Russia Dodged A Bullet By Wisely Choosing Not To Ally With The Now-Defeated Resistance Axis

Andrew Korybko 

Putin made the right choice, which was always driven by his rational calculation of what was in Russia’s objective interests as a state, not due to “Zionist influence” like some in the Alt-Media Community now ridiculously claim to defame him after being mad that he didn’t lift a finger to save the Resistance

The Iranian-led Resistance Axis has been defeated by Israel. Hamas’ terrorist attack on 7 October 2023 prompted Israel’s collective punishment of the Palestinians in Gaza, which set into motion a series of conflicts that expanded to Lebanon and Syria. Israel has also bombed Yemen and Iran. Hamas’ and Hezbollah’s leaderships were destroyed, leading to a ceasefire in Lebanon, while the Assad government was just overthrown by a Turkish-backed terrorist blitz that severed Iran’s military logistics to Hezbollah.

These outcomes were already surprising enough for those who believed the late Nasrallah’s claim that “Israel is weaker than a spider web”, but many were shocked that they occurred without Russia lifting a finger to save the Resistance, with whom they thought that it had allied against Israel long ago. That second-mentioned false notion will go down in infamy as one of the most successful psy-ops ever conducted against the Alt-Media Community (AMC), and ironically enough, by its own top influencers.

It was explained in early October “Why False Perceptions About Russian Policy Towards Israel Continue To Proliferate”, which readers should review for more detail, but which can be summarized as top AMC influencers telling their audience what they thought they wanted to hear for self-interested reasons. These include generating clout, pushing their ideology, and/or soliciting donations from well-intentioned but naïve members of their audience depending on the personality involved.

The preceding analysis also lists five related ones about Russian policy towards Israel since the start of the West Asian Wars, including this one “Clarifying Lavrov’s Comparison Of The Latest Israeli-Hamas War To Russia’s Special Operation”, which itself links to several dozen others. All of them also reference this May 2018 report about “President Putin On Israel: Quotes From The Kremlin Website (2000-2018)”. All of these materials rely on official and authoritative Russian sources to arrive at their conclusions.

They prove that Putin is a proud lifelong philo-Semite who never shared the Resistance’s unifying anti-Zionist ideology, instead always expressing very deep respect for Jews and the State of Israel. Accordingly, as the final decisionmaker on Russian foreign policy, he tasked his diplomats with balancing between Israel and the Resistance. To that end, Russia never took either’s side and always remained neutral in their disputes, including the West Asian Wars.

The most that he ever personally did was condemn Israel’s collective punishment of the Palestinians, but always in the same breath as condemning Hamas’ infamous terrorist attack on 7 October 2023. As for Russia, the most that it ever did was repeat the same rhetoric and occasionally condemn Israel’s strikes against the IRGC and Hezbollah in Syria, which Russia never interfered with. Not once did it try to deter or intercept them, retaliate afterwards, or give Syria the capabilities and authorization to do so either.

This was due to the deconfliction mechanism that Putin and Bibi agreed to in late September 2015 shortly before the Syrian operation. It was never confirmed for obvious diplomatic reasons, but these actions (or rather lack thereof) suggested that Putin believed that Iran’s anti-Israeli activities Syria posed a legitimate threat to Israel. For that reason, Russia always stood aside whenever Israel bombed Iran there, but Russia still sometimes complained due to Israel’s attacks formally violating international law.

It’s an objectively existing and easily verifiable fact that Russia’s opposition to Israel’s regional activities, be they in Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, or Iran, always remained strictly confined to the political realm of official statements. Not once did Russia ever threaten to unilaterally sanction Israel, let alone even remotely hint at military action against it as punishment. Russia won’t even symbolically designate Israel as an “unfriendly state”, though that’s because it doesn’t abide by US sanctions and won’t arm Ukraine.

Therein lies another fact that most in the AMC were either unaware of or in denial about and it’s that Israel isn’t the US’ puppet otherwise it would have already done those two things long ago. It’s beyond the scope of the present piece to explain this, as well as why the Biden Administration has tried to destabilize and overthrow Bibi, but this analysis here dives into the details and cites related articles. The point is that Russian-Israeli ties remain cordial and these two are far from the foes that some thought.

It therefore never made sense to imagine that Putin, who considers himself to be the consummate pragmatist, would burn the bridge that he personally invested nearly a quarter-century of his time building with Bibi between their two nations. After all, Putin boasted in 2019 that “Russians and Israelis have ties of family and friendship. This is a true common family; I can say this without exaggeration. Almost 2 million Russian speakers live in Israel. We consider Israel a Russian-speaking country.”

He was speaking before the Keren Heyesod Foundation, one of the world’s oldest Zionist lobbying organizations, during its annual conference in Moscow that year. Whenever members of the AMC were confronted with these “politically inconvenient” facts from official and authoritative sources such as the Kremlin’s own website, they spun a “5D chess master plan” conspiracy theory alleging that he was just “psyching out the Zionists”. Top influencers also aggressively “canceled” anyone who brought this up.

The end result was that these false perceptions of Russian-Israeli relations as well as Putin’s own views towards this subject continued to proliferate unchallenged through the AMC, thus leading to the impression that they were secretly allied with Iran due to their allegedly shared anti-Zionist ideals. This notion became a matter of dogma for many in the AMC and correspondingly turned into an axiom of International Relations for them. Anyone who claimed otherwise was smeared as a “Zionist”.

It's now known after Russia didn’t lift a finger to save the Resistance that they were never actually allies. Some of those that still can’t accept that they’ve been lied to by trusted AMC influencers who duped them for self-interested reasons (clout, ideology, and/or soliciting donations) now speculate that Russia “betrayed” the Resistance and “sold out to the Zionists” even though Russia was never on either’s side. If they don’t soon shake off their cognitive dissonance, they’ll detach themselves further from reality.

In retrospect, Russia dodged a bullet by wisely choosing not to ally with the now-defeated Resistance Axis since it would have needlessly ruined its relations with Israel, the undisputable victor of the West Asian Wars. Putin made the right choice, which was always driven by his rational calculation of what was in Russia’s objective interests as a state, not due to “Zionist influence” like some in the AMC now ridiculously claim to defame him after being mad that he didn’t lift a finger to save the Resistance.

The takeaways from this are several: 1) Putin and his representatives don’t play “5D chess”, they always say what they truly mean; 2) Russia isn’t anti-Israel nor anti-Zionist, but it also isn’t anti-Iran nor anti-Resistance either; 3) the AMC is full of charlatans who, for self-interested reasons, tell their audience whatever they think they want to hear; 4) their audience should thus hold them to account for lying about Russian-Israeli and Russian-Resistance relations; 5) and the AMC requires urgent reform. 

Andrew Korybko, Substack, December 12, 2024

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