Suspected US serial killer nabbed en route to Israel --Abuelazam was arrested carrying expired Israeli passport 12 Aug 2010 A man suspected of killing five people in a rash of 20 stabbings in three US states over three months was arrested in Atlanta as he tried to board a flight to Israel, a US official said Thursday. "He was apprehended by US Customs and Border Patrol officers and the Atlanta Police Department and arrested as he was attempting to depart on a flight to Tel Aviv," said customs spokeswoman Sandy Hasegawa. --MSNBC: Suspect lived in Virginia and had been arrested on an assault charge in Arlington, VA -- but was released.

An article this week in The Jerusalem Post suggested that "when the construction freeze in Judea and Samaria ends on September 26", Israeli PM Netanyahu intends to build mainly in the so-called settlement blocs "Israel will likely keep under an agreement with the Palestinians".

Further down, the piece notes:

Deputy Prime Minister Dan Meridor, who is also in the septet [inner security cabinet], first came out in favor of resuming building only in the blocs in a June 15 speech in Efrat.

Sources close to Netanyahu said shortly afterward that he might make such a decision because it could satisfy both Likud and Labor. They noted that Netanyahu had made a point of planting trees on Tu Bishvat in three “consensus” areas: Ariel, Ma’aleh Adumim and Gush Etzion.

So, according to Netanyahu, the 'consensus' areas - in other words, illegal colonies that are assumed to remain under full Israeli control - include Ariel, Ma'aleh Adumim and Gush Etzion. The following map from the Applied Research Institute of Jerusalem points out these three blocs, as well as Qiryat Arba in Hebron, and Modi'in Illit.

Some key settlement blocs

Defining what constitutes a 'bloc' is difficult, as there are differing interpretations. Here is another map from ARIJ, highlighting a greater number of blocs.

14 settlement blocs

We already know that Netanyahu intends to keep the Jordan Valley in Israeli hands. Along with the 'consensus' colonies, the borders of the Palestinian enclaves continue to get clearer.

I get a circle-the-wagons feeling from Israel's defenders in Washington. Thomas Friedman's column the other day was unhinged, lumping Oliver Stone with the British Prime Minister, and not acknowledging what has changed world opinion, the slaughter of civilians and denial of human rights to Palestinians for decades. Richard Cohen, who wanted to sing Hatikvah when he read Walt and Mearsheimer's book, is equally unbalanced in The Washington Post.

The piece is about two English writers viewing the Arab world: an unsigned review in the Economist of a biography of Islamic fundamentalist Sayyid Qutb and a book called The Arabs by Eugene Rogan of Oxford. Cohen says both scant Qutb's anti-Semitism. "Can it be that a mere 65 years after the fires of Auschwitz were banked, anti-Semitism has been relegated to a trivial, personal matter, like a preference for blondes -- something not worth mentioning?"

Cohen jumps to anti-Semitism throughout the Arab world, and anti-Zionism. Is it true, as Cohen states, that racism against Palestinians inside Israel doesn't approach the invective against Jews in the Arab world? I don't know, and I don't know that it matters; both must be condemned. More important, which is the applied prejudice? Palestinians must wait at checkpoints and cannot go to the beach, 1.5 million of them live in an open-air prison camp, their villages are wiped from the map. Cohen ignores this while imagining a second holocaust perpetrated by Arabs. This is an important column because it demonstrates what motivates so many American Zionists, emotion, fear of being wiped out. Is it rational? And important too because it demonstrates that Cohen, who once acknowledged that Partition was a "mistake," and Friedman are reduced to the essential job description of the Israel lobby, to defend by any means fair or foul. Cohen:

Critics of Israel frequently accuse it of racism in its treatment of Palestinians. Sometimes, the charge is apt. But there is nothing in the Israeli media or popular culture that even approaches what is openly, and with official sanction, said in the Arab world about Jews. The message is an echo of Nazi racism, and the prescription, stated or merely implied, is the same.

The Economist and Rogan are insufficient in themselves to constitute a movement. Yet I cannot quite suppress the feeling that the need to demonize Israel is so great that the immense moral failings of some of its enemies have to be swept under the carpet. As Jacob Weisberg pointed out recently in Slate, the "boycott Israel" movement is oddly unbalanced -- so much fury directed at Israel, so little at countries like China or Venezuela. Can it be that the French philosopher Vladimir Jankelevitch was prescient when he suggested years ago that anti-Zionism "gives us the permission and even the right and even the duty to be anti-Semitic in the name of democracy"? The line between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism, a demarcation I have always acknowledged, is becoming increasingly blurred.

On Monday evening, Jethro Tull performed in Jerusalem with Shlomo Gronich as guest keyboardist. Gronich played riffs from Israel's national anthem, the Hatikvah. Front man, Ian Anderson's decision to play in the apartheid state was taken in spite of urgent calls for him heed the boycott call. It is clear from his interview with the Jerusalem Post that he was contacted by both pro- and anti-boycotters, but he used the opportunity to call the Palestinian boycott call “irritating and shallow,” and to join the chorus of contempt for Elvis Costello, although curiously he was keen to emphasise that his decision was also based on maintaining his 'reputation' for not cancelling shows unless he is ill. From his statement on the band's official website in June 2010, we learned that he made up his "own mind in light of available facts, with my own experience and a sense of personal ethics.” That must be why he approached former British PM and the Middle East envoy of the risible Quartet, Tony Blair, for advice on which 'co-existence' charities he should donate his fee to for performing in Israel. Anderson's good will is accepted unquestioningly by the Post who are triumphant with the headline: 'Jethro Tull donates to co-existence'. Other apologists busy celebrating on a Jethro Tull internet discussion site: "The Jethro Tull Board proudly wishes a "yosha koach" to Jethro Tull for not yielding to the intense pressure, intimidation and lies of the Israel-bashing crowd. We are sure that Ian and the boys will receive unsurpassed love and gratitude from an audience, and from a nation..."

Ian got more than love; he got up-close and intimate with the Occupation. In 2008, Jethro Tull's famed guest keyboardist, Shlomo Gronich, performed for the settlers in Silwan. As reported by Gush Shalom in the lead up to the concert, "Gronich, who in the past presented himself prominently in the country and abroad as a “peace seeker” and even held joint performances with Arab artists, is now due to give a free performance at the “City of David” settler enclave at the heart of Silwan Village, in an event honouring the American millionaire and settler patron Irwin Moskowitz, in the framework of celebrating the anniversary of the occupation of Palestinian East Jerusalem and its annexation to Israel “Jerusalem Day”, June 2 ." Anderson had told the Post reporter that his donations “don’t make me feel particularly good or saintly, it was just one of those things you do, from time to time, like most people in my position,” he said.

Other artists 'in his position' are giving some real love, however: UK band Faithless's simple and witty statement sends out a message of support for the Palestinian call to boycott Israel: "...this short note is for all fans and family of the band in Israel. It's fair to say that for 14 years we've been promoting goodwill, trust and harmony all around the world in our own small but very loud! way. Ok. We've been asked to do some shows this summer in your country and, with the heaviest of hearts, I have regretfully declined the invitation. While human beings are being wilfully denied not just their rights but their NEEDS for their children and grandparents and themselves, I feel deeply that I should not be sending even tacit signals that this is either 'normal' or 'ok'"

Today, Thursday 12 August, in Dublin, is the launch of the Ireland Palestine Solidarity Campaign IPSC pledge, signed by over 130 Irish creative and performing artists, to boycott Israel:

In response to the call from Palestinian civil society for a cultural boycott of Israel, we pledge not to avail of any invitation to perform or exhibit in Israel, nor to accept any funding from any institution linked to the government of Israel, until such time as Israel complies with international law and universal principles of human rights.

In the words of IPSC Cultural Boycott Officer Dr. Raymond Deane, "These artists are aware of the Israeli Foreign Ministry's statement in 2005 that “We see culture as a propaganda tool of the first rank, and...do not differentiate between propaganda and culture.” On Wednesday PACBI released a statement on the historical significance on this pledge, which represents "a ground breaking strategy in supporting Palestinian struggle for freedom and justice.... Regardless of intentions, [an artistic] act is a conscious form of complicity that is manipulated by Israel in its frantic efforts to whitewash its persistent violations of international law and Palestinian rights."

There is no need for ‘saintly’ artists – a category Jethro Tull's Ian Anderson disingenuously implies he might fit into after his flirtation with ‘Reverend’ Blair; just individuals that are willing to wise-up to the shameless exploitation of their art.

Eleanor Kilroy is an artist and BDS activist living in London.

Wall Street steps up investment in Republicans
Fredreka Schouten, USA Today, Aug 11 2010

Wall Street interests are giving the lion’s share of their federal campaign contributions to Republicans, reversing their heavy giving to Democrats who control Congress, a new analysis of second-quarter financial reports shows. Back in Mar 2009, people and political action committees in the securities and investment industry gave 70% of their contributions to Democrats. By Jun 2010, the situation had changed markedly with 68% of Wall Street money now going to Republicans, according to the non-partisan Center for Responsive Politics. The report notes that the shift away from Democratic candidates came as the party pushed through legislation that imposes new regulations on the financial industry to avoid future Wall Street meltdowns and bailouts, which Obama signed into law last month.

"... Indeed, I would argue that because Sunni Arabs from Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Lebanon, and Egypt perpetrated the attacks of September 11, 2001, and because Sunni hostility to American and Israeli interests remains a conspicuous problem, the United States should theoretically welcome a strengthened Shiite role in the Middle East, were Iran to go through an even partial political transformation. And demographic, cultural, and other indicators all point to a positive ideological and philosophical shift in Iran in the medium to long term. Given this prognosis, and the high cost and poor chances for success of any military effort to eliminate Iran’s nuclear program, I believe that containment of a nuclear Iran is the most sensible policy for the United States...."

Israel to block future Gaza flotillas 12 Aug 2010 Defending Tel Aviv's deadly attack on the Gaza-bound flotilla, Israel's army chief has vowed to block future aid shipments heading toward the besieged strip. "If they come, they will be stopped by our defensive shield," Lieutenant-General Gabi Ashkenazi said in his address to the audience at the naval graduation ceremony in Haifa on Wednesday, Haaretz reported.

An initiative recently launched by the prestigious online literature magazine Words without Borders entitled “Cross-Cultural-Dialogues in the Middle East,” rings alarm bells in light of the Palestinian civil society call for boycott, divestment and sanctions on Israel. The initiators of this series of articles are Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi, who describes herself as being of Iranian Muslim background, and Chana Morgenstern, an Israeli fiction writer, who met as graduate students at Brown University in the US. Van der Vliet Oloomi and Morgenstern are now in Jerusalem undertaking to travel around “crossing borders,” and opening “dialogue” with persons from many different cultural and political locations. In their statement of purpose, New Blog Series: Cross-Cultural-Dialogues In the Middle East, Jul 29 2010, Van der Vliet Oloomi and Morgenstern explain:

We are hoping to gain a broader perspective on the ways in which contemporary Palestinian cultures negotiate the region’s complex and hybrid social landscape. The series, as we foresee it, will cover emerging guerilla poetry movements, collaborations between Israeli and Palestinian intellectuals and writers, interviews with international and local film makers, reviews of the Jerusalem Film Festival, as well as an overview of various grassroots cultural organizations in the West Bank.

Though this statement of purpose may be intentionally vague, it is important for anyone who wishes to engage in serious "dialogue" in this area to be aware that a condition of utmost serious conflict exists between a colonial, apartheid occupying power, Israel, and the indigenous people. As part of a strategy for nonviolent resistance, the Palestinians have issued an international call for BDS against Israel until it complies with international law and respects the universality of human rights Palestinian Civil Society Calls for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions against Israel, Jul 9 2005 . Briefly stated, the BDS call sets out the following demands: Israel must end its occupation and colonization of all Arab lands and dismantle the West Bank wall declared illegal by the International Court of Justice in 2004; recognize the fundamental rights of the Arab-Palestinian citizens of Israel to full equality; and respect, protect and promote the rights of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes and properties, as stipulated in UNSC Resolution 194. Is the Israeli partner in this project going to acknowledge the horror inflicted on its Palestinian counterpart? There are no two “equal” parties here: there is one side that has colonized both history and the land, ethnically cleansed most of the natives, and has been discriminating racially against the 1.5 million Palestinians who remain inside Israel as nominal citizens, as well as the millions more in the West Bank and Gaza Strip and the diaspora. Is this proposed dialogue going to “speak truth to power” and take cognizance of the three demands endorsed by the overwhelming majority of Palestinian civil society organizations?

Indeed, the guidelines issued by the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel Guidelines for Applying the International Cultural Boycott of Israel, Jul 20 2009 explicitly warn against events or projects that promote “false symmetry or balance.” PACBI condemns initiatives “based on the false premise that the colonizers and the colonized, the oppressors and the oppressed, are equally responsible for the ‘conflict’” as “intentionally deceptive, intellectually dishonest and morally reprehensible,” because they often seek “to encourage dialogue or ‘reconciliation between the two sides’” without ever acknowledging basic injustices and power imbalances. Thus, such initiatives serve to “promote the normalization of oppression and injustice.” Under these guidelines, all “events and projects that bring Palestinians and/or Arabs and Israelis together, unless framed within the explicit context of opposition to occupation and other forms of Israeli oppression of the Palestinians, are strong candidates for boycott.”

In discourse with those living in Palestine/Israel, it must be borne in mind that Israel holds thousands of political prisoners, among them many children. Millions of displaced Palestinians reside in refugee camps under conditions of deprivation in the West Bank, Gaza Strip, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and Egypt, and many others are scattered all over the world. When the UN recognized Israel it was on condition that the refugees be allowed to return, a condition that, though promised by Israel’s tearful representative Abba Eban, has never been fulfilled. The Gaza Strip, where I live, remains under a stifling siege notwithstanding international demands that the siege be lifted. International shipments of vitally needed medical supplies, food, clothing, and building materials have been systematically diverted by Israel using pirate-like raids against ships in international waters, as well as overland caravans. The last attack resulted in the massacre of nine peace activists and the injury of several dozen others aboard the Mavi Marmara when Israel attacked it and other vessels in the Gaza Freedom Flotilla in May.

Because I am a Palestinian, I do not have the option of “crossing borders” like Van der Vliet Oloomi and Morgenstern. Along with the other 1.5 million Palestinians in Gaza, my horizons are confined to this narrow strip of land. If we in Gaza were Jews, then under Israel’s racist system, we would not only be invited back to our homes throughout historic Palestine, but provided all sorts of subsidies, housing and support. This mass imprisonment of 1.5 million human beings, most of us refugees, just because we are the “wrong” religion, finds precedents only in the darkest chapters of human history. Not only are we imprisoned, but we are subjected to regular attack. During its 23-day long assault on Gaza starting in December 2008, Israel killed more than 1,400 Palestinians. The UN-commissioned Goldstone Report as well as numerous local and international human rights organizations documented illegal use of weapons such as white phosphorus and cluster bombs. Of the thousands of homes, schools and businesses intentionally destroyed or seriously damaged by Israeli bombing and bulldozers, only a fraction has been rebuilt, since Israel uses the pretext of “security” to prevent the shipment of cement and other building materials into Gaza.

But the situation of Palestinians in the West Bank is also dire. The gigantic apartheid separation wall cuts Palestinians from their social, economic and cultural centers and prevents them from working their land. Hundreds of checkpoints prevent normal travel including visits to hospitals for essential medical care and attendance at schools and universities for both students and teachers or just to maintain normal family and social life. A new report by the British-based Save The Children non-governmental organization documents that in certain places in the West Bank, malnutrition is even worse than in Gaza: 61% of children in Gaza are seriously malnourished, but up to 79% of children in “pockets of poverty” in the West Bank are malnourished as well. In both Gaza and the West Bank, “targeted killings,” i.e. extra-judicial executions, are a common Israeli practice. Unless the well-meaning bloggers and Words without Borders are prepared to take into account this climate of colonial-settler oppression, it is doubtful that their ministrations can bear fruit. An appeal can be made to Israeli individuals and institutions to join the boycott, and some courageous Israelis have indeed done so, like members of the group Boycott from Within.

How do Palestinians negotiate this “hybrid social landscape?” By raising their own and others’ consciousness that we are under a state of siege, facing the daily threat of extermination, and using all means in our power to resist and to preserve our communities and our culture. Unfortunately the Words without Borders initiative appears oblivious to these realities and speaks about Palestinians and Israelis in a language that obscures vast power differences that must be at the center of any serious, engaged and principled inquiry or action. Given these realities and the fact that this project is a blatant violation of the boycott guidelines endorsed by most Palestinian intellectuals, it is unlikely that many Palestinians will choose to participate. Those who do participate will not be members of the University Teachers’ Association in Palestine, or the Palestinian Writers’ Union, or even most Palestinian universities. Indeed, the choice is clear to the vast majority of Palestinians, and intellectuals must recognize that true “cross-cultural dialogue” is impossible when one voice is being stifled, silenced and erased by another.

FAQ on Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions

Source via Uruknet

Also see this… Boycott Updates

Obama’s Chinatown
Philip Weiss, Mondoweiss, Aug 11 2010

Probably closer to the Obamas than Lester Crown is Marty Nesbitt, Obama’s confidante and golfing buddy. For the sake of the Obamas’ dear friendship with Nesbitt’s wife Anita Blanchard, Michelle made her ill-fated trip to Spain. Earlier, to advance Nesbitt’s keen interest in Chicago’s bid for the 2016 Olympics, both Michelle and Barack made the sudden trip in 2009 to Copenhagen which also took people by surprise, and gave the Obamas their first taste of bad press. They must like Marty Nesbitt a lot and owe him a lot to have gone so visibly out of their way for his sake. Incidentally, he was the treasurer of Obama’s presidential campaign. Nesbitt is a close friend of Rahm Emanuel and David Axelrod. An Israel connection comes in, just possibly, there but more plainly when you connect two other dots. Ali Abunimah pointed out in Mar 2007:

Nesbitt works with the Pritzker Realty Group, and another close Obama friend is Penny Pritzker, a scion of the family of the Hyatt fortune, which has has been used for projects far less liberal in Israel than the Pritzker-Nesbitt politics are in the US. In 2003, the Forward reported on how he had ‘been courting the pro-Israel constituency. He co-sponsored an amendment to the Illinois Pension Code allowing the state of Illinois to lend money to the Israeli government. Among his early backers was Penny Pritzker, now his national campaign finance chair, scion of the liberal but staunchly Zionist family that owns the Hyatt hotel chain. The Hyatt Regency hotel on Mount Scopus was built on land forcibly expropriated from Palestinian owners after Israel occupied East Jerusalem in 1967.

All these people are linked through the Chicago Housing Authority and Valerie Jarrett, chair 1992-95 of the Chicago Department of Planning and Development, chair 1995-2005 of the Chicago Transit Board.

‘Anti-Semitism is worse in 2010 than 1910′
Gil Shefler, JPost, Aug 10 2010

Times are dire, anti-Semitism is on the rise and the world is becoming a more perilous place for the Jews to live in by the day, if you ask Prof Robert Wistrich, the head of the Hebrew University’s Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of Anti-Semitism and the author of a recently published book on the subject called A Lethal Obsession: Anti-Semitism From Antiquity to the Global Jihad. The evidence to support his claim is all around us, he said in an interview with the JPost on Monday:

Anti-Semitism is continually morphing all the time, which is its strength. There’s no sign of diminution and it will probably get worse. We see it in every indicator possible showing a clear and steady rise in the number of attacks recorded on Jews.

Why are things as bad as he believes they are? Wistrich says the last decade has seen a several strands of hatred towards Jews intertwine forming an unholy alliance between the extreme left and right together with fundamental Islam:

What I think that really struck me about the last decade that I don’t think was new but has become more intense is that we’ve seen the coming together of classical anti-Semitism with a number of other strands like anti-US feeling, Islamic fundamentalism and international delegitimization of Israel. Their convergence has become much starker.

But not everyone agrees with Wistrich’s opinion. As one reviewer of his tome pointed out, as prevalent and intolerable as anti-Semitism may be nowadays it couldn’t possibly be any worse than it was, say, back in 1910, could it? However, according to Wistrich, it is. He said unhesitatingly:

The year 1910 in comparison with what we’ve been living through in the past decade is a paradise. There was a nasty and ugly potential for anti-Semitism in 1910 but relatively speaking Jews lived in a stable environment and as one Jewish writer Stefan Zweig wrote it was an age of golden security.

The one big exception to that rule is Czarist Russia, that great bastion of anti-Semitism where Jews were confined to live under institutional discrimination within the confines of the Pale of Settlement and were victims of periodic pogroms. Anti-Semitism in Russia in 1910 was worse than it is today, he admits, but not the West:

Today, even in the most advanced and democratic societies, Jews are uncomfortable. The real difference between 1910 and today is not that anti-Semitism is less common but that Israel provides a powerful shield and deterrent. Not a perfect deterrent and also a cause of anti-Semitism in itself.

Whether one agrees or disagrees with Wistrich no one can doubt the depth of his knowledge or his commitment to research. Wistrich’s book includes 150 pages of footnotes. In conducting his research he read sources in 12 different languages: English and Hebrew, as you’d expect from an academic who was raised in Britain and teaches in Israel; his mother’s native Polish and its cousins Russian and Ukrainian; tongues of Germanic origin including German, Dutch and Yiddish; the Latin lingos of Western Europe, French, Italian and Spanish, and, finally, even Arabic. In one important language of particular importance to the study of anti-Semitism in our time, however, he said he had to rely on translations: Farsi. Iran and the fundamentalist Islam it espouses are a key component in the surge of hatred towards Jews around the world:

There’s a common resentment of Israel and the US, often linked with anti-Semitic thinking. Clearly, this has been round 70-80 years but it picked up steam with the Islamic Revolution. What we see is an assault on the West in which Israel and the Jews have become a surrogate for an attack.

Wistrich’s prose has won praise by reviewers but his thick brick of a book isn’t light reading. In case you’ve ever wondered what kind of a person walks into a bookstore and picks up a 1,000 page history of anti-Semitism Wistrich’s answer might surprise you –it’s not just Jews, he says:

By far the most insightful comments have been from non-Jews. In the US I appear on nationwide radio shows.

As one might expect those readers are mostly Mormons, Catholics and evangelicals, who tend to be supportive of Israel and Jews in general. But he said he has many secular non-Jewish readers in the US In any case, he commended his non-Jewish readership’s “genuine horror of reading and grasping the scale of the phenomenon.” Nearing the end of the interview one might be tempted to label Wistrich a pessimist. But he denies that he is one. Instead, he says he is a “guarded optimist.” Ironically, the elites are the great hope in the struggle against anti-Semitism. Once, they despised and feared uppity Jews. Now, they realize the error of their ways. Wistrich said:

This is a sign of belated awakening of some of the political elites to anti-Semitism. There are some minority voices in the Arab world, they are inconsequential now but will not be forever. Doesn't mean we're going to turn things round. That would require a long and concerted effort. But it has to begin somewhere. If Jews don't mobilize, then why should we expect others?

The Harper government is still withholding the details of Canadian Security Intelligence Service CSIS investigations that prompted CSIS Director Richard Fadden to comment on foreign influence on Canadian politicians. The media have been focusing on China as one source of inappropriate influence. However, Fadden indicated that at least five countries, including China and Middle East nations were involved. He did not specify which Middle Eastern countries. The government’s secrecy may indicate that Israel, to which the Harper government has given resolute uncritical support, is among the Middle Eastern countries that CSIS investigations reveal are unduly influencing Canada’s politicians. In his comments, Fadden talked about foreign influence exercised through university and social clubs. He noted;

You pay for their trips and when an event is occurring that is of particular interest to country ‘X,’ you call up and you ask the person to take a particular view.

Currently, Hillel Clubs operate on most Canadian campuses, and their mandates explicitly include “Israel advocacy” and promoting Jewish students’ identification with Israel. Opportunities for all-expenses-paid two-week trips to Israel are also made available to students. A similar process occurs with federal MPs and provincial legislators. The Canada-Israel Committee has been subsidizing trips to Israel for MPs and provincial legislators for decades. Canadians for Justice and Peace in the Middle East is concerned about the influence that Israel and the Canada-Israel Committee exercise on federal politicians through travel subsidies and possibly other means. CJPME President Thomas Woodley says:

We urge the government to disclose now which countries CSIS found exercising undue influence, and the means by which they do so.

As pointed out by veteran CBC journalist Brian Stewart, trips subsidized by foreign governments are “carefully planned, often by the host nation’s intelligence arm.” CJPME believes that Canadian policy should be moulded by respect for international law, and is concerned that Canadian Middle East policy could be skewed through the type of influence Fadden described. According to the federal ethics commissioner, the Canada-Israel Committee paid over $160,000 for various one-week trips by 14 MPs to Israel in 2009 alone. The Canada-Israel Committee subsidized a Jul 2010 trip by seven MPs: Conservative MPs John Duncan, Jeff Watson, Edward Fast and Brent Rathgeber, Liberal MPs Scott Simms and Anthony Rota and NDP MP Glenn Thibeault. No other Middle East nation has hosted so many MPs on such frequent and expensive trips.

Worried about an Israeli attack on Iran? That’s the idea. You must do what we can’t, because if you don’t, we will. This is how some Israelis are trying to twist Washington’s arm to get the US to attack Iran. A more honest way of making the argument would be to say this: If the US won’t attack Iran, then Israel will, even though it won’t accomplish its military objectives and it will open Pandora’s box. Desperate nations sometimes do desperate things. You have been warned. Another name for this: blackmail. It’s hard to counter an irrational argument when the irrationality is intentional. Such are the means by which someone like erstwhile Israeli army corporal and current Atlantic commentator Jeffrey Goldberg, attempts to persuade his readers: not through cogent reasoning based on clear evidence, but by an insidious form of argument that has the clarity of slime. Consider the way he tries to close his case for an attack on Iran, even while avoiding saying straight out that he supports such a course of action. The US must not take the risk of letting Israel attack Iran because if Obama orders US forces to attack instead, this would be the most patriotic thing to do. Obama would not be serving Israel’s interests; he would be defending Western civilization. Israel only wants what’s good for the US, and we’re supposed to believe that, even while few if any Israelis could be persuaded that the US only wants what’s good for Israel.

The truth is that everyone gets to define their own interests, so let’s ignore the obsequious crap from Peres and consider Goldberg’s core claim: that Israel is gearing up to strike Iran. Even if Goldberg is participating in a neocon game of bluff, the only kind of bluff worth engaging in is one that has credibility. To make a credible argument that Israel has the intention of going it alone, Goldberg would have to present the outline of a credible plan of attack. He doesn’t even try. And he prefaces this “plan” by saying Israel only gets one try. That’s not even a back-of-an-envelope war plan. It’s more like a Twitter war plan. Five years ago Kenneth Pollack dismissed the idea that Israel could attack Iran on its own. I don’t see any reason to doubt that his analysis on the military logistics of an attack still remains sound. Indeed, there seem to be plenty of Israeli analysts who concede that Israel simply does not have the option of going it alone. Even Goldberg quotes an unnamed Israeli general who says, “This is too big for us.” In The Persian Puzzle: The Conflict Between Iran and America, Pollack wrote:

The US should not count on Israel to conduct a counterproliferation strike for us. It is almost certainly the case that Israel would be willing to absorb the diplomatic costs of a strike, would be prepared to deal with Iran’s retaliation in the form of either terrorist attacks or missile strikes on Israel, and probably is not overly concerned about Iranian behavior in Iraq. The problem for Israel is much simpler: Iran is too far away. Most of the known Iranian nuclear facilities are around 1,000 miles away from Israel. Its Jericho II ballistic missiles could reach these targets, but they lack the payload, accuracy, and numbers to be able to significantly damage let alone destroy more than one or two of the large Iranian nuclear facilities, which leaves the matter to the Israeli Air Force. Even assuming that Israeli aircraft were to fly directly to Iran, overflying Jordan and Iraq, the only aircraft in its inventory that could reach Iran’s known nuclear sites are its 25 F-151 strike fighters. Israel would need to set up aerial refueling stations at three to five locations between Israel and the Iranian targets for its roughly 350 F-16s to be able to participate, which would be practically impossible. Because the F-151s would have to carry a considerable amount of fuel, they could not carry a great deal of ordinance. Given the size of the various Iranian nuclear facilities, it would not be possible for Israel to destroy all of them in a single raid as it did Osiraq. Nor would it be politically, militarily, or logistically possible for Israel to sustain multiple such strikes over the many days, if not weeks, it would take for all its F-151s to accomplish the job.

The neocon game of bluff will only box in the Obama administration if the Israeli “threats” are treated seriously. A more appropriate response would seem to be to focus on the limits of Israeli military action, unless that is one imagines that Israel would launch a nuclear attack on Iran, which to my mind is wildly implausible. If Israel wants to permanently seal its global pariah status, the first offensive use of nuclear weapons since Nagasaki is a sure way. Goldberg reports, but apparently didn’t take seriously, the observations of some Israelis who given their positions of military command seem to merit close attention. The message Netanyahu, Goldberg and other panic-stricken Zionists are unintentionally sending out is that come the day Iran acquires a nuclear weapon, Israelis may as well back their bags and abandon the Jewish state. That probably won’t happen because in such an event Israel will “discover” what many Israelis no doubt already think: that retired Gen Abizaid was right when he said that the US and its allies can “live with” a nuclear-armed Iran. Abizaid told an audience at tCSIS:

Let’s face it, we lived with a nuclear Soviet Union, we’ve lived with a nuclear China, and we’re living with nuclear powers as well.

That was true in 2007 and it’s true now. It’s also true that spineless politicians remain the playthings of fear-mongers who are addicted to war.

It is possible that at some point in the next 12 months, the imposition of devastating economic sanctions on the Islamic Republic of Iran will persuade its leaders to cease their pursuit of nuclear weapons. It is also possible that Iran’s reform-minded Green Movement will somehow replace the mullah-led regime, or at least discover the means to temper the regime’s ideological extremism. It is possible, as well, that “foiling operations” conducted by the intelligence agencies of Israel, the US, UK, and other Western powers, programs designed to subvert the Iranian nuclear effort through sabotage and, on occasion, the carefully engineered disappearances of nuclear scientists, will have hindered Iran’s progress in some significant way. It is also possible that Obama, who has said on more than a few occasions that he finds the prospect of a nuclear Iran “unacceptable,” will order a military strike against the country’s main weapons and uranium-enrichment facilities. But none of these things, least of all the notion that Obama, for whom initiating new wars in the Middle East is not a foreign-policy goal, will soon order the US military into action against Iran, seems, at this moment, terribly likely.

What is more likely, then, is that one day next spring, Israeli national security adviser Arad and Israeli defense minister Barak will simultaneously telephone their counterparts at the White House and the Pentagon to inform them that Netanyahu has just ordered roughly one hundred F-15Es, F-16Is, F-16Cs, and other aircraft of the Israeli air force to fly east toward Iran, possibly by crossing Saudi Arabia, possibly by threading the border between Syria and Turkey, and possibly by traveling directly through Iraq’s airspace, though it is crowded with US aircraft. It’s so crowded, in fact, that CENTCOM, whose area of responsibility is the greater Middle East, has already asked the Pentagon what to do should Israeli aircraft invade its airspace. According to multiple sources, the answer came back: do not shoot them down. In these conversations, which will be fraught, the Israelis will tell their US counterparts that they are taking this drastic step because a nuclear Iran poses the gravest threat since Hitler to the physical survival of the Jewish people. The Israelis will also state that they believe they have a reasonable chance of delaying the Iranian nuclear program for at least three to five years. They will tell their US colleagues that Israel was left with no choice. They will not be asking for permission, because it will be too late to ask for permission.

When the Israelis begin to bomb the uranium-enrichment facility at Natanz, the formerly secret enrichment site at Qom, the nuclear-research center at Esfahan, and possibly even the Bushehr reactor, along with the other main sites of the Iranian nuclear program, a short while after they depart en masse from their bases across Israel, regardless of whether they succeed in destroying Iran’s centrifuges and warhead and missile plants, or whether they fail miserably to even make a dent in Iran’s nuclear program, they stand a good chance of changing the Middle East forever; of sparking lethal reprisals, and even a full-blown regional war that could lead to the deaths of thousands of Israelis and Iranians, and possibly Arabs and USAians as well; of creating a crisis for Obama that will dwarf Afghanistan in significance and complexity; of rupturing relations between Jerusalem and Washington, which is Israel’s only meaningful ally; of inadvertently solidifying the somewhat tenuous rule of the mullahs in Tehran; of causing the price of oil to spike to cataclysmic highs, launching the world economy into a period of turbulence not experienced since autumn 2008, or possibly since the oil shock of 1973; of placing communities across the Jewish diaspora in mortal danger, by making them targets of Iranian-sponsored terror attacks, as they have been in the past, in a limited though already lethal way; and of accelerating Israel’s conversion from a once-admired refuge for a persecuted people into a leper among nations.

If a strike does succeed in crippling the Iranian nuclear program, however, Israel, in addition to possibly generating some combination of the various catastrophes outlined above, will have removed from its list of existential worries the immediate specter of nuclear-weaponized, theologically driven, eliminationist anti-Semitism; it may derive for itself the secret thanks, though the public condemnation, of the Middle East’s moderate Arab regimes, all of which fear an Iranian bomb with an intensity that in some instances matches Israel’s; and it will have succeeded in countering, in militant fashion, the spread of nuclear weapons in the Middle East, which is, not irrelevantly, a prime goal of the enthusiastic counter-proliferator who currently occupies the White House. I am not engaging in a thought exercise, or a one-man war game, when I discuss the plausibility and potential consequences of an Israeli strike on Iran. Israel has twice before successfully attacked and destroyed an enemy’s nuclear program. In 1981, Israeli warplanes bombed the Iraqi reactor at Osirak, halting forever, as it turned out Saddam Hussein’s nuclear ambitions; and in 2007, Israeli planes destroyed a North Korean–built reactor in Syria. An attack on Iran, then, would be unprecedented only in scope and complexity.

I have been exploring the possibility that such a strike will eventually occur for more than seven years, since my first visit to Tehran, where I attempted to understand both the Iranian desire for nuclear weapons and the regime’s theologically motivated desire to see the Jewish state purged from the Middle East, and especially since Mar 2009, when I had an extended discussion about the Iranian nuclear program with Netanyahu hours before he was sworn in as Israel’s prime minister. In the months since then, I have interviewed roughly 40 current and past Israeli decision makers about a military strike, as well as many US and Arab officials. In most of these interviews, I have asked a simple question: what is the percentage chance that Israel will attack the Iranian nuclear program in the near future? Not everyone would answer this question, but a consensus emerged that there is a better than 50% chance that Israel will launch a strike by next July. Of course, it is in the Israeli interest to let it be known that the country is considering military action, if for no other reason than to concentrate the attention of the Obama administration. But I tested the consensus by speaking to multiple sources both in and out of government, and of different political parties. Citing the extraordinary sensitivity of the subject, most spoke only reluctantly, and on condition of anonymity. They were not part of some public-relations campaign.

The reasoning offered by Israeli decision makers was uncomplicated: Iran is, at most, one to three years away from having a breakout nuclear capability, often understood to be the capacity to assemble more than one missile-ready nuclear device within about three months of deciding to do so. The Iranian regime, by its own statements and actions, has made itself Israel’s most zealous foe; and the most crucial component of Israeli national-security doctrine, a tenet that dates back to the 1960s, when Israel developed its own nuclear capability as a response to the Jewish experience during the Holocaust, is that no regional adversary should be allowed to achieve nuclear parity with the reborn and still-besieged Jewish state. In our conversation before his swearing-in, Netanyahu would not frame the issue in terms of nuclear parity. The Israeli policy of amimut, or opacity, prohibits acknowledging the existence of the country’s nuclear arsenal, which consists of more than 100 weapons, mainly two-stage thermonuclear devices, capable of being delivered by missile, fighter-bomber, or submarine, two of which are said by intelligence sources to be currently positioned in the Persian Gulf. Instead, he framed the Iranian program as a threat not only to Israel but to all of Western civilization, saying:

You don’t want a messianic apocalyptic cult controlling atomic bombs. When the wide-eyed believer gets hold of the reins of power and the weapons of mass death, then the world should start worrying, and that’s what is happening in Iran.

Israel, Netanyahu told me, is worried about an entire complex of problems, not only that Iran, or one of its proxies, would destroy Tel Aviv; like most Israeli leaders, he believes that if Iran gains possession of a nuclear weapon, it will use its new leverage to buttress its terrorist proxies in their attempts to make life difficult and dangerous; and he fears that Israel’s status as a haven for Jews would be forever undermined, and with it, the entire raison d’être of the 100-year-old Zionist experiment. In our conversation, Netanyahu refused to discuss his timetable for action, or even whether he was considering military preemption of the Iranian nuclear program. But others familiar with his thinking helped me understand his worldview. Netanyahu’s belief is that Iran is not Israel’s problem alone; it is the world’s problem, and the world, led by the US, is duty-bound to grapple with it. But Netanyahu does not place great faith in sanctions, not the relatively weak sanctions against Iran recently passed by the UNSC, nor the more rigorous ones being put in place by the US and its European allies. Those close to him say that Netanyahu understands however that Obama, with whom he has had a difficult and intermittently frigid though lately thawing relationship, believes that stringent sanctions, combined with various enticements to engage with the West, might still provide Iran with what one US administration official described to me as “a dignified off-ramp for Tehran to take.” But based on my conversations with Israeli decision-makers, this period of forbearance in which Netanyahu waits to see if the West’s nonmilitary methods can stop Iran, will come to an end this December. US Sec Def Gates said in June at a meeting of NATO defense ministers that most intelligence estimates predict that Iran is one to three years away from building a nuclear weapon. One Israeli policy maker told me:

In Israel, we heard this as nine months from Jun 2010, in other words, Mar 2011. If we assume that nothing changes in these estimates, this means that we will have to begin thinking about our next step beginning at the turn of the year.

The Netanyahu government is already intensifying its analytic efforts not just on Iran, but on a subject many Israelis have difficulty understanding: Obama. The Israelis are struggling to answer what is for them the most pressing question: are there any circumstances under which Obama would deploy force to stop Iran from going nuclear? Everything depends on the answer. The Israelis argue that Iran demands the urgent attention of the entire international community, and in particular the US, with its unparalleled ability to project military force. This is the position of many moderate Arab leaders as well. A few weeks ago, in uncommonly direct remarks, the ambassador of the UAE to the US, Yousef al-Otaiba, told me in a public forum at the Aspen Ideas Festival that his country would support a military strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities. He also said that if the US allowed Iran to cross the nuclear threshold, the small Arab countries of the Gulf would have no choice but to leave the US orbit and ally themselves with Iran, out of self-protection. He said:

There are many countries in the region who, if they lack the assurance the US is willing to confront Iran, they will start running for cover towards Iran. Small, rich, vulnerable countries in the region do not want to be the ones who stick their finger in the big bully’s eye, if nobody’s going to come to their support.

Several Arab leaders have suggested that US standing in the Middle East depends on its willingness to confront Iran. They argue self-interestedly that an aerial attack on a handful of Iranian facilities would not be as complicated or as messy as, say, invading Iraq. One Arab foreign minister told me:

This is not a discussion about the invasion of Iran. We are hoping for the pinpoint striking of several dangerous facilities. The US could do this very easily.

Israeli national security adviser Arad, once told me that the prime minister will sometimes, in the course of briefing foreign visitors on the importance of taking action against Iran’s nuclear program, say jokingly:

Let me tell you a secret. The US military is bigger than Israel’s.

Obama has said any number of times that he would find a nuclear Iran “unacceptable.” His most stalwart comments on the subject have been discounted by some Israeli officials because they were made during his campaign for the presidency, while visiting Sderot, the town in southern Israel that had been the frequent target of rocket attacks by Hamas, where he said:

The world must prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon. I will take no options off the table in dealing with this potential Iranian threat. And understand part of my reasoning here. A nuclear Iran would be a game-changing situation, not just in the Middle East, but around the world. Whatever remains of our nuclear nonproliferation framework, I think, would begin to disintegrate. You would have countries in the Middle East who would see the potential need to also obtain nuclear weapons.

But the Israelis are doubtful that a man who positioned himself as the antithesis of Bush 43, author of invasions of both Afghanistan and Iraq, would launch a preemptive attack on a Muslim nation. A senior Israeli official told me:

We all watched his speech in Cairo. We don’t believe that he is the sort of person who would launch a daring strike on Iran. We are afraid he would see a policy of containing a nuclear Iran rather than attacking it.

This official noted that even Bush balked at attacking Iran’s nuclear facilities, and discouraged the Israelis from carrying out the attack on their own. Bush would sometimes mock those aides and commentators who advocated an attack on Iran, even referring to the conservative columnists Charles Krauthammer and William Kristol as “the bomber boys,” according to two people I spoke with who overheard this. The Israeli official told me:

Bush was two years ago, but the Iranian program was the same and the intent was the same. So I don’t personally expect Obama to be more Bush than Bush.

If the Israelis reach the firm conclusion that Obama will not, under any circumstances, launch a strike on Iran, then the countdown will begin for a unilateral Israeli attack. The official told me:

If the choice is between allowing Iran to go nuclear, or trying for ourselves what Obama won’t try, then we probably have to try.

Which brings us to a second question, one having to do with the nature of the man considering military action: would Netanyahu, a prime minister with an acute understanding of the essential role the US plays in securing the existence of Israel, actually take a chance on permanently alienating US affection in order to make a high-risk attempt at stopping Iran? If Iran retaliates against US troops in Iraq or Afghanistan, the consequences for Israel’s relationship with the US military leadership could be catastrophic. Of course, Netanyahu would be risking more than his relationship with the US: a strike on Iran, Israeli intelligence officials believe, could provoke all-out retaliation by Iran’s Lebanese subsidiary, Hezbollah, which now possesses, by most intelligence estimates, as many as 45,000 rockets, at least three times as many as it had in summer 2006, during the last round of fighting between the group and Israel. An Israeli official who spends considerable time with the prime minister told me:

The only reason Netanyahu would place Israel’s relationship with the US in total jeopardy is if he thinks that Iran represents a threat like the Shoah. In WW2, the Jews had no power to stop Hitler from annihilating us. Six million were slaughtered. Today, 6 million Jews live in Israel, and someone is threatening them with annihilation. But now we have the power to stop them. Netanyahu knows that this is the choice.

Numerous Israeli commentators and analysts have pointed out to me that Netanyahu is not unique in his understanding of this challenge; several of the prime ministers who preceded him cast Iran’s threat in similarly existential terms. Still, Netanyahu is different. Israeli ambassador to the US Oren told me:

He has a deep sense of his role in Jewish history.

lengthy passages of pseudo psychoanalysis about netanyahu’s insane genocidal father omitted – RB

Iran and Israel maintained close diplomatic ties before the overthrow of the shah in 1979; Israel’s support of the shah obviously angered his enemies, the newly empowered mullahs in Tehran, but this is insufficient to explain the depth of official Iranian hatred of Israel and Jews; something else must explain the sentiment expressed by former commander of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps Rezai, who said in 1991, 14 years before the rise of Ahmadinejad:

The day will come when, like Salman Rushdie, the Jews will not find a place to live anywhere in the world.

I once asked Ali Asghar Soltanieh, a leading Iranian diplomat who is now Iran’s ambassador to the IAEA, why the leadership of Iran persistently described Israel not as a mere regional malefactor but as a kind of infectious disease. He replied:

Do you disagree? Do you not see that this is true?

In a speech in June, Ahmadinejad explained Middle East history this way:

Sixty years ago, by means of an artificial and false pretext, and by fabricating information and inventing stories, they gathered the filthiest, most criminal people, who only appear to be human, from all corners of the world. They organized and armed them, and provided them with media and military backing. Thus, they occupied the Palestinian lands, and displaced the Palestinian people.

The “invented story” is, of course, the Holocaust. Ahmadinejad’s efforts to deny the historical truth of the Holocaust have the endorsement of high officialdom: Iranian foreign minister Mottaki said in 2005:

The words of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on the Holocaust and on Israel are not personal opinion, nor isolated statements, but they express the view of the government.

The Iranian leadership’s own view of nuclear dangers is perhaps best exemplified by a comment made in 2001 by former Iranian president Rafsanjani, who entertained the idea that Israel’s demise could be brought about in a relatively pain-free manner for the Muslim world, saying:

The use of an atomic bomb against Israel would destroy Israel completely while its use against the Islamic countries would only cause damage.

It is this line of thinking, which suggests that rational deterrence theory, or the threat of mutual assured destruction, might not apply in the case of Iran, that has the Israeli government on a knife’s edge. And this is not a worry that is confined to Israel’s right. Even the left-wing Meretz Party, which is harsh in its condemnation of Netanyahu’s policies toward the Palestinians, considers Iran’s nuclear program to be an existential threat. Israeli policy makers do not necessarily believe that Iran, should it acquire a nuclear device, would immediately launch it by missile at Tel Aviv. One Israeli defense official told me:

On the one hand, they would like to see the Jews wiped out. On the other hand, they know that Israel has unlimited reprisal capability, and despite what Rafsanjani and others say, we think they know that they are putting Persian civilization at risk.

The challenges posed by a nuclear Iran are more subtle than a direct attack, Netanyahu told me:

Several bad results would emanate from this single development. First, Iran’s militant proxies would be able to fire rockets and engage in other terror activities while enjoying a nuclear umbrella. This raises the stakes of any confrontation that they’d force on Israel. Instead of being a local event, however painful, it becomes a global one. Second, this development would embolden Islamic militants far and wide, on many continents, who would believe that this is a providential sign, that this fanaticism is on the ultimate road to triumph. You’d create a great sea change in the balance of power in our area. An Iran with nuclear weapons would also attempt to persuade Arab countries to avoid making peace with Israel, and it would spark a regional nuclear-arms race. The Middle East is incendiary enough, but with a nuclear-arms race, it will become a tinderbox.

Other Israeli leaders believe that the mere threat of a nuclear attack by Iran, combined with the chronic menacing of Israel’s cities by the rocket forces of Hamas and Hezbollah, will progressively undermine the country’s ability to retain its most creative and productive citizens. Defense minister Barak told me that this is his great fear for Israel’s future:

The real threat to Zionism is the dilution of quality. Jews know that they can land on their feet in any corner of the world. The real test for us is to make Israel such an attractive place, such a cutting-edge place in human society, education, culture, science, quality of life, that even US Jewish young people want to come here. This vision is threatened by Iran and its proxies. Our young people can consciously decide to go other places, if they dislike living under the threat of nuclear attack. Our best youngsters could stay out of here by choice.

Patriotism in Israel runs very high, according to numerous polls, and it seemed unlikely to me that mere fear of Iran could drive Israel’s Jews to seek shelter elsewhere. But one leading proponent of an Israeli attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities, Ephraim Sneh, a former general and former deputy defense minister, is convinced that if Iran crossed the nuclear threshold, the very idea of Israel would be endangered. Sneh told me when I met with him in his office outside of Tel Aviv not long ago:

These people are good citizens, and brave citizens, but the dynamics of life are such that if someone has a scholarship for two years at a US university and the university offers him a third year, the parents will say, ‘Go ahead, remain there.’ If someone finishes a Ph.D. and they are offered a job in the US, they might stay there. It will not be that people are running to the airport, but slowly, slowly, the decision-making on the family level will be in favor of staying abroad. The bottom line is that we would have an accelerated brain drain. And an Israel that is not based on entrepreneurship, that is not based on excellence, will not be the Israel of today. Most critically, if Israel is no longer understood by its 6 million Jewish citizens, and by the roughly 7 million Jews who live outside of Israel, to be a natural safe haven, then its raison d’être will have been subverted.

He directed my attention to a framed photograph on his wall of three Israeli air force F-15s flying over Auschwitz, and asked me:

You see those planes? That’s the picture I look at all the time. When someone says that they will wipe out the Jews, we have to deny him the tools. The problem with the photograph is that we were too late.

To understand why Israelis of different political dispositions see Iran as quite possibly the most crucial challenge they have faced in their 62-year history, one must keep in mind the near-sanctity, in the public’s mind, of Israel’s nuclear monopoly. The Israeli national narrative, in shorthand, begins with shoah, which is Hebrew for “calamity,” and ends with tkumah, “rebirth.” Israel’s nuclear arsenal symbolizes national rebirth, and something else as well: that Jews emerged from WW2 having learned at least one lesson, about the price of powerlessness. In his new book, The Worst-Kept Secret: Israel’s Bargain With the Bomb, Avner Cohen, the preeminent historian of Israel’s nuclear program, writes:

Ben-Gurion was nearly obsessed with developing nuclear weapons as the only guarantor against further slaughter, declaring, ‘What Einstein, Oppenheimer, and Teller, the three of them are Jews, made for the US, could also be done by scientists in Israel, for their own people.’

Cohen argues that the umbrella created by Israel’s nuclear monopoly has allowed the Jewish state to recover from the wounds of the Holocaust. But those wounds do not heal, Sneh says:

The Shoah is not some sort of psychological complex. It is an historic lesson. My grandmother and my grandfather were from Poland. My father fought for the Polish army as an officer and escaped in 1940. My grandparents stayed, and they were killed by the Polish farmer who was supposed to give them shelter, for a lot of money. That’s why I don’t trust the goyim. One time is enough. I don’t put my life in the hands of goyim.

One Monday evening in early summer, I sat in the office of the decidedly non-goyishe Rahm Emanuel, the White House chief of staff, and listened to several National Security Council officials he had gathered at his conference table explain in so many words why the Jewish state should trust the non-Jewish president of the US to stop Iran from crossing the nuclear threshold. Emanuel told me before the meeting, in a tone meant to suggest both resolve and irritation at those who believe the president lacks such resolve:

The expression ‘All options are on the table’ means that all options are on the table.

The group interview he had arranged was a kind of rolling seminar on the challenges Iran poses; half a dozen officials made variations of the same argument: that Obama spends more time talking with foreign leaders on Iran than on any other subject. One of those at the table, Ben Rhodes, a deputy national-security adviser who served as the lead author of the recent “National Security Strategy for the US” as well as of the president’s conciliatory Cairo speech, suggested that Iran’s nuclear program was a clear threat to US security, and that the Obama administration responds to national security threats in the manner of other administrations, saying:

We are coordinating a multifaceted strategy to increase pressure on Iran, but that doesn’t mean we’ve removed any option from the table. This president has shown again and again that when he believes it is necessary to use force to protect US national security interests, he has done so. We’re not going to address hypotheticals about when and if we would use military force, but I think we’ve made it clear that we aren’t removing the option of force from any situation in which our national security is affected.

There was an intermittently prickly quality to this meeting, and not only because it was hosted by Emanuel, whose default state is exasperation. For more than a year, these White House officials have parried the charge that their president is unwilling to face the potential consequences of a nuclear Iran, and they are frustrated by what they believe to be a caricature of his position. A former Bush administration official told me that his president faced the opposite problem: Bush, bogged down by two wars and believing that Iran wasn’t that close to crossing the nuclear threshold, opposed the use of force against Iran’s program, and made his view clear, but no one believed him. At one point, I put forward the idea that for abundantly obvious reasons, few people would believe Obama would open up a third front in the greater Middle East. One of the officials responded heatedly:

What have we done that would allow you to reach the conclusion that we think that a nuclear Iran would represent a tolerable situation?

It is undeniably true, however, that the administration has appeared on occasion less than stalwart on the issue. French president Sarkozy has criticized Obama as a purveyor of baseless hope. At the UNSC last September, Sarkozy said:

I support the extended hand of the US, but what good have proposals for dialogue brought the international community? More uranium enrichment and declarations by the leaders of Iran to wipe a UN member state off the map.

Obama administration officials, particularly in the Pentagon, have several times signaled unhappiness at the possibility of military preemption. In April, Under-Sec Def Flournoy told reporters that military force against Iran was “off the table in the near term.” She later backtracked, but Joint Chiefs chair Mullen has also criticized the idea of attacking Iran. He said in April:

Iran getting a nuclear weapon would be incredibly destabilizing. Attacking them would also create the same kind of outcome. In an area that’s so unstable right now, we just don’t need more of that.

The gathering in Emanuel’s office was meant to communicate a number of clear messages to me, including one that was more militant than that delivered by Mullen: Obama has by no means ruled out counterproliferation by force. The meeting was also meant to communicate that Obama’s outreach to the Iranians was motivated not by naïveté, but by a desire to test Tehran’s intentions in a deliberate fashion; that the president understands that an Iranian bomb would spur a regional arms race that could destroy his antiproliferation program; and that US and Israeli assessments of Iran’s nuclear program are synchronized in ways they were not before. One official at the table, National Security Council official Samore, who oversees the administration’s counter-proliferation agenda, told me that the Israelis agree with US assessments that Iran’s uranium-enrichment program is plagued with problems. Samore said:

The most essential measure of nuclear-weapons capability is how quickly they can build weapons-grade material, and from that standpoint we can measure, based on the IAEA reports, that the Iranians are not doing well. The particular centrifuge machines they’re running are based on an inferior technology. They are running into some technical difficulties, partly because of the work we’ve done to deny them access to foreign components. When they make the parts themselves, they are making parts that don’t have quality control.

When I mentioned this comment to a senior Israeli official, he said:

We agree with this US assessment, but we also agree with Sec Def Gates that Iran is one year away from crossing the nuclear threshold.

Former Middle East peace negotiator and now senior National Security Council official Dennis Ross said during the meeting that he believes the Israelis now understand that US-instigated measures have slowed Iran’s progress, and that the administration is working to convince the Israelis and other parties in the region that the sanctions strategy has a chance of working. Ross said:

The president has said he hasn’t taken any options off the table, but let’s take a look at why we think this strategy could work. We have interesting data points over the past year, about Iran trying to deflect pressure when they thought that pressure was coming, which suggests that their ability to calculate costs and benefits is quite real. Last June, when they hadn’t responded to our bilateral outreach, the president said that we would take stock by September. Two weeks before the G-20, the Iranians said they would talk, after having resisted talking until that point. They didn’t do it because suddenly they saw the light; they did it because pressure was coming. They’re able to think about what matters to them. The sanctions Iran now faces may affect the regime’s thinking. The sanctions are going to cut across the board. They are taking place in the context of Iranian mismanagement. The Iranians are going to have to cut subsidies; they already have public alienation; they have division in the elites, and between the elites and the rest of the country. They are looking at the costs of trying to maintain control over a disaffected public. They wanted to head off sanctions because they knew that sanctions would be a problem. There is real potential here to affect their calculus. We’re pursuing a path right now that has some potential. It doesn’t mean you don’t think about everything else, but we’re on a path.

One question no administration official seems eager to answer is this: what will the US do if sanctions fail? Several Arab officials complained to me that the Obama administration has not communicated its intentions to them, even generally. No Arab officials I spoke with appeared to believe that the administration understands the regional ambitions of their Persian adversary. One Arab foreign minister told me that he believes Iran is taking advantage of Obama’s “reasonableness.” The foreign minister said:

Obama’s voters like it when the administration shows that it doesn’t want to fight Iran, but this is not a domestic political issue. Iran will continue on this reckless path, unless the administration starts to speak unreasonably. The best way to avoid striking Iran is to make Iran think that the US is about to strike Iran. We have to know the president’s intentions on this matter. We are his allies.

According to two administration sources, this issue caused tension between Obama and his recently dismissed director of national intelligence Blair. According to these sources, Blair, who was said to put great emphasis on the Iranian threat, told the president that the US’s Arab allies needed more reassurance. Obama reportedly did not appreciate the advice. In Israel, of course, officials expend enormous amounts of energy to understand Obama, despite the assurances they have received from Emanuel, Ross, and others. Delegations from Netanyahu’s bureau, from the defense and foreign ministries, and from the Israeli intelligence community have been arriving in Washington lately with great regularity. One Israeli official told me:

We pack our thermometers and go to Washington and take everyone’s temperature.

The increased tempo of these visits is only one sign of deepening contacts between Israel and the US as Iran moves closer to nuclear breakout: Israeli chief of staff Lt-Gen Ashkenazi is said to speak now with his US counterpart Adm Mullen regularly. Mullen recently made a stop in Israel that had one main purpose, according to an Israeli source:

To make sure we didn’t do anything in Iran before they thought we might do something in Iran.

Not long ago, chief of Israeli military intelligence Maj-Gen Yadlin paid a secret visit to Chicago to meet with Lester Crown, the billionaire whose family owns a significant portion of General Dynamics, the military contractor. Crown is one of Israel’s most prominent backers in the US Jewish community, and was one of Obama’s earliest and most steadfast supporters. According to sources in the US and Israel, Yadlin asked Crown to communicate Israel’s existential worries directly to Obama. When I reached Crown by phone, he confirmed that he had met with Yadlin, but denied that the general traveled to Chicago to deliver this message. Crown said:

Maybe he has a cousin in Chicago or something.

But he did say that Yadlin discussed with him the “Iranian clock,” the time remaining before Iran reached nuclear capability, and that he agreed with Yadlin that the US must stop Iran before it goes nuclear. Crown said:

I share with the Israelis the feeling that we certainly have the military capability and that we have to have the will to use it. The rise of Iran is not in the best interest of the US. I support the president, but I wish they were a little more outgoing in the way they have talked. I would feel more comfortable if I knew that they had the will to use military force, as a last resort. You cannot threaten someone as a bluff. There has to be a will to do it.

On my last visit to Israel, I was asked almost a dozen times by senior officials and retired generals if I could explain Obama and his feelings about Israel. Several officials even asked if I considered Obama to be an anti-Semite. I answered this question by quoting Abner Mikva, the former congressman, federal judge, and mentor to Obama, who famously said in 2008:

I think when this is all over, people are going to say that Obama is the first Jewish president.

I explained that Obama has been saturated with the work of Jewish writers, legal scholars, and thinkers, and that a large number of his friends, supporters, and aides are Jewish. But philo-Semitism does not necessarily equal sympathy for Netanyahu’s Likud Party, certainly not among US Jews, who are, like the president they voted for in overwhelming numbers, generally supportive of a two-state solution, and dubious about Jewish settlement of the West Bank. When I made these points to one senior Israeli official, he said:

This is the problem. If he is a J Street Jew, we are in trouble. We’re worried that he thinks like the liberal US Jews who say, ‘If we remove some settlements, then the extremist problem and the Iran problem go away.’

Rahm Emanuel suggested that the administration is trying to thread a needle: providing unshakeable support for Israel; protecting it from the consequences of an Iranian nuclear bomb; but pushing it toward compromise with the Palestinians. Emanuel, in our meeting, disputed that Israel is incapable of moving forward on the peace process so long as Iran looms as an existential threat. And he drafted the past six Israeli prime ministers, including Netanyahu, who during his first term in the late 1990s to his father’s chagrin compromised with the Palestinians, to buttress his case, saying:

Rabin, Peres, Netanyahu, Barak, Sharon, Olmert, every one of them pursued some form of a negotiated settlement, which would have been in Israel’s own strategic interest. There have been plenty of other threats while successive Israeli governments have pursued a peace process. There is no doubt that Iran is a major threat, but they didn’t just flip the switch on it a year ago. Israel should consider carefully whether a military strike would be worth the trouble it would unleash. I’m not sure that given the time line, whatever the time line is, that whatever they did, they wouldn’t stop it. They would be postponing.

It was then that I realized that, on some subjects, the Israelis and the US are still talking past each other. The US considers a temporary postponement of Iran’s nuclear program to be of dubious value. The Israelis don’t. One cabinet minister told me:

When Menachem Begin bombed Osirak, he had been told that his actions would set back the Iraqis one year. He did it anyway.

In my conversations with former Israeli air force generals and strategists, the prevalent tone was cautious. Many people I interviewed were ready, on condition of anonymity, to say why an attack on Iran’s nuclear sites would be difficult for Israel. And some Israeli generals, like their US colleagues, questioned the very idea of an attack. One general told me:

Our time would be better spent lobbying Obama to do this, rather than trying this ourselves. We are very good at this kind of operation, but it is a big stretch for us. The US can do this with a minimum of difficulty, by comparison. This is too big for us.

Successive Israeli prime ministers have ordered their military tacticians to draw up plans for a strike on Iran, and the Israeli air force has, of course, complied. It is impossible to know for sure how the Israelis might carry out such an operation, but knowledgeable officials in both Washington and Tel Aviv shared certain assumptions with me. The first is that Israel would get only one try. Israeli planes would fly low over Saudi Arabia, bomb their targets in Iran, and return to Israel by flying again over Saudi territory, possibly even landing in the Saudi desert for refueling, perhaps, if speculation rife in intelligence circles is to be believed, with secret Saudi cooperation. These planes would have to return home quickly, in part because Israeli intelligence believes that Iran would immediately order Hezbollah to fire rockets at Israeli cities, and Israeli air-force resources would be needed to hunt Hezbollah rocket teams. When I visited Maj-Gen Eisenkot, the general in charge of Israel’s Northern Command, at his headquarters near the Lebanese border, he told me that in the event of a unilateral Israeli strike on Iran, his mission would be to combat Hezbollah rocket forces. Eisenkot said that the 2006 war between Hezbollah and Israel, which began when Hezbollah fighters crossed the border and attacked an Israeli patrol, was seen by the group’s Iranian sponsors as a strategic mistake. Eisenkot said:

The Iranians got angry at Hezbollah for jumping ahead like that. Hezbollah suffered a lot during this war. Nasrallah lost a lot of his men. He knows he made a mistake. That is one reason we have had four years of quiet. What has changed in four years is that Hezbollah has increased its missile capability, but we have increased our capabilities as well. Our readiness means that Israel has freedom of action.

Even if Israel’s Northern Command successfully combated Hezbollah rocket attacks in the wake of an Israeli strike, political limitations would not allow Israel to make repeated sorties over Iran. One general told me:

The Saudis can let us go once. They’ll turn their radar off when we’re on our way to Iran, and we’ll come back fast. Our problem is not Iranian air defenses, because we have ways of neutralizing that. Our problem is that the Saudis will look very guilty in the eyes of the world if we keep flying over their territory.

The US, too, would look complicit in an Israeli attack, even if it had not been forewarned. The assumption, often but not always correct, that Israel acts only with the approval of the US, is a feature of life in the Middle East, and it is one the Israelis say they are taking into account. I spoke with several Israeli officials who are grappling with this question, among others: what if US intelligence learns about Israeli intentions hours before the scheduled launch of an attack? One of these officials told me:

It is a nightmare for us. What if Obama calls up Netanyahu and says, ‘We know what you’re doing. Stop immediately.’ Do we stop? We might have to. A decision has been made that we can’t lie to the US about our plans. We don’t want to inform them beforehand. This is for their sake and for ours. So what do we do? These are the hard questions.

Two officials suggested that Israel may go on pre-attack alert a number of times before actually striking. One said:

After the fifth or sixth time, maybe no one would believe that we’re really going.

Another question Israeli planners struggle with: how will they know if their attacks have actually destroyed a significant number of centrifuges and other hard-to-replace parts of the clandestine Iranian program? Two strategists told me that Israel will have to dispatch commandos to finish the job, if necessary, and bring back proof of the destruction. The commandos, who according to intelligence sources may be launched from the autonomous Kurdish territory in northern Iraq, would be facing a treacherous challenge, but one military planner I spoke with said the army would have no choice but to send them, explaining:

It is very important to be able to tell the Israeli people what we have achieved. Many Israelis think the Iranians are building Auschwitz. We have to let them know that we have destroyed Auschwitz, or we have to let them know that we tried and failed.

There are, of course, Israeli leaders who believe that attacking Iran is too risky. Army chief of staff Ashkenazi is said by numerous sources to doubt the usefulness of an attack, and other generals I spoke with worry that talk of an “existential threat” is itself a kind of existential threat to the Zionist project, which was meant to preclude such threats against the Jewish people. One general said:

We don’t want politicians to put us in a bad position because of the word Shoah. We don’t want our neighbors to think that we are helpless against an Iran with a nuclear bomb, because Iran might have the bomb one day. There is no guarantee that Israel will do this, or that the US will do this.

After staring at the photograph of the Israeli air-force flyover of Auschwitz more than a dozen different times in more than a dozen different offices, I came to see the contradiction at its core. If the Jewish physicists who created Israel’s nuclear arsenal could somehow have ripped a hole in the space-time continuum and sent a squadron of fighters back to 1942, then the problem of Auschwitz would have been solved in 1942. In other words, the creation of a serious Jewish military capability, a nuclear bomb, say, or the Israeli air force, during WW2 would have meant a quicker end to the Holocaust. It is fair to say, then, that the existence of the Israeli air force, and of Israel’s nuclear arsenal, means axiomatically that the Iranian nuclear program is not the equivalent of Auschwitz. I put this formula to Ephraim Sneh, the former general and staunch advocate of an Israeli attack. He replied:

We have created a strategic balance in our favor, but Iran may launch a ballistic missile with a nuclear bomb, and this F-15 in the picture cannot prevent that.

This is a devilish problem. And devilish problems have sometimes caused Israel to overreach. Netanyahu feels, for reasons of national security, that if sanctions fail, he will be forced to take action. But an Israeli attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities, successful or not, may cause Iran to redouble its efforts, this time with a measure of international sympathy, to create a nuclear arsenal. And it could cause chaos for the US in the Middle East. One of the few people I spoke with in Israel who seemed to be at least somewhat phlegmatic about Iran’s nuclear threat was Pres Peres, the last member of Israel’s founding generation still in government. Peres sees the Iranian nuclear program as potentially catastrophic, to be sure. But he advocates the imposition of “moral sanctions” followed by economic sanctions, and then the creation of “an envelope around Iran of anti-missile systems so the missiles of Iran will not be able to fly.” When I asked if he believed in a military option, he said:

Why should I declare something like that?

He indicated he was uncomfortable with the idea of unilateral Israeli action and suggested that Israel can afford to recognize its limitations, because he believes, unlike many Israelis, that Obama will, one way or another, counter the threat of Iran, not on behalf of Israel, though he said he believes Obama would come to Israel’s defense if necessary, but because he understands that on the challenge of Iran, the interests of the US, Israel, the West, and Western-allied Arab states naturally align. Based on months of interviews, I have come to believe that the administration knows it is a near-certainty that Israel will act against Iran soon if nothing or no one else stops the nuclear program; and Obama knows, as his aides and others in the State and Defense Depts made clear to me, that a nuclear-armed Iran is a serious threat to the interests of the US, which include his dream of a world without nuclear weapons. Earlier this year, I agreed with those, including many Israelis, Arabs and Iranians who believe there is no chance that Obama would ever resort to force to stop Iran; I still don’t believe there is a great chance he will take military action in the near future; for one thing, the Pentagon is notably unenthusiastic about the idea. But Obama is clearly seized by the issue. And understanding that perhaps the best way to obviate a military strike on Iran is to make the threat of a strike by the US seem real, the Obama administration seems to be purposefully raising the stakes. A few weeks ago, chief of staff of the National Security Council McDonough told me:

What you see in Iran is the intersection of a number of leading priorities of the president, who sees a serious threat to the global nonproliferation regime, a threat of cascading nuclear activities in a volatile region, and a threat to a close friend of the US, Israel. I think you see the several streams coming together, which accounts for why it is so important to us.

When I asked Peres what he thought of Netanyahu’s effort to make Israel’s case to the Obama administration, he responded, characteristically, with a parable, one that suggested his country should know its place, and that it was up to the US president, and only the US president, to decide in the end how best to safeguard the future of the West. The story was about his mentor, David Ben-Gurion. Peres told me:

Shortly after Kennedy was elected president, Ben-Gurion met him at the Waldorf-Astoria. After the meeting, Kennedy accompanied Ben-Gurion to the elevator and said, ‘Mr Prime Minister, I want to tell you, I was elected because of your people, so what can I do for you in return?’ Ben-Gurion was insulted by the question. He said, ‘What you can do is be a great president of the US. You must understand that to have a great president of the US is a great event.’ We don’t want to win over the president. We want the president to win.

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3. The Zionists have destroyed the American empire, just as they previously weakened Britain and France.

The Zionists are responsible for the Credit Crunch.

Greenspan's economy boom is linked to Wolfowitz' wars.

The 'War on Terror' is designed to help Israel.

4. The Political parties in the USA and UK are funded heavily by Jewish pro Israeli lobbies.

"It is far cheaper to buy a western politician than buying a tank.

"It is far cheaper to recruit a ‘new friend of Israel’ than flying an F15 for one hour."

5. Britain's Balfour Declaration was designed to please Jewish German bankers and Jewish Russian bankers.

These bankers were to fund the USA's entry into World War I.

Two months after the Declaration, America was in the war.

OxfAn: Excerpts: ".... Hizbollah Secretary General Hassan Nasrallah confirmed rumours that the STL is expected to indict his party, accusing the STL of working at the behest of Israel. This unprecedented attack on the STL prompted renewed commitment by Prime Minister Saad al-Hariri to the tribunal. Although Nasrallah last month claimed that Hariri had assured him that any Hizbollah members accused would be regarded as undisciplined elements of the party, officials close to Hariri have denied this. It may have been one of a number of deals Hariri was considering to persuade Hizbollah to accept the court's decision, but which Hizbollah declined.... Hizbollah's position. Nasrallah's media appearances set the stage for a new political controversy regarding the STL. Following his lead, the March 8 coalition is waging a campaign against the international tribunal, demanding its abrogation. Hizbollah's strategy is designed to send a signal to the STL and its Western backers either to delay any announcement or dismantle the tribunal altogether. Nasrallah accused the STL of basing its conclusions on fabricated evidence and false witnesses, linking the Israeli spies with the evidence gathered. He accused Israel of Hariri's assassination, claiming to have evidence which he will soon make public.... Hariri's position. Hariri has taken an ambiguous stance, reasserting his commitment to the STL while claiming that the tribunal will not be a cause for a renewed civil strife. He is aware that his government depends on the underlying political consensus, and that Hizbollah has the means to bring it down. More widely, he knows that an indictment of Hizbollah could destroy the precarious social stability between Sunnis and Shia that has endured since 2008. Nevertheless, rejecting the tribunal would be a politically costly move that would weaken Hariri vis-a-vis his domestic opponents and with respect to his Sunni constituency. It would also lead to isolation from his Western backers. He has so far adopted a strategy of buying time, trying to juggle two seemingly opposite positions. He is most likely waiting for the STL's announcement before attempting to renegotiate with Hizbollah from a stronger position, while hoping for a regional agreement on the tribunal which might moderate Hizbollah's response. Regional context. The July 30 meeting was a sign of deepening Saudi-Syrian rapprochement regarding Lebanon, and of the two countries' role in providing a 'regional cover' for the domestic situation. Essentially, Assad and Abdallah adopted a 'wait and see' position. The issue of the STL was not included in the public statement following their meeting, indicating that no common position had yet been reached on how to deal with the impact of a Hizbollah indictment. Syria-Hizbollah relations. Media reports have highlighted a possible cooling between Syria and Hizbollah, based on diverging interests. .......However, there are no concrete signs of such a distancing yet. It is possible that Syria and Hizbollah are intentionally pursuing different strategies, in part since the former is subject to significant international pressure. Outlook. The STL may issue its indictment in September. Once this happens, ...Hizbollah will probably demand an official stance from the Lebanese government regarding the indictment, which has the potential to trigger a crisis leading to the breakdown of the government........ On the other hand, a possible Syrian-Saudi deal on the STL, which would indicate a much broader agreement on regional issues, could provide a regional response to deal with the impact of the STL. This might force Hizbollah to accept some of the STL's conclusions NOT HAPPENING! and provide a regional guarantee for domestic stability in Lebanon. However, there are no signs so far that such a deal is close...."

"... When Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the highest-ranking American officer, was asked recently on NBC's Meet the Press whether the U.S. has a military plan for an attack on Iran, he replied: "We do."

General staffs are supposed to plan for even the most unlikely contingencies. But what the planning process will have revealed is that there is no way for the United States to win a non-nuclear war with Iran.

The U.S. could "win" by dropping hundreds of nuclear weapons on Iran's military bases, nuclear facilities and industrial centers i.e. cities and killing 5 million to 10 million people, but short of that, nothing works. On this, we have the word of Richard Clarke, counterterrorism adviser in the White House under three administrations.

Clarke revealed to The New York Times four years ago that, in the early 1990s, the Clinton administration had considered seriously a bombing campaign against Iran, but the military professionals told them not to do it.

The Pentagon's planners have conducted war games to model an attack on Iran several times in the past 15 years, and they just can't make it come out as a U.S. victory.

There's nothing the U.S. can do to Iran, short of nuking the place, that would force Tehran to kneel and beg for mercy. It can bomb Iran's nuclear sites and military installations to its heart's content, but everything it destroys can be rebuilt in a few years.

And there is no way that the United States could invade Iran. There are some 80 million people in Iran, and although many of them don't like the present regime, almost all are fervent patriots who would resist invasion. Iran is a mountainous country four times the size of Iraq. The Iranian army is slightly smaller than the U.S. Army. But unlike the U.S. Army, its troops are not scattered across literally dozens of countries.

If the White House were to propose anything larger than minor military incursions along Iran's south coast, senior American generals would resign in protest. Without the option of a land war, the only lever the United States would have is the threat of yet more bombs - but if they aren't nuclear, they aren't persuasive.

Whereas Iran would have lots of options for bringing pressure on the United States. Just stopping Iran's own oil exports would drive the oil price sky-high in a tight market: Iran accounts for around 7 percent of internationally traded oil. But it also could block another 40 percent of global oil exports just by sinking tankers coming from Iraq, Saudi Arabia and the other Arab Gulf states with its lethal Noor anti-ship missiles.

The Noor anti-ship missile is a locally built version of the Chinese YJ-82. It has a 140-mile range, enough to cover all the major choke points in the Gulf. It flies at twice the speed of sound just yards above the sea's surface, and it has a tiny radar profile. Its single-shot kill probability has been put as high as 98 percent.

Iran's mountainous coastline extends along the whole northern side of the Gulf, and these missiles' mobile launchers are easily concealed. They would sink tankers with ease, and in a few days insurance rates for tankers planning to enter the Gulf would become prohibitive, effectively shutting down the region's oil exports.

Meanwhile Iran would start supplying modern surface-to-air missiles to the Taliban in Afghanistan, and that would soon shut down the U.S. military effort there.

Iranian ballistic missiles would strike U.S. bases on the southern Arab side of the Gulf, and Iran's Hezbollah allies in Beirut would start dropping missiles on Israel. The United States would have no options for escalation other than the nuclear one, and pressure on it to stop the war would mount by the day as the world's industries and transport ground to a halt.

The end would be an embarrassing retreat by the United States and the definitive establishment of Iran as the dominant power of the Gulf region. That was the outcome of every war game the Pentagon played, and Mullen knows it. It is all bluff. It always was."

Some might recall the enemies list that President Richard Nixon kept in his desk. The list was appended to a memo that asked “how we can use the available federal machinery to screw our political enemies?” Named were a number of journalists who had criticized Nixon’s administration as well as celebrities like actors Gregory Peck and Paul Newman and athletes like Joe Namath. Nixon was clearly on to something, because in today’s US we have a new enemies list, one that is updated annually to make sure that nary a single malefactor is overlooked. It is the US State Dept’s Country Reports on Terrorism, which was unveiled last week in its 2009 version at a briefing conducted by Ambassador Daniel Benjamin, Foggy Bottom’s Coordinator for Counterterrorism. There is, of course, a US fixation with compiling lists and making numeric assessments of things that are not amenable to such analysis. Recently those featured on such lists have also been on the receiving end of one or another of the endless wars that the US engages in to rid itself of elements that it finds objectionable. The terrorism report claims to be an objective analysis of world terrorism, describing how it ebbs and flows globally. Its stated purpose is to “to help understand the current trends in global terrorism.” It also includes its infamous state sponsors of terrorism section, which purports to be an examination of all those countries that support terrorist groups. Conveniently for Sec State Clinton, who signed off on the report, the list is very light on introspection. The US is certainly the world’s leading supporter of terrorists that actually kill people, mostly in places like Iran, under direction from the CIA and military special ops, but its actions are not described in the report. Israel too, engages in terrorism through its intelligence service Mossad, most recently assassinating a Hamas official in Dubai in January, and its armed forces and police regularly engage in terrorism directed against the Palestinian people in an attempt to demoralize and intimidate them into submission. But, according to the State Dept, soldiers and other government employees cannot be considered terrorists. The State Dept report sometimes seems like a press release for the Israeli Foreign Ministry. Regarding the horrific Israeli invasion of Gaza and its aftermath, it reads:

Israeli forces conducted Operation Cast Lead from Dec 2008-Jan 2009 to root out terrorist organizations’ stockpiles of rockets and mortars in Gaza. The IAF launched airstrikes on HAMAS security installations, personnel, and other facilities, as well as rocket and mortar launch teams. On Jan 3, Israeli forces launched a ground invasion. Hostilities between Israeli forces and HAMAS militants continued through Jan 18, and the Israeli withdrawal of troops was completed on Jan 21. Israeli officials believed Operation Cast Lead helped achieve a level of deterrence, as rocket and mortar attacks from Gaza dropped precipitously following the conflict.

They were only rooting out terrorists. Nothing about Israeli provocations and no mention of the deliberate destruction of schools and infrastructure and the targeting of UN relief operations or the high level of civilian casualties. Hamas and Hezbollah, which do not threaten the US, are unambiguously described in the report as terrorists, almost certainly because they do threaten Israel, ignoring their roles as national resistance movements to an aggressive and expansionistic Tel Aviv. It also does not concede their greater significance as legitimate and generally respected political parties in Gaza and Lebanon. The report states:

Israeli security officials argued that Iran, primarily through the efforts of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, has established a sophisticated arms smuggling network from Iran through Syria to Hezbollah in Lebanon. Israeli security officials said Hezbollah continued to provide support to select Palestinian groups to augment their capacity to conduct attacks against Israel. Israeli politicians and security officials pointed to Hezbollah’s efforts to rebuild and re-arm following the 2006 conflict against the group as evidence that it remained a threat to Israel; these officials estimated that Hezbollah possessed an arsenal of over 40,000 short- and medium-range rockets.

The report suggests a new, heavily armed and malignant axis of evil. It clearly makes opponents of Israel the designated bad guys and fails to note that US intelligence has not been able to confirm Tel Aviv’s allegations, making one wonder why uncorroborated claims from biased foreign sources should appear in a US government document without any additional caveats. Regarding both Hamas and Hezbollah, the report goes on to note:

They continue to finance their terrorist activities against Israel primarily through state sponsors of terrorism Iran and Syria, and fundraising networks in the Arabian Peninsula, Europe, the Middle East, the US, and to a lesser extent, elsewhere.

It may be true that both groups receive foreign assistance, but, based on further reading, one might well ask “What ‘terrorist activities’?” The State Dept report states that only four Israelis were killed in terrorist incidents in 2009 and none of the deaths were attributed either to Hamas or Hezbollah. The report also notes that the northern Israeli “front” with Lebanon, where Hezbollah is entrenched, was quiet during the entire year. So Israel’s enemies are the US’s enemies and Hillary won’t let you forget that fact. And then there is the amazing state sponsors of terrorism section. Iran is described as the “most active state sponsor of terrorism.” Why? Because it supports Hamas and Hezbollah, of course, and because backing such groups has “a direct impact on international efforts to promote peace.” What efforts Hillary is referring to and what exactly is being impeded is not at all clear, particularly as it appears to most observers that the Netanyahu government has been the principal obstacle to peace through its settlements policy. The rest of the terrorism sponsor list is equally predictable: Sudan, Syria, and Cuba. Sudan hardly threatens the US or its interests and has cooperated in counterterrorism efforts, as the report concedes. But it harbors Palestinian groups. Ditto for Syria, which equally does not endanger the US or its people in any way. And then there is poor little Cuba. The report admits that Havana does not support violent struggle but it does provide “physical safe haven and ideological support” to three terrorist groups, FARC and ELN of Colombia and ETA from Spain. Oddly enough, Venezuela, which much more actively supports FARC, ELN, and ETA, is not on the list, but Caracas has oil, much of which is exported to the US, while Cuba is oil-less. As a compendium of useless and heavily politicized information, the State Dept annual Country Reports on Terrorism reign supreme, so why compile it at all? Well, Congress has mandated the nice glossy annual document that confirms all of its preconceptions and one also supposes that Ambassador Daniel Benjamin needs a job that keeps both him and his staff employed and out of mischief. Plus it enables Hillary to talk tough and it also is another building block in the case being made to attack Iran and to keep groups like Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Iranian Rev Guards beyond the pale. If anyone is curious, precisely how many US citizens have Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Iranians killed in the past eight years? The answer is “none.”

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu yesterday rejected a Palestinian demand that direct negotiations be based on a statement by the Quartet confirming its position that the future Palestinian state will be based on the 1967 borders.

Meeting in Jerusalem with U.S. envoy George Mitchell, Netanyahu repeated his demand for the renewal of direct talks without preconditions.

…Senior officials in Jerusalem who are involved in the efforts to renew direct peace talks said yesterday that Abbas’ latest formula was unacceptable to Netanyahu because it sought to impose preconditions that the Israeli public would oppose.

…After Netanyahu’s rejection, it appears that Mitchell’s latest visit to the region has ended in failure.

Affirming 1967 borders would be little more than a reformulation of every major peace proposal going back ten years from the Clinton and Taba talks to the Arab League proposal to the Quartet. Bibi’s rejection sends Israel-Palestine relations into total disarray and renders Mitchell’s work moot. And there certainly is now no Israeli partner.

It’s laughable that only 24 hours ago the N.Y. Times editorial board hectored Mahmoud Abbas about his refusal to enter into such talks with Israel. The Grey Lady warned Abbas that Obama was the best president for the Palestinians’ purposes he was every likely to get, and that Obama’s patience would wear thin. All empty threats and rhetoric. The fact of the matter is that Israel’s position, as evidenced by Bibi’s “No” less than a day later, renders negotiations moot. No serious Palestinian leader should or would be able to risk their position for the empty chalice offered by Israel and the U.S. It would make them a laughingstock in the Palestinian street, and rightly so.

But let’s make no mistake: failure of peace talks does not bring a maintenance of the status quo as Bibi assumes. It gives freedom of movement to all the gremlins who wish to work their mischief including radical settlers, Al Qaeda, radical Palestinian militant groups, Hezbollah, etc. There are elements too within the IDF and Israeli political echelon who’d nothing more than a good war to occupy themselves and take the world’s eye off the Occupation and Palestinian suffering. There are any rumblings above and below the surface that an imminent attack on Iran may be such a diversion.

So yes, there will be another war, and sooner rather than later. And during that war or sometime after, Barack Obama and his advisors will scramble to try to pick up the pieces and get things back to status quo ante. But that won’t work either since Obama is an incrementalist in a region where radical reform is needed to shake up people and nations who’ve been far too complacent for far too long.

So here’s my formula put in the most graphic terms possible: status quo=death. Any person or party who maneuvers to maintain the status quo and stands in the way of progress as Bibi has done, will sow the seeds of despair and reap death as their harvest.

Related posts:

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2. Israel-Palestine Proximity Talks, Game of Charade Sen. George Mitchell announced with a flourish the resumption of...
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11 August 2010 | ISM London

Four campaigners against Israeli apartheid were acquitted yesterday August 10th of all charges related to two direct action protests against the Israeli cosmetics retailer Ahava in Covent Garden, London. The campaigners locked themselves onto concrete-filled oil drums inside the shop, closing it down for two days in September and December of 2009.

The campaigners insist that they are legally justified in their actions as the shop’s activities are unlawful. All cosmetics on sale in the shop originate from Mitzpe Shalem, an illegal Israeli settlement in the occupied West Bank, and are deliberately mislabelled “Made in Israel”.

To date, no campaigner has been successfully prosecuted and Ahava has consistently refused to cooperate with the prosecuting authorities.

On the first day of trial, prosecutors dropped aggravated trespass charges. This would have required the prosecution to demonstrate Ahava was engaged in lawful activity. Significantly, the CPS decided that this was not something they would attempt to prove.

The primary witness for the prosecution, Ahava’s store manager, refused to attend court to testify despite courts summons and threats of an arrest warrant leading to the activist’s acquittal on all remaining charges.

Ms Crouch, one of the four acquitted today said: “This is a small victory in the wider campaign for boycott, divestment and sanctions against Israel. We’ll continue to challenge corporate complicity in the occupation and Israel’s impunity on the international stage.”

Mr Matthews, another acquitted campaigner, added: “The message is clear. If your company is involved in apartheid and war crimes and occupying Palestinian land, people will occupy your shop.”

The British government, the European Union, the United Nations and the International Court of Justice all consider Israel’s settlements to be illegal, as they are in breach of the Fourth Geneva Convention. Breaches of the Fourth Geneva Convention are also criminal offences under UK law International Criminal Court Act 2001 .

For more information please contact the defendant’s solicitor Simon Natas on: 0208 522 7707 UK

By George S. Hishmeh | Gulf News | August 12, 2010

Oftentimes, Israelis and their supporters bury their heads in the sand, ignoring all that goes on around them. Take, for example, the case of a university professor who joyously announced in a commentary published in a leading American newspaper, The New York Times — which in turn was remiss in not fact-checking — that 71 per cent of Arab respondents to an “opinion poll” had “no interest” in the Palestinian-Israeli “peace process”. Probably sharing his enthusiasm, the paper headlined the column, ‘The Palestinians, Alone’.

It turned out that the shady “poll” that was cited by Efraim Karsh, who teaches at King’s College, London and is author of Palestine Betrayed, was nothing more than a tally of readers responding to another reader’s query on the website of an Arabic television network. One would think that Karsh should have known better. His puerile analysis failed to differentiate between Arab views of the “peace process” — a lacklustre issue — and their genuine concern for the Palestinians, whose homeland was mostly usurped by Israel 63 years ago, while the West Bank and the Gaza Strip have been under Israeli control since 1967. Karsh’s conclusion was that the Palestinians should abandon their dependency on the Arab world: “The sooner the Palestinians recognise their cause is theirs alone, the sooner they are likely to make peace …”

Karsh would have done better had he digested what two prominent American Jewish leaders, Jeremy Ben-Ami and Debra Lee, wrote recently: “Decades of telling and retelling a comfortable narrative in which Israel is always extending its hand in peace, only to have it rejected by the Palestinians, understandably makes it hard to accept when the facts show otherwise”. They stressed that “facts don’t support the charge that the present Palestinian leadership is not a partner for peace”.

Perceived failure

Although there has been a noteworthy change in the American public opinion on Palestine, Arab public opinion on the Obama administration has turned negative because of the president’s perceived failure to deliver on the “new beginning” he had promised in his memorable Cairo address. This is clear from the results of a poll conducted last month by the University of Maryland and Zogby International in six Arab countries — Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Morocco, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.

Only 15 per cent of Arabs remain hopeful, while 63 per cent are discouraged about US policies, reported Dr Shibley Telhami, the Anwar Sadat professor for Peace and Development at the University of Maryland, who oversaw the poll. There has been a “dramatic change”, Telhami emphasised, in the perception of President Barack Obama, “whose disapproval rating jumped considerably, from 23 per cent in 2009 to 62 per cent in 2010″.

He added that the Palestinian-Israeli conflict remained “the single most disappointing issue for the Arab public, with 61 per cent of those polled citing that issue as a major disappointment, followed by 27 per cent citing Iraq”.

Lack of optimism

Nevertheless, 86 per cent of Arabs appeared prepared “in principle” to accept a two-state solution based on the 1967 borders. But the number of those who believe that Israel would never accept such a solution has increased from 45 per cent in 2009 to 56 per cent in 2010. This may give some ammunition to those who are counting on a one-state agreement.

The confusion emanating from Israel’s dilly-dallying about peace with the Palestinians was best described in the lead paragraph of a recent Washington Post report by Janine Zacharia from the Occupied West Bank. It read: “While Israeli Defence Minister Ehud Barak visited Washington … to talk about peace gestures towards the Palestinians, Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman was planting a tree in a Jewish [colony] in the West Bank — an indication of permanence that few Palestinians would welcome”.

Meanwhile, former US ambassador Chas Freeman recently lambasted Israel for being “an extreme liability for the US financially, strategically, politically”. Freeman made this assessment during a seminar at the Nixon Centre that focused on the point of whether Israel was an “asset or liability” for the US.

“Clearly, Israel gets a great deal from us,” he complained. “Yet it’s pretty taboo in the United States to ask what’s in it for Americans.” He continued by considering “what we generally expect allies and strategic partners to do for us”, before claiming that “Israel does none of these things and shows no interest in doing them”. He concluded: “Israel is therefore useless in terms of support for American power projection. It has no allies other than us. It has developed no friends. Israeli participation in our military operations would preclude the cooperation of many others. Meanwhile, Israel has become accustomed to living on the American military dole”.

It is therefore not surprising that Turkey has turned its back on the Israeli regime, or that others may want to do so in future should Tel Aviv continue on this track.

George Hishmeh is a Washington-based columnist. He can be contacted at ghishmeh@gulfnews.com.

There are those who would have us believe that:

[O]ne day next spring, the Israeli national-security adviser, Uzi Arad, and the Israeli defense minister, Ehud Barak, will simultaneously telephone their counterparts at the White House and the Pentagon, to inform them that their prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has just ordered roughly one hundred F-15Es, F-16Is, F-16Cs, and other aircraft of the Israeli air force to fly east toward Iran — possibly by crossing Saudi Arabia, possibly by threading the border between Syria and Turkey, and possibly by traveling directly through Iraq’s airspace, though it is crowded with American aircraft.

Worried about an Israeli attack on Iran? That’s the idea.

You must do what we can’t, because if you don’t, we will.

This is how some Israelis are trying to twist Washington’s arm to get the US to attack Iran.

A more honest way of making the argument would be to say this: If the US won’t attack Iran, then Israel will — even though it won’t accomplish its military objectives and it will open Pandora’s box. Desperate nations sometimes do desperate things. You have been warned.

Another name for this: blackmail.

It’s hard to counter an irrational argument when the irrationality is intentional. Such are the means by which someone like erstwhile Israeli army corporal and current Atlantic commentator, Jeffrey Goldberg, attempts to persuade his readers — not through cogent reasoning based on clear evidence, but by an insidious form of argument that has the clarity of slime.

Consider the way he tries to close his case for an attack on Iran — even while avoiding saying straight out that he supports such a course of action.

The United States must not take the risk of letting Israel attack Iran because if President Obama orders US forces to attack instead, this would be the most patriotic thing to do. Obama would not be serving Israel’s interests; he would be defending Western civilization.

Based on months of interviews, I have come to believe that the administration knows it is a near-certainty that Israel will act against Iran soon if nothing or no one else stops the nuclear program; and Obama knows — as his aides, and others in the State and Defense departments made clear to me — that a nuclear-armed Iran is a serious threat to the interests of the United States, which include his dream of a world without nuclear weapons. Earlier this year, I agreed with those, including many Israelis, Arabs — and Iranians — who believe there is no chance that Obama would ever resort to force to stop Iran; I still don’t believe there is a great chance he will take military action in the near future — for one thing, the Pentagon is notably unenthusiastic about the idea. But Obama is clearly seized by the issue. And understanding that perhaps the best way to obviate a military strike on Iran is to make the threat of a strike by the Americans seem real, the Obama administration seems to be purposefully raising the stakes. A few weeks ago, Denis McDonough, the chief of staff of the National Security Council, told me, “What you see in Iran is the intersection of a number of leading priorities of the president, who sees a serious threat to the global nonproliferation regime, a threat of cascading nuclear activities in a volatile region, and a threat to a close friend of the United States, Israel. I think you see the several streams coming together, which accounts for why it is so important to us.”

When I asked Peres what he thought of Netanyahu’s effort to make Israel’s case to the Obama administration, he responded, characteristically, with a parable, one that suggested his country should know its place, and that it was up to the American president, and only the American president, to decide in the end how best to safeguard the future of the West. The story was about his mentor, David Ben-Gurion.

“Shortly after John F. Kennedy was elected president, Ben-Gurion met him at the Waldorf-Astoria” in New York, Peres told me. “After the meeting, Kennedy accompanied Ben-Gurion to the elevator and said, ‘Mr. Prime Minister, I want to tell you, I was elected because of your people, so what can I do for you in return?’ Ben-Gurion was insulted by the question. He said, ‘What you can do is be a great president of the United States. You must understand that to have a great president of the United States is a great event.’”

Peres went on to explain what he saw as Israel’s true interest. “We don’t want to win over the president,” he said. “We want the president to win.”

Israel only wants what’s good for America — and we’re supposed to believe that, even while few if any Israelis could be persuaded that America only wants what’s good for Israel.

The truth is that everyone gets to define their own interests so let’s ignore the obsequious crap from Peres and consider Goldberg’s core claim: that Israel is gearing up to strike Iran.

Even if Goldberg is participating in a neocon game of bluff, the only kind of bluff worth engaging in is one that has credibility. To make a credible argument that Israel has the intention of going it alone, Goldberg would have to present the outline of a credible plan of attack. He doesn’t even try.

Israeli planes would fly low over Saudi Arabia, bomb their targets in Iran, and return to Israel by flying again over Saudi territory, possibly even landing in the Saudi desert for refueling—perhaps, if speculation rife in intelligence circles is to be believed, with secret Saudi cooperation.

And he prefaces this “plan” by saying Israel only gets one try. That’s not even a back-of-an-envelope war plan. It’s more like a Twitter war plan.

Five years ago Kenneth Pollack dismissed the idea that Israel could attack Iran on its own. I don’t see any reason to doubt that his analysis on the military logistics of an attack still remains sound. Indeed, there seem to be plenty of Israeli analysts who concede that Israel simply does not have the option of going it alone. Even Goldberg quotes an unnamed Israeli general who says: “This is too big for us.”

In The Persian Puzzle: The Conflict Between Iran and America, Pollack wrote:

[T]he United States … should not count on Israel to conduct a counterproliferation strike for us. It is almost certainly the case that Israel would be willing to absorb the diplomatic costs of a strike, would be prepared to deal with Iran’s retaliation in the form of either terrorist attacks or missile strikes on Israel, and probably is not overly concerned about Iranian behavior in Iraq. The problem for Israel is much simpler: Iran is too far away. Most of the known Iranian nuclear facilities are around 1,000 miles away from Israel. Its Jericho II ballistic missiles could reach these targets, but they lack the payload, accuracy, and numbers to be able to significantly damage let alone destroy more than one or two of the large Iranian nuclear facilities, which leaves the matter to the Israeli Air Force. Even assuming that Israeli aircraft were to fly directly to Iran, overflying Jordan and Iraq, the only aircraft in its inventory that could reach Iran’s known nuclear sites are its 25 F-151 strike fighters. Israel would need to set up aerial refueling stations at three to five locations between Israel and the Iranian targets for its roughly 350 F-16s to be able to participate, which would be practically impossible. Because the F-151s would have to carry a considerable amount of fuel, they could not carry a great deal of ordinance. Given the size of the various Iranian nuclear facilities, it would not be possible for Israel to destroy all of them in a single raid as it did Osiraq. Nor would it be politically, militarily, or logistically possible for Israel to sustain multiple such strikes over the many days, if not weeks, it would take for all its F-151s to accomplish the job. [My emphasis.]

The neocon game of bluff will only box in the Obama administration if the Israeli “threats” are treated seriously. A more appropriate response would seem to be to focus on the limits of Israeli military action — unless that is one imagines that Israel would launch a nuclear attack on Iran, which to my mind is wildly implausible. If Israel wants to permanently seal its global pariah status, the first offensive use of nuclear weapons since Nagasaki is a sure way.

Goldberg reports, but apparently didn’t take seriously, the observations of some Israelis who given their positions of military command seem to merit close attention:

Gabi Ashkenazi, the Israeli army chief of staff, is said by numerous sources to doubt the usefulness of an attack, and other generals I spoke with worry that talk of an “existential threat” is itself a kind of existential threat to the Zionist project, which was meant to preclude such threats against the Jewish people. “We don’t want politicians to put us in a bad position because of the word Shoah [Holocaust],” one general said. “We don’t want our neighbors to think that we are helpless against an Iran with a nuclear bomb, because Iran might have the bomb one day. There is no guarantee that Israel will do this, or that America will do this.”

The message Netanyahu, Goldberg and other panic-stricken Zionists are unintentionally sending out is that come the day Iran acquires a nuclear weapon, Israelis may as well back their bags and abandon the Jewish state.

That probably won’t happen because in such an event Israel will “discover” what many Israelis no doubt already think: that retired General John Abizaid was right when he said that the United States and its allies can “live with” a nuclear-armed Iran. “Let’s face it — we lived with a nuclear Soviet Union, we’ve lived with a nuclear China, and we’re living with nuclear powers as well,” Abizaid told an audience at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

That was true in 2007 and it’s true now. It’s also true that spineless politicians remain the playthings of fear-mongers who are addicted to war.

This article is cross-posted at Woodward's site, War in Context.

Amjad Atallah of the New America Foundation disputes the claim that Arab governments seek a U.S. or Israeli attack on Iran. Too destabilizing. And it doesn't touch the big enchilada: Palestinian freedom.

Are Arab governments considering yet another war? Despite the repeated unconfirmed reports about anonymous Arab leaders urging Obama to follow Israel's lead, the circumstances today are very different than 1979 or 1991. There is no threat from either Iraq or Iran toward any neighboring Arab state, not real or imagined. Iran's unique blend of western parliamentary democracy and the "rule of jurisprudents" hasn't really gained any adherents outside Iran. The two other Shia majority states, Iraq and Lebanon, have effectively adopted western parliamentary forms of government without any clerical overlay. And the popularity of Iran's leaders has been eclipsed - not by any Arab leader - but by the Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan whose ambitious and vigorous diplomacy in the region combined with very real economic engagement has made him a superstar - draining the air out of the Ahmadinejad bubble. The final popping of that bubble for Arab states will not come from a disastrous U.S. attack on Iran, but from resolution of the Israeli-Arab conflict. And finally, of course, no one in the region believes that Iran will invade any other country.

King Abdullah of Jordan has tried to convey this publicly and privately to American audiences on behalf of governments in the region...

For those advocates in the United States desperately trying to create a sense of inevitability to war with Iran, there is a logic to citing Arab leaders "who are more afraid of Iran than Israel." It makes it sound as if this war is not only about maintaining Israel's "military autonomy" to operate as it will in the region, but about the security of the region as a whole. It is excellent misdirection, intentional or not. Arab leaders will need to be more vocal in the coming days and months about their own interests and those of the region, in light of the campaign for a U.S. attack on Iran

By Philip Weiss on August 11, 2010

Probably closer to the Obamas than Lester Crown is Marty Nesbitt Obama’s “confidante and golfing buddy” . For the sake of the Obamas’ dear friendship with Nesbitt’s wife Anita Blanchard, Michelle made her ill-fated trip to Spain.

Earlier, to advance Nesbitt’s keen interest in Chicago’s bid for the 2016 Olympics, both Michelle and Barack made the sudden trip in 2009 to Copenhagen which also took people by surprise, and gave the Obamas their first taste of bad press.

They must like Marty Nesbitt a lot and owe him a lot to have gone so visibly out of their way for his sake. Incidentally, he was the treasurer of Obama’s presidential campaign. Nesbitt is a close friend of Rahm Emanuel and David Axelrod.

An Israel connection comes in, just possibly, there but more plainly when you connect two other dots:

Nesbitt works with the Pritzker Realty Group, and another close Obama friend is Penny Pritzker, a scion of the family of the Hyatt fortune, which has has been used for projects far less liberal in Israel than the Pritzker-Nesbitt politics are in the U.S. “In 2003, Forward reported on how he had ‘been courting the pro-Israel constituency.’ He co-sponsored an amendment to the Illinois Pension Code allowing the state of Illinois to lend money to the Israeli government. Among his early backers was Penny Pritzker — now his national campaign finance chair — scion of the liberal but staunchly Zionist family that owns the Hyatt hotel chain. The Hyatt Regency hotel on Mount Scopus was built on land forcibly expropriated from Palestinian owners after Israel occupied East Jerusalem in 1967 ”–Abunimah .

All these people are linked through the Chicago Housing Authority and Valerie Jarrett chair 1992-95, Chicago Department of Planning and Development; chair 1995-2005, Chicago Transit Board .

If I were a Republican J.J. Gittes looking for the Noah Cross among all these Mulwrays, I’d be looking here.

Less than two months ago, I was at a hastily-organized report-back from survivors of Israel's attack on the Mavi Marmara when someone, almost as an afterthought, suggested that an American boat should go to Gaza with the next Flotilla, proudly flying the red, white, and blue to show the world that not all Americans supported Israel's policies, and challenging Israel, who thought nothing of assaulting a Turkish ship, to try the same trick with a ship full of citizens of its closest ally. The crowd cheered enthusiastically.

Later someone said half-jokingly, "We should call it The Audacity of Hope!" The crowd cheered even louder.

A matter of weeks later, more than half of the $370,000 necessary to send a US boat, The Audacity of Hope, has already been raised. Read more about the campaign here. Last Thursday was the most ambitious fundraiser so far, a sunset cruise around New York on a giant boat that barely held 400 passengers. As reported here, one of the most striking things was that most of the speakers at the program that night were young Palestinians articulately often artistically voicing feelings and opinions that their elders would never have dared speak in public. What that reporter called the "monopoly" of "smart Jews" on speaking about this matter and being heard by the mainstream of the left appears to be ending.

Which brings up another important point. The "center" of the left is shifting. And this issue is finding a tremendous amount of traction there. Things are moving faster than we ever dreamed. There was, naturally, a small protest against our sunset cruise with about half a dozen angry-looking people holding placards accusing us of supporting terrorism. It was the most pathetic counter-protest yet. I truly felt bad for them. They looked like clowns, like some kind of bizarre anachronism.

But that wasn't the real threat. The day before the fundraiser party boat was scheduled to depart, the organizers got a call from the owners saying the engine was missing a part, so they would have to reschedule the event. The organizers were savvy enough to know this had nothing to do with engine parts. They suspected some individuals or organizations had gotten hold of the owners of the boat and pressured them to cancel the cruise. Pressured them how, I wonder? Threatened bad publicity? Tried to convince them it was a mission tied somehow to terrorist groups, which meant they might be prosecutable under the vague and slippery Material Support Law that snagged Noor's father? Called them anti-Semites? Offered a bribe?

We may never know. But if you think I'm being paranoid, read on. Normally when these unnamed groups try to shut down Palestine-related events, the owners of the venues cave and the organizers of the events mourn their tough luck. Not this time. This time the organizers held firm. They had a written contract, they had 400 people coming from all over the US, and they said the company would owe them for all the travelers' losses, not to mention the fact that 400 people would show up the next day and stage a protest against the boat company for breaching the contract. They kept arguing, countering any arguments by the owners, until... Lo and behold! The engine could be "fixed" after all!

But... would the organizers please reconsider flying the banner that said, "US BOAT TO GAZA -- THE AUDACITY OF HOPE"? Absolutely not, the organizers said. It's called free speech. And that was it. Whoever had tried to twist the arm of the boat company lost. The good guys won. And they're winning more and more. They're not scared anymore. Bring it on.

As Chris Hedges a former New York Times Middle East Bureau Chief who quit the Times rather than submit to their pro-Iraq-war dictates in 2003 said in his powerful speech that night:

I would like to remind them that it is they who hide in the darkness. It is we who stand in the light. It is they who deceive. It is we who openly proclaim our compassion and demand justice for those who suffer in Gaza. We are not afraid to name our names. We are not afraid to name our beliefs. And we know something you perhaps sense with a kind of dread. As Martin Luther King said, the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice, and that arc is descending with a righteous fury that is thundering down upon the Israeli government... Note this well. It is you who are afraid of us. We are not afraid of you. We will keep working and praying, keep protesting and denouncing, keep pushing up against your navy and your army, with nothing but our bodies, until we prove that the force of morality and justice is greater than hate and violence. And then, when there is freedom in Gaza, we will forgive you. We will ask you to break bread with us. We will bless your children even if you did not find it in your heart to bless the children of those you occupied. And maybe it is this forgiveness, maybe it is the final, insurmountable power of love, which unsettles you the most.

One of many other honored guests on the boat was Emily Henochowicz, an utterly adorable slip of an artist. She's a rising senior at New York's prestigious Cooper Union, and two months ago an Israeli soldier fired a tear gas canister at her face and destroyed her left eye. She was protesting the killings on the Gaza flotilla at the time, non-violently, away from the main action. The Israeli army claims it ricocheted off a wall, but there are photos from the event that clear show there's no wall for it to ricochet off of. Still, the Israeli government has refused to pay her medical expenses. C'est typique.

She was speaking with Amy Goodman and some others before we boarded the boat. She had her hair combed over the still-somewhat-livid empty eye socket and was wearing a thin pink sweater and black skirt. I was most astonished by how cute she was. None of her pictures did her justice. I joined their little circle, and Emily looked at me expectantly as if waiting for me to introduce myself. I told her I had lived in Palestine for a couple of years, and how much I admired not just her principled bravery but how she was handling it all with such grace.

"I was lucky," she said sincerely, proving my point. "My injury is a nuisance, but it's not debilitating. Not like what happened to Tristan Anderson. If the canister had hit just a few inches higher, I might be missing part of my brain."

Anderson, another American citizen, took another direct hit from another tear gas canister in the forehead at another non-violent protest in Bil'in in March 2009. He suffered a skull fracture and brain damage, and he may never fully recover. Furkan Dogan, another young American citizen, was killed by Israeli soldiers on the Mavi Marmara. So she was right; in that company, she's certainly lucky.

Still, that kind of perspective is rare in such a young and beautiful American artist, most of whom would be wailing like Nancy Kerrigan. The Village Voice did the best piece on her of any I saw. I dare you to read it and not fall completely in love with her. She's a Jewish grandchild of Holocaust survivors, by the way. You can also view her blog here.

The whole thing was yet another indication of a real shift in discourse. The energy was so positive, and the fact that $150,000 had been raised in just a few weeks was breathtaking. A clear signal -- a strong signal coming straight from the pocketbooks of Americans -- that people are sick and tired of standing around watching Israel become increasingly insane while innocent people pay the price in our name. They're just looking for leadership, and the US Boat to Gaza campaign among many others is providing it -- the Freedom Riders of our time. For anyone who thinks such a project is "too radical" or it's "not the right time," I give you the words of Martin Luther King, Jr., written from a Birmingham Jail:

I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to ‘order’ than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: ‘I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action’; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a 'more convenient season.'

And these words from the International Solidarity Conference in Johannesburg, South Africa in 1993:

You will remember the contempt with which they responded when, one after the other, international organisations in all walks of life expelled the representatives of apartheid and committed themselves to the perspective of a free and democratic South Africa. And as the actions and the words of condemnation by the peoples of the world grew stronger and more stern, so did the brutality of the Pretoria regime grow more bestial, as though reason and justice could be expunged by the baton, the gun and the hangman's noose. It may be that the beginning of the world movement against apartheid appeared then as but a small and lonely voice of protest. When India spoke at the United Nations against apartheid at the end of the 1940s she stood alone to speak. When those who did, began boycotting Cape grapes and wines and Outspan oranges and picketed supermarkets, they were few in number. Their governments, accustomed to treat the apartheid regime as a legitimate entity, neither saw nor heard those demonstrators. When we needed to fight with arms in hand, there were few countries even in Africa which had the possibility to extend assistance to us. And yet, because apartheid is truly evil and because there are men and women of conscience such as you who are gathered here, who would not connive at the perpetration of a crime by refusing to act against it, the antiapartheid movement grew into perhaps the strongest international solidarity movement this century, bringing together citizens of all countries, governments and international organisations. In the end this broad movement against apartheid gave enormous strength to our liberation movement, sustained and helped to free those who were in prison, maintained those who were in exile, enabling us to build... lasting monuments to international friendship and solidarity... and has brought us to the point where we can now say that victory is in sight.

Inshallah.

This piece is crossposted at Pamela Olson's blog, Fast Times in Palestine.