Yinon Plan

The Yinon Plan refers to an article published in February 1982 in the Hebrew journal Kivunim ("Directions") entitled 'A Strategy for Israel in the 1980s'. The article was penned by Oded Yinon, reputedly a former advisor to Ariel Sharon, a former senior official with the Israeli Foreign Ministry and journalist for The Jerusalem Post. It is cited as an early example of characterizing political projects in the Middle East in terms of a logic of sectarian divisions. It has played a role in both conflict resolution analysis by scholars who regard it as having influenced the formulation of policies adopted by the American administration under George W. Bush, and also in conspiracy theories according to which the article either predicted or planned major political events in the Middle East since the 1980s, including the 2003 invasion of Iraq and the overthrowing of Saddam Hussein, the Syrian Civil War and the rise of the Islamic State. Conspiracy theories further claim that the plan was introduced to the US by members of the Israeli Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies in administration and that it was adopted by the Bush administration following 9/11 (claimed to be a Mossad false flag) with the goal of furthering US interests in the region, while simultaneously advancing the alleged Jewish dream of Greater Israel "from the Nile to the Euphrates". Kivunim was a quarterly periodical dedicated to the study of Judaism and Zionism which appeared between 1978 and 1987, and was published by the World Zionist Organization's department of Information in Jerusalem. Yinon argues that the world was witnessing a new epoch in history without precedent, which required both the development of a fresh perspective and an operational strategy to implement it. The rationalist and humanist foundations of Western civilization were in a state of collapse. The West was disintegrating before the combined onslaught of the Soviet Union and the Third World, a phenomenon he believed was accompanied by an upsurge in anti-Semitism, all of which meant that Israel would become the last safe haven for Jews to seek refuge in.