to the KGB is the “best indication” that the Soviets
had no high-level spies in the country.
When Golda Meir arrived in Moscow as Israel’s ambassador in October 1948, she
attended a Rosh Hashanah service. As Meir recounts in her memoir, My Life (pp. 205–9),
she had not been enthusiastic about taking up this post, had believed Soviet Jewry was
disconnected from the wider community, and had read in Pravda the sly threat from Ilya
Ehrenburg against Jews associating with Israel’s representatives. Yet, on the day, she was
met by a euphoric crowd of maybe 50,000 Jews. Ten days later, at the Yom Kippur
service, Meir again barely had room to move in the crowd, and when the rabbi recited
the closing lines of his service, “Next year in Jerusalem”, “a tremor went through the
entire synagogue”, Meir records.
Golda Meir in Moscow, 1948 [source]
The display of enthusiasm at the return of the Jews to the world of states alarmed the
Soviet leadership and was one of the proximate causes of Stalin’s paranoia about Jews in
the government. “[B]y January 1949, it was apparent Russian Jewry was going to pay a
heavy price for the welcome it had given [Israel’s ambassadors]”, wrote Meir (p. 209),
and “the ‘treachery’ [this represented] to Communist ideals”. In Stalin’s view it showed
that “bourgeois nationalism” and divided loyalties were active among Soviet Jewry. The
Israeli victory over Egypt, Jordan, and Syria in the Six-Day War turbocharged this
dynamic. Many remaining intelligence assets sided with Israel after 1967 and the Soviet
decision, later regretted, to sever diplomatic relations with Israel severely hampered
espionage operations for the remainder of the Cold War.
The main Soviet bridgehead in the region had been in Egypt since 1955. Under Gamal
Abdel Nasser, Cairo became the seat of pan-Arab radicalism, agitating for the elimination
of Israel. The Soviets thwarted United Nations condemnation of Nasser’s regime for
blocking Israel’s access to the Suez Canal, and when Israel tried to force the issue with
the assistance of Britain and France in October 1956 they were halted by the Americans.
This hugely bolstered Nasser’s status, which he used — along with American-provided
communications equipment — to unleash a wave of revolution that toppled the
Hashemite monarchy in Iraq, the lynchpin of the pro-Western order, opening the region
up in earnest to Soviet influence. Iraq moved into the Soviet orbit and would remain
there for the remainder of the Cold War, albeit with considerable ambiguity in the 1980s
after Saddam Husayn came to power and started a war with the Iranian theocracy. The
Western and Arab desire to prevent the Islamic Republic overrunning Iraq led to them
offering support of various kinds, preventing Saddam being solely reliant on the Soviets.
Realising its mistake in trying to come to terms with Nasser after the fall of the Iraqi
monarchy, Washington intervened directly, sending troops to shore-up a tottering
government in Lebanon, and working in collaboration with the British and the Israelis,
who performed a counter-part intervention to secure Jordan. This operation to stem the
Egyptian-Soviet tide was just two years after President Eisenhower had halted a British-
French-Israeli operation at Suez designed to do the exact same thing.
SYRIA, THE SOVIETS, AND PALESTINIAN TERRORISM

Moscow’s toehold in Egypt was already faltering by the 1960s; it rapidly declined after
Nasser’s death in 1970. Nasser’s successor, Anwar al-Sadat, bravely ordered the Soviet
“advisors” out of his country in 1972, with no guarantee Moscow would not repeat the
invasion visited on its Czechoslovak satellite just four years earlier when it tried to chart
a more independent course. For various reasons the Soviets had to comply. Sadat turned
expectantly to the Americans and was met with the Vance-Gromyko Agreement in
October 1977, a blueprint for spheres of influence by the Carter administration that
would have handed Egypt back to the Soviets. The next month Sadat went to Jerusalem,
and President Carter would preside over the signing of the Camp David peace treaty in
March 1979, a fait accompli between the Egyptians and Israelis, which brought Egypt
fully into the Western camp.
Almost simultaneous with its decline in Egypt, the Soviets were digging in in Syria. After
the immediate post-independence shenanigans that saw multiple changes of government
in Damascus as a contest between Britain and Iraq on one side, and the French (as well
as to some degree the Israelis) on the other was settled in late 1949, Syria began to tilt
towards the Soviet Bloc in the mid-1950s under Shukri al-Quwatli. After a (third)
abortive U.S. effort to bring down the Syrian government in late 1957, Nasser and the
Soviets stepped forth as the saviours of Syrian independence — and promptly unified
the country with Egypt as the “United Arab Republic” in February 1958. The UAR broke
down in 1961, but the Ba’thist takeover of Syria in 1963 kept Syria in the Soviet column,
and the “corrective” coup by Hafez al-Asad in November 1970 cemented in power the
Soviets’ most reliable regional ally.
Abu Nidal [source]
The Hafez regime was the most intransigent when it came to making peace with Israel
and the one most addicted to using terrorism in its statecraft. Even after characters such
as Ilich Sánchez (Carlos the Jackal) and Sabri al-Banna (Abu Nidal) became an
embarrassment to the East German secret police and other Soviet satellite services,
which were so often the means by which Moscow interfaced with the terrorists it
supported, they continued to find haven and support from Damascus. In dealing with
Turkey over the damming of the Euphrates and the land disputes, Hafez chose to press
his case through the terror-insurgency of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), and was
backed by Moscow in doing so since it destabilised a frontline NATO state. It was thus
not an outlier that Hafez “negotiated” via terror with Israel.
The Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) was founded in 1964 as an Egyptian

initiative. The PLO, claiming to represent the Palestinian people, defined its mission as
an eliminationist one. The foundation of Israel was “illegal and false”, said the PLO
Charter, while rather oddly recognising the British imperial Mandate of Palestine as an
“indivisible unit” that would all be liberated. By the time Yasser Arafat took charge of the
PLO in the aftermath of the Six-Day War, such unity as it had was long gone, as was the
Egyptian domination of the group, and various ultra-radical splinters had emerged, most
of them supported by Asad’s Syria.
The prime case of a Syria-backed PLO splinter faction was the Popular Front for the
Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), formed in 1967. In 1972, the PFLP’s external actions
chief, Wadi Haddad, was ostensibly expelled and set up a new organization from his
home in Baghdad, under Saddam’s protection, referred to by some as the Special
Operations Group. Haddad continued to claim his terrorist attacks in the name of the
PFLP.
Haddad is probably best known as the mastermind of the Entebbe hijacking, one of the
most infamous terrorist atrocities against Israelis. Of crucial importance: Haddad was a
KGB agent and thus the PFLP functioned as a Soviet proxy.
Perhaps the most infamous atrocity against Israelis, against the athletes at the Olympic
Games in Munich in September 1972, also had KGB fingerprints. According to Arafat, the
man behind the Munich massacre was Hani al-Hassan, a member of his inner circle, who
was a Soviet “asset”. The KGB had also installed a full-fledged agent, Rafat Abu Auon
(codename: GIDAR), in al-Hassan’s office to provide additional guidance toward Soviet
aims. Arafat never specified al-Hassan’s role, but it is plausible since the group
responsible for Munich, Black September, was actually under PLO control, run by
another Arafat intimate, Salah Khalaf (Abu Iyad). Khalaf, one of the most prolific killers
even in the PLO, handled the PLO’s relationship with the KGB and was close to them.
Moreover, Khalaf is known to have planned the Munich operation with Mohammad
Oudeh (Abu Dawud) and Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen), Arafat’s successor and the
current PLO chairman. Abbas, who financed the operation, was also a KGB agent.
Salah Khalaf and Yasser Arafat [source]
Another of Arafat’s deputies, Khalil al-Wazir (Abu Jihad), led the blood-soaked Western
Sector unit within FATAH and was extremely close to the KGB. Yasser Abed Rabbo, a
crucial operative at the heart of the PLO, who would lead negotiations with Israel in the
2000s, had been an informant for the KGB. The Soviets were able to call on Nayef
Hawatma’s Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP) to, among other
things, train the Sandinistas and the PKK. Ahmed Jibril, the formal leader of PFLP after
Haddad’s departure — the group now calling itself PFLP-General Command (PFLP-GC)
— maintained a close relationship with Syrian intelligence and at a minimum would “not
carry out any attack the USSR would object to”.
In waging what Jeffrey Herf has called an “undeclared war” against Israel, the Soviet
Union was supported by its Warsaw Pact dependencies, none more enthusiastic than the
post-Nazi East German state that easily modified its racialist antisemitism into “anti-
Zionist” propaganda. It was often the Stasi or other East European intelligence that
handled the Palestinian terror groups, providing the KGB a degree of distance and
deniability.
The Soviets had always distrusted Arafat, regarding him as deviant, politico-militarily
and personally. Nonetheless, they had maintained channels of communication to him, as
is clear from the above, and assisted his rise within the PLO. By 1978, with Arafat’s
stature rising in the Third World, where the Soviets believed they could win the Cold
War, and the collapse of their other Palestinian options, the KGB consolidated its support
behind the PLO. For their part, the PLO would serve as a cut-out for the Soviet Union in
training and strengthening terrorist movements the world over, from Nicaragua to
Afghanistan.
The Soviet aim after that was to build up the PLO to the point that it could sit across from
Israel in peace negotiations, and by extension grant the Soviet Union a place at the table
as an equal with the United States in a future peace conference. This implicit recognition
that Israel could not be destroyed was something the Soviets had little success in
convincing the PLO of.
DELEGITIMIZING ISRAEL AND REFUSENIKS
Daniel Patrick Moynihan denounces United Nations Resolution 3379, 10 November 1975 [source]
Outside of the shadow war the Soviets helped regional governments and terrorists lead
against Israel, Moscow engaged in political warfare, beginning in earnest in the 1970s, to
delegitimize the state of Israel by, inter alia, equating Zionism with racism and
apartheid. This active measures campaign, like so many others, is still with us today,
disseminated earnestly by many who have no idea of its origins. The height of the Soviet
success was having the United Nations General Assembly pass a resolution in November
1975 declaring that “Zionism is a form of racism and racial discrimination”, a verdict
roundly denounced by the U.S.’s ambassador, Daniel Patrick Moynihan.
The Soviet political assault on Israel was, to a considerable degree, a continuation of an

old problem from Soviet domestic politics: the affinity of Jews for Israel. In the Soviet
Union in its last two decades this had an even more concrete aspect: many Soviet Jews
were trying to emigrate to Israel. This affronted Moscow in that it was part of a more
general “brain drain”, and it was an ideological embarrassment for a state that
proclaimed it had moved beyond ethnic distinctions, to a universalistic conception of
citizenship, to be confronted with the fact of ethno-religious discrimination in its midst
so extreme that its citizens were willing to risk starting their life again in a new country.
Those Jews blocked from emigration by the Soviet government became known as
“refuseniks”, and the wrangling over their fate was one of the major political contests of
the latter part of the Cold War. The U.S. Congress passed the Jackson-Vanik amendment
in 1974 that tied human rights — particularly the Jewish emigration — to trade
opportunities. As it happened, this backfired: the number of Jews allowed to emigrate
declined after this legislation was brought into effect. But the political damage to the
Soviet Union was very real, and they knew it. The KGB adopted a schizophrenic policy of
cracking down ever-further on Soviet Jewry, and worrying about the impact on the
Soviet Union’s reputation abroad.
A fascinating revelation in the Mitrokhin Archive is that in the last few years of Leonid
Brezhnev’s rule, when he was in a dream world of his own, Yuri Andropov, the KGB chief
whose institution effectively controlled foreign policy since the 1960s, ran deception
operations against the Politburo itself. Some of these had world-historical impacts, such
as Andropov’s skewed assessments of an invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 that led to a
monstrous catastrophe. Smaller but still significant was Andropov telling the Soviet
leadership that Jews had sufficient matsos for Passover in order that they support his
continued ban on Jews receiving matsos for the seder in parcels from abroad, a practice
he regarded as subversive.
To blunt the adverse coverage of the “refusenik” issue, the Soviets conducted a series of
active measures designed to tilt the balance. The Brooklyn-based extremist rabbi, Meir
Kahane, and the Jewish Defence League (JDL) that he founded, were a goldmine for the
Soviets. Kahane’s statements and the JDL’s claims of political violence could be amplified
— and, indeed, fabricated. The Mitrokhin Archive records that in July 1971, the KGB
planted a bomb in a black section of New York City and then claimed it in the name of
the JDL, saying it was revenge for the crimes of “black mongrels”. Antisemitic leaflets
were distributed in other areas, as well as documents calling for whites to save America
from the predatory Jews. The difference the KGB could make was marginal: the facts
remained as they were. But the Soviets did have some success in cultivating British Chief
Rabbi Jakobovitz, who came back from a tour of the Soviet Union quite convinced that
conditions were not so bad for Jews, a view he couldn’t be dissuaded of even after it
became clear that those he met were carefully-trained KGB operatives.
The extraordinary fact, documented by Mitrokhin and Andrew, is that “Zionism was
second only to the United States (‘the Main Adversary’) as a target for KGB active
measures.” Stalin’s murderous antisemitism died with him, but the antisemitic
worldview — repackaged later as “anti-Zionist” — infused the KGB in particular and the
Soviet hierarchy in general throughout its entire existence. It was left to Brezhnev, even
in his mental decrepitude, to grasp that “Zionism is making us stupid”. It did not stop the
problem, however.
Yuri Andropov [source]
After Andropov replaced Brezhnev in 1982, he was utterly convinced President Ronald
Reagan was planning a nuclear first strike, and began the expensive Operation RYAN to
uncover the details of this non-existent plot. As one would expect, Andropov was quite
sure the plan included Zionist collaboration. This hysteria calmed somewhat with
Andropov’s death in 1984, but it was well into the Gorbachev era that Jews were
allowed into the government, at long last reversing the Stalinist purge. The old guard
fought far more tenaciously to avoid lifting the restrictions on Jews than any other
group. Mitrokhin and Andrew conclude by noting that the Soviet Union collapsed soon
after these restrictions were lifted and many in the KGB analyzed the two events as one
and the same: “the triumph of Zionist subversion”.
POST-SOVIET RUSSIA’S THAW WITH ISRAEL

In October 1991, after half-a-century of estrangement, Israel and the Soviet Union
restored diplomatic relations. Two months later, the Soviet Empire finally perished.
Subsequent Israeli perception was that the state was constructing a more fruitful
relationship with the new Russian Federation, and certainly when compared with the
Soviets this was true. But the old problems remained under the surface: Moscow’s
support for rejectionist governments and terrorists. In its new form, the primary
problem was the Russians’ ever-closer strategic alliance with Israel’s nemesis, the Islamic
Republic of Iran.
One aspect that drew Israel and Russia closer was the movement, between 1988 and
1994, of more than 500,000 people to Israel from the areas of the fallen Soviet Union.
200,000 Soviet citizens had managed to make aliya before this and the total would reach
a million in the years after, about a quarter of them not Jewish under halachah (Jewish
law). This has had a profound effect, strengthening nationalist currents in culture, and
creating a connective social tissue — with a seventh of the population now speaking
Russian — between Israel and Russia. Over time, both aspects became increasingly
important politically, as did the importation of Russian organised crime.
In a paper for the Jerusalem Institute for Strategic Studies, Micky Aharonson noted that
Russia aligned with Israel through the 1990s in a concern about (Sunni) jihadism,
especially as the Chechen war ground on and radicals influenced from the Middle East
came to dominate the insurgency. Simultaneously, for both domestic political reasons
(since Russia has fifteen-million-plus Muslim inhabitants and 180,000 Jews) and to
bolster Moscow’s international image as a superpower mediator, the Russian

government has retained a firm position in favour of a Palestinian state.
During the Boris Yeltsin years, relations were rocky: initially rather strong as Yeltsin
sought to curry favour with the Americans, they were significantly diminished by 1996
as the influence of ultranationalists and Communists inside Russia peaked. The NATO
intervention in Bosnia in August 1995, against the Russian-aligned Serbs, had not helped
this mood; to the extent Israel was associated with the West, it was impacted by these
policies, despite Israel itself tilting to the Serbs’ side.
Though there were these difficulties, relations were sustained throughout by expanding
economic ties and diplomatic interest. Russia regarded Israel as an indirect path to the
White House during strained periods with the Americans and as an arena in which
Yeltsin could claim to demonstrate international credentials. Israel wanted the continued
flow of skilled immigration from Russia, plus certain natural resources, and hoped that
Moscow could act to modulate its erstwhile allies, especially Syria.
These elements of the relationship established between Israel and Russia after the Cold
War have remained fairly constant. Between 2003 and 2008, Israeli exports to Russia
quadrupled, covering key areas like nanotechnology, energy, and military hardware,
while Russian investment increased significantly in Israeli infrastructure. The fact that
Israel’s technology sector is so advanced, gives it a certain parity in such relations, says
Aharonson. At a political level, Russia continues to see Israel as a bridge to the West; the
other side of this equation is that relations are heavily influenced by considerations of
U.S. interest. Aharonson adds that Israel, on its part, does not automatically join Western
condemnations of Russian malign behaviour. This not only applies on Russia’s “near
abroad”, but, as the vague statement in March 2018 about the nerve agent attack in
Britain showed, much further afield.
The second half of the 1990s were frosty after Yeltsin bowed to internal pressures,
appointing as Foreign Minister and then Prime Minister Yevgeniy Primakov, a known ally
of Moscow’s Cold War Arab clients.
THE RETURN OF THE OLD ORDER
Aftermath of the apartment bombings in Moscow, September 1999 [source]
Vladimir Putin became Prime Minister in September 1999 and then, on the back of those
mysterious apartment bombings and the resumption of hostilities in Chechnya, president
in March 2000. “No previous head of state in Russia, or perhaps anywhere else in the
world, has ever surrounded himself with so many former intelligence officers”,
Mitrokhin and Andrew note (p. 490). Putin takes considerable interest in, and has a
considerable understanding of, intelligence matters, and “has more direct control of
intelligence than any Russian leader since Stalin”.
This is not to say that things are exactly the same in the Kremlin as in the Cold War; they
are not. Though the old security apparatus has seized back power, Putin himself seems to
have left the antisemitic aspect of the ancien regime behind. Indeed, the hardcore
nationalists and neo-Nazis in Russia share the view of the Ukrainian commander of the
Azov Battalion, who told The Guardian, “Putin’s not even a Russian. Putin’s a Jew.”
(Such rumours were also spread about Dmitry Medvedev, Putin’s placeholder between
2008 and 2012). In truth, Putin runs a state policy considerably less indulgent to
racialism and antisemitism than the general population.
That said, Putin is surrounded by a class of people, and is reliant on instruments of

power, from the clergy to the siloviki, where antisemitism is less attenuated. As
mentioned above, most of the KGB believed the Soviet downfall was the result of a
Zionist conspiracy. Just as the disproportionate numbers of Jews among the early
Bolsheviks, especially in the security agencies, gave a superficial plausibility to the
“Judeo-Bolshevik” conspiracy theory, in the 1990s the over-representation of Jews

among the post-Soviet oligarchs fed the sense in the enfeebled barons of the fallen order
that “the Jews sold out Russia”, a frequent refrain at Lubyanka in the Yeltsin years,
Andrei Soldatov and Irina Borogan write in The New Nobility.
The cohort currently in power in Moscow comes from the most Sovietized layer of the
Russian population, as Ekaterina Schulmann explained in a lecture at King’s College in
early October. Born in the 1950s, this demographic grew up with the Communists in
total control in a way they had not been before: indoctrinated in the schools, most of the
people who had known a different world, under the Tsar, were dead, so could provide
no mitigation; even the landscape of the old world had been destroyed by the war. This
was a laboratory in which the purest Homo Sovieticus was nurtured; the generation
beyond this was brought up as the ideological foundations slipped. Putin’s set were in
their 40s when the wall came down and lived through the 1990s, concluding that the
demise of the Soviet Union had been a disaster — and, for them, in terms of wealth and
status, it had been.
The interesting part, Schulmann pointed out, is that the Kremlin’s ultra-Sovietized
leadership thinks of itself as just simple Russians like all others. They live in an
environment where this illusion is a social norm, and because of their power they inspire
emulation from their juniors, reinforcing the idea that their worldview is the norm. The
crucial aspect about this worldview is not the antisemitism per se, even as it can’t be
ignored as a factor. It is that the worldview the Russian leadership is socialized into is
one where the U.S. remains the Main Adversary, constantly conspiring to undermine and
ultimately destroy Russia. Israel — the impress of the American-led West in the Middle
East — is related to by the Kremlin through that prism.
Given this, it is perhaps surprising that Putin came into office determined to improve
relations with Israel. After the 9/11 attacks in 2001, Russia became rhetorically
supportive of Israel, tying its own war in Chechnya to the then-ongoing Second Intifada
and the American-led action against al-Qaeda in Afghanistan. Israeli Prime Minister Ariel
Sharon, who formed a close personal bond with Putin, returned the rhetoric, saying
Israel should have acted in Lebanon as the Russians did in Chechnya. In 2005, Putin
became the first serving Russian head of state to visit Israel.
Yet, Moscow never went all-in for Israel and things started to fray quickly. Differences
were already showing by the time Sharon went to Moscow in September 2003. Russia
had opposed the Bush administration’s view, supported by Israel, that Arafat had to be
removed before there could be peace, and Russia-Israel relations deteriorated further in
2004. Russia voted for a U.N. Security Council resolution in March 2004 condemning
Israel for killing HAMAS founder Ahmed Yassin, voted in favour of another resolution in
June condemning the separation fence with the West Bank, and another that October
demanding Israel cease anti-terrorist operations in Gaza, which were designed to
provide security as Israel withdrew its occupation forces.
In March 2006, Putin invited the leadership of HAMAS, a group Russia does not consider
terrorist, to Moscow, and since then these visits have become more frequent. Indeed,
HAMAS’s leadership made a visit to Moscow in November this year after the Treasury
sanctions had exposed the mechanism by which the Kremlin assists in funding HAMAS.
Russia has offered consistent political support for other Palestinian terrorist factions.[1]
Putin’s regime first supported (and then opposed) the U.N. Goldstone Report on the
2008–09 Gaza war that was so biased against Israel its own lead author repudiated it. By
2011, Russia had, despite being a member of the Quartet that was supposed to negotiate
peace, indicated support for a resolution that would have declared a Palestinian state
unilaterally.
Even as Russia became progressively more diplomatically hostile to Israel in the mid-
2000s, the ruling administrations established party-to-party relations and visa-free travel
from Russia to Israel. This pattern goes back to the beginning of the post-Soviet era. In
early 1995, at a time when Russia was working to improve relations with Israel, Moscow
signed, with no significant negative response from Israel, a billion-dollar deal with Iran
to build four nuclear reactors in a country that even at that time was widely suspected of
pursuing nuclear weapons. The only pushback came two years later when Israel briefly
paused a gas deal — after Russia supplied additional military technology to Iran.
RUSSIA’S STRATEGIC RELATIONSHIP WITH IRAN

The striking, perhaps unique, aspect of the Israel-Russian relationship is that Israel
continues to draw closer, despite Russian actions that flatly contradict its core interests.
Russia’s burgeoning strategic alliance with the theocratic government in Iran is the
crucial aspect, and within that there are two key elements: Iran’s nuclear program and
the its regional expansion, specifically the supply of strategic resources to the Lebanese
branch of the Iranian revolution, Hizballah.
During the Cold War, the Soviet Union’s relations with Iran were strained. In 1959, the
Shah signed a secret security agreement with Israel; for the next twenty years, Iran was
Israel’s closest ally in the Muslim world and a pillar of Western influence in the region.
The Soviets, naturally, tried to disrupt this and other pillars that underpinned the
Western security architecture in the region. The Mitrokhin Archive discloses an attempt
by the KGB to assassinate the Shah in 1962, one of the last such operations, and
thereafter the KGB put considerable resources into active measures to destabilise the
Shah’s regime, both disseminating fabricated stories to stir up suspicion between the
Iranian ruler and the U.S., and preparations for kinetic sabotage. The Soviets lost much
of their network in Iran after the defection of Oleg Lyalin in 1971, Mitrokhin records,
and the Shah’s security forces were very effective in blocking the KGB’s access to the
country through diplomatic channels.
The Shah of Iran, Muhammad Reza Pahlavi, the West’s critical Middle Eastern ally from 1941 to 1979, at
his coronation in October 1967, with his son, Reza, and his wife, Empress Farah [source]
Like the CIA, the KGB was blindsided by the Shah’s downfall in January 1979, and hardly
more pleased with the result. “The Tehran residency remained resolutely hostile to [the
new dictator, Grand Ayatollah Ruhollah] Khomeini”, Mitrokhin and Andrew note,
though it did find one thing about the new circumstances more favourable: Khomeini
was even more paranoid than the Shah, and with the swirl of American documents
around Tehran, plundered from the Embassy, it was easy for the KGB to get credible
fabrications into the right places. KGB active measures portraying the first president of
the Islamic Republic, Abolhassan Banisadr, as a CIA agent probably helped lead to his
removal in June 1981, and similar active measures against Sadegh Ghotbzadeh, one of
Khomeini’s closest associates, triggered his removal as Foreign Minister in August 1980
and almost certainly helped secure his appointment with a firing squad two years later.
The West tried to calm Lebanon’s civil war and subsequently became a victim of
Hizballah, Iran’s long arm in the Levant, through a series of bombings and endless
kidnappings in the 1980s. In September 1985, Hizballah turned on the Soviet Union,
murdering one Soviet diplomat, Arkady Katkov, and kidnapping three more. In response,
the KGB sent the severed genitals of one of the kidnappers relatives to him in a box, and
shot their captive in the head. Hizballah released the remaining three diplomats and
never again harmed Soviet citizens in Lebanon.
The Soviets declared themselves neutral in the Iran-Iraq war and cut off all contracts
with Saddam. Once Saddam dropped his rhetorical opposition to the Red Army’s
conquest of Afghanistan — and the Iranians turned the tide in 1982, forcing the Iraqis
onto their own territory — Moscow relented, ceasing support to Iraqi Kurds and
resuming large-scale weapons supplies to Baghdad. The prospect of a victorious Islamist
revolutionary regime inciting the Muslim populations of Central Asia to revolt was too
much for the Centre to risk, Mitrokhin discloses, though the Soviets were not willing to
supply Saddam at levels that would enable his victory.
The end of the Iran-Iraq war, Khomeini, and the Soviet Union, plus Saddam’s becoming a
liability after his aggression against Kuwait, paved the way for Moscow and Iran to find a
warmer relationship by 1990. As the 1990s wore on, the Russians increasingly saw Sunni
jihadists as the problem and Shi’ism, even in a militant form, since it was constituted in a
state power, as a potential counter-weight. It was in this period that Russia began
extending assistance to Iran’s nascent nuclear program.
The U.S. exempted Moscow from the sanctions on Iran to allow arms sales, and this
emboldened Russia to ignore all other restrictions, beginning a transfer of missile and
nuclear technology. Russia has used its diplomatic position to shield Iran’s missile
program, at home and abroad, when those missiles are transferred to proxies such as the
Huthis in Yemen.
In an ideal world, Russia would prefer Iran not have nuclear weapons, but Moscow is
also confident that such weapons would not pose a threat to its sovereignty — and might
indeed provide it with advantages in its main strategic goal of undermining the American
global position. As an ally-cum-patron of Iran’s, regional states like Turkey and Saudi
Arabia, and the U.S. beyond that, would have to treat with Russia as an intermediary. As
so often, turmoil would provide Russia an opportunity. Hence, Russia’s willingness, time
after time down to the present, to defend Iran’s nuclear program from international
pressure, and to physically defend the program by transferring an S-300 anti-aircraft
system.
Iran’s proxies in the region cause the most immediate trouble to Israel, and Russia not
only protests Israel’s efforts to constrain these groups, but actively supports them,
including the most powerful of them, Lebanese Hizballah.
When Russia released its list of recognized terrorist groups in July 2006, it notably did
not include Hizballah (nor HAMAS). At this time, the U.S. was well-aware that Iran was
using Hizballah to support Shi’a militias in Iraq that were killing American soldiers and
Iraqi civilians. It was also perfectly clear that Hizballah was liquidating opponents of
Iranian and Syrian influence in Lebanon, whittling down the “cedar revolution” that it
would ultimately reverse. All the while, Russia provided political backing for Hizballah
as it went about this grim business.
The trendline can be seen in Russia’s different reactions during Israeli-Hizballah conflicts
a decade apart. When Israel reacted seriously to Hizballah for the first time, with
Operation GRAPES OF WRATH in April 1996, Russia had been relatively even-handed,
even as it ultimately condemned Israel. In 2006, Russia not only immediately
condemned Israel’s “disproportionate use of force”, but joined in on Hizballah’s side. The
Russians provided intelligence to Hizballah from listening posts it jointly manned with
Iran on the Golan Heights. Advanced anti-tank weapons Russia supplied to Syria were
passed to Hizballah. This “leakage” was not accidental: using Syria as a cut-out to
terrorist groups, notably the PKK, was standard Moscow policy for decades.
RUSSIA’S INTERVENTION IN SYRIA

The Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) was concluded in July 2015 between
Iran and world powers, the Permanent Five of the United Nations Security Council plus
Germany and the European Union. The JCPOA ostensibly stripped Iran of a nuclear-
weapons capacity in exchange for sanctions relief. The deal, in fact, failed as an arms
control accord, though that was hardly its primary purpose. By this point, the Iran-
Russia axis had already made considerable inroads against American influence, and it
was just about to move to solidify its alliance structure and enforce a new order across
the northern Middle East.
Iran’s involvement in the campaign by Bashar al-Asad’s regime to crush the uprising
against its outbreak in 2011, with Hizballah snipers cutting down peaceful
demonstrators. In the summer and autumn of 2012, with Asad struggling, under attack in
his own capital and the rebellion having overtaken the largest city, Aleppo, Iran began to
move its Shi’a jihadists into Syria to bolster the regime. Asad’s woes continued into early
2013 and his downfall seemed like a matter of time. Yet his regime had largely been
stabilised by the middle of the year. The key factor in turning the tide was, as Phillip
Smyth has so extensively documented, Iran orchestrating a full-fledged international
Shi’a jihad, flooding Khomeini’ist militants into Syria, preventing Asad’s battered regime
from collapsing, and virtually capturing its security structures in the process.[2]
Russia, meanwhile, was providing weapons, intelligence, propaganda support, and

diplomatic protection to the Asad regime. There were repeated efforts under the Obama
administration to work with Russia to reduce the violence and find a settlement; all of
them failed because Russia’s mission was to secure and rehabilitate its client regime,
working in lock-step with Iran.
The Iranian and Russian assistance proved not to be enough, however. By early 2015,
Asad was losing ground again. To reverse this trend, immediately after the signing of the
JCPOA, the leader of Iran’s foreign terrorist apparatus, Qassem Sulaymani, journeyed to
Moscow — in violation of a global travel ban — to plan a joint Iran-Russia intervention.
In September 2015, with the insurgency at the gates of areas in the regime’s heartland,
Russia stepped in directly with an aerial campaign to rescue Asad for a second time.
Moscow’s effort to militarily and politically salvage Asad’s crumbling regime meant
systematically targeting the mainstream rebels supported by the West, trying to leave
only al-Qaeda and the Islamic State (ISIS) as opponents to the regime. Only once the
moderate rebels had been crushed at Aleppo in December 2016 did the pro-Asad forces
turn on the jihadists in a serious way — and even then it was mostly to capture the ISIS-
occupied territory in the east before the West’s partners did.
To complement the Russian bombing, Iran stepped up the involvement of its Shi’a
International. Hizballah, the oldest and truest offspring of the Iranian regime,[3] has
spearheaded the Iranian intervention in Syria, creating “Islamic revolutionary” clones of
itself from among Syrians and foreigners, and providing them with military and
ideological training, logistics, weapons, and command. Russia has worked directly with
Hizballah, training its terrorists in surveillance, reconnaissance, and special operations
tactics, as well as providing invaluable air support. Russian special and other forces, who
have complete contempt for Asad’s army, fight alongside Hizballah, whom they admire
as “blood brothers”. Moscow is also providing heavy weapons to Hizballah, according to
none other than Hizballah. That Hizballah is believed to be tied into Syria’s weapons of
mass destruction program — an extension of the Iranian WMD program, itself a
derivative of North Korea’s — does not appear to concern the Russians, nor Hizballah’s
global criminality that stretches all the way to the borders of the U.S. “homeland”.[4]
ISRAEL’S FLAWED STRATEGY WITH RUSSIA IN SYRIA

The Israeli approach in Syria has been rooted in its handling of Russia for two decades
before that: trying to work with Russia, while separating out the Iran issue. This was
always rather fanciful, given the emphasis the doctrine of the ruling regime in Iran places
on Israel’s destruction, and the consummation of the Russian-Iranian alliance structure

in the northern Middle East. But it was not only Israel that was tantalised by the delusion
of serious operational daylight between Iran and Russia. The Obama administration was
repeatedly drawn in by this prospect.
The argument, roughly, was that Russia was in Syria as an act of Great Power prestige, a
demonstration that the post-Soviet international decline was over. Russia’s interests
included securing the old naval base at Tartus and the new airbase at Hmaymeem, while
preserving its ally in Damascus. Russia would have demonstrated to autocrats region-
wide the benefit of an alliance with Moscow, which stands firm by its allies no matter
what. Not coincidentally, the Russians had used Syria to test and advertise various new
weapons systems that could be sold to this additional dictatorial clientele. Given these
rather narrow, material interests, so the argument went, and the disruption to them if an
Israeli-Iranian war broke out on Syrian territory, Moscow could be, if not separated
from Tehran then used to rein it in, since the Iranians’ grander, ideological ambitions in
Syria will ultimately undermine Russia’s own interests. All it required to sustain this
fantasy was to believe that the Russians were able and willing to side with the West over
Iran.
The Russian air support was vital to the pro-Asad forces on the ground being able to
advance, but how this fact morphed into the (literally) fantastic belief that Moscow
could exert serious influence on events in Syria — something taken near-ubiquitously in
commentary, analysis, and policy circles as an axiom until very recently — is one of the
great mysteries of recent times. Perhaps it is a testament to the power of wish-thinking,
since it permitted the argument to be made that if the United States and her allies
wanted to contain and/or ultimately expel the Iranian theocracy from Syria, it could be
done by teaming up with the Russians.[5] This was a much cheaper option than any
serious effort to block Iranian expansionism on the ground, where it matters. And it fit
nicely with the U.S. administration’s complete indifference to Asad: it could now be
pretended that Iran’s influence in Syria could be diminished while Asad remains in
power — albeit at the expense of bolstering the Russians.
Capacity aside, there was never any reason to believe, as U.S. National Security Adviser
John Bolton put it in August, that “Russia’s objective is to get Iran” out of Syria, and not
only because this was a month after the Russians said they couldn’t do it. Moscow
doesn’t “have the same interest as Iran in Syria”, Bolton added. The Israelis, too, have
repeatedly spoken as if they have an understanding with Moscow to protect core
interests in Syria. The Israelis have struck at Iranian targets in Syria hundreds of times
since 2013, first to prevent the shipment of advanced weapons to Hizballah and latterly
to prevent Iran establishing a presence in Syria akin to that it has in Lebanon through
Hizballah. Jerusalem seemed to credit Russia with permitting these strikes, rather than
simply being unable to prevent them. Both aspects of this — that Russia’s wants Iran to
leave Syria and Israel’s room for manoeuvre — are dubious.
Russia’s central goal in Syria is to stabilise the Asad regime, and it is unwilling to put
significant numbers of its own troops into Syria to do it. Thus, Russia’s whole position in
Syria rests on Iran. So far from being able to empower one element of the pro-Asad
coalition against the others, empowering any one part of the interdependent tri-ped
empowers the whole structure — and vice versa, weakening any one would weaken the
whole thing. In this sense, with Iran the driving force of events in the Levant, Moscow is
once again party to an undeclared war against Israel.
Under the protection of Russia, Israel’s autonomy is being restricted. Iran is entrenching
on three borders — through Hizballah in Lebanon, HAMAS and Palestinian Islamic Jihad
(PIJ) in Gaza,[6] and its various Shi’a militias in Syria — as part of its phased effort to
destroy Israel by making life in the state unbearable. A specific component of this has
been the build-up of a vast, increasingly-accurate missile arsenal across all fronts that
can menace all of Israel’s key infrastructure and population centres. Yet Israel seemed to
believe it had no choice but to go on trusting Russia to do something about this.
The notion that Moscow was in any way safeguarding Israeli interests in Syria should
have been realised to be a fallacy in July 2018, at the latest, when Russia managed to
neutralise Israel as a force laced with Iranian terrorists took over Deraa in southern
Syria, on Israel’s northern border. Deraa’s fall was also the hinge moment when it
became clear that for all of the rhetoric of the Trump administration against Iran, they
really did not have the stomach to contest matters with the Islamic Republic where it
truly counted.[7] While Israel has the power to attempt to shape its own terms in these
circumstances, for Jordan, a weak and dependent state, unable to fight the pro-Asad
forces on its own and frightened of being overwhelmed with refugees, there was no
choice but to accede to the Asadist reality, another hindrance to forming a serious anti-
Iran policy.
As the pro-Asad offensive began into Deraa, and Russia joined the fray with its airstrikes,
Moscow was stringing Jerusalem along with a diplomatic process that promised to keep
Iranian militias away from Israel’s border.[8] It had been previously reported that
Iranian troops were being disguised as “regular” Syrian army troops, and soon even that
façade gave way. It was plain for all to see that Iran’s forces were advancing towards
Israel with Russian air cover. Israel gave up its rebel assets, the buffer for itself and
Jordan against IRGC and its means of influencing events in Syria, and Hizballah has now
annexed these rebels into its force.
In the midst of the Deraa offensive, as Russia was assuring Israel that it would limit Iran’s
influence, Israel had to deploy its David’s Sling interceptor system for the first time to
shoot down a Syrian jet that attacked its territory from the Iranian-dominated T-4 base,
almost certainly with some degree of Russian complicity.
Perhaps because Israel had now surrendered its leverage inside Syria, Jerusalem if
anything doubled-down on the Russia track after Deraa. Moscow announced on 1
August that it had pulled the Iranians back fifty miles from the Israeli border, and the day
after said Russian military police would patrol the Golan. The Israeli defence minister
presented an optimistic picture of the situation, attributing to Asad agency he does not
have. But Iran had not moved out of the border area — the Russians had simply lied
about this. Whatever reduction in “the scale of [the Iranians’] activity in Syria” the
Israelis were detecting by the end of the month is better described as consolidation: Iran
formalised its presence and control over vast sectors of the Syrian state with a defence
pact on 27 August.
A minor miracle occurred in Syria on 18 September: after decades of futility, Asad’s air
defence systems brought down an aircraft — one belonging to its Russian ally, killing
fifteen people. Moscow responded hysterically, blaming Israel and (re)announcing the
delivery of an ostensibly-advanced S-300 to Syria that could, in theory, put Iranian
weapons shipments to Hizballah out of reach of the Israeli Air Force (IAF), a direct
violation of the tacit accord the Israelis believed they had with the Kremlin.
Israel’s counter-response was to have Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declare that
he will meet Vladimir Putin, with some notion being voiced of the Russian ruler acting as
a mediator with Iran. This political victory for the Russians had no evident benefit to the
Israelis: Israel does not lack for channels to the Iranians and Moscow had conceded by
then it had no ability, even if it had the will, to help Israel achieve its goals. The meeting
was scheduled for 11 November on the side-lines of the armistice commemorations for
the Great War; the meeting was said to be cancelled, to avoid politicising such a solemn
event, and then went ahead anyway. Netanyahu said the meeting could be described as
“very important”, but he did not elaborate.
Since October, as the Institute for the Study of War has explained in detail, the Russian
government has thickened a network of overlapping air defences in Syria; how
operational they are is unclear, but NATO cannot be unconcerned about such a
development on its doorstep and they seem to have played a part in deterring Israel.
Back in September, the Russians had also vowed to jam Israeli radar and satellite
systems, complicating the IAF’s ability to attack Iranian targets in Syria. According to
Israeli officials, this electronic warfare has occurred. There has been a precipitate
decline in the tempo of Israeli air raids into Syria concurrent with these actions by
Moscow: the only confirmed Israeli strike since the September fiasco was on 29
November. One reason Israelis have given for this period of abstinence is that the 10
February and particularly the 9 May round of strikes did so much damage to Iran’s
position — destroying “nearly all” of Iran’s military infrastructure in Syria, according to
the defence minister — that they removed the urgency for continued action.
This is almost certainly a rationalisation. It is true that Iran appears to have escalated its
activity in Lebanon and Iraq, where missiles capable of hitting Israel have been
deposited. But there is no indication this is at the expense of Syria. For example, even as
Iran keeps its options for escalation against Israel open in Syria, it is diverting civilian
airliners loaded with weapons from Syria to Beirut — in order to feed them back into
Syria, without the risk of Israeli airstrikes. As well as the obvious nonsense this makes of
Lebanese sovereignty, it reinforces the trend of IRGC creating an integrated two-front
threat to Israel from the north. The beginning of the anti-tunnels Operation NORTHERN
SHIELD last week points to a revival of concern about southern Lebanon in Israel.
Jerusalem has tacitly declared Lebanon off-limits during the time of the Syrian war and
the U.S. has committed to the country’s “stability” — despite it functioning as IRGC’s
operation headquarters, that is to say a source of instability for the entire area. Bizarrely,
even at this late stage, some in Israel believe they detect the hand of Russian
benevolence, attributing the change in flight patterns — a factor making Jerusalem’s
options more limited and costly — to Moscow’s efforts to curb Iranian misbehaviour.
The “Alchwiki Network” through which Iran, with Russia’s assistance, supports Asad and anti-Israel
terrorist groups in the Levant and Gaza [source]
Netanyahu’s testimony to the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defence Committee on 19

November, to the effect that Russia cannot remove Iran from Syria, and the U.S.
Treasury sanctions the next day, showing how Russia helping Iran support Asad, as well
as HAMAS and Hizballah, terrorist groups with openly exterminationist policy toward
Israel, should have settled this issue.[9] But the Russians themselves admitting that this
was the case in July did not stop people arguing the contrary for months afterward, and
Netanyahu then went on to give an upbeat, if unspecific, assessment of Russia’s role in

Syria and his engagement with Putin in November.
The reality is quite different. Whether Russia is truly angry about the downing of its spy
plane in September “or is just exploiting it to dictate new strategic rules in the north, the
result is the same”, as Amos Harel wrote. Moscow’s priority is to stabilise the Asad
tyranny, an interest that radically conflicts with Israel’s interest in preventing Iran’s
entrenchment in Syria, since the regime only still stands because of Iranian troops and
IRGC-controlled Shi’a militias. With Iran digging in all around Israel, and Moscow
offering protection — perhaps soon in Lebanon — the “problem Israel faces in the north,
in a nutshell, is the real danger that its operational window of opportunity is closing”,
Harel concludes.
WHAT CAN BE DONE?

Eliminating Iran’s influence in Syria entirely is impossible; even under some
unimaginable scenario where Iran withdrew all military assets, its intelligence and
societal elements would remain. Iran has been in Syria for a long time. IRGC ran the
June 1996 Khobar Towers bombing in Saudi Arabia out of its Embassy in Damascus, for
example, and Iran-backed Shi’a proselytism in eastern Syria and elsewhere had affected
Christians and Sunnis, Arabs and Kurds, long before the war. The demographic shifts
orchestrated by Iran and the creation of organic militia elements like Liwa al-Baqir mean
Tehran is in the Levant to stay.
What Israel can try to do is keep Iran’s project off-balance, enforce red lines on the
development and transfer of certain weapons, and prevent the normalisation of Iran’s
presence and the low-intensity warfare that we have seen in Syria. Iran gains
ideologically from this state of controlled hostility, and the long-term trendline is in
Tehran’s favour, surrounding Israel with rooted proxies and restricting the Jewish state’s
freedom of action. The U.S. could make a meaningful difference, but it would require
the U.S. to shift its policy, away from having “one mission” — the defeat of ISIS — and
towards a meaningful counter-Iran strategy, specifically finding a viable method of
unseating Asad, the sine qua non of any effort to diminish Iranian power in the region. In
the meantime, it means resisting Moscow’s efforts to redraw the terms of engagement.
There is now a growing consensus when speaking to Israelis that the Russians are playing
a negative role in Syria vis-à-vis Iran, even if the Israelis tend to see this as a recent shift.
One suspects that the struggle to this point, in Washington and Jerusalem, to accept that
there is no Russian shortcut to containing, let alone evicting, Iran from Syria, is a case of
the wish being father to the thought: without that path, the options start to look more
costly — economically, politically, and militarily. Fortunately, the Russian presence is
only a meaningful impediment if others choose to treat it as such.
The precedents are there. In July 1970, Israel sprang a trap on the Soviet Union, a far
more powerful entity than modern-day Russia, in the Sinai and shot down five of its
fighter jets in three minutes. The result was to secure Israel’s freedom of movement and
to further discredit a disintegrating Soviet position in Egypt. More famously, in June
1982, Israel got into a “dogfight” over Lebanon with Syria’s Soviet-made anti-aircraft
systems and air force. Israel suffered damage to two planes, while obliterating Asad’s air-
defence network and taking down more than eighty Syrian jets. Israel has always served
as a demonstration of the superiority of Western ways, and this was such a potent
example that even the Soviets finally got the message and began the foredoomed path to
perestroika.
In Syria at the present time, Israel and the U.S. have always had much more room to
move than they let on. Trump’s strikes at the regime over chemical weapons and the
killing of 200 Russian mercenaries in February attest to this. The Kremlin did not
attempt interfere with, or retaliate for, the strikes against Asad, despite Trump taunting
Moscow directly in advance. The Russians simply disowned the mercenaries to avoid the
moral-political necessity of a response. A tweet from Trump in September seems to have
played an important part in halting a then-impending offensive by the pro-Asad coalition
into Idlib. Likewise, with Israel’s aerial campaign. The belief that Moscow had any role in
permitting this is distorting, as is the needless worry over the S-300. Israel promised in
2013, when this matter was first raised, to prevent such a system becoming operational,
and reiterated recently that it would evade or destroy the system if delivered to Syria.
Jerusalem should adhere to this position. If Russia wishes to retain the image of control
it has built, it will not challenge Israel in the skies over Syria or provoke the Israelis into
making good on their threats to topple Asad’s regime.
Israel’s tilt toward Russia is understandable and a great deal of the responsibility lies
with the United States. The Americans under Obama led in this direction, viewing
Russia’s intervention in Syria positively, as a means of getting to a durable settlement,
and even signed onto a military pact to target Asad’s enemies. To this day the U.S.
continues down a diplomatic path that can only lead to triumph for the Russia-Iran-Asad
coalition. Nearly all of the U.S.’s militarily-minor allies have made peace with the Russia-
Iran axis — Egypt, Jordan, and increasingly the smaller Gulf states — and the U.S.’s key
allies, Saudi Arabia and above all Turkey, have tested this route, too.
In many ways Israel’s predicament is analogous to Turkey’s. Both states border the
Syrian hecatomb and have had their immediate strategic interests neglected or actually
threatened by American policy; both have explored whether they can work through
Russia to meet some minimal needs. Both are destined to be disappointed. Moscow’s
objectives stand in opposition to their interests, and this malevolent intent is combined
with a high degree of impotence; creating the impression that it is the central player by
forging links with all sides and playing spoiler is the extent of the Kremlin’s capacity in
Syria. But without American leadership, the further fragmentation of the Western
alliance structure and its replacement in the northern Middle East by the Russian-Iranian
axis seems inevitable.
* * * * *********************************
Notes
[1] In August 2011, Russia’s then-Deputy Foreign Minister Mikhail Bogdanov met in
Damascus not only with HAMAS’s political leader, Khaled Meshal; he met Moscow’s old
friends from the DFLP and PFLP-GC, Nayef Hawatma and Talal Naji, respectively; and
Maher al-Taher of the other PFLP branch.
Al-Taher, who became PFLP leader in 2001, was most recently in the news for having
accompanied British Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn to an October 2014 ceremony
in Tunisia to lay a wreath for the Black September killers — a month before PFLP
slaughtered four rabbis in Jerusalem. Moscow had placed “particular emphasis on …
inter-Palestinian accord” at this meeting, in the belief that uniting these terrorists would
help towards “the creation of an independent Palestinian state”, according to the Foreign
Ministry.
On it has gone. In March 2015, when the PFLP deputy Abu Ahmad Fuad was in Moscow,
along with Al-Taher, speaking about launching a “third intifada”, Bogdanov indicted his
support. Fuad, Al-Taher, and Bogdanov met again in November 2017 to discuss
“Palestinian national unity” and their support for Asad. Al-Taher is given free rein in
Russian state media. Hawatma had been in Moscow months earlier to flaunt his
coordination with the Kremlin and to warn about the “Jewish-Russian Zionist lobby”.
The Russian “offer” last month to mediate between Israel and the Palestinians is, at best,
an effort to snub Trump’s search for “the deal of the century”, and, at worst, it is an
attempt to extend its influence into yet another area of the Middle East against a
Western ally.
[2] Iran’s role came into the open in Syria no later than the intrusion of Hizballah at
Qusayr in mid-2013, which triggered, in tandem with the massive chemical weapons
attack in Ghuta that August, a serious escalation in sectarianism. The armed opposition
adopted various strategies to cope with this dynamic and prevent the loss of its soldiers
to the jihadist insurgents, notably appropriating their rhetoric. By early 2014, the trend
reversed and the rebellion went to war with the Islamic State.
[3] As Tony Badran has written — see here and here — the seeds of Hizballah were sown
in Lebanon before the foundation of the Islamic Republic in Iran. It was in the struggle
over the leadership of the Shi’is in Lebanon that the cadres who later became Hizballah
were born, and it was in Lebanon that this radical trend showed its ability to liquidate
those who stood in its way — even on its “own” side, notoriously working with the PLO
and Muammar al-Qaddafi to murder Imam Musa al-Sadr, a determined opponent of the
Khomeini faction.
This triangle — Khomeini and the proto-Hizballah in Lebanon, the PLO, and Qaddafi —
was to prove instrumental in the downfall of the Shah. They all wanted, for their own
reasons, to topple the strongest ally of America and Israel in the region. In his book The
Fall of Heaven, Andrew Scott Cooper notes the two primary terrorist groups operating
against the Shah in the late 1970s, the Communist “urban guerrillas” of the Fedayeen-e-
Khalq and the Marxist-inflected, Khomeini-aligned Islamists of the Mujahideen-e-Khalq

(MEK). Both received support from Qaddafi and Palestinian terrorists.
The Fedayeen were trained at camps run by George Habash’s PFLP in Libya, in Oman,
and in South Yemen, Cooper reports, and “were … supplied by Communist regimes in
Poland, Czechoslovakia, and East Germany.” The Fedayeen had “close ties to an
assortment of international terrorist groups”, including the Baader-Meinhof Gang and
the Irish Republican Army. In the aftermath of Khomeini’s triumph, the bulk of the
Fedayeen sided with the new regime — only to be purged and crushed in the mid-1980s,
once they had provided cover for the Islamists to do away with the rest of the Left that
had assisted in the revolution.
“Khomeini had forged a tactical alliance” with MEK in 1972, Cooper documents. After
training at PLO camps in Lebanon and Syria, and with Habash in Libya, MEK operatives
“slipped back into Iran”. MEK received money from Khomeini, passed to operatives in
Najaf, and at least some of that came from Qaddafi, especially in the lead-up to the
revolution. It was a sanguinary provocation by PLO-trained MEK cadres in September
1978 that ratified for the Shah his decision, made days earlier, to leave as soon as he
could. The Shah flew out of Tehran on 16 January 1979. MEK was purged in 1981 and
appeared at a dead-end, but it has gained something like a second life recently thanks to
some gullible Westerners.
[4] Hizballah, the leading edge for Iran globally, engages in a vast array of revenue-
generating criminal enterprises, particularly in Latin America, and it is notable that
Russia’s return to the Western Hemisphere — in Cuba, Nicaragua, and notably in
Venezuela — overlaps considerably with the Iran/Hizballah position.
[5] A parallel fantasy has been mooted by some: strengthening the Asad regime itself as
the means of thwarting Iran’s designs in the Levant. The reality is that the pro-Asad
forces are in tatters, barely able to hold together a network of gangsters and sectarian
warlords that compete with one-another for resources and rents, a patchwork system we
politely call “the regime”. Any offensive capability left to the regime is provided by Iran,
which has followed a time-tested script in capturing what passes for state institutions in
Syria.
(As an aside, there is a recent case, in Yemen, where the fallen ruler, Ali Abdullah Saleh,
tried to do what so many in the West have hoped for in Syria, namely tilt to the Russians
as a means of decreasing Iranian influence. When Saleh was murdered by his Iranian-
backed Huthi allies in December 2017, it was, according to some involved in the conflict,
at the direct instructions of Qassem Sulaymani and was intended precisely to shut down
this idea of a “Russia option”, i.e. settling matters in Yemen on terms other than
Tehran’s.)
Of Asad’s militias that ostensibly retain some “independent” capacity, most notoriously
Quwwat al-Nimr (The Tiger Forces) led Suhayl al-Hassan, it only restates the problem.
Al-Hassan’s forces are propped up by foreigners, and the man himself is under U.S.
sanctions for his role in using “barrel bombs” against civilians, among other things. Al-
Hassan was known to trade with ISIS, undermining the regime’s war effort, but
enriching his militia and enhancing his power.
If the West was going to ‘empower Asad out of his dependence on Iran’, one fundamental
aspect of this would presumably be providing him an independent revenue stream. Any
money the West fed into nominally-Asad-held areas of Syria would, if it wasn’t taken
directly by Iran, be syphoned off by al-Hassan and his likes, reinforcing the most corrupt
and cruel elements in the country; subsidise the regime’s crimes against humanity, past
and future; and produce neither ‘stabilisation’ nor ‘reconstruction’.
As Fred Hof, the former State Department lead on Syria once put it, “Those who counsel
cooperation with Assad should think things through very, very carefully with their own
reputations in mind.”
[6] There is some controversy over Iran’s relationship with HAMAS. Of late, Israelis have
sought to distinguish PIJ, an Iranian “proxy”, from HAMAS, which is said to be less an
Iranian creature. For example, Jerusalem said of a PIJ rocket attack in late October,
“Islamic Jihad did not wait to get a green light from HAMAS”, instead taking its
instructions direct from Iran. Meanwhile, Prime Minister Netanyahu signed a ceasefire
with HAMAS that nearly toppled his government in mid-November, and has allowed the
payment of millions of dollars from Qatar to HAMAS. The playing down of HAMAS’s
reliance on Iran appears be part of the messaging around a strategy that, while prodding
Qatar and Turkey to increase their influence with HAMAS, has apparently accepted
HAMAS as the least-worst option for Gaza — the others being to militarily topple
HAMAS, then either leave, producing chaos that might help Iran (and ISIS), or stay, and
get mired in a political and diplomatic crisis.
While the politics of the Israeli posture are understandable, analytically it is a different
matter. In May 2018, HAMAS spokesman Yahya Sinwar, appearing on Hizballah’s Al-
Mayadeen television channel, spoke of the “almost daily” contact his organisation has
with Hizballah, the “strong, powerful and warm” ties HAMAS has with Qassem
Sulaymani, and the extent of the “capabilities” HAMAS had been able to build up thanks
to “a lot of money, equipment and expertise” provided by Tehran. The next month it was
revealed that Israel had detected the movement of HAMAS militants into Hizballah-
controlled areas of Lebanon for training and the construction of missiles — a scheme
arranged by Iran. The U.S. sanctions in November documented the transfer of millions of
dollars from Iran, through Hizballah and Asad’s central bank, to HAMAS. The U.S. was,
after these sanctions, “in a position to really go after all the revenue streams Iran uses to
fund HAMAS”, said Brian Hook, the U.S. special envoy for Iran. In sum, there is a degree
of uncertainty about the exact extent of Iran’s influence over HAMAS, and little doubt
that it is considerable, even as it is not total.
[7] Deraa had been one of the four “de-escalation” zones created in September 2017 as
part of the Astana process. The pro-Asad coalition had used the calm from these “de-
escalation” zones to sequence its war, concentrating its resources on these areas one-by-
one and liquidating them, deporting the survivors to Idlib, the final such zone still in
existence and the source of a current crisis. Deraa was a special case: in July 2017, an
agreement was formed after months of negotiations for a ceasefire in the south, with an
agreement to freeze the front lines; the U.S. and Jordan would guarantee rebel
compliance, and Russia was to keep Asad in check.
As the Deraa offensive was being prepared, the State Department issued a statement, on
25 May 2018, saying the U.S. would take “firm and appropriate measures” against any
violations of the ceasefire agreement by the Asad regime. A statement in identical terms
was issued on 14 June. The regime coalition’s initial operations into Deraa had begun on
19 June. On 21 June, the U.S. threatened “serious repercussions” if the pro-Asad forces
attacked the Deraa “de-escalation zone”. A separate statement was released by U.N.
Ambassador Nikki Haley on 22, saying the U.S. “expect[s] Russia to do its part to respect
and enforce the ceasefire it helped establish”.
Yet, on 24 June it became public that the U.S. had told the rebellion it was on its own.
“[Y]ou should not base your decisions on the assumption or expectation of a military
intervention by us”, the U.S. wrote to the Free Syrian Army factions. The same day, the
Russians came in with airstrikes. The Asad regime recommenced barrel bombing in the
south that day after, after pausing for a year, and soon the hospitals were being targeted.
[8] In late May 2018, before the Deraa offensive began, the Russians agreed — in public
— to keep all “non-Syrian forces” away from Israel’s border. By early July, the U.S. had
effectively replaced the Israelis in dialogue with Russia: the contours of a deal were
emerging a few weeks later that would withdraw American forces and at least some
Iranian forces within a corridor near Israel’s border; Bolton was pushing for the total
withdrawal of Iran’s troops first, before any U.S. troops were evacuated. It was thought
that this deal would be finalised at the 16 July Trump-Putin summit in Helsinki; it was
not. In the aftermath, the Russians continued to signal their intent to curb Hizballah, but
on 23 July, the Israelis went public to reject Russia’s 100-kilometre Iranian-free zone,
saying Iran had to leave entirely. By this time, however, it was over: Deraa city fell on 12
July and the deportations to Idlib had begun; Israel rescued many of the “White
Helmets” on 22 July; and, with the rebellion crushed, the pro-Asad forces turned to the
small ISIS pocket, wrapping up operations on 31 July. This effectively replaced ISIS with
Hizballah on Israel’s border, regarded by a significant faction of Israelis as a dreadful
strategic mistake.
[9] The Russia-Iran axis in support of anti-Western terrorism is not limited to the Arab
world: in Afghanistan, the Russian policy is to work hand-in-glove with Iran in support
the Taliban, against the Coalition and the Kabul government.
Syria Israel Soviet Union Russia Iran
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8/11/2019 “Zionism is Making Us Stupid”: The Russian Relationship with Israel from the Soviets to Putin

“Zionism is Making Us Stupid”: The

THE SOVIET UNION AND THE FOUNDING OF ISRAEL

The Soviet media in January 1953 broadcast details of an extraordinary scheme by a

THE EARLY COLD WAR

Golda Meir in Moscow, 1948 [source]

SYRIA, THE SOVIETS, AND PALESTINIAN TERRORISM

Abu Nidal [source]

The Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) was founded in 1964 as an Egyptian

Salah Khalaf and Yasser Arafat [source]

DELEGITIMIZING ISRAEL AND REFUSENIKS

The Soviet political assault on Israel was, to a considerable degree, a continuation of an

Yuri Andropov [source]

POST-SOVIET RUSSIA’S THAW WITH ISRAEL

bolster Moscow’s international image as a superpower mediator, the Russian

THE RETURN OF THE OLD ORDER

Aftermath of the apartment bombings in Moscow, September 1999 [source]

That said, Putin is surrounded by a class of people, and is reliant on instruments of

“Judeo-Bolshevik” conspiracy theory, in the 1990s the over-representation of Jews

RUSSIA’S STRATEGIC RELATIONSHIP WITH IRAN

RUSSIA’S INTERVENTION IN SYRIA

Russia, meanwhile, was providing weapons, intelligence, propaganda support, and

ISRAEL’S FLAWED STRATEGY WITH RUSSIA IN SYRIA

on Israel’s destruction, and the consummation of the Russian-Iranian alliance structure

Netanyahu’s testimony to the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defence Committee on 19

Netanyahu then went on to give an upbeat, if unspecific, assessment of Russia’s role in

WHAT CAN BE DONE?

Khalq and the Marxist-inflected, Khomeini-aligned Islamists of the Mujahideen-e-Khalq

Syria Israel Soviet Union Russia Iran

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