(Politico) Ben Judah - From Majdal al-Shams in the Golan Heights, the Israeli military watches over Syria. But there is no more Syria here: every village is for itself; some are starving, or cut off, and all are armed, run by the most violent who live among them, pledging often-notional allegiance to the warlords who can protect them. The villages loyal to Assad must more and more raise their own militias to defend themselves. What Israeli officials see replacing the states of the Middle East is an ethnic patchwork where the Jewish state is surrounded by Shiite, Druze, Sunni, and Kurdish enclave-states and they are no longer the only vulnerable ethnic-outsider. What was once considered a flight of fancy of 1948 war-hero Yigal Allon, that Israel needed to see the birth of Druze and Kurdish states to break the Arab hegemony in the Levant, is fast becoming a reality.
2015-06-18 00:00:00Full ArticleBACK Visit the Daily Alert Archive