Hezbollah: Israel’s Excuse for Stealing the Golan Heights

Now that Israel is getting a lot of heat for its decision to put finishing touches on the wholesale theft of Syria’s Golan Heights, Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu has launched a new PR campaign. 

Netanyahu claims arch-enemy Hezbollah is preparing to use the Golan to attack Israel. In order to get the attention of the American people—it already has the full attention of the US government—and make excuses ahead of the plan to make annexation final, Netanyahu said the leader of the Hezbollah group has killed Americans and now is set on killing Israelis. 

Reuters reports:

Israel on Wednesday accused a suspected Lebanese Hezbollah operative [Ali Mussa Daqduq] who was previously held in Iraq over the killing of five U.S. military personnel of now setting up a Syrian guerrilla network for cross-border attacks on Israeli targets.

The Israeli foreign minister connected this alleged plot by Iran and Hezbollah directly to the push to have the US officially recognize the annexation. He said it would be “an appropriate” response to what he described as increased Hezbollah activity on the Golan.

Israel’s IDF said Daqduq is the “mastermind” behind the plan. The allegation is “based on what it described as previously classified intelligence,” according to the Reuters report. 

The claim Daqduq is linked to Hezbollah comes from US intelligence sources. British forces captured Daqduq in Iraq where he was assisting the resistance to occupation. In 2008 The New York Times, a dependable source for government narratives, reported Iran had trained Hezbollah operatives to kill US troops. 

Militants from the Lebanese group Hezbollah have been training Iraqi militia fighters at a camp near Tehran, according to American interrogation reports that the United States has supplied to the Iraqi government.

This claim was extracted from Shia detainees during “enhanced interrogation”—doublespeak for torture—by the US military, thus the validity of the accusations remain in question, not that we should expect The New York Times to make note of it. 

The United States had handed Daqduq over to Baghdad in 2011 after failing to secure a custody deal ahead of the U.S. military’s [phantom] withdrawal from Iraq. Washington said it had received Baghdad’s assurances Daqduq would be prosecuted, but he was later cleared by an Iraqi court and repatriated to Lebanon. 

The US produced a long laundry list of crimes he was said to have committed and this was used to persaude the Iraqi government to turn him over to the US and face a military tribunal.

Iraq had found there wasn’t sufficient evidence to convict Daqduq and he was released “despite the entreaties of the Obama administration,” the Times reported in November 2012. 

As pressure mounts in Congress to have the United States officially recognize and condone the theft of Syrian territory, Israel has decided to resurrect the specter of Ali Mussa Daqduq and his connection to Hezbollah. 

Bibi’s Twitter performance will further distract from corruption charges leveled against him. It will also bolster the arguments of neocons that Iran and Hezbollah are not only a threat to Israel, but also to the national security of the United States. Both are intricately entwined. 

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This article was originally published on the author’s blog site: Another Day in the Empire.

Kurt Nimmo is a frequent contributor to Global Research.


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Articles by: Kurt Nimmo

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