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7
Israeli
Foreign Policies, August 1994
8 August
1994
The scope of Israeli foreign policies can be
said to be truly worldwide. This is especially
the case when, in the wake of recent terrorist
assaults against Israeli and Jewish targets in
Buenos Aires and London, the Israeli government
professed the eradication of all such terror in
the entire world as its aim. At the same time,
however, due to Israeli automatic attribution of
responsibility for all those assaults to Iran,
Israeli foreign policies are also firmly
anchored in the region of the Middle East. It
can even be conjectured that the primary purpose
of the Washington treaty with Jordan recently
signed by Rabin and King Hussein was not so much
to make peace as to seek to use Jordanian
territory for action against Iran. And the same
purpose was by no means absent from the `peace
process' pursued earlier with Arafat. Here I
will deal with the Israeli antiIranian
propaganda campaign which is being intensified:
its policy context clearly being the Middle East
in the widest possible meaning of that term,
that is, extending from Afghanistan to Morocco,
the Muslim republics of the former USSR
included.
Let me proceed to discuss the strategic
significance of the Israeli Accord with Jordan.
It is both defensive and offensive. Jordan
commits itself not to allow and third state's
army to enter its territory. (But there is no
mention of a possible entry of the Israeli Army
into Jordan.) Most Israeli commentators
understood this stipulation as precluding the
threat of the so-called `Eastern Front', that
is, of allied Arab armies attacking Israel from
the east. Even though Israel's border with
Jordan is more difficult to defend than its
Egyptian border, the whole notion has in my view
long belonged to the realm of fiction. With the
Jordanian border secure and a firm peace with
Egypt, only the borders with Syria and Lebanon
remain hostile. They are relatively short,
allowing for heavy concentrations of troops and
fire, the preferred Israeli method of warfare.
The prospect of so shortening the potential
front line has been discussed for a long time in
professional military magazines of the Israeli
Army. But Israeli strategists are also keenly
aware of the two-fold importance of the Irbid
area of Jordan, located just south of the Golan
Heights and Syria. By penetrating this area, the
Syrian
(79)
Army could out(lank the Israeli troops
deployed in the Golan Heights. By penetrating
the same area, however, the Israeli Army could
outflank the bulk of the Syrian Army, entrenched
in its fortifications opposite the Golan
Heights, and speedily advance toward Damascus.
Now, the Israeli military alliance with Jordan
(which is what the agreement with that country
amounts to), precludes the former prospect while
enhancing the likelihood of the latter. All too
clearly, it poses a major threat to Syria.
Still, the most likely target of a possible
Israeli armed attack is at the present moment
Iran. Oren (Davar, 7 January 1994) views the
agreement with Jordan primarily in that context:
`The agreement is intended to establish a
military alliance between Israel and Jordan and
thus extend the boundary of Israel's military
presence to the eastern tip of the Jordanian
desert. Israel's undisguised military presence
there, right on the border of Iraq, means that
the route of its war planes to Iran will be
hundreds of kilometres shorter.' Had they had to
take off from Israeli territory, only the most
advanced Israeli planes, practically only the
F-15s, could reach Iran without refuelling in
the air. A glance of the map of the Middle East
will suffice to show that the Iraqi-Jordanian
border area is alread7 quite close to Iran:
close enough to let Israel use its plentiful
older model planes (or missiles) for bombing
raids on Iran after overflying the Iraqi
territory. Oren does expect Jordan `to grant the
Israeli Air Force the tight to overfly its
territory, at least in emergency situations.'
Sure enough, the use of Jordanian territory for
a possible assault of Iran implies the existence
of a tacit Iraqi complicity with Israel. Oren
must imply no less than that when he says that
once Israeli alliance with Jordan is fully
operational, `Rafsanjani will be compelled to
approach Israel with greater restraint than to
date.' In more general terms Oren opines that
`just as Israel had opened the flow of American
dollars to Sadat and enabled the Egyptian Air
Force to receive advanced planes from the US
within no more than year and a half after
Sadat's visit to Jerusalem, so the Rabin
government which enabled Jordan to receive not a
few US dollars, will feel entitled to use its
agreement with Jordan not just for the sake of
the military status quo, but in order to improve
Israel's military strength considerably, to the
point of letting the Israeli Air Force and
eventually Intelligence reach the western
boundary of Iraq.' In my view, this crucial
change in strategic configurations in the Middle
East either has already occurred or is likely to
occur in the coming months.
I feel tempted at this point to digress in
order to recount some new revelations about the
past relations oC the Zionist movement and the
State of Israel with the Hashemite regime in
Jordan. A veteran of Haganah's Intelligence
Service, Yo'av Gelber, recently published a book
bearing the title The Roots of the Lily, (the
lily being
(80)
the emblem of Israeli Military Intelligence),
which heavily relies on documents declassified
only in recent years. According to Gelber, King
Hussein's grandfather, Abdullah, was recruited
as a spy for the Zionist movement in the early
1920s, soon after being appointed `Emir of
Trans-Jordan' by the British. He was instructed
to spy on all sorts of Arab leaders, but his
main task was to spy on his British masters.
Heaps of documents depict Zionist intra-agency
squabbles over whether Abdullah's demands for
payment for each rendered service should be
fully respected or subject io some bargaining,
the late Moshe Sharett being a consistent
advocate of the latter. All payments to Abdullah
were in cash directly delivered to him. Other
intra-agency disputes were over Abdullah's
occasional demands to be paid not in banknotes,
but in gold coins. In addition to .his, one of
Abdullah's wives was put on the Zionist pa7roh
to spv on her husband. Gelber boasts that the
British discovered the whole scheme only after
more than twenty years, in 1946. Their reaction
was not only to offer Abdullah more money than
the Zionist movement could possibly pay, but
also to give more military aid for Abdullah's
army. Most importantly, however, they dangled
before him a vision of becoming king of `the
greater Syria' - Syria, Lebanon and Palestine
together. This displeased Ben-Gurion greatly,
and relations between the Zionist movement and
subsequently the State of Israel with Jordan
dwindled to a coordination of policy directed,
as Oren defines it, `against their common enemy,
Palestinian nationalism'.
A fuller cooperation between Israel and
Jordan was revived by King Hussein in 1958,
right after the revolution in Iraq in which his
close relatives from the Iraqi royal family
perished. As Oren puts it, Hussein `sent his
Armenian Intelligence advisor to Israel' with
dispatch. On the Jordanian side cooperation with
Israel was carried through solely by the
kingdom's Armenian or Circassian functionaries.
Azarya Alon (Davar, 28 July) informs us that one
unit guarding King Hussein is comprised solely
of Circassians and considers this fact
advantageous to Israel.
The Israeli alliance with King Hussein
endured until 1965. Oren points out that, as
subsequently revealed by declassified American
documents, George Bush, acting in capacity of
CIA Director had in that year offered King
Hussein personal payment. Bush's scheme was
considered in Israel hostile and it was recalled
when he became President. But Hussein again
became subservient to Israel before the `Black
September' of 1970. After that date he became a
virtual Israeli spy, as his grandfather had
been. As is well known, it was he who in
September 1973 forewarned Golda Meir about the
incipient attack of Egypt and Syria on Israel,
although he was not believed. Good relations
have been maintained since, regardless of which
party ruled Israel. As was reported by the
Hebrew press
(81)
on the occasion of the present Washington
Accord, Shamir had met King Hussein in London
even during the Gulf Crisis, in November 1990,
in order to assure him that unless Iraqi land
forces are let into Jordan, Israel was not going
to invade it, even in the case of it launching
hostilities against Iraq. The present
Israeli-Jordanian alliance is therefore the
crowning point of decades of thinly disguised
cooperation.
Let me now quote at some length an
instructive portrayal of Israeli relations with
Morocco by Daniel Ben-Simon writing in Davar (7
June). After gloating about how excellent the
relations between the two countries have been,
Ben-Simon admits that `the web of relations
between the two states rests on the shoulders of
a single individual: King Hassan II. Morocco's
kindness toward Israel and all the Jews depends
solely on his feelings ... Only a few thousand
Jews have remained in Morocco: most of them in
Casablanca where they are among the wealthiest
people. Hassan II has highly appreciated the
Jewish contribution to the development of his
country. When the French left in 1954, the Jews
tended to replace them in their occupations in
industry and commerce.' Ben-Simon fails to
understand that if the Jews `replaced' the
French in Morocco with the effect of becoming
very wealthy in the process, then the same
grudges which ordinary Moroccans had had against
the French and their role in Morocco are now
likely to be revived against the Jews.
Ben-Simon continues: `Hassan II has a
weakness for Israel. To many of his visitors he
expressed his admiration for Israel's ability to
turn wilderness into a fertile land. He does not
hide his belief that Jews are cleverer than
other nations, and that economic, social and
cultural revolutions and progress were a product
of Jewish genius. In the early 1970s, when the
hostility between Israel and the Arab states
reached its peak, he indulged in fanciful
reveries about what could be achieved by
blending Jewish genius with Arab capital. "If
there is peace, the Middle East may in this way
become the strongest power on earth", he used to
say.' This sounds not unlike the Protocols of
the Elders of Zion.
But such visions for the future depend on a
purely personal factor: `Hassan I1 is an
absolute monarch, one of the few such still left
in the world. All state affairs depends on his
decisions and orders. In theoryo, Morocco has a
constitution and democratic institutions. But
their impact is very limited. In practice,
everything is subordinated to his will. In the
West, Hassan II succeeded in manufacturing for
himself an image of an enlightened, open-minded,
liberal, educated king who relies on democratic
institutions. Consequently, the western
countries would turn a blind eye to oddities of
that democracy, and content themselves with the
existence of many parties and periodic elections
in Morocco.
(82)
Hassan II fights like a lion to maintain this
image. It was not too easy, after books appeared
depicting his regime as one of the most
obscurantist in the world. A French journalist
Gilles Perrault wrote a book documenting the
outrages committed by the King's regime, in the
first place the atrocities in treating the
regime's opponents. The King not only banned the
book, but also sought to prevail upon President
Mitterrand to do the same in France. Regardless
of whatever Mitterand might have wanted, the
French law precluded the possibility of his
satisfying the King.
`On several occasions, the King would berate
his Western critics, "Do you want Morocco to
become an Islamic state like Iran? Just say so",
he would reply to queries about his misdeeds.
Western countries do realize that they can ill
afford another state resembling Algeria or Iran.
This is why western governments prefer to turn a
blind eve on whatever the King might do and
speculate about what may happen after Hassan II.
If he just retires he will be succeeded by the
Crown Prince Sidi Mohammed. The Crown Prince is
a very different character than his father,
gentle, refined, with a penchant for
romanticism. Some in the West would prefer the
King to appoint his younger son, Moulay Rashid,
as his successor. Like his father, Moulay Rashid
is tough, determined to hold on to power at any
price. He wants to be Crown Prince in order to
assure that the country toes the pro-Western
line. If Morocco remains a monarchy, its further
rapprochement with Israel can be expected. If
monarchy is abolished there, everything becomes
possible. Then, the very survival of the tiny
Jewish community in Morocco may also be in
doubt. For in Morocco, everything depends on the
will of our friend, the King.' I guess that
`some in the West' is Ben-Simon's codename for
Israeli Intelligence whose links with Hassan II
have been notorious. But his whole treatment of
Israeli relations with the Moroccan regime shows
how much Israel and the organized Jewish
communities in the Diaspora have always tended
to support despotic regimes, especially in the
Muslim world.
Let me return to Iran, on which Israeli
foreign policies currently focus. Prior to the
last wave of terrorist attacks on Jewish targets
in Buenos Aires and London the situation in this
respect was summed up by Aluf Ben (Haaretz, 12
July), whose article deserves to be quoted at
some length: 'During the last two years the
Iranian threat has been the central element in
Israel's foreign and security policy. After the
Gulf War ruined Iran's rival Iraq, Iran emerged
more powerful than ever. Israel feared that Iran
could aspire to regional hegemony and ruin the
peace process by virtue of having nuclear
weapons and long-range missiles, of building a
modern air force and navy, of exporting
terrorism and revolution and of subverting Arab
secular regimes.' Let me observe that when
(as
(83)
plenty of other evidence shows) Israel `after
the Gulf War' decided that Iran was its enemy
number one, the latter was still exhausted after
the lengthy war with Iraq and hadn't yet begun
its nuclearization. Really, Israeli enmity
toward Iran stemmed from the fact that it `could
aspire to [the] regional hegemony' to
which Israel aspires. `Last year Rabin said that
Iran was the main threat to Israel's security.
The Chief of Staff Ehud Barak described the
monster of Tehran as the most terrible danger to
peace in the whole world. Why? Because Iran
undermines political stability in the Middle
East, because it opposes the flow of oil to the
developed world and because it wants to upset
the cultural equilibrium between the West and
Islam. "The Iranian regime poses a danger to the
very foundations of world order", said Barak.' I
believe the quote from Barak is authentic, but I
don't know where he said it. Certainly, it has
never been published before. Although I don't
disregard the dangers such utterances may
entail, the spectacle of an Israeli general
concerned about the potential upsetting of `the
cultural equilibrium between the West and Islam'
strikes me as having its comic side as well.
Commenting on a terrorist attack on Jewish
targets, on 29 July, Uzi Mahanaimi wrote in
Shishi: `The Iranians are now busy hiring
foreign experts to make the little gifts they
obtained fully operational. Is this perhaps why
Israel vacillates about knocking the downtown of
Tehran with all its might? Is somebody in Israel
afraid that the madmen in Tehran may already
possess the bomb? Is this the reason they cannot
be touched? I hope things are not that bad. I
find it absolutely clear that as long as the
heads of the Iranians do not get whacked, and as
long as Israel keeps playing its games with
Hizbollah in Lebanon, our embassies cannot but
continue to be blown up.' Mahanaimi has no doubt
that the Iranians 'are responsible fot the
bombing of our embassy and Jewish Centre in
Buenos Aires'. He claims that `the proofs of
this abound', but he mentions only one, namely
that `through their Argentinian embassy the
Iranians denied any connection with the
outrage.' Why should the denial be a proof?
Mahanaimi's argument runs as follows: `I know
them bloody well. This is why I can say with
confidence that had Israel reacted properly to
the bombing of its embassy in Argentina two
years ago, the Iranians would have thought twice
before sending their saboteurs once again. After
the first bombing in Argentina, it was the
Commander of Israeli Military Intelligence who
accused the Iranians of complicity, lot a
journalist voicing his opinion, but the very
Commander of Israeli Military Intelligence said
that. Why did Israel do nothing then? After all,
if Katyushas are fired upon the Galilee, Israel
escalates almost to the point of a war. So why
didn't we react likewise when our entire embassy
was blown sky high? The Iranians have plenty of
sensitive targets across
(84)
their country. Hitting them could make the
Ayatollahs think twice before they play with
fire next time.' And so on and so forth.
Ron Ben-Yishay (Yediot Ahronor, 29 July) says
that `Intelligence sources estimate that one and
the same hand in Tehran was behind the terrorist
assault in Buenos Aires, the Hizbollah attacks
in Lebanon and the two terrorist assaults in
London': the operational medium being the
`Iranian Intelligence officers masquerading as
diplomats and working in all Iranian embassies
the world over'. BenYishay claims that `until
two weeks ago' Israel did nothing against Iran
`except abuse it verbally', but now `many
Israeli politicians, including the Prime
Minister, believe that Israel should hit the
Iranians right where it hurts.' Ben-Yishay does
not seem to mean by that an armed attack on
Iranian territory, but only a world-wide
elimination of whomever Israel may 1abe1 as an
`Iranian' terrorist. This transpires from his
saying that Israel `should treat all Iranian
terrorists as it treated the PLO's international
terror after the 1970 Black September'. He
refers to Israeli Intelligence then killing
Palestinians and other Arabs (including some
innocent people like a Moroccan waiter
mistakenly identified as a PLO agent in
Lilienhammer, Norway), but stopping short of
doing anything more violent. Ben-Yishay says
that `the dragon is already too powerful for
Israel to slay it alone'. He hopes the western
states will help Israel in its struggle against
the Iranian dragon.
However, voices advocating some caution and
moderation have resounded as well. Let me quote
two. A Labor Party stalwart Shalom Yerushalmi
writing in Maariv (3 August), admits that `in
Lebanon Israel did commit against Hizbollah, the
operational arm of Khomeinism some
"eliminations" Iranian style, e.g the Sheikh
Mussawi affair [murdered together with his
family] or kidnappings, e.g. of Sheikhs
Obeid and Dirani. It is not clear what Israel
gained thereby, but there also have been massive
bombardments of civilian populations. I Think we
should stop playing such dangerous games.'
Yerushalmi advises Rabin to follow in the
footsteps of Shamir's judicious conduct during
the Gulf War. Shamir then merely threatened that
Israel would retaliate but didn't follow his
threats through. But restraint toward Iran
would, argues Yerushalmi, be even more advisable
now than in the past toward Iraq. Iran is
stronger than Iraq, larger in size and
population. The war against Iraq was really
`only a war against an insane dictator and a
handful of his henchmen', whereas Iranians are
in their majority `united in their support for
the mad ideology hammered into their heads by
the Ayatollahs'. Yerushalmi advises Rabin to ask
the West to impose `some potent economic
sanctions against Iran', paired with a
propaganda campaign to the effect that Iranian
nuclearization threatens everybody.
(85)
Even more interesting are the views of some
components of Israeli and apparentlyo also US
intelligence as relayed by Tzvi Bar'e1 in
Haaretz (24 July). Contrary to the quoted
commentators who believe (presumably after being
briefed by the Israeli Prime Minister's Office)
that Iran was solely responsible for the Buenos
.Sires and London terrorist assaults, Bar'el
quotes `a senior Israeli Intelligence source' as
telling him that `the working presumption
[of Israeli Intelligence] is that the
assault was committed by local terrorists hired
for pay, the moneyo being traceable to
Hizbollah. The same source claims that the
Iranian connection amounts only to political and
economic patronage Iran bestows on Hizbollah: "I
presume that under different political
circumstances Israel could blame Syria or Libya
in the same way as it now accuses Iran. In the
same way it was once customary to blame the
former USSR for standing behind terrorist acts
which gained international publicity".' Bar'el
contrasts this point of view with Rabin's and
Netanyahu's views. Rabin `rushed to announce
that Iran was responsible. After a while,
without retracting the first version, he pinned
the responsibility on Hizbollah.' Incidentally,
this seems to be Rabin's jafon de parler. When
the Intifada had just broken out he rushed to
blame Iran and Libya for their `exclusive
responsibility' for it. This stupid falsehood
was then, for some time, elevated to the rank of
Israeli propaganda line. Rabin's mendacity
borders on the pathological, even more so than
Sharon's or Shamir's. The western media only
show how biased they are when they fail to
document Rabin's systematic lying. Netanyahu
surpasses even Rabin in mendacity. According to
Bar'el, Netanyahu opined that `Iran, Hizbollah
and Syria were equally responsible.' A record in
lying, however, has been attained in this affair
by the Israeli Chief of Staff, Ehud Barak. He is
reported by On Levy (Davar, 3 August) to have
said that `the intelligence community of the
entire world knows for sure that Iran stands
behind the terror.' Dissenting from Rabin,
Netanyahu and Barak alike, Bar'el reports that
`Israeli Intelligence has so far failed to find
evidence linking the Buenos Aires terror with
any of the three factors', that is, with `Iran,
Hizbollah and Syria'.
But Bar'el makes also some fairly keen
observations about the nature of state terror,
which deserve to be quoted at length: `Iran is a
terror state in the same way as Iraq, Libya or
Syria. But the list of terror states can be
extended. Not so long ago Argentina, Chile and
South Africa qualified as well by virtue of
committing routinely political murders or
terrorist assaults against dissenters living
outside their borders.' Let me comment that
Israel, and especially the Labor Party was
chummy with the three regimes named here as
terrorists. Rabin particularly cultivated close
relations with the South African apartheid
regime. Helped by his present
(86)
Defence Deputy Minister Motta Gur, he
advanced the ties with Argentinian and Chilean
juntas. 'Still', continues Bar'el, `some states
can be said to be more terroristic than others.
At the present moment, by far the most terrorist
state in the Middle East, and perhaps in the
entire world, is Afghanistan. As estimated by
various intelligence experts, most subversive
and terrorist acts against Arab regimes were
committed by veterans of the war against
communism, or of the tribal war continuing to
grip that country till this very day. The Afghan
government and other authorities maintain
training programmes in terror for the cohorts of
volunteers who for this very purpose come to
Afghanistan.
`Paradoxically, however, Afghanistan is not
defined as a terror state. Instead, it is
glorified by the US as a nation of valiant
patriots who expelled the Soviet invaders. On
the opposite side, the US seeks to overthrow
Saddam Hussein not 6ecause his henchmen have
committed lots of terrorist acts but because he
poses a threat to US interests in the Middle
East ... Fortunately for Israel, Iran is
nowadays an easy target to be branded as a
terror state ... Its diplomats have admittedly
been found to be involved in some terrorist
acts, but acts aimed only at exiled Iranian
political dissenters. Iran is a fundamentalist
state, but no more so than Saudi Arabia or the
Islamic opposition in Algeria. Yet the US has
the best of relations with the former and is
perfectly prepared to parley with the
latter.
'The crucial factor which helps uphold the
definition of Iran as a terror state is the
non-operational character of such a definition.
By itself, the definition cannot authorize
Israel to dispatch its Air Force to raid some
targets on Iranian territory. Nor can it by
itself warrant the imposition of economic
sanctions on Iran, aggravating its economic
plight. Intelligence experts commonly estimate
that acts of retaliation directed against
Iranian targets would hardly deter Iran while
mounting trouble for Israel. A senior foreign
intelligence source told me that in the absence
of decisive evidence linking the recent
terrorist assaults to Iran, the definition of
Iran (or of any other state for that matter) as
a terror state discredits a state advancing such
a definition because it brings into relief the
dismal failure of its intelligence. Talking of
"decisive evidence", my interlocutor meant
evidence as decisive as that found by the US
linking the Libyan government with the terrorist
act in Berlin discotheque.' This `senior foreign
intelligence source' sounds as if he were an
American.
Bar'el formulates an interpretation of what
he heard from this presumed American
intelligence source: `In other words, the more
vague a given state's concept of the sources of
terrorism, the more its intelligence can be
faulted for incompetence. As the same source put
it, "occasionally you may have good intelligence
as in some cases
(87)
in Lebanon. But then you are catching
individual criminals, not states. When your
intelligence is rather poor, you bomb wide
areas, but not close to the borders of Syria, in
spite of the obvious fact that without the
latter Hizbollah couldn't move a finger. You
also take care to spare the Lebanese state
machinery as far as possible, even though the
Hizbollah are represented in the Lebanese
parliament".' After his observations of American
Intelligence, Bar'el returns to Israeli
Intelligence: 'The problem, as indicated to me
by my intelligence source, is that when
political authorities choose to put blame for
terror on a country according to what under
given political conditions may be convenient,
intelligence work is bound to suffer. It is
because those authorities then want to find
"proofs" of what they have already assumed,
instead of looking for genuine proofs showing
who was really responsible for a given terrorist
outrage.'
However, in spite of Israeli military
censorship (recently more lenient), the Hebrew
press has for years been full of
pragmatically-minded criticism of Mossad and of
stories about scandals and personal squabbles
rampant among its high-ranking staff. This
criticism became sharper after the last wave of
terror revealed Mossad's incompetence. As Bar'el
puts it, 'From the viewpoint of the terrorists
the first recent assault in Buenos Aires is
already the second terrorist success. For
anti-terrorist struggle agencies, whether
Israeli, Argentinian or otherwise, the successes
of Argentinian terrorism must be particularly
embarrassing, because investigations of the
first assault [the bombing of the Israeli
embassy] failed to yield any clue as to the
identity of its perpetrators and because neither
assault was preceded by specific advance
indication that it was going to occur.' Similar
views were widely echoed in the Hebrew
press.
Ze'ev Shiff (Haaretz, 5 August), whose
`connections' are in my evaluation better than
Bar'el's goes farther in his criticism of
Mossad, without sparing Military Intelligence
either. According to him, `the latter's complete
failure to penetrate Hizbollah's ranks was not
its finest hour. With the exception of whatever
could 6e learned through kidnappings, e.g. of
Dirani, everything indicates that Israel knows
very little about Hizbollah.' Shiff deplores the
fact that `in the past it was much easier to
penetrate the PLO organizations in Lebanon and
thus obtain information, than is now possible to
obtain information about Hizbollah, even by way
of continual observation from distance.' Still,
Shiff views Mossad as more incompetent than
Military Intelligence, the proof being that
within the two years which have lapsed since the
Israeli embassy in Buenos Aires was bombed
`Mossad failed to learn anything about it.' In
spite of lack of evidence, Shiff assumes that
the embassy was bombed by `fundamentalists' who
committed the
(88)
recent assault. But he denies that
responsibility for these bombings can be pinned
on any state and he backs this conclusion by a
finding reached by some unnamed intelligence
bodies that explosives used in Buenos Aires and
London were manufactured from locally available
raw materials, `which means that the explosives
were not smuggled in by any embassy'. He
concludes that `Israel is not in a position io
claim that the terrorists have been dispatched
by a single agency. It does not know who are
their leaders.' None the less, Shiff says that
`we need a lot of Israeli operations of the same
kind which were used against Palestininian
terrorism in the 1970s, only superior in
quality.'
In pursuing its anti-Iranian campaign, Israel
seems to aim higher than a mere Mossad
operation. To all appearances, the conditioning
of the Israeli public for the peace process is
to be followed by an alliance with Saddam
Hussein. A curious piece of evidence that such
an alliance is in the cards is the complete
silence of the Hebrew press, which for months
already hasn't uttered a single word about the
never-ending atrocities occurring in Iraq. The
prospect of alliance with Iraq is already being
mooted by Mossad veterans. Shmuel Toledano, a
ex-Mossad senior who once served as the Prime
Minister's Advisor on Arab Affairs and is active
in politics, writes in Haaretz (7 August) that
`if Israel is attacked from the east, the
Jordanian army will at first try to contain the
attack on it, thus giving Israel time to
mobilize its forces to encounter the attackers.'
This opportunity has, nevertheless, one hitch:
`Something may yet go amiss in the Hashemite
kingdom's interior, giving rise to unwelcome
developments.' This is Toledano's elegant way of
alluding to the possibility that the Hashemite
dynasty may yet be toppled by a popular
revolution. The remedy, as seen by Toledano, of
an Israeli peace and alliance with Iraq, is the
best way to protect the Hashemites from
`unwelcome developments'. Although Toledano sees
them as unwelcome to Israel, they could be no
less unwelcome to Saddam Hussein. And the
strategic value of Iraq to Israel would be no
mean consideration either.
Toledano is well aware that in the way of
making such an alliance `stands the US which
thus far hasn't been favourably disposed toward
any state seeking to circumvent the sanctions
against Iraq, and especially to help Iraq emerge
out of its international isolation.' `But', says
Toledano, `President Clinton who now badly needs
to shore up his domestic ratings, will perhaps
be able to explain his approval of Israeli-Iraqi
alliance as a step towards advancing peace in
the Middle East.' Toledano wants 'Israel to
obtain from the US the entry ticket letting Iraq
rejoin the family of the civilized nations'.
Toledano recalls that `Iraq still has accounts
to settle with Syria for joining the
[US-led] coalition during the Gulf War.'
This is why `an Iraqi alliance with Israel is
going to hurt Syria badly and reduce
(89)
its bargaining power. At the same time let us
not forget that Saddam Hussem owes a moral debt
to Arafat for supporting him fervently
throughout the Gulf War and paying a high price
for that support. Now Arafat wants as many Arab
states to make peace with Israel as possible.
But he must be particularly interested in making
Iraq do so, simply because Iraq has been so
friendly to him. Besides, Iraq may then help him
negotiate with Israel. And the Palestinians will
then see that Arafat is not isolated.' For all
such reasons, Toledano defines the alliance with
Iraq as lying in `Israel's existential
interest'.
It is fairly safe to predict the formation of
such an alliance, overt or covert, in a not very
distant future. It can be also fairly safely
predicted that the Clinton administration will
either overtly support or tacitly condone the
whole scheme. What I cannot predict is whether
the envisaged Israeli world-wide anti-terrorist
drive will incline the Clinton administration to
support Israel, Whatever happens, however, I
find it likely that the peace process with
Jordan is on Israel's part intended as a
preliminary step to a violent contest with
Iran.
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