Reasons for War I
When pondering reasons for war one need only follow the money.
In 1935 Brigadier General Smedley D. Butler wrote: “War is a racket. It always has been.”[1] It remains one. According to Andrew Feinstein: “Global military expenditure is estimated to have totaled $1.6tn in 2010, $235 for every person on the planet. This is an increase of 53% since 2000 and accounts for 2.6% of global domestic product.”[2]
That huge gas fields lie off the coast of Gaza is surely no coincidence. As Michel Chossudovsky points out: “The issue of sovereignty over Gaza’s gas fields is crucial. From a legal standpoint, the gas reserves belong to Palestine.”[3] The last thing many (Deep State) Israelis want is a situation in which Palestinians are actually able to lay claim to their own resources; peace would be a disaster. Supporting Hamas, facilitating their attacks and kicking Palestinians out of Gaza makes extremely good financial sense.
As Jeff Halper makes clear: “Without an occupation and an interminable conflict, how would Israel sustain its strong international standing? The Occupation represents a resource for Israel in two senses: economically, it provides a testing ground for the development of weapons, security systems, models of population control and tactics without which Israel would be unable to compete in the international arms and security markets, but no less important, being a major military power serving other militaries and services the world over lends Israel an international status among the global hegemons it would not otherwise have.”[4]
Yotam Feldman shares this view: “Israeli products and methods are used in America’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the conflict with the FARC in Colombia, wars against drug lords in Mexico, ethnic conflicts in Kashmir, as well as economic conflicts, embodied by gated communities for the affluent in South Africa, Latin America and the US. This has a tremendous effect on Israel. Its military exports have tripled from $2 billion annually at the beginning of the 2000s to $7 billion annually last year (2012), and Israel has become the world’s fourth-sixth military exporter throughout this past decade.”[5]
An important piece of background information for Operation Protective Edge was provided by Eran Efrati: “…before the operation started in Gaza, the army, the military, was asking for an increase of two billion shekels to its fund also to protect more settlements in more areas. In a very weird and surprising course of events, they were refused by the Treasury in Israel, because of an inside conflict inside the government, something very special that happened. Until now, because of the operation that happened, it was increased already by three billion. So, this is what happened in operation. We completely forget what we are doing here. Someone is selling us with the idea that an expansion of a settlement will somehow make us more safe and more protected…The U.S. money is continue to go into settlement expansion, into military equipment, and, of course, going back to your military-industrial complex, because more than 70 percent of the $3 billion you’ve given us every year is coming back to your companies and to your weapons. But it also increases ours.”[6]
The conflict in what was once Palestine is nevertheless unique for a number of reasons.
When discussing the Balfour Declaration Engdahl writes: “But more relevant than the evident hypocrisy in the Balfour – Rothschild exchange was the British Great Game, which lay behind the Balfour note. It is not insignificant that the geographical location for the new British-sponsored Jewish homeland lay in one of the most strategic areas along the main artery of the enlarged post-1914 British Empire, in a sensitive position along the route to India as well as in relation to the newly won Arab petroleum lands of Ottoman Turkey. The settlement of a Jewish minority under British protectorate in Palestine, argued Balfour and others in London, would give London strategic possibilities of enormous importance. It was, to say the least, a cynical ploy on the part of Balfour and his circle.”[7]
“The idea of a Jewish-dominated Palestine, beholden to England for its tenuous survival, surrounded by a balkanized group of squabbling Arab states, formed part of this group’s (Grey, Toynbee, Wells & Milner) concept of a new British Empire. Mackinder, commenting at the time of the Versailles peace conference, described his influential group’s vision of the role a British protectorate over Palestine would play in the Great Game of British advance toward a post-1918 global empire, to be shaped around a British-defined and dominated League of Nations.”
“Mackinder described how the more far-thinking of the British establishment viewed their Palestine project in 1919:”
“If the World-Island be inevitably the principal seat of humanity on this globe, and if Arabia, as the passage-land from Europe to the Indies and from the Northern to the Southern Heartland, be central to the World-Island, then the hill citadel of Jerusalem has a strategical position with reference to world-realities not differing essentially from its ideal position in the perspective of the Middle Ages, or its strategical position between ancient Babylon and Egypt.”
“He noted that the Suez Canal carries the rich traffic between the Indies and Europe to within striking distance of an army based on Palestine, and already the trunk railway is being built through the coastal plain by Jaffa, which will connect the Southern with the Northern Heartland.”
“Commenting on the special significance of the thinking behind his friend Balfour’s 1917 proposal to Lord Rothschild, Mackinder noted: “The Jewish national seat in Palestine will be one of the most important outcomes of the war.”[8]
Interestingly enough one of the most important outcomes of the Iraq War in 2003 was the reestablishment of the strategically vital Mosul-Haifa pipeline.
Gary Vogler, a former senior oil consultant for US Forces-Iraq, wrote in May 2018: “The oil agenda I discovered and experienced was to supply Iraq oil to Israel. The players were the neoconservatives in the Bush Administration, their favorite Iraqi – Dr. Ahmed Chalabi and the Israeli government. One of the motives was because Israel was paying a huge premium for its oil imports and this premium had just started in the late1990s. The agenda called for the reopening of the old Kirkuk to Haifa pipeline and its significant expansion.”[9]
[1] p.23 War is a Racket, Brigadier General Smedley D. Butler
[2] p. xxii The Shadow World, Andrew Feinstein
[3] War and Natural Gas: The Israeli Invasion and Gaza’s Offshore Gas Fields Prof Michel Chossudovsky, Global Research 8 January 2009
[4] p.4 War against the people, Jeff Halper
[5] +972 Magazine “Wars on Gaza have become part of Israel’s system of governance”: An interview with filmmaker Yotam Feldman May 22, 2013
[6] Democracy Now, September 12, 2014
[7] p.55 A Century of War F. William Engdahl
[8] pp.56-57 Ibid
[9] If Americans Knew Blog, Gary Vogler, May 7, 2018