The images could not be more pleasing to the head of the Kremlin. Massive marches with Palestinian flags in Europe. North American universities resemble the Sorbonne of the French May 1968, with students marching and setting up barricades to demand the White House stop the Israeli offensive in the Gaza Strip. And massive demonstrations in Arab countries, pressuring their governments to attack Israel.
Added to this is Erdogan’s attack against Israel, with speeches justifying the massacre of Jewish civilians perpetrated by Hamas on Saturday, October 7, causing the earthquake generated by the conflict in Gaza to shake NATO, of which Turkey is a member. powerful and of very high strategic value.
Ukraine has disappeared from screens and newspaper headlines since Hamas launched a bloody pogrom in southern Israel, sparking the conflict that overshadowed the war unleashed by the Russian invasion of its Slavic neighbor.
Convulsion in northwestern societies, Turkish shake-up in the Atlantic alliance and danger in the Middle East of an escalation of the conflict of such magnitude that it forces the United States to allocate part of its military energies on the eastern coast of the Mediterranean.
The war between Israelis and the terrorist organizations Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad and Hezbollah is so functional to Vladimir Putin’s plans and urgencies that his shadow is projected over that conflict.
Why is it logical to suspect that not only Iran, but also Russia is behind the war taking place in Gaza, collaborating imperceptibly with Hamas? There are many reasons.
One of them is, precisely, the functionality that this conflict has for the expansionist war that Russia is waging in Ukraine.
The margins of expansion of the conflict that is developing in the Gaza Strip and growing on the border between Israel, Lebanon and Syria are so great that the United States was forced to provide strong support in arms to Israel, bifurcating from this way the massive support it gives to Ukraine in terms of weapons and ammunition.
In this way, the war that Hamas triggered with a bloody display of cruelty in southern Israel may reduce the supply of weapons with which the Western powers support Ukraine’s resistance to the invading army.
The war in Ukraine has been bogged down for months in a situation that, ultimately, is functional for the Russian forces that are managing to contain the Ukrainian offensives in the East and South.
If the Western supply of weapons and ammunition to the Ukrainian army declines, because the conflict in Israel absorbs part of that military assistance, Kiev’s difficulties in recovering territories occupied by the Russians will grow exponentially, forcing Volodymyr Zelensky to enter into a negotiation that will enlarge the map of Russia.
That reason could have converged with another: the bond that Russia and the Islamic Republic of Iran have been cultivating for years. That link reversed the enmity between the Soviet Union, an officially atheist Marxist state, and the Islamist revolution with which Ayatollah Ruholla Khomeini created a religious state in the country that the despotic Shah of Persia had attempted to Westernize.
As Hafez al Assad’s rise to power in Syria involved a secular regime that confronted Islamist organizations such as the Muslim Brotherhood, whose rebellion in the city of Hama he crushed with massive bombings, Damascus sought to get closer to Moscow by granting the USSR a military base. in Latakia in 1970.
To defend this military base that Russia inherited from the Soviet era, Putin sent military forces and the Wagner Group to fight against the enemy militias of the Syrian Alawite regime, during the civil war.
As his regime is based on Syria’s Alawite minority, overwhelmingly smaller than the majority Sunni community, based on some features of his ethnicity Hafez al Assad had proposed that Alawism was one of the branches of Shiism.
In this way he sought the support of the important Shiite community in Lebanon and the only Shiite regime in the Muslim world: that of the Iranian ayatollahs.
Bashar al Assad continues his father’s course. Syria’s current autocrat has been approaching Iran for years to strengthen alliances against his majority Sunni enemies. That is why Russia’s entry into the civil war, defending the Alawite regime so that it does not disappear, and can even reconquer territory that it had lost at the beginning of the conflict, turned Bashar al Assad into a bridge of rapprochement between Moscow and Tehran, because in In the Syrian conflict, both were on the same side.
This relationship showed its strength since the beginning of the invasion of Ukraine, since, since then, Iran has been supplying explosive drones and other weapons to the Russian army.
If Iran helps Russia in its war against Ukraine, why wouldn’t Russia help Iran in the war it is waging against Israel, so far indirectly through Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad in Gaza, and Hezbollah and pro-militias? -Iranians in Lebanon and Syria?
One of the contributions that the Russian president would be making to the Arab arms of Iran that are confronting Israel is the experience and capacity for action of the squads of hackers and trolls with which the Kremlin has interfered in Western electoral processes and in powerful social media campaigns by NATO powers.
The massive demonstrations that are shaking North American universities and European cities, although they are explained by the solidarity awakened by that undoubted victim of the conflict that is the civilian inhabitants of Gaza, demonstrate the amplifying effect of support and repudiation that the cyber squad campaigns have. Russians.
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