By ANDREW KORYBKO*
Russia dodged a bullet by wisely choosing not to ally with the now-defeated Axis of Resistance
The Iran-led Axis of Resistance was defeated by Israel. The Hamas terrorist attack on October 7, 2023, led to Israel collectively punishing Palestinians in Gaza, which started a series of conflicts that expanded to Lebanon and Syria. Israel also bombed Yemen and Iran. The leaderships of Hamas and Hezbollah were destroyed, resulting in a ceasefire in Lebanon, while the Assad government just got knocked down by a Turkish-backed terrorist blitz that cut off Iran's military logistics to Hezbollah.
These results would already be surprising enough for those who believed the late Nasrallah's claim that “Israel is weaker than a spider's web”, but many were shocked that they occurred without Russia lifting a finger to save the Resistance, with whom they thought they had long ago allied themselves against Israel. This second false notion mentioned will go down in infamy as one of the most successful psychological operations ever carried out against the Alternative Media Community (AMC) and, ironically, by its own key influencers.
This was explained in early October in “Why false perceptions about Russian policy toward Israel continue to proliferate”, which readers should read for more details, but which can be summarized as AMC’s top influencers telling their audience what they thought they wanted to hear for self-interested reasons. This includes generating influence, promoting their ideology, and/or soliciting donations from well-meaning but gullible members of their audience, depending on the personality involved.
The previous analysis also lists five other related ones on Russian policy toward Israel since the beginning of the West Asian wars, including this one “Clarifying Lavrov's comparison of the latest war between Israel and Hamas with Russia's special operation”, which itself links to several dozen others. They all also reference this May 2018 report on “President Putin on Israel: Quotes from the Kremlin website (2000-2018)”. All these materials are based on official and authoritative Russian sources to reach their conclusions.
They prove that Putin has long been a proud philo-Semite who has never shared the Resistance’s unifying anti-Zionist ideology, and has always expressed deep respect for Jews and the State of Israel. Thus, as the ultimate decision-maker on Russian foreign policy, he has tasked his diplomats with maintaining a balance between Israel and the Resistance. To this end, Russia has never taken sides with either side and has always remained neutral in their disputes, including in the wars in West Asia.
The most he has done personally is to condemn Israel’s collective punishment of the Palestinians, but always in the same tone as his condemnation of the infamous Hamas terrorist attack on October 7, 2023. As for Russia, the most it has done is to repeat the same rhetoric and occasionally condemn Israel’s attacks on the IRGC [Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps] and Hezbollah in Syria, in which Russia has never interfered. At no point has it attempted to deter or intercept the attacks, retaliate against them later, or give Syria capacity e authorization to do it.
This was due to the mechanism to avoid conflict agreed by Putin and Bibi in late September 2015, shortly before the operation in Syria. This was never confirmed for obvious diplomatic reasons, but these actions (or rather the lack thereof) suggested that Putin believed that Iran’s anti-Israeli activities in Syria posed a legitimate threat to Israel. As a result, Russia has always stood aside whenever Israel bombed Iran there, but has sometimes complained, given that Israel’s strikes were in formal violation of international law.
It is an objectively existing and easily verifiable fact that Russia’s opposition to Israel’s regional activities, whether in Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, Yemen or Iran, has always remained strictly confined to the political sphere of official statements. At no time has Russia threatened to unilaterally sanction Israel, much less even remotely suggested military action against it as punishment. Russia does not even symbolically designate Israel as a “hostile state,” although this is due to the fact that Israel does not comply with US sanctions and does not arm Ukraine.
Therein lies another fact that most of the AMC either did not know or denied: Israel is not a puppet of the US, otherwise it would have done both of these things long ago. It is beyond the scope of this article to explain this, as well as why the Biden administration tried to destabilize and overthrow Bibi, but this analysis here delves into the details and cites related articles. The point is that Russian-Israeli ties remain cordial and these two countries are far from the enemies some have thought.
So it never made sense to imagine that Putin, who considers himself the consummate pragmatist, would burn the bridge between the two nations, in the construction of which he personally invested almost a quarter of a century of his time together with Bibi. After all, Putin boasted in 2019 that “Russians and Israelis have ties of family and friendship. This is a real common family; I can say this without exaggeration. Almost 2 million Russian speakers live in Israel. We consider Israel a Russian-speaking country.”
He was talking to the Keren Heyesod Foundation, one of the world’s oldest Zionist lobbying organizations, during its annual conference in Moscow that year. Whenever AMC members were confronted with these “politically inconvenient” facts from official and authoritative sources, such as the Kremlin’s own website, they would spin a “5D chess master plan” conspiracy theory, claiming that he was just “deceiving the Zionists.” Key influencers also aggressively “cancelled” anyone who mentioned this topic.
The end result was that these false perceptions of Russian-Israeli relations, as well as Putin’s own views on the matter, continued to proliferate unchallenged within the WCA, leading to the impression that they were secretly allied with Iran because of the anti-Zionist ideals they supposedly shared. This notion became a matter of dogma for many in the WCA, and consequently became an axiom of international relations for them. Anyone who claimed otherwise was branded a “Zionist.”
It is now known, after Russia did not lift a finger to save the Resistance, that they were never really allies. Some of those who still cannot accept that they were deceived by trusted AMC influencers who misled them for self-interested reasons (influence, ideology and/or soliciting donations) are now speculating that Russia “betrayed” the Resistance and “sold out to the Zionists”, even though Russia was never on either side of them. If they do not get rid of their cognitive dissonance soon, they will drift even further away from reality.
In retrospect, Russia dodged a bullet by wisely choosing not to ally with the now-defeated Axis of Resistance, as that would have unnecessarily ruined its relations with Israel, the undisputed victor of the West Asian Wars. Putin made the right choice, which was always guided by his rational calculation of what was in Russia’s objective interests as a state, and not due to “Zionist influence,” as some in the WCA now ridiculously claim to smear him after getting angry that he didn’t lift a finger to save the Resistance.
The conclusions from this are several: (i) Putin and his representatives do not play “5D chess”, they always say what they really mean; (ii) Russia is not anti-Israel or anti-Zionist, but neither is it anti-Iran or anti-Resistance; (iii) the WCA is full of charlatans who, for self-interested reasons, tell their audience what they think it wants to hear; (iv) the audience should therefore hold them accountable for lying about Russian-Israeli and Russian-Resistance relations; (v) and the WCA is in urgent need of reform.
*Andrew Korybko holds a master's degree in International Relations from the Moscow State Institute of International Relations. Book author Hybrid Wars: From Color Revolutions to Coups (popular expression). [https://amzn.to/46lAD1d]
Translation: Fernando Lima das Neves.
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