Israel-Palestine: How Netanyahu Demolished the Plan A of the Peace Process

Related Post: Israel-Palestine - Netanyahu’s Two-State Magical Sidestep
Transcript: Netanyahu Speech on Israel-Palestine (14 June)

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s carefully-framed speech on 14 June portrayed a peaceful Israel pursuing all necessary steps for a regional peace agreement.

It's when you read the speech more closely that problems emerge. Netanyahu’s priority of economic development rather than political agreements, Israel’s pre-conditions for peace (including no pre-conditions on Israel), and its political and social securitization are out of step with dynamics in the Middle East.

Netanyahu's speech was bolstered by developments  such as the conflict between Fatah and Hamas. Since the beginning of June, the tension in the West Bank has soared dramatically. After several Hamas members were killed by Fatah, a Damascus-based Hamas spokesman, Talal Nasser, called on Palestinians to fight the Palestinian Authority as though they were fighting the Israeli occupation. In response, the Palestinian police arrested 36 Hamas supporters in the West Bank. Hamas’s unsustainable and irrational steps were partly curbed by its chief in Damascus, Khaled Mashaal, who complained instead about pre-conditions set by the Obama Administration. He declared that Hamas would not be an obstacle to the peace process if it was included as a partner in Israeli talks with the Palestinian Authority.

However, in the eyes of important actors in the international community, there is no legitimate ground for Hamas unless it confirms the conditions of the Quartet: recognition of Israel, ending terrorist activities and abiding by the past agreements signed by the PA. And Hamas will not issue that confirmation as long as Gaza and the West Bank are divided both geographically and politically.

Thus Netanyahu can rely upon the "existential threat" of a strong Hamas troubling Fatah in the West Bank and, more importantly, relying of the backing of a "potentially nuclear-armed" Iran.

There are, of course, issues beyond Hamas. How can there be a peace process with Fatah while settlements are still not frozen and the proposal of a demilitarized Palestinian state includes "ironclad security provisions" for Israeli security forces? How can Netanyahu foresee a real regional peace agreement without giving any concessions  to Israel's Arab neighbours, for example, when his Syrian colleague Bashar Assad has already declared that there will be no negotiations without the promise to return the Golan Heights to Syria?

For Netanyahu, the wonder of "Hamas" is that it can always trump these difficulties because of the overriding notion of Israeli "security".

Securitization of Israel’s Existence

The remarkable threats in Netanyahu’s speech were those of nuclear weapons and radical Islam. Because Iran is considered as the nexus of these two, it is the number one enemy for Israel. Radical Islam’s branches – Hamas and Hezbollah – follow:

The Iranian threat looms large before us, as was further demonstrated yesterday. The greatest danger confronting Israel, the Middle East, the entire world and human race, is the nexus between radical Islam and nuclear weapons....Hamas will not even allow the Red Cross to visit our kidnapped soldier Gilad Shalit, who has spent three years in captivity, cut off from his parents, his family and his people.

The contrast to these menaces is the unique character of Israelis. They are the ones whose forefathers and prophets lived in the same lands where they now live; they are the only nation linking their state’s existence with religion and history. It is Israelis who suffered from expulsions, pogroms, massacres, and a Holocaust which has no parallel in human history. Despite these hardships, it was Israelis who formed their own state.

The threat of Iran-Hezbollah-Hamas endangers this unique "existence", word used three times by Netanyahu in his speech. Each time, "existence" referred not only to community but to Israeli institutions: “It is clear that any demand for resettling Palestinian refugees within Israel undermines Israel’s continued existence as the state of the Jewish people....On a matter so critical to the existence of Israel, we must first have our security needs addressed....Our people have already proven that we can do the impossible. Over the past 61 years, while constantly defending our existence, we have performed wonders.”

Netanyahu’s Investment in "Peace"

But how to deal with the issue that, while Netanyahu might have an emphasis on "security", others would be looking for "peace"?

In a speech where every word was selected carefully, “peace” was used on 43 occasions, 15 more times than Barack Obama invoked it in his Cairo speech. The word “war” was used seven times, once to highlight Israel’s success in the 1967 Six-Day War, six times to depict the ugliness of wars in general.

In addition, there were two references to the religion of the Torah and the prophet. This was to show one party in the conflict, Israelis, demanding peace not just in their political debates but also in their prayers. This religious commitment put forth Israel’s honesty when “the root of the conflict was, and remains, the refusal to recognize the right of the Jewish people to a state of their own”. Israelis struggle for peace day and night while Arabs dismiss “the truth”.

Israel’s Pre-Conditions for A Two-State Solution under “The Road Map”

Netanyahu's headline statement, according to many in the Western media, was that he finally accepted "peace" through a two-state solution. However, the corollary of Netanyahu’s demand that Palestinians must recognize Israel as a Jewish state is that Israelis will not accept the right of return of Palestinians who left their homes after 1948 war. His insistence, “The territory under Palestinian control must be demilitarized with ironclad security provisions for Israel,” means that Israel will control all borders, reserving the right to intervene, in the name of both Israeli and Palestinian securities, with forces surrounding the entire Palestinian territories. This may also include Israeli defense of Jewish settlements and some military outposts inside the West Bank.

When all this is taken into consideration, as well as Netanyahu’s declaration, “Jerusalem must remain the united capital of Israel,” it is clear that the Israeli Government’s demands are distant from the "two-state" conditions in United Nations Resolutions 242 and 338. In this case, the Road Map loses its meaning, even before parties agree on progress towards regional peace.

The Justifications of Preconditions

Netanyahu’s approach was a combination of religious belief and a “security” perspective to justify a position as necessary rather than illegitimate. He said:

The connection between the Jewish people and the Land of Israel has lasted for more than 3500 years. Judea and Samaria, the places where Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, David and Solomon, and Isaiah and Jeremiah lived, are not alien to us. This is the land of our forefathers.

This subtle move put a “history” of thousands of years above international law to establish the “unique” character of Israel. And it also ensured that the security perspective was not forgotten. Netanyahu set this up through a clear distinction between Israel, with its values and culture, and those who would always remain outside that ideal:

But we must also tell the truth in its entirety: within this homeland lives a large Palestinian community. We do not want to rule over them, we do not want to govern their lives, we do not want to impose either our flag or our culture on them.

And because Palestinians can never be part of the unique character, with its inherent "peace", security's conditions must be placed upon them from the outset of negotiations: 

Without these two conditions (the recognition of Israel as a Jewish state and the demilitarization of the Palestinian state), there is a real danger that an armed Palestinian state would emerge that would become another terrorist base against the Jewish state, such as the one in Gaza… Without this, sooner or later, these territories will become another Hamastan. And that we cannot accept.

Once again, to give substance to the threat of the ideological-cultural outsider, Netanyahu invoked specific enemies, "In order to achieve peace, we must ensure that Palestinians will not be able to import missiles into their territory, to field an army, to close their airspace to us, or to make pacts with the likes of Hezbollah and Iran.”

The Future of Settlements

The problem for Netanyahu, entering this speech, is that all his definitions of a proper Israel and a potentially dangerous Palestine did not cover the in-between area: Israeli settlements on Palestinian land. Therefore, he began by trying to pull those settlements back into "Israel", not geographically but on a higher cultural ground:

The territorial question will be discussed as part of the final peace agreement. In the meantime, we have no intention of building new settlements or of expropriating additional land for existing settlements… But there is a need to enable the residents to live normal lives, to allow mothers and fathers to raise their children like families elsewhere. The settlers are neither the enemies of the people nor the enemies of peace. Rather, they are an integral part of our people, a principled, pioneering and Zionist public.

On a less exalted level, Netanyahu had said: No Freeze on Settlements (see the follow-up to the speech in Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman's meeting with US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in Washington).

But, to return to Netanyahu's attempted higher plane of discussion, he never referred to "the West Bank".  Instead, he used "Judea and Samaria", the Biblical expression used for the West Bank, three times. Once more, an eternal religious invocation --- one which can only be claimed by Jewish people --- was deployed to keep open the issue of "legitimacy" in a disputed area.

Indeed, "Judaea and Samaria" provided the foundation for Netanyahu's claim of no connection between Israel’s occupation of Palestinian lands and terrorist attacks:

Those who think that the continued enmity toward Israel is a product of our presence in Judea, Samaria and Gaza, is confusing cause and consequence… The attacks against us began in the 1920s. We evacuated every last inch of the Gaza strip, we uprooted tens of settlements and evicted thousands of Israelis from their homes, and in response, we received a hail of missiles on our cities, towns and children… The claim that territorial withdrawals will bring peace with the Palestinians, or at least advance peace, has up till now not stood the test of reality.

Putting the Burden on the Palestinian Authority

Netanyahu was clear, "The Palestinians must decide between the path of peace and the path of Hamas. The Palestinian Authority will have to establish the rule of law in Gaza and overcome Hamas.”

Given Netanyahu's refusal to make any concessions on the Israeli position, it is obvious that there can be no positive answer from the other side. The Palestinian Authority's leader Mahmoud Abbas dismissed Netanyahu’s speech as “sabotaging” peace efforts. Nemer Hammad, an advisor to Mahmoud Abbas said, "Netanyahu’s speech had not brought anything new."

Netanyahu and his Cabinet members knew that this would be the reaction. The speech was not meant to open negotations but to frame them in such a way that they could not be started. Why? The Israeli Prime Minister's strategy is to buy time and then, in more favourable political condition, returns to talks based on his agenda of the economic development of the West Bank. As he said in another part of his speech: “I call on the Arab countries to cooperate with the Palestinians and with us to advance an economic peace. An economic peace is not a substitute for a political peace, but an important element to achieving it.”

Almost two weeks have now passed since Netanyahu's speech, responding to President Obama's original plan for Israeli-Palestinian talks.  The Plan B of a wider engagement between the US and Iran in the region, alongside or awaiting those talks, is now comatose after turmoil in Tehran. A Plan C, based on an anti-Iran rhetoric as well as changed relations with countries like Syria, may come into play.

All this, however, is speculation beyond immediate significance: the Netanyahu effect --- blending security, Israeli exceptionalism, and religion --- has been to take Plan A off the table.

Boom: A Few Global Facts on Military Expenditures for Your Kind Consideration

On June 8, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) released its calculations global military expenditure in 2008. It seems that the economic global crisis has not shattered the balance of demand and supply in the military-industrial complex. Indeed, thanks to "more significant issues" such as "the war on terrorism", Iran’s nuclear threat, and regional conflicts, the maximization of profit remains on track. Here are some important findings in our world where human life is, unfortunately, less valuable than flags, bullets, and lands.

Can you imagine how $1,464 billion spent on military weapons contribute to world poverty while almost half of the world – over three billion people – live on less than $2.50 a day, more than 80 percent of the world’s population lives in countries where income differentials are widening, and the poorest 40 percent of the world’s population accounts for 5 percent of global income while the richest 20 percent accounts for more than 75 percent?

Total Expenditure on Arms:

1- $1,464 billion was spent by all countries in 2008 which amounts to 2.4 percent of global GDP of the same year.
2 - The world expenditure on arms in 2008 increased 4 percent in real terms from $1,405 billion in 2007.
3 - Since 1999, there has been an increase of 45 percent in real terms.

Top 10 Countries of 2008:

1 – USA: With $607 billion expenditure, the US has 41 percent of overall expenditure.
2 - China: Chinese officials spent $84 billion, which is 6 percent of the total expenditure. This amount of money spent on arms is threefold that of 1999.
3 – France: French representatives spent $65.74 billion.
4 – United Kingdom: British decision-makers purchased arms at a value of $65.35 billion.
5 – Russia: With $58.6 billion expenditure, which amounts to 4 percent of overall, Russians spent three times the amount of 1999.
6 – Germany: $46.87 billion, which was 11 percent less than 10 years ago.
7 – Japan: $46.58 billion, which was 1.7 percent less than 1999.
8 – Italy: $40.69 billion
9 – Saudi Arabia: $38.2 billion
10 – India: $30 billion.

United States of America, the Winner of the Title:

As the champion of the list, with $607 billion expenditure in 2008, the US accounted for the majority (58 percent) of the global increase between 1999 and 2009.

Nuclear Weapons:

If you think  that it is only Iran and North Korea that pose a nuclear threat, the final paragraph of the report may surprise you:

SIPRI estimates that in total there were around 8 400 operational nuclear warheads in the world, of which almost 2000 were kept on high alert and capable of being launched in minutes. Counting spare warheads, those in storage and those due for dismantlement, there were some 23 300 nuclear weapons in the arsenals of eight states: the USA, Russia, China, the UK, France, India, Pakistan and Israel.

Text: The Latest IAEA Report on Iran's Nuclear Programme

These are the concluding paragraphs of the latest report of the International Atomic Energy Agency on Iran's nuclear programme. There have been a few dramatic (and misleading) headlines, but the gist of the IAEA's conclusions are the same: 1) Iran has not suspended uranium enrichment and enrichment-related activities; 2) there is no evidence that Iran is diverting its declared nuclear material to a military programme; 3) the IAEA would like further co-operation from Tehran to verify that there is no military programme using undeclared material; 4) the IAEA would like the US to provide Iran with the documents which supposedly establish that Iran is or has pursued a nuclear weapons programme.

SUMMARY

19. As has been reported in previous reports, the Agency continues to verify the non-diversion of declared nuclear material in Iran.

20. Iran has not, however, implemented the modified text of its Subsidiary Arrangements General Part, Code 3.1, on the early provision of design information, and has continued to refuse to permit the Agency to carry out design information verification at IR-40.

21. Iran has not suspended its enrichment related activities or its work on heavy water related projects as required by the Security Council.

22. Contrary to the request of the Board of Governors and the requirements of the Security Council, Iran has neither implemented the Additional Protocol nor cooperated with the Agency in connection with the remaining issues which give rise to concerns and which need to be clarified to exclude the possibility of military dimensions to Iran’s nuclear programme. Unless Iran implements the Additional Protocol and clarifies the outstanding issues, the Agency will not be in a position to provide credible assurance about the absence of undeclared nuclear material and activities in Iran.

23. The Agency believes that it has provided Iran with sufficient access to documentation in its possession to permit Iran to respond substantively to the questions raised by the Agency. However, the Director General urges Member States which have provided documentation to the Agency to work out new modalities with the Agency so that it could share further information with Iran since the Agency’s inability to share additional information with Iran, and to provide copies or, if possible, originals, is making it difficult for the Agency to progress further in its verification.

24. The Director General will continue to report as appropriate.

Creating Iran's Nuclear Weapon: The US, Israeli Intelligence, and "The Laptop Documents"

Related Post: Text of The Latest IAEA Report on Iran’s Nuclear Programme

It has been a near-open secret that the source for allegations of Iran's continuing programme for nuclear weapons is a mysterious Iranian laptop supposedly obtained by US officials in 2004.

This article by investigative journalist Gareth Porter goes further. Putting together reports and interviews, he claims that Israeli intelligence played a key role in assembling the "laptop documents" and then feeding them to Washington.

And, as Porter notes, this is an ongoing story. For despite the lack of any additional evidence --- laptop or other --- for an imminent Iranian nuclear weapon --- Israel's covert operators continue to get this tale into the US Congress and thus the American press.

Iran nuclear leaks 'linked to Israel'

by Gareth Porter



WASHINGTON - A report on Iran’s nuclear program issued by the United States Senate Foreign Relations Committee last month generated news stories publicizing an incendiary charge that US intelligence is underestimating Iran’s progress in designing a “nuclear warhead” before the halt in nuclear weapons-related research in 2003.

That false and misleading charge from an intelligence official of a foreign country, who was not identified but was clearly Israeli, reinforces two of Israel’s key themes on Iran - that the 2007 US National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iran is wrong, and that Tehran is poised to build nuclear weapons as soon as possible.
But it also provides new evidence that Israeli intelligence was the source of the collection of intelligence documents which have been used to accuse Iran of hiding nuclear weapons research.

The committee report, dated May 4, cited unnamed “foreign analysts” as claiming intelligence that Iran ended its nuclear weapons-related work in 2003 because it had mastered the design and tested components of a nuclear weapon and thus didn’t need to work on it further until it had produced enough sufficient material.

That conclusion, which implies that Iran has already decided to build nuclear weapons, contradicts both the 2007 NIE on Iran, and current intelligence analysis. The NIE concluded that Iran had ended nuclear weapons-related work in 2003 because of increased international scrutiny, and that it was “less determined to develop nuclear weapons than we have been judging since 2005″.

The report included what appears to be a spectacular revelation from “a senior allied intelligence official” that a collection of intelligence documents supposedly obtained by US intelligence in 2004 from an Iranian laptop computer included “blueprints for a nuclear warhead”.

It quotes the unnamed official as saying that the blueprints “precisely matched” similar blueprints the official’s own agency “had obtained from other sources inside Iran”.

No US or International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) official have ever claimed that the so-called laptop documents included designs for a “nuclear warhead”. The detailed list in a May 26, 2008, IAEA report of the contents of what have been called the “alleged studies” - intelligence documents on alleged Iranian nuclear weapons work - made no mention of any such blueprints.

In using the phrase “blueprints for a nuclear warhead”, the unnamed official was evidently seeking to conflate blueprints for the re-entry vehicle of the Iranian Shehab missile, which were among the alleged Iranian documents, with blueprints for nuclear weapons.

When New York Times reporters William J Broad and David E Sanger used the term “nuclear warhead” to refer to a re-entry vehicle in a November 13, 2005, story on the intelligence documents on the Iranian nuclear program, it brought sharp criticism from David Albright, the president of the Institute for Science and International Security.

“This distinction is not minor,” Albright observed, “and Broad should understand the differences between the two objects, particularly when the information does not contain any words such as nuclear or nuclear warhead.”

The Senate report does not identify the country for which the analyst in question works, and the Senate Foreign Relations Committee staff refused to respond to questions about the report from Inter Press Service (IPS), including the reason why the report concealed the identity of the country for which the unidentified “senior allied intelligence official” works.

Reached later in May, the author of the report, Douglas Frantz, said he was under strict instructions not to speak with the news media.

After a briefing on the report for selected news media immediately after its release, however, the Associated Press reported May 6 that interviews were conducted in Israel. Frantz was apparently forbidden by Israeli officials from revealing their national affiliation as a condition for the interviews.

Frantz, a former journalist for the Los Angeles Times, had extensive contacts with high-ranking Israeli military, intelligence and Foreign Ministry officials before joining the Senate Foreign Relations Committee staff. He and co-author Catherine Collins conducted interviews with those Israeli officials for The Nuclear Jihadist, published in 2007. The interviews were all conducted under rules prohibiting disclosure of their identities, according to the book.

The unnamed Israeli intelligence officer’s statement that the “blueprints for a nuclear warhead” - meaning specifications for a missile re-entry vehicle - were identical to “designs his agency had obtained from other sources in Iran” suggests that the documents collection which the IAEA has called “alleged studies” actually originated in Israel.

A US-based nuclear weapons analyst who has followed the “alleged studies” intelligence documents closely says he understands that the documents obtained by US intelligence in 2004 were not originally stored on the laptop on which they were located when they were brought in by an unidentified Iranian source, as US officials have claimed to US journalists.

The analyst, who insists on not being identified, says the documents were collected by an intelligence network and then assembled on a single laptop.

The anonymous Israeli intelligence official’s claim, cited in the committee report, that the “blueprints” in the “alleged studies” collection matched documents his agency had gotten from its own source seems to confirm the analyst’s finding that Israeli intelligence assembled the documents.

German officials have said that the Mujahedin E Khalq (MEK), the Iranian resistance organization, brought the laptop documents collection to the attention of US intelligence, as reported by IPS in February 2008. Israeli ties with the political arm of the MEK, the National Committee of Resistance in Iran (NCRI), go back to the early 1990s and include assistance to the organization in broadcasting into Iran from Paris.

The NCRI publicly revealed the existence of the Natanz uranium-enrichment facility in August 2002. However, that and other intelligence apparently came from Israeli intelligence. The Israeli co-authors of The Nuclear Sphinx of Tehran, Yossi Melman and Meir Javeanfar, revealed that “Western” intelligence was “laundered” to hide its actual provenance by providing it to Iranian opposition groups, especially NCRI, in order to get it to the IAEA.

They cite US, British and Israeli officials as sources for the revelation.

New Yorker writer Connie Bruck wrote in a March 2006 article that an Israeli diplomat confirmed to her that Israel had found the MEK “useful” but declined to elaborate.

Israeli intelligence is also known to have been actively seeking to use alleged Iranian documents to prove that Iran had an active nuclear weapons program just at the time the intelligence documents which eventually surfaced in 2004 would have been put together.

The most revealing glimpse of Israeli use of such documents to influence international opinion on Iran’s nuclear program comes from the book by Frantz and Collins. They report that Israel’s international intelligence agency Mossad created a special unit in the summer of 2003 to carry out a campaign to provide secret briefings on the Iranian nuclear program, which sometimes included “documents from inside Iran and elsewhere”.

The “alleged studies” collection of documents has never been verified as genuine by either the IAEA or by intelligence analysts. The Senate report said senior United Nations officials and foreign intelligence officials who had seen “many of the documents” in the collection of alleged Iranian military documents had told committee staff “it is impossible to rule out an elaborate intelligence ruse”.

Gareth Porter is an investigative historian and journalist specializing in US national security policy. The paperback edition of his latest book, Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam, was published in 2006.

(Inter Press Service)

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