Wallwritings

by James M. Wall

Could Israel be using Wikileaks to prepare the US for an Israeli air strike against Iran?

This nation is moving toward a repeat of the US rush to invade Iraq in 2003. Mass media coverage of the Wikileaks story is performing the same function the media played to make the case for the 2003 US invasion and subsequent occupation of Iraq.

President George W. Bush was a willing instrument in the military invasion of Iraq. Controlling a major Arab state, Bush assumed, was in the best interest of the US.

Jeff Gates argues in Sabbah Report that Wikileaks is being used as part of Israel’s game theory warfare:

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.

What is sobering about Gates’ argument is the reminder that the campaign to present Iran as a nuclear threat to the region duplicates the campaign waged to win US public opinion through a series of Bush-Cheney lies and deception about non-existent WMDs leading up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

The majority of the American public was duped into supporting the Bush war strategy in 2003. Voices were raised against the strategy, but the main stream media and political leaders in both parties gave their endorsement.

One speech against the Iraq invasion by then Illinois State Senator Barack Obama was enough to gain the support of anti-war progressive voters. New York Senator Hillary Clinton reluctantly supported the war, a decision that contributed to her loss to Obama in the Democratic primary race.

We are reminded of the American pro-war enthusiasm and our public resistance to criticism of the war in the years leading up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, by the arrival of the movie, Fair Game, which opened in US theaters in early November.

The film’s release could not have been better timed to warn the American public of the old saying: “Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me”.

Unfortunately, the American public has an extremely short memory. Fair Game covers events that began a decade ago. Instead of seeing real history, we escape into action, sex, comedy, or fantasy movies.

What the public is missing by not seeing Fair Game is a thrilling, fast-paced real life adventure story involving Valerie Plame Wilson and Joseph Wilson, a married couple, (Naomi Watts and Sean Penn (pictured above), loyal and dedicated US public servants who were ensnared in the post 911 White House web of lies about Iraq.

The Wilsons were victims of an illegal White House strategy, orchestrated through the office of Vice President Dick Cheney by Karl Rove and implemented by Cheney’s Chief of Staff, I. Lewis (Scooter) Libby.

Valerie Plame Wilson began her training as a CIA agent after graduating from college. Joseph Wilson began his government service in Niger as a general services officer. He was later the Deputy Chief of Mission (to US Ambassador to Iraq, April Glaspie) at the US Embassy in Baghdad.

The film is based on two books, one written by Plame (Fair Game) and the other by Wilson (The Politics of Truth). It was directed by Doug Liman, who was the director of the 2002 film, The Bourne Identity, another adventure film of deceit in high places.

Plame is the daughter of retired US Air Force colonel, Sam Plame (Sam Shepherd). She is such a dedicated and trained CIA operative that, at first, she finds it impossible to break her code of silence even after she is falsely accused in the White House campaign.

Her husband’s reputation is attacked, his career as a consultant is wrecked. Plame’s career as a CIA agent is ended; her agents are exposed. Some are killed.

Her father reminds her that “what they did was wrong, Val, just plain wrong. Don’t you ever forget that”.  Plame breaks her silence and agrees to testify before Congress, leading the US Justice Department to launch an investigation of Libby, but not, it must be noted, of Karl Rove or Dick Cheney.

Libby was convicted March 6, 2007, of lying and obstructing a leak investigation. He was sentenced to 30 months in prison and fined $250,000.

Four months later, President Bush commuted Libby’s sentence. Vice President Cheney was angry with Bush for not granting Libby a full pardon.

MSNBC reported on Libby’s conviction in a 2007 story:

Libby is the highest-ranking White House official to be convicted of a felony since the Iran-Contra scandal of the mid-1980s.

The case brought new attention to the Bush administration’s much-criticized handling of weapons of mass destruction intelligence in the run-up to the Iraq war.

The verdict culminated a nearly four-year investigation into how CIA official Valerie Plame’s name was leaked to reporters in 2003. The trial revealed that top members of the administration were eager to discredit Plame’s husband, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, who accused the administration of doctoring prewar intelligence on Iraq.

The scene below comes late in Fair Game before Plame testifies to the congressional committee. She is talking with her former CIA boss:

Alan Dershowitz is a noted criminal and civil liberties lawyer. He is a strong Zionist with close ties to Israel’s right-wing government. In a Huffington Post column, Dershowitz does not speculate. He writes as if it is a fact that Israel plays a major role in pushing US policy in the Middle East.

Now that the WikiLeaks reveal widespread Arab support for the military option against Iran’s nuclear facilities to be put on the table, the time has come to reassess United States policy toward the Ahmadinejad regime.

Even if Israel freezes settlement building, the Palestinians come to the negotiating table and an agreement is reached about borders, refugees and Jerusalem, there will still be no real peace in the Middle East — if Iran continues on its determined path toward developing deliverable nuclear weapons.

On November 29, PBS correspondent Judy Woodruff interviewed Zbigniew Brzezinski, national security advisor for President Jimmy Carter, about the Wikileaks documents.

Brzeniski told Woodruff:

The real issue is, who is feeding WikiLeaks on this issue? They’re getting a lot of information which seems trivial, inconsequential, but some of it seems surprisingly pointed.

. . .  The very pointed references to Arab leaders could have as their objective undermining their political credibility at home, because this kind of public identification of their hostility towards Iran could actually play against them at home.

. . . I have no doubt that WikiLeaks is getting a lot of the stuff from sort of relatively unimportant sources, like the one that perhaps is identified on the air.

But it may be getting stuff at the same time from interested intelligence parties who want to manipulate the process and achieve certain very specific objectives.

Iranian Professor Farhang Jahanpour  recently wrote a guest column for Juan Cole’s Informed Comment site. Cole is a professor at the University of Michigan.

Jahanpour is a former professor and dean of the Faculty of Languages at the University of Isfahan, Iran, and a former Senior Fulbright Research Scholar at Harvard.

He writes:

What is truly alarming about the new batch of Wikileaks diplomatic files is the extent to which US politicians and their Israeli allies are obsessed with Iran.

There is virtually no talk of Israeli colonial settlements on the West Bank, the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, the war crimes in Gaza, the attack on the aid flotilla, and Israel’s arsenal of hundreds of nuclear weapons, but there is constant preoccupation with Iran’s uranium enrichment and whether Israel or the United States should attack Iran first.

The media has dwelt almost exclusively on the remarks of the Saudi King Abdullah’s ambassador in Washington, calling on America to “cut off the head of this snake”.

There are quotes from the rulers of other Western friends in the Middle East, Kuwait, Bahrain, UAE and Jordan, repeating what American officials wanted to hear, namely that Iran’s nuclear ambitions pose an “existential threat” to them…

By latching on to the alleged remarks of these autocratic rulers, Western media has tried to convey the idea that Iran does not only pose an “existential threat” to Israel, but to all those other friends of the West as well.

However, the Arab rulers’ nightmare is that while they hate Iran for obvious reasons, most of their subjects look up to Iran as the only country in the region that is championing the Palestinian cause and is standing up to Israel and the West.

Justin Elliott writes on Salon.com, that Israel’s warnings of danger about Iran as a nuclear threat, has been a recurring Israeli theme since the mid-1990s.

Officials at the U.S. Department of State, we learned from the secret cables released by WikiLeaks last week, have serious questions about the accuracy — and sincerity — of Israeli predictions about when Iran will obtain a nuclear weapon.

As one State official wrote in response to an Israeli general’s November 2009 claim that Iran would have a bomb in one year: “It is unclear if the Israelis firmly believe this or are using worst-case estimates to raise greater urgency from the United States.”

. . . . According to various Israeli government predictions over the years, Iran was going to have a bomb by the mid-90s — or 1998, 1999, 2000, 2004, 2005, and finally 2010. More recent Israeli predictions have put that date at 2011 or 2014.

An Israeli attack against Iran would not have been a wise move in the mid-90s and it would not have been a wise move any year since.

Barack Obama knew when he ran for president in 2008, that an attack on Iran would be a monumentally bad decision.

We can only hope that Obama is now playing his own intelligence game against the American/Israeli war party, a game in which the President of the United States ultimately refuses to grant Israel permission to attack Iran. Inshallah.

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by James M. Wall

A regular reader wrote recently and asked why I write so often about Palestine and Israel.

It was a good question and after some time for reflection I have an answer for him, inspired by a 1971 Johnny Cash song, “The Man in Black”.

Cash had been asked why he always wore black. He explains that he did so because he identifies with the poor and the hungry, the prisoners, the lonely and the old, and those who are dying in a war in a distant land, at that time, the Vietnam War.

A few years later, after “The Man In Black” became a best-selling album, Cash said:

“With the Vietnam War as painful in my mind as it was in most other Americans’, I wore it ‘in mournin’ for the lives that could have been.’ … Apart from the Vietnam War being over, I don’t see much reason to change my position … The old are still neglected, the poor are still poor, the young are still dying before their time, and we’re not making many moves to make things right. There’s still plenty of darkness to carry off.”

The Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, and our American wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan, are today providing “plenty of darkness”. Together, these wars are today’s Vietnam.

I am aware that I cannot sing, or write simple, powerful poetry as Cash has done. But I must write about the darkness that covers our nation as it continues its pursuit of empirical conquest at a tremendous cost at home, under the guise of “fighting terror”. Indeed, “terrorism” is today’s version of the Communism that Nixon and Kissinger used as their excuse for “defending” South Vietnam in the 1960s and 1970s.

Johnny Cash originally recorded “The Man in Black”  before a college audience in May, 1971, one year after the Kent State Massacre when, during a student protest against the invasion of Cambodia, Ohio national guardsmen fired 67 rounds over a period of 13 seconds, killing four students and wounding nine others, one of whom suffered permanent paralysis.

In May, 1971, Richard Nixon and his Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, were still conducting a secret war, the details of which were only fully revealed on June 30, 1971, when the US Supreme Court ruled that the federal government could not prevent the publication of the Pentagon Papers in the New York Times.

The story of how those Papers were finally published in the Times is vividly presented in the 2010 documentary, The Most Dangerous Man in America. The title refers to Daniel Ellsberg, the Harvard professor who courageously risked his freedom to deliver the Pentagon Papers to the Times.

Henry Kissinger, who once taught with Ellsburg at Harvard, bitterly described his former academic colleague as “the most dangerous man in America.”

Ellsberg writes of his experiences in his 2002 book, Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers.

Along with the vast majority of the American public, Johnny Cash was unaware of the Vietnam war narrative which Nixon and Kissinger tried to keep secret, when he wrote the lyrics for  “The Man in Black”. What he did know was that young Americans and many Vietnamese were dying needlessly.

The lyrics are at the end of this post.

Today, with wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, the West Bank Bank and Gaza our military forces, and our surrogate Israeli military forces, are involved in an overall war against what a previous American president misnamed as “the global war on terror”.

This 2010 midterm election have essentially ignored the thousands and hundreds of thousands who are dying in distant lands because of our wars. Instead,  public attention is riveted on the craziness of the Tea Party candidates, some of whom may very well end up in the Congress.

The American public does not know about the Israeli settlers who set fire to a Palestinian girls’ school building near Nablus this past week. Juan Cole, whose Informed Comment blog is a flashing light of warning to the American public, tells the story of the attack on the school:

The phrase “ethnic cleansing” conjures up a swift, comprehensive act of expulsion. But in reality, moving a large population off its land is the death of a thousand cuts, a slow, inexorable process of stealing property, harassment, forcing people into a condition of malnutrition.

The Native Americans in the Americas, the Aborigines in Australia, and the Palestinians in Israel/Palestine were only sometimes forced off their land suddenly and en masse. The gradual processes told, in the long run.

The amazing thing about what is being done to the Palestinians in the Palestinian West Bank by Israeli illegal aliens is that it is happening in full view of the world, reported on by wire services, and yet remains invisible to Western publics.

The world reacts in horror when the Taliban in Afghanistan torch girls’ schools. But Israeli squatters just set fire to the store room of a Palestinian girls’ school, and the whole school would have gone up in flames if that warehouse had not been near a water main. The Israeli illegals left behind graffiti saying ‘regards from the hills.’

Cole also reports that earlier in October,

Israeli squatters set fire to a Palestinian mosque in Bethlehem.

[Also this autumn] there is the seasonal vandalism against olive trees in Palestinian orchards, which reached a fever pitch this year. The Israeli authorities prosecute few of these offenses and almost never hand down a punishment to an Israeli squatter.

The 10 million olive trees in the West Bank and Gaza, occupying some 45 percent of the farmland, are the matrix of Palestinian existence. An attack on olive trees is a form of economic warfare of the first water.

The American public knows far more about the fumbling responses of the Republican candidate for Joe Biden’s old Delaware senate seat, than it does about the needless death of a 2-year-old Gaza child who was prevented by the Israeli army from traveling the short distance outside Gaza for specialized treatment. The Palestinian organization, Physicians for Human Rights, has that story on its website:

Nasma Abu Lasheen died on Saturday, October 16, 2010 in Gaza. Israel failed to issue her an urgent entry permit for life-saving medical treatment at Ha-Emek Medical Center in Afula, Israel. She was two years old.

Abu Lasheen, a young resident of Gaza diagnosed with Leukemia, was referred for emergency treatment in Israel on October 6, 2010. When requests to the Israeli Army for an entry permit went unanswered for several days, by way of B’tselem, the family contacted Physicians for Human Rights- Israel (PHR-Israel) for additional help.

That very same day, on October 13, 2010, PHR-Israel contacted the Gaza District Coordination Office (DCO) demanding a permit be issued immediately to the baby and her father to enable their entry into Israel. A military approval was finally granted the next afternoon, October 14, 2010.

Abu Lasheen’s medical condition had been deteriorating rapidly and by the time the permit was received, the treating doctor in Gaza, Dr. Mohammad Abu Sha’aban, said she was too sick to travel. Nasma died in the early morning hours of October 16, 2010.

Ziad Abbas works for the Middle East Children’s Alliance on a project to bring clean water to the children of Palestine. He grew up in Palestine. He writes in Counter Punch, that his work is especially personal to him because of  his own childhood experiences of growing up deprived of water.

Israel controls and uses 89% of the water resources in the West Bank, leaving 11% for the 2.5 million Palestinians. The Israeli Occupation continues to limit Palestinian access to clean water as form of collective punishment by controlling the water resources and distribution and by destroying the water that we are able to get.

During Israeli military incursions, and especially during curfews, when we could not leave our homes, Israeli soldiers would shoot the water storage tanks on our roofs. Our water would pour down the sides of our buildings unused.

During the recent attack on Gaza, Israel targeted the entire water infrastructure including the largest water purification system in Gaza. They also targeted electrical generators that supported water purification and sewage treatment.

I write about these things because American churches are still hung up on not offending their Jewish neighbors, thus choosing interfaith harmony over justice.

I write about these things because major denominational meetings, like this past summer’s General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church, USA, dickered and delayed and finally decided to study further how they might best deal with the “problems” in the Middle East.

Since that Presbyterian GA meeting, two-year-old Abu Lasheen died waiting for permission to travel to an Israeli hospital. Since that meeting, Israeli settlers set fire to a Palestinian girls school, leaving behind graffiti on the wall that said, “regards from the hills”. Something about the insensitive arrogance of that graffiti implies there was not enough room on the wall to add, in Clint Eastwoodian fashion, “we’ll be back.”

I write about the American media’s blindness to the narrative of the suffering in Palestine because Tom Friedman continues to fool his liberal readers by pretending to criticize Israel when his criticism always includes the AIPAC approved list of what he insists are “facts”, but which are either outright lies or distortions of reality.

The most recent example was Friedman’s October 20 column which calls on Israel to help President Obama line up world opposition to Iran by reaching a friendly agreement with Palestinian negotiators.

Friedman opens his column with a set of “stubborn facts” which are really just a repeat of the acceptable Israeli narrative which, of course, he assures his readers are “stubborn facts”.  Only, they are not.

Here is the start of Thomas Friedman’s latest  column, followed by corrections:

Say what you want about Israel’s obstinacy at times, it remains the only country in the United Nations that another U.N. member, Iran, has openly expressed the hope that it be wiped off the map. And that same country, Iran, is trying to build a nuclear weapon.

Israel is the only country I know of in the Middle East that has unilaterally withdrawn from territory conquered in war — in Lebanon and Gaza — only to be greeted with unprovoked rocket attacks in return.

Indeed, if you want to talk about spoiled children, there is no group more spoiled by Iran and Syria than Hezbollah, the Lebanese Shiite militia.

Hezbollah started a war against Israel in 2006 that brought death, injury and destruction to thousands of Lebanese — and Hezbollah’s punishment was to be rewarded with thousands more missiles and millions more dollars to do it again. These are stubborn facts.

Friedman’s “stubborn facts” are stubborn, alright. They are falsehoods or distortions he clings to “stubbornly”.

Iran’s President Ahmedinejad never used the phrase, “wipe Israel off the map”. That was an initial mistranslation into English which the media loved and never let go. The media has refused, as Friedman does here, to go back and obtain the original statement by Ahmedinejad in a speech he gave to a Persian audience.

The Iranian president was quoting an ancient statement by Iran’s first Islamist leader, the late Ayatollah Khomeini, when he said that “this regime occupying Jerusalem must vanish from the page of time” just as the Shah’s regime in Iran had vanished.

He was not making a military threat. He was calling for an end to the occupation of Jerusalem at some point in the future. The “page of time” phrase suggests he did not expect it to happen soon. There was no implication that either Khomeini, when he first made the statement, or Ahmadinejad, in repeating it, felt it was imminent, or that Iran would be involved in bringing it about.

Another error: It is true that Israel took its military forces out of Lebanon and Gaza, but it did so because the cost in Israeli lives had become too expensive to maintain the garrisons in those two areas.

The invasions had proved to be a major loss for the vastly superior Israeli forces, a fact Friedman ignores as he praises Israel for its “unilateral withdrawal” from the two countries it had invaded and failed to control.

Friedman writes that “Hezbollah started a war against Israel in 2006 that brought death, injury and destruction to thousands of Lebanese.”

Israel did launch a massive invasion of Lebanon in 2006, but who fired the first shot has been debated. Israeli sources have confirmed that Israel’s invasion plans were already on the drawing board when a border skirmish erupted, giving Israel the excuse it wanted to launch a war that, indeed, “brought death, injury and destruction to thousands of Lebanese.”

Who brought those deaths, injuries and destruction to the Lebanese? Israel, of course.

Careful research would quickly demonstrate to Friedman and every other pro-Israel pundit and politician that Friedman’s “stubborn facts” are either false or distorted.

I will continue to write on Israel and Palestine as long as pundits like Thomas Friedman have access to the pages of the New York Times, and the American public remains ignorant of the actual facts on the ground in Israel and Palestine.

The Man in Black, lyrics by Johnny Cash

Well, you wonder why I always dress in black, Why you never see bright colors on my back,  And why does my appearance always have a somber tone. Well, there’s a reason for the things that I have on.

I wear the black for the poor and the beaten down, Livin’ in the hopeless, hungry side of town, And I wear it for the prisoner who has long paid for his crime, But still is there because he’s a victim of the times.

I wear the black for those who never read, Or listened to the words that Jesus said, About the road to happiness through love and charity, Why, you’d think He’s talking straight to you and me.

Well, we’re doin’ mighty fine, I do suppose, In our streak of lightnin’ cars and fancy clothes, But just so we’re reminded of the ones who are held back, Up front there ought ‘a be a Man In Black.

I wear it for the sick and lonely old, For the reckless ones whose bad trip left them cold, I wear the black in mornin’ for the lives that could have been, Each week we lose a hundred fine young men.

And, I wear it for the thousands who have died, Believen’ that the Lord was on their side, And I wear it for another hundred thousand who have died, Believen’ that we all were on their side.

Well, there’s things that never will be right I know, And things need changin’ everywhere you go, But ’til we start to make a move to make a few things right, You’ll never see me wear a suit of white.

Ah, I’d love to wear a rainbow every day, To tell the world that everything’s OK, But mabe I can carry off a little darkness on my back,

‘Till things are brighter, I’m the Man In Black.

The photo at the top of the page is of two Bedouin girls, in school uniform, returning to their houses after a school day in Abu Farda near the West Bank city of Qalqilia on October 6, 2010. MaanImages/Khaleel Reash.

The Youtube above, and the lyrics by Johnny Cash may be found at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qLkmC2VuXA8.

by James M. Wall

President Obama is so desperate to keep Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu glued to the peace talks negotiation table for two additional months, that he appears to have authorized an “incentive package” to Israel that is demeaning, dehumanizing, and insulting to Palestinians.

The “package” deal is said to be contained in a letter from Obama that has been delivered to Bibi Netanyahu. A report of the letter has been “leaked” by a David Makosky, a close associate of Obama advisor Dennis Ross.

The New York Times reports that “the package of incentives for Israel was devised largely by Dennis B. Ross.” (Ross is pictured above with Prime Minister Netanyahu.)

Mark Landler wrote in the Times that the US is offering Israel:

military hardware, support for a long-term Israeli presence in the Jordan Valley, help with enforcing a ban on the smuggling of weapons through a Palestinian state, a promise to veto Security Council resolutions critical of Israel during the talks and a pledge to forge a regional security agreement for the Middle East.

Talk about giving away the store in a deal that cheats the original store owner, just look at the significance of this package, the implications of which Mark Landler does not describe in detail, sparing his pro-Israel readers the ugly meaning of the deal.

The package promises that the United States will support a long-term Israeli “presence in the Jordan Valley”, an American guarantee that gives away yet more Palestinian land, the rich farm area that runs along the Jordan River and which, of course, allows Israel to protect itself from a mighty Jordanian army which might pour across the Jordan river to attack a hapless nuclear power.  The absurdity of that image is mind-boggling.

The package is nothing less than another American endorsement of Israel’s take over of Palestinian land.

The US will also “help” Israel prevent any arms “smuggling” into Gaza.  And, pray tell, how will that be done?  By assuring Israel it may retain a security barrier in the south of the Gaza Strip, more land confiscation and further assurance that blockade of all Gaza will continue?

And how about that part of the “incentive package” that the US will veto Security Council resolutions critical of Israel during the talks. So what is new?  The US already automatically vetoes all resolutions “critical of Israel”. Would this mean that if Israel bombed Iran, and the UN sends up a protest resolution, even that act of war would get a US veto because the US always keeps its word?

What do the Palestinians get as their part of the “incentive package? Reuters is reporting that the US promises the Palestinians that it will support their preference for the outline of a border between the West Bank and Israel along the Green Line.

Since Israel’s “apartheid” (separation) wall, built well within the 1967 Green Line,  is already such an established “fact on the ground”, the emptiness of that promise should be obvious to anyone actually paying attention to the negotiation process.

The “incentive package”, so generous to Israel and demeaning to the Palestinians, could not be accepted by Netanyahu by himself.  He needs to gain the support of his right-wing Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman who told the United Nations General Assembly recently:

Israel should drop plans to negotiate a peace deal within the next year, and pursue a two-stage interim pact that could lead to decades of negotiations and the redrawing of Israel’s borders to separate Arabs and Israelis.

Lieberman’s ultra conservative racist worldview is embarrassing to many American Jews and Israeli citizens, but he does lead a political party that could block any effort by Netanyahu to accept the insulting “incentive package” Dennis Ross has delivered  to Bibi.

At first, the Israeli government rejected the US proposal, but this might change now that the Israeli Cabinet, on Sunday, passed a new citizenship law drafted by Lieberman’s right wing party that would require “every non-Jew wishing to become a citizen to swear loyalty to Israel as a Jewish state.”

The  Jerusalem newspaper Ha’aretz, reports that in the Cabinet meeting twenty-two ministers voted in favor of the proposal. Eight ministers were opposed.

Prior to the Cabinet vote,

Netanyahu said the amendment to the citizenship law would require that “anyone seeking to become a naturalized Israeli citizen will declare [that] he or she will be a loyal citizen of the state of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state.”

Gideon Levy’s Sunday Ha’aretz column opens with this headline:”The Jewish Republic of Israel: Swearing an oath to a Jewish state will decide its fate. It is liable to turn the country into a theocracy like Saudi Arabia”.

Levy’s column, written for his Jerusalem readers, begins

“Remember this day. It’s the day Israel changes its character. As a result, it can also change its name to the Jewish Republic of Israel, like the Islamic Republic of Iran. Granted, the loyalty oath bill that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is seeking to have passed purportedly only deals with new citizens who are not Jewish, but it affects the fate of all of us.

From now on, we will be living in a new, officially approved, ethnocratic, theocratic, nationalistic, and racist country. Anyone who thinks it doesn’t affect him is mistaken. There is a silent majority that is accepting this with worrying apathy, as if to say: “I don’t care what country I live in.”

Also anyone who thinks the world will continue to relate to Israel as a democracy after this law doesn’t understand what it is about. It’s another step that seriously harms Israel’s image.”

Finally, we must ask: Who is this Dennis Ross, the American diplomat who has emerged as the peace talks point man for the Obama Administration, shoving aside George Mitchell and even Secretary of State Hillary Clinton while engaging in deal making with the likes of Avidor Lieberman?

Ross is a long time neoconservative operative working within the American Israel Public Affairs Committee network.  Makowsky is his colleague who currently works for the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP), a neoconservative think tank founded in 1985 by Martin Indyk, a former research director of AIPAC.

Before joining the Obama team, Ross was a Middle East peace negotiator for President Bill Clinton. With Democrats out of power during the Bush years, Ross worked for WINEP.

At the start of the Obama administration, Ross was given a broad range of responsibilities in the State Department, none of which involved Israel because Ross was regarded by some as “an unsuitable diplomat for the Middle East because of his strong ties to Israel.” Earlier in 2010 Ross was moved from State to the National Security Council.  The website Rightwebpicks up the story:

According to a report in Haaretz, unnamed “diplomatic sources” in Israel speculated, among other reasons, that Ross might have been moved out of State and into the NSC because of a book he cowrote with David Makovsky of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP), which is titled Myths, Illusions, and Peace—Finding a New Direction for America in the Middle East.

In the book, which was written before Ross was tapped to serve in the administration, Ross and Makovsky express views at odds with the approach taken by the Obama State Department, including arguing that the United States must delink Iran policy from issues related to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Nathan Guttman of Forward, [an American Jewish publication] wrote that some experts saw Ross’s move to the NSC as an “olive branch to Israel,” which has chafed at Obama’s tough line on Israeli policies toward Palestinians.

Aaron David Miller, a former Mideast peace negotiator, told Guttman, “It’s clear that if Obama wants to advance something on Iran, and on the Israeli-Palestinian front, he will need to reach a modus vivendi with Israel, and that will require someone who knows the Israelis well.”

It is now clear that Dennis Ross, a longtime neoconservative and Israeli supporter ensconced in the Washington establishment,  has assumed a major role in US-Israel relations.

Meanwhile, in Sirte, Libya, on Friday the Arab League voted to walk what the New York Times referred to as a “diplomatic tightrope”. The League agreed to give American peace process negotiators one additional month to reach an agreement with Israel on a settlement freeze.

The League has long been a paper tiger which issues statements but does little to support its members, especially the Palestinians.  One major Arab League member, Egypt, for example, supports Israel’s Gaza blockade by closing off its border with Gaza.

Jonathan Cook, a British journalist who works in the West Bank, has suggested that Obama’s “incentive package” for Israel would have gained a two month settlement construction freeze long enough to extend the freeze through the US November elections.

I refuse to subscribe to that level of cynicism, though it is hard to deny that there appears no other obvious explanation for the “incentive package”

Too bad we don’t have Helen Thomas sitting in the front row at Obama’s press conferences. She could ask  the president to explain the Dennis Ross letter drafted for Obama. No other White House journalist seems to care.

Could it be that Thomas was sandbagged by that renegade rabbi into making an ill-advised statement in a street corner interview, just so she could be ousted from her job?

Meanwhile, if you are wondering what the Jordan Valley “security border” that Obama promised Israel in the “package” deal, looks like, the United Nations map at the right side of this page provides an overview of the space Obama proposes become a permanent part of Israel.  The red areas on this map represent land under Israel’s total control. Obama’s offer would simply codify that reality.

Sure seems like a lot to give away to get only a two month extension of talks that are going nowhere in the first place.