The news snippet headline was intentionally misleading - " Israelis are on their way to conquer Barcelona." Scrolling down the page I realised our intentions weren’t belligerent at all, at the most they were an expression of an aggressive business attitude. Instead of loading our bunker buster bombs and flying off to Iran, hordes of Israeli hi-tech entrepreneurs from a hundred Israeli communications companies flew west to participate in the Mobile World Congress exhibition held in Barcelona last week. The exhibition attracts leaders of the global industry. Tens of thousands of mobile network operators, policy makers and executives of the world's communication companies attended the event. It provides an opportunity to examine the industry's recent innovations and trends.
A few weeks ago nine Israeli aviation companies brought their wares to the Singapore Airshow. In its review of the airshow Jane's Defence Weekly focused attention on the Israeli pavilion and published an interview with Joseph Ackerman CEO of a leading Israeli defence electronics company, Elbit Systems In the interview Ackerman explained that Elbit manufactures and sells both standard off-the-shelf products and variant models adapted to meet specific customer requirements.. The company's business philosophy shared by other Israeli defence industries has been described as a gentle aggressive approach. Seemingly a contradiction in terms, it is much like the business belligerency of the Israeli exhibitors at the Barcelona MWC.
Belligerency aside, business or other kinds, this week I really wanted to write about Purim in Israel and how it is celebrated here at Ein Harod.
However, there was only one show in town, namely the AIPAC Conference held in Washington and I couldn't ignore it. More than 13000 people attended the opening session of this year’s conference.
Guest speakers included President Barack Obama, President of Israel Shimon Peres and Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu. I doubt if many people really believed the conference would really help resolve the differences between Obama and Netanyahu regarding the way to deal with the Iranian nuclear threat .
Purim customs include bringing gifts to friends and neighbours, usually the triangular shaped pastry known as Hamantaschen (Haman's Ears). Ahead of the conference Netanyahu met with the President in the White House. As fitting the occasion and the Purim festival our Prime Minister gave the President a special gift copy of the Book of Esther. Netanyahu reminded the President of the existential threat recounted in that biblical text and its relevancy today. Later on during his address at the AIPAC conference Netanyahu spoke of the threat the Jewish people faced in 1944. The focus on that year was not wasted on Obama, he surely knew about the claim that the allied forces should have bombed Auschwitz in 1944. Author Michael Berenbaum has argued that it is not only a historical question, but "a moral question emblematic of the Allied response to the plight of the Jews during the Holocaust ". During his second visit to the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem in 2008, President George W. Bush said "We should have bombed it." A number of historians have noted that this argument has no basis and that the idea of bombing Auschwitz or the rail lines leading to it is to a very large extent a post-war invention. The matter came to light in the late 1970s when aerial reconnaissance films, which had never been developed or seen by anybody during the war, were found by CIA analysts to show that U.S. bombers had flown over Auschwitz.-Birkenau on their way to and from bombing other targets. Nevertheless the Holocaust factor is central to Netanyahu's weltanschauung.
“A little more conversation” was how the Economist summed up three hours of sombre private discussion between Barack Obama and Binyamin Netanyahu at the White House. The “bottom line” of the piece in the Economist also related to existential threats and survival. "The very purpose of the Jewish state," Mr Netanyahu declared in the Oval Office, "is to restore to the Jewish people control over our destiny. And that is why my supreme responsibility as prime minister of Israel is to ensure that Israel remains the master of its fate." The Economist goes on to ask, “Posturing? Tactics? Or the cri de coeur of an Israeli leader weighed down by the tragedies of Jewish history? The guessing game goes on.”
Jeffrey Goldberg's interview with President Obama published last week in the Atlantic was probably the most significant event leading up to the Netanyahu – Obama encounter in Washington. Goldberg asked Obama, "Is it possible that the prime minister of Israel has over-learned the lessons of the Holocaust?" Obama cautiously side-stepped the question replying that he was sure the lesson of the Holocaust weighs on Netanyahu. Commenting on the interview journalist James Fallows said," This is a crucial question, but one that is best asked by someone, like Goldberg, whose support for the welfare of Israel and the idea of Zionism is not in doubt. Obama dealt with it well."
Fallows concluded, "The most positive way to describe US-Israeli relations is that they are close allies and partners. The more realpolitik description is that Israel is fundamentally dependent on long-term U.S. support and good will. In these circumstances it is graceless, to put it mildly, for the Israeli prime minister to take such a preemptory and borderline contemptuous tone toward the American president, while his de facto allies at the Emergency Committee for Israel launch a similarly dismissive and borderline insulting ad campaign about the president. Netanyahu is hardly being a chessmaster here; it is hard to imagine the leader of any other American ally assuming there would be no repercussions for behaving this way. Let us hope that the upcoming meeting and AIPAC session have a more respectful, partnerlike, and sober tone." The consensus in Israel is that very little has improved.
An editorial in the New York Times this week posed a critical question," What if sanctions and diplomacy are not enough?
President Obama has long said that all options are on the table. In recent days his language has become more pointed — urged on, undoubtedly, by Israel’s threats to act alone."
In his column in the New York Times this week Thomas L. Friedman said,
"The question of whether Israel has the need and the right to pre-emptively attack Iran as it develops a nuclear potential is one of the most hotly contested issues on the world stage today. It is also an issue fraught with danger for Israel and American Jews, neither of whom want to be accused of dragging America into a war, especially one that could weaken an already frail world economy." Friedman sums up, "It is important politically, because this decision about whether to attack Iran is coinciding with the U.S. election. The last thing Israel or American friends of Israel — Jewish and Christian — want is to give their enemies a chance to claim that Israel is using its political clout to embroil America in a war that is not in its interest."
Yediot Ahronot military affairs commentator Ron Ben Yishai asked, “ What should we do when Iran crosses the ‘red line,’ that is, the point where Israel and the US would agree that Iran's progress requires an Israeli or American military strike of any kind or a combination of the two. President Obama told AIPAC that the US won't tolerate a situation where Iran possesses nuclear weapons. However, Israel says defining the red line this way would in fact enable the Iranians to become a nuclear power. While Tehran won't possess a nuclear warhead or atomic bomb, it would be able to produce a nuclear device at any given moment. “
If this happens, Ben Yishai claims, Iran's leadership would merely have to decide to go ahead and within six months at most it could produce a nuclear weapon. “As opposed to uranium enrichment, the development of the actual weapon can be hidden relatively easily, and hence the Americans would not even know about it, as was the case when Pakistan, India and North Korea became nuclear powers.
Hence, Israel demands that the American ‘red line’ would be defined as ‘nuclear capability,’ that is, Iran's shift to producing 90% enriched uranium, or a large quantity of 20% enriched uranium. Netanyahu also made it clear to Obama that Israel's red line is the stage when the new, underground enrichment facility at Fordow approaches full capacity.”
Another NYT columnist, David E. Sanger wrote in a similar vein, ”While American intelligence agencies famously misjudged that Saddam Hussein was advancing on a bomb project when he had none, they also have a long record of missing signs that countries were getting very close to a bomb. They missed the timing of the first Soviet nuclear test in 1949, to President Harry S. Truman’s outrage. They also got the timing wrong on China in the 1960s, India in the ’70s and Pakistan in the ’80s. To this day, even after North Korea has conducted two nuclear tests, no one is sure whether the country’s engineers actually know how to make and deliver a real, working bomb.
The Israelis cite this sorry record to suggest that the Americans are overstating their capabilities. ‘The Israeli view is that because they have less capability to deal with Iran, they have less time to allow this to go on,’ one senior American official said. ‘They think that because we have more capability, we have more time.’”
Der Spiegel also related to the time factor, but in the sense of a time fuse.
In a lead article - Tehran's Last Chance - Israel, Iran and the Battle for the Bomb the paper said, “Twelve hours is also an agonizingly long time for politicians, acting under the pressure of an ultimatum, to prevent a war that would mean the inevitable deaths of large numbers of people.
In 1914, the German Reich gave the Russians 12 hours to stop mobilizing their troops. In 1956, the French and the British gave then-Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser the same amount of time to withdraw his troops from the Suez Canal, which he had just nationalized, and allow Israel to use the waterway again. A war ensued in both cases, partly because those who had threatened to use military force knew that it would hardly be possible to comply with their demands so quickly. In other words, they wanted the situation to escalate.
An Israeli attack on Iranian nuclear facilities would apparently also involve a 12-hour lead time. According to intelligence sources in Tel Aviv, Israeli politicians told Martin Dempsey, the US chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, that the Israeli leadership intends to give the White House only half a day's notice once it has decided to proceed with a military strike. In other words, Israel wants to be sure of two things: on the one hand, that US President Barack Obama is not taken completely by surprise by a possible attack, and on the other that he is not in a position to seriously question his ally's decision and undermine it with diplomatic efforts.
Is this how a country should treat its most important ally? Is this the way it should pressure the very power on whose goodwill it depends?”
Apparently Steve Clemons Washington editor at large for The Atlantic and editor in chief of Atlantic Live, favours containment. Relating to the Goldberg interview he wrote, “But what Obama seems not to understand in the well-meaning description of his attempted Iran strategy is that he is actually creating a railroad track to disaster. He conveys in the interview a disinterest in containment, suggesting that Iran acquiring a nuclear weapon changes the world and triggers a rampant and dangerous proliferation in an unstable part of the global neighborhood.
Not all nuclear bombs are the same. Israel's 200 plus thermonuclear warheads are not simple fission devices and have a destructive capacity that could seriously end Iran as a functioning state. Iran, even if it were to produce a nuclear warhead tomorrow, would have none of the destructive capacity that Israel could rain down on the Islamic Republic of Iran. Anthony Cordesman, David Albright and others have done extremely important and useful, admittedly Stangelovian analyses of what a back-and-forth firing exchange of nuclear weapons would mean for both states. As Cordesman told me recently, Israel would survive fine -- Iran would be devastated.”
Next week my wife and I will holidaying in Eilat so I doubt if I will be able to post my weekly letter.
Let’s hope we will still be around in two weeks time.
Have a good weekend.
Beni 8th of March, 2012.
No comments:
Post a Comment