Everyone is on the Yuval Diskin Israel’s messianic leadership story– we better join this party late. “I will tell you things that might be harsh,” Diskin said: he cannot trust Netanyahu and Barak at the wheel in confronting Iran. Harriet Sherwood’s coverage in the Guardian was the top story on their website this morning.
Israel’s former security chief has censured the country’s “messianic” political leadership for talking up the prospects of a military stike on Iran‘s nuclear programme.
In unusually candid comments set to ratchet up tensions over Iran at the top of Israel’s political establishment, Yuval Diskin, who retired as head of the internal intelligence agency Shin Bet last year, said he had “no faith” in the abilities of the prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, and the defence minister, Ehud Barak, to conduct a war.
The pair, who are the foremost advocates of military action against Iran’s nuclear programme, were “not fit to hold the steering wheel of power”, Diskin told a meeting on Friday night.
“My major problem is that I have no faith in the current leadership, which must lead us in an event on the scale of war with Iran or a regional war,” he said.
At Haaretz, Amos Harel says that Diskin penned his off-the-cuff comments on a sheet with a Bible verse on it, and Obama will use the statement as a magic carpet to come to Jerusalem at last:
Should we receive word of an upcoming visit by President Barack Obama to Israel, it will only serve as further proof that the United States is making all efforts to prevent a possible Israeli attack.
Harel says there is now open conflict between the Meir Dagan camp and the Netanyahu camp.
the full-fledged attack of [former Mossad head Dagan’s] close friend, former Shin Bet head Yuval Diskin, of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Ehud Barak, brings the confrontation over the Iranian question to another level. Since the end of his term as the head of the Mossad last January, Dagan seems to be on a divine mission to stop the bombing.
Jodi Rudoren at the New York Times emphasizes the same point, open debate on the question now in Israel
Shlomo Avineri, a political scientist at Hebrew University and former director general of the Foreign Ministry, said, “This is bringing the latent disagreement, which has been there for months, into the open, and it gives steam to the public debate.”
Don’t forget that just as he pushed the Iraq war, Jeffrey Goldberg carried the water for this messianic hysteria over Iran in the Atlantic a year or so back, a piece called The Point of No Return, in which he wrote about fighter planes over Auschwitz and made Netanyahu out to be a rational actor focused on Iran’s alleged messianism:
In our conversation before his swearing-in, Netanyahu … framed the Iranian program as a threat not only to Israel but to all of Western civilization.
“You don’t want a messianic apocalyptic cult controlling atomic bombs,” he said. “When the wide-eyed believer gets hold of the reins of power and the weapons of mass death, then the world should start worrying, and that’s what is happening in Iran.”
In his statement, Yuval Diskin also underlines what Annie Robbins has been saying on this site for months, the whole point of the Iran hooha is to grab the West Bank:
“This government has no interest in talking with the Palestinians, period. It certainly has no interest in resolving anything with the Palestinians, period.”
And Jodi Rudoren opens the Diskin critique makes this observation:
Indeed, Mr. Diskin did not limit his critique to Iran. He said Israel had in recent years become “more and more racist,” and, invoking the 1995 assassination of Yitzhak Rabin, said there are many extremist Jews today who “would be willing to take up arms against their Jewish brothers.”
This paragraph has since been removed from the Times story. Huh. You can find it here. What up?
Ilene Cohen in an email emphasizes the turbulence in the Israeli discourse (a turbulence we can only hope to get over here):
The growing racism, the threat of civil war over settlement evacuation (should any Israeli leader be so foolish as to consider such a thing in a serious way), and anxiety over possible mutiny in the military over such evacuation are themes that now routinely thread through reportage in Israel. And for detailed chapters on precisely these topics, see Gershom Gorenberg, The Unmaking of Israel.
Oh and here’s Thomas Pickering on Al Jazeera saying the Israelis are fighting.
He did say he thought they were rational, and that’s something that perhaps the Israelis have not been forceful in echoing… puts him [Gantz] crossways with the Prime Minister…
We’re in this subtle period where either a strike is being prepared… or the Israelis would like the Iranians to think that is happening…
Phil, it has been an amazing turn of events watching all of these secret service guys coming out from both Israel and the U.S and basically walking back all of the “imminent war talk” against iran, what i find most intriguing is where did the change of orders come from exactly?
Was it Pentagon? I don’t know, but sometime ago someone or some series of someones made a decision and then the dominoes just started lining up, does it have to do with the potential for economic upheaval and the resulting chaos that could ensue?
As best i remember CJCS Gen. Dempsey was the first major American official who was sent out to make an official statement.
any ideas?
I found this from Pepe Escobar of Asia Times which sheds some light on the change from war with Iran to a focus on China.
I guess we just didn’t enough time to get around to Iran, and if Syria is to go it will be a NATO operation, Libyia-like.
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Global_Economy/ND28Dj04.html
“Before 9/11, the Bush administration had been focused on China as its future global enemy number one. Then 9/11 redirected it to what the Pentagon called “the arc of instability,” the oil heartlands of the planet extending from the Middle East through Central Asia. Given Washington’s distraction, Beijing calculated that it might enjoy a window of roughly two decades in which the pressure would be largely off. In those years, it could focus on a breakneck version of internal development, while the US was squandering mountains of money on its nonsensical “Global War on Terror.”
Twelve years later, that window is being slammed shut as from India, Australia, and the Philippines to South Korea and Japan, the US declares itself back in the hegemony business in Asia. Doubts that this was the new American path were dispelled by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s November 2011 manifesto in Foreign Policy magazine, none too subtly labeled “America’s Pacific Century.” (And she was talking about this century, not the last one!)”
”Neither Netanyahu nor Barak have moderated their rhetoric. The prime minister recently said that those who downplayed the threat from a nuclear Iran “have learned nothing from the Holocaust”.
Ha!…..it’s the zionist who have learned nothing from the holocaust.
They think the holocaust shield protects them from ever having to pay or answer for what they do. Like primitives who made human sacrifices to their Gods, they think of the Jews murdered by Hitler as only offerings to their Zionist entity in return for perpetural immunity from any future crimes Zionist rule would ever commit.
Run Jews, run, run, run, away from these psychopaths.
At Haaretz, Amos Harel says that Diskin penned his off-the-cuff comments on a sheet with a Bible verse on it, and Obama will use the statement as a magic carpet to come to Jerusalem at last:
Should we receive word of an upcoming visit by President Barack Obama to Israel, it will only serve as further proof that the United States is making all efforts to prevent a possible Israeli attack.”
LOL…that’s a nice piece of spin to try and up Israel’s image by trying to entice BO to visit. Don’t go BO.
Very interesting that the Times removed the paragraph that included Diskin’s comments about Israel becoming “more and more racist.” A little sensitive, are we, NYT?
His remarks on this are still available at Haaretz:
A separate story at Haaretz focuses on Diskin’s comments about Israel’s policy toward Palestinians, which are interesting mainly because public figures aren’t supposed to say such things, even though what he says is completely obvious to anyone with open eyes:
Although Diskin’s comments about the policies of Netanyahu and Barak toward Iran seem to be attracting the most attention, Haaretz reporter Barak Ravid offers this interesting perspective: