With Hamas and Fatah meeting this week in Cairo, reconciliation between the rival Palestinian political parties is likely only a matter of time. Official U.S. policy holds that Hamas is only a terrorist entity, and any agreement between the two factions jeopardizes continued U.S. aid. There is reason to believe, however, that more flexible, productive positions will be expressed in the U.S. media. Slowly but unmistakably, space is opening up among the commentariat for new, critical ideas about Israel and its relationship to the United States.
Freedom of this sort was visible in the pages of the New York Times last week. Thomas Friedman, the paper’s foreign affairs columnist, wrote that American leaders were betraying the country by outsourcing their foreign policy to Israel. A standing ovation given to the Israeli prime minister by the U.S. Congress this year was “bought and paid for by the Israel lobby,” he wrote. Phrased bluntly as it was, Friedman’s sentence was startling. As the quintessential establishment columnist, Bill Clinton’s favorite pundit and a thrice Pulitzer Prize-winner, Friedman is often seen in the U.S. as authoritative on the Middle East and rivaled only perhaps by the Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg in the influence of his writing on popular discussion.
Not surprisingly, Friedman’s piece elicited furor from those policing the conversation about Israel. The Israeli ambassador, American Jewish Committee, Jerusalem Post and even members of Congress gang-swarmed Friedman, accusing him of anti-Semitism and hatred of Israel. It was not the first time in recent months Friedman has been critical of Israel policy. In September, he wrote of the Obama government that the “powerful pro-Israel lobby in an election season can force the administration to defend Israel at the U.N., even when it knows Israel is pursuing policies not in its own interest or America’s.” A more damning critique of Israel and the lobby would be difficult to make.
Even so, Friedman is not the only Times-man to let go the pro-Netanyahu line. Columnist Roger Cohen is even more critical of Israel than is Friedman, and like Friedman he is notable for being a liberal supporter of the Iraq War — not exactly a radical, in other words. Cohen now regularly writes about Israel’s “illiberalism,” says U.S. foreign policy has been “Likudnized,” and calls opposing Israeli oppression of the Palestinians the most important task currently facing diaspora Jews.
Cohen believes the new conversations he has contributed to represent “changes going on in the U.S. Jewish community,” he said in a phone interview. “Jewish identify in postwar America was built very much on the Holocaust and support for Israel, and for younger American Jews that may have less resonance. There may be a rethinking of that form of attachment to Israel.”
J Street, the organization devoted to lobbying for Israel from a liberal perspective, is both reflective of, and a stimulant to, a more balanced conversation about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Cohen says. If he is right, J Street is performing its job well. Public discussion about the Mideast conflict is still nowhere near evenhanded in the United States, but it is more so than it used to be.
Three academics, Tony Judt, Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer, deserve a lot of credit for expanding the permissible. Whatever one thinks of their analyses or prescriptions, they endured opprobrium and ostracism, to state the obvious: The unconditional U.S.-Israeli relationship is good for neither the U.S. nor Israel. Walt has an important perch at Foreign Policy’s website, which he uses to regularly espouse his once-radical views on Israel.
Criticism of the special relationship, once rare, is now frequent. Newsweek/Daily Beast’s Andrew Sullivan has become a regular source of attacks on the unqualified U.S. support for Israeli policy. Time magazine’s Joe Klein has been similarly outspoken. “If you don’t think that the Israel Lobby has an enormous influence on the Congress, you’re deluding yourself,” he wrote recently.
Peter Beinart, also of Newsweek/Daily Beast, inspired headlines with his critique of the “Failure of the American Jewish Establishment.” He has a forthcoming book sure to get a lot of attention called “The Crisis of Zionism.” Former New York Observer writer Philip Weiss has created a one-stop shop for critics of Israel and U.S. policy. And, of course, Salon’s own Glenn Greenwald regularly questions the bipartisan consensus on Israel.
As one would expect, these developments are causing a great deal of consternation from those determined that views favorable to the Palestinians never get a hearing. In 2006, the American Jewish Committee released its infamous report accusing these new critics of Israel of being simply anti-Semitic. Last year, Lee Smith of Tablet magazine made the odd charge that publications like the Atlantic and Salon encourage Jew-hating writers in the hopes of increasing page views. Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol has lamented that charging Israel’s critics with “anti-Semitism” doesn’t effectively silence them any longer. And this week Iran-Contra convict Elliott Abrams criticized Friedman and Klein because they exemplify the mainstreaming of Walt and Mearsheimer’s ideas.
But it isn’t only pundits and academics. Diplomats and the people who would be on the center-right of American politics (if such a thing still existed) have been vocal about their alienation from U.S. discussion of Israel. Bruce Riedel of the Brookings Institution, an advisor to three presidents on Middle East and South Asian issues, told me in an email that “Fear of angering extreme evangelicals and the old lobby still inhibit real debate about Israel in American politics.”
Paul Pillar, former CIA bigwig, has become a stark critic of Israel for the National Interest. He has defended the comparison of Israel’s occupation policies with apartheid South Africa, and says that he agrees with all of Walt and Mearsheimer’s analysis, including the most incendiary charge — that the Israel lobby was instrumental in pushing the U.S. to invade Iraq.
Lawrence Wilkerson, former chief of staff for Colin Powell, has been similarly outspoken about the power of what he calls “the Jewish lobby.” Jack Matlock, Ronald Reagan’s ambassador to the Soviet Union, has written that by far the greatest threat to Israel’s security and well-being is the policies of its own government. And in 2009 longtime diplomat Chas Freeman blasted the Israel lobby for successfully ending his nomination to be chairman of the National Intelligence Council.
For all the discussion-widening in the chattering classes, official U.S. foreign policy has changed little, if at all. Obama has overseen unprecedented military deals between Israel and the United States, and all but abandoned the Palestinians in the international diplomatic arena. Newt Gingrich’s historically discredited claim that the Palestinians are an “invented people” shows that American politicians still take some of the most extreme positions in the Israeli polity as gospel.
Still, at the outset of his term Obama made the biggest rhetorical push against Israeli settlement policy that any U.S. president ever has, only to back down in the face of Israeli objections. The resulting animosity between Netanyahu and the administration is no secret. Democratic rank-and-file voters are also less supportive of Israel than they used to be, and less so than Republicans are now. The new conversation about Israel has yet to make its way into Congress and the executive branch, but that day may be coming.
This article originally appeared on
Imprint.
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.
The affairs of the workers of Eretz Israel should be in the hands of the workers of Eretz Israel, 1935.
To experience the role of posters in the birth, growing pains, and ultimate conflict, this is perhaps the best online resource. Here’s what Walsh collects: 1) international artists and agencies; 2) Zionist and Israeli artists and agencies; 3) Palestinian nationalist artists and agencies; 4) Arab and Muslim artists and agencies. And here is what he says about his collection of over 6,700 posters:
I first began collecting Palestine posters when I was a Peace Corps volunteer in Morocco in the mid-1970s. By 1980 I had acquired about 300 Palestine posters. A small grant awarded with the support of the late Dr. Edward Said allowed me to organize them into an educational slideshow to further the “third goal” of the Peace Corps: to promote a better understanding of other peoples on the part of Americans. Over the ensuing years, while running my design company, Liberation Graphics, the number of internationally published Palestine posters I acquired steadily grew. Today the archives include some 3,000 Palestine posters from myriad sources making it what many library science specialists say is the largest such archives in the world.
To fortify our home - use Hebrew cement, 1937.
Come and See the Palestine Exhibition - Vienna, 1925.
Text in logo in upper left hand corner - The Worker, 1937.
Build Industries In Palestine!, 1927
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.”
New critics of Israel: Roger Cohen, left, of New York Times; Paul Pillar of the CIA. (Credit: Reuters/AP) 
(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) 
