(March 30, 2021 / JNS) While Israel was busy with the domestic political imbroglio surrounding last week’s Knesset elections, a strategic threat that could threaten the country’s very existence was developing. If the Iranian-Chinese alliance reaches its full potential, the Middle East could once again be dragged into a new cold war between superpowers.

Soviet support for the late Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser’s radical policies ensured him regional hegemony that threatened Israel for more than a decade. The American attempt to placate the Egyptian leader only made things worse.

Now, massive Chinese assistance to the radical regime in Tehran could provide Iran support in its attempts to impose its hegemony on the region within the framework of another kind of cold war now developing between Washington and Beijing. Such Chinese support, along with U.S. President Joe Biden’s conciliatory tone, could pose the kind of strategic threat Israel has not seen since the 1973 Yom Kippur War.

In recent years, Israel has faced an escalating war with Iran in an attempt to prevent it from attaining the kind of power that would allow it to construct massive military infrastructure around its borders. Iran understands that only Israel can thwart its aspirations for hegemony. It has tried to deter Israel by threatening its population centers.

Most Arab regimes have also come to understand that only Israel is strong and determined enough to stop the ayatollahs. While the United States is more important, it is less reliable and determined. These Arab states were appalled by former U.S. President Barack Obama’s approach but temporarily encouraged by that of his successor, Donald Trump.

Under Biden, they have begun to worry once again. That is the meaning of the Abraham Accords. In many ways, the old, familiar Israeli-Palestinian conflict has been replaced by an Arab-Israeli coalition that opposes Iran and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, and is suspicious of the new U.S. administration.

Trump’s determined stance offered a comprehensive response to the Iranian challenge. It did not relate merely to the nuclear threat.

A focused response in the form of the 2015 nuclear deal, which effectively bolstered Tehran’s position, does not effectively meet the challenge. What is required is a zero-sum game that seeks to harm Iran, mainly in the economic arena, and deters it from conflict by ensuring U.S. support for Israel’s military actions it.

When Iran engaged in numerous provocations against Saudi Arabia’s oil industry, Trump responded by assassinating Qassem Soleimani, head of the elite Quds Force. Tehran didn’t dare offer a suitable response to the painful and humiliating blow it was dealt. But the main tool was sanctions that hit Iran’s economy to such an extent that, had they been in place for another four years, the ayatollah regime would have been unlikely to survive.

We are now witnessing something reminiscent of what we saw under the late U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower: deep economic and military involvement by a superpower competing with the U.S. and a conciliatory response from Washington.

China’s foreign minister signed a 25-year strategic deal, first drawn up during Chinese President Xi Ji Ping’s 2016 visit to Iran, aimed at increasing bilateral trade tenfold, to $600 billion in 10 years. The deal will provide China with priority access to huge investments in Iranian infrastructure, banking, and communications.

The agreement also allows for joint military exercises and military cooperation in the future. In return, China is set to provide Iran with vast amounts of oil and gas in the long-term at relatively low rates.

This kind of agreement serves to effectively neutralize U.S. economic pressure, seriously bolsters Iran’s bargaining position, and could herald a renewed Iranian effort toward regional hegemony. The rate of its realization and its characteristics depend crucially on U.S.-China ties. This is a very important Chinese bargaining chip in the international area—one that was suspended under Trump and pulled out once again under Biden, with significant repercussions for Israel.

This article first appeared in Israel Hayom.

Source: https://www.jns.org/opinion/the-iran-china-deal-is-cause-for-israeli-concern/

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U.S. Ambassador Nathan Sales, a coordinator for counterterrorism at the State Department, told reporters in Washington late on November 13 that Iran spends about $700 million a year on Hezbollah, the Lebanese militia that has fought wars with Israel and has provided critical support to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad in his seven-year civil war against Sunni rebels.

In addition, Sales said Tehran gives Hamas, the militant Palestinian group that controls the Gaza Strip, and other “Palestinian terrorist groups” another $100 million a year.

He did not specify where the rest of the funding goes, but he claimed the total spending by Iran supporting militant activities primarily in the Middle East is close to $1 billion a year.

“Iran is the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism. It has held that dubious distinction for many years now, and it shows no signs of relinquishing the title,” Sales said.

“Sadly, it is the Iranian people who are forced to pay this price. The resources that Iran uses to fund its global terrorist ambitions are resources that come directly out of the pockets of everyday, average Iranians.”

U.S. President Donald Trump has said the sanctions he reimposed on Iran this year were aimed in part at forcing Tehran to curb its support for militant activities in the Middle East, making such financial outlays more difficult and burdensome.

A principal goal of the U.S. sanctions imposed last week was to cut Iran’s revenues from exporting oil, which have provided a large share of funding for the government and Iran’s military, including its Quds Force, which conducts foreign military operations involving Hamas and Hezbollah.

Iranian officials have said the sanctions will do nothing to deter the country’s support for allies in Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, Iraq, and elsewhere.

But in street protests that broke out in Iran earlier this year, some demonstrators expressed concern about the money the government is spending in Syria and elsewhere outside Iran.

Sales made his comments as the United States announced a new round of sanctions against the son of Hezbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, as well as other senior commanders of Hezbollah and Hamas.

The department announced it was offering up to $5 million for information leading to Hamas leader Salih al-Aruri and Lebanese Hezbollah leaders Khalil Yusuf Mahmud Harb and Haitham Ali Tabatabai.

U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for Diplomatic Security Michael Evanoff said Harb is Hezbollah’s military liaison with Hamas while Tabatabai commands Hezbollah forces fighting alongside the Syrian Army in Syria.

Sales claimed that Hezbollah’s extensive military operations and growing political clout in Lebanon pose a danger for the Lebanese people. He made that claim on the same day that Lebanon’s prime minister accused Hezbollah of blocking the formation of a government in Beirut.

“Inside Lebanon, Hezbollah’s destructive actions have endangered the Lebanese people,” Sales said. “Thanks to Iran’s backing, Hezbollah has built a fearsome arsenal. The group has stockpiled more than 100,000 rockets and missiles inside Lebanon, and we see this as a massive and destabilizing buildup.”

“As we all know, Hezbollah hides its missile factories in population centers, effectively using innocent civilians as human shields,” Sales said.

The ambassador claimed that Iran’s ties with Hamas have grown recently and also pose a danger in the region.

“We are also deeply concerned about Tehran’s growing ties to Hamas,” he said. “After a brief split early in the Syria conflict, Hamas and Iran have rebuilt their relationship. Iran is once again providing Hamas with much-needed funding.”

Source: https://americanmilitarynews.com/2018/11/us-claims-iran-is-spending-1-billion-a-year-backing-hezbollah-other-allies/

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The Trump administration should publicly warn Russia and Iran that the United States will respond forcefully to future threats in Syria.

The February 10 military clash between Iran and Israel ushered in a new phase of the Syrian war. Iran for the first time challenged Israel directly instead of attacking indirectly through surrogates, such as Hezbollah.

The Syrian civil war—the world’s bloodiest conflict in recent decades—has evolved into a proxy war that could easily escalate into a much broader regional war. Iran’s provocative violation of Israeli airspace with an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) set off a chain reaction that is accelerating this transformation. The mission of the Iranian UAV—a Shahed 171, which Tehran apparently reverse engineered from a downed U.S. RQ-170 Sentinel drone that crashed in Iranian territory in 2011—remains unclear. Launched by Iranian Revolutionary Guards from the Tiyas air base in central Syria, the UAV crossed into Israel over the Jordanian border at an unusually low altitude, perhaps to avoid detection.

Although Hezbollah and Hamas have deployed Iranian-made UAVs over Israel in the past, this was the first known attempt by Iran to penetrate Israeli airspace.

The UAV was intercepted and destroyed by an Israeli Apache helicopter, and Israel responded with an airstrike on the Iranian command-and-control trailer in Syria that remotely controlled the UAV.

An Israeli F-16 fighter involved in that operation was shot down by Syrian anti-aircraft missiles and crashed inside Israel, injuring the pilot. It was the first Israeli fighter plane lost in combat since the 1982 war in Lebanon.

Israel responded by launching a second wave of attacks on twelve Syrian and Iranian targets in Syria. Among those hit were Syrian SA-17 and SA-5 anti-aircraft batteries and Iranian forces deployed in the country to support Syrian dictator Bashar Assad.

The Israeli military estimated that the retaliatory strikes destroyed nearly half of Syria’s air defense missile batteries. The reprisals also hit Iranian and Syrian targets close to Russian military positions at Tiyas air base and elsewhere, a factor that led Russian president Vladimir Putin to call Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu to avert further escalation.

The Russian Foreign Ministry quickly issued a statement: “We urge all sides to exercise restraint and to avoid any actions that could lead to an even greater complication of the situation.”

The fact that Israel, Iran and Syria all subsequently de-escalated the confrontation underscored the fact that Putin’s assertive intervention in Syria has established Russia as the prime arbiter of Syria’s future. Israeli journalist Amos Harel wrote that: “The quiet after the Netanyahu-Putin phone call shows once again who’s the real boss in the Middle East.”

Moscow has its own reasons for tamping down Iranian-Israeli hostilities. It wants to avoid collateral damage to Russian forces, prevent further losses to its Syrian client regime and consolidate a more favorable military outcome in Syria. But Moscow’s agenda is jeopardized by Tehran’s competing goals, which have put Iran on a collision course with Israel and the United States in Syria.

Iran’s Rising Threat in Syria

Having tightened its grip on strategic areas of Syria, Iran now is willing and able to use these locations as staging areas for operations against Israel. Although direct action against Israel is risky, Iran’s Revolutionary Guards may have calculated that the presence of Russian military personnel at the Tiyas air base and elsewhere in close proximity to Iranian personnel would deter an Israeli counterattack.

Iran’s intentions were foreshadowed last month, when a senior Iranian official visited the Lebanese side of Lebanon’s border with Israel and made provocative comments about the liberation of Jerusalem.

Ayatollah Ebrahim Raisi— the hardline cleric who lost Iran’s presidential election last year but might still be in line to become the next supreme leader—was escorted within a United Nations buffer zone by Hezbollah officials who were uniformed and armed. This incident, which violated UN Security Council resolutions that established a demilitarized zone in Lebanon, prompted Israel to warn the Security Council that Iran was subverting the UN’s peacekeeping role in Lebanon and destabilizing the region.

Iran has replicated its proxy strategy of using Hezbollah in Lebanon, by creating a wide array of Shia militia groups directed by the Quds Force, the elite special forces of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps. This foreign legion of militias recruited from pro-Iranian Iraqis, Afghans and Pakistanis has advanced closer to the Israeli border.

Harakat al-Nujaba (“Movement of the Noble”), an Iranian-backed Iraqi militia fighting in Iraq and Syria, announced that it stands with Syria to confront the Israeli “aggression and cowardly massacre.” The group—also known as Harakat Hezbollah al-Nujaba—is an independent unit that is part of the Iraqi Popular Mobilization Forces, which was created in 2014 to fight ISIS.

The group operates in both Iraq and Syria under the control of the Quds Force. Last March it announced formation of a “Golan Liberation Brigade.” Its goal: to help the Syrian regime take back the Golan Heights, which Israel seized in the 1967 Six-Day War.

Israel’s “War Between the Wars”

Israel has avoided intervening in Syria’s complex, multisided civil war, but it has been drawn into a deepening confrontation with Iran and its Hezbollah surrogates, who have exploited the Syrian war to open up a new potential front with Israel and boost the flow of sophisticated weaponry to expand Hezbollah’s military threat to Israel.

In what Israeli military leaders have called “the war between the wars,” Israel has launched over one hundred air strikes to destroy Iranian-supplied arms inside Syria before they could be transferred to the Lebanon-based terrorist group. But none of those strikes was as large as the February 10 attacks.

Hezbollah has almost thirty thousand fighters—up to a third of them now deployed in Syria to prop up the Assad regime. The terrorist group is thought to have amassed an arsenal of up to 150,000 rockets, which it has dispersed amid civilian buildings and underground bunkers covertly built in Lebanon. Iran has provided the bulk of these weapons, including increasingly accurate longer-range missiles capable of targeting most of Israel.

Perhaps motivated by steady losses of arms and equipment due to Israeli air strikes, Iran reportedly is building at least two weapons factories in Lebanon to assemble advanced missiles, anti-tank weapons and UAVs. Israel is likely to target these facilities in future rounds of fighting with Iran and Hezbollah.

Iran’s Challenge to the United States in Eastern Syria

Iran’s Revolutionary Guards also have threatened U.S. military forces and their allies, the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), in eastern Syria. On February 7, an armored column of Iranian-led militias, including Afghan Shia fighters and local Arab tribal fighters, advanced along with Russian private military contractors from the Wagner Group, toward a SDF base where U.S. special operations forces were stationed.

After the column fired artillery rounds toward the base, U.S. forces responded with air strikes, UAV missile strikes and artillery fire, killing scores of fighters, including many Russian military contractors.

In crossing the Euphrates River, the ground offensive violated the deconfliction agreement reached between Moscow and Washington. It also inserted Iran directly into the intensifying competition between the U.S.-backed SDF and the Iranian/Russian/Syrian forces trying to gain control over eastern Syrian oil fields formerly controlled by ISIS.

Moscow may have calculated that using military contractors in this Iranian-led operation would give it plausible deniability sufficient to avoid broader consequences for its actions. Washington cannot afford to let Russia or Iran off the hook for this direct challenge to U.S. forces.

The Trump administration should publicly warn Russia and Iran that the United States will respond forcefully to future threats in Syria and strongly support Israeli military efforts to blunt threats emanating from Syria. If Moscow is not willing or able to restrain Iran in Syria, it must share the responsibility—and bear consequences—for Iran’s destabilizing actions in Syria.

James Phillips is the senior research fellow for Middle Eastern affairs in The Heritage Foundation’s Allison Center for Foreign Policy Studies.

Image: An Israeli Air Force F-35 fighter jet flies during an aerial demonstration at a graduation ceremony for Israeli Air Force pilots at the Hatzerim air base in southern Israel, December 27, 2017. REUTERS/Amir Cohen

Source: http://nationalinterest.org/feature/irans-intensifying-war-israel-24592

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