The Road Ahead for Israel
The New York Times did its best to spin Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu’s
duplicity on a two-state solution into an attack on President Obama with a lead
story saying Obama’s rebukes had gone too far and risked “buoying Netanyahu.”
But the damage from Israel’s election is real and lasting, says Alon Ben-Meir.
By Alon Ben-Meir
Those of us who regularly observe and try to make sense of the madness sweeping
the Middle East often find ourselves, perhaps out of desperation, engaging in
wishful thinking, hoping that in the end, reason will prevail over lunacy.
We analyze unfolding events, dissect patent facts, reassess our assumptions, and
try to discern where we were right and where we erred, but we often find
ourselves exactly where we began. Nevertheless, this self-agonizing search for
reason and understanding still reveals another dimension to our human frailty.
We choose to live in the cocoon we have grown accustomed to out of fear or
complacency, however stifling or even deadly it may be, rather than break out
and seek new horizons, regardless of how necessary and promising they could be.
I lament the results of the Israeli elections, not because I disrespect and
distrust Netanyahu, but because a relative majority of Israelis choose to
continue living in the bubble, fearful of changing the status quo even though it
will inevitably burst.
The damning consequences Netanyahu’s new government will inflict on the country
are as certain as night following day. Israel, which has been led astray by
Netanyahu for so long, is fast approaching a new precipice unlike any other it
has faced in years past.
Following the wrath he brought upon his head for his earlier statement that
there will be no Palestinian state under his watch, Netanyahu once again changed
his mind only two days following the elections, stating in an interview on MSNBC
that he wanted “a sustainable, peaceful two-state solution.”
This reversal of his true position is tactical, designed to play for time, and
is just another cheap political stunt. The Europeans, Americans and
Palestinians, who have had extensive experience with him throughout the peace
process, fully recognize his duplicity. He has lost every grain of credibility
and no one will trust that he will negotiate in good faith in the future.
Moreover, his coalition government, which is in the making, will certainly
include his natural partner, the right-of-center political parties, who oppose
the establishment of a Palestinian state under any circumstances and will not
join his government for one day if they believe his reversal is genuine.
What does Netanyahu think the Palestinians will do now that he has revealed his
bigotry? What choice did he leave them with but to resort to the United Nations
Security Council (UNSC), demanding the recognition of a Palestinian state while
seeking retribution against Israel in the International Criminal Court?
Having been misled, lied to and humiliated by Netanyahu, President Obama, who
spent precious time, resources, and political capital in the peace process, is
left with no choice but to seek a UNSC resolution that calls for a two-state
solution based on the 1967 borders.
Although such a measure is the most positive the U.S. can take to safeguard
Israel’s future as a democratic and Jewish state, it is a crushing defeat for
Netanyahu, who desperately sought to obstruct the rise of a Palestinian state by
relying on the U.S. to shield his perverted scheme.
The European Union, who has long viewed the Israeli settlements as illegal, will
now be fully convinced that Netanyahu has no intention of ending the occupation.
Encouraged by Obama’s change of position, they will initiate Boycott, Divestment
and Sanctions (BDS) against Israeli products made in the Palestinian
territories.
Furthermore, many European countries will follow Sweden and recognize the
Palestinian state, labeling Israel as an occupying power of a sovereign nation
and subjecting it to increasing political pressure and, potentially, economic
sanctions.
The Arab states, especially Egypt, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia, who find themselves
thrust into regional upheaval in the wake of the civil war in Syria, the rise of
ISIS and the Iranian threat, view an Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement as
central to regional stability. They have been working behind the scenes to
restrain the Palestinians from rising violently against Israel. They now feel at
a loss, unable to control the potential eruption of a third Intifada, as the
Palestinians are now more determined than ever to rid themselves of the bondage
of occupation.
Finally, throughout the past six years, and especially during the election
campaign, Netanyahu repeatedly crossed the line of political civility. He
demonstrated his racism when he implored his followers to come out and vote to
neutralize the influx of Israeli Arab voters. Although he recently apologized
for his chauvinistic statement, his apology cannot be accepted, as he knew
exactly what he was saying and meant it.
Netanyahu reminds me of Aristophanes: “You won’t persuade me even if you
convince me.” Moreover, he polarized the Israeli public while alienating a large
segment of American Jews and the Democratic Party by making a mockery of U.S.Israeli relations.
Where will all this lead to? Will Netanyahu, at age 65, begin to think of his
legacy? What kind of Israel does he want to leave behind?
I believe that Netanyahu will remain true to his ideological upbringing and
prevent the creation of a Palestinian state, believing that it will rob the Jews
of their historic/biblical right to the “entire land of Israel,” stretching from
the Mediterranean to the Jordan River. He will expropriate yet more Palestinian
land, expand the settlements, and play for time believing that he will outlast
Obama, and hoping that the next President will be a conservative Republican who
will let him rampage what is left of the West Bank.
The tens of thousands of Israelis who demonstrated a few days before the
election, led by Meir Dagan and other top former security officials, cannot
allow this to happen by giving Netanyahu free reign. They and hundreds of
thousands more Israelis must now persistently engage in demonstrations and civil
disobedience, forcing him to either change his policies and seek genuine peace,
or step down.
Only the public en masse coupled with outside (especially American) pressure can
make Netanyahu realize that Israel’s destiny is intertwined with an independent
Palestinian state and that neither can live in peace and security without the
other. But as a deep ideologue, he discards the facts and chooses to cling to
his wishful thinking, especially because Israel has been successful in beating
the odds, presumably justifying his chosen path.
Netanyahu, however, ignores the evidence that times have changed, and regardless
of how successful he was, it should not blind him from grasping that Israel’s
future wellbeing depends on a two-state solution.
But as T. S. Eliot once observed, “Human kind cannot bear very much reality.”
And for Netanyahu, a Palestinian state is simply too much reality to bear.
Having flip-flopped in the past, perhaps he will soon be struck with a spasm of
lucidity, change his mind again, and recognize that peace with the Palestinian
provides Israel with the ultimate security. If Netanyahu really cares about
Israel’s future security, peace should be the legacy he would want to leave
behind.
Dr. Alon Ben-Meir is a professor of international relations at the Center for
Global Affairs at New York University. He teaches courses on international
negotiation and Middle Eastern studies. [email protected]. Web:
www.alonben-meir.com
Journalists Who Hate Whistleblowers
A disturbing trend in mainstream U.S. media is how many “star” journalists side
with the government in its persecution of whistleblowers and even disdain fellow
reporters who expose secret wrongdoing, an attitude that is destroying what’s
left of American democracy, as John Hanrahan explains.
By John Hanrahan
Following the late January guilty verdicts in the espionage trial of former CIA
officer Jeffrey Sterling, more proof emerged, if any more were needed, that many
elite mainstream journalists abhor whistleblowers and think they should go to
prison when they divulge classified information.
One would think that a business that has relied on confidential informants for
some of the major investigative stories of this and the previous century would
applaud whistleblowers who risk everything on behalf of the people’s right to
know what their government is doing in the shadows.
But looking back at cases over the last five years, we see the unedifying
spectacle of some of the nation’s best-known print and broadcast journalists
venting their outrage at whistleblowers’ disclosures and expressing their
preference for being kept in the dark by the government in the name of national
security.
Most recently, Walter Pincus of The Washington Post and an opinion writer for
The Economist both weighed in critically against Sterling after his conviction.
Pincus also strongly defended the integrity of the Operation Merlin program,
details of which Sterling was accused of leaking to New York Times reporter
James Risen, and contended that Risen gave an erroneous portrayal of portions of
the program in his 2006 book State of War. (More about these later.)
Sterling, who has never admitted leaking any classified information,
nevertheless with his conviction joined the ranks of those whistleblowers and
conduits for whistleblowers who have come under fire from prominent journalists
for disclosing classified information to the press, e.g., Wikileaks, Julian
Assange, Chelsea (formerly Bradley) Manning, Edward Snowden, John Kiriakou, and
others.
Journalistic heavyweights — New York Times columnists Thomas Friedman and David
Brooks, Washington Post columnists David Ignatius and Richard Cohen, CNN anchor
Wolf Blitzer, NBC’s former Meet the Press host David Gregory, and the New
Yorker’s Jeffrey Toobin — are among the journalistic heavyweights who have in
one instance or another come to the defense of the government’s secrecy policies
and who have pilloried those making the leaks.
Sounding Like Press Officers
And, in the process, they frequently sounded more like government press officers
than independent, skeptical watchdogs of the public interest. Of course, some of
these outraged members of press royalty have themselves benefited from
“approved” government leaks designed to make the leaking parties look good, the
kind of leaks that don’t get prosecuted.
For example, Ignatius, a veteran writer known for his CIA sources and insider
information, derided whistleblowers in the aftermath of Snowden’s June 2013
National Security Agency mass surveillance revelations as “malcontents and selfappointed do-gooders who may get security clearances.” He darkly hinted that
Snowden “looks these days more like an intelligence defector, seeking haven in a
country hostile to the United States, than a whistleblower.”
The ever imaginative Thomas Friedman, in criticizing the NSA leaks, offered up a
modern-day version of the Vietnam War’s “we had to bomb the village in order to
save it” as the reason to condemn Snowden’s revelations. [Read it here.]
In Friedman’s telling, Americans must not overly concern themselves about our
government spying on citizens and must accept a curtailment of privacy and civil
liberties today in order to protect the nation and ward off a repeat of 9/11,
which, if it occurred, would lead to an even more serious crackdown on civil
liberties.
As he wrote: “[W]e don’t live in a world any longer where our government can
protect its citizens from real, not imagined, threats without using big data
under constant judicial review. It’s not ideal. But if one more 9/11-scale
attack gets through, the cost to civil liberties will be so much greater.” Yes,
a little authoritarianism today will forestall really big authoritarianism down
the line.
We have even witnessed some journalists suggesting that Glenn Greenwald be
charged with crimes for being the primary reporter of Snowden’s NSA disclosures,
most notably, NBC’s David Gregory. (Gregory has snottily referred to Greenwald
as someone who “claims that he’s a journalist”, as if true journalists are only
those, like Gregory, who always bow to government authority.)
In June 2013, two weeks after the Snowden revelations, Gregory asked Greenwald
on Meet the Press: “To the extent that you have aided and abetted Snowden, even
in his current movements, why shouldn’t you, Mr. Greenwald, be charged with a
crime?” [See the video how Greenwald demolished Gregory.]
Over the years, Greenwald, first with Salon and The Guardian and now with The
Intercept, has been the most vigilant documenter of the hostility of many in the
mainstream press to whistleblowers and their support for secrecy in all matters
connected to whatever the government claims involves a national security issue.
[See, for example, his 2010 column on the reaction of many journalists,
politicians and others to the Wikileaks disclosures.]
Mocking the Muckrakers
There is also the example of Bill Keller, then executive editor of The New York
Times, who famously trashed Julian Assange in the Sunday Times Magazine in early
2011. Although Wikileaks provided a horde of secret documents that the Times
used for major news stories, Keller, nevertheless, decided to do a gossipy hitjob on Assange, certainly one of the most peculiar acts of journalistic
ingratitude and dumping of one’s source in the modern age.
In Sterling’s case, a Jan. 29 article on the “Democracy in America” blog of The
Economist came up with a particularly disturbing headline: “Why locking up
leakers makes sense.” It was signed with the initials D.R., per The Economist’s
tradition of not disclosing full names in bylines.
The anonymous blogger takes a sort of “I’m-all-right-Jack-f-you” attitude toward
whistleblowers in their dealings with reporters. Noting that James Risen was
excused by the Justice Department from testifying in the Sterling case after
making it clear that he would not name his sources for a botched CIA nuclearcomponent-designs-for-Iran operation that he described in his 2006 book State of
War, the Economist article stated:
“The conflict between society’s desire for a vigorous free press that holds
government to account and its need for the state to keep secrets from foreign
enemies can never be resolved. But Mr. Risen’s reprieve and Mr. Sterling’s
conviction could shift the balance in the right direction.”
Let that sink in: A writer for a magazine adjudged in journalistic circles to be
a serious, prestigious publication, says it strikes a nice balance to have a
whistleblower go to jail. The writer skims over the fact that this reprieve for
Risen was the result of a policy only recently adopted by outgoing Attorney
General Eric Holder and that today’s policy can change from one administration
to the next, or even from one attorney general to another in the same
administration.
There was no binding precedent set in Risen being let off the hook; there is no
guarantee that the next brave reporter who refuses to name a source in a
national security case won’t end up in jail. And no guarantee that reporter
won’t be indicted as a co-conspirator if an attorney general decides to cross
that line.
In this regard, the Obama administration has already indicated that reporters
who benefit from classified leaks can be considered partners in an illegal
activity, as was divulged in 2013 in the investigation of a 2009 national
security leak to Fox News reporter James Rosen. Rosen was described as a coconspirator in a government investigator’s affidavit seeking a search warrant to
obtain Rosen’s personal e-mails in a leaks case involving North Korea’s nuclear
weapons testing.
Stephen Kim, a State Department official with particular expertise in North
Korea’s nuclear program, was subsequently indicted and pleaded guilty in April
2014 to one count under the Espionage Act of divulging classified information to
Rosen. Kim’s case marked an especially egregious misuse of the Espionage Act, as
reported by Peter Maass in The Intercept here.
Rehabilitating Merlin
Also in the Sterling trial aftermath, Walter Pincus, the Washington Post’s
veteran national security reporter, weighed in with the journalistic equivalent
of an amicus brief in support of the bizarre CIA scheme, Operation Merlin.
The CIA’s plan, as Risen’s State of War discloses, was to give flawed nuclear
weapons component designs to the Iranians in the hope the supposedly clueless
recipients would waste years going down this wrong path. Pincus asserts, as did
CIA witnesses at trial, that Operation Merlin, far from being botched and
possibly even helpful to the Iranians in their nuclear research, as Risen
portrayed it, was really a marvelous success until its cover was blown with the
publication of State of War.
Pincus’s argument that Risen got it wrong dovetails nicely with the CIA’s effort
to rehabilitate what Risen described as “what may have been one of the most
reckless operations in the modern history of the CIA.”
A May 2013 Politico article stressed Pincus’s closeness to the CIA and that
agency’s point of view, quoting Post columnist Dana Milbank as saying: “Walter
conveys the sense of what the intelligence community is thinking on any given
subject.” Yes, he does.
Even before the Sterling case came to trial, Pincus had displayed animosity
toward whistleblowers and some reporters’ dealings with them. He had even said
it’s fine for the FBI to get secret warrants to rummage through reporters’
telephone records in investigating leaks, as was the case with six Associated
Press reporters and editors. [See here and here.]
And in the month after Snowden’s June 2013 NSA disclosures, Pincus penned a
speculative, innuendo-filled column, the gist of which was what he saw as the
sinister possibility that Julian Assange, Wikileaks, Glenn Greenwald and
filmmaker Laura Poitras had all colluded with Snowden to leak secret documents
for them to publish.
Greenwald challenged Pincus’s piece over much of a two-day period before the
Post finally appended multiple corrections to the article that shot down the key
“conspiracy” points Pincus had laid out.
Obama’s Obsession
Even at this late date, with a record number of at least eight individuals
charged by the Obama administration under the 1917 Espionage Act (compared to
three such prosecutions for all of Obama’s predecessors combined), many
prominent journalists can’t see, or won’t admit, or don’t believe, that an
attack on whistleblowers is also an attack on the press and on the First
Amendment.
They appear either not to care or to have scant awareness of the chilling effect
on the symbiotic relationship between investigative reporters and their sources
every time whistleblowers are charged or convicted for crimes that could land
them in prison for decades, if not a lifetime.
They also appear to accept at face value the stories spun by the CIA, the NSA,
the Pentagon or other members of the vast U.S. national security state
apparatus. It matters not to them the number of times those agencies have been
shown to be liars, whether it be over non-existent weapons of mass destruction
in Iraq or the extent of the vast surveillance operations directed at American
citizens and people worldwide.
Why do these stars of the news media so readily brush off concerns about our
dangerous warfare/surveillance state revealed by Snowden, Manning and the
others? Why do they cheer on the government’s crackdown on unauthorized leaks
and tell us surveillance and the diminishment of our civil liberties is really
for our own good in a scary world, rather than side with the Bill of Rights and
the handful of other journalists and whistleblowers who expose secrets that
people in a free society should have the right to know?
Why do they sound as if they are angling for a position on the National Security
Council or membership in the Council on Foreign Relations, rather than aspiring
to be another I.F. Stone (who lived by the tenet, “all governments lie”) or
Edward R. Murrow or Seymour Hersh?
James Risen, of course, “gets” why whistleblowers are vital to investigative
reporting and a free press, as he explained to an unsympathetic David Gregory on
“Meet the Press” shortly after Snowden’s disclosures in June 2013. [See cringeworthy video excerpts here of Gregory and correspondent Andrea Mitchell
lecturing to one of the premiere investigative reporters of this generation why
whistleblowers like Snowden are so dangerous.]
Risen fielded his colleagues’ pro-secrecy, anti-whistleblower comments deftly,
pointing out to them the obvious: “The only reason we’ve been having these
public debates” over surveillance and civil liberties “and that we’re now
sitting here talking about this is because of a series of whistleblowers. That
the government has never wanted any of this reported, never wanted any of it
disclosed.
“If it was up to the government over the last ten years, this surveillance
infrastructure would have grown enormously with no public debate whatsoever. And
so every time we talk about how someone is a traitor for disclosing something,
we have to remember the only reason we’re talking about it is because of it.”
Given the co-dependency of confidential sources and journalists, it would be
worthwhile to remind mainstream reporters and editors that when it comes to
investigative reporting you, too, are a species of whistleblower. And when a
whistleblower goes to jail, a part of our press freedom goes to jail, too.
John Hanrahan is a former executive director of The Fund for Investigative
Journalism and reporter for The Washington Post, The Washington Star, UPI and
other news organizations. He also has extensive experience as a legal
investigator. Hanrahan is the author of Government by Contract and co-author
of Lost Frontier: The Marketing of Alaska. He has written extensively for
NiemanWatchdog.org, a project of the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard
University. [This article originally appeared at ExposeFacts.org.]