Arab League Military Advisor: Protocols of Elders of Zion Reveal Israel’s Goal is to Expand from Nile to Euphrates

Can you stomach a paragraph of General Mahmoud Khalifa? It’s nothing new. You’ve read about it dozens of times here at Jihad Watch. But the tide of idiocy has to keep being swept back. Here’s the standard crazed claim of a Muslim Arab about the schemes and dreams of “the Jews.” In this case the semi-demented speaker in question is, by Arab and Muslim lights, not a lone lunatic exercising his lungs at Hyde Park Corner, but the Military Advisor to the Arab League. A retired general. A distinguished fellow. Not someone to dismiss.

Here’s what this distinguished general and Military Advisor had to say about Israel and the Jews in June 2020, and which he and innumerable others no doubt still believe:

General (Ret.) Mahmoud Khalifa, the military advisor to the Secretary-General of the Arab League, said in a June 29, 2020 interview on Mehwar TV (Egypt) that the Arabs must arm and strengthen themselves as long as Israel exists “because it wants to devour Arab lands and expand.” He explained that The Protocols of the Elders of Zion says that Israel wants to expand from the Nile to the Euphrates, to make it all Jewish land, and to gather all the Jews there before expanding further.”

General Mahmoud Khalifa: “As long as Israel exists, it compels [the Arabs] to import weapons and to strengthen our countries, because it wants to devour Arab lands and to expand. Israel is an expansionist state. Its goal, according to The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, is to expand from the Nile River to the Euphrates River. They will bring all the Jews in the world and turn it into a Jewish land, and after that, they will expand once again.”

The goal of tiny Israel is not to expand “from the Nile to the Euphrates,” but merely – can you blame it? – to stay alive, to not be destroyed by its Arab enemies. Israel has had to fight four major wars – in 1948-49, 1967, 1973, and 2023-4 – for its survival. It has also had to fight a half-dozen smaller wars, against the various terrorist groups that try to murder its people: the PLO, Hamas, Hezbollah. It also fought one campaign against Egypt in 1956, in order to stop the infiltration of Egyptian fedayeen into southern Israel, where they killed hundreds of Israeli civilians between 1949 and 1956.

The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, as all educated people know, but General Mahmoud Khalifa does not, is the most notorious forgery in modern history, offered by antisemites as proof that Jews are plotting to take over the world. Since its contrivance around the turn of the century by the Russian Okhrana, or Tsarist secret police, The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion has taken root in antisemitic circles around the world. Its author is believed to have been a little-known Tsarist official, Serge Nilus, who edited several editions of the Protocols, each with a different account of how he discovered the document. In his 1911 edition, Nilus claimed that his source had stolen the document from (a nonexistent) Zionist headquarters in France. Other “editors” of the Protocols maintained that the document was read at the First Zionist Congress held in 1897 in Basel, Switzerland. It would have taken General Khalifa a few minutes to discover online this unsavory history of the forgery, but he would undoubtedly claim that all those websites denouncing the Protocols are themselves the product of powerful Jews who, of course, control all of the world’s media, and are determined to blacken the name of the truth-telling Protocols.

Many questions are naturally provoked by this deep belief in the validity of the Protocols. If “the Jews” are so all-powerful, if they had Great Britain, as well as other countries, in their pocket, why did they ever allow the British, who held the Mandate for Palestine, to remove all of Eastern Palestine from the Mandate, in order to create the Emirate of Transjordan? Surely World Jewry could have brought its political and economic might to bear on the British government to prevent such a step. After all, the Hashemite Emir Abdullah had no power of his own; he was merely the recipient of whatever territory or title the British chose to provide. Where were those formidable Elders of Zion when needed to stop the transformation of Eastern Palestine into the Emirate of Transjordan?

Another obvious question raised by the Protocols is this: if World Jewry has been so powerful, how is it that the Jews were unable to stop Hitler, unable to prevent the Nazis from coming to power and mass murdering, by poison gas, the shooting, burning alive, beating to death, of six million of Europe’s Jews? How can the Jews be both all-powerful and completely helpless?

It would be fascinating to see just how General Khalifa would reply to this. Fortunately for him, he has never had to endure any skeptical questioning. He’s a General. He’s a Military Advisor to the Arab League. Perhaps it’s time.

And what about the supposed desire of the Jews, according to General Mahmoud Khalifa, to extend Israel “from the Nile to the Euphrates”? What evidence do we have of this? During the Suez Campaign in 1956, Israel soon came into possession of the Sinai. Its troops were at the Nile, which according to General Khalifa the Jews want as the western border of the Jewish mega-state that is to extend “from the Nile to the Euphrates.” Yet after Israel in 1956 had captured the entire Sinai in 100 hours of what was known as Operation Kadesh, it readily returned the Sinai to Egypt in 1957 in exchange for an Egyptian promise to keep the Straits of Tiran open to Israeli shipping. How does that wiling surrender of the Sinai fit with the supposed desire of the Jews to extend their western border to the Nile?

In 1967, Israel had another chance to place its western border at the Nile, and again it rejected the possibility. It held the entire Sinai, but made clear it was ready to give it all back to Egypt in exchange for a peace treaty, which is exactly what happened with the Camp David Accords, according to which Prime Minister Begin agreed to hand back to Egypt all of the Sinai, in three tranches, in exchange for a peace treaty. No one in Israel, nor in the supposed all-powerful circles of World Jewry, objected.

How does General Khalifa, who is Egyptian, explain the handing back by Israel – twice – of the entire Sinai to Egypt, thereby foregoing its potential western border “on the Nile”? As for the Euphrates, when has Israel shown the slightest interest in extending its eastern border beyond the Jordan River? In June 1967, having swept the board of its enemies, and with the armies of Jordan and Syria prostrate, the Israeli forces could have kept going, following either of two routes, to the Euphrates River. The Israelis could have crossed the Jordan River into Jordan, and then traveled through Jordan to the northern Euphrates in Syria. They could also have descended from the Golan Heights deep into Syria and then to the Euphrates. Neither happened. No Israeli, soldier or civilian, was interested in such a venture. Israeli troops stopped, and remained, at the Jordan River in the east, and on the Golan Heights in the north. Perhaps General Khalifa can explain Israel’s palpable unwillingness, on both its western and eastern borders, to try to expand – as Khalifa assures us the Jewish state wants to — “from the Nile to the Euphrates.” We’re all ears.