In last week’s article about the bloody clashes in Syria’s Suwayda province, I wrote that Israel “undoubtedly wishes for the violence to escalate, so it may seize the opportunity to empower that faction of Syrian Druze seeking to establish a kind of Druze principality under Israeli protection” (“Syria and the Danger of Playing with Fire,” Al-Quds Al-Arabi, 15 July 2025).
It is worth recalling a long-standing idea within the Zionist movement—especially its “hawkish” wing—that the interests of the Zionist project are best served by fragmenting the Arab Mashriq through the creation of sectarian and ethnic minority-based entities. These entities, under Israeli protection, would facilitate the emergence of a regional imperial structure dominated by Israel as the region’s most powerful military force.
Though this may sound like something out of a conspiracy theory, the most important document exposing this project is far from fiction.
This document is none other than the personal journals of Moshe Sharett (1894–1965), one of the founders of the State of Israel and its second prime minister, who took office in late 1953 after David Ben-Gurion temporarily stepped down. Sharett, a known “dove” within the Zionist establishment, recorded his thoughts between 1953 and 1957 in a private diary not intended for publication. These entries were later published in Hebrew in 1979 across eight volumes.
Israeli journalist Livia Rokach, a former correspondent for Israel Radio in the 1960s who later became a fierce critic of Zionism (and who died by suicide in 1984), studied these volumes thoroughly. She translated and highlighted their most dangerous revelations in a book published in 1980 by the Association of Arab-American University Graduates (AAUG). The book’s introduction was co-authored by the late Palestinian scholar and activist Naseer Aruri (1934–2015), and Noam Chomsky also contributed a foreword.
The Sharett diaries reveal extensive discussions among Israeli political elites about plans to occupy southern Syria, establish a Maronite state in Lebanon, separate Gaza from Egyptian control (prior to its occupation in 1967), and expel Palestinian refugees from territories captured in 1948—starting with the deportation of Gaza’s refugees into Egypt.
In 1982, the AAUG also published an English translation of another revealing Zionist document, translated and annotated by Israel Shahak (1933–2001), a Holocaust survivor, professor of chemistry at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and one of the most prominent Jewish critics of Zionism. Shahak also led the Israeli League for Human and Civil Rights.
This document, published in February 1982 in a Zionist magazine, later became known as the “Yinon Plan,” after its author, Oded Yinon, a senior official at Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs who briefly served as an advisor to Ariel Sharon. At the time, Sharon was Israel’s Minister of Defence and oversaw the 1982 invasion of Lebanon under the right-wing Menachem Begin government.
Yinon’s article, titled “A Strategy for Israel in the 1980s,” outlined a vision that included the creation of a Coptic state in Egypt, part of a plan to fragment Egypt—and by extension, Sudan and Libya—along sectarian lines. It also called for the partitioning of Lebanon, Syria, and Iraq into ethnic and sectarian mini-states (including a proposed Druze state linked to the Golan Heights), and suggested that Palestinians should be granted control over Jordan, thereby facilitating the mass transfer of Palestinians from the West Bank to the East Bank.
Although the Zionist project to fragment the region faded from public discourse in later decades—mainly due to U.S. policy favouring the post-colonial borders drawn after the fall of the Ottoman Empire—some American strategists did support partitioning Iraq during the U.S. occupation. However, the sharp rightward shift in both Israeli society and governance under Benjamin Netanyahu’s current leadership has resurrected and reinvigorated this Zionist fragmentation agenda.
Netanyahu’s government seized upon the events of 7 October 2023—the day of Hamas’s “Al-Aqsa Flood” operation—to launch not only a genocidal war against the people of Gaza, but also a broader campaign targeting Palestinians across all territories, as well as escalating threats toward Lebanon, Syria, and Yemen—all countries that have experienced or are experiencing sectarian civil wars.
Not to mention Iraq, which, though not yet subject to direct Israeli aggression, was already dismantled by the United States beginning in 1991 and then rebuilt post-2003 under a “divide-and-rule” sectarian framework. Similarly, Libya, Sudan, and Yemen have all undergone de facto partition.
Today, the conditions for implementing the Zionist vision of fragmentation are more favourable than ever, especially in the three Arab countries geographically closest to Israel: Lebanon, Syria, and Iraq.
Israel’s current behaviour toward Syria and Lebanon fits squarely within this strategy. Yet there is a growing contradiction between this Zionist ambition and the interests of powerful Arab states allied with Washington, particularly the wealthy Gulf monarchies, as well as Turkey, all of whom oppose such fragmentation.
This tension has reportedly reached its peak, and is said to be one of the key reasons for Donald Trump’s administration’s frustration with Israel’s recent actions in Syria.
