Oded Yinon was not a member of the Israeli government, but worked as a journalist, a research assistant and a lecturer. Using his work as a representative of an Israeli strategy would be like circulating an article written 30 years ago by some Arab journalist and representing it as the official strategy of the Palestinian Authority. Never mind that Hamas and the Iranian government openly state their desire to destroy Israel; they don’t need conspiracy theories to convince people of that, but the annoying detail is that people don’t seem to care as much, or not to take them seriously as they would an idea stated by an Israeli journalist 33 years ago. Yet Yinon’s Plan for “Greater Israel” has been invoked as if Yinon traveled in a time machine and had the ear of Mr. Herzl himself. All of the turmoil and dissolution in the Middle East is part of a Zionist plot, to which one could imagine many bewildered Jews replying, “If only the world didn’t have so much faith in us.”
According to the conspiracy site LeakSource, Israel was behind each and every recent conflict in the region, including the wars in Iraq and Syria and the regime changes in Egypt, on its way to a Zionist empire from the Nile the the Euphrates. ISIS is a part of a Zionist plan to divide Iraq into three parts. The US is Israel’s attack dog in its Middle Eastern. The recent direct confrontation between the US government and Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu is further “evidence,” argue the theorists, of America being at Israel’s beck and call. On the website Syria 360, an NPR interview with Moshe Yaalon, Israel’s Defense minister, is used in support of the suspicion that the Yinon Plan is official policy. Yaalon told Morning Edition that the borders of the Middle East “will absolutely change,” and sated, “the borders have already changed” under Assad. Now Yaalon could just be making an observation, but to a conspiracy theorist, the circular logic is absolutely compelling; assuming that Israel is behind the alteration of Syria’s borders, Yaalon’s observation that this has happened is a quiet cry of victory for the Yinon Plan. Rather than making an ideological statement, Yaalon might simply be acknowledging that, “Libya was a recent creation, a Western creation arising from the First World War. It’s the same for Syria and Iraq, and what we are currently witnessing is the collapse of the Western concept.” The 360 writer says, rather predictably, given his formulaic viewpoint, “and what about the New Israel? Is it not the creation of the Rothschild slave bankers and the law firm run by Lloyd George, who later became Prime Minister of Great Britain?”
Gilad Atzmon, an alto sax Jazz musician and an Israeli expatriate living in London, publishes in radical pro-Palestinian journals and sees the West as trying to break the Muslim countries on two fronts. First, Atzmon thinks the second war in Iraq was waged almost entirely for the sake of Israel with pressure from neo-Conservatives in the US and the UK devoted to the Yinon Plan. However, even Israeli and Jewish liberals do not manage to escape suspicion, according to Atzmon’s theory, and he thinks George Soros’ support for LGBT movements in Muslim countries is meant to create further fragmentation and erosion of those societies. Atzmon recounts in his blog a story of a Jewish lesbian activist who asked George Soros’ Open Society foundation for funds “that would inspire queer Arabs, especially from Egypt and Iran (although Iranians aren’t Arabs).” Atzmon writes, “What we see here is clear evidence of a blatant intervention by George Soros and his institute in an attempt to break Arabs and Muslims and shape their culture. So while the right wing Jewish lobby pushes the Arabs into ethnic, sectarian wars, their tribal counterparts with George Soros’ OSI institute do exactly the same—attempt to break the Arab and Muslims by means of marginal and identity politics.”