AL MONITOR
Bahman Baktiari
It’s not often that spy masters and security chiefs represent the democratic impulse and the conscience of a nation adrift. But in Israel, where the hard right holds power and the left has all but collapsed, that is, to some extent, the case.
A couple of months ago, I reported a piece in Israel describing how many present and former military and intelligence chiefs were, in defiance of political custom, speaking out publicly against the Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, who was doing all he could to press for a unilateral attack on Iran and its nuclear facilities. The most outspoken of those security chiefs was former Mossad director Meir Dagan, who said a unilateral attack would do little to derail the Iranian program; instead, he said, it would unite the Iranian leadership and, quite possibly, ignite a regional war. (Dagan was clearly ailing when I met with him in Tel Aviv. His health was worse than he let on; Dagan just got a liver transplant in, of all places, Belarus.) Since then, Dagan and his allies seem to have won a victory, at least for the moment. Despite a clownish performance in September at the United Nations, at which he brandished his famous Wile E. Coyote cartoon of a nuclear bomb, Netanyahu backed off his bellicose talk. For now, anyway.
The political voice of the security chiefs is not limited to the Iran issue. Not long ago, I saw Dror Moreh’s brilliant documentary “The Gatekeepers,” in which the last six chiefs of Shin Bet, Israel’s domestic-security agency, describe their experiences during the occupation and their common belief that the failure to reach a just accommodation with the Palestinians will lead, inevitably, to disaster for everyone concerned.
Over three years, Moreh spoke with Avraham Shalom (1981-1986), Yaakov Peri (1988-1994), Carmi Gillon (1995-1996), Ami Ayalon (1996-2000), Avi Dichter (2000-2005), and Yuval Diskin (2005-2011). These Shin Bet leaders served in Labor and Likud governments; they were instrumental in the occupation; they set up informer networks, gave arrest orders, oversaw everything from targeted assassinations to brutal interrogations. They are, politically, a mix, but they all conclude that the occupation is illegal, immoral, brutal, and self-destructive. None of them seem to have any faith in the political leadership and rue the leadership’s capitulation to the settler movement. Perhaps the most moving, and sickening, sequence of the film revolves around the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin, an event that effectively ended the hopes of Oslo. Carmi Gillon, who was the chief of Shin Bet at the time, tells Moreh that Rabin’s killer, a religious fanatic named Yigal Amir, “won big time.”
Here in the U.S., we have been concentrating on our own election, our own storms. In Tel Aviv, twenty thousand people came to a rally marking the seventeenth anniversary of Rabin’s death. Netanyahu and other officials gathered on Mount Herzl, in Jerusalem, to remember Rabin, who exemplified the Israeli realist who had thrown in his lot for peace and accommodation with the Palestinians. The Israeli President, Shimon Peres, who won the Nobel Peace Prize along with Rabin and Yasir Arafat, said that Rabin had “laid the foundation for the future peace agreement with the Palestinians.”
Netanyahu saw it his way. Rabin, he said, “recognized the Iranian threat. There is great turbulence all around us—in historical proportions.” According to the news wire Ynet, Netanyahu went on to say, “Since the murder, Iran’s proxies seized control of half of the Palestinian people, the half that’s in Gaza, and they are looking to take over the other half in Judea and Samaria”—the West Bank.
A few days earlier, Netanyahu announced that he and his Likud Party had formed an alliance with the Foreign Minister, Avigdor Lieberman, and his Russian-dominated Yisrael Beiteinu Party (the Our Home Israel Party) for elections on January 22nd. In the 2009 elections, Netanyahu ran to the center-right (at least by the standards of an ever more conservative political map), but now he has thrown in with the country’s most prominent xenophobe. Lieberman, who emigrated in 1978, lives in the West Bank settlement of Nokdim. He admires Vladimir Putin. He is so given to outrageous statements about Arabs that foreign reporters are rarely allowed to talk to him.
Political insiders in Israel know that Netanyahu and Lieberman distrust each other, but their newfound alliance makes it almost impossible for a center-left bloc to win in January. Their leaders are, to the last, extremely weak.
One of those centrist leaders, Tzipi Livni, told the Jerusalem Post that if Lieberman were to get a post like Defense Minister in a new government, disaster was inevitable. “We are talking about an existential threat to the State of Israel,” Livni said. “Netanyahu is losing his senses and is gambling with Israel's security out of political and survivalist considerations.” She continued, “Lieberman was the one who threatened to bomb the Aswan dam. Is this the Defense Minister that Israel needs right now?”
Aluf Benn, the editor-in-chief of Haaretz, wrote that Netanyahu, by forming this alliance, had “formed a war cabinet that will lead Israel into a confrontation with Iran.” Benn argued that victory in January for the right-wing coalition would ward off Israeli opposition to an attack on Iran, leaving only the United States “to delay, or even prevent, a command to the Israel Air Force to take off for Iran.”
Another columnist at the paper, Ari Shavit, who has sometimes written sympathetically about Netanyahu, wrote that the new coalition “turns Israel’s center-right prime minister into a prime minister held captive by dark forces. If until yesterday Netanyahu could still claim to be the Israeli Ronald Reagan or Rudy Giuliani, yesterday he turned into Glenn Beck. Even his Republican friends won’t be able to accept the fact that he has crawled into political bed with one of Vladimir Putin’s admirers.”
I am not so sure. Mitt Romney, who famously told the donors of Boca Raton that the Palestinian issue is best just “kicked down the field,” does not seem inclined to debate Bibi Netanyahu, no matter what coalition he forms.
Photograph by Lior Mizrahi/AFP/Getty.
Over three years, Moreh spoke with Avraham Shalom (1981-1986), Yaakov Peri (1988-1994), Carmi Gillon (1995-1996), Ami Ayalon (1996-2000), Avi Dichter (2000-2005), and Yuval Diskin (2005-2011). These Shin Bet leaders served in Labor and Likud governments; they were instrumental in the occupation; they set up informer networks, gave arrest orders, oversaw everything from targeted assassinations to brutal interrogations. They are, politically, a mix, but they all conclude that the occupation is illegal, immoral, brutal, and self-destructive. None of them seem to have any faith in the political leadership and rue the leadership’s capitulation to the settler movement. Perhaps the most moving, and sickening, sequence of the film revolves around the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin, an event that effectively ended the hopes of Oslo. Carmi Gillon, who was the chief of Shin Bet at the time, tells Moreh that Rabin’s killer, a religious fanatic named Yigal Amir, “won big time.”
Here in the U.S., we have been concentrating on our own election, our own storms. In Tel Aviv, twenty thousand people came to a rally marking the seventeenth anniversary of Rabin’s death. Netanyahu and other officials gathered on Mount Herzl, in Jerusalem, to remember Rabin, who exemplified the Israeli realist who had thrown in his lot for peace and accommodation with the Palestinians. The Israeli President, Shimon Peres, who won the Nobel Peace Prize along with Rabin and Yasir Arafat, said that Rabin had “laid the foundation for the future peace agreement with the Palestinians.”
Netanyahu saw it his way. Rabin, he said, “recognized the Iranian threat. There is great turbulence all around us—in historical proportions.” According to the news wire Ynet, Netanyahu went on to say, “Since the murder, Iran’s proxies seized control of half of the Palestinian people, the half that’s in Gaza, and they are looking to take over the other half in Judea and Samaria”—the West Bank.
A few days earlier, Netanyahu announced that he and his Likud Party had formed an alliance with the Foreign Minister, Avigdor Lieberman, and his Russian-dominated Yisrael Beiteinu Party (the Our Home Israel Party) for elections on January 22nd. In the 2009 elections, Netanyahu ran to the center-right (at least by the standards of an ever more conservative political map), but now he has thrown in with the country’s most prominent xenophobe. Lieberman, who emigrated in 1978, lives in the West Bank settlement of Nokdim. He admires Vladimir Putin. He is so given to outrageous statements about Arabs that foreign reporters are rarely allowed to talk to him.
Political insiders in Israel know that Netanyahu and Lieberman distrust each other, but their newfound alliance makes it almost impossible for a center-left bloc to win in January. Their leaders are, to the last, extremely weak.
One of those centrist leaders, Tzipi Livni, told the Jerusalem Post that if Lieberman were to get a post like Defense Minister in a new government, disaster was inevitable. “We are talking about an existential threat to the State of Israel,” Livni said. “Netanyahu is losing his senses and is gambling with Israel's security out of political and survivalist considerations.” She continued, “Lieberman was the one who threatened to bomb the Aswan dam. Is this the Defense Minister that Israel needs right now?”
Aluf Benn, the editor-in-chief of Haaretz, wrote that Netanyahu, by forming this alliance, had “formed a war cabinet that will lead Israel into a confrontation with Iran.” Benn argued that victory in January for the right-wing coalition would ward off Israeli opposition to an attack on Iran, leaving only the United States “to delay, or even prevent, a command to the Israel Air Force to take off for Iran.”
Another columnist at the paper, Ari Shavit, who has sometimes written sympathetically about Netanyahu, wrote that the new coalition “turns Israel’s center-right prime minister into a prime minister held captive by dark forces. If until yesterday Netanyahu could still claim to be the Israeli Ronald Reagan or Rudy Giuliani, yesterday he turned into Glenn Beck. Even his Republican friends won’t be able to accept the fact that he has crawled into political bed with one of Vladimir Putin’s admirers.”
I am not so sure. Mitt Romney, who famously told the donors of Boca Raton that the Palestinian issue is best just “kicked down the field,” does not seem inclined to debate Bibi Netanyahu, no matter what coalition he forms.
Photograph by Lior Mizrahi/AFP/Getty.
Bob Schieffer of CBS News struck the right note when he opened this week’s presidential debate on foreign policy by reminding viewers it was “the 50th anniversary of the night that President Kennedy told the world that the Soviet Union had installed nuclear missiles in Cuba, perhaps the closest we’ve ever come to nuclear war.” He called it “a sobering reminder that every president faces at some point an unexpected threat to our national security from abroad.”