The days when the US and its Israeli allies could achieve direct military victories over their adversaries in West Asia are over. Instead, they have shifted to a calculated doctrine of divide and rule. As part of the ongoing regional war, the information front is where battles are shaped and ultimately won.

Since October 7, 2023, the Israeli-US alliance has demonstrated its inability to decisively win wars through direct military intervention. Even the limited gains secured by this Zionist-imperialist bloc over the past two years have relied not on battlefield success, but on a calculated mix of tactics, with propaganda at their core.

Following the disastrous and costly US invasions of nations like Iraq and Afghanistan, it started to become clear that overthrowing governments through direct military intervention was a strategy in need of replacement. Not only because of the military complexities and development of more sophisticated technology by their adversaries, but also due to the lasting impact on local populations of such wars of aggression.

After all, no matter how oppressive any given government may be, American soldiers carrying out human rights abuses, directly seizing control of territory and oil resources, and reducing cities to rubble, only breed generations of contempt. Therefore, pacifying revolutionary voices and destroying such movements requires a different approach, one that is arguably more brutal than the latter.

Disarming the Resistance

A push toward disarming Resistance groups throughout the region is currently underway. This mission includes getting rid of the arms of Hezbollah, the PMF, and Hamas, along with all the Palestinian factions.

Achieving this is a process that requires attacking a number of different pressure points. For the purpose of this article, we should focus on the cases of Hezbollah and Hamas as our primary points of reference, as they maintain stark similarities. 

Since the start of Operation Al-Aqsa Flood, the Israelis have sought to turn their military defeat into an opportunity to eliminate all the threats against them in the entire region. Not only is this something that is routinely communicated through Washington and Tel Aviv-based think tanks, but it is also clearly outlined under Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu’s pledge of “total victory” in his “seven-front war”.

In Lebanon, the operation to disarm Hezbollah only began with the terrorist pager-attack operation and infiltration that led to the assassination of its senior leadership. The next phase was to inflict blows upon Lebanese society, the civilian population, in particular, those who form Hezbollah’s base of supporters.

The ceasefire agreement was then purposely violated thousands of times, with the intention of publicly humiliating Hezbollah, but most importantly, to humiliate the people of Lebanon. Take, for example, the Israeli fighter jet flyover during the funeral of Hezbollah’s Secretary-General Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah; this was not done simply out of pettiness but served as a calculated show of force.

As a tool of war, Zionist propaganda sought to present Hezbollah as an organization that was militarily defeated and largely succeeded at creating this illusion, despite the successes of Hezbollah fighters in the ground battles to hold southern Lebanese villages during the war. In order to reinforce this idea, the constant ceasefire violations, including the kidnapping and murder of civilians, the destruction of residential areas, and even the bombing of Beirut, were carefully calibrated.

The Israeli security establishment understands full well that Hezbollah is still very much capable and intact as a fighting force, which is why they are still attacking targets they claim to belong to the group on a near-daily basis. Yet, the absence of the reassuring voice of Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah led to doubt about the group’s condition.

Overall, the result has been a diabolical Lebanese political climate under the command of a rather shameless puppet Prime Minister Nawaf Salam, who has allowed the United States to walk all over his government’s policy-making decisions, against the will of the majority of the Lebanese. 

When recently interviewed by The National, US Envoy Tom Barrack laughed at the prospect of Washington arming the Lebanese Army to defend itself from Israeli aggression, instead explicitly stating that the US arms them to “fight their own people”. 

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He also expressed the following beliefs: “So people say, well, they’re fighting over borders and boundaries. It’s not what they're fighting over. A border or a boundary is the currency of a negotiation…The end result is that somebody wants dominance, which means somebody has to submit. In that part of the world, submit, there’s no Arabic word for submit. They can’t wrap their head around submit. So eventually, prosperity is the only answer.”

One of the most valuable things about the Trump administration is that the president and many of his officials have the propensity to say the quiet part out loud. If they view people as “animalistic” or that they are not “civilized”, they say so, and this is how they view the Arab and Muslim World.

Such people are therefore deserving of being maneuvered with, under such a disrespectful understanding. Yet, they do succeed in finding many of those Arabs and Muslims that do behave as their slaves, who have inferiority complexes or just seek a pay day, thus re-enforcing the view from Washington about the way the region works: That you can tame some, but others will behave like wild beasts and refuse to be ruled, thus they must be cut down to size.

This view, adopted amongst Israeli and American policy makers alike, that the Arabs only understand the language of force, dates back over a hundred years in the mindsets of Zionists. In 1923, the leader of the Revisionist Zionist movement, Ze’ev Jabotinsky, stated that "there will only be peace when our enemies lose hope that the Jewish state won't exist."

Under this line of thinking, the Israelis created what they call their “deterrence policy”, which was another way of saying that they vowed to exact major prices on the Arab populations for daring to challenge them, demonstrating the might of their superior weaponry. It is due to this thinking that Israelis instantly decided to commit genocide and destroy all of Gaza, while then deciding to devastate Lebanon too, after the military blows they received from both. 

Yet, now, as the Israelis seek to cause divisions and stir unrest inside Lebanon, in the Gaza Strip, they have been arming ISIS-linked militant groups to carry out military operations against Hamas for them and to stir unrest by encouraging certain clans to arm themselves in order to challenge the rule of Hamas. These groups include the so-called “Popular Forces” in Rafah; the “Counterterrorism Strike Force” in Khan Younis; and the “People’s Army Northern Forces” in North Gaza.

Immediately after the Gaza ceasefire was announced, these terrorist groups began escalating their attacks against the Palestinian resistance, as well as civilians, even attempting to justify their actions by citing Daesh Fatwas that label the Resistance fighters as disbelievers.

Although alone these tactics fail to achieve their desired aims, the Israelis and Americans understand that they are playing a long game, which involves countless psychological operations against the peoples of the region.

In the case of Syria, this strategy worked exactly as they desired it to. They used Takfiri Wahhabi ideology to divide Sunni Muslims, then turned every sect against one another, while also backing ethnic minorities in order to forward their goals. The end result was the total collapse of the old Syrian regime, which was replaced by a US collaborator entity that was destined to continue dividing the nation from the moment it entered Damascus.

In Syria’s case, external military pressure was combined with a civil war that the US and its allies took control over, completely robbing the Syrian people of their ability to direct the opposition that formed and recruiting those Syrians who did to be their puppets. The US, with the help of its Gulf client regimes, spread sectarianism with the goal of weakening the foundations of what it meant to even be Syrian. Then, after both the government and controlled opposition battled it out, ending in a stalemate, the sanctions and psychological operations came into effect. 

As the former government in Damascus collapsed, the Israelis then decided to trigger a major air operation to destroy all of Syria’s strategic weapons they possibly could and seized the territory they desired, while immediately forming a line of communication with Ahmad al-Sharaa.

In Iran, the Israelis were recently revealed by Haaretz to have been behind a social media operation that employed Farsi speakers to run thousands of fake accounts, posing to be Iranian supporters of returning to power the nation's deposed former Monarchy. This campaign began in 2022, around the time of civil unrest inside Iran.

Meanwhile, BBC Persian, Voice of America Persian, and Iran International are all well-funded machines pumping out disinformation with the goal of stirring opposition to the government in Tehran. The US, Israelis, UK, and EU countries all have intelligence assets throughout Iran that are ready to act, as we saw during the 12-day war back in June.

The ultimate goal here, on all fronts, is to delegitimize all those who dare to challenge the Zionist Project. Recently, for example, Al-Hadath and Al-Arabiya, two Saudi State-funded media outlets, claimed that Hamas had agreed to disarm, which caused a string of negative reactions online among supporters of Palestinian Resistance. Yet, the so-called “Hamas source” cited clearly didn’t exist, and the story turned out to be fake.

Whether it be through the sectarian religious influencers, TV networks, and social media pages that pump out round-the-clock divisive propaganda, or through bought and paid-for political actors, the psychological war is relentless against the regional resistance. All of this is designed to make the support bases of the Resistance buckle under the pressure and begin turning on their movements.

The idea is to get enough brainwashed people to carry out actions on behalf of the Israeli-US alliance, deluding them into the belief that the Resistance laying down their weapons and accepting defeat will somehow bring prosperity. Every single time a population, or at least a considerable portion of it, submits, they get the very opposite of “stability”, “economic revival”, and the “break” that they sought. Instead, they find themselves as slaves to the Zionist agenda.