https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uRu95Fg4r70
January 21, 2009: Israel, the Jews and the Sunni-Shiite Conflict: A Symposium
Hosted by: The Hebrew University of Jerusalem
The Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of Antisemitism
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israeli_support_for_Iran_during_the_Iran%E2%80%93Iraq_war
Israeli support for Iran during Iran-Iraq war.
https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=72fADAAAQBAJ&pg=PA17&lpg=PA17#v=onepage&q&f=false
"The detested Zionist army had secretly come to the aid of the Islamic Republic in its war against Iraq. The nearly friendless Islamic Republic needed help against the Iraqi invaders. The Israelis wanted to ensured the safety of the 80,000-strong Jewish community in Iran and confound their Arab enemies. In the words of British journalists John Bulloch and Harvey Morris:
It was the Israelis who devised and manufactured the huge, lightweight polystyrene blocks which the Iranian assault forces carried with them to build instant makeshift causeways across the shallow Iraqi water defences in front of Basra; it was Israel which kept Iranian planes flying in spite of a lack of spares; and it was Israeli instructors who taught the new young Iranian commanders how to handle troops, how to move their forces about and how to exploit the openings made by the fanatically brave young volunteers who died in their thousands in the human-wave assaults. Above all, it was the Israelis who involved the Reagan administration in the Iran-Contra affair. For all the speeches of Iranian leaders, the diatribes against Israel, the denunciations at the Friday prayers, there were never less than about a 100 Israeli advisers and technicians in Iran at any time throughout the war, living in a carefully guarded and secluded camp just north of Tehran; they remained there even after the ceasefire. [157a]
https://twitter.com/cybertosser/status/788507608541958145
https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=rd-aCwAAQBAJ&pg=PT66&lpg=PT66#v=onepage&q&f=false
Lebanese Shias welcomed Israeli invasion against PLO in 1982. Page 66 of the book "The Shia Revial" by Vali Nasr.
https://www.commentarymagazine.com/uncategorized/israel-hatred-helped-ruin-syria/
2006: And though its Iranian patron made cash payments to families left homeless, Tehran’s money went primarily toward rebuilding Hezbollah’s arsenal.
So who actually cleaned up the mess left by Hezbollah’s war? “With all due respect to Tehran, most of the rebuilding efforts were shouldered by wealthy Arab states such as the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar, which donated hundreds of millions of dollars,” reporter Jack Khoury wrote in Haaretz this week. “Qatar alone donated more than $300 million and took charge of rebuilding houses in the 30 hardest-hit communities.” And those houses weren’t just rebuilt; they were made even bigger and better than before.
The Sunni Arab states didn’t shell out lavish reconstruction aid because of any fondness for Shi’ite Hezbollah or its Shi’ite Iranian patron. In fact, the Saudis openly condemned Hezbollah for starting the war. Nor were they motivated mainly by compassion, as evidenced by the cold shoulder they have given victims of the far greater devastation wrought by Syria’s civil war (the Gulf States are notorious for refusing to accept Syrian refugees).
Rather, given the Arab world’s loathing for Israel, these countries felt they simply couldn’t afford to appear unsupportive of “Israel’s victims”–especially since Hezbollah, despite starting an unnecessary war that wreaked havoc on its own population, had become an Arab hero for doing so. Consequently, they joined forces to rebuild Lebanon.
http://jcpa.org/article/shiites-sunnis-and-israel/
http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_opinion.php?id=1790
Right now, Israeli interests appear to be aligned with the Sunnis in this struggle, largely because Iran supports the Shiites' quest for power. But moving beyond the present, is it true that Israel's interests are permanently aligned with the Sunni world against the Shiites? Vali Nasr, a former U.S. official who was born in Tehran, reminds his readers of the stereotypes held in the U.S. defense establishment on the Sunni-Shiite split: He quotes a Pentagon official in the 1980s who said that the Shiites were "bloodthirsty, baby-eating monsters."
There was a political context for these clear prejudices. The U.S., at the time, was funding Afghan mujahedeen and their Sunni extremist allies who fought the Soviet army, while Lebanese Shiites had attacked the U.S. Marines in Beirut. Israel had its own version of these theories. In the 1980s, it was common among Israeli defense experts to say that only Shiites engage in suicide bombings, not Sunnis. But then came the rise of Hamas and al-Qaida, on the Sunni side, which proved – especially after the Sept. 11, 2001 terror attacks – how overly simplistic these stereotypes had been.
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The Sunni-Shiite rivalry rose to new heights with the establishment of the Safavid Empire in 1501, when Shiite Islam became the state religion of Persia, under Shah Ismail. The Shiite Safavid Empire waged wars with the Sunni Ottoman Empire and, to this day, Sunni Muslims claims that because the Shiites "stabbed the Ottomans in the back" they were never able to get beyond the gates of Vienna and conquer all of Europe in the name of Islam.
It was at this time that the Jews of Shiite Iran suffered far more than the Jews of the Sunni world, where the Ottoman Empire welcomed Jewish refugees from Spain, who had fled the Inquisition. In contrast, at this time the Shiite clergy of Iran developed the idea that Jews were a source of ritual impurity. Thus if a Jew touched a piece of fruit in the market in Tehran, it could no longer be eaten by a Shiite.
Shah Abbas (1571-1629) demanded that Hebrew books be burned; at one point he decreed that Jews convert to Islam or be put to death. He pulled back from this edict, but the idea survived in Persia. In 1839, the Jews of Mashhad were given the choice of conversion to Islam or death, and many outwardly became Muslims, while preserving their Judaism privately.
What about today? With the rise of Ayatollah Khomeini, anti-Jewish attitudes became prominent in Iran again. In his book "Islamic Government," Khomeini wrote: "We must protest and make the people aware that the Jews and their foreign backers are opposed to the very foundations of Islam and wish to establish Jewish domination throughout the world." Given his view of the Jewish people, it was not surprising that in 1979 he labeled Israel as a "cancerous growth in the Middle East," adding that "every Muslim has a duty to prepare himself for battle against Israel."
This language about Israel as a "tumor" or as a source of infection has been used by Ayatollah Khamenei and others today. Radical Iranian clerics who provide the religious indoctrination of the Revolutionary Guard, like Ayatollah Mesbah Yazdi, say that the Jews are the source of global corruption. Ayatollah Nur-Hamedani, another lecturer to the Revolutionary Guard, has said that the Jews must be vanquished to prepare for the arrival of the Hidden Imam.
Do these Iranian doctrines make Shiite Islam the main problem of Israel? The Shiites of southern Lebanon actually helped Jewish settlements in the north before 1948 and fought the PLO alongside Israel in the early 1980s, prior to the rise of Hezbollah. The leader of Iraqi Shiites, Ayatollah Ali Sistani, rejects Iranian extremism and writes on his website that Jews and Christians are ritually pure. Sistani is far more revered by Shiites worldwide than Khamenei.
Moroever, the Sunni side has a problematic history with the Jewish people that must not be forgotten. Over the centuries, Jews were largely second-class citizens, who paid discriminatory taxes like the jizya (poll tax) and were intermittently exposed to indiscriminate violence with notable pogroms occurring in Fez, Morocco (1912), Baghdad, Iraq (1941), Tripoli, Libya (1945) and Aleppo, Syria (1947).
Since its establishment in 1928, the ideology of the Muslim Brotherhood has always fed anti-Israel attitudes on the Sunni side. But now with the "Arab Spring," the ideology of the Muslim Brotherhood is spreading along with Salafi intolerance of non-Muslims, including Middle Eastern Christians, who are increasingly fleeing the region as a result. Israel must defend its national interests in the Middle East, especially in light of the growing Iranian threat to develop nuclear weapons. But it should not be drawn into the Sunni-Shiite struggle on the basis of incorrect stereotypes of either side.
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