A Tom to cast away stones

Image via Printable Colouring Pages.

Do you remember this?

last November at a conference of the Israel American Council, a lobbying group Adelson has funded, he joked in a public discussion with another wealthy Israeli: “Why don’t you and I go after The New York Times?” Told it was family owned, Adelson quipped, “There is only one way to fight it: money.” At this same conference Adelson was quoted as saying that Israel would not be able to survive as a democracy: “So Israel won’t be a democratic state,” he added. “So what?”

West of Eden: I told you so

I love this bit of sophisticated language abuse, picked up by the Times the other day:

Yuval Steinitz, the finance minister, was recently recorded at a closed meeting of his Likud Party activists saying that while “media is important in a democracy,” the Israeli media for the most part favor the left over Likud.

“Beyond that,” he continued, “the media has lost its respect for one small, simple word: ‘truth.’ There is no more respect for the word truth.”

Especially when the minister uses it, eh? And respecting it means if the minister says it's true, you don't ask a lot of impertinent questions. Because it's just the word you're supposed to worry about, not the thing itself.

The Blindfolding of Truth, an Allegory. Byam Shaw, ca. 1909. From The Textile Blog.

The big story in Israel, now that the war with Iran is being postponed till—well, till whenever they need to start seeing it in the newspapers again, has been the tiff between Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Ehud Barak, who have given each other back their respective rings and may be casually dating other ministers, ZOMG.

It seems that Barak was chatting with the Americans behind Netanyahu's back, while Israeli elections are swimming back into the picture, this time rumored for February (the vote has to take place by October 2013 at the latest). Netanyahu's big vulnerability with his voters is that he may have frightened them by being so hostile to Obama; they've finally realized that in one month Obama is likely to get reelected—Mr. Adelson can't buy 'em as effectively over here as he can there—and they are scared he'll want to punish them somehow for having such an unspeakable head of government. As if.

So Barak went to America, according to the Times:

On Wednesday, Mr. Netanyahu’s loyalists accused the defense minister of using his recent trip to the United States to differentiate himself from the prime minister and move away from the recent friction with the Obama administration.

“As far as I know, yes, he distanced himself in an attempt to make political gains,” Yisrael Katz, the minister of transportation, told Israel Radio.

Mr. Katz was echoing remarks attributed to Mr. Netanyahu from a closed meeting on Tuesday. Mr. Netanyahu was quoted in the Israeli news media as saying that Mr. Barak had deliberately exacerbated the tensions between the prime minister and Washington in an attempt to make himself look like the moderate who can repair relations. 

In response, Mr. Barak’s office issued a statement saying that the defense minister “works to strengthen relations with the United States and at their heart, the security relationship.”

Then Saturday night the PM, says Haaretz (which has recently installed one of those stupid subscription walls, so I now have to limit myself to 10 articles per month), called the DM in to demand an explanation of this démarche.

Full cooperation between the prime minister and the defense minister is necessary for the security of the citizens of Israel," Netanyahu will tell Barak, sources close to the prime minister's said before the meeting. Netanyahu, they added, will also request of Barak that such remarks will not reoccur during Barak's term as minister in his cabinet.

In response, a source close to Barak said that "no one reprimands the defense minister, not even the prime minister."

The source added that Barak is convinced his actions are contributing to the Israeli government, its relations with the U.S. and to Israel's security. "Barak will continue to act according to his understanding in Israel and abroad," he said.

They'd so longed for a little war they could call their own, you see; until it was really the only thing that was keeping them together, and then inevitably after the miscarriage...

Meanwhile, that drone that invaded Israel Saturday remains a remarkable mystery, in that nobody really knows where it came from, or who it belongs to: the IDF didn't spot it over the Mediterranean until it was practically in Gaza, and when they got around to taking it out they blew it to smithereens instead of knocking it down whole so they could have a look.

Assuming it was an Iranian drone sent from a Hezbollah camp in Lebanon, that was an awfully long flight for it to remain undetected, and it is also a matter of some surprise that, according to the reliable Richard Silverstein, it was able to spend 20 minutes in Israel's own airspace before getting shot down about 18 miles from Dimona, and the Negev Nuclear Research Center, where practically all of the actually existing WMDs of the region come from. What kind of shape has the IDF gotten into, while the PM and DM were running around chasing each other's shadows?

Another Israeli institution that's not as fierce as it used to be is the daily press: Maariv seems to have escaped getting closed down at the last minute this week with an emergency loan from its controlling shareholders, but it and Haaretz are both in serious financial trouble. The New York Times says that

the economics of the print media have been skewed by the arrival five years ago of Israel Hayom, a free national newspaper owned by Sheldon Adelson, a conservative American billionaire who is a staunch supporter of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Israel Hayom, viewed as pro-Netanyahu, now claims the widest distribution of any Hebrew newspaper on weekdays. Public television and radio have also come under tighter state control.

Oops, there's that pesky Mr. Adelson again. If you click the link you get to Israel Hayom's English-language website, which looks more devoted to Willard Mitt Romney than to Netanyahu. Is he more Murdoch or more Berlusconi?

Frank McAndrew, Knox College.

Not too far away, the Turkish army went on shelling across the Syrian border for the sixth day in a row, and Prime Minister Abdullah Gul told reporters,

"The worst-case scenarios are taking place right now in Syria ... Our government is in constant consultation with the Turkish military. Whatever is needed is being done immediately as you see, and it will continue to be done....

"There will be a change, a transition sooner or later ... It is a must for the international community to take effective action before Syria turns into a bigger wreck and further blood is shed, that is our main wish."

Oh, and Barak and Netanyahu have made up, sort of, speaking of Israel Hayom, issuing a joint communiqué to the effect that

"the prime minister and defense minister have agreed to continue cooperating on the security challenges Israel faces."

The message continued: "the defense minister is in agreement with the prime minister on all matters relating to Israel's response to the Iranian threat, as well as managing Israel's relationship with the United States, under the prime minister's leadership."

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Ehud Barak have put their feud behind them. Photo by Yoav Ari Dudkevitch.

Persian blinds

Updated 10/14

FurReal Friends butterscotch pony.

Heard on the BBC this morning a remarkable story about the blogger Richard Silverstein having been leaked a secret document from someone in Israeli security circles detailing the order of operations in an upcoming Israeli strike against Iran. A cyber attack destroys all the country's communications and compromises their electrical grid, planes come to bomb all the nuclear facilities, cruise missiles are used to assassinate all the top echelon of nuclear officials. Equipment and strategies that have never been tested will all work in seamless coordination with each other, Iran will be unable even to respond, Israelis will suffer nothing more than maybe a little whiplash. And you'll get a pony, if you're extra good. You can read an English version at the blog, Tikun Olam, and it's pretty scary; as Silverstein says,

This is Shock and Awe, Israel-style. It is Bibi’s effort to persuade high-level Israeli officials that Israel can prosecute a pure technology war that involves relatively few human beings (Israeli, that is) who may be put in harm’s way, and will certainly cost few lives of IDF personnel.

Bibi’s sleight of hand here involves no mention whatsoever of an Iranian counter-attack against Israel. The presumption must be that the bells and whistles of all those marvelous new weapons systems will decapitate Iran’s war-making ability and render it paralyzed. The likelihood of this actually happening is nearly nil.

There will be those who will dispute the authenticity of this document. I’m convinced it is what my source claims, based on his prior track record and the level of specificity offered in the document. It references cities by name and the facilities they contain. It names new weapons systems including one Israel supposedly hasn’t even shared with the U.S.

No, it’s real. Or I should say that while it’s real, it is the product of the Israeli dream factory which manufactures threats and then creates fabulist military strategies to address them. The dream factory always breaks the hearts of the families of those whose members fall victim to it. It never produces the result it promises, nor will it do so here.

Then, in the comments, a startling twist: a different version of what appears to be the same document, in Hebrew, appeared on the Israeli web portal Fresh a few days ago as a work of fiction, by "an old friend of the Forum who wishes to remain anonymous" and with all information "based on foreign sources and open only" (this is Google Translate, you really don't have to trust me). It seems to have rather less technical detail than Silverstein's and a good deal more wish fulfillment, down to an elaborate reconstruction of how Hezbollah will behave.

It looks to me, in fact, as if each of these is a different redaction of some document prior to both, edited perhaps for different purposes. Silverstein, insists that this is not so: his is a translation of the original official paper, given to him to help expose how crazy Netanyahu and Barak really are. But I'd like to hear some speculation about what the other one is.

The drumbeat, meanwhile, seems to have become as intense as it was in the spring, before the formation of the Great National Unity Government that is now, of course, gone once again, apparently broken over the issue of the Haredim doing national service for a couple of years--once again Iran is reaching that threshold of something or other before which they must be stopped; or, to the more cynical, Netanyahu is reaching that threshold where he just won't be able to control himself.

Whatever it is seems keyed in timing to the US elections, whether it's his hatred for Obama, his love for his old pal Willard, or his dependence on Willard's patrons Mr. and Mrs. Adelson. I'm more convinced than ever that it's all bluff--hope it is, because if he really intends to lead his country to war on the basis of a plan as flimsy as the one Richard Silverstein describes then he is delusional and the outcome could be very horrible indeed.

A herd of Shetlands, from Horse and Man.

Update 10/14
I note somebody's been looking at this old thing. Its fearful tone (or rather Silverstein's) has become outdated now that it's quite clear that Netanyahu was bluffing, as I mostly expected. That explains, by the way, why this plan was so weird, so amateurish and incomplete: it wasn't written for the IDF, it was written for the Israeli (and maybe US) press.

Another first: Virality!

Updated 4/9/2012

Well, maybe not so much viral as bacterial, we're not exactly taking over, but a piece of mine from last January is suddenly rocketing into the... umm, low dozens of hits (at the time of writing).

H1N1 flu virus. From University of Wisconsin-Madison News.

It's evidently related to today's front-page New York Times story by Michael Barbaro on the heartwarming friendship between Binyamin Netanyahu and Willard Mitt Romney, two [jump]

A first: Insider poop!

Steve Benen is among those wondering what's ailing the non-Romney Republican candidates in their failure to gang up on the front-runner:

I’m at a loss in trying to explain this. It’s not as if there’s nothing to criticize Romney over. The guy used to support abortion rights, gay rights, gun control, “amnesty” for undocumented immigrants, and combating climate change. He distanced himself from Reagan, attended Planned Parenthood fundraisers, and helped create the blueprint for the Affordable Care Act. He supported taxpayer-funded abortions and taxpayer-financed medical care for undocumented immigrants.

Do these non-Romney candidates not realize they’re losing? Are they reluctant to go after him because they want to be his running mate?

I heard from somebody who heard from somebody who's been in New Hampshire (also, somebody's mother-in-law is in the chain) (also, I think I made some of it up): they know the Republicans are going to lose in November and they're all trying to detach themselves--they'd rather see themselves losing right now and getting it over with. Willard is on his own here, because nobody likes him.

By Alfred Pearse (1856-1933)

Update 1/9/2012

All, that is, except naturally for crypto-Belgian imperialist terrorist Dr. Newton Leroy Gingrich, who never was any good at holding it back, and who has a backer whose remarkable vindictiveness almost matches his own.