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Press TV has conducted an interview with Gordon Duff, senior editor of Veterans Today, about Israel’s envoy to the US Michael Oren saying Israel prefers al-Qaeda-affiliated operatives to Iranian-backed groups.

- Now what we are hearing being said there by Michael Oren about al-Qaeda, this could be interpreted by some as you know just a preference that’s mentioned there as a part of his speech or signifying more deeper or closer relationship between Israel and al-Qaeda. What do you think?

- Well one of the things that Oren left out of his speech and this would be the last thing he says publicly as ambassador of the United States is that in supporting al-Qaeda it is not that he is necessarily announcing that he wishes to see the overthrow of just the Assad regime but that he is supporting a US policy that now abandons US support from matric forces, that he is advocating that the United States officially get behind al-Qaeda, the group that Senators Graham and McCain have been working with all along and that the US admit to that relationship with al-Qaeda that many of us have suspected has existed since the late 1990s.

- And when it comes to that relationship at least between al-Qaeda and Israel, a lot of observers have been asking the question why hasn’t al-Qaeda been directly for instance threatening the interest of Israel and that is the question that they say, you know raises a whole new set of ideas on this relationship. What is your response?

- You know there is an odd coincidence that al-Qaeda since its founding in documents from the late 1990s has never said anything threatening about Israel. Al-Qaeda has never attempted an active terrorism against an Israeli backed entity of any kind.

If anything, al-Qaeda has seemingly acted as a surrogate of the Israeli intelligence services all along. Now this can either be seen as a very, very bizarre coincidence or one could read something into Michael Oren’s statement today and perhaps assume that the relationship between Israel and al-Qaeda is one that is well over 15 years old.

- And just quickly, let’s refer to something that he said about the strategic “arc” that extends from Tehran to Damascus and to Beirut and he said that the Assad government was the keystone in that arc.

What do you think the Israeli preference is right now for this whole situation? Some people have been saying that it is trying to urge the Obama administration to launch a war, others are saying its main intention is to keep the situation in Syria chaotic and in a state of civil war?

- Well if the Obama administration does engage in a war against Syria and I believe that that is Israel’s policy that that war will last more than a decade.

The initial policy that we recognize was an attempt to balkanize Syria to create an al-Qaeda led state on the border between Iraq and Syria and use that to overthrow Iraq and use that to destabilize Iran.

Their policies have morphed into something far more severe, a regional chaos at the risk of a world war. They are pushing the United States into a direct military confrontation with Russia.