Regime Change for Whom?
The Incestuous Partnership Between the USA and Israel is Ripe for Regime Change.
The Zionist fusion of the United States of America with Israel has become a thoroughgoing disaster causing grave damage across many frontiers of rapid ruination. As is currently on broad public display, the fusion of these two polities is contributing to the downfall of many important pillars of global civilization.
Rather than standing back as spectators to simply observe the rapid civilizational decline associated with the oversized role presently seized by the governments of USA and Israel, people are finding ways to resist the unfolding debacle. An important aspect of this more general resistance finds an important anchor in the worldwide movement to counter and stop the genocidal assault on Palestinian people.
This assault to eliminate Palestinians people in the process of Israelifying historic Palestine currently dominates the priorities of the US-Israeli partnership. From the time of its inception in 1979, the Islamic Republic of Iran has placed a high priority on defending Palestinians living under Israeli control from abuse, displacement and elimination.
The time has come to reverse the civilizational decline, to ramp up the movement to protect the Palestinians from the genocidal assault waged by the US-Israeli partnership. The time has come to revert back to the project of building upon as well as enhancing the achievements gained during the Century of Enlightenment.
My proposal here during this moment in the many-faceted cataclysm engulfing the world, is to apply the rhetoric and strategy of regime change to prevent the horrific outcomes being sought by the US-Israel duo. Why not reverse the US-Israeli scheme to revert back into the illusory realm created after 9/11 to justify the psychological operations integral to the Israel-led Global War on Terror?
Why not demand the principles of regime change be applied to the war mongers in charge of the Israel-US partnership rather than go along with the fraud presently being put before us. One of my goals here is to address and reverse the widespread poverty in public understanding of history. This poverty of understanding creates the basis for repeating unnecessary mistakes that undermine the health of the human condition.
The top US and Israeli war mongers and genocidaires currently count on the public retaining its high level of historical ignorance. As long as historical memory is kept in short supply, the US-Israeli predators can replay in Iran the same policy disasters applied during the ill-considered regime change that plunged Iraq into chaos in 2003.
New Names for Old Patterns of History
The abundance of references to “regime change” these days reminds me very much of the former popularity of the phrase, “collateral damage.” Both terms basically sterilize and give the appearance of triviality to procedures that are in fact extremely ruthless. These procedures of so-called regime change often include mass murder, mass displacements of entire populations plus the wanton elimination of priceless cultural inheritances.
Like the term “genocide,” the term “regime change,” is of fairly recent invention even though the processes of conquest that the phrases describe, go far back in history. The old patterns of historical change that have long been with us, tend to be obfuscated by the imposition of new language. Such language is prone to conceal rather than reveal the true import and meaning of the crucial concepts at issue.
The term, “regime change” was seized upon by the US-Israeli partners who were behind the events leading to the post-9/11 Wars. These 9/11 wars were often rationalized in name of fighting terrorism. The resulting invasions and predations involved violent transformations imposed by US Armed Forces often acting at the behest of Israel.
The most many-faceted and expensive regime change operation after 9/11 took place in Iraq. After the US capture and execution of the sometimes errant US-backed puppet President, Saddam Hussein, the chaos in Iraq continued for decades. Much like what transpired in Libya after the “regime change” removal of Muammar Gaddafi, the lack of a clear and decisive outcome seems to be what the Netanyahu government has in mind for Iran.
The people who called for the overthrow of the government of Saddam Hussein in 2003 were largely the same group of Israel First Zionists who united to create the Project for the New American Century. Many members of PNAC were important participants in arranging the false flag event of September 11, 2001.
Many of the PNAC officials played significant roles in misrepresenting their own important functions in bringing about the violent events that took place in Manhattan and at the Pentagon. This spectacular display of dramatized destruction was well calculated to traumatize and disorient the public.
The public panic and confusion mitigated against the development of rational efforts to carefully evaluate the evidence of what had really transpired on the day of 9/11. Instead, the whole spectacle was immediately declared to be an Islamic job before any real investigations could take place. In this fashion public opinion was immediately aligned with the agenda of more US-backed wars for Israel. These preplanned wars for Israel were directed at Muslim-majority countries like Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Somalia, Sudan Libya and Iran.
The photos below include many of the main culprits of the 9/11 crimes used to provide justification for the precedent-setting regime change war in Iraq.
By presenting Muslims as the objects of blame, the aim was to turn public opinion against Islamic religion, people, and culture. Quite clearly the war mongers and genocidaires are putting concerted effort into preparing public opinion to accept the already-initiated US-Israeli war on Iran.
In doing so the predatory forces are resuscitating the heritage of the Global War on Terror initiated by the Republican President, George W. Bush. Indeed the renewal of anti-Muslim propaganda derived from the GWOT has for almost two years helped justify the expanding arc of US-Israel militarism stretching now from Gaza to the West Bank, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Yemen and Iran.
The extension of this war into Iran, a large, resource rich and technologically sophisticated country of 90,000,000 people, could not practically go forward without the large-scale backing of the US Armed Forces. If anything has been demonstrated since October of 2023, it is the extreme dependence of the diminutive Israeli fighting force on the military muscle of the ailing US superpower. In this build up to war the Islamic Republic of Iran extends the heritage of the Persian Empire into contemporary times.
If the US President, Donald Trump, continues to be roped into the illegal military operations of Benjamin Netanyahu, the USA will continue to share the Israel government’s infamy and criminality in the global community. The USA will once again be robbed of its capacity to direct significant stores of energy and resources at fixing its own ailing infrastructure as well as the growing incapacities of its own citizens.
The government of Donald Trump, which cannot seem to extract itself from Ukraine’s and NATO’s deeply flawed proxy war against Russia, will show itself to be doubly or even triply incapable of making good on the promise to Make America Great Again.
The relationship between the Project for the New American Century, the first-term government of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and the importance of 9/11 wars in the US-Israel partnership, are outlined in an essay published in 2003 by Joseph Cirincione for the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
https://carnegieendowment.org/research/2003/03/origins-of-regime-change-in-iraq?lang=en
The author begins with flattering comments introducing readers to the Israel First neoconservatives whose main objective was to build up US military power to serve more effectively the foreign policy objectives of Israel. Netanyahu’s effort to recruit Donald Trump and the US government in the cause of overturning the Iranian government continues a well established process. From the perspective of 2003, Joseph Cirincioni explores the roots as well as the envisaged extensions of this process that continues to deliver on the neocon takeover of US politics.
The Extremism of the US-Israel Partnership Arouses Extreme Resistance from Its Critics
If these were somewhat normal times the application of regime change to the Israel-US partnership might seem outlandish. But these are not normal times and the resentment from within Israel and the United States for the failures of the regime are becoming so intense that they are becoming potentially transformational.
The United States and Israel are implementing genocidal and war mongering policies that find considerable support in the governments of Great Britain, the European Union and the Five Eyes countries. It is becoming increasingly clear to average people in these countries, however, that government authorities have become puppets of rigged systems. The puppets pretend they represent real democracies that are in fact devoid of genuine accountability for supposed leaders and real self-determination for citizens.
A worldwide system is being crafted based on the cultivation of a Luciferian regime of mass murder, the promotion of lies over truth, and the transitioning of bodies and consciousness. Various forms of these “trans” alterations are being pressed forward by AI, robotization, genetic modification, aggressive surgeries as well as the theft of the resources in ways that further enrich the rich at the expense of the poor and the middle classes.
The extent of the dispossession and disempowerment of the largest mass of humanity is becoming so severe that law is being set up that would transform some altered people into the patented private property of corporations. The result is to re-introduce institutions of slavery that arise now in new biotechnological contexts.
In the United States and Israel, new frontiers of political culture are being coupled to a regime of tyranny disguised as law and order. This approach to political economy is being pushed ahead with the object of cultivating corporate engines for innovations in genocide, warrentless surveillance, incarceration, torture, and in biodigital tampering with the human form.
Planantir corporation can be conceived as a corporate version of an experimental lab rat created to engage in this kind of multi-faceted enterprise. Not surprisingly, the Palestinians continue to be overrepresented among the human lab rats being tested to see what people cannot and cannot endure. See
Gaza as a Laboratory for Future Genocides
In his essay below, Emanuel Pastreich unflinchingly introduces a startling thesis. He argues that the ruthless and many-facteted mass murder in Gaza is part of a carefully-monitored research project, one aimed at further development of genocidal strategies, techniques, and prototypes.
A Nobel Peace Prize for Genocidal Activity? The Role of the Epstein Files in Negotiations Between Trump and Netanyahu?
This pattern of decline and fall showed up in the imagery of the gong show that unfolded in early July of 2025 in the White House. It included footage of Genocider-In-Chief, Bibi Netanyahu, making a pitch for a Nobel Peace Prize to go to his partner in international crime, US President Donald Trump.
The transformation of Gaza into a pulverized rubble heap of death and desecration is becoming in the eyes of many a bloodied beacon. This beacon marks the destination where the Israel-US war machine seems to be pointing humanity. Both the UN Charter and the Ten Commandments are falling beneath the authority of the dictate, Kill or Be Killed. “Never Again” is giving way to the theocratic instruction that the Chosenites must not let up until all the Amalekites are eliminated.
The genocidal partners menace us all with a very wide and fast growing array of weapons of mass destruction. The proliferation of mass murder can generate massive profits alongside near unlimited control of people and our environments.
https://old.bitchute.com/video/WIeRiY84vPfn/
The weapons of mass annihilation threaten us in multiple ways including by means of the ongoing attacks on the genetic integrity of our species.
Somehow the political, economic and cultural integration of Israel and the USA must be decoupled and dismantled if humanity is to have any prospect of a decent future. If there is any component of global society calling out for some sort of immediate and comprehensive regime change, it would find its centre in the Zionist partnership linking the USA and Israel.
The volatile character of the relationship between Israel and the United States was demonstrated between July 7 -11 during the third visit in 2025 of Netanyahu and to Trump’s While House. The effort of the Trump government to shut down any prospect of getting to the bottom of the Jeffrey Epstein matter ballooned into a renewed scandal as the secret negotiations between Trump and Netanyahu seemed to reach a climax.
The Jeffrey Epstein scandal can be seen as a kind of ritual demonstration of the extent of the perversion permeating the relationship between Israel and the United States. Many books, essays and documentary films have delved into aspects of what amounts to the basis of a horror story that continues to both fascinate and repel the public. The basic outline of the well known intrigue is as follows:
Jeffrey Epstein was recruited to serve the Israeli intelligence establishment through an elaborate blackmail operation. With the collaboration of Ghislaine Maxwell, the daughter of a famous UK media mogul and Mossad agent, Epstein gathered up access to large numbers of teenage and underaged girls.
These girls were groomed for sexual encounters with powerful men of large reputation….. mostly men with much influence in governments, scientific circles, high finance, show business, academia, the arts and other fields.
These encounters were filmed in locations that include a large network of luxurious locations built up by Epstein and his backers. These backers were often prominent individuals such as Les Wexner and Alan Dershowitz. They were known to be strong backers and advocates of Israel.
The films came to be widely understood as the basis for the blackmailing of powerful individuals. To avoid public infamy and humiliation these filmed power brokers were easily coerced into adopting the positions and policies that went against their own better judgment.
These basic outlines of a series of sordid interactions came to be seen as a possible explanation of how it is that seemingly credible figures can be pressured into decisions that seem to run against common sense and even their own self-interest.
Authorities, it seemed, were gradually taking up the process of investigating Epstein and charging him with crimes, first gently in 2008 and then aggressively mid-2019. Under controversial circumstances, Epstein was said to have committed suicide in prison in 2024.
Donald Trump and his MAGA supporters as well as some of his appointees promised to release new material explaining the Epstein investigation. Then suddenly in the midst of the negotiations between Trump and Netanyahu, the Trump government announced the Epstein files were closed and it was declared there was no need for any more research or publications on the matter. The Epstein controversy was for some unexplained reason suddenly made a done deal for the Trump administration.
This shocking development opened questions about whether or not Trump was somehow subject to blackmail. Did the Epstein bunch have something on him? Elon Musk indicated in a tweet that Trump does appear somewhere in the Epstein files. Was President Trump subject to pressure by the Israeli government? Was Netanyahu himself exploiting the content of the Epstein files to get Trump to commit the US government to bringing about regime change in Iran?
Did the future of the Epstein files become a bargaining point in negotiating some sort of false flag event in the run up to regime change for Iran? Was there some sort of deal with Trump to shut down the Epstein file, to perhaps make them the exclusive domain of Netanyahu as he headed back to Israel?
Tucker Carlson and others made the assumption that, if the Epstein bunch had collected damning material on Trump, the Democratic Party would have used it during the presidency of Joe Biden. I don’t see why such an assumption is necessarily true. After all, according to Epstein himself, Trump was his best friend for a decade. Who knows what kind of antics the two men might have engaged in earlier in their careers.
While surfing in search of accusations concerning Trump’s sexual escapades I ran into a site, the Intel Drop, with a series of posts involving accusations that Trump had settled with several parents concerning sexual allegations involving young boys and girls. I don’t know what to make of these allegations and I can’t say if there is any truth at all in what the web site is reporting. But the surprising allegations involving material I did not expect to see, have been published on the open Internet.
While the Netanyahu entourage was still in the White House in early July, Trump chastised a journalist for bringing up the Epstein matter. It was a very clear case of Trump protesting much too loudly and too inconsistently with his former emphasis on the importance for America of coming to some sort of resolution with the Epstein matter.
As I see it, the issues raised by the career of Jeffrey Epstein preying off mostly American bigwigs for the benefit of Israel, is highly suggestive that the US-Israel relationship has become perversely incestuous in many obscene ways. The crimes the two governments share, or at least those crimes we know about, are sometimes stupendous.
For instance Michael Collins Piper explained to us in detail in his classic volume, Final Judgment, how President John F. Kennedy had to be killed so that Israel could create its own secret arsenal of nuclear weapons outside the very laws that Iran is wrongfully accused of violating. If the issue is to be pressed about who can or cannot possess nuclear weapons, then Israel’s deep dark criminal record in the development and ownership of highly destructive nuclear devices, has to be addressed. The issue of Israel’s illegal possession of nukes should be made a major topic of discussion in all international venues.
One thing is for sure. The Middle East was set on very unstable footings when it was decided by the US government once the Kennedy brothers were gone, that Israel would be the sole power in the region allowed to possess nuclear weapons. This imbalance should no longer be tolerated. Some are arguing strongly that the Middle East would become much more stable if Iran did become a country equipped with nuclear weapons.
https://www.acsu.buffalo.edu/~fczagare/PSC%20504/Waltz.pdf
In all the discussions about who is who sitting around the dinner table at the White House, I heard frequent references to John Ratcliffe. Ratcliffe is the head of the CIA under President Trump. Some see him as basically an agent of Mossad in the conduct of his responsibilities. There is something very wrong with this picture.
Radcliffe seems to be conforming to a history of very close collaboration between Mossad and the CIA. The CIA’s first counter-intelligence boss, James Angleton, basically became a double agent whose highest allegiance seems to have been to Israel. Michael Collins Piper emphasized his importance in bringing about and then covering up the role of Israel in the assassination of JFK.
Perhaps if the United States and Israel could treat each other as foreign governments rather than as extensions of one another, something short of a regime change could become the destiny of these two polities. As it is now, however, the partnership between Israel and the USA has become as problematic as knowing what to make of the memory of Jeffrey Epstein in the history of statecraft through the institutions of Zionist child abuse, pedophilia and blackmail.
Appendix
Written in 2015 in SOTT, Sign of the Times, the essay gives background and context to the subjects I raise above.
Flashback: a short history: The neocon 'Clean Break' grand design and the 'regime change' disasters it has fostered
Dan Sanchez
David Stockman's Contra Corner
Tue, 30 Jun 2015 18:01 UTC
From top left: Albert Wohlstetter, Oded Yinon, Richard Perle, William Kristol, Robert Kagan, David Wurmser, Paul Wolfowitz, Joseph Lieberman, William Safire, Eliot Cohen, David Frum, Norman Podhoretz, Kenneth Adelman, Charles Krauthammer, Benjamin Netanyahu, Phili Zelikow, Elliott Abrams, Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Douglas Feith and Bernard Lewis.
To understand today's crises in Iraq, Syria, Iran, and elsewhere, one must grasp their shared Lebanese connection. This assertion may seem odd. After all, what is the big deal about Lebanon? That little country hasn't had top headlines since Israel deigned to bomb and invade it in 2006. Yet, to a large extent, the roots of the bloody tangle now enmeshing the Middle East lie in Lebanon: or to be more precise, in the Lebanon policy of Israel.
Rewind to the era before the War on Terror. In 1995, Yitzhak Rabin, Israel's "dovish" Prime Minister, was assassinated by a right-wing zealot. This precipitated an early election in which Rabin's Labor Party was defeated by the ultra-hawkish Likud, lifting hardliner Benjamin Netanyahu to his first Premiership in 1996.
That year, an elite study group produced a policy document for the incipient administration titled, "A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm." The membership of the Clean Break study group is highly significant, as it included American neoconservatives who would later hold high offices in the Bush Administration and play driving roles in its Middle East policy.
"A Clean Break" advised that the new Likud administration adopt a "shake it off" attitude toward the policy of the old Labor administration which, as the authors claimed, assumed national "exhaustion" and allowed national "retreat." This was the "clean break" from the past that "A Clean Break" envisioned. Regarding Israel's international policy, this meant:
"...a clean break from the slogan, 'comprehensive peace' to a traditional concept of strategy based on balance of power."
Pursuit of comprehensive peace with all of Israel's neighbors was to be abandoned for selective peace with some neighbors (namely Jordan and Turkey) and implacable antagonism toward others (namely Iraq, Syria, and Iran). The weight of its strategic allies would tip the balance of power in favor of Israel, which could then use that leverage to topple the regimes of its strategic adversaries by using covertly managed "proxy forces" and "the principle of preemption." Through such a "redrawing of the map of the Middle East," Israel will "shape the regional environment," and thus, "Israel will not only contain its foes; it will transcend them."
"A Clean Break" was to Israel (and ultimately to the US) what Otto von Bismarck's "Blood and Iron" speech was to Germany. As he set the German Empire on a warpath that would ultimately set Europe ablaze, Bismarck said:
"Not through speeches and majority decisions will the great questions of the day be decided — that was the great mistake of 1848 and 1849 — but by iron and blood."
Before setting Israel and the US on a warpath that would ultimately set the Middle East ablaze, the Clean Break authors were basically saying: Not through peace accords will the great questions of the day be decided — that was the great mistake of 1978 (at Camp David) and 1993 (at Oslo) — but by "divide and conquer" and regime change. By wars both aggressive ("preemptive") and "dirty" (covert and proxy).
"A Clean Break" slated Saddam Hussein's Iraq as first up for regime change. This is highly significant, especially since several members of the Clean Break study group played decisive roles in steering and deceiving the United States into invading Iraq and overthrowing Saddam seven years later.
The Clean Break study group's leader, Richard Perle, led the call for Iraqi regime change beginning in the 90s from his perch at the Project for a New American Century and other neocon think tanks. And while serving as chairman of a high level Pentagon advisory committee, Perle helped coordinate the neoconservative takeover of foreign policy in the Bush administration and the final push for war in Iraq.
Another Clean Breaker, Douglas Feith, was a Perle protege and a key player in that neocon coup. After 9/11, as Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, Feith created two secret Pentagon offices tasked with cherry-picking, distorting, and repackaging CIA and Pentagon intelligence to help make the case for war.
Feith's "Office of Special Plans" manipulated intelligence to promote the falsehood that Saddam had a secret weapons of mass destruction program that posed an imminent chemical, biological, and even nuclear threat. This lie was the main justification used by the Bush administration for the Iraq War.
Feith's "Counter Terrorism Evaluation Group" trawled through the CIA's intelligence trash to stitch together far-fetched conspiracy theories linking Saddam Hussein's Iraq with Osama bin Laden's Al Qaeda, among other bizarre pairings. Perle put the Group into contact with Ahmed Chalabi, a dodgy anti-Saddam Iraqi exile who would spin even more yarn of this sort.
Much of the Group's grunt work was performed by David Wurmser, another Perle protege and the primary author of "A Clean Break." Wurmser would go on to serve as an advisor to two key Iraq War proponents in the Bush administration: John Bolton at the State Department and Vice President Dick Cheney.
The foregone conclusions generated by these Clean Breaker-led projects faced angry but ineffectual resistance from the Intelligence Community, and are now widely considered scandalously discredited. But they succeeded in helping, perhaps decisively, to overcome both bureaucratic and public resistance to the march to war.
The Iraq War that followed put the Clean Break into action by grafting it onto America. The War accomplished the Clean Break objective of regime change in Iraq, thus beginning the "redrawing of the map of the Middle East." And the attendant "Bush Doctrine" of preemptive war accomplished the Clean Break objective of "reestablishing the principle of preemption"
But why did the Netanyahu/Bush Clean Breakers want to regime change Iraq in the first place? While reference is often made to "A Clean Break" as a prologue to the Iraq War, it is often forgotten that the document proposed regime change in Iraq primarily as a "means" of "weakening, containing, and even rolling back Syria." Overthrowing Saddam in Iraq was merely a stepping stone to "foiling" and ultimately overthrowing Bashar al-Assad in neighboring Syria. As Pat Buchanan put it:
"In the Perle-Feith-Wurmser strategy, Israel's enemy remains Syria, but the road to Damascus runs through Baghdad."
Exactly how this was to work is baffling. As the document admitted, although both were Baathist regimes, Assad and Saddam were far more enemies than allies. "A Clean Break" floated a convoluted pipe dream involving a restored Hashemite monarchy in Iraq (the same US-backed, pro-Israel dynasty that rules Jordan) using its sway over an Iraqi cleric to turn his co-religionists in Syria against Assad. Instead, the neocons ended up settling for a different pipe(line) dream, sold to them by that con-man Chalabi, involving a pro-Israel, Chalabi-dominated Iraq building a pipeline from Mosul to Haifa. One only wonders why he didn't sweeten the deal by including the Brooklyn Bridge in the sale.
As incoherent as it may have been, getting at Syria through Iraq is what the neocons wanted. And this is also highly significant for us today, because the US has now fully embraced the objective of regime change in Syria, even with Barack Obama inhabiting the White House instead of George W. Bush.
Washington is pursuing that objective by partnering with Turkey, Jordan, and the Gulf States in supporting the anti-Assad insurgency in Syria's bloody civil war, and thereby majorly abetting the bin Ladenites (Syrian Al Qaeda and ISIS) leading that insurgency. Obama has virtually become an honorary Clean Breaker by pursuing a Clean Break objective ("rolling back Syria") using Clean Break strategy ("balance of power" alliances with select Muslim states) and Clean Break tactics (a covert and proxy "dirty war"). Of course the neocons are the loudest voices calling for the continuance and escalation of this policy. And Israel is even directly involving itself by providing medical assistance to Syrian insurgents, including Al Qaeda fighters.
Another target identified by "A Clean Break" was Iran. This is highly significant, since while the neocons were still riding high in the Bush administration's saddle, they came within an inch of launching a US war on Iran over yet another manufactured and phony WMD crisis. While the Obama administration seems on the verge of finalizing a nuclear/peace deal with the Iranian government in Tehran, the neocons and Netanyahu himself (now Prime Minister once again) have pulled out all the stops to scupper it and put the US and Iran back on a collision course.
The neocons are also championing ongoing American support for Saudi Arabia's brutal war in Yemen to restore that country's US-backed former dictator. Simply because the "Houthi" rebels that overthrew him and took the capital city of Sanaa are Shiites, they are assumed to be a proxy of the Shiite Iranians, and so this is seen by neocons and Saudi theocons alike as a war against Iranian expansion.
Baghdad is a pit stop on the road to Damascus, and Sanaa is a pit stop on the road to Tehran. But, according to the Clean Breakers, Damascus and Tehran are themselves merely pit stops on the road to Beirut.
According to "A Clean Break," Israel's main beef with Assad is that:
"Syria challenges Israel on Lebanese soil."
And its great grief with the Ayatollah is that Iran, like Syria, is one of the:
"...principal agents of aggression in Lebanon..."
All regime change roads lead to Lebanon, it would seem. So this brings us back to our original question. What is the big deal about Lebanon?
The answer to this question goes back to Israel's very beginnings. Its Zionist founding fathers established the bulk of Israel's territory by dispossessing and ethnically cleansing three-quarters of a million Palestinian Arabs in 1948. Hundreds of thousands of these were driven (sometimes literally in trucks, sometimes force marched with gunshots fired over their heads) into Lebanon, where they were gathered in miserable refugee camps.
In Lebanon the Palestinians who had fled suffered an apartheid state almost as rigid as the one Israel imposed on those who stayed behind, because the dominant Maronite Christians there were so protective of their political and economic privileges in Lebanon's confessional system.
In a 1967 war of aggression, Israel conquered the rest of formerly-British Palestine, annexing the West Bank and Gaza Strip, and placing the Palestinians there (many of whom fled there seeking refuge after their homes were taken by the Israelis in 1948) under a brutal, permanent military occupation characterized by continuing dispossession and punctuated by paroxysms of mass murder.
This compounding of their tragedy drove the Palestinians to despair and radicalization, and they subsequently lifted Yasser Arafat and his fedayeen (guerrilla) movement to the leadership of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), then headquartered in Jordan.
When the king of Jordan massacred and drove out the PLO, Arafat and the remaining members relocated to Lebanon. There they waged cross-border guerrilla warfare to try to drive Israel out of the occupied territories. The PLO drew heavily from the refugee camps in Lebanon for recruits.
This drew Israel deeply into Lebanese affairs. In 1976, Israel started militarily supporting the Maronite Christians, helping to fuel a sectarian civil war that had recently begun and would rage until 1990. That same year, Syrian forces entered Lebanon, partook in the war, and began a military occupation of the country.
In 1978, Israel invaded Lebanon to drive the PLO back and to recruit a proxy army called the "South Lebanon Army" (SLA).
In 1982 Israel launched a full scale war in Lebanon, fighting both Syria and the PLO. Osama bin Laden later claimed that it was seeing the wreckage of tall buildings in Beirut toppled by Israel's "total war" tactics that inspired him to destroy American buildings like the Twin Towers.
In this war, Israel tried to install a group of Christian Fascists called the Phalange in power over Lebanon. This failed when the new Phalangist ruler was assassinated. As a reprisal, the Phalange perpetrated, with Israeli connivance, the massacre of hundreds (perhaps thousands) of Palestinian refugees and Lebanese Shiites. (See Murray Rothbard's moving contemporary coverage of the atrocity.)
Israel's 1982 war succeeded in driving the PLO out of Lebanon, although not in destroying it. And of course hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees still linger in Lebanon's camps, yearning for their right of return: a fact that cannot have escaped Israel's notice.
The Lebanese Shiites were either ambivalent or welcoming toward being rid of the PLO. But Israel rapidly squandered whatever patience the Shiites had for it by brutally occupying southern Lebanon for years. This led to the creation of Hezbollah, a Shiite militia not particularly concerned with the plight of the Sunni Palestinian refugees, but staunchly dedicated to driving Israel and its proxies (the SLA) completely out of Lebanon.
Aided by Syria and Iran, though not nearly to the extent Israel would have us believe, Hezbollah became the chief defensive force directly frustrating Israel's efforts to dominate and exploit its northern neighbor. In 1993 and again in 1996 (the year of "A Clean Break"), Israel launched still more major military operations in Lebanon, chiefly against Hezbollah, but also bombing Lebanon's general population and infrastructure, trying to use terrorism to motivate the people and the central government to crack down on Hezbollah.
This is the context of "A Clean Break": Israel's obsession with crushing Hezbollah and dominating Lebanon, even if it means turning most of the Middle East upside down (regime changing Syria, Iran, and Iraq) to do it.
9/11 paved the way for realizing the Clean Break, using the United States as a gigantic proxy, thanks to the Israel Lobby's massive influence in Congress and the neocons' newly won dominance in the Bush Administration.
Much to their chagrin, however, its first phase (the Iraq War) did not turn out so well for the Clean Breakers. The blundering American grunts ended up installing the most vehemently pro-Iran Shiite faction in power in Baghdad, and now Iranian troops are even stationed and fighting inside Iraq. Oops. And as it turns out, Chalabi may have been an Iranian agent all along. (But don't worry, Mr. Perle, I'm sure he'll eventually come through with that pipeline.)
This disastrous outcome has given both Israel and Saudi Arabia nightmares about an emerging "Shia Crescent" arcing from Iran through Iraq into Syria. And now the new Shiite "star" in Yemen completes this menacing "Star and Crescent" picture. The fears of the Sunni Saudis are partially based on sectarianism. But what Israel sees in this picture is a huge potential regional support network for its nemesis Hezbollah.
Israel would have none of it. In 2006, it launched its second full scale war in Lebanon, only to be driven back once again by that damned Hezbollah. It was time to start thinking big and regional again. As mentioned above, the Bush war on Iran didn't pan out. (This was largely because the CIA got its revenge on the neocons by releasing a report stating plainly that Iran was not anything close to a nuclear threat.) So instead the neocons and the Saudis drew the US into what Seymour Hersh called "the Redirection" in 2007, which involved clandestine "dirty war" support for Sunni jihadists to counter Iran, Syria, and Hezbollah.
When the 2011 Arab Spring wave of popular uprisings spread to Syria, the Redirection was put into overdrive. The subsequent US-led dirty war discussed above had the added bonus of drawing Hezbollah into the bloody quagmire to try to save Assad, whose regime now finally seems on the verge of collapse.
The Clean Break is back, baby! Assad is going, Saddam is gone, and who knows: the Ayatollah may never get his nuclear deal anyway. But most importantly for "securing the realm," Hezbollah is on the ropes.
Comment: All that has changed since Russia joined with Syria to keep Assad in power.
And so what if the Clean Break was rather messy and broke so many bodies and buildings along the way? Maybe it's like what Lenin said about omelets and eggs: you just can't make a Clean Break without breaking a few million Arabs and a few thousand Americans. And what about all those fanatics now running rampant throughout large swaths of the world thanks to the Clean Break wars, mass-executing Muslim "apostates" and Christian "infidels" and carrying out terrorist attacks on westerners? Again, the Clean Breakers must remind themselves, keep your eye on the omelet and forget the eggs.
Well, dear reader, you and I are the eggs. And if we don't want to see our world broken any further by the imperial clique of murderers in Washington for the sake of the petty regional ambitions of a tiny clique of murderers in Tel Aviv, we must insist on American politics making a clean break from the neocons, and US foreign policy making a clean break from Israel.
See Also:
An obscure anniversary, or once again about Japanese militarism
Rare Sassanid-era inscription condemning break of promise discovered in southern Iran
Ancient temple ruins discovered in Andes shed light on lost society
Best of the Web: CIA officer George Joannides monitored Oswald before and after JFK assassination, new records reveal
Amen! Right-on! Magnifico! ...Par excellance! On the money! Over-the-target! Red-pilling! Brilliant!
https://www.globalresearch.ca/usa-israel-ripe-regime-change/5895079
republished in Global Research.ca
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