In this mailing:
- Soeren Kern: EU "Upgrades" Relations with Israel, Strangling Strings Attached
- Michael Curtis: The French Railroad and the Holocaust
- David Samuels: Netanyahu Plays the Romney Card
EU "Upgrades" Relations with Israel, Strangling Strings Attached
by Soeren Kern
August 3, 2012 at 5:00 am
August 3, 2012 at 5:00 am
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The
upgrade, which comes amid a barrage of unending criticism of Israel's policies,
in fact appears aimed at increasing Israel's economic dependence on the
European Union, with the objective of enhancing the bloc's leverage over the
State of Israel. Authored by EU delegations to the Palestinian Authority, the
document includes severe recommendations meant to strengthen Palestinian
control over East Jerusalem and coerce Israel to change its policy in the West
Bank. The document is unprecedented in that it deals with internal Israeli
issues.
The European Union has upgraded trade and diplomatic relations with Israel
in more than 60 activities and fields, including agriculture, energy and
immigration.
But the wide-ranging boost to bilateral relations, which was announced at
the annual EU-Israel
Association Council meeting in Brussels on July 24, is unlikely to end the
deep-seated hostility European officialdom harbors towards the Jewish state.
The move, which comes amid an unending barrage of European criticism of
Israeli policies in the West Bank, Gaza and within Israel itself, in fact
appears aimed at increasing Israel's economic dependence upon the European
Union, with the objective of enhancing the bloc's leverage over the State of
Israel.
As a whole, the package stops short of the full upgrade in relations that
was frozen after Israel's invasion of the Gaza Strip in January 2009, but is
highly significant nonetheless.
Among other measures, the European Union will remove obstacles impeding
Israel's access to European government-controlled markets and enhance Israel's
co-operation with nine key EU agencies, including the European Police Office (Europol), the
EU's Judicial Cooperation
Unit (Eurojust) and the European
Space Agency (ESA).
Notably absent from the package is the Agreement
on Conformity, Assessment and Acceptance of Industrial Products (ACAA), a
trade agreement that seeks to eliminate technical barriers to trade in
industrial products, with the objective of increasing European access to
Israeli markets, and vice-versa.
Although the European Commission and the European Council approved the ACAA
in March 2010, ratification of the agreement has been held up in the European
Parliament due to lobbying by pro-Palestinian
activist groups, who argue that the agreement will benefit Israeli
companies that do business in the disputed, so-called Occupied Territories.
The Committee on Foreign Affairs of the European Parliament (AFET) on June 7
recommended
that the ACAA be ratified, but its fate will be determined by the Committee
on International Trade (INTA), which is scheduled
to vote on the measure on September 18, 2012.
In any event, the official
EU statement announcing the upgrade in bilateral relations is also replete
with condescending criticism of Israel, which the EU accuses of perpetrating a
wide range of human rights abuses in the "occupied Palestinian territory
(oPt)" and within Israel itself.
Among other items, the statement refers to Israel's obligation to protect
the rights of the Arab-Palestinian minority, stressing the "importance to
address it as a core problem in its own right." The document also condemns
the "excessive recourse by Israel to administrative detention."
The EU urges Israel "to refrain from actions which may…curtail the
freedom of association and freedom of speech (of civil society)" and it
calls on Israel to prosecute "settler extremists" for their
"continuous violence and deliberate provocations against Palestinian
civilians."
The statement "stresses Israel's obligations regarding the living
conditions of the Palestinian population" and condemns "developments
on the ground which threaten to make a two-state solution impossible, such as,
inter alia, the marked acceleration of settlement construction, ongoing
evictions of Palestinians and the demolition of their housing and
infrastructure in the occupied Palestinian territory (oPt), including East
Jerusalem, the worsening living conditions of the Palestinian population and
serious limitations for the Palestinian Authority to promote the economic
development of Palestinian communities, in particular in Area C."
The EU is also "concerned about reports on a possible resumption of
construction of the separation barrier because the EU considers that the
separation barrier where built on occupied land is illegal under international
law, constitutes an obstacle to peace and threatens to make a two-state
solution impossible."
The statement comes amid a wave of official EU criticism of Israel that is
often one-sided, disproportionate and bordering on obsessive.
In July, for example, the European
Parliament passed a highly biased resolution accusing Israel of literally
dozens of offenses against the Palestinian population, Palestinian institutions
and even Arab Bedouins. The statement criticizes Israel for "expansion of
settlements and settler violence, planning restrictions and the consequent
acute house shortage, house demolitions, evictions and displacements,
confiscation of land, difficult access to natural resources, and the lack of
basic social services and assistance…" The resolution even accuses Israel
of "creating an institutional and leadership vacuum in the local
Palestinian population."
In June, EU
"Foreign Minister" Catherine Ashton, who has a well-earned reputation
for making statements that seek to isolate and delegitimize the Jewish state,
criticized Israeli policies that "are illegal under international law and
threaten to make a two-state solution impossible." Since assuming her post
in December 2009, Ashton has never criticized Palestinian obstructionism and
their setting impossible preconditions for entering genuine peace talks with
Israel. (In March, Ashton famously equated the killing of three children at a
Jewish school in France with "what is
happening in Gaza.")
In May, the EU's
27 foreign ministers unanimously condemned "the ongoing evictions and
house demolitions in East Jerusalem, changes to the residency status of
Palestinians…the prevention of peaceful Palestinian cultural, economic, social
or political activities…the worsening living conditions of the Palestinian
population…of jeopardizing the major achievements of the Palestinian Authority
in state-building…the continuous settler violence and deliberate provocations
against Palestinian civilians…" But nowhere does the document call on the
Palestinian Authority to recognize the legitimacy of Israel as a Jewish state,
a move that arguably more than any other would advance Palestinian aspirations
for statehood.
In January 2012, the EU published a document called "The
EU Heads of Mission Report on East Jerusalem" which makes an urgent
plea for the EU to adopt a more "active and visible" implementation
of its policy towards Israel and the peace process.
Authored by EU delegations to the Palestinian Authority, the document
includes severe recommendations meant to strengthen Palestinian control over
East Jerusalem and coerce Israel to change its policy in the West Bank.
The document recommends that the European Union fund Palestinian
construction projects in Area C of the West Bank without Israel's cooperation,
undermining Israeli control. But under the Oslo Accords, Area
C is under full Israeli civil and security control; it contains all of
Israel's West Bank settlements and a small Palestinian population. The EU
document also states that Israel's policies are undermining the prospect of a
Palestinian state on the 1967 borders, and calls on Israel to support
Palestinian construction across Area C and in East Jerusalem.
The report includes a radical proposal for "appropriate EU legislation
to prevent/discourage financial transactions in support of settlement
activity." Under the proposal, the European Commission would use
legislation to force European companies to stop doing business with companies
involved in settlement construction and commercial activities.
Recommendations include the preparation of a "blacklist" of
settlers considered violent in order to consider later the option of banning
them from entering the European Union. The document also seeks to encourage
more PA activity and representation in East Jerusalem.
The report advises senior EU figures visiting East Jerusalem to refrain from
being escorted by official Israeli representatives or security personnel. In
addition, the document encourages officials to instruct European tourism firms
to refrain from supporting Israeli businesses located in East Jerusalem and to
raise EU public awareness of Israeli products originating from the settlements
or from East Jerusalem.
In December 2011, the Israeli
newspaper Haaretz obtained a classified working paper produced by European
embassies in Israel, which recommended that the European Union should consider
Israel's treatment of its Arab population a "core issue, not second tier
to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict."
The document is unprecedented in that it deals with internal Israeli issues.
According to European diplomats and senior Foreign Ministry officials quoted by
Haaretz, the document was written and sent to EU headquarters in Brussels
behind the back of the Israeli government.
Other issues the document deals with include "the lack of progress in
the peace process, the continued occupation of the territories, Israel's
definition of itself as Jewish and democratic, and the influence of the Israeli
Arab population."
The original document also included suggestions for action the EU should
take, but these were removed from the final version at the insistence of
several countries. Among these were the suggestion that the EU file an official
protest every time a bill discriminating against Arabs passes a second reading
in the Knesset, and that the EU ensure that all Arab towns have completed urban
plans, "with each member state potentially 'adopting' a municipality to
this end."
Haaretz reported that, according to a European diplomat involved in drafting
the report, work on it began in 2010 at the initiative of Britain. The idea was
to write a report that could be debated by a forum of EU foreign ministers. At
some point, however, several countries, among them the Czech Republic, Poland
and the Netherlands, expressed objections to its contents and the document was
watered down.
Also in December, four
EU members of the UN Security Council issued an angry joint statement
branding Israeli "settlements" in Palestinian occupied territories
and East Jerusalem as "illegal under international law." The
statement said: "We call on the Israeli government to reverse these steps.
The viability of the Palestinian state that we want to see and the two-state
solution that is essential for Israel's long-term security are threatened by
the systematic and deliberate expansion of settlements."
While the EU continues to exert pressure on Israel, Jerusalem has been
unable to extract meaningful concessions from Brussels. For example, the EU
has once again rejected an Israeli request that the bloc designate the
Lebanon-based Hezbollah as a terrorist group.
Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman recently launched a new
diplomatic push to convince the EU to outlaw Hezbollah following the murders of
five Israelis and a Bulgarian bus driver on July 18. Israel blames Hezbollah
for the suicide bombing at Bulgaria's Burgas airport.
Cypriot Foreign Minister Erato Kozakou-Marcoullis, whose country currently
heads the EU presidency, said there is "no consensus among the EU member
states for putting Hezbollah on the terrorist list of the organization,"
and claimed that there is "no tangible
evidence of Hezbollah engaging in acts of terrorism."
Lieberman has also failed to persuade Catherine Ashton, the EU foreign
policy chief, to "intervene" on Israel's behalf in a controversy
regarding Tunisia's desire to include a clause in its new constitution making normalized
relations with Israel a criminal offense.
As these examples and many others indicate, Israel should be under no
illusion that the recent "upgrading" of bilateral relations with the
European Union will end European hostility toward the Jewish state. Quite to
the contrary; Israel should be expecting an increase in European meddling in
its internal affairs.
Soeren Kern is a
Distinguished Senior Fellow at the New York-based Gatestone Institute. He
is also Senior Fellow for European Politics at the Madrid-based Grupo de
Estudios Estratégicos / Strategic Studies Group. Follow him on Facebook.
Related Topics: Soeren Kern
The
French Railroad and the Holocaust
Is a Public Company Private?
by Michael Curtis
August 3, 2012 at 4:00 am
August 3, 2012 at 4:00 am
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In all
these legal encounters, the SNCF has used contradictory, but successful,
arguments. In the French case, it argues that the court has no jurisdiction
over it because it was a private company. In the U.S., it argues that courts
have no jurisdiction over it because it was not a private company but an arm of
the French government.
Even though in wartime France, under the Vichy regime headed by Marshal
Pétain, people behaved in a manner thought necessary for survival, the issue of
legal as well as moral judgment has arisen again in lawsuits involving the
actions of the Societé Nationale des Chemins de Fer Français (SNCF), the French
railroad system, during World War II. For a long time there was denial and an
eerie silence on the part of postwar French authorities in general, and the
SNCF in particular, about their participation in the Holocaust. Only on
November 4, 2010 did Guillaume Pepy, the present chair of the SNCF, issue a
statement that "The Nazis and their French Vichy collaborators directed
these terrible actions," and conveyed "profound sorrow and regret for
the consequences" of the acts of SNCF. Those acts were the transport in
French trains of 76,000 Jews in France to the death camps.
Pepy again spoke on the issue in January 2011 in Bobigny, a suburb of Paris,
the depot and transfer point from which 22,000 Jews who had been interned at
Drancy were shipped to Auschwitz and other places. He then said "In the
name of the SNCF I bow down before the victims, the survivors, the children of
those deported, and before the suffering that still lives." He pledged
that a memorial would be built at Bobigny to commemorate the victims.
Whether this pledge was sincere or cynical is a matter of judgment
particularly in view of the eagerness with which the SNCF has been a bidder to
build lucrative high-speed rail projects in Florida and California, where a
number of Holocaust survivors still live.
Opposition from Holocaust survivors in these two states has arisen because
of the fact that the SNCF has never made any restitution or reparations to the
victims. In spite of these recent expressions of regret, the company is still
unwilling to provide compensation to survivors for its wartime actions, all of
which have been amply documented. From March 27, 1942 to August 17, 1944, in
French trains, the SNCF transported 76,000 Jews in 75 convoys from French camps
to the death camps. Fewer than 3,000 would return.
Two facts make the participation of the SNCF in the Holocaust even more
jarring. One is that the transports continued into August 1944, two months
after the Allied landing on D-Day and a week before Paris was liberated. The
other is the Germans paid SNCF per head and per kilometer for a third class
ticket for the victims who, in fact, were cheated even in this way by being
transported, in about 3,000 cattle wagons, each usually containing 50 people.
Accounts of those transports indicate that conditions were horrendous: long
trips lacking elementary hygiene, and with minimal food and water supplies. The
SNCF was well paid for its activities; it even continued to reclaim payments of
bills after the liberation.
Did the SNCF have any choice other than to transport the 76,000 Jews to
death camps? By an agreement of June 30, 1940, Germany approved the principle
of French operation of the French railroads under German supervision. Like
other French agencies, the SNCF willingly undertook the services required by
the Nazis. Although it did in reality have a margin for manoeuvre and to
undercut orders, it ran the transport trains without any secrecy on regular
schedules, in full knowledge of the ultimate fate of the Jewish passengers. It
never tried to delay a train or to prompt sabotage. Except in a few cases,
orders were carried out without protest or resistance. The railcars were
disinfected after each deportation and prepared for the next shipment. Senior
rail officials accompanied the trains to the French border.
Those officials justified their behavior in two ways. One was that the SNCF
was simply applying the laws and rule of the Vichy government. The other was
that they were forced to comply with the Nazi demands. These arguments are not
only morally putrid and inhumane; they were also refuted -- albeit indirectly:
the SNCF was not specifically mentioned by name -- by the French Conseil d'État
in February 2009, when it declared that the state, at that time governed by the
Vichy government, was responsible for facilitating the deportation of Jews.
Both the Vichy government and the SNCF were now seen to have committed crimes
against humanity.
The arguments of the SNCF officials are fallacious. Only one SNCF worker, a
man named Léon Bronchart, refused on October 31, 1942 to work on a convoy. He
was given only a brief suspension for his action; he has been honored by Yad
Vashem in Jerusalem as a "righteous gentile." His action showed that
acts of courage and refusal to comply with unjust orders were possible without
serious punishment.
On the actions of the SNCF, the official, impartial report by Christian
Bachelier is devastating. Bachelier found no record of any official protest by
SNCF against the deportations. He concluded that, right from the start,
representatives of SNCF were involved in the technical details of transport.
The SNCF participated in the events following the roundup of 13,000 Jews in
Paris on July 16, 1942, 8,000 of whom were held in the Vél d'Hiver cycling
stadium, since demolished. The SNCF also managed the transport of these Jews to
the camps of the Loiret. In addition, the SNCF managed the transport of Jews
from the "free" Vichy area to occupied northern France. The French convoys
of these victims, openly and fully listed as part of European railroad
scheduling agenda, were formed, routed, and driven by French railroad
employees.
The moral case against SNCF is clear; more in question is the legal
argument. The SNCF was formed on January 1,1938 by the consolidation of five
privately owned rail companies; the French state owned 51% and subsidized it.
During World War II, between 1940 and 1944, it remained a private enterprise,
controlled by the Vichy government, but was acquired by the French state only
after the war. On December 31, 1982 all assets of the SNCF passed to the state;
thus SNCF became a state-owned body without any change to its corporate form.
Up to 2001 the French government and its agencies were immune from
prosecution because they, including SNCF, claimed sovereign immunity. This
immunity was lifted in 2001 and therefore agencies could be sued. Further,
because it is partly state-owned, the SNCF has continued to claim protection
under the U.S. 1976 Foreign Sovereign Immunity Act.
Holocaust survivors and descendants of those transported have in recent
years, both in France and in the U.S., sought financial compensation as well as
SNCF acknowledgment of guilt. A lawsuit was brought in France by Alain Lipietz
on behalf of his uncle and his half-brother, who had been transported in 1944
from Toulouse to Drancy, the French antechamber of Auschwitz. In June 2006, the
court in Toulouse found the SNCF guilty of collaborating with the Nazis in
deporting the two men. Even though both men survived the war, the SNCF was
fined 61,000 euros for this act. However, in the Court of Appeals in Bordeaux,
in March 2007, the case was dismissed. The case then went to the Conseil
d'État, the French administrative court of last resort, which, without commenting
on the substantive issues, concluded on December 21, 2007 that it lacked
jurisdiction in the matter as the grievance was not a French state issue. Its
rationale was that although the SNCF during the war was a mixed enterprise,
essentially it was a private company.
After the Lipietz trial hundreds of other survivors filed similar claims. As
France has no class-action suits, the SNCF has to answer each claim, which
leads to individual lawsuits. Since the decision of the Conseil d'État,
however, the French courts are closed to individual suits against SNCF.
In the U.S., a class-action suit (Abrams v. SNCF) was brought on behalf of
over 300 survivors. The court held in December 2001 that it lacked jurisdiction
because SNCF was an agency or instrumentality of a foreign state protected
under the U.S. 1976 law. The plaintiffs appealed, arguing that at the time the
actions occurred, the SNCF was not a state agency. But the charges that SNCF
had committed war crimes and crimes against humanity were dismissed by the U.S.
Court of Appeals for lack of jurisdiction. It held that the "evil
actions" of SNCF were not "susceptible to legal redress in U.S.
federal court today."
Another lawsuit (Freund v. SNCF), filed in March 2006 by 26 persons who were
then joined by 400 others, charged that the SNCF collaborated with the
occupation authorities, complied with their instructions and profited from its
actions. The main attorney for the plaintiffs, Harriet Tamen, contends that
SNCF was an independent commercial and economic entity and therefore can be
sued.
There is no French government fund with a finite amount with which to
compensate victims. Ms. Tamen contends that the only specific fund was
established by French banks -- with no funding from the government -- to make
restitution for funds that were taken from Jewish account holders but which
were never returned. The lawsuit she is conducting is not against the
government but against a privately owned French company alleged to have been
involved in war crimes and crimes against humanity. However, the Second Circuit
Court of Appeals in September 2010 held that immunity still applied to SNCF.
In all these legal encounters the SNCF has used contradictory, but
successful, arguments. In the French case, it argues that the court has no
jurisdiction over it because it was a private company. In the U.S., it argues
that courts have no jurisdiction over it because it was not a private company
but an arm of the French government.
To overcome the obstacles a bill, the Holocaust Rail Victims Justice Act,
was introduced in the US Congress in March 2011 to allow US citizens and others
to make claims and to take action against railroad companies that had deported
them or their relatives to Nazi concentration camps on trains owned or operated
by those companies. The bill would waive the claim of the SNCF that it is
shielded by foreign sovereignty protection. At this point, August 2012, the
bill has not passed.
Some French historians and official Jewish community leaders, including
Roger Cukierman , head of CRIF (the official organization of French Jews), and
Serge Klarsfeld and his son Arno, have opposed or been neutral to the claims
against the SNCF on the grounds that it was acting under duress, under orders,
and that it has been more forthright than other French bodies in explaining its
wartime activities. But it is difficult to accept this perspective of SNCF in
view of the recent statements of Mr. Pepy that "the French and their Vichy
collaborators directed these terrible actions." The time is long overdue
for reparation to be paid.
Michael Curtis is author of Should Israel Exist? A Sovereign Nation under
attack by the International Community.
Related Topics: France
| Michael
Curtis
Netanyahu Plays the Romney Card
by David Samuels • Aug 2, 2012 at 1:27 pm
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Lost in the discussion of Mitt Romney's Olympic
gaffes were the larger geopolitical ramifications of the Israeli leg of the GOP
candidate's grand tour. In Jerusalem, the Republican Presidential candidate
called blocking Iran's nuclear ambitions a "moral imperative," adding
"In the final analysis, of course, no option should be excluded. We
recognize Israel's right to defend itself, and that it is right for America to
stand with you."
As heard by Americans, these lines in Romney's Iran speech are a swipe at
President Obama which also translates into pitch to Jewish GOP donors like
Sheldon Adelson, the biggest whale on the trip, to write more checks. But this
is a pitch that Romney has made with plenty of success at home. So why,
exactly, was he in Jerusalem?
One reason -- aside from the obligatory photo op at the Western Wall -- may
be that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu wanted him there. Adelson,
one of the Romney campaign's biggest donors, is closer to Netanyahu than he is
to Romney. Dan Senor, Romney's chief foreign policy advisor, who arranged the
GOP candidate's visit, also has close ties to Netanyahu's inner circle. Given
these facts, it is perhaps more interesting to think about what Netanyahu may
have gained from Romney's visit.
The most immediate and tangible payoff the Israeli prime minister received
came last Friday from the Obama administration, which was eager to show Jewish
voters in America -- and the Israelis -- that it, too, is tough on Iran. In a
televised speech, the President promised Israel an additional $70 million -- in
a sign of his eagerness to seem strong, Obama accidentally promised "$70
billion" -- to fund Iron Dome, the anti-missile system that US
policymakers have come to understand as a magical machine that, if fed
regularly, forestalls aggressive Israeli military actions.
Obama also sent Netanyahu the gift of a helpless Leon Panetta, who came in
handy as a theatrical prop for a prime-time Netanyahu television appearance in
which the Israeli leader blasted the Obama administration for having
effectively done nothing to stop Iran's march towards a bomb. Score: Netanyahu
2, Obama 0.
But the greatest benefit Netanyahu received came from the content of
Romney's speech itself, which was later amplified by Dan Senor, who stated that
"If Israel has to take action on its own in order to stop Iran from
developing the capability, the governor would respect that decision." By
getting the GOP candidate more or less on record as supporting an Israeli
military strike against Iran, Netanyahu opened up some politically-useful
daylight between the Obama administration's Iran policy and the perceived
internal American consensus about whether an Israeli strike on Iran would deal
a blow to America's national interests. In other words, Netanyahu re-framed
Obama's Iran policy as a campaign issue, with the Obama campaign on one side
and the Romney campaign on the other side. While an Israeli attack might be
controversial within such a frame, it would be much harder to inarguably
construe it as an attack on America. Obama's anger in such an event would
simply be the anger of a politician scorned in the middle of an election
campaign, not the anger of an American President on behalf of his entire
nation.
My own reporting has long suggested that Israeli noises about a possible,
likely or imminent attack on Iran are part of a sometimes scripted, sometimes
unspoken cooperative interaction with successive American administrations which
have used the threat of an Israeli strike to gain support for meaningful
sanctions. "You know how crazy those Israelis are," American envoys
have been whispering in European and other capitals for the last decade or so.
"If we don't stop them with sanctions, there's no telling WHAT they might
do. Why, only last week, Barak was telling some reporter that Iran getting the
bomb would be just like THE HOLOCAUST . . .."
Every few months, when the Israelis sense that US resolve in the sanctions
department is weakening, or the Iranians enrich uranium to new levels, they
ratchet up the rhetoric without any proper coordination, and cause political
problems for the US President. This trick works because it forces Obama to
prove that he is strong by pushing harder for stronger sanctions or else face
the ire of potential voters and donors -- some of whom are Jewish, and some of
whom are not. The diplomatic tango between the US and Israel over the Iranian
nuclear program is a dance between friends who know each other's moves well.
The common understanding behind this loose choreography is that a full-on
Wagnerian attack with 120 warplanes that would probably invite a large-scale
Iranian retaliatory response is too much of a gamble for even the most cocksure
Israeli government to take. This would be true even if a large number of
Iranian sites were seriously damaged and scientists and other key personnel
were killed in a strike, and especially true if the attack could be framed as a
failure. Given the IAF's performance in the 2006 Lebanon war, in which
Hezbollah's command and control structure continued to function and Israel
failed to kill a single key political or military leader of a relatively minor
guerrilla force, which lacked serious weapons of the kind that the Iranians
possess, failure, however defined, seems quite possible. The idea of an Israeli
attack on Iran has therefore seemed like a useful fantasy that helps sell
newspapers.
So the question that occurs to me is whether something has changed in the
last six months or so that might explain the increasingly harsh and
uncompromising rhetoric of both Netanyahu and Barak, who by all accounts have
become quite close, and run the Iran portfolio together.
The easy answer -- as per Romney's visit to Jerusalem -- is that it is an
American election year. Obama's need to conform to Israeli demands will never
be greater, and his ability to punish the Israelis -- in any scenario short of
an actual attack -- will never be more constrained. For Netanyahu, pressuring
Obama through any and all available means, including Mitt Romney, is a way to
produce very tangible results for his country -- like bunker busters and more
money for Iron Dome -- while also scoring political points at home, which he
doesn't mind doing. The fact that he might also damage the political prospects
of a man he neither likes nor trusts probably doesn't keep him up at night
either.
Yet the alarm with which this shift in rhetoric has been greeted by key
figures in the Israeli security establishment, like former Mossad chief Meir
Dagan, and credible news reports of stepped-up NSA and CIA surveillance of
Israeli military personnel and movements, suggests to me that something more
than election year politics may be involved here. Subsequent to their poor
showing in Lebanon, the Israelis appear to have taken out a Syrian nuclear
facility, and killed a half-dozen key nuclear scientists in the heart of
Tehran, as well as found clever ways to make centrifuges explode inside of
Iran's own nuclear facilities. Israel's military planners can be disorganized
and lazy, but they aren't dumb.
What the evidence suggests, I feel, is that something big and
technology-related has changed in Israeli strategic thinking that has generated
a clever new attack plan which seems plausible to Israel's leaders -- and which
has made Obama's people worried about the political and economic effects of an
Israeli strike. If that's true, then the question is whether that change is
more likely to result in an Israeli strike, or a pre-emptive American strike --
and whether the Iranians will provide the necessary pretext for a war that no
one in the region actually wants, but which appears much more likely than it
did six months ago, given the continuing Iranian drive for a bomb.
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