Published on February 28th, 2015 | http://www.lobelog.com/israel-working-with-al-qaeda/#more-28181

Israel Working With Al-Qaeda?

by Jim Lobe
When Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu addresses the Joint Session of Congress here next week, will any of those in attendance muster the courage to ask him whether Israel is supporting al-Qaeda? None other than Bill Kristol’s Weekly Standard strongly suggests that it is.
I know: it’s a rather shocking thing to suggest. And, thus far, LobeLog has only recently alluded to such support via the contributions in the past month (here and here) of Aurelie Daher, an expert on Hezbollah. Her analyses focused on the possible emergence of a second front in the confrontation between Hezbollah (with Iran) and Israel along the occupied Golan Heights on the Syrian side of the border, which has been controlled by anti-government forces for well over a year. And those rebel forces have been increasingly dominated by Jabhat al-Nusra, as noted by Aurelie.
Now, in the March 2 edition of The Weekly Standard, Thomas Joscelyn, a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), reminded us that al-Nusra is “an official branch of al-Qaeda and openly loyal to al-Qaeda emir Ayman al Zawahiri.” Moreover, Joscelyn recalled that in their initial forays against the Islamic State (ISIS or IS) in Syria last September, U.S. warplanes also attacked members of the so-called “Khorasan” Group, which was allegedly planning attacks against the United States itself, as well as other western targets. This Group, Joscelyn stressed, “is not a separate entity, but instead “deeply embedded with the Nusra Front.” In other words, there seems to be no question that al-Nusra is indeed al-Qaeda, at least insofar as the FDD and The Weekly Standard are concerned. And there is also no question that al-Qaeda has been very interested in attacking the “far enemy,” including the United States and Western Europe, for quite some time.
Of course, Joscelyn’s article didn’t address the relationship between Israel and al-Nusra. As the title suggests—“Doomed Diplomacy: There’s No Way Iran Will Ever Help Fight Al Qaeda”— it focused almost entirely on recapping all past U.S. government allegations regarding Iran’s alleged “sponsorship” of al-Qaeda going back many years. (Joscelyn just published a couple of new allegations — “New Docs Reveal Osama bin Laden’s Secret Ties With Iran” — Friday on the Standard’s blog that actually suggest a much rockier relationship than “Doomed Diplomacy.”) You can judge the merits of his case yourself, although I would also encourage you to take a look at a less tendentious analysis that Matt Duss published for the U.S. Institute of Peace, as well as a shorter piece by occasional LobeLog contributor, Barbara Slavin, for Al-Monitor.
But, while Joscelyn didn’t address the tie between Israel and al-Qaeda/Nusra, another article appearing in the same Weekly Standard edition— “Friend and Foe in Syria: The Enemy of My Enemy Is My Enemy’s Enemy”—by hard-line neoconservative Lee Smith quite remarkably did. The article is a compelling one: not only because it concludes that Israel is indeed colluding with al-Qaeda’s Syrian affiliate, but also because it makes abundantly clear that, in Smith’s words, the United States and Israel have reached “strategic divergence” across the Middle East. Stated another way, U.S. and Israeli interests in Syria and elsewhere are no longer the same (if they ever were).