Israel's Dangerous Game with Iran

The NYT has a must-read that examines the dangerous game that the US and Israel are playing with Iran, but shines perhaps the brightest spotlight on Israel's resort to one of its most-used tactics, historically: assassination.  In this instance, we're talking about assassination of Iranian nuclear scientists.


As Glenn Greenwald has pointed it, what the Israelis are doing is terrorism.


And as two US experts point out in the NYT piece, the consequences down the line - for both Israel and the US - may be extremely dangerous.

William C. Banks, an expert on national security law at Syracuse University, said he believed that for the United States even to provide specific intelligence to Israel to help kill an Iranian scientist would violate a longstanding executive order banning assassinations. The legal rationale for drone strikes against terrorist suspects — that the United States is at war with Al Qaeda and its allies — would not apply, he said.

“Under international law, aiding and abetting would be the same as pulling the trigger,” Mr. Banks said. He added, “We would be in a precarious position morally, and the entire world is watching, especially China and Russia.”

Gary Sick, a specialist on Iran at Columbia, said he believed that the covert campaign, combined with sanctions, would not persuade Iran to abandon its nuclear work.

“It’s important to turn around and ask how the U.S. would feel if our revenue was being cut off, our scientists were being killed and we were under cyberattack,” Mr. Sick said. “Would we give in, or would we double down? I think we’d fight back, and Iran will, too.”

More perspectives on the danger - and stupidity - of the US+Israel current tactics are here.  And Juan Cole speculates (with some evidence to back it up, to some extent) that the latest assassination might have been a combined production of the Mossad and the anti-Iranian-regime group known as the MEK (Mujahedin e-Khalq), both of which have an established track record of terrorist assassinations.


At least the US has condemned the most recent assassination.  (It remains to be seen if the Israelis will get the message, but in an election season, don't expect Obama or Clinton to call them out on this.)


Doesn't it make sense that, at some point, the Iranians will find a way to retaliate?  The Iranian press is already calling for vengeance against Israel.

More on Ethan Bronner's eulogy of Settler Extremist Hanan Porat

A few days after I'd posted on my disgust over the NYT's Ethan Bronner's fawning eulogy of West Bank extremist settler Hanan Porat comes a spot-on essay from Lizzy Ratner at Mondoweiss.  It deserves posting here in full - with the reminder that as the nation's supposed "newspaper of record," the New York Times has a long way to go in achieving some real balance in its reporting on Israel and Palestine.  And Bronner's ties to Israel are too well documented to rehearse here.

Late Wednesday night, after I finished devouring the Steve Jobs obituary on the New York Times website, my eye happened to catch the headline for another of the day's death reports: "Hanan Porat, Jewish Settlement Leader, Dies at 67." (Actually, my eye didn't so much catch the headline as was forced toward it by the Times's "Recommended for You" list, which has apparently pegged me as member of the all-things-Israel demographic, which is a whole other story ... sort of.)RetweetMy first reaction was disgust followed by a strong desire to register my protest by refusing to read. What was the Times doing running an obituary of a settlement leader, a founder of the extremist movement responsible for gobbling up dunam upon dunam of Palestinian land, for dispossession, violence, apartheid, and an ultra-nationalism so toxic it approaches fascism? If a leader of Hamas died, would the Times eulogize him too? It goes without saying that it would never grant precious death-page real estate to a human rights leader like Michel Warshawski or Raji Sourani.
But then curiosity got the better of me and I clicked on the link which brought me, in a matter of seconds, to a 574-word Ethan-Bronner special capped by a photograph of a young and dashing Porat. Based on Bronner's homage, which is written in a tone that can only really be described as sympathetic-masquerading-as-neutral, here is what I learned:
* Hanan Porat was hot! "[I]n his prime, in the 1970s and ’80s, when the Israeli right began its political ascent, he was a fiery advocate of hard-line Zionism, cutting a handsome figure with a mane of thick dark hair topped by a knitted yarmulke," Bronner writers. And indeed, the man in the photograph, the one riding high above the shoulders of dozens of men, pants tight, plaid shirt loose, arms spread in ecstasy, looks like a 1970s god, a real-life Berger -- so much so that even now I can't help but wonder: could a guy that good looking really be that bad?
* Porat "establish[ed] Jewish communities in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip."  Well, gosh, I like communities, communities are good, doesn't everyone want more communities in this atomized, go-it-alone world? In fact, I was part of a community once, during a semester I spent at an enviro-wilderness high school in Maine. It was cool. We quoted Thoreau and Whitman and kept a communal journal and shared food and clothes and secrets and had really intense, deep friendships.
* Porat "helped turn Israel’s religious settler movement into a powerful force" through the establishment of the aforementioned communities. Hm, a powerful force -- oh I get it, like Adele 0r Hank Greenberg or women!
* Benjamin Netanyahu, who is the only outside source quoted in the article (and gets quoted twice), really liked Porat, and Porat really liked the Land of Israel: "Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Mr. Porat had 'dedicated his life to building up the land of Israel, and to educating generations of students about religious Zionism and loving the land of Israel and the Jewish people.'” Wow, what a warm and generous-sounding guy, so full of love and altruism. A true mensch!
* Porat was a" fervent advocate of Jewish power across the biblical land of Israel." How romantic, the biblical land of Israel. Good thing he wasn't advocating Jewish power across the contemporary land of Palestine.
* Porat helped found Gush Emunim, "which means 'the bloc of the faithful.'” Well, that doesn't sound that bad, does it? Sure, "gush" is an unfortunate word (rhymes with tush and mush and whatnot), but "bloc of the faithful" sounds pretty innocuous.
* Porat helped build a Jewish settlement in the heart of the Palestinian city of Hebron, "where the biblical patriarchs and matriarchs are said to be buried." Cool, sign me up for a tour! I want to see where the patriarchs and matriarchs are planted.
* Porat grew up on kibbutz Kfar Etzion, "which is on land that was later won by Jordan during Israel’s 1948 war of independence. He re-established the community after the 1967 Middle East war, when the land was conquered by Israel." Well, that sounds fair enough. I mean, we're just talking about land, right? First Jordan won the land, then Israel won the land, and since we're just talking about land, what's the big deal?
* The Etzion bloc that Porat helped found "is one of the large West Bank settlement blocs that Israel wants to keep in any deal with a future Palestinian state. One reason many Israelis consider it theirs by right is that it had been settled by Jews before 1948." I guess that means that Jews discovered the area, or at least developed it, and we all know: you discover something, you own it.
* The settlements Porat helped create "remain among the biggest obstacles to creating a Palestinian state." Bummer.
* Porat "is survived by his wife, 11 children and a number of grandchildren." Aw, how sweet, he was a dad and granddad -- and so prolific!
Now here's what I could have learned about Hanan Porat but didn't -- not from theNew York Times and not from the dozens of other mainstream publications that wrote about Porat's death:
* The settlements that Porat  helped found are illegal under international law, and their creation is widely consider a war crime, which would suggest that Hanan Porat himself is a war criminal.
* The settlements that Porat helped found, and the infrastructure of oppression that has been built up all around the settlements to keep them well-watered, bucolic, and "secure," has turned the West Bank into a land of bantustans and Israel into an apartheid state.
* The settlements that Porat and his movement helped found sit on hundreds of thousands of dunams of stolen land and consume as much as (and, at this point, most likely more than) 42 percent of the West Bank. In the process, settlers have forced thousands of Palestinians from their homes.
* The settlements that Porat helped found, and the system of "bypass" roads, apartheid wall, and checkpoints that accompany them, violate Palestinian human rights, including "the right of property, the right to equality, the right to a suitable standard of living, and the right to freedom of movement."
* The settlement that Porat helped found in the heart of the Palestinian city of Hebron is one of the most extreme, radical settlements in existence, a place where the occupation is its most foul, violent, and abusive.
* As Porat fully intended, the settlements are not merely obstacles to the creation of a Palestinian state, they have killed any hope and possibility of a true Palestinian state.
* Gush Emunim, which Porat helped found, was not merely the "bloc of the faithful," it was an extremist, messianic movement that gave birth to a "Zionist fundamentalism" that was aggressive and expansionist at best and violent and terroristic at worst.
* For all his alleged Talmudic brilliance and religious zealotry, Porat was a pretty bad Jew. As Nehemia Shtrasler wrote in a helpful op-ed in Haaretz, "The abuse in the territories [that Porat helped create and support] is also in total contradiction to the moral teachings of Israel's prophets - Amos, Isaiah, and Jeremiah - but Porat and his colleagues knew only the Book of Joshua."
* After Baruch Goldstein murdered 29 Palestinians and wounded more than 100 at a mosque in Hebron, Porat, who helped found the illegal settlement where Goldstein lived, was asked by a reporter to offer his thoughts on the massacre. His response: "Happy Purim."

Turkey-Iran Joint Offensive vs. Kurd Resistance

As noted in the WaPo.
This surely injects into State Department thinking - and Congressional hem-twisting over Israel - even greater concern about Turkey's direction under PM Erdogan.  A country that had been both Israel's and the US's staunchest ally in the Middle East now purports to coordinate with the "mad mullahs" in military strikes against the Kurds.  And some of those strikes will undoubtedly cross into Iraqi Kurdistan, where the government has long relied on the US's backing.


And this atop Turkey's assurance to Iran that the NATO radar bases it will be hosting are no threat to Iran.

The WSJ's Twisted Spin: Obama an "Anti-Israel President"

Bret Stephens' piece today is nothing if not over the top in its biased allegations and twisted spin in his assessment of Obama's recent pronouncements on the Arab Spring and the Israel-Palestine issue.  To wit:

it isn't often that this or any other U.S. president welcomes a foreign leader by sandbagging him with an adversarial policy speech a day before the visit.

Sandbagging?  Adversarial?  Stephens surely refers to Obama's reference to the 1967 borders as the starting point for negotiations, with appropriate swaps.  Nothing in that reference runs counter to decades of US policy concerning that issue.  Bibi and his people know that; or they have no excuse not to know it.  If Bibi felt sandbagged or picked on, that's on him, not on Barack.  In fact, one might just as easily make the case that Bibi was the more adversarial of the two with his day-after lecture, which tried to bully the US president in order to throw some rhetorical red meat to his Likudniks back home.

No U.S. president has explicitly endorsed the '67 lines as the basis for negotiating a final border, which is why the University of Michigan's Juan Cole, not exactly a shill for the Israel lobby, called it "a major turning point."

Explicitly or not, that has been US policy for many years (and that Juan Cole, for whose work I have great respect, called it a turning point mystifies me).  It explains why the US still refuses to move its embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.  It also explains the protests a few months ago when the US vetoed a Security Council resolution that would have reinforced the illegal status of Israel's settlements in the West Bank - a policy that, again, the US adheres to officially.

on Thursday Mr. Obama called for Israel to make territorial concessions to some approximation of the '67 lines before an agreement is reached on the existential issues of refugees and Jerusalem. . . .   the essence of his proposal is that Israel should cede territory, put itself into a weaker position, and then hope for the best. This doesn't even amount to a land-for-peace formula.

That Obama made no statement of US positions on refugees and Jerusalem is lamentable, but so is Stephens' use of "concessions" for an act that would put Israel on the right side of both international law and history: to return the West Bank to Arab Palestinian control.

Mr. Obama was also cheered for his references to Israel as a "Jewish state." But why then obfuscate on the question of Palestinian refugees, whose political purpose over 63 years has been to destroy Israel as a Jewish state?

No, their underlying purpose lies in their right - likewise enshrined in international law - to return to the homes and homelands from which they were driven, illegally and unjustly, beginning in 1947.

Nothing like chumming the water for Bibi's speech to Congress.  But I suppose one can't expect much different from a Wall Street Journal columnist whose previous employment was as editor at the Jerusalem Post.

I'd rather embrace the assessments of a long-time CIA official who has probably forgotten more about the history of US public diplomacy on this issue than Bret Stephens will ever know.  Paul Pillar writes at The National Interest: 

The drop-the-veil moment during this past week was the importunate lobbying by Netanyahu's government before President Obama delivered his Middle East speech [4] on Thursday at the State Department (and doesn't that say something right there—where else would one see a foreign government get in the last lobbying licks on a president's speech, even at the expense of delaying the speech?) to omit any mention of the 1967 borders as the basis for negotiating land swaps and an eventual territorial settlement. The president mentioned that anyway, and in the joint appearance on Friday Netanyahu said nothing about land swaps, instead denouncing the 1967 borders as not being a suitable basis for anything.

 

(Netanyahu, by the way, reiterated that position to AIPAC.)

More from Pillar:

 

As Mr. Obama correctly noted in his address to AIPAC [5] on Sunday, there was nothing new in his mention of 1967-borders-with-swaps. It has long been recognized as the only formula that has any hope of being the basis for a successful negotiation. It has been the basis for several official proposals, including one by Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert in 2008. It also has been at the center of several unofficial proposals, including ones from people whose concern for Israel cannot be doubted (such as a plan offered by David Makovsky [6] of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy).

So for Netanyahu, not only is the land allotted to the Jewish state in the UN partition plan of the 1940s not enough, and not only is the larger territory that became the State of Israel with what we call the 1967 borders not enough. Even with land swaps that would extend Israel farther into the West Bank and include the large majority of the settlements Israel has constructed on land seized in the 1967 war, that would still not be enough for him. How much would be enough? One can speculate on what crumbs of land would be left to the Palestinians, but speculation is not required to have an idea based on Netanyahu's own statements of what such a “state” would entail: Israeli control of the airspace, no military of its own [7], and, as the prime minister mentioned on Friday, a “long-term” Israeli military presence along the Jordan River. It sounds like a bantustan that would make Bophuthatswana look like a paragon of sovereignty. But trying to envision the details of such an entity is pointless because it is a non-starter very likely intended to be rejected. . . .

Dishonesty in his professed desire for a peace settlement and a Palestinian state was only one part of the deception Netanyahu has displayed this past week. Another part concerned his reasons for coveting all that land. This part of the duplicity derives from the nature of U.S. interests involving Israel. The United States has an interest in assuring the security of Israel. In his AIPAC speech, President Obama properly referred to this aspect of U.S.-Israeli relations as “ironclad.” But the United States has no positive interest in either party to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict acquiring title to land not because it is needed for security but instead for historical or religious reasons, or simply to acquire living space. The only U.S. interest is the negative one of being associated in the minds of much of the rest of the world with the Israeli occupation. So Netanyahu couched his denunciation of the 1967 boundary in security terms, saying (again ignoring what President Obama said about land swaps) that the boundary was “indefensible.”

Let's see—even if we ignore, as Netanyahu has, what would be needed for the Palestinians' security—how has that boundary figured into Israeli security in the past? In the one war that was fought across the boundary—the one in 1967—the Israeli Defense Forces conquered the entire West Bank in less than a week (while they also were taking the Golan Heights away from Syria and the Sinai away from Egypt). Since that war, the differential between Israel's military capability and that of its Arab neighbors has become if anything even greater (even just at the conventional level, without considering Israel's acquisition of nuclear weapons beginning in the 1970s). Who would threaten Israel across that 1967 border? A demilitarized Palestinian “state”? Some rusty post-Cold War army from some other Arab country that somehow made it into the West Bank? For many years the biggest threat to Israelis' security has come not across a border beyond which Israel lacked control but instead from angry Palestinians in land that Israel does control. The idea of the 1967 border as indefensible is—given military realities in the Middle East—itself indefensible. And the notion that an Israeli-Palestinian boundary based on land swaps on either side of that border, and as part of a larger peace agreement, would threaten Israeli security is ludicrous.

Related articles

• Israel's 1967 borders 'indefensible', Netanyahu tells Aipac (guardian.co.uk)
• Netanyahu defiant on 1967 borders (bbc.co.uk)
• Bibi Caves At AIPAC: Obama Spooked Him (tpmcafe.talkingpointsmemo.com)