In recent days, we’ve witnessed the rare spectacle of Israelis and Palestinians celebrating at the same time. Ironically, this was the result of negotiations between the government of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the Palestinian resistance organization Hamas, which Israel and the United States describe as “terrorists.” It was a moment that revealed what it would take for negotiations between seemingly irreconcilable foes to result in a credible agreement and why the current “peace process” has gone nowhere.
But in the wake of the Israel-Hamas agreement under which 1,027 Palestinians held by Israel are being released in exchange for one Israeli soldier held in Gaza, the editors of the New York Times expressed a good deal of frustration.
“If Mr. Netanyahu can negotiate with Hamas — which shoots rockets at Israel, refuses to recognize Israel’s existence,” they wondered in an Oct. 18 editorial, “why won’t he negotiate seriously with the Palestinian Authority, which Israel relies on to help keep the peace in the West Bank?”
What are the chances of this happening? The Times was referring to the supposedly “moderate” Ramallah-based Palestinian Authority of Mahmoud Abbas, whose U.S.-backed security forces collaborate with Israel to keep any form of armed or unarmed Palestinian resistance in check. The Times noted that Netanyahu had defied Israeli families whose loved ones had been killed in armed attacks by some of the Palestinian prisoners: Why can’t Netanyahu also buck the wishes of Israeli settlers in the West Bank in a similar way and put in place a settlement freeze?
Abbas insists he won’t return to negotiations until Israel stops building Jewish-only colonies in the West Bank, especially in and around eastern occupied Jerusalem. The blame lay squarely with Netanyahu according to the Times: “The problem is not that he can’t compromise and make tough choices. It’s that he won’t.”
In calling for a return to negotiations between Israel and the PA, the Times was echoing others — including the Obama administration — who are incapable of seeing alternatives to the failed U.S.-backed “peace process.”
But this is terribly unfair to the Israeli prime minister. Netanyahu has done absolutely nothing that his supposedly more “dovish” predecessors, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, did not do. Olmert and Livni did negotiate with Abbas without ever stopping settlement construction and without advancing proposals that would meet even Abbas’ minimalist demands. Netanyahu says he’s willing to do the same and constantly begs Abbas to meet him at the negotiating table.
And the Olmert government, like Netanyahu’s, negotiated with Hamas. The Palestine Papers — a trove of documents and minutes related to the peace process that was leaked to Al Jazeera in January — shed light on what happened.
In 2008, Israel and Hamas were very close to reaching the deal that Netanyahu eventually struck: about 1,000 Palestinian prisoners for the Israeli prisoner of war. But it was Abbas’ Palestinian Authority, the leaked documents unambiguously show, that lobbied hard and successfully for Israel not to do the deal. PA officials argued — as the Times now does — that handing a victory to Hamas would damage Abbas, who has nothing to show for all his cooperation with the occupation.
Instead, PA officials wanted Israel to negotiate with them over a prisoner exchange. But as Livni explained to senior Abbas aides at a March 31, 2008, meeting in Jerusalem, “We wanted to talk with Abu Mazen [Abbas] but he cannot release Gilad Shalit.”
And that in a nutshell is the answer to the Times’ question. Israel did not negotiate with Hamas because Hamas is “moderate,” any more than the U.S. has negotiated with the Taliban in Afghanistan because it is “moderate,” or the U.K. negotiated with representatives of the Irish Republican Army because they were “moderate.”
In all those cases, enemies who had previously been declared off limits (“we don’t negotiate with terrorists”) were brought into the fold because they were in a position of strength.
Similarly, the reason Israel has been willing to limit its military assaults on the Gaza Strip recently is in part because Hamas and other Palestinian factions have been able to exercise limited deterrence with their rockets.
Netanyahu will not impose a settlement freeze in response to Abbas’ demands simply because Netanyahu believes in and supports the colonization of the West Bank, and Abbas does not have the power to make him.
Israel only negotiates seriously when it feels it has no other choice and when its adversary has enough power to impose an outcome it cannot prevent by other means.
Does this mean that Hamas and Israel could potentially do a deal over the broader issues? The answer is no, but not because of the conventional wisdom that Hamas doesn’t recognize Israel, espouses violence, and refuses to accept signed agreements.
In fact, Hamas has said repeatedly — including in a New York Times interview with its leader Khaled Meshal — that the movement is willing to accept a Palestinian state in only the West Bank and Gaza Strip, provided all Israeli settlements are removed and the rights of Palestinian refugees are respected.
But while Hamas was strong in the specific context of negotiations over prisoners, the movement by itself or even in combination with other Palestinian factions is not strong enough to compel Israel to meet broader demands.
The power balance remains too lopsided against Palestinians for negotiations to be anything more than what they have been for two decades: a cover for Israel to continue colonization.
For this reason in 2005, Palestinian civil society, independently of all political factions, issued its unified call to supporters around the world for boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) on Israel. It urges that these “punitive measures” be maintained until Israel recognizes the Palestinian people’s rights and respects international law in three ways: an end to the occupation and colonization of Arab lands conquered in 1967; recognizing the fundamental rights of Palestinian citizens of Israel to full equality; and respecting the rights of Palestinian refugees, including the right of return. These are goals that unify all Palestinians, whether they support the fast-fading two-state solution, or a single democratic state incorporating Israelis and Palestinians throughout historic Palestine (Israel, the West Bank and Gaza Strip together).
Modeled on the successful campaign that helped isolate apartheid South Africa, the logic is straightforward: As long as Israel enjoys an overwhelming power advantage it will never respect Palestinian rights nor dismantle its racist, colonial and apartheid-like policies. Why should it when it pays no price for doing what it pleases?
The BDS campaign was prompted in part by the response — or rather the lack of it — to the 2004 International Court of Justice ruling that Israel’s West Bank wall is illegal. When no governments took any measures to enforce the decision, Palestinians realized that global civil society would have to act.
Similarly, Israel remains in violation of countless U.N. resolutions, and has faced no accountability whatsoever for the war crimes and crimes against humanity committed over many years, but most recently in Gaza in 2009 and detailed in the U.N.-commissioned Goldstone report.
Could the BDS shift the balance of power such that Israel would be forced to concede Palestinian rights? The international movement’s rapid growth has convinced some influential Israelis that it can. Last year, the Reut Institute, a think tank with close ties to the Israeli government, called for an all-out campaign of “sabotage” and “attack” on “delegitimization” of Israel. It especially focused on BDS, and warned that the movement’s “ momentum is gaining.”
In response to the Reut report, the Jewish Federations of North America and the Jewish Council for Public Affairs launched a multimillion-dollar initiative to “combat anti-Israel boycott, divestment and sanctions campaigns.”
And in his May speech to the Israel lobby (AIPAC), President Obama vowed that the U.S. would help Israel fight “delegitimization.”
But he warned nonetheless that “the march to isolate Israel internationally — and the impulse of the Palestinians to abandon negotiations — will continue to gain momentum in the absence of a credible peace process and alternative.”
Israel’s isolation is growing not only because of BDS, but because of regional developments including the uprising that toppled Egypt’s pro-Israel Mubarak regime, and Turkey’s break with Israel over the Gaza siege and the attack on the Mavi Marmara.
While this might dismay Obama, those who yearn for negotiations leading to peace and justice should do all they can to hasten the erosion of Israel’s power advantage over the Palestinians. After all, as this week’s events demonstrate, Israel only negotiates seriously with the strong.
Stark Aerospace of Mississippi is perhaps the only foreign-owned company with FAA permission to fly a drone in U.S. airspace. Based in the town of Columbus, not far from Mississippi State University, Stark is a subsidiary of the state-owned Israel Aerospace Industries — not that you could tell from looking at the company’s website, executive leadership or affiliations. You have to go to the Mississippi secretary of state website to learn that two of Stark’s three directors are Israelis.
So too with the America’s drone industry. The Israeli influence is not visible but it is real, documented and extremely relevant to the future of drones in America. If you want to know how drones may change American airspace in coming years, just look to Israel, where the unmanned aerial vehicle market is thriving and drones are considered a reliable instrument of “homeland security.”
“There are three explanations for Israel’s success in becoming a world leader in development and production of UAVs,” a top Israeli official explained to the Jerusalem Post last year. “We have unbelievable people and innovation, combat experience that helps us understand what we need and immediate operational use since we are always in a conflict which allows us to perfect our systems.”
Israel’s drone expertise goes back to at least 1970, according to the UAV page of the Israeli Air Force. Mark Daly, an expert on unmanned aircraft at Jane’s Defense in London, notes the Israelis were the first to make widespread use of drones in Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon, when the aircraft were used to monitor troop movements.
Now, as the Arab media and Western reporters such as Scott Wilson of the Washington Post have reported, the Israeli Defense Force uses fleets of constantly hovering drones to intimidate and control the Arab population in the Gaza Strip. (The residents call these drones “zenana,” which both sounds like the aircraft’s distinctive buzz and is Arabic slang for a nagging wife.) The IDF regularly uses drones for targeted assassinations of suspected militants, saying the drones enable them to use “precision strikes” to avoid hurting civilians. Yet as Human Rights Watch has documented, the drone strikes during the Gaza War killed scores of children who were nowhere near armed combatants.
Israel markets its expertise in defense to the rest of the world. Israeli academic Neve Gordon cites a glossy government brochure on drones titled “Israel Homeland Security: Opportunities for Industrial Cooperation,” which boasts, “no other advanced technology country has such a large proportion of citizens with real time experience in the army, security and police forces.” The chapter called “Learning from Israel’s Experience” notes that “many of these professionals continue to work as international consultants and experts after leaving the Israel Defense Forces, police or other defense and security organizations.”
The work has paid off when it comes to drones: The Jewish state is the single largest exporter of drones in the world, responsible for 41 percent of all UAVs exported between 2001 and 2011, according to a database compiled by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. Israeli companies export drone technology to at least 24 countries, including the United States.
In addition to exports, Israeli companies also create subsidiaries in consumer countries. “To increase sales outside Israel, Israel’s defense companies have to set up subsidiaries in target markets, rather than expand local manufacturing,” Haaretz reported in 2009. The Israelis “set up Stark in 2006 to drum up business in America,” according to Haaretz, because the U.S. prefers “to buy armaments and other defense gear from local companies.” In 2007, Stark “inaugurated its first production outfit, which makes Hunter unmanned vehicles that it sells through Northrop Grumman. In fact, the U.S. armed forces have been using [Israeli-made] Hunter drones since the early 1990s.”
As for domestic drone uses, the Israeli example is perhaps most instructive at the U.S. border. The 5 million Palestinian Arabs living in and around Israel, like the 11 undocumented resident aliens in the United States, are ineligible for citizenship in the land they call home. Both groups are subject to monitoring, barriers to entry and rapid expulsion. Not surprisingly one of the first uses of drones by the Department of Homeland Security was to monitor the U.S.-Mexico border, where it now flies Israeli-made Hermes 450 drones.
And the Israeli example is instructive not just at the border, but also south of it, where the Mexican government has allowed the U.S. to fly drone missions as part of the drug war. Mexico has, apparently, learned a thing or two from its northern neighbor about the best country for buying drones. In March, when it allegedly purchased two new drones of its own, it knew where to go: Israel.
An ancient and priceless book, a murky history of evasions and coverups, an underground of sinister and possibly violent dealers, a former spy who drops tantalizing hints and a wily 84-year-old millionaire who says stuff like, “The problem with this story is that it could damage your health”: Are these the ingredients for a cheesy, improbable historical thriller? Yet “The Aleppo Codex,” Matti Friedman’s account of his attempts to learn the history of one of the world’s most precious books, sports all of these assets, and it’s nonfiction. If reporting this story damaged Friedman’s health, it probably happened when he realized what he’d stumbled into and his reporter’s heart started beating in doubletime.
The Aleppo Codex is the most authoritative version of the Hebrew Bible, produced in the 10th century by the great rabbi Aaron Ben-Asher and the scribe Shlomo ben Buya. Friedman, who lives in Israel and has covered the Mideast and the Caucasus for the Associated Press and other publications, explains that the codex’s significance to Jewish faith and identity is more than symbolic. As a people scattered across the globe, “instead of being bound by a king, a temple, or geography, [Jews] needed to be bound by something else, something portable. What emerged was the idea that a people could be held together by words.” Yet in the centuries before printing, when words were transmitted orally and by copyists, it was all too easy for mistakes and variations to creep in, and “Jews could not be held together by a book if they were not reading precisely the same one.”
The codex was the perfect version of the Bible, a sort of atomic clock of Judaism, and intended to be the model for all subsequent copies. Its early history was fraught: captured by Crusaders in the fall of Jerusalem, ransomed by the Jewish community in Cairo and consulted by the fabled sage Maimonides, it was eventually taken to the Syrian city of Aleppo. There, it resided for half a century. Although it was well-cared-for by Aleppo’s Jewish community, it had come to be revered as a relic or treasure; few were allowed to see it and no one was allowed to copy it.
All that changed in 1947, when the establishment of the state of Israel by a United Nations resolution led to unrest in the Arab world and the harassment and persecution of Jewish communities in Muslim nations. In Aleppo, this took the form of riots and the sacking of the synagogue. The codex — commonly referred to as the Crown — was supposed to have been consumed in a fire set by the mob.
It was not, and in 1958, the Crown was smuggled into Jerusalem by a cheese merchant who was one of the few Syrian Jews to receive official permission to emigrate to Israel. Friedman became interested in this “lonely treasure and millennium-old traveler” in 2008, when he decided to write an article about it. He imagined the piece would be “an uplifting and uncomplicated account of the rescue of a cultural artifact,” but what he discovered instead was a thicket of conflicting reports, missing records, puzzling omissions, stonewalling officials and obsessed amateur sleuths.
The mysteries surround not the ancient history of the book, but what happened to it between 1947 and the mid-1970s, although even establishing where things got dodgy proved to be a challenge. Friedman relates each piece of the story as he untangled it himself, and part of the pleasure of “The Aleppo Codex” is getting to tag along on the heels of a real-life investigative journalist as he does his detective work. Those years spent writing wire copy have not eroded the author’s eloquence, either, as the book’s headier touches attest: “Down in those streets, the stores now shuttered, the women of the manzul were receiving clients, and the men were submerged in cafe smoke like deep-sea divers, tubes between their lips, inhaling the rose-scented oxygen of water pipes.”
While the official story simply states that the Crown was presented to the president of Israel, Itzhak Ben-Zvi, upon its arrival in Jerusalem in 1958, Friedman unearthed evidence that this was no simple handoff. Most of the Jewish community of Aleppo had immigrated to Israel, and their rabbis insisted that the Crown was supposed to have been delivered to them. The cheese merchant maintained that the rabbis still living in Aleppo, the ones who had passed him the book, told him no more than to give it to “a religious man.” (The Syrian government prevented communication with the Jews in Aleppo, so his story could not be confirmed or disproved.) The Aleppo rabbis decided to take their complaint to court.
This dispute embodied major tensions within the newly formed state. The Aleppo rabbis had presided over what was, as Friedman writes, “an old community by the time Roman legions destroyed the Jewish temple in Jerusalem in AD 70.” The Israeli leadership, “largely secular European socialists,” did not strike the Aleppo Jews as “representing the entire Jewish people.” Why should these interlopers be allowed to appropriate a book that had been the focal point of Aleppo’s venerable Jewish community for half a millennium?
The codex lawsuit was also a dramatic example of what Friedman describes as a “largely untold story” concerning the migration of the Jewish Diaspora to Israel after the formation of the state. Along with the movement of people, there was also a “great migration of books.” Jews from all over the Muslim world were forced to leave neighborhoods their families had inhabited for centuries. Not only did distinctive local cultures vanish overnight, but so did many of their treasured texts, left at docks and airstrips with the promise that they would be forwarded on to their owners in Israel, and then never seen again. Well, not exactly never: Some of these books and scrolls turned up later in state archives and even in booksellers’ shops.
If that were all there was to the story of the Aleppo Codex, it would be fascinating (and dismaying) enough, but after wrestling with the shadowy story of how the Crown got to Jerusalem, Friedman turns to a second and even more disturbing question: Where is the rest of it? About 200 pages, some 40 percent of the Crown, are missing. These are the most important parts of all: the first five books of the Bible, also known as the Pentateuch and the Torah. Again, the official story holds that portions of the Crown were burned in the 1947 fire, but this has since been disproved. A couple of single pages have been found in places as far-flung as Brooklyn, N.Y., where they were carried around by Aleppo old-timers as good-luck charms. The bulk of the Torah, however, remains MIA.
This is where Friedman’s investigation gets especially lively, as he consults with a former Mossad case officer and secretly records an impromptu interview with one of the dozen or so men rich enough to have bought the missing pages. Supposedly, this collector and his daughter were approached by two dealers with a briefcase at a Jerusalem book fair in the 1980s. They were shown an old codex identified as part of the Crown, but the collector says he refused to buy it because the price was too high. One of the dealers later turned up dead in a Tel Aviv hotel room registered to a man who didn’t exist.
Friedman has his suspicions about the collector’s story: Would this man really consider $1 million too much to pay for a supposedly priceless text? He devotes most of his energy, however, to getting to the bottom of who is responsible for ripping out the heart of the Crown and selling it on the black market. As he settles on three likely culprits, “The Aleppo Codex” builds to a moral crescendo more impressive than the climactic fight scene in any thriller. “A volume that survived one thousand years of turbulent history was betrayed in our times by the people charged with guarding it,” Friedman writes. “We might file this tale between Cain and Abel and the golden calf, parables about the many ways we fail.”
JERUSALEM — Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s frenetic politicking over the last week appears aimed at one thing: strengthening his ability to take on Iran.
Only days after announcing the surprise dissolution of his government and early elections, on Tuesday Netanyahu presented his compatriots with a second shocker: He cancelled elections and announced a strengthened parliamentary coalition, bolstered by unification with the opposition Kadima party.
This new union means Netanyahu will control more than 90 seats in Israel’s 120-seat parliament, known as the Knesset. The new majority is unprecedented in modern times. Former army chief of staff and Kadima’s newly-elected leader, Shaul Mofaz, will join as deputy prime minister. The center-right Kadima party adds heft to Netanyahu’s mandate at a time of urgently polemical debate in Israel over Iran’s nuclear program.
Netanyahu’s political jockeying provoked an immediate and strong reaction in Israel.
Labor Party leader Shelly Yachimovitch, who will benefit politically if, as expected, she is now named opposition leader, said: “This ugly maneuver is going to be taught in universities for a long, long time.”
Israel’s Occupy-style protest movement, meanwhile, announced a series of demonstrations to call for political reform this coming weekend. The main question occupying Israel’s punditry even after this second twist remains the same: Is Netanyahu acting to strengthen his hand if he decides to strike Iran before the American elections in November?
Ari Shavit, a top political analyst at the Israeli daily Ha’aretz, who is known for his contacts in circles close to Netanyahu, told GlobalPost that the prime minister has been intent on early elections for at least a few months, for one principal reason that will not please Washington.
“Netanyahu designed to have early elections in Israel so they preempt the American elections in November and give him time to bring the Iranian nuclear crisis to a climax in autumn, in the two months between the Israeli elections and the Americans’,” he said.
Netanyahu’s decision to then abandon early elections in favor of a broader coalition appears aimed at that same result. “Netanyahu suddenly understood that the Likud” — Netanyahu’s party — “could easily split to the right, in which case, even if re-elected, he would not have the mandate he needs,” Shavit said. “Instead of an election preparing the ground for a confrontation, now he has unity preparing the ground for confrontation.”
The Israeli leader has long argued that a pre-emptive strike on Iranian facilities may be the only way to prevent Iran from developing nuclear-weapons capability.
But opposition from European leaders and US President Barack Obama, who supports a diplomatic approach, and from a growing chorus of former Israeli military commanders who argue that a unilateral strike would only delay, not halt, Iranian ambitions, have weakened the prime minister’s position.
Netanyahu’s logic seems to hold that if Obama is re-elected in November, he will no longer have to worry about domestic politics and will be able to press Netanyahu on Iran and the question of peace talks with the Palestinians — an area Netanyahu is eager to keep out of the international spotlight.
“The Iranian reason remains Netanyahu’s motivation,” Shavit said. “The difference is that now the season is shortened. He does not have to wait until the election on Sept. 4 before bringing the Iranian issue to a head. He can act now.”
Chanan Kristal, a political analyst for Israel Radio, had a somewhat different take. He said that two possibilities exist that can explain Netanyahu’s actions — but agreed that the move was driven by Iran.
“Either [Netanyahu] needs [new Deputy Prime Minister] Mofaz in his government in order to justify postponing any action against Iran, or he needs Mofaz inside so as to provide legitimacy for when he does attack Iran. Mofaz has so far come out against an attack, but it remains clear that those making the decision will be Netanyahu and Defense Minister [Ehud] Barak. For now, all bets are off.”
Shavit warned that anyone interested in preventing a conflict with Iran, such as the United States, will need to act swiftly to find a political solution.
“Otherwise there is a risk by the end of summer, we’ll find ourselves in a dire situation,” he said.
At the joint press conference announcing his union with Kadima and Mofaz, Netanyahu appeared to be peeved at much of the sniping he has recently faced by a growing list of former military and intelligence leaders expressing doubts about his Iran policy. He seemed especially put off by Yuval Diskin, the former head of Israel’s internal security agency and an apolitical figure respected across the board, who last week took the criticism farther than most.
“My major problem is that I have no faith in the current leadership, which must lead us in an event on the scale of war with Iran or a regional war,” he said. “I don’t believe in either the prime minister or the defense minister. I don’t believe in a leadership that makes decisions based on messianic feelings.”
The implication that Netanyahu and Barak are not competent to make decisions on matters of national security, specifically regarding Iran, ricocheted loudly across the political universe and clearly remained on Netanyahu’s mind today as he repeatedly stressed the “sanity” of his government and said: “I have even been referred to as messianic. Yes, messianic.”
JERUSALEM, Israel — As negotiations proceed in Istanbul over Iran’s nuclear program, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu can’t seem to stop harping about the threat posed by the Islamic republic.
Following the conclusion of last week’s talks between Iran and Western powers, for instance, Netanyahu publicly complained that the five-week gap between each summit amounted to no more than “a freebie” for Iran to continue developing its nuclear capacity unimpeded.
A growing cadre of Israeli political analysts view Netanyahu’s posturing on Iran as part of a long-term pre-electoral strategy — he faces mounting threats against the stability of his coalition.
Alon Liel, a 30-year veteran of the country’s foreign ministry, where he once served as director general, told GlobalPost he believes the Iranian issue is expedient for Netanyahu both internationally and domestically. Abroad, he is vulnerable to accusations that he is not moving toward peace talks with the Palestinians. Internally, he needs to shore up his right flank ahead of elections.
“In Netanyahu’s political circles, and even beyond that, it is very comfortable for him to lift the issue of Iran to high decibels. He needs to address internal political realities and consolidate an Israeli consensus, and also, internally and externally, to postpone the Palestinian issue,” he said. “He is much more comfortable talking about the Iranian danger than he is addressing the crisis with the Palestinians.”
Leil said that Netanyahu is “earnestly” concerned by the possibility of Iran developing into an existential threat to Israel, but thinks most of the rhetoric is aimed to serve his re-election campaign.
“I personally am much more frightened by the silence of the Palestinians than by the verbal back and forth between Obama and Netanyahu,” he said.
U.S. President Barack Obama responded swiftly to Netanyahu’s outburst over the five-week gaps.
“Now, the clock is ticking. And I’ve been very clear to Iran and to our negotiating partners that we’re not going to have these talks just drag out in a stalling process. But so far, at least, we haven’t given away anything — other than the opportunity for us to negotiate and see if Iran comes to the table in good faith,” Obama said. ”And the notion that somehow we’ve given something away — or a ‘freebie’ — would indicate that Iran has gotten something. In fact, they’ve got some of the toughest sanctions that they’re going to be facing coming up in just a few months if they don’t take advantage of these talks.”
Alon Pinkas, a former Israeli consul general in New York and chief of staff to four foreign ministers, told GlobalPost that Netanyahu’s outburst was irresponsible.
“The promptness and resoluteness of the U.S. response suggests that [if] Israel had reservations, [they] should have been conveyed through quieter channels. Mr. Netanyahu’s reaction gave the impression of a major divergence in U.S. and Israeli positions where one may not really exist,” he said.
American officials went out of their way to assure the Israeli public that their prime minister had been informed of every facet of the Istanbul talks ahead of time, while they were under way, and after their conclusion.
Netanyahu is juggling a number of challenges ahead of elections next year. Like many in the international Occupy movement, the organizers of last summer’s massive wave of social protests in Israel are gearing up for a renewed effort this season.
Also, senior political allies such as Deputy Prime Minister and former Chief of Staff Moshe Ya’alon are growling at Netanyahu from the right, threatening to bolt from his government if he complies with a Supreme Court order to evacuate illegal Jewish settlements in the West Bank.
Many Israeli ministers say they are resigned to the government’s collapse well before the scheduled date for elections, in late 2013.
Amos Yadlin, a former chief of military intelligence, took the unusual step last week to calm any talk of a possible Israeli strike against Iran, telling Israel Army Radio that “even if Iran achieves the capacity to make a bomb, I don’t think the first thing they’ll do is launch a bomb against Tel Aviv.”
Many Israeli analysts dismiss the squabble on Iran as mere posturing for the benefit of the media, positing that, behind the scenes, Netanyahu and Obama are coordinating a united front — or that Netanyahu is simply playing for local votes.
“Five weeks is not the end of the world,” Iran expert Meir Javedanfahr told the Israeli website Times of Israel, dismissing Netanyahu’s complaint about the time between negotiations.
Liel said Netanyahu “is a spin master with a genius for PR, a real master. The last thing he wants, for example, is for the UN to take up Palestinian demands, or the ticking time bomb of the settlements. He wants quiet on that front. And the best way to get that silence is to raise the tone of the Iranian issue.”
The Israeli blogger Anshell Pfeffer said naked electoral calculations explain Netanyahu’s impertinence.
“He needs to present the Israeli public with an achievement on the Iranian issue and he needs it soon. The prime minister hears not only the ticking of the Iranian atomic clock; last summer’s clamor from Tel-Aviv’s Rothschild Boulevard also echoes in his ears. It was the lowest point of his second term, with his ratings plummeting and Likud ministers talking openly about losing the next elections.”
Freed prisoners Palestinian Khalil Abu Alba, left, and Israeli Gilad Schalit. (Credit: AP) 
Dan Walsh’s incredibly rich Palestine Poster Project Archives includes much in the way of protest, but it also contains a trove of rare Zionist/Israeli posters from the 1920s through the ’50s, largely before partition. The ones excerpted here are from the Mahmoud Darwish Memorial Gallery, which includes a collection of Zionist Worker agency posters calling for increased development of Palestine.
(Credit: Benjamin Wheelock) 
Matti Friedman 
Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu delivers a speech to his Likud party members during the party convention in Tel Aviv, Israel, Sunday, May 6, 2012. (AP Photo/Ariel Schalit) (Credit: AP) 
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (Credit: AP Photo/Uriel Sinai, Pool) 
