The jihad against Israel: Muslim Brotherhood seizes the spear from Iran

Readers may recall a two-part essay in Murtadd to Human from two months ago, discussing what we see as the more appropriate targets for Israel to hit, given that she is facing jihad, a religious war, rather than a war between states. Keep this in mind for the discussion that follows.

Astute readers will have noticed that this website questions the power of the international relations/geopolitics/peace studies paradigm to explain events in the world in general, but especially developments in the Middle East, and that it is a most unsuitable basis from which to develop responses to jihad. The jihad against Israel, that this paradigm has no mechanism for recognising, let alone analysing, brings its ineffectiveness into sharp focus. Let us call it by its standard designation, the nation-state paradigm.

Hezbollah, as far as the nation-state paradigm is able to make sense of it, is an “Iranian proxy,” because Iran is a state over there while Hezbollah is a "non-state actor" inside another state over here. When the Israeli pagers exploded on 17 September, severely crippling Hezbollah, nation-state pundits thought themselves super-sleuths for wondering out loud what the Iranian ambassador was doing with a Hezbollah pager. That very question distills to its essence the impotence of the nation-state paradigm.

The Islamic Republic of Iran might formally be a nation-state, but ideologically and practically, it is nothing of the kind. It is an imamate, the Shi’a version of a caliphate. In Islamic conception, there is no such thing as a nation-state. A caliphate/imamate, of course, at any one time encompasses a given geographic extent, but its jurisdiction is not determined by its geographic extent. Rather, its jurisdiction extends over all Muslims, wherever they may be, even if throughout history there have been quarrels over which caliphate/imamate a Muslim ruler pledges allegiance to and puts his followers at the disposal of for the purposes of jihad. An Islamic state, therefore, does not recognise itself as a nation-state and will not operate according to what the nation-state paradigm expects of a nation state.

Western people were outraged when Ayatollah Khomeini issued a death fatwa against the British novelist Salman Rushdie. To Muslims around the world, Khomeini’s fatwa showed willingness to protect the Muslims and validated his claim to leadership of the ummah, the world collectivity of Muslims. Hezbollah is not a "proxy", but as integral to the executive organs of the Islamic Republic as its Ministry of Finance. The Iranian ambassador to Lebanon was 100 percent entitled to have a Hezbollah pager, indeed, it would have been a dereliction of duty for him to not have one. In short, rivalry between nation-states is not the only force driving world affairs, and in the Middle East, it is far from being even the main force.

The ascent of the Shi’a-led jihad had filled the vacuum created by the disarray in its Sunni counterpart, such as the hounding of the Muslim Brotherhood out of a number of Sunni states seeking to extricate their societies from the stranglehold of Islam, or just to avoid trouble, the internecine struggles within the heterodox Sunni-led jihad (not only against Israel, but globally), and the internecine struggles within the Muslim Brotherhood itself.

The Muslim Brotherhood, founded in 1928, four years after the abolition of the Ottoman Caliphate, conceives of itself as the caliphate-in-waiting, and as such presumes itself the leader of the ummah and so of all jihad, a status that remained unchallenged until the establishment of the Islamic Republic of Iran in 1979. Within a decade it set in motion its plans to topple the Muslim Brotherhood from leadership of the ummah and so also jihad, which it was well on its way to accomplishing by 7 October 2023, by which time the Muslim Brotherhood was run as two rival factions based in London and Ankara, respectively.

The Islamic Republic of Iran just over a year later acceding to its principal military force, Hezbollah, signing a truce with Israel through its real proxy, the Lebanese government, was an unambiguous sign to the Muslim Brotherhood in Turkey that the Shi’a were in no position to resist their retaking the leadership of the global jihad. They had an army ready just across the border in northwestern Syria and had to act immediately before any rival Sunni jihad army, also in Syria, did it. That the Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad happened to be out of the country at the time made the opportunity too good to miss.

As far as the nation-state paradigm is concerned, “Turkish-backed rebels” took advantage of Assad’s absence from the country and the weakness of Syrian government forces, now without Hezbollah and with only minimal Russian support, to take over the country by executing a thunder run down the road to Damascus—come on, we avoided the word “epiphany”.

The Muslim Brotherhood is both seizing the opportunity to regain the leadership of jihad and simultaneously rearranging the Syrian theatre of war so they, rather than a rival jihad organisation, end up confronting Israeli forces, thereby both reaping the prestige and solidifying their claim to jihad leadership, with the entire Turkish military behind them. If Israeli military strategists are not doing so already, they would be prudent to take a very careful look at that nuclear plant so neatly tucked away behind the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus. And there we were all thinking that Turkish hostility during the recent Eastern Mediterranean gas crisis was about gas.

The Muslim Brotherhood is not the only party to the conflict suddenly finding itself landed with an extraordinary opportunity. A month ago, this website published “Extraordinary opportunities call for extraordinary acts. Everything else is squander,” in which we examine the historic possibilities opened up for Israel by the enfeeblement of Hezbollah/Iran combined with the re-election of Donald Trump to the US Presidency. Well, that extraordinary opportunity has just become extraordinarily extraordinary.

Whatever strengths the Biden administration wielded in order to threaten Israel with a damaging UN resolution before it leaves office is fast crumbling under the weight of ghosts coming back to haunt it, not least of which is the Biden family’s corruption. Joe Biden pardoning his son, and whatever the legal and constitutional ins and outs of the matter, that was the last straw for many. More and more of the Biden officials’ energies are now channelled into saving themselves from an incoming administration vocal and explicit about coming after them. It’s going to be a long six weeks to 20 January, during which Israel will become an increasingly irritating distraction for the Biden administration and the Obama deep state. There is no reason for Israel to any longer pay any heed to the current US administration, and not a moment too soon.

If the Muslim Brotherhood forces seize Damascus, Israel will have something akin to ISIS right on her northern and eastern borders, because those forces will overrun Jordan. Their aim is not to take either Syria or Jordan; their aim is to take Israel. Building up defences in the Golan Heights is a waste of resources and especially time. This enemy has the entire Turkish military behind it and strategic depth all the way to the Black Sea in the north and the Karakoram Range in the east. Israel has no strategic depth, none, because of an incurable urge to keep giving away their land.

Erdogan must not be dismissed as a fantasist dreaming of neo-Ottoman glory. He must be taken very seriously as the power behind what the nation-state analysts can only call “rebels”. Erdogan is reported to have said the following: “We called [Syrian President Bashar al-]Assad. We said, let's determine the future of Syria together. We did not receive a positive response.” Recep Tayyeb Erdogan takes it as a given that his territory extends all the way to the Israeli border, at least for now. He speaks with the arrogance of a man at the head of the ummah’s army, and he is. The only question is, who else can he mobilise?

Erdogan also needs to break through from Syria to the Mediterranean, so that Turkish territorial waters can extend all the way to the Israeli maritime border. And guess what, the previous Israeli government already made that a whole lot easier when it rushed to hand over Israeli territorial waters to Hezbollah. South Lebanon is a vacuum that Israel, even to save herself, will not fill. The Muslim Brotherhood forces are barreling down through Syria to fill exactly that vacuum before Israel does. In what little time remains, in order to not be overwhelmed from the west, the north and the east, Israel must without delay:

1. Seize Damascus before anyone else does! To those in Israel who even now, after the year just gone by, still insist on obeying “international law”, they can relax. The Syrian state no longer exists. The way is clear. Seize Damascus, for pity's sake. When a jihad army takes control of Damascus, they will slaughter like nothing we have ever seen. Do it for those hapless people, if you cannot do it for yourselves. It is a genocide waiting to happen and you can prevent it.
2. Rescind the ceasefire, occupy south Lebanon, consolidate it with the territory seized in southwestern Syria and annex it all, including Damascus. This will also severely complicate the Muslim Brotherhood’s advance into Jordan, because they would have to send part of their forces east, away from the Mediterranean and towards the American forces, to get around the territories seized by Israel.
3. Eliminate Hezbollah wherever they remain in Lebanon and eliminate all known Hezbollah members and sympathisers in the Lebanese government, including Amal.
4. Give Lebanon back to the Christians.
5. Create an independent Druze Protectorate out of south Lebanon and southwest Syria. This will humiliate both the Shi’a and the Sunni jihad, and cause them to blame each other for the loss of not only “Muslim land”, but also this supposed “Muslim capital”.
6. Publicly declare an intention to recognise a Kurdish state. In the likely event of Iraq not surviving the current war as a unitary state, Israel, by recognising Kurdistan as a state and arming her to the teeth, would have the perfect opportunity to create a serious existential dilemma for the Turkish state, namely, nation or ummah. Israel publicly declaring such an intention now, while Turkey is on the move, would be a psychological spanner in the works that will help galvanise the Kurds to bring that state about. For Turkey, it will be a rerun of 1919-1924, only this time as nation versus restoration of the caliphate, as opposed to nation versus retention of the caliphate.
   
   Turkey prevaricating under such a dilemma will throw the Muslim Brotherhood back into the very turmoil it is now recovering from. Such a development will make it much easier for those Sunni Arab states that want to extricate themselves from Islam and move into the 21^st century to do so, and a strong and confident Israel, obviously adept at operating in the Middle East, rather than a timid Israel that can only think of defending herself while enslaved to her reputation in a world of corrupt diplomacy, is the key to that. Carpe diem!

Those who insist that it is all about states versus states are still struggling with whether to call the advancing army 'rebels' or 'Islamist rebels'.

Picture credits:

Xi Knight - Own work Vector Version created from Muslim Brotherhood Logo; ikhwanonline.com, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=121537345

Madden - own algebraic / numeric construction according to the URL http://flagspot.net/flags/ir'.html., Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=777702