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Tag: Israeli Expansionism

  • Britain ready to back Palestinian statehood at UN

    Britain ready to back Palestinian statehood at UN

    Mahmoud Abbas pledge not to pursue Israel for war crimes and resumption of peace talks are UK conditions

    Ian Black, Middle East editor

    Palestinians hold posters
    Palestinians hold posters of President Mahmoud Abbas during a rally supporting the UN bid for observer state status, in the West Bank city of Ramallah. Photograph: APAimages/Rex Features

    Britain is prepared to back a key vote recognising Palestinian statehood at the United Nations if Mahmoud Abbas pledges not to pursue Israel for war crimes and to resume peace talks.

    Abbas, president of the Palestinian Authority, has called for Britain’s backing in part because of its historic responsibility for Palestine. The government has previously refused, citing strong US and Israeli objections and fears of long-term damage to prospects for negotiations.

    On Monday night, the government signalled it would change tack and vote yes if the Palestinians modified their application, which is to be debated by the UN general assembly in New York later this week. As a “non-member state”, Palestine would have the same status as the Vatican.

    Whitehall officials said the Palestinians were now being asked to refrain from applying for membership of the international criminal court or the international court of justice, which could both be used to pursue war crimes charges or other legal claims against Israel.

    Abbas is also being asked to commit to an immediate resumption of peace talks “without preconditions” with Israel. The third condition is that the general assembly’s resolution does not require the UN security council to follow suit.

    The US and Israel have both hinted at possible retaliation if the vote goes ahead. Congress could block payments to the Palestinian Authority and Israel might freeze tax revenues it transfers under the 1993 Oslo agreement or, worse, withdraw from the agreement altogether. It could also annex West Bank settlements. Britain’s position is that it wants to reduce the risk that such threats might be implemented and bolster Palestinian moderates.

    France has already signalled that it will vote yes on Thursday, and the long-awaited vote is certain to pass as 132 UN members have recognised the state of Palestine. Decisions by Germany, Spain and Britain are still pending and Palestinians would clearly prefer a united EU position as counterweight to the US.

    Willian Hague, the foreign secretary, discussed the issue on Monday with Abbas and the French foreign minister, Laurent Fabius, offiicals said.

    Palestinian sources said Hillary Clinton, the US secretary of state, raised the issue with Abbas at his Ramallah headquarters last week, shortly before a ceasefire was agreed in the Gaza Strip, as had Tony Blair, the Quartet envoy.

    Abbas has been widely seen to have been sidelined by his rivals in the Islamist movement Hamas, as well by his failure to win any concessions from Israel. Abbas, whose remit does not extend beyond the West Bank, hopes a strong yes vote will persuade Israel to return to talks after more than two years.

    Officals in Ramallah have opposed surrendering on the ICC issue so it can be used as a bargaining chip in future, but views are thought to be divided. Abbas said at the weekend: “We are going to the UN fully confident in our steps. We will have our rights because you are with us.”

    Leila Shaid, Palestine’s representative to the EU, said: “After everything that has happened in the Arab spring, Britain can’t pretend it is in favour of democracy in Libya, Syria and Egypt but accept the Palestinians continuing to live under occupation. As the former colonial power, Britain has a historic responsibility to Palestine. Britain is a very important country in the Middle East, it has extensive trade relations, and David Cameron should know he risks a popular backlash from Arab public opinion if he does not support us.”

    Palestinians have rejected the claim that they are acting unilaterally, calling the UN path “the ultimate expression of multilateralism”. Israel’s apparent opposition to unilateralism has not stopped it acting without agreement to build and expand settlements, they say.

    guardian.co.uk, 

  • Jewish women settlers learn how to use guns

    Jewish women settlers learn how to use guns

    While the diplomats haggle, deadly tensions are mounting in the nascent Palestine

    The quest for Palestinian statehood at the UN has worsened a climate of fear on the ground in the West Bank

    Harriet Sherwood in Qusra

    Women at the Jewish settlements
    Women at the Jewish settlement of Pnei Kedem practise firing pistols and high-powered rifles. Photograph: Nati Shohat/Flash90

    The settlers come down the hill from the outpost, mostly on foot, but occasionally on horseback or in tractors or 4x4s. They carry Israeli flags, and sometimes bring guns, shovels and dogs. There may be as few as three or as many as 40. They taunt the local villagers and sometimes attack them. Often the Israeli army arrives and trains its weapons on the villagers.

    In Qusra, deep among the terraced hills of the West Bank, fear is on the rise. “The settlers are provoking us continuously,” said Hani Abu Reidi, head of the village council. “They uproot olive trees, kill our sheep, burn our mosques and curse our prophet. They want to drag us into the sphere of violence. We do not want to go there.”

    As the Palestinian quest for statehood looks set to be mired in diplomatic back rooms for weeks or months, tension on the ground is mounting. Both Palestinian villagers and Jewish settlers say each other is responsible for a spike in attacks over the past fortnight; mostly small-scale incidents such as throwing stones, molotov cocktails and insults. Both sides claim the other is preparing to invade their communities and attack their people. It has created an edgy climate of fear and menace, and is a forewarning of potential battles to come if the struggle for the land moves up a gear with impending Palestinian statehood.

    The request by the Palestinians to be admitted to the United Nations as a full member state, formally submitted on Friday, will now be considered by the security council for an undefined period, during which efforts to get both sides back to the negotiating table will intensify.

    If no progress is made, the Palestinians will press for a vote at the security council, a move the US has pledged to veto. The Palestinians would then have the option of asking the 193-member general assembly for enhanced status, albeit short of full statehood. As this process inches forward, anger on the ground is rising.

    On Friday, violence between settlers from the outpost of Esh Kodesh and around 300 Qusra villagers ended in a haze of teargas and bullets fired at the villagers by Israeli troops, two of which struck Issam Odeh, 33, killing the father-of-eight.

    Qusra set up a defence committee earlier this month after one of the village’s four mosques was vandalised in a settler attack condemned by the US and the European Union. Up to 20 unarmed men patrol the mosques from 8pm to 6am every night, and Abu Reidi claims they have already foiled at least one attack. Other Palestinian villages have followed suit.

    On the hilltops, preparations for clashes have also been under way for weeks. Security around settlements and outposts has been reinforced with extra barbed wire, CCTV cameras, security guards and dogs. And the settlers themselves are armed and primed in anticipation of what they believe will be incursions by Palestinians intent on making their hoped-for state a reality on the ground.

    This week, photographs were published on a pro-settler news website,Arutz Sheva, showing women from Pnei Kedem, an outpost south of Bethlehem, learning to shoot. In Shimon Hatzadik, a Jewish enclave in the midst of the Palestinian neighbourhood of Sheikh Jarrah, in east Jerusalem, settlers are preparing to invoke a law allowing self-defence against intruders. “We are talking about shooting at their legs and if that doesn’t work, and our lives are in danger, we won’t be afraid to shoot straight at them. Most of the residents here are armed,” spokesman Yehonatan Yosef told parliamentarians two weeks ago.

    Activists in the settlement of Qiryat Arba, on the edge of Hebron, have distributed clubs, helmets and teargas to nearby outposts. “They’ve been given all of the tools we could provide for them in order to protect themselves,” Bentzi Gopstein, a member of Qiryat Arba’s council, told theYnet news website. “But we must remember that the best defence is offence. We can’t stay close to our fences. If the Arabs can come to us, they must learn we can come to them.”

    The settlers believe Israeli soldiers will be hampered by restraints imposed by commanders fearful of negative publicity. “They are not receiving the right orders,” said radical activist Itamar Ben-Gvir from Qiryat Arba. “There’s no state in the world that would allow the enemy to cross its lines and enter its communities. If the IDF will not act properly, we will have to defend ourselves.”

    Women and children would take part in defensive action, he said. “We want to present an equation: women against women; children against children. The Arabs are intending to use their children and we will not sit still.”

    Shaul Goldstein, mayor of the Gush Etzion settlement bloc south of Bethlehem, expects the focus in the coming weeks to “move from hypothetical issues in New York to practical terror here in Judaea and Samaria [the biblical term for the West Bank]”. Gush Etzion had a comparatively good relationship with its Palestinian neighbours, he said. “We are trying to talk to them to reduce friction and tension. But if the Palestinians march towards the settlements, there is a red line. If they try to cross, to penetrate our communities, it will be a big problem.”

    As well as fighting on the ground, many settlers believe they must also wage a political battle against the Israeli government. “Netanyahu is a weak leader, not standing for the values he was elected for,” said Goldstein. “The [settlement] construction freeze was the first in history – and this from a rightwinger. So we have to push him, to press him, to keep him to hold the line.”

    The settlers are not just fighting to hold on to the land they already occupy; they intend to expand and grow – as they see it, reclaiming the land that has been willed to them by God.

    “Our purpose is to build new towns and communities, new outposts in Judaea and Samaria,” said veteran activist Daniella Weiss. “It’s our role as Jews to build the land of the Jews.”

    In Qusra, Abu Reidi agreed the land is at the heart of confrontations between Jewish settlers and Palestinian villagers. “Their ultimate goal is to drive us from our land,” he said. “Defending the land is a holy task. If we let them succeed, they will take more and more.”

    www.guardian.co.uk, 24 September 2011

  • Israel Isolates Itself

    Israel Isolates Itself

    OP-ED COLUMNIST

    by Roger Cohen

    LONDON — Here’s what the United Nations report on Israel’s raid last year on the Turkish-flagged Mavi Marmara had to say about the killing of a 19-year-old U.S. citizen on board:

    RogerCohen“At least one of those killed, Furkan Dogan, was shot at extremely close range. Mr. Dogan sustained wounds to the face, back of the skull, back and left leg. That suggests he may already have been lying wounded when the fatal shot was delivered, as suggested by witness accounts to that effect.”

    The four-member panel, led by Sir Geoffrey Palmer, a former prime minister of New Zealand, appears with these words to raise the possibility of an execution or something close.

    Dogan, born in upstate New York, was an aspiring doctor. Little interested in politics, he’d won a lottery to travel on the Gaza-bound vessel. The report says of him and the other eight people killed that, “No evidence has been provided to establish that any of the deceased were armed with lethal weapons.”

    I met Dogan’s father, Ahmet, a professor at Erciyes University in Kayseri, last year in Ankara: His grief was as deep as his dismay at U.S. evasiveness. It’s hard to imagine any other circumstances in which the slaying in international waters, at point-blank range, of a U.S. citizen by forces of a foreign power would prompt such a singular American silence.

    Senior Turkish officials told me Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan had raised Dogan’s fate with President Obama. But of course no U.S. president, and certainly no first-term U.S. president, would say what Prime Minister David Cameron of Britain said: “The Israeli attack on the Gaza flotilla was completely unacceptable.” Even if there’s an American citizen killed, raising such questions about Israel is a political no-no. So it goes in the taboo-littered cul-de-sac of U.S. foreign policy toward Israel, a foreign policy that is in large measure a domestic policy.

    The Palmer report, leaked to The New York Times last week, is a split-the-difference document, with the Israeli and Turkish members of the panel including notes of dissent. My rough translation of its conclusion would be this message to Israel: You had the right to do it but what you did was way over the top and just plain dumb.

    It found that Israel’s naval blockade of Gaza is legal and appropriate — “a legitimate security measure” — given Hamas’s persistent firing of thousands of rockets from the territory into Israel; that the flotilla acted recklessly in trying to breach the blockade; that the motives of the flotillas organizers raised serious questions; and that the Israeli commandos faced “organized and violent resistance.”

    But it also called the raid — 72 nautical miles from land — “too heavy a response too quickly.” The flotilla, it says, was far from representing any immediate military threat to Israel. Clear prior warning should have been given. The decision to board “was excessive and unreasonable.” It criticizes Israel for providing “no adequate explanation” for the nine deaths or explaining “why force was used to the extent that it produced such high levels of injury.” The panel is left dismayed by Israel’s inability to give details on the killings. It calls Israel’s policy on land access to Gaza “unsustainable.”

    Overall, the panel finds that Israel should issue “an appropriate statement of regret” and “make payment for the benefit of the deceased and injured victims and their families.”

    Yes, Israel, increasingly isolated, should do just that. An apology is the right course and the smart course. What’s good for Egypt — an apology over lost lives — is good for Turkey, too.

    Israel and Turkey have been talking for more than a year. Feridun Sinirlioglu, a senior Turkish foreign ministry official, has met with numerous Israeli officials. At times agreement has been close. Ehud Barak and Dan Meridor, Israel’s defense and intelligence ministers, have argued the case for an apology; Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman has led the hawks saying Israel never bends; Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has had his finger to the wind. In the end, Lieberman and the far right have won, as they tend to with this abject Israeli government.

    “It’s a typical case where coalition considerations trumped strategic thinking, and that’s the tragedy,” Shlomo Avineri, an Israeli political scientist, told me. “Given the Palestinian issue at the U.N., and relations with the new Egypt, we could use strategic wisdom.”

    That’s right. Instead, locked in its siege mentality, led by the nose by Lieberman and his ilk — unable to grasp the change in the Middle East driven by the Arab demand for dignity and freedom, inflexible on expanding settlements, ignoring U.S. prodding that it apologize — Israel is losing one of its best friends in the Muslim world, Turkey. The expulsion last week of the Israeli ambassador was a debacle foretold.

    Israeli society, as it has shown through civic protest, deserves much better.

    “We need not apologize,” Netanyahu thundered Sunday — and repeated the phrase three times. He’s opted for a needless road to an isolation that weakens Israel and undermines the strategic interests of its closest ally, the United States. Not that I expect Obama to raise his voice about this any more than he has over Dogan.

    www.nytimes.com, September 5, 2011

  • Israeli army arms Jewish settlers in preparation for Palestinian unrest

    Israeli army arms Jewish settlers in preparation for Palestinian unrest

    Jewish settlers across the West Bank are being armed and trained by the Israeli military in anticipation of unrest and violence leading up to a Palestinian demand for statehood at the United Nations in three weeks.

    Settlers
    On Monday morning, a Palestinian man from Nablus drove a stolen taxi into a police blockade outside a Tel Aviv nightclub before stabbing several onlookers Photo: AP

    Phoebe Greenwood in Tel Aviv

    The Israeli Defence Force fears that demonstrations ahead of the UN debate on September 20 will bring violent confrontations between Palestinians and Israeli settlers living illegally in settlements across territory occupied by Israel.

    Leaked documents have outlined Israeli plans to arm security guards working on the Jewish settlements with riot gear, including tear gas and stun grenades.

    In a statement issued on Tuesday, an Israeli army spokesperson confirmed that the military is training “community leadership and security personnel throughout Judea and Samaria” but refused to comment on whether they were also being provided with additional arms.

    An Israeli security source told the Daily Telegraph: “These security officers are employed by the Ministry of Defence and have to be able respond to any security threat, like the murders in Itamar. It would be irresponsible if we did not prepare them for every eventuality.”

    In March this year, five members of the Jewish Fogel family were killed while they slept in their home in the West Bank’s Itamar settlement by two Palestinian teenagers from a neighbouring village.

    Mata Vilnai, the Israeli home affairs minister announced on Tuesday that a terror cell based in the Sinai Peninsula is preparing to carry out a series of attacks in Israel over the coming weeks.

    On Monday morning, a Palestinian man from Nablus drove a stolen taxi into a police blockade outside a Tel Aviv nightclub before stabbing several onlookers. Eight people, including several teenagers, were injured.

    Gill Kosover, who owns a car workshop outside where the attack took place, said Israelis are braced for more violence.

    “This is nothing,” he said. “This will happen more and more as we head towards September. This is just the beginning. Things are starting to boil here.”

    But Palestinians are also victims of the growing communal violence in the West Bank.

    B’Tselem, the Israeli human rights agency, has reported 42 cases of Jewish settler violence for police investigation since the beginning of 2011, including the murder of two Palestinian teenagers.

    Chris Gunness, a spokesman for the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees, accused Israeli soldiers of turning a blind eye to settler assaults on Palestinians: “The close relationship between the IDF and the illegal settlement project in the West Bank is confirmed by the many reports we see of the most violent settlers forcing Palestinians of their ancestral land under the noses of the IDF, sometimes with their protection if not connivance,” he said.

    www.telegraph.co.uk, 30 Aug 2011

  • U.S. Group Stirs Debate on Being ‘Pro-Israel’

    U.S. Group Stirs Debate on Being ‘Pro-Israel’

    By ETHAN BRONNER

     

    israeli criticism
    Rina Castelnuovo for The New York Times – A fortified shelter in Sderot, Israel. Israelis are feeling increasingly insecure about any criticism they believe could help enemies.

    JERUSALEM — On one side were members of the Israeli Parliament and advocates who argued that there was only one legitimate way to support Israel from abroad — unconditionally. On the other were those who insisted that love and devotion did not mean withholding criticism.

    For an electric two hours on Wednesday, the sides fought bitterly inside a parliamentary hearing room. As they spoke, tensions on the Gaza border rose and turmoil spread across the Middle East; hours later a bomb went off in Jerusalem, killing one person and wounding dozens. Israelis are feeling increasingly insecure about any criticism they believe could help their enemies.

    At the center of the parliamentary debate was a three-year-old American advocacy group, J Street, which calls itself pro-Israel and pro-peace, a left-leaning alternative to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, or Aipac, the pro-Israel lobbying group in the United States. J Street opposes Israeli settlements in the West Bank and urged President Obama not to veto an antisettlement resolution in the United Nations Security Council recently.

    The conveners of Wednesday’s hearing, a hawkish Likud legislator named Danny Danon and a conservative colleague from the centrist Kadima party, Otniel Schneller, wanted to expose J Street for what they believed it to be — a group of self-doubting American Jews more worried about what their neighbors say than what is good for the state of Israel.

    “This is a dispute between those who care what non-Jews will say and those who believe in being a light unto nations, between the mentality of exile and that of redemption,” Mr. Schneller said. “J Street is not a Zionist organization. It offers love with strings attached. They say, ‘We love you only if you behave the way we like.’ ”

    Jeremy Ben-Ami, J Street’s founder, came from Washington to defend his group, which claims about 170,000 supporters.

    “We should work through our differences with respect, vibrant discussion and open dialogue,” he told the legislators. “It only weakens Israel and the Jewish people to make differences of opinion into something greater and to accuse those who criticize Israeli policy of being anti-Israel or worse.”

    The committee meeting, which drew a crowd and often descended into shouting matches, was unprecedented, according to many Israelis. No one could recall a debate inside Israel’s Parliament examining whether an American group calling itself pro-Israel was living up to the name.

    But another parliamentary committee hearing is planned on a similar topic — whether the foreign news media are covering Israel fairly. The focus of that debate will be a comparison of news media coverage of the recent killings of five members of a settler family with the coverage of the Israeli takeover last year of a Gaza-bound flotilla in which nine activists were killed by commandos.

    Both hearings are part of a larger trend in this year’s Parliament — a turn rightward. Two laws passed this week have been widely condemned by civil liberty groups and advocates on the left. The first is known as “the Nakba bill,” in reference to the Arabic word for “catastrophe” commonly used by Arabs to describe the birth of Israel in 1948. Arabs who are Israeli citizens often commemorate Israeli independence by noting their losses — the destruction of hundreds of villages and the exile of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians.

    The new law allows the Finance Ministry to remove funds from municipalities or groups if they commemorate Independence Day here as a day of mourning or reject Israel as a Jewish and democratic state. The original bill, which produced much alarm and was altered, would have imposed prison sentences.

    The second new law that has drawn criticism from the left establishes admissions committees for small communities in the Negev and Galilee, areas with large Arab populations. The new law says that communities with 400 or fewer families may set up committees to screen potential residents for whether they fit in socially. At the last minute, a rider was added barring discrimination based on race, gender or nationality, but critics contend it will still serve to keep Arabs out of Jewish communities.

    It is precisely such developments in Israel that J Street leaders say are driving many American Jews, especially younger ones, from devotion to Israel. Therefore, they say, J Street has a vital role in advocating its views here and in bridging the gap between liberal American Jews and an increasingly nationalistic Israeli society.

    David Gilo, who is the chairman of J Street, said in the hearing that the contract that had long existed between Israel and Jews abroad — one of unconditional support — was expiring and a new one was being drafted. He argued that the new contract was good not only for those abroad but for Israel as well, since it would bring into the fold those who would otherwise be alienated. “The new contract cannot be based on unilateral dictation of what is right, who is right and who is wrong,” he said. “Only agreement on common values and a genuine attempt to understand where each party comes from can reinstate an Israeli-American Jewish partnership.”

    Nachman Shai, a member of Parliament from Kadima, said at the hearing that J Street represented an important part of American Jewry, and that Israel should not turn a blind eye to it.

    Shlomo Avineri, a political scientist at Hebrew University who did not attend the hearing, said J Street was in a problematic position because “it is very difficult to be an advocacy group while criticizing the subject of your advocacy. It is difficult to say we are the greatest supporters of Israel but on every issue that arises we are on the other side.”

    He added that the extreme right in Israel had always insisted that criticism of Israeli policy was unpatriotic. Now, the extreme right has more power than ever in the country’s history, he said, giving its views a greater platform.

    Mr. Danon, the Likud chairman of the committee holding the hearing, said he would put to a vote in the coming two weeks a resolution calling J Street pro-Palestinian, asking it to “purge from its ranks” anti-Zionist elements and urging Israeli government officials to refrain from contact with it.

    Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has consistently refused to meet with J Street officials.

    Mr. Ben-Ami of J Street said afterward: “This is a time of real uncertainty and threat in Israel, and what we saw at the hearing is part of a larger trend of Israel turning in on itself. It is redefining who is a Jew, redefining who is a citizen and now redefining who is a friend.”

    www.nytimes.com, 24 March 2011

    More on J Street:

  • WikiLeaks: More Israeli Game Theory Warfare?

    WikiLeaks: More Israeli Game Theory Warfare?

    by Jeff Gates

    The United States is the real victim of WikiLeaks. It’s an action aimed at discrediting them.
    — Franco Frattini, Foreign Minister of Italy

    The impact of the WikiLeaks release of diplomatic cables fits the behavior profile of those well versed in game theory warfare.

    When Israeli mathematician, Robert J. Aumann, received the 2005 Nobel Prize in economic science for his work on game theory, he conceded, “the entire school of thought that we have developed here in Israel” has turned “Israel into the leading authority in this field.”

    The candor of this Israeli-American offered a rare insight into an enclave long known for waging war from the shadows. Israel’s most notable success to date was “fixing” the intelligence that induced the U.S. to invade Iraq in pursuit of a geopolitical agenda long sought by Tel Aviv.

    When waging intelligence wars, timing is often the critical factor for game-theory war planners. The outcome of the WikiLeaks release suggests a psy-ops directed at the U.S.

    Why now? Tel Aviv was feeling pressure to end its six-decade occupation of Palestine. With this release, its foot-dragging on the peace process was displaced with talk of an attack on Iran.

    While the U.S. bore the brunt of the damage, the target was global public opinion. To maintain the plausibility of The Clash of Civilizations, a focus must be maintained on Iran as a credible Evil Doer.

    With fast-emerging transparency, Israel and pro-Israelis have been identified as the source of the intelligence that took coalition forces to war in Iraq. Thus the need to shift attention off Tel Aviv.

    WikiLeaks may yet succeed in that mission.

    Foreseeable Futures

    Game theory war planning aims to create outcomes that are predictable — within an acceptable range of probabilities. That’s why Israeli war planners focus on gaining traction for a plausible narrative and then advancing that storyline step by gradual step.

    For the Zionist state to succeed with its expansionist agenda, Iran must remain at center stage as an essential villain in a geopolitical morality play pitting the West against Islamo Fascists.

    To displace facts with false beliefs — as with belief in the intelligence that induced the invasion of Iraq — momentum must be maintained for the storyline. Lose the plot (The Clash) and peace might break out. And those deceived may identify the deceiver.

    Thus the timing of this latest WikiLeaks release. Its goal: to have us believe that it is not Tel Aviv but Washington that is the forefront of geopolitical duplicity and a source of Evil Doing.

    Intelligence wars rely on mathematical models to anticipate the response of those targeted. With game theory algorithms, reactions become foreseeable — within an acceptable range of probabilities.

    Control enough of the variables and outcomes become a mathematical inevitability.

    The WikiLeaks Motive

    Was the reaction to this latest WikiLeaks foreseeable? With exquisite timing, the U.S. was discredited with an array of revelations that called into question U.S. motives and put in jeopardy U.S. relations worldwide.

    As the Italian Foreign Minister summarized: “The news released by WikiLeaks will change diplomatic relations between countries.”

    The hard-earned trust of the Pakistanis disappeared overnight. Attempts to engage Iran were set back. The overall effect advanced The Clash storyline. If Washington could so badly misread North Korean intentions, then why is the U.S. to be trusted when it comes to a nuclear Iran?

    This Wiki-catalyzed storyline pushed Israel off the front page in favor of Iran.

    Even U.S. detainees at Guantanamo are again at issue, reigniting that shameful spectacle as a provocation for extremism and terror. U.S. diplomats will now be suspected of spying and lying. What nation can now trust Americans to maintain confidences?

    In short, the risks increased for everyone.

    Except Israel.

    Should Israel launch an attack on Iran, Tel Aviv can cite WikiLeaks as its rationale. Though an attack would be calamitous from a human, economic and financial perspective, even that foreseeable outcome would be dwarfed by the enduring hatred that would ensue.

    That too is foreseeable — from a game theory perspective of those marketing The Clash.

    The effect of the U.S. invasion of Iraq was predictable. King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia foresaw it, noting simply that the U.S. invasion would “give Iraq to Iran as a gift on a golden platter.”

    With the elimination of Sunni leader Saddam Hussein, the numerically dominant Shiites of Iraq were drawn into the political orbit of the Shiite-dominant Iran.

    By Way Of DeceptionGame theorists focus their manipulation of affairs on their control of key variables. Then events take on a life all their own. The impact of this discrediting release was wide-ranging and fully foreseeable.

    A Mossad case officer explained Israel’s success at waging war by way of deception: “Once the orchestra starts to play, we just hum along.”

    These, after all, are the leading authorities in the field.

    Jeff Gates is author of Guilt By Association, Democracy at Risk, and The Ownership Solution. Read other articles by Jeff, or visit Jeff’s website.

    , December 1st, 2010