Sheldon Adelson is doubling-down on his fair-haired white boy, Newt Gingrich, with a second $5-million Super PAC gift given through his wife, Miriam.  If God forbid, Newtie wins the nomination I’d bet we can expect gifts in the $50-100 million range from Big Shel.  This gift, and the NY Times article to which I linked, make clear that Newt is largely a creature of Adelson’s money.  Without it, Romney would already be the Republican nominee.  With it, he spent millions tearing down Romney and boosting his own presence and visibility:

The Adelsons’ contributions on Mr. Gingrich’s behalf illustrate how rapidly a new era of unlimited political money is reshaping the rules of presidential politics and empowering individual donors to a degree unseen since before the Watergate scandals.

The wealth of a single couple has now leveled the playing field in two critical primary states for Mr. Gingrich, a candidate who ended September more than $1 million in debt, finished out of the running in Iowa and New Hampshire and, unlike Mr. Romney, has yet to attract the broad network of hard-money donors and bundlers that traditionally propel presidential campaigns.

Remember also, that when Gingrich ran for president in the past he was a lightly-regarded, laughingstock also-ran.  In these days of Supreme Court permitted “free money,” a back-of-the-packer can bring unlimited cash to bear and break through to the mainstream.  This causes a tremendous distortion in the political process.

I have no doubt that Barack Obama will have more than enough cash of his own to offset the Adelson “touch.”  But in other circumstances, otherwise freakish candidates like Gingrich could easily win primaries and even the presidency while have no real grassroots base or large donor pool.  Is this really what the Founding Fathers had in mind when they conceived the American presidency?

In case there is any dissension in the comment thread ranks related to my reference to Newt as a ‘white boy,’ know that I’m referring ironically to the deep ethnic hatreds roiling in Newt’s brain from Muslims to uppity (“food stamp”) Negroes to radical “alien-Alinsky” Jews.  Let’s make clear his clear preference for his white, Christian kind which does make some small allowance for good Not-One-Incher Jews like Reb Adelson.

The Times article notes that John Sununu (of Lebanese Arab descent), issues a direct threat to Adelson, saying that all the Republican financiers backing Romney would take revenge on him the next time he turned to them for backing to build a new casino.  That seems a hollow threat since money men are in the business of making money and if Sheldon can make them money he’ll have no problem finding financial backing.

But it is interesting to note the level of dismay Adelson is provoking in the circle of the Republican elite.  This is exactly where Adelson likes to be.  He’s already upset the Israeli political system by offering Bibi virtual financial carte blanche and hundreds of millions worth of free publicity via his Yisrael HaYom newspaper.  First, Adelson ensured a virtual permanent Likudist majority in Israeli politics.  Now he seeks to install a permanent ultranationalist pro-Israel U.S. government in the form of Newt Gingrich.

Let’s spin this fantasy out a bit farther.  Let’s say Newt gets the nomination along with another, say $100 mil from Adelson to spend against Obama.  Do you think the latter will make Bibi pay a price for this?  Not on your life.  Which is precisely what lies at the heart of the current president’s grave weakness when it comes to Israel.  He simply doesn’t have the stomach for hard-nosed politics that other truly great presidents have had and understood.  It’s why Obama can never be a great president and may end his second term being a somewhat mediocre one.

Of all the enemies facing the State of Israel, or more specifically Bibi Netanyahu (but why distinguish between the two–aren’t they identical?), who do you think he would single out as the most dangerous: Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran, Turkey?  None of the above.  His worst enemies are two newspapers.  Two “extreme leftist” newspapers to be sure, but newspapers nonetheless.  Apparently, words are more powerful than Qassams and Shihabs.

The Jerusalem Post editor heard Bibi made precisely such a statement, and told this to an audience at an international Zionist conference:

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Israel’s two greatest enemies are The New York Times and Haaretz, the editor of The Jerusalem Post said in a speech.

Steve Linde, addressing a conference in Tel Aviv of the Women’s International Zionist Organization, said Wednesday that Netanyahu made the remark to him about the newspapers at a private meeting “a couple of weeks ago” at the prime minister’s office in Tel Aviv.

“He said, ‘You know, Steve, we have two main enemies,’ ” Linde said, according to a recording of the WIZO speech provided to JTA. “And I thought he was going to talk about, you know, Iran, maybe Hamas. He said, ‘It’s The New York Times and Haaretz.’ He said, ‘They set the agenda for an anti-Israel campaign all over the world. Journalists read them every morning and base their news stories … on what they read in The New York Times and Haaretz.’ ”

Linde said he and other participants at the meeting asked Netanyahu whether he really thought that the media had that strong a role in shaping world opinion on Israel, and the prime minister replied, “Absolutely.”

One of the shrewdest things Bibi has done, and the most damaging to Israeli democracy, is that he’s focussed on controlling the media.  His chief ally, Sheldon Adelson, bought himself a paper, Yisrael HaYom, which Bibi credits not just with winning him the last election, but maintaining overall rightist dominance of Israeli political discourse.  This is why Bibi’s threats to destroy Channel 10 should be taken dead seriously.  Bibi wants to win. And the best way to do so is to control the channels of distribution of information (eg. propaganda).

Note also that Israel’s “greatest enemies” are not external enemies, not forces seeking to kill Israelis; but rather journalists who try to cover Israel for a world audience.  These are the true enemies in the eyes of the paranoid far-right.  It’s not that their words kill, but they present an image of Israel to the world that enrages ultranationalists.

There are at least two avatars of dissent in the media.  One in Israel is Haaretz.  The other in the U.S. is the NY Times.  These are organs he cannot control.  Haaretz is outside his control because it has foreign financing that supports its independent editorial position (as opposed to Channel 10, which has foreign investors like Ronald Lauder, who are vulnerable to pressure from the Israeli right and figures like Adelson, and will not stand up for an independent editorial position).  The Times, of course, is a U.S. publication and as such Netanyahu can do little more than gnash his teeth at the vitriol he perceives as emanating from correspondents like Tom Friedman and Roger Cohen.

It’s ironic that Bibi doesn’t credit the Times Israel correspondent, Ethan “Eytan” Bronner as being one of his assets.  Bronner’s largely softball reporting gives Bibi plenty of leeway and undeservedly so.

The Post’s editor is regretting his candor (Hebrew).  In a telephone interview with 7th Eye, he’s claiming he thought there were no journalists present when he made what he intended to be “private” remarks.  Remarkable that a newspaper editor would speak in a public setting and expect his remarks to remain private.  If he had a reporter at a similar event who didn’t report this story he’d likely fire him.  Steve Linde, the doltish newspaperman in question, also claimed that JTA took his remarks out of context, though he couldn’t tell 7th Eye what the proper context would be, nor what words Bibi used that might’ve been different than those reported by JTA.  You see, Bibi’s remarks were “not for publication,” Linde explained.  Which is precisely why Linde quoted them in a public setting.  Got it?

My friend, Sol Salbe posted a link to this story on Facebook to which he appended the famous quote from Greek drama:

He who the gods wish to destroy, they first make mad.

I don’t know if Bibi is mad or stone cold sober.  But I do know that Israel, under his leadership, is rapidly sliding down a slippery slope towards destruction.

The level of settler violence, always high, has reached a fever pitch of late.  Usually the attacks go by the common name “price tag,” which alludes to a form of payback against the government for dismantling illegal settlements.  Though lately, the attacks seem to have taken on a life of their own and need no spark to ignite them: three mosques have been burned, two in the past week; a West Bank IDF outpost was trashed and a senior officer injured with a brick thrown through his car window; settlers occupied an abandoned monastery on the Jordanian border to warn King Abdullah not to interfere in matters concerning the Temple Mount; death threats and vandalism against Peace Now leaders.

In particular, the assault against the IDF unit and wounding of the officer seems to have unnerved many in Israel.  While Israelis argue about many things, there is an avowed reverence for the IDF in many circles.  Whatever you trash, you don’t trash our boys, the ones who protect us.  The most radical of the settlers have violated this national covenant because, while there are few threats against their political agenda, if the nation ever turns against them, they understand it will be the army that will face them.  In the few instances where the State musters the fortitude to dismantle an outpost or settlement, it is the army that does it.  That’s why the most radical settlers espouse outright hatred of the army and engage in regular acts of vandalism and harassment though till now, they’d never risen to this level of intensity.

All of Israel seems to wringing its hands, with the common refrain being–these settlers are not representative of the overwhelming majority of law-abiding settlers.  They’re an extremist minority within a minority.  They’re an aberration, a schandeh, an embarrassment to Israel in the face of the world community.  This Jerusalem Post editorial is typical:

What is needed is some proportion. The burning of mosques by Jewish hooligans is deplorable, but it is no more representative of the country – or the direction it is going – than Florida Pastor Terry Jones’ burning of a Koran in May was a reflection of America.

Terry Jones doesn’t live in occupied territory (unless you want to argue we should return Florida to the Pensacolas).  He doesn’t have the mortgage for the house where he resides and which sits on occupied territory, subsidized by the U.S. government.  The government hasn’t built roads to his home cutting through land belonging to a foreign nation.  Terry Jones doesn’t elect members of Congress who mirror his views precisely.  The president doesn’t meet regularly and consult with Terry Jones’ best friends.  Terry Jones hasn’t yet killed anyone, let alone a neighbor living next door to him on that occupied land.  Terry Jones is a Christian lunatic crackpot.  Settlers are most definitely not.

The Israeli government, which itself shares most, if not all of the values of the settler extremists went into emergency session to determine how to deal with the threat posed by the hooliganism and violence.  The answer Bibi Netanyahu devised is to begin treating settler criminal suspects just as badly as Palestinian security detainees.  In other words, arrest without speedy trial, denial of legal representation, etc.  So techniques and tactics which have failed to quell Palestinian resistance will now be used in a failed effort to suppress settler revolt.  Not to mention that Israel’s vaunted democratic values, what’s left of them anyway, will be further eroded.  But this doesn’t matter to most Israelis, who see security detainees as individuals who don’t deserve any rights.

There was one bridge too far for Bibi, though.  He won’t say the “T” word.  He wouldn’t call the settlers terrorists.  Doing so would allow the State to treat the settlers basically as the U.S. treats Guantanamo detainees, offering them virtually no rights at all.

Former defense minister Binyamin Ben Eliezer’s response to the settler pogroms was to recommend shooting them as the IDF would any Palestinian group which had the chutzpah to invade one of their camps.  Shimon Peres called the settlers a schandeh fahr di goyim (but in Hebrew, of course).  Jeffrey Goldberg said Israel should “declare war” on them and throw them in the desert prison where it houses Fatah and Hamas terror prisoners, Ketziot (where Goldberg himself served in the IDF).

But there is one basic, fundamental problem with everything I’ve described above and which renders Israel’s response the height of hypocrisy.  The settlers are not an aberration.  They are not a schandeh.  They don’t represent an extremist minority.  In fact, about them you could say: “L’etat c’est moi.”  The settlers ARE the State.  They may be slightly ahead of the conventional political mainstream, but as the American politicians say about Israeli prime ministers when they come to DC: “there’s no daylight between Israel and the U.S.”

I can hear liberal Zionists like Goldberg or Gershom Gorenberg protest that I overstate my case.  Even some readers will no doubt try to take me to task.  But I maintain that just as Malcolm X said after the Kennedy assassination that the latter’s killing was the “chickens coming home to roost,” so settler killings and general hooliganism are a manifestation of an overall national consensus that Israel must maintain the Occupation virtually forever.

Yes, I know there is supposedly general support for a two state solution, liberal Zionists are fond of pointing out that Bibi even claims to support this approach.  But that’s not how to determine what a nation believes.  Watch what I do, not what I say, is an old motto regarding politicians.  It holds true of nations as well.  The vast majority of Israelis may say they support two states, but they also don’t believe there will ever be peace with the Palestinians.  A nation which has given up on peace will never make the choices necessary to achieve it.

Why else are settlers who are guilty of major crimes like murder, maiming, arson, etc. almost never charged, let alone prosecuted?  Why else when a settler is imprisoned (but only for the most heinous of crimes like mass murder) are they invariably sent to a mental hospital and judged insane, rather than to prison?  Why else do Israeli presidents invariably pardon or grant clemency to almost every single Jewish terrorist?   At some point, you have to recognize that the terrorist, he is us.

So if Israel wants to maintain the Occupation.  If it approves of the ongoing theft of Palestinian land.  If it supports the building of the Separation Wall and the consequent sequestration of another 15% or more of available Palestinian land.  If it shrugs its shoulders at the constant drip-drip-drip of settler and IDF homicidal violence against both Palestinians and Israeli peace activists, then it must take responsibility for the criminals within, who are little more than mirrors of Israel itself.

Frankly, I’m sick and tired of the faces and arms raised to the sky whenever a settler commits an especially outrageous act (such as the assassination of Rabin, for one).  These are not alien acts committed by body snatchers or pod people.  These are your own kin, your own fellow citizens.  They act on your behalf.  They ARE you.  You cannot deny them.  You cannot distance yourself.  You cannot say they work for themselves alone.

From the very first moment of the settlement enterprise shortly after the 1967 War, Israel blessed it and said it was doing God’s and the nation’s work.  Even Shimon Peres, who leads the hand-wringers today in claiming these settlers are bad, bad boys who must be spanked by their mommies; even Peres went to the settlements at a critical juncture in the early stages and threw in his lot with them.  There would be no Hilltop Youth, no Baruch Marzel, no Yigal Amir without the prior approval offered by Israel’s power élite to the Greater Israel-Gush Emunim movement.

Many Israeli commentators are getting carried away talking about a cancer in the body politic.  The most extreme of the settlers are not alien to Israel, they ARE Israel.  Look at the Israeli government, at the Knesset.  The bright, shiny faces representing Israel on the world stage could just as easily be throwing bricks and Molotov cocktails at IDF officers if they took off their suits and ties (when they wear them).  Lieberman?  A former Kach member.  Yaalon?  Committed an act of insubordination against PM Sharon in refusing to evacuate Gaza settlers.  Netanyahu?  Spoke openly of expelling Israeli Palestinian citizens as recently as 1988.  There is almost a seamless web of ideological conviction and action between the current Israeli governing élite and the settlers.

What is to be done?  That’s one of the hardest questions to answer.  This is why I’ve come to despair that an answer can come from within Israel.  Until he died, on good days I believed that Sharon might take on the settlers in the same way Ben Gurion took on Begin by sinking the Altalena in 1948.  Now that Sharon is gone, there’s no one.  Tzipi Livni?  Gimme a break.  She may not even win the next Kadima Party primary, let alone become prime minister.  Barak?  Don’t even go there.  So who?

The key is outside intervention.  Israel is rapidly turning into Serbia or apartheid era South Africa or Putin’s Russia.  It is an outlaw nation.  A nation not of laws but of whims and caprices.  What Bibi wants, Bibi gets.  A TV channel airs documentaries critical of you?  Shut it down.  An NGO exposes injustices committed by the army or intelligence services?  Turn off the tap of foreign support.

Similarly, what settlers want, they get.  They are never satisfied with half a loaf when they could have the whole.  And the whole invariably involves a Palestinian village or family who owns an orchard or spring which would look might fine with some sprightly new tile-roofed settler homes sitting on that land.

The settlers have theft in their heart, which means that Israel is a nation built on theft.  And you cannot separate settlerism from Zionism (as practiced by the Israeli political élite) or Israeli national identity.  They are interchangeable.  That is why I despair that any Israeli leader would have the political will to make a virtual political suicide pact to extirpate the settlers as a power base within Israel.  For that is what it will take.  There can be no compromise, no saying that settlers may be criminals but not terrorists as Bibi does.  Someone’s got to look this scourge in the eye and say: we’ve seen the enemy and he is us.  Until then, you’re just talking about window-dressing.

I’ve been watching the bitter unfolding of a vendetta between the Israeli government and Tom Friedman, who’s writing increasingly vitriolic prose about the Netanyahu government.  The spectacle of Israel’s liberal Zionist forward cadre turning its back on the current government in a most public and disconcerting way is almost a joy to behold.  Not that Friedman has grown much wiser from the thrashing.  He’s still touting Fayyadism as the solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.  But as far as his analysis of the current Israeli government, he’s quite acute on that score.

The problem of course for liberal Zionists like Friedman is that they hold out hope that Israel can save itself, which I no longer believe.  It will be interesting to watch for any evolution in Friedman’s thinking on that score.

Newt Gingrich on yet another Yisrael Hayom cover.

Sheldon Adelson, in effect, contributes $36 million every year to support the election and rule of Bibi Netanyahu. No, you won’t find that figure in any public donation record because he doesn’t give this money directly to Bibi. This is the amount of his subsidy of Yisrael Hayom, Israel’s most popular daily newspaper.  Bibi himself credits the paper with putting him in office and keeping him there. Yossi Verter wrote in Haaretz a few weeks ago:

The truth comes out. Netanyahu believes that without Yisrael Hayom, his personal journal edited, as it were, night by night in his own office, he would never have been elected and the right-wing bloc would not win a majority.

There is no comparable phenomenon in U.S. journalism. It would be as if Gannett had a billionaire owner for whom money was no object in advancing the specific political career of one far-right American politician. Imagine USA Today as a free paper totally funded by ads and the owner’s largess. Imagine too, that virtually the entire newspaper is given over to promotion of the views of Ron Paul or Newt Gingrich, along with other hot tabloidy subjects. Then you’d approach the impact that Yisrael Hayom is having on Israeli politics and journalism.

With Bibi about to destroy Channel 10 by revoking its broadcast license in revenge for its robust exposes of his vices and those of his patron, Adelson, it would provide a perfect opening for the latter to buy his own TV station as well.  That would further the right-wing revolution in Israeli media which Bibi and Shelly have been crafting for a number of years.

The reason this is all interesting is that Adelson has now closed in on a Republican presidential candidate who he will support in the same way he supported Bibi. The Forward recently profiled his efforts on behalf of Newt Gingrich and noted that Adelson was in a distinct minority among wealthy Jewish Republicans who were largely supporting Mitt Romney as the most electable (because most moderate) Republican in the pack. Sheldon Adelson, like George Bush and Dick Cheney before him, isn’t interested in pragmatism or electability. He’s interested in true believer ideological purity. And he isn’t afraid to put his money where his mouth and pocketbook are.

All of this explains this item in Shuki Taussig’s 7th Eye blog about the vast increase in coverage of Gingrich in the pages of Yisrael Hayom:

In the past few weeks, it has devoted an unusual amount of attention to Newt Gingrich…The number of stories the paper devotes to this American politician stands in stark contrast to the paucity of its normal foreign [affairs] coverage…The question is whether this is merely an initiative of the paper’s editors which will have no further influence than inside Israel, or whether it may impact a political campaign an ocean away.

Certainly, in the mind of a megalomaniac like Adelson the impact should carry over from Israel to America. Whether it does or not is another question. Luckily for us in America, while there is great media concentration in the hands of a few companies, it is still not as concentrated as it is in Israel, where there are four major dailies for the whole country. In such an environment, with one of those four in the hands of a right wing oligarch with unlimited resources and a voracious political ambition, he can ride roughshod over the other three which are bound by more conventional matters of profits and losses.

So Adelson’s patronage of Gingrich won’t have as much of an impact as it does inside Israel. Where it will have an impact is on Israeli attitudes toward the U.S. It will encourage precisely the sort of supercilious, rejectionist approach taken by Bibi toward Barack Obama. It will encourage the end-arounds by which Bibi has attempted (successfully due to Obama’s political tumesence) to go over the president’s head and appeal directly to Congress. Which means that with a Democratic president, Adelson and Bibi have a veto and with a Republican president, they have it in the bag. Even if Gingrich doesn’t win the nomination and Romney does, the winner will take notice of the Gingrich-Adelson patronage and seek as close a set of relations as possible with the gambling tycoon. Which means that Israel would have the U.S. in its pocket during any Republican administration.

Finally, if Adelson is willing to sink nearly $40 million to ensure a far right Israeli leader, then he’d certainly be willing to spend even more to get his sort of candidate elected president. If that candidate was Newt Gingrich. I doubt he would do the same for Mitt Romney or almost anyone else. If Newt wins the nomination, follow Shelly’s money. It’ll be everything on Newt to win in the sweepstakes race.

There was a time just after the last Iranian election when Roger Cohen reported his brave, searing, and moving reports on the swelling of what many of us thought might be revolution, or at least democratic reform, when I thought the NY Times columnist was a true hero.  I hung on every word he wrote from and about Iran.  His vision seemed so true, so relentless.

But as sometimes happens in the crucible of ferocious epochal events, people rise above their pedestrian limitations and meet the call of history.  It is their finest hour.  But once the crisis is over they revert to same-old, same-old cautious thinking.  This is true of Roger Cohen.  He’s just written a column endorsing the Obama administration’s “silent” counter-terror policy of assassination and blatant violation of human and constitutional rights.  To be fully accurate, he’s actually added a caveat to this endorsement.  The policy makes him “uneasy.”  This is supposed to somehow reassure us that Cohen still has retained some sense of conscience about the reign of terror pursued by Barack Obama in Iran and Iraq and the rest of the Middle East.

I find it appalling.  If it were Jeffrey Goldberg or Tom Friedman, it’s something you’d expect: liberals who’ve been mugged by 9/11.  The result has made them go soft in the head and endorse policies they would find odious if practiced inside U.S. borders.  But to have Cohen join the parade of liberals betraying every value they should hold sacred is beyond discouraging.

He begins the column well enough with an important observation: that Obama has quite cleverly and diabolically (my words, not Cohen’s) pursued a “silent” counter-terror policy by which the U.S. has gone to war with its enemies in the Middle East without declaring it:

The Obama administration has a doctrine. It’s called the doctrine of silence. A radical shift from President Bush’s war on terror, it has never been set out to the American people. There has seldom been so big a change in approach to U.S. strategic policy with so little explanation.

I approve of the shift even as it makes me uneasy. One day, I suspect, there may be payback for this policy and this silence. President Obama has gone undercover.

You have to figure that one day somebody sitting in Tehran or Islamabad or Sana is going to wake up and say: “Hey, this guy Obama, he went to war in our country but just forgot to mention the fact. Should we perhaps go to war in his?”

The idea that Cohen can endorse a policy that makes him uneasy, all the while conceding that this approach will come back to haunt us here on our own home ground is abysmally short-sided.  What we have here is a failure of liberal nerve.  A failure to recognize something that Malcolm X did understand, that the chickens of American violence will come home to roost.  The piper will be paid.

Though a number of journalists and analysts have speculated that the U.S. collaborated with Israel to produce the Stuxnet worm which attacked Iran’s centrifuge system and sabotaged it uranium enrichment program, Cohen is one of the first to state that the entire black ops program against Iran is a joint project of the U.S. and Israel.  It is something I knew in my bones but had not seen overt proof of.  I am virtually certain that Cohen would not have written so overtly and that his editors would not have allowed him to state this so clearly, unless he and they knew more than they are saying:

In Iran, a big explosion at a military base near Tehran recently killed Gen. Hassan Tehrani Moghaddam, a central figure in the country’s long-range missile program. Nuclear scientists have perished in the streets of Tehran. The Stuxnet computer worm has wreaked havoc with the Iranian nuclear facilities.

It would take tremendous naïveté to believe these events are not the result of a covert American-Israeli drive to sabotage Iran’s efforts to develop a military nuclear capacity. An intense, well-funded cyberwar against Tehran is ongoing.

One of the main themes of this blog over the past two years has been my attempt to point out that Israel, in its approach to Iran is the emperor with no clothes.  There simply is no viable policy.  Terror is not policy.   It’s bad enough when you’re a terror organization and present no agenda other than nihilistic violence.  But when you’re a state you simply have no excuse.  So now what Cohen is saying is that the U.S. too is marching in lockstep with terror.  It’s beyond heartbreaking.

In this passage, Cohen again articulates reality coldly and clearly, but at the end once again loses his nerve and lucidity at the crucial moment:

In general, it’s hard to resist the impression of a tilt toward the extrajudicial in U.S. foreign policy — a kind of “Likudization” of the approach to dealing with enemies. Israel has never hesitated to kill foes with blood on their hands wherever they are.

This is a development about which no American can feel entirely comfortable.

After everything we know about Israel’s horrendous human rights policy, its record of potential war crimes, its extrajudicial assassinations which have killed a huge percentage of civilians along with whoever the intended victims might’ve been, all Cohen can muster is this is something about which no one can feel “entirely comfortable?”  Really?  And hey, Cohen, Israel’s targeted killings don’t only kill “foes with blood on their hands.”  They kill civilians and lots of alleged militants who may or may not be guilty of something, since no evidence is ever presented of anything that they’ve done wrong.  Is this really the model we as Americans want to emulate?

Here is where the NY Times columnist’s argument truly founders.  He posits only two polar opposite options in fighting a war against America’s alleged enemies, when there are of course other options which go unmentioned:

So why do I approve of all this? Because the alternative — the immense cost in blood and treasure and reputation of the Bush administration’s war on terror — was so appalling. In just the same way, the results of a conventional bombing war against Iran would be appalling, whether undertaken by Israel, the United States or a combination of the two.

Political choices often have to be made between two unappealing options. Obama has done just that.

He talks about one alternative being covert war and the other overt.  Is this really the choice?  Or is this the articulation of a liberal Mideast Cold warrior (remember the precursors to the neocons–the anti-Soviet Cold warriors?), someone who talks himself into war as the only option, all the while refusing to see other ones staring him right in the face?

I’ve read Cohen’s writings on the Israeli Arab conflict as well and they’re similarly disappointing.  He’s drunk the Goldberg-Friedman-Gorenberg liberal Zionist KoolAid: yes, the Israelis are making a mess of things.  But the Palestinians are just as much to blame.  What we need to do is find a few good Palestinian moderates (“where is the Palestinian Gandhi?”) like Abbas and Fayyad and allow them to tame the Arab beast for Israel–then everything will turn out right.  Liberal Zionists are guilty of the same failure of nerve in their vision of Israel’s future as Cohen is guilty of in failing to follow his liberal philosophy to its proper conclusion in analyzing Obama’s foreign policy.

Obama’s counter-terror policy is just as immoral, just as violative of constitutional protections and international law as Israel’s.  If it is wrong for Israel, it is wrong for America.  It should be wrong for Roger Cohen too.  Roger, you’ve just essentially endorsed Bibi’s approach to dealing with the Arab world.  Is that the vision you and Pres. Obama have to offer us?  If Israel has become a pariah state (read Leon Panetta’s latest on this theme) do we wish to join her in international isolation?  Of course Obama will pursue this as a policy by stealth whereas Bibi doesn’t need to do this.  He can flaunt it before an ever appreciative Israeli audience.  But how long can Obama fool the world, lulling it into the false belief that he’s that Nobel Peace laureate, the guy for change and Hope?  Not too long.

What we’re seeing in Israeli politics and have seen since 2000, when the last Labor government ruled Israel, is the rise of a permanent far-right majority. Not a majority within the populace, but a ruling majority cobbled together from various right and farther right strands of Israeli nationalist discourse.

If we’re honest we realize that there is no electoral left or even center in Israeli politics. There is only right and farther right. The Israeli nationalists have so dominated the discourse with their national security mantra that no alternative can develop until there is a peace treaty. That is one of the reasons, whether consciously or unconsciously, the Israeli right can never allow peace. It would sound the death knell to their political hegemony.

Many might argue that this is the will of the people and therefore a legitimate political expression.  I don’t think so.  The Israeli situation reminds me of similar nationalist domination of Milosevic era Serbia, pre-1972 Northern Ireland, or Sinhalese dominated Sri Lanka.  In these countries there was/is a nominal democracy.  People have a choice.  But no matter what the choice everyone, even voters of the left, know the outcome will be a right-wing Tweedle Dee or Tweedle Dum.

This, is catastrophic for Israel in the short to medium term, though most Israelis may not recognize this.  But in the long run, and you’ll have to try to follow my somewhat perverse thinking here, this may actually be good for Israel.  During the last election, Jerry Haber of Magnes Zionist argued that the best candidate was Bibi Netanyahu.  He reasoned that if the most extreme politician won it would more profoundly expose the dysfunction and racism at the heart of Israeli society.  If the least-worst candidate won (Tzipi Livni), Israel would continue limping along on the road to nowhere.  Similarly, this is why I argue that a permanent Likudist government will hasten the day when the world will come to know that if it doesn’t intervene, then Israel will bring the entire region to the brink of Armageddon.

If you take my logic to the extreme, one might argue that one should support an Israeli attack on Iran since this too will prove catastrophic to all concerned.  The outcome of the catastrophe may be a realization, just as happened after the Serbian massacre of Srebrenica or during the Serbian assault on pre-independence Kosovo, that allowing the status quo meant genocide.  But I can’t go that far.  I don’t wish to see thousands of Iranian and Israeli dead just for the sake of bringing closer the day when Israel will be restrained and compelled to make the compromises it should’ve made decades ago for the sake of regional peace and stability.

But know that if there is an Israeli attack, this will be the long-term consequence.

I write all this by way of bringing us to the current Israeli political moment.  Though for many decades I was a liberal Zionist supporter of the left-wing of Labor, Meretz and all their various political permutations, I’ve come to believe over the past year or so, that Israeli politics is a sinkhole.  The Knesset is a bunch of windbags droning on endlessly about matters having little or nothing to do with governing a modern state.  Decisions of real import are made in élite ministerial committees and not subject to review or oversight by the larger body.  That is, when decision of any real import are made, which appears to be exceedingly rare.

Israeli activists protest outside Likud Party headquarters against rising authoritarianism (Oren Niv/ Activestills)

No, Israeli politics now consists solely of debating and passing legislation that would turn Israel into the sort of fake democracy that was Serbia or currently is Iran.  Take the bills du jour under consideration or recently passed by the Knesset: the anti-BDS law which allows any Israeli to sue anyone for publicly supporting BDS and to secure a hefty monetary judgment against them; or the bill that would’ve prohibited Israeli NGOs (read activist human rights and peace groups) from receiving any more than nominal funding from foreign governments (recently derailed by Bibi after fierce opposition was expressed by the EU and U.S.); and the bill that would allow Israeli politicians and oligarchs to sue any media outlet for libel without having to prove that the so-called libelous story caused any damages to the plaintiff.

The bill could be especially pernicious for Israeli bloggers since none have the deep pockets of media conglomerates enabling them to withstand the legal onslaught of which a Leonid Nevzlin or Sheldon Adelson is capable.  In fact, an Israeli blogger contacted me recently asking my advice about ways in which they could protect themselves in the light of the media Dark Ages which she foresaw.  A word Dena Shunra used got me thinking even further about this: samizdat.  Israel is rapidly moving into territory inhabited by the former Soviet Union in the days of the dissidents (yes, Virginia, there was a day when Natan Sharansky stood for freedom and liberty against state oppression), when they organized in small underground cells and passed around secret samizdat containing ideas deemed subversive by the government.  The difference being today we have the internet and don’t need to print samizdat on mimeograph machines like in the old days.

But Israeli bloggers will still have to protect themselves by moving their blogs to offshore hosts not under Israeli jurisdiction.  They’ll have to incorporate their blogs as companies or non-profits so they won’t be personally liable for any judgments against them.  They’ll have to create mirror sites in case the government takes theirs down.  They may have to protect their sources by taking special care possibly by using encrypted e-mail services.  They will need to develop a network of attorneys to defend them from civil or criminal prosecution.

In short, Israeli bloggers fear their country is turning into Mubarak-era Egypt or Bahrain or Saudi Arabia in which dissident bloggers can be thrown into prison or bankrupted according to the whim of the rich and powerful.  Bloggers are the canaries in the coal mine which warn a society when it losing the oxygen of democracy it needs to survive.  This is especially true in an Israel rife with gag orders, military censorship, and intelligence services permitted to run rampant over individual rights.  Israel needs its bloggers as much or more than it needs its mainstream media.

This is not an academic exercise, dear readers.  This is not Chicken Little warning that the sky is falling.  Israeli authoritarianism is here.  The plague is among us.

This is what Putin did in steamrollering Russia’s independent media way back in the heady days when there was such a thing.  These are precisely the sorts of prosecutions allowed in authoritarian regimes like Russia, Iran, Moldova, etc. where the governing élite simply use the judicial process to bankrupt their opponents.  This allows the powerful to place a mantle of respectability over their machinations.  It is naked political power concealed in a velvet glove.

Besides the bills and laws I referenced above, Bibi is also using regulatory power to silence his enemies among the press.  I’ve noted here the closing of Radio All for Peace last week, and the done-deal dictating the closure of Channel 10, which has broadcast unflattering exposes of both Bibi and his chief bagman Sheldon Adelson.  Further, today’s Hebrew edition of Ynet carries reports of a plan hatched by Netanyahu to take control of yet another TV station, this time the educational channel.  Yesterday, Israeli journalists held an unprecedented emergency meeting to address the wholesale onslaught on the press.  Make no mistake, these acts are not merely a series of discreet, disconnected undemocratic decisions.  They are of a piece with a government and nation well on its way to a permanent right-wing majority whose control is ensured by rising authoritarianism.

Jeffrey Goldberg’s claim in his NY Times review of Gershom Gorenberg’s new book that the Israeli electorate is somehow powerless in the face of the onslaught of settler political power, though certainly consoling to liberal Zionists, in no way corresponds to political reality.  Israelis (though not all) allow themselves to be willingly co-opted by their leaders.  To argue that Israelis don’t want press freedom curtailed, or that they don’t want the government to control what they see and hear on TV, radio or in print, is disingenuous.  Unlike the three monkeys, they see the evil, they hear the evil, and they do the evil.  And do little or nothing to stop it.

I lived in Israel just before the first Lebanon war and remember Peace Now demonstrations which warned that former general Ariel Sharon, then a rising star of Israeli politics, was likely to stage a putsch to gain power.  Today’s right doesn’t need a coup.  It runs the joint.  And will run it for the foreseeable future.

Lee Atwater, George Bush Sr’s Karl Rove, formulated a Republican political game plan that called for invoking wedge issues like homosexuality, abortion and immigration in order to gain support for implementing the Party’s real agenda.  In Israeli politics there are now ONLY wedge issues.  There is no overarching political agenda for the ruling coalition except permanent rule.  Likud doesn’t stand for any big ideas.  There is no debate about national health care or how to engineer an economic recovery as there has been in this country.  There is only Arab-bashing, left bashing, settlements, and muzzling the media.  This is what passes for a political platform.

I should make clear what I am NOT arguing.  I do not support nihilism or giving up on Israel until change comes.  Of course, the opposition, whatever is left of it, should never give up.  It must make its voice heard.  Not to do so would be a betrayal of Israel.  But in doing so, the Israeli left must realize that it is simply hopeless to bring change purely internally.  Change must come from the outside.  It can be supported from within as happened in Serbia after Milosevic’s downfall.  But the key catalyst must be outside intervention.

Of course, the world is not prepared to intervene in the Israeli-Arab conflict.  It is either too preoccupied or too morally conflicted to do so.  It seems there must be thousands of dead and blood running in the streets before the world’s conscience can be pricked.  Of one thing you may be sure: with a permanent ruling right-wing majority in Israel, there will be blood, much blood.  The only question is how much before the world will be called upon to act.

In this circumstance, I see Barack Obama as in the same position as Bill Clinton during the Rwanda and Serbian genocides.  He declined to act because he knew he would have to summon domestic political resolve to do so.  That meant expending his capital to get Republicans on board a policy of intervention, an approach Republicans are generally loathe to adopt.  So Clinton allowed things to spin out of control not once (Rwanda), but twice (Serbia).  The result was 800,000 dead in the first instance and 250,000 dead in the second.  A million dead altogether.  Those are a lot of bodies to burden one’s conscience.  If Bill Clinton were a more contemplative fellow he could make a brilliant Shakespearean tragic hero a la King Lear or Hamlet.  But I doubt his moral failures weigh heavily on his conscience.

I hope to God that a similar charnel house will not be required before Barack Obama realizes that he and the rest of the world must act regarding Israel-Palestine.

All of the above explains why I disagree so profoundly with the Gershom Gorenbergs and Haaretz’s of Israel who believe that liberal Zionism and a moderate left is still possible in Israel.  These folks want to nibble around the edges of what’s wrong.  They want to tinker with the machinery instead of overhauling it.  We’re far past tinkering.  And the well-intentioned liberals of Meretz, who may hate Bibi but will support him when he gets Israel into the next war, don’t have any answers that will work.

Yesterday, I wrote my first post about a brewing Israeli scandal, Bibitours, which is enveloping the Israeli airwaves and political discourse.  I’ve just started watching Raviv Drucker’s video reports which broke the story and it’s potentially huge.  As I understand it, Bibi, in the period from when he ended his first prime ministership in 1999 until as late as 2005 (and possibly later) accepted millions of dollars worth of speakers fees, hotel, food, and personal jet travel from a network of pro-Israel groups and individual right-wing donors against the ethics rules of the Knesset.  Those rules state that an MK may only speak or travel when it is directly related to his government role and that family members must be paid for directly by the member and not by outside parties.  MKs must also receive permission from a Knesset committee for such travel.  In addition, any benefit accrued on behalf of family members must be declared on personal tax returns.

According to my understanding of Drucker’s report, Bibi did none of these things.  To give you a sense of the scope of the charges, between 1999 and 2001 alone Bibi earned $2-million in speaking fees from pro-Israel groups like Israel Bonds, American Enterprise Institute and BICOM.  Hundreds of thousands of dollars in stays at luxury hotels in London, New York, Brussels and elsewhere were paid for on his behalf by corporate fatcats with business interests that could directly benefit from helping a future prime minister.  Scores of trips using private jets of these same fatcats.  Private cars at the beck and call of Sara Netanyahu and her children.  All of this again in direct violation of ethics guidelines and Israeli tax law.

In a number of these cases, the groups themselves were reimbursed for the fees and other expenses by private parties whose names are the cream of the crop of French, U.S. and British Jewish corporate power.  Among the names of those who offered Bibi financial carte blanche are Arnon Milchan, the Hollywood powerbroker and Poju Zabludowicz, chairman of BICOM, who helped fund Adam Werrity’s first-class world travel conniving for regime change in Iran.  Most of those individuals either refused to discuss their actions or offered limited explanations and were reluctant to talk.  Some confessed to memory lapses.  Some even tried to hide them in ways that are even more suspicious.

That Bibi is a typically corrupt Israeli politician will come as no surprise to any Israeli.  Prime ministers going all the way back to Yitzhak Rabin have been accused of, and toppled because of corruption and bribery charges.  So this is nothing new.  The question becomes whether the story has legs.  What brought down Ehud Olmert was a cascading series of charges which reinforced the corruption charges against him.  So far, Drucker has opened a huge reservoir of information and charges which the State Controller has begun to investigate.  If these charges stick, then the Israeli media will be forced to delve into them in greater detail, which may lead to even more and newer revelations.

That could threaten Bibi’s hold on power, which is why he’s attempted to get Drucker fired and the government’s chief investigator removed from the case.  This story is potentially deadly for him, though it’s still too early to tell how it will play out.

It should be noted that even if Bibi falls it likely will not change the complexion of Israeli politics or make it any easier to resolve the thorny issues of the Israeli-Arab conflict.  Anyone who takes his place will almost as bad on these issues as Bibi is or was.  But if Bibi does fall, it can only be for the good both for the direct reasons related to the corruption charges and because his is a deeply noxious influence on the Israeli political scene.

There are a considerable number of Middle East analysts and bloggers who dismiss the idea that Israel will attack Iran.  My good friend Max Blumenthal doesn’t believe it for a minute.  He says there’d be too much “blowback.”  Others point out that operationally Israel doesn’t have the means to carry out such a complex military operation without direct U.S. assistance, if not participation.  At this point in the argument, many say the U.S. simply won’t play.

I’m not a military analyst so I can’t say that Israel can go it basically alone and attack Iran using the resources it has on hand from its own military stockpile (which include much U.S.-supplied weaponry like bunker buster bombs).  But while I believe that Israel’s military is nowhere near as sturdy and quasi-invincible as it once was (long ago), the IDF has shown itself in the past to be quite good at improvisation and taking audacious risks.  That’s why I believe that if Israel truly wanted to attack it would figure out ways of doing so.

These naysayers generally argue that the real purpose of the current round of saber-rattling is a sort of psychological warfare against Iran.  The hope is that by turning the screws with ever more draconian sanctions and threats of war, that Iran will at some point come to its senses and agree that discretion is the better part of valor.  At that point, a chastened Iran will return to the realm of the reasonable and become an obedient servant of U.S. and Israeli interests in the region (or something close to that).

There’s only one problem with this–and it’s a big one.  I think Iran is a hardened target not just physically but psychically.  The Iranians lost hundreds of thousands in the Iran-Iraq War which they fought for eight years.  Persia in general is a place that has known wars for millennia.  Does anyone think that Israel, even with its nuclear weapons, can spook them?  I just don’t see it.  The only way I can see Iran changing course in the context of military action is if Israel can strike a blow and bring the regime to its knees.  But barring dropping a nuclear weapons on Teheran, it can’t do that.  Not even if it wanted to.

Likewise, some argue that the Israeli drumbeat of war is meant to persuade the Russians and Chinese, who have resisted the newest round of sanctions, that if they continue doing so the only alternative is war.  Some see Israel in this scenario as Uri Avnery does, as the U.S. Rottweiler, whom we unleash in order to scare recalcitrant Security Council members into voting our way.

There is only one problem with this overall concept.  And it’s a big one.  No one believes or cares.  If the U.S. and Israel want to turn this into a Las Vegas poker hand bluff, I think the Russian and Chinese are willing to wait them out to see what kind of cards they’re holding.  If you think about it, why would they care that Israel would bomb Iran?  They realize, just as much of the world realized in 2003, that once the U.S. invaded Iraq, it would only be a matter of time before the decision came back to haunt us–and it did.  Similarly, the Recalcitrant Ones would like nothing better than to watch Israel sink into a Persian miasma, while taking us along with them.  It would leave them sitting pretty to pick up the pieces after we messed up things royally.

Yes, it’s true that China might be concerned that its energy supplies could be cut off in the event of an Iranian shut-down of the Straits of Hormuz.  But the question is whether the Chinese might be willing to withstand such a short-term hit in order to allow the U.S. and Israel to so embarrass themselves that China will come out of it in an event stronger position regionally and internationally.  The general rule is if your competitor wants to bet the store and make a fool of himself in the process, you clear out of the way and give him plenty of room.

This means that one of two things can happen: either Bibi Netanyahu and Ehud Barak are bluffing and don’t really intend to go to war.  If that’s true, I’m afraid they are fools and will find this strategy an abject failure.  Or the doomsayers are right and the Dynamic Duo do intend to strike Iran.  I’d say I’m a doomsayer who wants to be proven wrong, but is increasingly doubtful I will be.

On a slightly different subject: I adapted this from an Israeli tweet that noted the dichotomy between the J14 social justice movement and an Iran attack.  My take:

Bibi to J14: if you don’t have bread, go eat Jericho IIIs.