https://www.jns.org/opinion/richard-kemp/political-warfare-against-israel-led-by-russia-and-china

Political warfare against Israel, led by Russia and China

U.S. intelligence assessments have determined that the Gaza conflict provides uniquely productive conditions for foreign-influence operations in the West.

Richard Kemp

Support for Zionism is an American patriotic duty. It should be the unwavering policy of all political parties that wish to advance the interests of the United States. Not for historic, sentimental or religious reasons, but because, whether you like Jews and the Jewish state or not, Israel is an indispensable component of U.S. national security.

Before setting out what that means, I will offer proof that it is true. That proof is the importance America’s adversaries attach to undermining U.S. backing for Israel, especially China and Russia, and the massive efforts they make to bring it about.

Both countries (as well as Iran, Qatar and Turkey) have been running extensive and highly effective political warfare campaigns against the State of Israel.

The former Soviet Union’s campaign, led by the KGB, goes all the way back to the 1960s and was called “Operation SIG.” Its documented purpose was to undermine U.S. and British interests in the Middle East by turning a religious war by the Arabs against the Jews into a war of national liberation, a Soviet specialization for destabilization operations. They rebranded the Arabs in the land as the “Palestinian people,” wrote the Palestinian National Charter, and took control of the Palestine Liberation Organization to attack Israel.

It was in Moscow that the now familiar fabrications against Israel of illegal occupation, land theft, apartheid, genocide and all the rest were first dreamt up.

The West is the target, the Jewish state is the weapon, and its strategic indispensability to the United States is the motive.

China’s political warfare campaign began more recently and built upon the Soviet foundations. Both the U.S. Department of Justice and the U.S. House of Representatives’ Ways and Means Committee are currently investigating Beijing’s funding of widespread anti-Israel protests in America and elsewhere, including Europe and the United Kingdom.

Some of the funding has reportedly been provided covertly to Code Pink: Women for Peace, a hard-left American-based “feminist” protest group that has organized hundreds of anti-Israel and pro-Hamas marches both before and since the Hamas-led massacre in Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, has suggested that Beijing has pumped hundreds of millions of dollars into such propaganda and indoctrination.

Actions in the United Kingdom have included protests against military bases; British authorities are now also investigating subversive Chinese involvement.

This modus operandi fits established Chinese methodology in what they call “unrestricted warfare” in support of their strategic interests. Previous U.S. intelligence assessments have determined that the Gaza conflict provides uniquely productive conditions for foreign-influence operations in the West, especially by China, Russia and Iran. There is no doubt that all three of these countries have worked to amplify anti-Israel narratives on an industrial scale. This has been a major factor in the post-Oct. 7 orgy of Jew hate in the media and social media, on the streets, at university campuses and international organizations.

Make no mistake: This is not driven by grassroots humanitarian anger, as many would like to believe. It is the result of a carefully orchestrated foreign state campaign of manipulation and sedition, and it is all built on lies and distortion of the truth.

What’s the purpose of such massive investment, especially by China and Russia? As with the “SIG,” it is intended to subvert, divide, destabilize and damage the United States and its allies. The West is the target, Israel the weapon and its strategic indispensability to America the motive.

What about that strategic indispensability?

Israel’s defensive activities preserve multiple billions of dollars Washington would otherwise be obliged to spend; relieve the United States of the burden of having to maintain far greater combat forces and intelligence resources in the Middle East, also at vast expense; and save many American soldiers’ lives.

Former Israeli ambassador Yoram Ettinger, a specialist in this area, characterizes Israel as America’s “leading force multiplier.” He calculates that the $3.8 billion annual contribution to Israel’s defense yields an unprecedented annual return on investment of well over 1,000%.

The Israeli military battle tests advanced American weapons systems supplied to it, such as the F-35 combat plane, enabling enhancements and development that improve U.S. global military capabilities without an American plane in the air, boot on the ground or shot fired. That also goes for the evolution and refinement of tactical and operational techniques and procedures. I met several American military commanders and pilots in Israel during the war with Iran this year. All of them explained how much benefit they gained from IDF experience and hard-earned battlefield capability.

Add to that the immense advantages to the U.S. economy accrued through foreign-weapons sales as a result of Israeli endorsement of combat equipment. That applies to both public and private sector revenues and to significant employment generation from the boosts to arms sales. I should make the point that Israel’s battle testing is not the result of unprovoked aggression on its part. Israel has never started a war but has too often had to defend its people against attacks on them.

Israeli intelligence is just as much a multiplier of American capabilities as battle tactics and equipment development. Jerusalem provides Washington with vital information on enemy weapons and technology capabilities, including nuclear proliferation and cyberwar—whether through combat, capture or covert exploitation—enhancing American countermeasures. Israel, with unrivaled coverage of international jihadists, also shares vital pre-emptive intelligence that has saved many American lives at home and around the world.

Ettinger quotes Gen. George Keegan, former chief of U.S. Air Force Intelligence, who said: “I could not have procured the intelligence [received from Israel] with five CIAs.” It’s worth noting that one CIA costs about $15 billion per year, so if he’s anywhere near right, intelligence alone represents a massive return on that $3.8 billion annual investment.

It goes back to the Cold War

No other ally comes anywhere near approaching the value that Israel provides to America and the West’s collective defense in intelligence or any of the other areas mentioned. Nor have any of them worked so assiduously to ensure American security interests are taken care of as well as their own. Alongside the indirect benefit accrued to U.S. allies from all of this, many of these countries gain substantial direct advantage. Germany, for example, is increasingly dependent on Israeli air-defense systems. At the beginning of September, its navy successfully test-fired Israel’s LORA ballistic missile from a frigate in the North Atlantic. The head of the German navy said the test “made naval history,” giving its warships a new long-range precision-strike capability.

Beyond America’s enemies’ determination to deny the West this remarkable advantage lies a separate but related motivation to put their crosshairs on Israel. Don’t make the mistake of thinking, as they wish you to think, that this is anything to do with Israeli “settlements,” “war crimes” or Palestinian rights. None of those are of any concern to China or Russia.

In any case, they know it’s all lies. Just as much as some of Israel’s supposed “critical friends” know it, yet nonetheless intentionally promote such calumnies to appease Israel-hating elements among their own electorates. Instead, the focus of these despots is on Israel, which decisively constrains their own ambitions in the Middle East. That goes back to the Cold War, especially the severe strategic damage inflicted on the USSR during Israel’s defensive campaigns.

But note how Israel’s actions have led to the hasty withdrawal of Russian forces from Syria since the fall of the longtime regime of Bashar Assad in December 2024. Israel has humiliated and seriously degraded Iran, a client of China, and easily neutralized Chinese and Russian air defenses, ballistic missiles and combat planes there. Similar harm has been done to air defenses in Syria, Iraq and Houthi-controlled Yemen.

The conflict exposed the limits of Chinese strategic influence in Iran, including its failed attempts to halt attacks on Gulf states and restore freedom of navigation in the Strait of Hormuz, even to the extent of being unable to secure transit for its own shipping. This has severe adverse consequences for China’s strategic aspirations in the region, not least to displace America as the Gulf’s security guarantor. Thus, Israel’s role in preventing Russian and Chinese strategic dominance in the region, both to its own benefit and America’s, has contributed markedly to the dictators’ determination to vitiate the Jewish state.

What should be at least as troubling to genuine American patriots as it is to Israelis is the growing diminution of support for Israel in the Democratic Party and the increasing divide among Republicans. To be fair, many of those who are guilty of opposing Israel are acting unwittingly, taken in by a political warfare machine that they do not comprehend. The pro-/anti-Zionist question is equally an acid test for America’s allies around the world. As in American politics, there is a direct and telling correlation between countries and international entities that genuinely support the Western democratic order, with America as its leader, and those that support Israel.

I would urge the U.S. president, now and in the future, to judge those countries and entities for their support or otherwise of America’s most important combat multiplier. And to judge particularly harshly those who actively work to harm Israel, including boycotting Israeli companies and sanctioning democratically elected politicians, which amounts to indirectly sabotaging U.S. security.

https://www.jns.org/opinion/richard-kemp/political-warfare-against-israel-led-by-russia-and-china