A Generation Trained to Kill on a Mission from God

“Learning while young is like carving in stone.”

Arabic Saying

As the United States continues to swat at the bees’ and wasps’ nests scattered around Middle East, regional tensions continue to rise. The biggest step was taken by Donald Trump on May 18^th of last year. Even though his most senior intelligence and military advisors informed him that Iran was in compliance with the 2015 United Nations nuclear containment accord (the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action), Donald Trump withdrew the American ratification, claiming that it was the deal was “one-sided,” “insane” and “defective to its core,” a description quite the opposite from that of the other five signatories.

He ramp-upped military aid to Saudi Arabia to support a weak, Sunni-led government in Yemen against Iran’s Shiite Houthis rebels that had led to massacres of untold thousands of innocent civilians, a collapse of infrastructure, starvation and outbreaks of deadly diseases… even as the better-armed Saudis consistently failed to restore the old regime. On March 13^th of this year, a bi-partisan resolution, condemning our continued supply to Saudi fighters in and over Yemen, easily passed the U.S. Senate. Trump threatened a veto should that resolution ever reach his desk.

Eschewing the two-state solution that had been U.S./U.N. policy for decades, Trump declared that the United States would relocate its embassy in Tel Aviv to what the U.S. declared to be the official capital of Israel; Jerusalem. On May 14^th of last year, that U.S. embassy formally opened. Only Guatemala, Honduras, Vanuatu the Czech Republic and Romania have joined the United States in accepting Jerusalem as Israel’s capital.

Despite our complaints about other nations, notably Russia, trying to influence U.S. and European elections, Trump’s commitment to his evangelical base – promoting an Israel strong enough to fulfill the Armageddon prophecy, forcing the Second Coming of Christ – appears to pushing him to be all but stumping on the campaign trail to reelect Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, whose local indictment on corruption is imminent.

In late March, at a White House press conference with Netanyahu at Trump’s side (in the final leg of the Israeli PM’s election campaign), the President announced out of thin air, for no particular reason other than to bolster Netanyahu’s credibility at a critical time, that the U.S. would now officially recognize Israel’s permanent right to make the Golan Heights (part of Syria until the 1967 War) part of its sovereign territory. That reality already existed. The statement from the White House was completely unnecessary and hardly generated the uniformly positive response even in Israel. Like so many Republican voters who actually live at or near the proposed U.S./Mexican vanity wall and oppose its construction, Israeli residents in the Golan Heights were deeply concerned with Trump’s latest bees’ nest swat.

“As far as Yoav Levy is concerned, the Golan Heights are Israeli and forever shall be. But that doesn’t mean Levy is applauding President Trump’s decision to recognize Israeli sovereignty over the land seized from Syria 52 years ago… ‘This will wake up the bear,’ said Levy, a vintner who produces $40 bottles of Cabernet Sauvignon on his Golan collective farm, Moshav Kidmat Zvi. ‘And for what?’… ‘It is provocative,’ agreed his companion Yael Pudik.

“Many of the estimated 25,000 Israeli Jews who settled in the Golan Heights — as well as some of the roughly same number of Druze Arabs living there — concur that the lush hills, tented date farms and sizable agricultural production here are better off in Israeli hands… What makes them nervous, however, was Trump’s announcement, first on Twitter and then at a news conference with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at his side, declaring the Golan Heights to be Israeli.

“Levy and Pudik noted that the 100-mile border between northeast Israel and southwest Syria has remained remarkably peaceful, despite the official rancor between the two nations. And for several years, the Israeli army has helped Syrian refugees by trucking in food and building and staffing a hospital in the demilitarized ‘no-man’s’ zone between the two countries.” Los Angeles Times, March 31^st. We’ve not done remotely what various U.S. presidents have told us, most recently Trump.

With Iraq firmly within Iran’s sphere of influence, with the Taliban having the upper hand in Afghanistan and with Trump’s order for U.S. troops to depart Syria, the defeat of ISIS may ring false for NATO allies believing that they have done much of anything to de-radicalize the Middle East. If anything, their declawing of ISIS in the face of Syrian repression and Saudi Arabia’s failed efforts in Yemen may have reinforced the remaining Islamists, ready to reconfigure… even more angry with the West. Russia is capitalizing on this fear, arming those who oppose the West regardless of the brutality of the repression

Beyond this reconfiguration, a lull in the impact of radicalization and civil war, there is a very big question about what to do with the millions of children whose core education has been under rough and brutal ISIS schooling. The April 1^st Los Angeles Times explains: “The saying [under the title above] has come to the fore as authorities begin efforts to reeducate about 25,000 school-age children being held in Al Hol, the desolate internment camp on the edge of eastern Syria for members of Islamic State’s so-called caliphate and refugees from the communities the militant group controlled in Syria and Iraq.

“With the radical group having lost the last of the land it controlled after nearly five years of warfare, authorities now face the challenge of reeducating the children of the militant fighters, most of them schooled from an early age in Islamic State’s barbaric ways… Over those years, the children were taught with textbooks that glorified the group’s fighters and their ‘conquests,’ trained to use small firearms and grenades and provided intense religious studies based on extremist interpretations of Sunni Islam. Educators must now figure out how to get through to youngsters who were systematically radicalized and militarized in all the territories held by Islamic State, which, at its zenith, controlled a full third of Syria and Iraq each.

“Moreover, these children represent a minuscule — though probably the most troublesome — portion of what have been referred to as ‘Syria’s lost generation’: the millions of schoolchildren who have lost out on some or all of their formal education during the nation’s eight-year civil war.

“The scale is staggering: 2.1 million children in Syria are out of school and an additional 1.3 million are at risk of dropping out, aid agencies say. One in 3 schools in Syria is either damaged or destroyed, and a third of those still standing have been turned into makeshift centers for the displaced or military bases.

“That, along with more than 140,000 educators having left their posts to fight or flee, swelled class sizes to 150 students per teacher in some areas of the country. In former rebel enclaves long besieged by the Syrian military, some teenagers don’t know how to write their names or even hold a pen, according to Save the Children, a nongovernmental organization focusing on children’s rights.

“Most of those who have been able to remain in school have received a mere patchwork education, the consequence of incessant fighting among myriad groups seeking control of Syria…, In their time under Islamic State, the children crowding Al Hol’s dust-swept tents were given a syllabus suffused with the militant group’s ideology, a toxic interpretation of Sunni Islamic precepts.

“They were the caliphate’s children, groomed to be the next generation of the extremists’ project; the ones who would expand Islamic State from its base covering a third of Iraq and Syria each, with about 8 million people under its rule, to ‘conquer Constantinople and Rome,’ as the group’s spokesmen often vowed.”

Israeli is and remains a vital American ally, something we must never forget. But we aren’t necessarily doing Israeli citizens any favors with our policies. Almost nothing that the Trump administration has done in the Middle East has made that region less volatile, global U.S. interests safer or defused the West as the terrorist target of choice. We have had a bumbling autocrat-wannabe, catering to the largest segment of uninformed and highly mythically-motivated in his base, place the United States, its people and its global interests in harm’s way for the sole purpose of his getting reelected. His decisions don’t help us and probably even put millions of Israelis at unnecessary risk.

              I’m Peter Dekom, and please prepare to vote in the 2020 election.