Descendants of Gog & Magog Join Russia, Iran in Joint Military Drill - By Adam Eliyahu Berkowitz -
"O mortal, turn your face toward Gog of the land of Magog, the chief prince of Meshech and Tubal. Prophesy against him." Ezekiel 38:2 (The Israel Bible�)
Iran announced last week that they will, for the first time, hold joint war drills with China, and Russia. One rabbi, an end-of-days expert, stated that this will bring together all the elements "to end all of history."
Rear Admiral Hossein Khanzadi announced last week that the maneuvers will be held in the northern Indian Ocean from December 22 to January 20.
"When we talk about joint wargames, we are talking about two or more countries with a high level of relations in various political, economic and social fields, which culminate in cooperation in the military sector, with wargames usually being the highest level of such cooperation," Khanzadi said to Iran's Tasnim news agency.
"A joint wargame between several countries, whether on land, at sea, or in the air, indicates a remarkable expansion of cooperation among them," he added.
Maritime tensions in the region are high. Iran has been blamed for attacks against several tankers. In September, an Iranian drone attack destroyed half of Saudi Arabia's oil production capability. Iran has also been blamed for other attacks. In June, Iran shot down a U.S. surveillance drone over the Strait of Hormuz. President Trump ordered a military strike against IRGC radar and missile sites but ordered the military to stand down at the last moment. That same month, the U.S. blamed Iran for attacks that damaged two tankers as they transited the Strait. A series of similar attacks using magnetic mines has targeted tankers in the Strait since the summer.
Last month, the commander of U.S. Central Command opined that a major Iranian attack is "very possible." The U.S. dispatched an aircraft carrier and tens of thousands of pounds of military equipment and artillery to the Persian Gulf region in response to these potential Iranian threats.
One interpretation of the Bible has Russia at the head of the multi-national army of the pre-Messiah War of Gog and Magog. Rabbi Haim Shvili, a 20th-century Jewish mystic wrote a book of predictions concerning the Messiah in 1935. Remarkably, Rabbi Shvili understands the prophet Ezekiel to foresee the War of Gog and Magog as being launched by a Russian-led coalition.
O mortal, turn your face toward Gog of the land of Magog, the chief prince of Meshech and Tubal. Prophesy against him Ezekiel 38:2
Rabbi Shvili understood the Hebrew word in the verse, rosh (chief) as identifying Russia to be the leader of the Gog and Magog coalition. Rabbi Shvili predicted that the Russian-led coalition will be opposed by a coalition of comparable size, comprising soldiers from all 70 nations.
The Bible explicitly identifies Iran's role in the War of Gog and Magog.
I will turn you around and put hooks in your jaws, and lead you out with all your army, horses, and horsemen, all of them clothed in splendor, a vast assembly, all of them with bucklers and shields, wielding swords. Among them shall be Persia, Nubia, and Put, everyone with shield and helmet; Ezekiel 38:4-5
Iran is the modern incarnation of Persia.
It is interesting to note that some Medieval Christian travelers to China reported the Mongol belief that their nation was descended from Magog. The Mongolian Empire once included sections of Russia, China, and North Korea. The Chinese and all the minority groups living in China are of the Mongoloid race, which stems from Noah's son Japheth. Etymologists have conjectured that the name Mongol is derived from the name Magog.
Rabbi Pinchas Winston, an expert in Jewish eschatology and author of many books on the subject, noted that this military exercise will bring together many elements that are predicted to be part of the final pre-Messiah War of Gog and Magog.
"All these events need to be considered because no one knows what will be the final events that spark off the inevitable," Rabbi Winston said as a disclaimer. "This certainly has the elements and the potential. Not only because it is politically and militarily charged but even more so since it involves several nations that have the pedigree that makes them candidates for having an active role in the Gog and Magog War."
Rabbi Winston noted that according to historical and Torah tradition, Magog migrated to the north.
"But nations have both a geo-national reality as well as a spiritual reality," Rabbi Winston said. "Amalek, Gog, these are specific archetypal evils that can be anywhere in the world and any person."
"Every day, the potential for Gog and Magog grows greater. The global pie is shrinking and the populace is increasing. As this phenomenon grows, selfishness gets unbridled and greed rules the world. People are grabbing what they can while they can. Battle lines are being drawn."
"History is coming to an end," the rabbi warned. "The secular world sees time as an endless cycle but the Bible repudiates all that. The Jewish perspective has a definite end-point. That is what the concept of Messiah comes to teach us."
"If you see time as an endless cycle then you can look at this union of Iran, Russia, and China and say that it is nothing new and nothing new will come out of it. But if you think of Gog and Magog as the beginning of the end, it takes on a powerful new significance."
"A secular historian will see that this is the leaders doing something with human motives. But the truth is that this is Hashem (God, literally 'the name') doing something very special and we need to understand His motives."
"With the big picture, everything is significant and everything comes together. Anti-semitism, the impeachment in the U.S., the Israeli elections, AND this military union; it all comes together."
Rabbi Winston cited Rabbi Yisrael Meir Kagan, a world-renowned Torah authority known popularly as the Chofetz Chaim. Rabbi Kagan passed away in 1933, after the First World War but before the beginning of World War II.
"The Chofetz Chaim wrote that Gog and Mago would be a three-stage war," Rabbi Winston said. "He believed that World War One, what was called at the time the War to end all wars, was the first stage. Though he did not live to see World War II, we can assume that was the second stage. He predicted that the final war would be the worst of all."
Iran wants to challenge western navies in Gulf with China and Russia - Seth J. Frantzman -
Iran's Rear Admiral Hossein Khanzadi announced a joint naval drill with Russia and China, after the US and France have both planned maritime security initiatives in the Gulf.
Iran thinks it is entering the big league in naval powers as its Rear Admiral Hossein Khanzadi announced a joint naval drill with Russia and China. It came as a deputy chief of the Chinese Joint Staff was in a meeting with Khanzadi, according to Iran's Press TV.
What's really behind the scenes of this is that Iran wants to show off after the US and France have both announced maritime security initiatives in the Gulf.
Iran is pushing a "Hormuz peace" plan called HOPE. Now Iran says its Maritime Security Belt drill will go ahead on December 27. Iran wants to work more closely with China. Having Russia on board is a win as well for Tehran. The problem for Tehran is that while China is an emerging naval behemoth, and Russia is a historic naval power, Iran has a weak navy. Iran's great naval "achievements" of the last years has been using fast boats to harass real navies. One US official said at a conference in February that the US could destroy Iran's navy easily. In fact Iran's navy is bifurcated between the IRGC and the actual navy. The IRGC is the one that harasses western governments. The actual navy doesn't do much. But Iran has been showcasing new drones and other technology for its ships.
So Iran's message is that it can play in the big league with the Russians and Chinese. That would be a big win for Iran as it faces the so-called "maximum pressure" campaign from the US. The US National Defense Strategy conceived between 2015 and 2018, is seeking to shift toward confronting big or threatening countries like Iran, Russia, China and North Korea. This is supposed to get away from the counter-terror obsession of 2001-2015. Go big or go home is the name of the game in this strategy.
The US is going big at sea with a new $20 billion deal for submarines. China is looking to build its fourth aircraft carrier and China recently ended US military port calls in Hong Kong as a message for the US to stop interfering. The US is spending $650 billion on defense, while China is spending $250 billion. Russia has a new warship named the Gromky while it sent its advanced Admiral Gorshkov to Cuba this year.
All this now impacts the Gulf because of Iranian attacks on oil tankers that began in May and because various countries want to project strength. France is also in the game in the Gulf. It got the Netherlands to sign on to its naval mission led from the UAE. The US held its Maritime Exercise IMX in the Gulf in October for three-weeks to show its forces. The US Fifth Fleet is based in Bahrain. The US has sought to lead an International Maritime Security Construct in the Gulf along with the UK, Australia, Bahrain and Saudi Arabia.
Iran's defense budget is peanuts in comparison at only $20 billion. It has a relatively new destroyer called the Sahand and several other large ships. Overall though, Iran's naval posturing is purely about showing it can do a joint exersize with other countries amid the US pressure. This will lead to its message that nearby countries, such as Oman should work with it on its HOPE initiative.
Is China the real force behind Iran? -
Iran this week announced further violations of the 2015 JCPOA nuclear deal. More advanced centrifuges will be developed, and it is reopening the notorious Fordow nuclear facility.
Iran is steadily shaking off the strict controls imposed on its nuclear program in response to President's Trump's withdrawal from the deal in May 2018 and the re-imposition of tough sanctions to squeeze the Iranian economy.
President Trump believed the deal was a poor way to stop Iran getting a nuclear weapon and did nothing to address wider concerns such as Iran's ballistic missile program and support for dangerous groups in the Middle East, such as Hezbollah. The UK has long supported the nuclear deal but Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab said on Wednesday that 'Iran's latest actions clearly contravene the deal and pose a risk to our national security.'
Lurking in the background, and a key player in the Iran saga is China. Much has been made of the resurgence of Russia as the real power broker in the Middle East, not least when it played a key role brokering a deal between the Kurds, the Assad regime and Turkey after the US announced its withdrawal from North East Syria. But it is China that has been hiding in plain sight, quietly arming Iran, buying its oil, boosting its economy and limiting the impact of US sanctions.
China is one of the so called P5 +1 who signed the JCPOA Iran nuclear deal alongside the US, Russia, France, the UK and Germany. It is committed to the elaborate constraints on Iran's nuclear program included in the agreement. In 2015 this looked like a rare piece of harmonious international diplomacy to tackle a looming threat to international peace and security.
But when the US withdrew from the agreement and sought to use sanctions to restrict Iran's oil industry and weaken its economy, China made it clear it had no interest in complying. China prioritizes energy imports to power its economy, it is the world's largest importer of crude oil and is currently buying most of Iran's oil.
Britain shares deep concerns with the US about Iran's missile program, and the extent to which that missile technology is being exported to non-state actors in the Middle East. But Iran's missile capability didn't develop organically, it had a pivotal helping hand. In 2008, China surpassed Russia to become Iran's biggest arms supplier and has long been providing anti-ship missiles, anti-aircraft missiles and cruise missiles to Iran. Chinese experts supported Iran's missile program, helping it develop more sophisticated missiles with improved accuracy, range and payload.
In September, Saudi-Aramco oil facilities in Khurais and Abqaiq were attacked by UAVs and cruise missiles in a stunning strike that briefly crippled Saudi oil output and shocked the oil market. Although the attack was claimed by the Houthi's in Yemen many analysts believe the cruise missiles were fired from Iran and some were an Iranian produced missile resembling a Chinese design.
The Saudi attack was the long tail of a Chinese-Iranian missile development partnership that had come to fruition, presenting a new level of threat that forced an urgent reassessment of anti-cruise missile defenses across the region. Even in Israel, whose aerial defenses are among the most sophisticated in the world, the National Security Council studied the Saudi attack and committed extra funding to boost anti-missile systems.
Crucially China doesn't really pick sides, instead opting to build defense and commercial partnerships that straddle the conflicts in the Middle East. China's deep partnership with Iran is no barrier to warm relations with Israel that now includes extensive trade and even infrastructure investments in two major ports - Haifa and Ashdod.
China is the world's largest supplier of military drones and has been exporting to Iraq, Egypt, Jordan, the UAE and Saudi Arabia. It also supplies armored personnel carriers, anti-tank missiles and unmanned ships and is starting to present a significant challenge to the UK defense industry in a region that accounts for 60 per cent of UK arms exports.
UK trade in the Middle East, at nearly �60bn is significant, but it is dwarfed by China's $220bn. China's economic muscle is being utilized in its ambitious belt and road initiative which includes ports and infrastructure projects across the region.
China has become the most important trade partner and investor in the Middle East, so it is no surprise that it is a key player in Iran.
But without a proper examination of China's role as a partner of Iran, US and European efforts to push Iran towards talks on its nuclear program and deal with its dangerous missile program are doomed to failure. An urgent resolution is however in China's interests as above all it requires stability and unrestricted energy supplies.
The complex reality is that the route out of the current Iranian crisis is through Beijing, not Tehran and this is a challenge that US and British diplomats are only starting to fully comprehend.
How the Israel-Iran war might begin - Yaakov Katz -
In the back of everyone's mind there will be a constant and nagging question mark over what happens next. Everyone that is, except for Iran.
The missiles will come in low, after being in the air for almost an hour, and when they hit, they will be coming just over the horizon. People who witness the attack will remember later that the missiles didn't fall from the sky. They flew at their target straight, like a bullet.
The drones will hit just a few minutes later. They will have been flying at low altitudes for longer, taking off in Iraq, crossing into Syria, and then across the border into Israel.
The "swarm" of drones and cruise missiles - as it will later be referred to - will have caught the country by surprise. By the time they strike, the target will be less relevant - the Haifa oil refinery, an apartment building in Kiryat Shmona, or a school in Katzrin.
This scenario, while fiction for now, is one that the IDF top brass is talking about on a regular basis these days. It is being played out in the minds of IDF generals and intelligence officials, responsible for watching Iran's every move, from Tehran all the way to its proxies' bases in Yemen, Iraq, Syria and the Gaza Strip.
The model is very similar to Iran's attack against the Aramco oil facility in Saudi Arabia in September: within the span of 17 minutes, 18 drones and three low-flying missiles hit the facility with amazing precision. The ability to launch a coordinated cruise missile/drone attack that hit its target with precision (except for a few cruise missiles that missed) was an impressive feat. That Iran has this capability came as a surprise to many in America and Israel's defense establishments.
That Iran would like to attack Israel is not a secret. Two weeks ago, an Iranian-backed militia in Syria fired four Fajr-5 rockets at the Hermon Mountain in Israel. The rockets were intercepted by Iron Dome batteries.
In August, Israel struck an Iranian-backed cell planning to launch explosives-laden drones into Israel from Syria. After both incidents, the Israeli Air Force carried out extensive retaliatory strikes against Iranian targets in Syria.
But what happens if Iran succeeds in hitting Israel with an Aramco-style attack? What happens if it hits a strategic installation and causes extensive economic damage or worse - loss of life? What will Israel do?
This question is at the heart of discussions within the defense establishment, and there are a number of possible answers, each with its advantages and disadvantages.
IF FOR example the cruise missiles and drones are launched from Syria, Yemen or Iraq, the easiest move is for Israel to simply retaliate against the cell that launched them, assuming it is able to quickly locate and identify the attackers.
On the other hand, while such a retaliation has tactical value - denying the cell the ability to continue firing missiles - what does it say about Israeli deterrence? If Iran knows that it can strike at Israel via proxies from other countries and not pay a direct price, what will stop it from continuing?
For that reason, another option would be for Israel to strike back directly at Iran and to deliver a decisive blow against the regime that would make the clerics there understand that there is a personal price to be paid for attacking Israel.
How would Israel do that?
Israel will likely need to rely on its Air Force, the backbone of which - the F-35 Joint Strike Fighters, F-16I Sufas and F-15I Raams - are specially configured for long-range bombing operations.
With some refueling, the planes would be able to fly to Iran, attack their targets and return. There are different routes: flying directly over Jordan and Iraq, over Saudi Arabia and Iraq, or along the Turkish-Syrian border. All have their advantages and disadvantages. Some are longer while others are more dangerous.
Israel could potentially use drones in such an attack. According to foreign reports, the Heron TP - Israel's largest drone with the wingspan of a Boeing 707 - has the ability to carry missiles. How big and how much damage they can cause remains unknown. That is why while the drones - if they are even an option - might minimize the risk to pilots, their ability to cause extensive damage is limited.
For this reason, for example, Avigdor Liberman when he was defense minister, and Naftali Bennett before he became defense minister, both pushed for the IDF to develop additional long-range capabilities. Liberman tried to establish a missile corps in the IDF. At the time, the focus was on short-to-medium range that was not big enough to reach Iran, but that would have been the next stage.
Prior to being appointed defense minister, Bennett also raised the issue in security cabinet meetings and tried to push the military to think creatively about how it can deal decisive blows to far away enemies like Iran. Now, as defense minister, he can try to implement his vision.
EACH RETALIATORY option will directly impact the scope of the conflict that will follow. If, for example, Israel goes with option 1 and limits its strike to the missile launchers in Iraq, Syria or Yemen, there would likely be almost no response. Iran would understand that Israel needed to vent and would accept the follow-up blow.
If Israel goes with option 2 and strikes in Iran, an unprecedented move, it could lead to a regional war. Iran can activate its militias based in Syria, Islamic Jihad in the Gaza Strip and, of course, Hezbollah in Lebanon which has the ability to launch over 1,000 rockets and missiles a day against Israeli targets.
In theory, Iran also has the potential to launch its own long-range ballistic missiles toward Israel. While Iran has developed an impressive ballistic missile capability, they have never really been tested in combat. Will they be able to make the flight to Israel and accurately hit their targets? Maybe, maybe not. Either way, they would first have to make it through the Arrow, Israel's ballistic missile defense system.
What would Israel target in such an attack against Iran? For purposes of deterrence, it might be enough to strike at a single symbolic target, like a military base. On the other hand, if you know that a massive war is coming, maybe it would be the right time to strike additional targets at the same time - nuclear facilities, missile depots and launchers, air force bases, navy ships. If there is already going to be a war, it might as well be worth it.
The same could be argued about Hezbollah. If the military assessment is that Hezbollah would attack Israel after such a strike, then the IDF would need to consider launching a preemptive strike against Hezbollah and hitting targets - its long-range missile arsenal, assuming Israeli intelligence knows where it is stored as an example - at the same time that an attack is launched against Iran. At least this way, if war with Hezbollah comes, Israel will have limited the Lebanese-based group's ability to inflict damage.
WILL ANY of this happen? That is impossible to know. Based on the frequency of visits by top US military officials in the last few weeks - Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley, head of the US Air Force Gen. David Goldfein, and CENTCOM chief Gen. Kenneth McKenzie were all here last month - there is coordination going on behind the scenes between the Pentagon and the IDF.
The same can be understood from the two phone calls Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu recently had with President Donald Trump, during which they discussed the threat from Iran as well as other "critical" regional issues.
The problem, though, is that anything Netanyahu does today will be seen as politically driven. If there is an attack in the coming weeks after Israel has gone to another election, then however Israel responds will be looked at through the prism of Netanyahu's legal predicament. Did he decide to go to war to try and postpone his trial, or did he decide to contain a devastating attack to avoid a war that would incur casualties and possibly also a political price?
In the back of everyone's mind there will be a constant and nagging question mark over what happens next. Everyone that is, except for Iran.
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