Brig. Gen. Gal Hirsch (Alon Ron)

Let it not be said that the IDF doesn’t learn from its mistakes and draw the proper conclusions.* The new deputy commander of Israel’s “depth command,” designed to take the battle to the enemy far from Israeli territory, is Brig. Gen. Gal Hirsch (Hebrew). In 2006, he commanded the unit which was attacked by Hezbollah resulting in the capture and death of two IDF soldiers. This embarrassing debacle in turn led to the Lebanon War, an even more embarrassing debacle for Israel and the IDF.

The Almog Report (chaired by Doron Almog, another IDF commander embroiled in controversy), which examined IDF performance during the war, slammed him for his unit’s sloppy preparation and performance that betrayed weaknesses which enabled the Hezbollah attack.  Most notoriously, Hirsch bragged to the Israeli media that the IDF controlled the village of Bint Jabel the day before nine Golani troops were killed there in a massive firefight.  In this he wasn’t alone.  The IDF bragged it’d killed Hassan Nasrallah using a U.S. bunker buster when it hadn’t.  Dan Halutz also predicted his forces would bomb Lebanon back to the Stone Age.  Though they tried awfully hard, they didn’t quite succeed at that either thanks in part to Iranian funds which helped rebuild the south.

Almog planned to recommend that Hirsch be deprived of any future IDF command, but he resigned just before the document was released. This enabled him to rear his ugly head again as he has today, like a cat of nine lives.

One wonders how someone who resigned in disgrace for something close to dereliction of duty could be allowed to return in a role with a supposedly prestigious new unit which shows that the IDF is adapting to new technology and the changing world.  All this goes to confirm that the IDF is very good at recycling the same tired old faces which have failed in the past and much less successful at looking at objectives and strategy in new and unorthodox ways.  It would rather remain with the tried, failed and true than experiment with the new and unconventional.

One also wonders how a commander who couldn’t prepare for or prevent his own troops from being attacked and killed by a relatively primitive fighting force like Hezbollah will succeed in combat against far more sophisticated enemies like Iran.

His Hebrew Wikipedia article reveals rather ironically that he chaired a group, Noam, which commemorated a fallen IDF soldier, Eytan Belhassan.  No word on his chairing any similar committees in memory of Ehud Goldwasser or Eldad Regev.  Imagine how the parents of these two men and all the other soldiers under his command feel about this atrocious rehabilitation of failed commander.

* the Hebrew (l’hasik maskanot) for “drawing the [proper] conclusion” means “resignation”

A feared wave of homegrown terrorism by radicalized Muslim Americans has not materialized, with plots and arrests dropping sharply over the two years since an unusual peak in 2009, according to a new study by a North Carolina research group.

The study, to be released on Wednesday, found that 20 Muslim Americans were charged in violent plots or attacks in 2011, down from 26 in 2010 and a spike of 47 in 2009.

Charles Kurzman, the author of the report for the Triangle Center on Terrorism and Homeland Security, called terrorism by Muslim Americans “a minuscule threat to public safety.” Of about 14,000 murders in the United States last year, not a single one resulted from Islamic extremism, said Mr. Kurzman, a professor of sociology at the University of North Carolina.

The report also notes that the number of American Muslims charged with terrorism since 9/11 has topped out at the whopping total of 193. Of all the thousands of such cases, only 193 were perpetrated by Muslims in the past 11 years! The anti-jihadis owe these American citizens an abject apology. But they won’t get one. Instead they’ll continue feeling the cold blast of hate. And anti-Muslim haters like Yerushalmi will continue their financially lucrative campaign of writing anti-Sharia laws for state governments, some of which don’t even have a substantial Muslim population living in their borders. If anything was a solution in search of a problem, this is it.

No doubt, Geller will be snooping into the study author’s background (Jewish) attempting to find bias or some other taint. Good luck to her. It won’t take much to satisfy her twisted mind that the study is part of the international conspiracy to downplay the Muslim menace.

MSNBC finally confirms possibly one of the worst kept secrets of the war between Israel and Iran: that the Mossad has recruited, trained, equipped and directed a domestic terror campaign against Iran’s nuclear program using the personnel of the Mujahadeen al-Khalq (MEK):

Two senior U.S. officials confirmed for NBC News  the MEK’s role in the assassinations, with one senior official saying, “All your inclinations are correct.”

One aspect of this report, however, is misleading.  The U.S. officials who confirm Mossad involvement in these plots carefully note that the U.S. is not participating.  That, unfortunately is not quite true.  The Bush administration allocated $400-million for this black ops war against Iran.  A good portion of this is suspected of funding Israel’s efforts.  So it is highly likely that we are the paymasters for this effort and our denials ring hollow.

With the help of a high level source inside Israel I have been reporting the Mossad-MEK connection for months, though I had no direct confirmation from U.S. officials, which is what was needed to nail down the allegations.  It’s good to be vindicated. Now I expect the MSM to beat a path to my door asking for interviews and expressing interest in all that information I’ve been reporting for so long. Right.

The blockbuster report also includes an instructive interview with a senior Iranian aide who details the charges and explains in detail how the Mossad trained one of the suspects:

“The relation is very intricate and close,” said Mohammad Javad Larijani, a senior aide to Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader, speaking of the MEK and Israel.  “They (Israelis) are paying … the Mujahedin. Some of their (MEK) agents … (are) providing Israel with information.  And they recruit and also manage logistical support.”

Moreover, he said, the Mossad, the Israeli secret service, is training MEK members in Israel on the use of motorcycles and small bombs.  In one case, he said, Mossad agents built a replica of the home of an Iranian nuclear scientist so that the assassins could familiarize themselves with the layout prior to the attack.

…Israel does not have direct access to our society. Mujahedin, being Iranian and being part of Iranian society, they have … a good number of … places to get into the touch with people. So I think they are working hand-to-hand very close.  And we do have very concrete documents.”

There is another element to this that is important which I’ve reported before.  The MSNBC goes into great detail about the MEK’s long-term war against both the Shah, the succeeding Iranian regime, and the U.S.  In the process, they even collaborated with elements of Al Qaeda.  May this sound the death knell for MEK lobbying efforts to remove itself from the Treasury Department’s terror list.  And all the Beltway insiders who accepted hundreds of thousands of dollars in return for joining in this effort should not only be ashamed, they should return it as blood money.  That includes people like Howard Dean, Michael Mukasey, John Bolton, Tom Ridge, Louis Freeh, Patrick Kennedy, James Woolsey and others.  In light of today’s report, Ridge may want to rethink this paean to terrorists he offered in a media interview:

“There’s an extraordinary group of bipartisan or even apolitical leaders, military leaders, diplomats, the United States … the United Kingdom, the European Union, even a U.S. District Court in Washington, said that this group that was put on the foreign terrorist organization watch list in 1997 doesn’t deserve to be there,” Ridge said in November on “The Andrea Mitchell Show” on MSNBC TV.

I’m also gratified that the MSNBC reporters get a Saban Center scholar to concede that this program by Israel is state sponsored terror.  He waffles and wavers a bit, but finally concedes that it walks and talks like a duck and it’s pretty much a duck:

Daniel Byman, a professor in the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University and also a senior fellow with the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution, said that if the accounts of the Israeli-MEK assassinations are accurate, the operation borders on terrorism.

“In theory, states cannot be terrorist, but if they hire locals to do assassinations, that would be state sponsorship,” said Byman, author of the recent book, “A High Price: The Triumphs and Failures of Israeli Counterterrorism.” “You could argue that they took action not to terrorize the public, the purpose of terrorism, but only the nuclear community. An argument could also be made that degrading the program means that you don’t have to take military action and thus, this is a lower level of violence and that really these are military targets, where normally terrorist targets are civilians.”

But ultimately, Byman said, there is a “spectrum of responsibility” and that Israel is ultimately responsible.

Remember that the Saban Center is financed by one of Aipac’s wealthiest supporters, Haim Saban.  In fact, I imagine that the scholar may be having a conversation with his superiors right about now about being “overly candid” in his assessment.

Paul Auster and David Grossman at 2010 Jerusalem Writers Festival (Yoav Ari Dudkevitch)id

In light of the argument between Tayyip Erdogan and Paul Auster about the relative freedoms of Turkey and Israel, I thought it would be instructive to quote from a Hebrew language profile of Auster published (of all places) in Yisrael HaYom.  Unfortunately, the original interview was in English but the article was published in Hebrew.  A request to the reporter for the original English materials was (of course) unanswered.  So I’ll translate back into English the portions of the interview that dealt with Auster’s views about Israel:

Auster was nine months old when the UN voted in favor of the birth of the State of Israel…The fate of European Jewry after WWII occupied his family’s attention.

“I grew up on Israel,” he says.  ”Every day I went to Hebrew School in New Jersey knowing that a large portion of my lessons would be devoted to raising funds for the young state.  We were involved in planting trees and writing pen-pal letters to people in Israel.  We felt that we were part of the State despite the fact that physically we were distant from it.  We felt, young and old, that we were helping build an idealistic new place.  We were very excited by this.”

“I said that I was raised on Israel and in a certain sense, it accompanies me my entire life.  The connection is beyond the fact that I have friends and acquaintances there.  It’s possible to deliberate forever about the elements of Zionism and its foundations, but in the period of destruction that WWII left behind in Europe,  Israel seemed a very reasonable response both in terms of the remaining Jewish refugees and the world at large.

“I admit that I have mixed feelings about the Israel of today, because Israeli society has changed.  Israel was transformed from an idealistic state to a socialist state, but to date, it is a state within which there are far too many fundamentalist religious elements.  I don’t believe the founders of Israel would’ve foreseen that the state would become one in which the subject of religion would become so fateful and essential, in the future.”

What I remember especially from your conversation with David Grossman at the 2010 Writers Festival were your memories of your last visit to Israel in 1997:

“I visited Israel only twice, in January 1997 and May 2010.  What I saw in 1997 with my own eyes was difficult.  It was only a year after the murder of Rabin.  People in the streets were still in mourning.  The feeling in the air was one of great trauma.  The prime minister then as today, was Binyamin Netanyahu, a man whose views personally I do not share.     Nevertheless, Netanyahu signed the Hebron agreement, which signified a gigantic step in the political process toward the Palestinian people.  So there was hope.  People talked about things.  Besides I remember we stayed in Jerusalem and the streets were humming on Shabbat and stores were open and full of customers.

“On my second trip, the streets were empty and closed except for a lone café that remained open.  I traveled to Tel Aviv to see a friend and when I told him about this he said in typically cynical Israeli fashion: ‘Jerusalem isn’t a city.  It’s a disease.’

“The festival in which I participated at Mishkenot Shaananim was well-organized and there seemed a true hunger in Israel for artistic life and spiritual existence.  But from a political perspective I understand that people no longer know what to think, and don’t see any hope on the horizon.  One of the writers who participated in the Festival said to me, justifiably, that the sense was that Israelis live between despair–characterizing the left side of the spectrum, and denial–characterizing the right.  With very little in between.  The denial is intolerable, it can’t survive.  The despair too doesn’t elicit any hope.  So everything is a mess.”

Auster says that more than anything, he can’t come to terms with the settlers who arrived in Israel from the U.S.

“Many of the settlers came from here, even from Brooklyn.  This is subject that concerns me a lot.  Because most of them aren’t originally Israeli, but American fanatics who live in a Wild West fantasy in which the Palestinian are the Indians.  These people don’t behave rationally and because of this the situation is quite complicated.  This sort of irrationality also characterizes American politics: people so fixed in their ideas that they can only see the world in one way and never change their minds.  You can’t have any sort of dialogue with people like this.  Therefore you can’t create any relationship with them.  It happens in Israel.  It happens in America.  And it happens in too many countries in the world.

Though Auster speaks with great warmth and sensitivity about his relationship with Israel’s greatest living novelist, David Grossman, it’s clear that he has little more than an artificial sense of what Israeli life is like.  That’s why he can mouth platitudes about Israel being a secular democracy when it’s anything but.  For that young Jewish boy helping to plant trees in the young Jewish state, Israel will always be a secular democracy.  But for real Israelis living day to day existence in a state overwhelmed by ultranationalist fervor, there is little left of secular democracy but fumes.

In my first post about the Auster-Erdogan dispute I focussed on the threats to press freedom and free speech inside Israel proper.  Anat Matar has written about the same subject from a Palestinian vantage point.

While Auster certainly wasn’t thinking of this when he spoke about Israel’s alleged free press, he should’ve because these issues in the Territories are controlled by Israel and are a reflection of Israel.  It is common for liberal Zionists like the American Jewish author to see the Occupation as something apart from Israel.  If only Israel could end the Occupation or separate from it, then all would return to normal.  What he doesn’t understand is that the Occupation IS Israel.  It isn’t apart from it.

Here is how Matar describes the problem (translation by Sol Salbe):

A close scrutiny of the reports by Reporters without Borders shows that the organisation expressed its concern at the wave of arrests of West Bank and East Jerusalem journalists. Among others, these included the arrest Isra Salhab, presenter of a TV program about Palestinian prisoners, and the extension of the detention of Walid Khaled , editor of Filisteen newspaper…

Arrests of and injuries to journalists and photographers at the weekly Friday demonstrations are a common sight…Reporters without Borders has strongly condemned the violent manner in which the Israeli forces are treating journalists. Among other things it mentions two photographers — Mahib Al-Barghouti, and Hazem Bader – who sustained injuries in the face and legs while working. Bader, an Associated Press photographer, was arrested while covering a demonstration at the village of al Tawani , when a stun grenade exploded right in front of him. He is still suffering from multiple burns. Al- Barghouti was recently wounded while covering the weekly protest in Bil’in. Two bullets penetrated his leg, when he was in a different location and at some distance from the other participants in the demonstration.

The Committee to Protect Journalists has sent a strongly worded protest letter to Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu about a month ago. The note protested about Israel’s violent attitude to journalists covering the events in the West Bank. This note as well contained a great deal of facts and figures on the administrative detentions of journalists, physical assaults and the persistent harassment of journalists while they are on the job.

One could…add the arrest and imprisonment of writers – Ahmed Katamish who is under administrative detention provides one well-known example – but it is not my intention here. My aim, as noted earlier, is to endeavour to pinpoint the origin of Auster’s blindness…

The point is that Auster, like many other intellectuals in the West, ignores everything that happens outside Israel’s formal borders – as if anything related to the never-ending Occupation has no bearing on the essence of Israel identity as a liberal and enlightened country. This is exactly what is always behind those who play innocent and deny Israel’s Apartheid situation…It’s true: if you resolutely ignore what is happening in the blood-stained front yard, you can truly rejoice at the freedom that characterises what’s inside the palace, where Auster hangs around when he visits the Holy Land.

In short, the situation in Israel is grim, much grimmer than Auster acknowledges.  Instead of seeing the situation for what it really is, he wears rose-colored glasses and talks about his “mixed feelings” about Israel and the “complications” that settlers cause.  The real situation has gone far beyond the point of ambivalence and complications. Israel is in a crisis.  It’s existence is threatened.  Not from without, but from within.  Settlers aren’t just a complication, they are strangling the secular democratic state he raised money for as a child.

My feeling is that soon the State of Israel, at least as we conceived it when we were young idealistic liberal Zionists, will be doomed.  I don’t know what will replace it.  It could be something far worse.  It could be something better.  But its fate hangs in the balance.  And Auster’s moral blindness hinders, rather than helps.

U.S. bunker buster bomb at White Sands in 2007 (AP)

Leon Panetta revealed to the Wall Street Journal that the U.S.’ most powerful bunker buster has failed tests designed to prove it could penetrate and destroy Iran’s most hardened nuclear facility in Fordow:

Pentagon war planners have concluded that their largest conventional bomb isn’t yet capable of destroying Iran’s most heavily fortified underground facilities, and are stepping up efforts to make it more powerful, according to U.S. officials briefed on the plan.

…But initial tests indicated that the bomb, as currently configured, wouldn’t be capable of destroying some of Iran’s facilities…

Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, in an interview with The Wall Street Journal Thursday, acknowledged the bomb’s shortcomings against some of Iran’s deepest bunkers. He said more development work would be done and that he expected the bomb to be ready to take on the deepest bunkers soon.

But never fear, the boys in the back room are devising ever larger and more destructive capability for the 30,000-lb. weapon.  They spent $330-million for 20 of these babies.  They say they need another $80-million.  Eventually, they promise to get it right:

Doubts about the MOP’s effectiveness prompted the Pentagon this month to secretly submit a request to Congress for funding to enhance the bomb’s ability to penetrate deeper into rock, concrete and steel before exploding, the officials said.

In the meantime, Israel, which doesn’t yet have our most lethal variety of bunker buster, pursues its own plans to attack Iran.  Reuven Pedatzur, one of the leading analysts of Israel’s military air capability, warns in a deliciously ironic Haaretz column that if the U.S. doesn’t yet have a weapon capable of knocking out Iran’s most impenetrable facilities, Israel has no business trying to do this with even less capable weaponry:

If Israeli Air Force planes succeed in reaching the targets and in dropping bombs on them with great accuracy, but they are nevertheless not destroyed, this would pose questions about the justification of a military operation…

It is doubtful whether the price we would pay – which would find expression in the form of an Iranian response that could lead to a regional conflict, barrages of missiles and rockets from the north and the south, international pressure on Israel, waves of terror against Jewish targets around the world and various other negative repercussions – would justify the strike.

The Washington Post’s Walter Pincus adds a few other caveats that should make policymakers in Tel Aviv and Washington think and think again about what they’re planning.  He mentions that the Israelis don’t have enough refueling capability to cover the needs of their planes for a 2,000 mile total round trip journey in attacking Iran.  The columnist lists six major Iranian target sites for attack and notes how much more complicated such strikes would be than the previously successful ones against Saddam’s reactor and Syria’s.

Israeli Haredim enjoying view from Israel during Operation Cast Lead

You remember the descriptions of the First Battle of Bull Run when all of Washington’s high society rode out in their fine carriages and horses to picnic under the shady trees and watch their Union boys send the Rebs packing?  Did they get the shock of their lives when the Rebel musket balls whizzed over their heads and the Union soldiers ran for their lives from the field?  Or similarly, the Israelis in southern Israel who took lawn chairs out to watch the IDF smash Gaza to smithereens in 2009?  Here’s a picture of another group of expectant, thrilled Israelis watching the action.

That’s what the foreign press corps appears to be doing now in Tel Aviv in preparation for an attack on Iran.  They’re renting the right to put film crews and reporters on the city’s rooftops (Hebrew) during the upcoming war in order to cover the anticipated Iranian counterattack.  That way they can get great photo ops and pictures of missiles wreaking havoc on the city. What a story!  What a feast for the eyes!  Other news organizations like CBS, Fox News, and NBC are sending their senior producers to Israel to scope out the place in case they have to send in the big boys–the news anchors and senior correspondents (especially since no one can report from Teheran!).

We can’t wait!  I don’t know why I should have to point out that this is irony.  But there are some right-wingers who have neither a sense of irony nor humor.  So it’s for them I guess.

 …The United States would agree to full recognition and respect for the Islamic Republic, and Iran would agree to regional cooperation with the United States in Afghanistan and Iraq. Both sides would agree to address the full range of bilateral disputes.

The International Atomic Energy Agency and the United Nations Security Council could accept an Iranian civil nuclear program in return for Iran’s agreeing to grant inspectors full access to that program to assure that Iran did not build a nuclear weapon. Once international agencies had full access to Iran’s nuclear program, there could be a progressive reduction of the Security Council’s sanctions that are now in effect. Iran would agree to cease making threats against Israel, and the United States would agree to support efforts toward achieving a nuclear-free zone in the Middle East.

It would be important to make arrangements for Israel’s security; the exact shape of those measures would have to be worked out in the negotiations. An agreement in which there would be full access to Iran’s nuclear program, with a monitored limitation of 5 percent enrichment, would offer Israel additional reasons for confidence in the deal.

Both sides would agree to cooperate in reducing the influence of the Taliban and Al Qaeda in Afghanistan; in combating drug trafficking; and in keeping open the routes through which energy flows to the world from the Persian Gulf. Both sides would agree that while wide differences between the two nations remained, those differences must be resolved peacefully.

I’m not sure the 5% enrichment limitation is acceptable since it will hardly allow Iran to develop a civilian nuclear program.  But possibly no enrichment beyond 20% might work.  Also, the U.S. will have to promise to bring Israel into the NPT and to lobby intensively for a Middle East nuclear free zone.  Only the U.S. can compel Israel to do this.  Otherwise, it won’t happen.  Those are big stumbling blocks.

What the proposal doesn’t mention, and which could be a critical long-term component in any resolution, is solving the Israel-Palestine issue.  Even if the U.S. and Iran agree to a settlement between themselves, a festering Israel-Palestine conflict will maintain a high level of tension in the region.

The op-ed uses the example of Nixon and Mao’s rapprochement as a parallel to the current situation between Iran and the U.S.  But the former diplomats note this important distinction between the two eras and situations:

The China analogy for American-Iranian relations falls short in some areas. The most important is that Mao was ready for an American approach, while Iran’s supreme religious leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, is not. Instead, he is convinced that the United States will not work with Iran until his regime is gone.

For Iran’s leadership, the notion that the United States is bent on overthrowing its rulers is rooted in historical experience: the United States did overthrow Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh in 1953, supported the Shah afterward, supported Saddam Hussein’s war against Iran in the 1980s, and now backs increasing efforts to weaken and isolate Iran.

Reducing the malign influence of this legacy on the thinking of Ayatollah Khamenei will be essential to achieving any deal. Simply “keeping the door open to diplomacy” will not be sufficient. So the Iranian leader must be approached directly, but discreetly, by someone he trusts who conveys assurances from President Obama that covert operations and public pressure have been demonstrably reduced. The interlocutor might be a leader from a country in the region, enlisted when the American president felt the time was right.

Ayatollah Khamenei will have to be convinced by actions, not just messages. Just as Nixon halted covert action in Tibet before approaching China, a similar signal will be needed with Iran.

There is no guarantee that diplomacy will succeed. But that is also true of war. And only diplomacy can offer Iran’s current rulers a stake in building a secure future without a nuclear bomb. Only diplomacy can achieve America’s major objectives while avoiding the mistakes committed in Iraq or Vietnam.

After so much blather and delusional thinking from so many U.S. (I especially “like” Niall Ferguson’s call for a new “Six Day War” against Iran which would involve “creative destruction,” which is turn is reminiscent of that other infamously delusional phrase crafted by Condi Rice during the 2006 Lebanon war, which she called the “birth pangs of a new Middle East”), and particularly Israeli politicians and analysts, it’s finally welcome to hear clear thinking and realism.  Though I am afraid that the conflict has gone beyond such pragmatic approaches.  I fear that both sides are on the road to war and nothing can stop it.  Though I hope I’m wrong.

Another issue that complicates the Pickering-Luers proposal is that the U.S. would essentially have to turn its back on Israeli hysteria about Iran.  It would have to drop its participation in the Israeli covert ops campaign against Iran.  It would have to firmly tell Israel the war scenario has come to the end of the road.  We will also have to demand that Israel join NPT and that it confront world pressure for a nuclear free Middle East.  Israel wouldn’t have to necessarily accede to this immediately.  But it will not be able to dawdle forever as it has regarding solving the Palestine issue.  I just don’t see Obama having either the will or the muscle to pull this off.  If it were Nixon and Kissinger–maybe.  Or Clinton–maybe.  But Obama? He doesn’t have it in him.  Again, may I be proven wrong.

In a somewhat related development, Efraim Halevy, the former Mossad chief touts a Pax Israelitus which envisions toppling the Syrian regime, icing Iran out, replacing Assad with a compliant, pro-western (i.e. pro-Israel) puppet.  Of course, he only says some of those things.  But he means all of them.  Halevy has a grand vision that foresees a new Syria cutting Iran’s arms lifeline leading to Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza.  This is turn will somehow force Iran to end its nuclear program and even topple the Ayatollahs.

Though I usually find Halevy eminently pragmatic, here he’s drunk the typical Israeli Koolaid, which usually involves elaborate fantasies of skullduggery and manipulation that turns the world from hostile to friendly to Israeli interests.  Returning to the Pickering-Luers thesis, there is only one way to create a stable Middle East.  That is negotiations among equals and with full consideration of the interests of all parties.

What Halevy is proposing is more of the same contrived realpolitik which has meant rivers of blood running for decades.  It’s also part of a neocon vision of western intervention to make the Middle East safe for Israel and our interests.  Other pro-Israel sources who’ve been touting this path are Michael Weiss in the pages of Foreign Policy and the Aipac affiliated Washington Institute for Near East Policy.  They spin a fantasy of hitching our wagon to the star of the Free Syrian Army, which, once it comes to power, will cast out Iran, make nice with Israel and turn off the spigot to Hezbollah.

Instead, all parties including Israel, Iran, Syria, Lebanon and others need to sit and figure out how to give each party something of what they want to satisfy its most critical needs.  For Syria, that will mean a new government that is independent and not dominated by the U.S., the west or Israel.  One hopes such an independent Syria will pursue a course that favors neither Iran nor Israel unduly, but approaches each for what it can offer Syria.

This sort of new Syrian government would focus on improving its domestic economy and improving people’s lives rather than dabbling in regional power politics as it does now with Iran and Lebanon.  In turn, this would mean Israel would have to reign in its own impulse to dabble in the double game of spycraft and covert war against its neighbors.  Territorial disputes would be resolved by Israel returning the Golan and Shebaa Farms to their rightful owners.  In turn, Syria and Lebanon would recognize Israel and normalize relations.  This of course would help sideline or defang Hezbollah.

But none of this can happen through Halevy’s machinations.  It can only happen by negotiations in good faith, something Israel clearly isn’t prepared to do (yet).

Not surprisingly, the BDS event organizers were a tad sensitive about who would be reporting from these media outlets. They ultimately decided to refuse access to the event for the Exponent’s reporter and a far-right pro-Israel filmmaker. Personally, I think they made a mistake. I would’ve negotiated with the Exponent for an op ed by a Penn faculty member who supported BDS in return for allowing a hostile reporter to have access. If the newspaper refused, then let them slam BDS while you point out how unfair they were in refusing to allow you to present your point of view in the newspaper.

It should e noted that The Exponent’s former editor, Jonathan Tobin, now graces the editorial masthead at Commentary. So the Exponent is certainly no exemplar of diversity on the question of coverage related to Israel or BDS.

Jane Eisner, the Forward’s managing editor decided to pile on, writing an editorial criticizing the decision to bar the reporter, as an infringement on free speech. This is wrong for all sorts of reasons. One, because the pro-Israel media has a monopoly on access to the mainstream community through it’s media outlets. That means that they present their slanted version of BDS to their readers without allowing the BDS movement to portray itself in their pages. If anyone is repressing free speech and the diversity of debate it is the Exponent and Forward.

But even more important is the fact that the Israel Lobby routinely restricts media access to reporters it doesn’t like at events they host. Aipac provided press credentials to The Guardian’s Chris McGreal to cover it’s 2007 national conference. When McGreal arrived to pick up his credentials and registration packet, he was not only denied access, but Josh Block, Aipac’s then PR capo di tutti, had the reporter frog-marched out of the hall escorted by security guards. I reported this story in my blog at the time and in the Guardian’s Comment is Free. But The Forward never took up the matter. Somehow, when the BDS movement stifles the press it’s newsworthy, but when Josh Block and Aipac do it they get a pass.

Further, if Jane Eisner wants to talk about freedom of speech in the media, she should look in the mirror. I, for example am blackballed from appearing there. How do I know? Let’s just say a little birdie told me. My crime? Criticizing The Forward’s decision to take Republican Jewish Coalition ads in 2008 which accused Barack Obama of being racist. You see some journalists can be very thin skinned about criticism. Which is ironic because those same editors refuse to allow activists to be equally thin-skinned about critical coverage.

Mao, who himself didn’t brook much dissent, said “let a thousand flowers bloom.”. Why can’t we in the Jewish community do at least as well?