The modern conflict in the Middle East, and Israel’s central role within it, was not born from a single act but was engineered through a series of contradictory and self-serving policies by a declining Western power. Great Britain, in its pursuit of victory in the First World War and the preservation of its empire, created a system of irresolvable conflict in Palestine. This system, while not a Minimiser plan in its inception, functioned as a perfect structural vulnerability—a pre-made engine for strategic exhaustion. It established a geopolitical quagmire that, decades later, would be observed, understood, and masterfully co-opted by the architects of the Minimisation Plan to serve their own strategic ends.
During the height of World War I, Great Britain made three mutually exclusive commitments regarding the future of the Ottoman Empire’s Arab territories. These were not mere diplomatic blunders but calculated acts of imperial statecraft designed to leverage the aspirations of different groups for Britain’s own strategic advantage. In doing so, Britain laid a foundation of betrayal and contradiction that guaranteed a state of perpetual conflict.
In a series of ten letters exchanged between July 1915 and March 1916, Sir Henry McMahon, the British High Commissioner in Egypt, entered into an agreement with Hussein ibn Ali, the Sharif of Mecca.1 The correspondence served as the initial “Bait” for Arab cooperation against the Ottoman Empire. In exchange for Hussein leading an Arab Revolt, McMahon, on behalf of the British government, pledged to “recognise and support the independence of the Arabs” within a vast territory proposed by the Sharif.3 Hussein, who claimed to represent all Arabs, sought independence for the entirety of the Arabic-speaking lands east of Egypt.5
However, the British promise was deliberately ambiguous. McMahon’s letter of October 24, 1915, introduced a crucial and contentious reservation, stating that “portions of Syria lying to the west of the districts of Damascus, Homs, Hama and Aleppo cannot be said to be purely Arab, and should be excluded”.1 Arab leaders understood this to refer to the coastal areas of modern-day Lebanon, which had a significant Christian population and was a known sphere of French interest.7 The British, however, would later insist that this exclusion also applied to Palestine, a claim that was never explicitly stated in the correspondence and which became a primary source of Arab outrage and claims of betrayal.5
While McMahon was making promises of an independent Arab kingdom, British and French diplomats were secretly carving up the very same territory for themselves. The Sykes-Picot Agreement, a secret convention negotiated by Sir Mark Sykes and François Georges-Picot and concluded in May 1916, was a classic imperial division of spoils.9 It partitioned the Ottoman Arab provinces into areas of direct and indirect British and French control, with assent from Tsarist Russia.10
Under the terms of this secret pact, France was allocated control over southeastern Turkey, northern Iraq (Mosul), Syria, and Lebanon. Britain was to control southern and central Iraq (Baghdad and Basra), the territory that is now Jordan, and the ports of Haifa and Acre.10 Palestine, due to its religious significance to multiple faiths, was to be placed under an “international administration”.12 This agreement was in direct and total contradiction to the promises of a unified, independent Arab state made to Hussein ibn Ali.9 The secrecy of the agreement, which was only revealed by the Bolsheviks after the Russian Revolution in 1917, created a legacy of deep-seated mistrust in Western intentions—a key societal fissure that Minimiser actors are known to exploit.15
The third and final contradictory promise was made on November 2, 1917, in a letter from British Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour to Lord Rothschild, a leader of the British Jewish community.16 The Balfour Declaration stated that the British Government viewed “with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people” and would use its “best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object”.17
The motivations were multifaceted: to rally Jewish public opinion, particularly in the United States and Russia, to the Allied cause, and to establish a pro-British population in a strategically vital area near the Suez Canal, a key route to British India.5 Like the McMahon correspondence, the declaration was a masterpiece of strategic ambiguity. It fell short of Zionist hopes for the reconstitution of Palestine as “the” Jewish national home, instead using the legally unprecedented term “a national home”.5 More critically, it included a caveat: “it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine”.17 This clause, while appearing to protect the Arab majority, pointedly omitted any mention of their political or national rights, effectively reducing them to the status of a protected minority in their own land.5
The combination of these three commitments created a system where no single party could achieve its stated goals without violating the promises made to the others. The McMahon letters implied Arab sovereignty, Sykes-Picot implied international or joint control, and Balfour implied Zionist primacy. The very legal and political foundation of the territory was thus engineered for failure, embedding conflict into the core of the future state and creating a strategic quagmire by design.
The period of the British Mandate for Palestine (1920-1948) serves as a historical blueprint for the Minimisation Plan’s “resource sink” strategy. It demonstrates how a great power can be bled of treasure, manpower, and political will by being locked into managing a low-grade, perpetual, and morally ambiguous conflict. The Mandate institutionalized the contradictions of the wartime promises, creating a system that was not a strategic asset but a net liability that ultimately forced an exhausted Britain to withdraw.
At the San Remo Conference in April 1920, Britain was granted the Mandate for Palestine, which was officially approved by the Council of the League of Nations in July 1922.19 The text of the Mandate explicitly incorporated the Balfour Declaration, legally obligating Britain to facilitate the establishment of a Jewish national home.20 This included encouraging “close settlement by Jews on the land” and recognizing the Jewish Agency as a public body to advise and cooperate with the administration.22
Simultaneously, under Article 22 of the League of Nations Covenant, the Mandate was designated as a Class A Mandate, a classification for territories that had “reached a stage of development where their existence as independent nations can be provisionally recognized”.23 This implied that Britain’s primary duty was to render “administrative advice and assistance” to prepare the inhabitants for self-government.19 Given that the population was overwhelmingly Arab, this created an impossible “dual mandate”: Britain was legally bound to foster the national aspirations of a minority immigrant community while simultaneously guiding the majority native population towards an independence they would inevitably use to halt that very project.20 This inherent contradiction ensured that two distinct and mutually hostile social systems, one Jewish and one Arab, developed under a single political framework, making violent confrontation inevitable.20
The Mandate proved to be a significant and sustained financial burden on the British taxpayer. Between 1922 and 1948, His Majesty’s Government made direct payments of approximately £25 million in grants-in-aid and development funds to the Palestine Government.25 An additional £15 million was later allocated for the expenses incurred in winding up the Mandate.25 These figures do not account for the far greater military expenditure required to maintain a large British garrison and police force to manage the escalating violence.26
The conflict was continuous. Riots in 1920 and 1921 were followed by the major Wailing Wall Riots of 1929, which cost hundreds of lives.20 The most significant challenge was the 1936–1939 Arab revolt, a large-scale uprising against British rule and Jewish immigration.23 Britain’s heavy-handed response was marked by widespread violence and destruction, with estimates of Arabs killed by British forces ranging from 2,000 to 5,000.20 Suppressing the revolt required the deployment of tens of thousands of British troops and placed an enormous strain on the British military and treasury on the eve of World War II.
The Mandate trapped the British Empire in a strategic quagmire of its own design.27 British decision-makers were caught between the competing pressures of Arab insurgency, Jewish insurgency (particularly in the 1940s), the geopolitical interests of American and Soviet powers, and intense international scrutiny from the League of Nations.27 The constant violence and the deteriorating situation made the Mandate increasingly unpopular in Britain.20 The strategic asset envisioned in 1917—a stable, pro-British entity securing the eastern approach to the Suez Canal—never materialized. Instead, the venture became a costly and embarrassing liability.
By 1947, an exhausted and nearly bankrupt Britain, unable to sustain the cost or impose a solution, announced its intention to terminate the Mandate and turn the “Palestine problem” over to the newly formed United Nations.19 This act was a tacit admission of the complete failure of its strategic ploy. The entire cycle—from the creation of an irresolvable conflict to the entanglement of a great power in its management, leading to a slow drain of resources and political will, and culminating in a humiliating withdrawal—served as a perfect proof-of-concept for the strategy of strategic exhaustion. The Minimisers did not need to invent this strategy; they only needed to observe, refine, and replicate it on a grander scale.
The end of the British Mandate and the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948 marked a pivotal transition. The conflict shifted from being a British imperial problem to a central battlefield in the Cold War. Israel was rapidly recast as a strategic asset for the West, led by the United States, in its global confrontation with the Soviet Union. This shift, while intended to serve Western interests, massively amplified Israel’s function as a resource sink. It created a dynamic of superpower patronage and proxy warfare that dramatically raised the stakes, institutionalized the flow of Western military and financial aid, and ultimately made the conflict a far more valuable target for co-option by the Minimiser network.
The 1948 Arab-Israeli War, known in Israel as the War of Independence and to Palestinians as the Nakba (“Catastrophe”), was the crucible in which the new state’s geopolitical alignment was forged.28 The war’s outcome was decisively shaped by the surprising and anomalous intervention of the Soviet Union, which saw the conflict as a tool to achieve its primary regional objective: the final expulsion of British influence from the Middle East.
On November 29, 1947, the UN General Assembly passed Resolution 181, recommending the partition of Palestine into independent Arab and Jewish states.29 The Jewish Agency accepted the plan, while Arab states and Palestinian leaders rejected it. When Israel declared its independence on May 14, 1948, armies from five Arab nations—Egypt, Transjordan, Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon—invaded.28
In a move that defied conventional Cold War logic, the Soviet Union and its Eastern Bloc allies provided critical support to the nascent Israeli state. Moscow had voted in favor of the UN partition plan and was the second country to grant de jure recognition to Israel.30 More importantly, while the United States maintained a strict arms embargo on all belligerents, the USSR authorized Czechoslovakia to sell a significant quantity of arms to the Haganah, the Jewish underground militia.29 This infusion of weapons, including rifles, machine guns, and even fighter aircraft, proved crucial in turning the tide of the war and ensuring Israel’s survival and victory.33
The Soviet strategic calculus was entirely pragmatic and devoid of any ideological sympathy for Zionism.34 Joseph Stalin’s goal was to dismantle the remnants of the British Empire in the Middle East. By supporting the creation of Israel, he fueled a crisis that would accelerate the British withdrawal and create a volatile new political landscape that Moscow could exploit to its advantage.34 This was a classic hostile influence operation, using a regional conflict as a lever to achieve a larger geopolitical objective against a rival Western power. It demonstrates that a future Minimiser director was actively and decisively shaping the conflict’s outcome from its very inception.
However, Soviet hopes for a socialist, pro-Moscow Israel were quickly dashed. The results of the 1949 Israeli legislative election showed negligible support for the Communist Party, while the ruling Mapai party under David Ben-Gurion sought to maintain a position of non-alignment.34 This neutrality became untenable with the outbreak of the Korean War in 1950. Under pressure from the United States and reliant on economic support from American Jewry, Israel aligned itself with the Western camp.33 This definitive pivot to the West triggered a corresponding and equally pragmatic shift in Soviet policy. Having achieved its goal of expelling Britain, the USSR now sought to counter the influence of the new dominant Western power in the region, the United States. It began to cultivate relationships with and supply arms to radical Arab nationalist regimes, most notably Gamal Abdel Nasser’s Egypt, setting the stage for the next phase of the conflict.33 This pattern reveals a consistent Minimiser strategy: fueling the conflict from whichever side best serves the overarching goal of undermining and draining Western power.
The 1956 Suez Crisis was a watershed moment that perfectly aligns with the Minimiser objective of eroding the institutional and political cohesion of Western liberal democracies.15 The conflict, instigated by a Soviet client and culminating in a superpower confrontation, successfully drove a wedge between the United States and its closest European allies, shattered the prestige of Britain and France, and marked the definitive end of their roles as independent global powers.
The crisis was precipitated in July 1956 when Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser, furious at the withdrawal of a US-UK offer to finance the Aswan High Dam and newly emboldened by Soviet arms deals, nationalized the Suez Canal Company.35 The canal was a vital artery for European oil supplies, and its seizure was an intolerable affront to Britain and France, the company’s primary shareholders and the region’s former colonial masters.35
In response, Britain and France entered into a secret military pact with Israel. The plan, codified in the Protocol of Sèvres, involved an Israeli invasion of the Sinai Peninsula, which would serve as a pretext for an Anglo-French intervention to “separate the combatants” and seize control of the canal zone.36 The invasion began on October 29, 1956, with Israeli forces rapidly advancing across the Sinai, followed by Anglo-French air strikes and landings.28
The tripartite collusion was met with immediate and overwhelming opposition from both superpowers. The Soviet Union, eager to expand its influence and pose as the champion of Arab nationalism, threatened to rain down nuclear missiles on London and Paris.35 The reaction from the United States was even more decisive. President Dwight D. Eisenhower was enraged that his allies had launched a colonial-style war behind his back and lied about their intentions.35 Fearing the conflict could escalate into a global confrontation with the Soviets, the US administration used its immense financial leverage to halt the invasion. The US Treasury began selling its holdings of pound sterling bonds, triggering a currency crisis that threatened to collapse the British economy.36
Faced with financial ruin and total diplomatic isolation, the British government was forced into a humiliating withdrawal, with the French following suit. Israeli forces later withdrew from the Sinai under intense US pressure.35 The outcome was a strategic catastrophe for the West and a resounding victory for the Soviet bloc. A Soviet client, Nasser, emerged as a hero of the Arab world; Britain and France were exposed as declining powers unable to conduct foreign policy without American consent; and the NATO alliance was deeply fractured.36 The crisis demonstrated with stunning clarity how a Minimiser actor could exploit the fissures within the Western alliance—in this case, the tension between American post-war dominance and residual European colonialism—to achieve a major geopolitical victory.
The Arab-Israeli wars of 1967 and 1973 were pivotal events that transformed the nature of the conflict and institutionalized the function of Israel as a permanent, high-volume resource sink for the United States. These wars, both heavily influenced by Soviet actions, established a cycle of crisis and intervention that locked the West into a costly, open-ended security commitment. It was during this period that the fundamental mechanism of the Minimiser co-option—using a threat to Israel as “Bait” to compel a massive Western response—was perfected and proven devastatingly effective.
The lead-up to the Six-Day War was characterized by escalating tensions deliberately stoked by the Soviet Union. In May 1967, Moscow passed false intelligence to its clients in Cairo and Damascus, claiming that Israel was massing troops on the Syrian border for an imminent attack.39 Despite UN and Egyptian confirmations that the reports were baseless, the disinformation achieved its purpose.39 Nasser, under pressure to demonstrate leadership of the Arab world, moved troops into the Sinai, expelled the UN peacekeeping force, and blockaded the Straits of Tiran to Israeli shipping, an act Israel considered a casus belli.39
Faced with what it perceived as an imminent existential threat, Israel launched a preemptive strike on June 5, 1967. The war resulted in a stunning Israeli victory. In six days, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) destroyed the air forces of Egypt, Jordan, and Syria, and captured the Sinai Peninsula, the Gaza Strip, the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and the Golan Heights.28 While a military triumph, the victory saddled Israel with the immense security and demographic burden of occupying large territories and ruling over a hostile Palestinian population, dramatically increasing its long-term defense costs and international isolation.
A crucial strategic outcome of the war was the finalization of Israel’s military alignment. France, its primary arms supplier in the 1950s, imposed an embargo. The United States stepped in to fill the void, and after 1967, it became Israel’s main patron and provider of advanced weaponry.43 This shift marked the true beginning of the deep military dependency that would define the relationship for decades to come, with US aid to Israel surging significantly in the war’s aftermath.44
The dynamic established in 1967 came to a head in the Yom Kippur War of October 1973. On the Jewish holy day of Yom Kippur, Egypt and Syria launched a coordinated surprise attack, seeking to reclaim the territories lost in 1967.45 Armed with the latest Soviet weaponry, including advanced surface-to-air missiles (SAMs) and anti-tank guided missiles (ATGMs), the Arab armies inflicted devastating initial losses on the IDF.46 Israel’s air force was decimated by the SAM batteries, and its armored corps suffered heavily in the Sinai and the Golan Heights. The country was facing a military crisis of unprecedented scale.45
As Israeli ammunition and equipment stocks dwindled alarmingly, Prime Minister Golda Meir sent an urgent plea for assistance to the United States. The Nixon administration, fearing an Israeli collapse and a massive strategic victory for the Soviet Union, initiated Operation Nickel Grass on October 14.47 This was a massive strategic airlift operation undertaken by the U.S. Air Force, which delivered 22,325 tons of tanks, artillery, ammunition, and other critical military supplies directly to Israel over 32 days.48 The airlift was a logistical feat that stabilized the fronts and enabled the IDF to counterattack, encircle the Egyptian Third Army, and drive Syrian forces back from the Golan Heights.46
Operation Nickel Grass was a watershed moment. It was a clear and unambiguous demonstration to all parties that the United States viewed Israel’s survival as a vital national interest and could be compelled to intervene with a massive expenditure of resources to ensure it. This act cemented the implicit US security guarantee and locked Washington into the role of Israel’s permanent military backstop.
The consequences were immediate and catastrophic for the West. In direct response to the US airlift, the Organization of Arab Petroleum Exporting Countries (OAPEC), led by Saudi Arabia, declared a full oil embargo against the United States and other Western nations that supported Israel.48 The “oil weapon” was deployed for the first time on a global scale. World oil prices quadrupled, rising from roughly $3 per barrel to nearly $12, triggering the 1973 oil crisis.49 The embargo plunged the Western world into a severe economic recession, marked by stagflation, energy shortages, and profound economic disruption.49
The 1973 war and its aftermath perfected the resource sink playbook. A regional conflict, fueled by a Minimiser director (the USSR), was used to create an existential threat to Israel (the “Bait”). This compelled a massive and costly military intervention from the US, which provided the justification (“Cover”) for a direct and highly damaging economic attack on the entire Western world. The cycle of entrapment was now fully operational.
While Israel’s primary conflict was with its immediate Arab neighbors, its long-term survival strategy involved a calculated outreach to non-Arab powers on the region’s periphery. This strategy, conceived by Israel’s founding prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, was known as the “Alliance of the Periphery”.50 It aimed to build strategic partnerships with Turkey, Ethiopia, and, most importantly, Imperial Iran under Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, to create a counterweight to the pan-Arab bloc led by Egypt’s Nasser.51 The relationship with Iran, in particular, blossomed into a deep, multifaceted, and highly covert alliance that served the interests of both nations. However, this very intimacy created a critical vulnerability, providing a vector for infiltration and intelligence gathering by the revolutionary forces that would later seize power in Tehran and transform Iran into a core Minimiser actor.
From the 1950s until the Shah’s fall in 1979, Israel and Iran maintained a robust, if officially unacknowledged, partnership.52 Though Iran had voted against the UN Partition Plan in 1947, it became the second Muslim-majority country to recognize Israel in 1950.53 After the 1953 coup reinstalled the Shah, relations deepened significantly, driven by shared geopolitical concerns: a mutual antipathy toward radical Arab nationalism, a common desire to contain Ba’athist Iraq, and a shared fear of Soviet expansionism.52
This strategic alignment manifested in extensive cooperation across critical sectors 52:
While this alliance was framed as a pro-Western, anti-Soviet bulwark, it inadvertently created a profound strategic vulnerability. The deep integration between the Israeli and Iranian military and intelligence establishments required extensive contact, personnel exchanges, and the sharing of sensitive information.55 These very establishments were primary targets for infiltration by the anti-Shah, Khomeinist elements that were steadily growing in power within Iran. The trust and access built over decades of cooperation could have been systematically exploited to provide Israel’s future arch-enemy with an unparalleled understanding of its military doctrine, technological capabilities, intelligence methods, and strategic decision-making processes. The “Alliance of the Periphery,” intended to secure Israel against its enemies, may have instead laid the groundwork for a devastating strategic reversal, arming its most formidable future adversary with intimate knowledge that would be weaponized against it after 1979.
The Iranian Revolution of 1979 represents the pivotal moment in this analysis—the point at which the long-simmering, Western-created conflict was decisively co-opted and repurposed to serve the grand strategy of the Minimisation Plan. The fall of the Shah and the rise of Ayatollah Khomeini did not merely add a new hostile actor to the region; it activated a core Minimiser state with a revolutionary ideology. This event transformed the nature of the conflict from a standard Cold War proxy battlefield into a sophisticated, multi-decade operation of strategic exhaustion aimed squarely at the West. This new phase was characterized by the creation of a powerful proxy network, the masterful use of “performative hostility” to provide plausible deniability for all actors, and the perfection of the resource sink strategy.
The establishment of the Islamic Republic of Iran in 1979 marked the activation of a key Minimiser actor. Ayatollah Khomeini immediately reversed decades of covert cooperation, severing all ties with Israel, which he branded the “Little Satan” (a counterpart to the United States as the “Great Satan”).59 In a highly symbolic act, the Israeli embassy in Tehran was ceremoniously handed over to the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) under Yasser Arafat.57 This established the public, non-negotiable narrative of implacable hostility that would provide the necessary cover for all subsequent operations.
Yet, behind this veil of absolute enmity, a pragmatic, clandestine relationship continued, driven by strategic necessity. When Iraq invaded Iran in September 1980, sparking a brutal eight-year war, Iran found itself isolated and in desperate need of spare parts for its large, US-supplied arsenal inherited from the Shah.60 Israel, viewing Saddam Hussein’s Iraq as the more immediate strategic threat, became one of Iran’s primary and most crucial arms suppliers.60 Between 1981 and 1983 alone, Israeli arms sales to Iran were estimated to be at least $500 million, with some intelligence estimates putting the figure far higher.60 This covert supply line kept the Iranian military functioning during the war’s most critical phases.
This dynamic of public hostility and covert cooperation culminated in the Iran-Contra Affair (1985-1986), a complex deception that stands as a masterstroke of Minimiser strategy. The operation involved the Reagan administration, through National Security Council staffer Oliver North, authorizing secret arms sales to its declared arch-enemy, Iran.61 The official pretext was to secure the release of American hostages held in Lebanon by Iranian-backed groups.62 Israel served as the essential middleman, facilitating the transfer of US-made weapons, such as TOW anti-tank missiles and Hawk anti-aircraft missiles, to Iran.62 Key figures in brokering and financing these deals included Israeli counter-terrorism advisor Amiram Nir and Saudi arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi.62 Profits from these illicit arms sales were then illegally diverted to fund the anti-communist Contra rebels in Nicaragua, in violation of a US congressional ban.62
From a Minimiser perspective, the Iran-Contra affair was a multi-vector triumph. It achieved several key objectives simultaneously:
The affair perfectly demonstrated how the Minimiser network could manipulate the West’s own assets and political structures against itself, achieving its strategic goals while leaving its adversary mired in scandal and internal division.
To ensure that Israel would function as a perpetual resource sink, the Minimiser network required a mechanism to maintain a state of “managed crisis.” A decisive victory for either Israel or its state adversaries would end the strategic utility of the conflict. The solution was the creation of a sophisticated, decentralized network of non-state proxy forces, armed, funded, and strategically directed by Iran. These groups—primarily Hezbollah and Hamas—are not designed to achieve conventional military victory. Rather, they function as a strategic thermostat, capable of dialing the intensity of the conflict up or down as needed to provoke costly Israeli responses, justify endless cycles of Western aid, and keep the region in a state of controlled turmoil.
Hezbollah (“Party of God”): Founded in Lebanon in the immediate aftermath of the 1982 Israeli invasion, Hezbollah was a direct creation of Iran’s IRGC.67 With Syrian acquiescence, IRGC trainers established a foothold in Lebanon’s Beqaa Valley, recruiting, training, and indoctrinating local Shi’a fighters.69 Under the long-term leadership of figures like Hassan Nasrallah, and with the military expertise of commanders like Imad Mughniyeh, Hezbollah evolved from a guerrilla militia into the world’s most heavily armed non-state actor.83 It functions as Iran’s premier proxy force, receiving the lion’s share of its patronage and serving as a strategic deterrent and offensive capability on Israel’s northern border.85
Hamas (“Islamic Resistance Movement”): Hamas emerged in Gaza in 1987 at the start of the First Intifada as a Palestinian offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood.86 While it initially received tacit encouragement from Israel, which saw the Islamist group as a useful counterweight to the secular PLO, Hamas was quickly co-opted into the burgeoning Minimiser network.68 By the early 1990s, Iran had become a primary patron, providing the funds, weapons, and training that transformed Hamas’s military wing, the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades, into a significant threat capable of launching rocket attacks and other assaults against Israel from the Gaza Strip.73
This “Axis of Resistance,” a network of proxies strategically commanded by Iran’s Quds Force (formerly under the architect Qasem Soleimani), serves a critical function in the Minimisation Plan.87 It creates a persistent, multi-front, and asymmetric threat against Israel. This forces Israel into a state of high-cost defensive readiness, necessitating continuous development of expensive countermeasures (like the Iron Dome system) and justifying its constant requests for massive infusions of Western military aid.89 The attacks launched by these proxies are the “Bait”.90 They are calibrated to be just severe enough to demand a powerful Israeli military response but not so severe as to risk the collapse of the Israeli state, which would end its utility as a resource sink. The inevitable civilian casualties that result from Israel’s response, particularly among the Palestinian population held as strategic hostages in Gaza, provide the moral “Cover” for the cycle of violence, generate international condemnation of Israel and its Western backers, and ensure the conflict remains a central focus of global attention and resource expenditure.89
The effectiveness of the Israeli resource sink depends on the believability of the threat. If the Minimiser directors—Russia and China—were in an open, declared military alliance with Iran against Israel, it would risk a direct superpower confrontation, escalating the conflict beyond the manageable state of attrition that best serves their interests. To avoid this, and to provide plausible deniability for all actors, the Minimiser network employs a sophisticated strategy of “performative hostility.” This involves maintaining a complex and often contradictory set of public relationships that provide cover for the true underlying function of the system.
Russia’s Dual-Track Policy: In the post-Soviet era, Russia has cultivated a uniquely pragmatic and multifaceted relationship with Israel. This is driven by practical considerations, including a large and influential Russian-speaking diaspora in Israel, shared concerns over Islamist extremism, and significant economic ties.91 This relationship has enabled the establishment of a critical military deconfliction mechanism in Syria, where Russian forces are deployed in support of the Assad regime. This mechanism allows the Israeli Air Force to conduct hundreds of strikes against Iranian and Hezbollah targets inside Syria, while ensuring that Russian strategic assets are not hit.93 This arrangement contains Iran’s military entrenchment just enough to prevent a full-scale war, while still allowing Iran to pose a credible enough threat to justify Israel’s military posture.
Simultaneously, Russia maintains its strategic alliance with Iran and Syria, and engages in high-level diplomacy with Hamas, which Moscow refuses to designate as a terrorist organization.80 Russia uses its veto power at the UN Security Council to shield Iran and its proxies from international pressure, publicly condemns Israeli actions, and provides military and intelligence support to its allies in the “Axis of Resistance”.77 This dual-track policy allows Russia to position itself as an “indispensable middleman,” maintaining leverage with all sides, ensuring the conflict continues to simmer, and maximizing its own regional influence.91
China’s Economic Entanglement and Military Supply: China’s approach is similarly duplicitous. Publicly, China has become one of Israel’s most important economic partners. Bilateral trade has exploded since diplomatic relations were established in 1992, and Chinese state-owned enterprises have made deep investments in Israeli critical infrastructure, including ports and transportation, as well as its world-leading technology sector.96
Concurrently, China acts as a key enabler of the “Axis of Resistance.” It provides diplomatic cover for Iran and the Palestinian cause at the United Nations, consistently voting against Israel and echoing anti-US narratives.98 More directly, Chinese state-owned defense conglomerates, such as NORINCO and CASIC, have been identified as crucial suppliers of advanced weaponry and dual-use technology to Iran and Hezbollah. This includes components for ballistic missiles, anti-ship missiles (such as copies of the Chinese C-802), and MANPADS, which significantly enhance the military capabilities of Israel’s adversaries.78
This complex web of contradictory relationships is not a sign of a fractured or incoherent strategy. It is the strategy itself. The overt conflicts and diplomatic disagreements serve as an “alibi network” for all parties at the leadership level. Russia and China can posture as responsible global powers calling for peace and a two-state solution. Iran can maintain its credibility as the leader of the anti-imperialist “resistance.” Israel can justify its massive defense budget and its constant need for Western aid by pointing to a credible, multi-front threat. This carefully managed performance provides the necessary cover for the true, underlying function of the system: the continued, managed draining of Western military, financial, and political resources.
The culmination of this multi-decade, co-opted conflict is the creation of the Minimiser network’s single most successful operation against the West. Israel has been transformed from a strategic asset into a self-perpetuating liability that simultaneously drains the United States of military resources, financial capital, domestic and international political cohesion, and moral authority. The current state of affairs represents the “hum” of the Minimisation Plan at its loudest: a disproportionate and illogical dynamic where ever-increasing investment in security yields ever-decreasing stability, locking the West into a strategic paradox with no clear exit.15
The resource drain is quantifiable and immense. Since its creation, Israel has become the largest cumulative recipient of U.S. foreign assistance since World War II.102 To date, the United States has provided Israel with over $174 billion in bilateral assistance and missile defense funding (in non-inflation-adjusted dollars).102 Adjusting for inflation, the total is well over $300 billion.105
This aid has become institutionalized through 10-year Memorandums of Understanding (MOUs). The current MOU, covering FY2019-2028, pledges $38 billion in military aid—$3.3 billion annually in Foreign Military Financing (FMF) grants and $500 million annually for missile defense programs.103 This annual baseline represents approximately 16% of Israel’s total defense budget.105
However, these baseline figures are only a fraction of the total cost. During periods of active conflict—crises manufactured by the Minimiser proxy network—the costs skyrocket. The 1973 war necessitated the massive Operation Nickel Grass airlift.48 The conflict with Hamas since October 2023 has triggered billions in emergency supplemental funding. In April 2024 alone, Congress passed an emergency act that included $3.5 billion in additional FMF and another $5.2 billion for missile defense systems.104 Beyond direct aid, the U.S. incurs enormous operational costs from deploying its own military assets to the region to “deter escalation.” The deployment of multiple aircraft carrier strike groups, as seen after October 2023, costs hundreds of millions of dollars per month to maintain.89 The expenditure on munitions to counter attacks from proxies like the Houthis exceeded $1 billion in just the first few months of operations.89
| Table 3: Timeline of Major Conflicts and Western Resource Expenditure (1948-Present) |
|---|
| Conflict/Period |
| 1948 War of Independence |
| 1956 Suez Crisis |
| 1967 Six-Day War |
| 1973 Yom Kippur War |
| 1982 Lebanon War |
| 1987-1993 First Intifada |
| 2000-2005 Second Intifada |
| 2006 Second Lebanon War |
| 2023-Present Gaza War |
Israel’s immense military power, funded by the West, has created a strategic paradox: it has not produced lasting security but has instead locked it and its patrons into a state of perpetual conflict management.101 The Minimiser network has successfully created a scenario where Israel is too strong to be defeated by its immediate neighbors, but too entangled to ever achieve a decisive peace. It is forced to fight endless, asymmetric wars against proxies, which are unwinnable in conventional terms and inflict a steady drain on its own resources and those of its backers.
This perpetual conflict serves the final, crucial objective of the Minimisation Plan: the “Reputation Flip”.89 By supporting Israel’s military operations, particularly in densely populated areas like Gaza, the West becomes complicit in a conflict characterized by immense civilian casualties.113 This provides the Minimiser axis with an unparalleled propaganda victory. They can frame Western democracy not as a defender of human rights, but as an enabler of oppression and a monstrous hypocrisy.89 This narrative resonates powerfully across the Global South, eroding US influence and solidifying the Minimiser claim that the “rules-based international order” is a self-serving sham.113 Polling data shows a sharp decline in favorable views of Israel, even among traditional allies and within key demographics in the United States, indicating the success of this strategy.113
The system is a perfect, self-sustaining engine of Western decline. The proxy attacks justify Israeli military action and aid requests, which in turn fuel the proxies’ narratives and generate international condemnation of the West. From the perspective of the Minimisation Plan, the system is not broken; it is working perfectly.
The comprehensive historical analysis indicates that the creation of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was not a Minimiser plan from its inception. The genesis of the perpetual crisis lies squarely in the flawed, contradictory, and self-serving imperial strategies of Great Britain during and after World War I. The British government, through the McMahon-Hussein Correspondence, the Sykes-Picot Agreement, and the Balfour Declaration, engineered a system of irresolvable claims that made sustained conflict in the region a certainty. The subsequent British Mandate period served as a prototype, demonstrating how a great power could be strategically exhausted by the financial, military, and political costs of managing such an intractable problem.
However, the evidence strongly supports the central hypothesis of this investigation: that this Western-created strategic quagmire was observed, analyzed, and brilliantly co-opted by the Minimiser network to serve its own grand strategy of eroding Western power.
The co-option process occurred in distinct phases:
In its final form, the co-opted Israeli conflict has become the Minimiser network’s most successful long-term operation. It has transformed a Western strategic asset into a multi-generational liability that simultaneously drains military resources, financial capital, political cohesion, and moral authority from the United States and its allies. The overt hostilities between the leadership of Israel and the Minimiser directors in Tehran, Moscow, and Beijing are the necessary performance that keeps the Western patrons engaged and paying for a spectacle designed to accelerate their own decline.
The following table provides a summary of U.S. foreign aid obligations to Israel from the post-World War II era to the present, based on data from the Congressional Research Service. The figures are presented in current (non-inflation-adjusted) U.S. dollars and illustrate the scale and evolution of the financial commitment, which forms a core component of the “resource sink” hypothesis.
| Period/Year | Military Aid ($ millions) | Economic Aid ($ millions) | Missile Defense ($ millions) | Total Aid ($ millions) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1946-2020 (Cumulative) | $104,506.2 | $34,347.5 | $7,411.4 | $146,265.1 |
| 2021 | $3,300.0 | $0.0 | $500.0 | $3,800.0 |
| 2022 | $3,300.0 | $0.0 | $1,500.0 | $4,800.0 |
| 2023 | $3,300.0 | $0.0 | $500.0 | $3,800.0 |
| Total (1946-2023) | $114,406.2 | $34,347.5 | $9,911.4 | $158,665.1 |
Source: Congressional Research Service, “U.S. Foreign Aid to Israel,” March 1, 2023.103 Note: Missile defense funding figures are provided by the Department of Defense and are separate from USAID data.
Analysis of Trends:
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