( Middle East Monitor ) – It seems that the repercussions of the debate recently held between current US President Joe Biden and his rival, former US President Donald Trump, which caused a crisis for the former, fuelled a campaign led by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu against the current US administration, and aims, among other things, to hold it responsible for Israel’s failure to achieve absolute victory in its war against the Gaza Strip. In light of this campaign that those close to Netanyahu have continued to ignite over the past few days, we have come across two related features.

The first is accusing the Biden administration of being the one preventing Israel from achieving the “desired victory” in the war it has been waging against Gaza since 7 October by placing conditions on Israel and delaying arms shipments to it. Looking at what is written by those closest to Netanyahu, other suspicions arise before our eyes regarding that administration’s positions on Iran. Several days ago, one of them, a historian specialising in American history, Gadi Taub, wrote that the Biden administration is convinced that the path to establishing calm in the Middle East will go through de-escalation and reaching deals with Iran.

Hindustan Times Video: “Netanyahu Rants Against USA Over Weapons; Biden Hits Back: Israel To Lose Ally Amid Gaza Struggle?”

It is a systematic policy initiated by the administration of former President Barack Obama, and still, at its core, the goal is reducing US intervention in the region, in order to prevent being drawn into wars. In his opinion, contrary to the policy pursued by Trump, what the Biden administration is doing does not strengthen the power of the United States’ allies against Tehran. Rather, on the contrary, it causes it to move away from its allies and take steps towards Iran, which would give the US a new status of an arbitrator who does not have any biassed tendencies toward one party or another. According to his reading, from the first day it took office in the White House, the Biden Administration sent signals to the Iranians indicating that it was seeking to reach settlements with them.

Its first steps were to remove the Houthis from the list of terrorist organisations and stop sending offensive weapons to Saudi Arabia that could help it fight the Houthis in Yemen. This administration also imposed the maritime border demarcation agreement with Lebanon on Israel, refrained from imposing economic sanctions on Iran, and released financial sums to it estimated at about $100 billion. Taub reaches the following conclusion: The US has been able to curb Iran for a long time, but since Biden took power in the White House, it has been doing the exact opposite.

The second feature is publicly declaring Netanyahu’s bet on Trump’s return to the White House, after his victory in the upcoming elections. The two will then return to what has been described as the “golden era” of their relationship which prevailed during Trump’s presidency.

According to what an analyst wrote in the Israel Hayom newspaper, there are those who have begun to rub their hands with anticipation in Israel and expect Trump to be elected president. They believe that if he becomes president of the US, all the problems of arms shipments and humanitarian problems imposed by the Biden administration on Israel will disappear. On the other hand, it was stated in other analyses, especially by military analyst Ron Ben-Yishai, that it should be remembered that Trump has many reservations about Netanyahu. Likewise, Trump’s position on the war on Gaza was contradictory. At first, he supported it, then he said that Israel must end it. Now, he is back to supporting the continuation of the war and the destruction of Hamas.

Hence, the big problem with him is that he does not know which side he will wake up on every morning, and what decision he will make before drinking his coffee. On the other hand, it is clear that his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, will be alongside Trump in the White House, and he is a great friend of Israel. Kushner is the architect behind the normalisation of relations between Israel and the UAE and Bahrain, and the display of American power in the Gulf region and the Middle East.

This article first appeared in Arabic in Arab48 on 3 July 2024

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor or Informed Comment.

Via Middle East Monitor

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The Israeli government is putting pressure on the left-leaning newspaper Haaretz to line up in support of the government in its conduct of the war in Gaza.

The communications minister, Shlomo Karhi, has suggested financial penalties be applied to the paper accusing it of “lying, defeatist propaganda” and “sabotaging Israel in wartime”. The proposal aims to cancel state subscriptions to the paper and “forbid the publication of official notices”.

In response, the Israeli Journalists’ Union called the move a “populistic proposal devoid of any feasibility of logic”. Haaretz, which is an independent daily newspaper, has been publishing since 1919, and has frequently been the target of right-wing administrations.

On October 20 the government enacted emergency regulations, enabling it to temporarily shut down foreign media seen as harmful to the country. This legislation allows for the closure and signal blocking of any media for 30 days at a time.

Haaretz noted on October 15 that an earlier draft of the legislation titled: “Limiting Aid to The Enemy through Communication” included plans for sweeping limitations on domestic as well as foreign media. In the end, the former was not included in the new law.

Karhi’s intention with this legislation was also to shutter the Qatari TV station Al Jazeera. However, the cabinet turned down this specific proposal due to Qatar’s role in current hostage and prisoner negotiations. On November 13, the Times of Israel reported that the same legislation was used to prevent broadcasts of the Lebanese channel Al-Mayadeen TV inside Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories for “security reasons”.

Israel’s defence minister, Yoav Gallant, accused the network of being “a mouthpiece of Hezbollah” and its journalists of “supporting terror while pretending to be reporters”.

One week later on November 21, two of the station’s reporters were killed in an Israeli air strike on southern Lebanon. Correspondent Farah Omar and camera operator Rabih al-Maamari were covering firing between Hezbollah and Israel in Tayr Harfa, a mile from the Israeli border, when they were hit.

TRT World: “Israeli minister threatens Haaretz with sanctions over Gaza reporting”

On its website, the Committee to Protect Journalists, while labelling Al-Mayadeen “Hezbollah-affiliated,” called for “an independent investigation into the killing of journalists”. It emphasised that “journalists are civilians doing important work during times of crisis and must not be targeted by warring parties”.

The CPJ reports that 57 journalists and media workers have been killed since the conflict began. This includes 50 Palestinians, four Israelis and three Lebanese media workers. Reporters without Borders lists Israel at number 97 in its Freedom of Press rankings of 180 countries, above the Central African Republic and below Albania. It notes:

Under Israel’s military censorship, reporting on a variety of security issues requires prior approval by the authorities. In addition to the possibility of civil defamation suits, journalists can also be charged with criminal defamation and ‘insulting a public official’. There is a freedom of information law, but it is sometimes hard to implement.

Mandate-era restrictions

Limitations on the press were first introduced under the “Defence (Emergency) Regulations” put in place by the British during the Palestine mandate and repealed when they left in 1948. But following the establishment of the state of Israel, most of the wide-ranging regulations got incorporated into Israeli legislation.

Legacy mandate-era legislation concerned with demolishing houses, detention of individuals and curfews has been in continuous use in the Occupied Territories, according to Israeli human rights group B’Tselem.

According to the Times of Israel in terms of domestic censorship, “any articles in both traditional media and social media” that deal with security and intelligence have to be sent to the chief censor, Brigadier General Kobi Mandelblit, for approval before publication. This is completely in line with The Defence (Emergency) Regulations, 1945.

The Times reported that Haaretz’s journalism has been “largely supportive of the war effort, though highly critical of the government leading it”.

In attacking the newspaper, Shlomo Karhi wrote a letter to cabinet secretary, Yossi Fuchs, in which he quoted from a couple of pieces which were, in fact, opinion columns rather than straight news reports.

One was written by Gideon Levy on October 9, under the headline: “Israel Can’t Imprison Two Million Gazans Without Paying a Cruel Price”. In the article Levy opined: “Behind all this lies Israeli arrogance; the idea that we’ll never pay the price and be punished for it. We’ll carry on undisturbed.”

In another column, Amira Hass, was also mentioned as proof of Haaretz’s “defeatist and false propaganda”. Karhi quoted from a piece she wrote on October 10: “In a few days Israelis went through what Palestinians have experienced as a matter of routine for decades, and are still experiencing – military incursions, death, cruelty, slain children, bodies piled up in the road.”

In response to Karhi’s attacks on the newspaper, Haaretz’s publisher, Amos Schocken, accused the government of attempting “to stifle the free press in Israel”. In a post on X (formerly Twitter) he wrote: “When Netanyahu’s government wants to shut us down, it’s time to read Haaretz.”

Colleen Murrell, Full Professor in Journalism, Dublin City University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

She quotes him as saying, “There is an apartheid state here. In a territory where two people are judged under two legal systems, that is an apartheid state.”

Tamir Pardo, roughly 69, served as the head of Mossad from 2011 to 2016. He is no leftist or bleeding heart liberal, but an exemplar of the tough, pragmatic and somewhat ruthless Israeli tradition of security officials. He once observed that Mossad is a criminal organization with a license and that is what makes it fun. I suspect the same thing can be said about most external intelligence organizations, including MI6 and the CIA.

Goldenberg added, “Pardo said that as Mossad chief, he repeatedly warned Netanyahu that he needed to decide what Israel’s borders were, or risk the destruction of a state for the Jews . . . Pardo warned that if Israel doesn’t set borders between it and the Palestinians, Israel’s existence as a Jewish state will be in danger.”

What he means is that if the extremists in the current government of Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu succeed in their goal of annexing the occupied Palestinian territories, they will willy nilly make 5 million Palestinians Israeli citizens. Taking the land without the people and keeping the indigenous Palestinians stateless is the very definition of Apartheid. The only way to regularize and make legitimate such an annexation would be to give Palestinians citizenship. But if they were added to the nearly 2 million Israelis of Palestinian heritage, that would make about 7 million Palestinian-Israelis versus 7 million Jewish Israelis. Pardo’s point is that Israel would no longer be a Jewish state under those circumstances but a multi-ethnic one, like Belgium or Lebanon.

The Jewish Power and Religious Zionism extremists in the government, I think, hope to chase the Palestinians away to Jordan, creating a large new wave of refugees. I’m not sure, though, that such a thing is possible now, as it had been in 1948 and 1967. Jordan’s army would try to stop it. If such expulsion or “transfer” succeeded, it would likely make Jordan unstable, with highly negative security implications for Israel. And of course such an expulsion of the Palestinians would be a major war crime that might well lead to sanctions on Israel.

Pardo supports the massive protests that have roiled Israel since January, and which aim to pressure PM Netanyahu to back off his plan to neuter the country’s High Court. Pardo also, like many Israelis, despises the Jewish Power and Religious Zionism zealots who now control key cabinet posts. He said in a radio interview in late July, “Someone took the Ku Klux Klan and brought it into the government.” The someone was of course Netanyahu, as Pardo acknowledged.

He even went so far as implicitly to compare Bezalel Smotrich’s call for the Palestinian village of Huwara to be wiped out to the mass parties of the 1930s, including, presumably, the Nazis.

He said the government’s rules allowing Jewish communities to exclude Palestinian-Israelis were “antisemitic:” “Tomorrow morning, they can’t enter a club, or a locality, or can’t buy a house in a certain area, or have less rights, that is antisemitism for its own sake.” I think his point was that Arabs are also Semites, and were being discriminated against on racial grounds.

Jonathan Shamir at Haaretz wrote, of Pardo’s revelations in his radio interview with Kan, “When Pardo confronted Netanyahu with the fact that Israel ‘rules from the [Mediterranean] sea to the [river] Jordan, and in practice, holds Gaza as the largest open air prison in the world,’ he said he was never met with any substantive response. ‘His vision [on this issue] is the vision of Smotrich,’Pardo charged.”

Pardo worried about an exodus of physicians, the hi tech sector, and academics from Israel, without which, he said, “we won’t have a country anymore” or it will become a third world state. He also worries about the military and Mossad being weakened by the increasing number of Israeli refuseniks who decline to serve.

Pardo not only had a long career in the Mossad, starting in 1980, but also was detailed to the Israeli Defense Forces for a while, and worked briefly in the tech sector himself. In 2011-2016 while heading Mossad, he came into conflict with Netanyahu over the prime minister’s plans to launch a unilateral attack on Iran without parliamentary approval. On the other hand, Pardo has lobbied the international community hard to stop Iran’s nuclear enrichment program.

So he isn’t saying that Israel is an Apartheid state, or that it keeps Gaza as an open air prison, or that the Israeli extremist parties are the KKK because he is a Marxist or has studied intersectionality. He is saying these things because as a former security official, he sees them as dire security threats to Israel.

The problem he points to, however, of not having settled borders and not really wanting them goes back to David Ben-Gurion. As Israel was coming into being in May 1948, Ben-Gurion wrote in his diary that the new state, like the US, had no recognized borders. He was implying that it could still grow, just as the US extended west through the nineteenth century under the doctrine of manifest destiny. It is one reason that the claim by Israel apologists that Israel recognized the 1947 UN General Assembly partition plan whereas the Arabs did not falls flat. The Israelis did not really recognize it. They took lots of territory that the UNGA did not award them, and in later years they tried to annex Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula, one tenth of Lebanon, and both the Palestinian West Bank and Gaza. They only managed to keep the latter two, but they were clearly attempting to grab as much of their neighbors’ territory as they could get away with. (The UNGA plan, by the way, did not have the force of law, since it was never ratified by the UN Security Council).

That is, Pardo seems to think he is asking for a return to pre-1967 normalcy, but what he is really asking for is for Israel to settle down and become an ordinary country instead of behaving like a messianic cause with an expansionist remit, as it generally has done since its founding.

In the U.S. many Americans are disgusted with the recent decisions, and behavior, of a majority of Supreme Court justices. Democrats are exploring legislative solutions to a.) Create new legislative protections for voting rights and civil rights issues, and b.) Dilute the power of SCOTUS to undermine and dispense with Constitutional principles and guardrails to protect Trump and his far-far right wing agenda. , Rather than allow Congress to claim more power, the proposal is to expand the SCOTUS and, end the filibuster and Electoral College. Both were designed to appease Southern slave owners, by giving their states greater legislative and voting power than “free” states.

Now, Bibi and his allies have a move afoot to undermine the independence of Israel’s judicial system, and make his criminal convictions for fraud and corruption disappear. Their design is to give the Knesset (Parliament) greater control over the courts, with the power to overturn any legal decision by a simple parliamentary majority. Bibi has forsaken alliances with centrists to form a government, because they’ve abandoned him over many behaviorial and policy issues. So he’s reached out to the dregs of the far-far right to form a new government. Kevin McCarthy had to make Faustian bargains with multiple far-far right Congressmen, to the point where his leadership status is fragile, if at all functional. Both men are craven, ego-driven politicians driven by self-service rather than public service.

By extension the health and trajectories of the social contracts in the US and Israel have also seen concurrent downturns, abetted by how Bibi and Donald Trump have fueled one another’s imperial madness. The fracturing of the social contract in both democracies has been aided by parallel right-wing dynamics to dilute democratic protections approach. John Locke probably didn’t foresee democratic republics regressing back to authoritarianism.

The American social contract was first weakened by the pure legislative obstructionism led by Newt Gingrich, in opposition to Bill Clinton’s presidential and legislative agenda. The pandemic exposed the fragility of the social contract in the US, and how most Republican officials used it as an excuse to NOT take care of business. A visceral example is its greater negative impact of people and communities of color, framed by a racist president who exacerbated the pandemic with his quixotic “leadership.” A foundation of the social contract is a functional, civil government that protects people’s rights and property and honors the Law of Nature.  

The aims of Trump, Bibi and their ilk is to replace the social contract with the Divine Right of Kings. John Locke’s social contract theory was the model for liberal and democratic governments in Europe and the U.S, and arose in opposition to the presumption of divine authority. January 6 was Trump’s violent attempt to destroy the American social contract; he failed but isn’t done. Bibi is trying to  “ . . . change the character of the State of Israel,” from a secular democracy into a hyper-religious fundamentalist Zionist state, intent on abridging the rights of women and the LGBTQ community,” says Eliad Shraga, chair of the Movement for Quality Government in Israel. He called on President Isaac Herzog to declare Netanyahu as unfit to serve as prime minister. Opposition MP’s are trying to craft their own “25^th Amendment” to remove Bibi, as the US tried with Trump.

                         The speed with which Bibi has realized his agenda has galvanized much of the nation, resulting in a demo of 80,000 strong in Tel Avis – in the rain, on a Saturday night to protest his attempts to corrupt and cripple the civil and criminal justice systems in Israel. Attendees included former opposition leader Tzipi Livni, former Prime Minister Ehud Barak, National Unity party leader and former defense minister Benny Gantz, and Ra’am party leader Mansour Abbas. Opposition leader Yair Lapid opted out because he and Gantz were not allowed to speak.

            One of the most succinct comments came from Former Supreme Court justice Ayala Procaccia who said, “Something has been deeply broken in our social pact, in the basic framework of rules agreed upon throughout the country’s history.” So Thomas Hobbes and Algernon Sidney, theorists of the social contract, are rolling over in their graves again. Their new slogan is, ““No democracy without the High Court.” Police had to stop protesters from occupying a freeway. The crowd represented a full spectrum of Israeli society from secular to visibly religions, and across the age spectrum as well. Another slogan chanted was, ““My country has three branches of government, three!” Bibi and his acolytes are trying to make it 2.5, with a drastically weakened judiciary beholden to the politics of sensationalism and fear.

            Meanwhile, Bibi is claiming a Trumpian “mandate” to do as he pleases; nothing complex; just a primitive declaration of power. He is essentially saying, “Remain calm, let us carry on and don’t interfere.” One of the most profound objections is to Bibi’s intent to allow a Knesset majority to appoint judges at the whim of current office holders, in this case Bibi himself. His overriding goal? To escape the corruption and fraud charges for which he has been on trial. He’s trying to accomplish what Trump was prevented from doing by the guardrails of American democracy.

            Bibi and his allies are trying to remove those guardrails in Israel. If he gets his way a consequence would be acceleration of illicit squatter-settlements in Occupied Palestine and ultimately the illegal annexation of those territories. They’ve become so empowered, they don’t try to be coy about it anymore. Another economic consequences would further weaken Israel’s economy by granting more privileges and tax breaks the ultra-Orthodox or Haredim, including continued exemption from military service for Yeshiva students and more and higher government stipends for full-time religious scholars. They are giving more financial aid for Yeshivas and Haredim schools, which already barely teach math, science, English and secular life skills. A similar debate is occurring in some Haredim communities of New York State. The long-term problem is that the ultra-Orthodox, as the fastest growing demographic in Israel, will generate more takers and fewer earners to support the state.

            Bibi has abandoned decades US treaty agreements including Camp David and Oslo, UN Resolutions and thoughtful Israeli policies. Though peace talks have been frozen for years, the new government’s proposed steps would be the death knell for Israeli democracy and Palestinian human rights. Considering the flagrant manner in which Bibi has broken many sacrosanct U.S.-Israeli treaties and agreements, you wish the Biden Administration would get serious about formally sanctioning Israel for these violations by withholding aid, and calling them out at the U.N.

Yeah, that’ll be the day.

People running for the Knesset, including Netanyahu, say racist things all the time against Palestinians and Palestinian-Israelis. The law implicitly was designed to exclude Palestinian-Israelis who “negated” the state of Israel. But then it was also applied to Kach, the fascist party of Rabbi Meir Kahane, which wanted to expel the 21% of Israelis who are of Palestinian heritage and which promoted violence against them. The Israeli establishment doesn’t care for the Palestinian-Israelis (sometimes called “Arab Israelis”) either, but did not want the maelstrom the Kach was proposing to stir up, and so banned it.

The Jewish Power party is full of Kahanists and so naturally wants the law repealed.

Not only that, but this government will openly award permits to businesses that wish to discriminate against women and gays “for religious purposes,” writes Aaron Rabinowitz at Haaretz. That demand came from the ultra-Orthodox United Torah Judaism Party. The UTJ party also extracted enormous housing and educational subsidies for the ultra-Orthodox and their seminary students from Netanyahu, who will now pay Haredi seminarians more than soldiers in the army. Businesses will also be allowed not to serve gatherings where gender segregation is not practiced. The Haredim, some 8 percent of Israel’s population and now a swing vote, object to the mixing of strange men and women, rather as Saudi Arabians did before the recent reforms of Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman. Gender segregation often works to disadvantage women.

Scott Prosterman pointed out in these pages that the more liberal pro-Israel lobbies in the U.S. are being alienated by this government.

The Israeli newspaper Arab 48 points to a new study by the Institute for National Security Studies at Tel Aviv University which warns that the new government’s proposed policies in the occupied Palestinian West Bank will bring it into conflict even with the very pro-Israel Biden administration. Secretary of State Antony Blinken has warned against expanding Israeli settlements in Palestinian territory, against trying to annex Palestinian land, and against changing the status quo of the Temple Mount, the third holiest shrine of the Muslim world. The new government is full of people dedicated to doing all those things.

Arab 48 also reports on plans to repurpose the internal security agency, Shin Bet, to investigate crimes by Palestinians, even though, as an intelligence agency, it has no remit to conduct criminal investigations.

( Middle East Monitor ) – Israelis are watching political developments in Europe with interest, particularly in Sweden and Italy, amid fears that the Jewish communities there may soon face problems. Italy, for example, is expected to have a right-wing government involving Georgia Meloni’s Brothers of Italy party and Matteo Salvini’s party, the League (formerly the Northern League). Israelis consider this to be problematic because of their previous links to the extreme right and neo-fascists. However, even the list of centre-left candidates for the Democratic Party included figures who publicly expressed anti-Semitic and anti-Israel positions.

Israel’s concern over the outcome of the elections requires the government to establish common interests and closer relations with the various parties. It is true that the latter are generally supportive of Israel in certain aspects, but not as a whole. There is also anti-Semitism in Italy, including Holocaust denial.

A real challenge facing the Israeli project for colonizing the West Bank is posed by the left. The Italian left encourages the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement and pro-Palestinian positions. More seriously for Israel, is that all such positions pass quietly without an official response. There has to be a question mark over how and to what extent the incoming Italian government will fight against anti-Semitism and anti-Israel positions.

There is a fear in Israel that a right-wing Italian government will take anti-Israel positions at the UN, and oppose anti-BDS legislation. The number of openly anti-Israel Italian MPs across all parties may increase, putting doubts in Israeli minds about how far the allies of Israel in Rome will go to defend Israel, especially against BDS campaigns.

Although support for BDS in Italy is relatively low compared with other countries, the problem of anti-Semitism still exists. This has prompted the Jewish community to agree with the Italian Ministry of Education to teach about anti-Semitism in schools. An agreement has also been reached with the Roman Catholic Church to review all textbooks and remove everything related to religious and political anti-Semitism. Zionists believe that any anti-Israel activism is de facto anti-Semitism, but such conflation of the two is disputed.

Away from the elections, Israel is concerned about growing Palestine solidarity among Italians. Major Italian cities — including Rome Milan, Genoa, Turin and Florence — witness frequent demonstrations against Israel’s illegal settlements. Palestinian Italians as well as local solidarity groups take part.

In Sweden, meanwhile, the far-right has also swept to power after many years of left-wing government. This constitutes another challenge and opportunity for Israel to renew and strengthen its relations with the government in Stockholm.

Sweden is generally not friendly towards Israel; successive left-leaning governments probably explain why. The past eight years of a Social Democrat government had a negative record in terms of Sweden’s attitude towards Israel state, especially under former Prime Minister Stefan Lofven and Foreign Minister Margot Wallstrom. The Social Democratic Party has an influential pro-Palestinian lobby.

Before the latest election in Sweden, especially under Prime Minister Magdalena Andersson, relations with Israel improved, but that was a little late. Now the right-wing parties show a more positive attitude towards Israel. They tend to sympathise with Israel as an extension of the West in a hostile Islamic region. They stood with Sweden’s Jewish community in the face of an increase in anti-Semitic violence.

It is worth noting the position of Israeli Prime Minister Yair Lapid towards the right-wing populist Sweden Democrats. His Foreign Ministry has supported the boycott of the party on the basis that Israel, officially at least, does not give legitimacy to parties with a neo-Nazi heritage. Such a policy will not serve Israel in its relations with Sweden over the next four years, as the Sweden Democrats will be the most influential party. Paradoxically given such a heritage, the party is a supporter of the Zionist state. Israel may not have the luxury of giving up its contact with the Swedish far-right, despite its Nazi heritage, because it is now a political majority.

Relations between Israel and Sweden have stumbled from crisis to crisis, with Israel accusing the left-wing government in Stockholm of being one of the most hostile in Europe, and behind many EU initiatives to condemn Israel at every opportunity. Former Foreign Minister Wallstrom has always waved a “red card” towards Tel Aviv, as Israel puts it, which prompted Israeli leaders to refuse to meet her.

Today, Israelis are cautiously optimistic about the right-wing victory in Sweden, claiming that this will mean a change in foreign policy towards Israel. The belief is that most of these parties are more pro-Israel, although they do not support Jews; oppose the recognition of an independent State of Palestine; and call for tighter control over financial aid for the Palestinians.

Dr Adnan Abu Amer is the head of the Political Science Department at the University of the Ummah in Gaza. He is a part-time researcher at a number of Palestinian and Arab research centers and he periodically writes for Al Jazeera, the New Arabic and the Monitor. He has written more than 20 books on the Arab-Israeli conflict, the Palestinian resistance and Hamas.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor or Informed Comment.

Via Middle East Monitor

This work by Middle East Monitor is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. Article lightly edited for Informed Comment house style.

Former Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu invited himself for a security meeting with Israeli caretaker Prime Minister Yair Lapid last month to discuss Iran’s nuclear programme. Afterwards, he said that Lapid and Defence Minister Benny Gantz did not live up to their responsibilities for preventing a new nuclear deal with Iran. According to Netanyahu, Israeli officials should have done the same thing that he did prior to the signing of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) in 2015 and met with influential US Congressmen, senior US officials and prominent mass media figures.

“Netanyahu taught us exactly what not to do,” responded an Israeli government official. “In 2015, he went to Congress, spoke with senior government officials and the media, and we got the nuclear deal shoved in our faces.” This time, he added, “We worked quietly. We put in tremendous efforts and reached the opposite result.”

Israeli officials have said several times that a deal between Tehran and the world powers on Iran’s nuclear programme is off the table for the foreseeable future. However, multiple reports have emerged recently suggesting that a deal is possible. Last week, the US State Department rejected claims by Israeli officials that Washington had given up on the talks with Tehran.

“We have been and are continuing to seek a mutual return to full implementation of the JCPOA,” a statement attributed to a US State Department spokesperson pointed out. This was, said the Times of Israel, a reply to an Israeli official who said that, “The Americans and most Europeans say there’s not going to be a [new] JCPOA.”

Netanyahu, former Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, Lapid, Mossad officials and many others across the Israeli political and security spectrum do not share the same view towards Iran’s nuclear programme and the efforts of the world powers to reach a deal with Tehran. However, those who are against the deal are not opposed to it in the same way or for the same reason.

“Neither Prime Minister Yair Lapid nor his predecessor, Naftali Bennett, is as stridently opposed to a nuclear deal as Benjamin Netanyahu,” wrote Ronen Bergman of the New York Times two months ago. Indeed, he added, “High-ranking members of the Israeli defence and intelligence establishments are saying that a new agreement along the lines of [the JCPOA]” would be in Israel’s “best interest.”

Why are there clear differences between Israeli political, military, security and intelligence figures with regard to Iran’s nuclear programme? I think that the election campaigns have a lot to do with it, as appeals are made to the electorate to secure votes. Everyone wants to be seen as “Israel’s strongman” (or woman) in the face of perceived existential threats. This is important as the politicians jockey for positions in the Israeli hierarchy and be able to take important decisions to destroy Iran’s nuclear programme.

It is interesting to note that in the run-up to the January 2013 General Election in Israel, the late Rabbi Ovadia Yosef advised the politicians not to mention Iran as an enemy. He recognised that those, including Netanyahu, who were pushing Israel to the brink of war with Iran at that time, were doing this for electoral reasons. To illustrate his point, he told them that they could not succeed in deterring the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, so how did they expect to deter Iran?

Another factor to be considered is the attempts by Israeli officials to end the isolation of the occupation state. Israel has been in the Middle East for more than 70 years and yet still feels like an alien presence. It is true that most Arab regimes are friends of Israel, but everyone — including Israelis — knows that this “friendship” does not reflect the feelings of the masses, who still look at Israel as the enemy.

Hence, it looks as if Israel is creating a fake enemy and exaggerating the threat in order to rally its friends around it. The occupation state is trying to mobilise the Arab states by claiming that an Iranian nuclear bomb is a real threat to them as much as to Israel. The so-called Abraham Accords have to be viewed in this context. Such a tactic also generates sympathy and support in the US and the West generally.

Israel has destroyed alleged nuclear facilities in two different regional countries in the past, and neither Iraq in 1981 nor Syria in 2007 responded with even a single bullet. Why does Israel feel so afraid of Iran and how it might respond?

What nobody is mentioning is that Israel has at least 90 nuclear warheads, with the capability of building up to 200, and yet it is afraid that Iran might get one nuclear bomb. This is a paradox that makes it clear that Israel’s concerns about Iran’s nuclear programme are false.

Former Israeli National Security Adviser Yaakov Amidror, who is now a senior fellow at the Jerusalem Institute for Strategy and Security, was the first to highlight the issue of Iran’s nuclear programme in the early 1990s. He still believes that the solution for this is to bomb the Iranian nuclear facilities. “I don’t see any other way but to bomb them,” he told the BBC last year, but the Israeli government has not made such a move.

Moreover, a former head of research for the Israeli Mossad spy agency, Sima Shine, told the BBC, “I hope that the diplomatic channel will succeed.” Mossad is pushing for the military option to end Iran’s nuclear programme, and yet a former senior official is pushing for diplomacy to succeed.

This provides us with a glimpse of the baseless nature of Israel’s hostility towards Iran. Add this to my belief that the Iranian regime works for US interests, and it is obvious that it cannot be an enemy of Israel, as both proxies work for the same bosses in Washington.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor or Informed Comment.

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( Middle East Monitor ) – As the countdown begins for the signing of a nuclear agreement between Iran and world powers, a number of disputes have surfaced between Israel and the US about the deal. There is also criticism within Israel of the government’s political and military approach towards the agreement. The occupation state appears to be opposing the whole world, which has more or less united to curb Iran’s nuclear ambitions through diplomatic means, while Israel foolishly sticks to the punishment approach.

In a step devoid of political wisdom, former Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu tried to prevent the signing of the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action nuclear deal agreed by the administration of then US President Barack Obama. Netanyahu arrived in Washington on the eve of the signing ceremony and delivered a speech in the US Congress against the deal behind Obama’s back. Obama did not hesitate to describe him as ungrateful. In the end, Netanyahu returned empty handed while the agreement was signed.

The strange thing is that current Prime Minister Yair Lapid is now following in Netanyahu’s footsteps. His National Security Adviser, Eyal Kholta, has arrived in Washington for talks at the White House during which he will hear the details of the agreement before expressing Israel’s opposition. It is true that he will be briefed on the details closely, but he will not get what he wants. US President Joe Biden is determined to give Israel a second chance, which it will be a mistake to miss. Mossad spy chief David Barnea has also criticised the agreement, which is being seen as direct criticism of the Biden administration.

Meanwhile, more Israelis are calling for a different policy on the Iran nuclear issue. Automatic opposition to any agreement, coupled with angry rhetoric and an attack on Iran, may earn Brownie points within certain sections of the Israeli electorate, but it brings Tehran closer to deciding to arm itself with nuclear weapons, because it will be the one to decide whether there will be a renewable agreement with the global powers regarding the nuclear file.

Many Israelis believe the new agreement to be less useful than what was on the table earlier. The fact is that Israel can’t expect anything better. Iran has made great progress in the production of centrifuges, and is able to enrich uranium faster than before. Israeli policy has played an important part in reaching this bleak situation. It began with Netanyahu’s direct attack on Obama, and he continued to push Trump to withdraw from the agreement — which he did in 2018 — even though Iran had fulfilled its part of the terms.

Israelis are afraid of reproducing Netanyahu’s opposition to the nuclear agreement to the point of starting a crisis with Biden, which could cost Israel a lot. The current agreement, even if Israel sees it as bad, is better than no agreement at all, because Israel’s current policy is pushing Iran to acquire nuclear weapons. Tel Aviv needs to think seriously about a change of policy.

A nuclear Iran is apparently a serious threat to Israel, because it will open the regional nuclear arms race even wider. This will require an examination of every step that Iran takes when looking at other conflict zones. Israelis recall that the late Mossad chief Meir Dagan said, “Forcefully preventing Iran’s bomb cannot be achieved by Israel alone; it requires international preparation.”

All of this confirms that Israel is facing a complex situation, which has prompted its military and security leaders to ask the politicians and government to coordinate their activities with other countries, notably the US, as well as with their regional partners. The idea must be to create checks and balances against Iranian interests in various places, and to stop believing blindly that the only solution is Israel’s military power. Such a belief means, in short, bringing Iran closer to having nuclear weapons.

Israelis are now talking about the conflicting interests of the US and Israel in the nuclear agreement to be signed. This requires the latter to find a way to act without necessarily causing a clash between Lapid and Biden. Netanyahu clashed with Obama, causing relations to deteriorate dramatically.

Although not much is known about the details of the new nuclear agreement, it is clear that it is already much weaker than the original JCPOA signed by Obama, according to Israeli estimates. If implemented, the deal will limit Iran’s ability to enrich uranium even more than the original agreement. Meanwhile, Tel Aviv is still making great efforts to persuade Washington not to sign the agreement, or at least to toughen some of its provisions.

Four main components have been identified to deal with the consequences of the imminent agreement: careful monitoring by the intelligence services, which will prevent Iran from developing an explosive nuclear device secretly; the means to respond and disrupt production if Iran resumes its nuclear weapons development programme; a joint identifier by Tel Aviv and Washington as when to consider Iran to have achieved a breakthrough towards nuclear weapons; and understandings on the action to be taken by Tel Aviv and Washington together, or separately, if Tehran actually gets a nuclear bomb.

It is clear that there are a number of conflicting interests between the occupying power and the United States. The latter has an interest in lifting sanctions on Iran so that it will be able to produce and export oil and gas with no limits, averaging 3.5 million barrels per day, in the face of the consequences of the Russia-Ukraine war, and to fill the fuel shortage that Russia has created for Europe in the coming winter. The US also wants to save Iran from falling into the arms of China and Russia and thus reduce the strategic and economic negotiating power of the anti-Western camp.

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Via Middle East Monitor

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