On Sunday morning, Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon said that the documents released by Wikileaks will not harm the relations between Israel and the US.:
There's nothing to get excited about. We have to be patient. As someone who knows Israel-US relations from up close, I can say that our joint interests are the basis of the relationship, and not small issues hear and there. No document can damage our friendship with the US.
His premier Benjamin Netanyahu added, "Israel is not the center of international attention."
According to a US report from June 2009, Defense Minister Ehud Barak told a congressional delegation that the Israeli government "had consulted with Egypt and Fatah prior to Operation Cast Lead, asking if they were willing to assume control of Gaza once Israel defeated Hamas". Barak added: "Not surprisingly. Israel received negative answers from both".
After this leak, how many Palestinians do you think will give credibility to Ayalon's recent article, "Palestinian revisionism is the only obstacle to peace"?
Other documents, dating from 2005 to 2009, highlight Israel's claim that Iran will have nuclear weapons by 2010 and the importance of taking this threat seriously. "Israel is not in a position to underestimate Iran and be surprised like the US was on September 11, 2001," Israel's Military Intelligence Chief Maj.-Gen. Amos Yadlin said to Congressmen in May 2009. Barak told the American delegation a month later that a strike on Iran's nuclear facilities was viable until the end of 2010, but after that "any military solution would result in unacceptable collateral damage".
Another report of a August 2007 meeting with Mossad chief Meir Dagan establishes that "covert measures" to be used against Iran were discussed. Dagan "urged more attention on regime change" in Iran, "asserting that more could be done to develop the identities of ethnic minorities in Iran".
There will be immediate consequences of these revelations: for example, look for the Iranian regime to wave this proof that foreign dark forces are trying to break Iran. Hamas will uses the leaks against Fatah and Fatah will use them against Israel.
But far beyond this is the question of how others will use American "power": these cables indicate how that concept is not necessarily real but is an image that local governments manipulate for their own ends. Now that the act is out in the open, can they continue to do so? And how can the Obama Administration respond?