Mr. Bennett Goes to Washington
President Biden’s meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett certainly didn’t go as expected. The tragic airport attack in Kabul occurred shortly before they were scheduled to meet and it had to be delayed. One assumes that the whole thing was abbreviated on account of the news.
Palestine was only mentioned in passing. However, Bennett told the New York Times that he would expand settlements in the West Bank, decline to reopen a Jerusalem consulate for Palestinians, and refuse to enter any kind of peace agreement with Palestine. Bennett later boasted, “I am the only prime minister in three decades who told the president of the United States I am not going to hold peace talks with the Palestinians.”
The big focus was obviously Iran. Everyone knows Israel has nuclear weapons and regularly threatens its neighbors with violence but Iran enriching a small amount of uranium is akin to genocide or something. The Biden administration is trying to reboot the Iran Deal and Israel is openly trying to tank this prospect. Bennett obviously didn’t get the answers he wanted on that front but Biden did not rule potentially attacking the country or strengthening sanctions even more. “We’re putting diplomacy first and see where that takes us. But if diplomacy fails, we’re ready to turn to other options,” said the president.
Axios’s Barak Ravid reported that Bennett also asked Biden to keep U.S. troops in Iraq and Syria. The Israeli delegation said they were “optimistic” with Biden’s response, something to remember as pundits claim we’re suddenly not at war for the first time in twenty years.
Back to Israel’s nukes for a second. Ravid also had some interesting information in his newsletter. A senior Israeli official says Biden assured Bennett that the U.S. would provide cover for Israel’s not-so-secret arsenal. As Ravid points out, this has become a tradition of presidents since Israel’s obtained the weapons in the late 1960s. He breaks down some of the history:
The strategic understandings were first discussed between Nixon and Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir in 1969, at which point the Israeli nuclear capability had crossed the point of no return.
- Presidents Ford, Carter, Reagan, George H.W. Bush and Clinton reiterated those oral understandings in their first meetings with their Israeli counterparts.
- In 1998, during the Wye River peace conference, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu asked President Bill Clinton to turn the oral understanding to a written document. Clinton agreed and signed a letter committing that the U.S. would allow Israel to retain its “strategic deterrence” capability regardless of any non-proliferation initiative.
- In 1999, when Ehud Barak replaced Netanyahu, Clinton signed the letter again. So did President George W. Bush when working with Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon.
Ravid also notes that Israel was concerned Obama wouldn’t sign the letter and were relieved to learn that his governing strategy didn’t contain a whole lot of hope or change. In fact, Obama passed a gag order in 2012 prohibiting federal employees from discussing Israel’s nuclear weapons.
Last week the site happened to run a piece Grant F. Smith breaking down some of this history:
Much has happened in the decades since President Richard Nixon first promised Israeli Prime Minster Golda Meier never to publicly discuss Israel’s nuclear weapons. US Senators Stuart Symington and John Glenn learned that Israel (with help from some proxies in the US) in the 1960s diverted enough US weapons grade uranium from the government contractor NUMEC to build a dozen bombs. Outraged that nothing was being done about it, the senators complicated presidential “strategic ambiguity” by amending US foreign assistance laws to condition aid to nuclear weapons countries that were not signatories to the treaty on the non-proliferation of nuclear weapons...
Why is such information continuing to receive protection? If multiple US government agencies reveal that the US has long known Israel has a nuclear weapons program, it raises uncomfortable questions about amount of foreign aid illegally delivered to Israel. Since Symington and Glenn became law, the US has transferred nearly a quarter of a trillion dollars in publicly known foreign assistance to Israel, and additional billions in covert assistance...
Obviously none of this will change under Biden or Bennett.
The Case of Dr. Fidaa Wishah
The cottage industry propped up around Cancel Culture™ has pretty strict parameters. Hysteria is only developed when certain people are allegedly canceled by certain places. Palestinians, and supporters of the Palestinian cause, never meet the criteria.
And so it goes with the case of Dr. Fidaa Wishah, a pediatric radiologist (and Palestinian) who was fired by the Phoenix Children’s Hospital (PCH) in June over private social media posts criticizing Israel. Yesterday we ran a piece by Wishah explaining her termination:
Let me be clear, I have never discriminated against a Jewish person in my personal or professional life. Many of my colleagues, friends, and mentors are Jewish. My social media posts have always been critical of the State of Israel and its treatment of the innocent people of Gaza and the West Bank. My mother, father, sister, and her children all still reside in Gaza in the same refugee camp and were being subjected to bombings and terror. Each day I feared that they would be killed. I used my platform as a U.S. citizen to bring awareness to what was happening. A plain and honest reading of my posts make it abundantly clear that my criticisms are of the actions of a state, not that of the Jewish people. Despite that, trolls on the internet began a campaign calling for my termination and bombarded PCH with messages. Within 48 hours PCH, without ever consulting with me, responded to the internet trolls claiming that they had completed a thorough investigation and terminated my employment. This is false. I acknowledge that PCH alerted me to the trolls and the complaints they were getting. However, 48 hours later, without any explanation or investigation, I was terminated. How can PCH claim to have completed a thorough investigation without ever having discussed it with me? The truth is, I am a Palestinian woman and I dared to speak up against Israel. PCH and its board terminated me because of who I am and where I come from.
Wishah just filed a complaint Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and says she’s suing the hospital on discrimination grounds.
Biden’s Drones
The last two newsletters have focused on the mainstream media melting down over the United States finally withdrawing troops from Afghanistan. Many pundits cited the terrible ISIL-KP suicide bombing of August 26 as proof that the country must endure perpetual occupation. It’s unlikely that most Americans know the difference between this group and the Taliban. Of course the mainstream media did them few favors in this regard. CNN even had H. R. McMaster on to baselessly assert that maybe the Taliban was connected to the attack. Feel free to guess whether Jim Sciutto pushed back on this fantasy at all.
It had been surreal watching a U.S. president occasionally acknowledge that this country is an Empire and that the occupation of Afghanistan was futile. However, the Kabul blast predictably reverted Biden to the usual standard: declarations of resolve, promises to hunt people down, etc. Biden’s retaliatory missile strike killed ten civilians, five of them children. The administration referred to the operation as “successful.” Most of the people expressing grave concern for the Afghan people a few weeks ago have had very little to say about any of this.
Murtaza Hussain has a great piece in The Intercept pointing out that this tragedy isn’t an aberration, but that similar attacks have gone under the radar:
The Kabul drone strike is just one in a long string of attacks in Afghanistan by U.S. forces and their proxies reported to have killed large numbers of civilians. Past attacks have hit families traveling in cars and buses, wedding parties, hospitals filled with patients, and groups of farmers working in fields. While the withdrawal of American troops can be described as the end to the war in Afghanistan, the Kabul strike shows how the war may simply enter a new chapter, with the U.S. striking targets with aircraft launched from faraway drone bases...
What separated the recent Kabul drone strike from the long pattern of reported civilian deaths was the level of immediate attention and outrage it has generated. The U.S. war in Afghanistan has mostly been waged in rural areas, away from the attention of international media. Kabul, on the other hand, is the highly populated capital and the country’s center for expatriates, nongovernmental organizations, and both Afghan as well as international journalists...
When the strike was reported, immediate video footage of the civilians who were killed in the attack began to circulate, and even international journalists were able to quickly access the attack site...
One wonders how quickly the American public would have turned on the war if some of the aforementioned tragedies were as well-known.
Odds & Ends
?? FAIR’s CounterSpin program interviewed Center for International Policy senior fellow Matthew Hoh about troop withdrawal in Afghanistan:
The United States has wanted this war in Afghanistan to be about Al Qaeda and 9/11. And certainly that’s what Joe Biden tried to do in his remarks the other day. And the reality is that this is a living legacy of the Cold War. This war begins, I think you could fairly start it, in 1973, when the king is deposed. And since that time—same year I was born, 48 years ago—there has been nothing but political chaos or violence, war, in Afghanistan. And the majority of that has been instigated to a degree, and supported greatly, by outside nations, chiefly the United States.
And what makes the tragedy about Afghanistan even more tragic is so much of this war, so much of this violence and suffering, it’s got almost nothing to do with the Afghans themselves.
?? When they write the definitive history of the “War on Terror” one day I assume they’ll include this exchange from Tuesday’s White House press briefing:
Q Building on Anne’s first question, does the President envision any situation in which he might deploy a large amount of U.S. troops abroad under his presidency? Any sort of foreign conflict that would require the sort of mass troop deployment that he just said we are trying to move past?
MS. PSAKI: Well, I think one of the pieces that he talked about in the speech was how he views our engagements in the world — and I think this is probably why you’re asking this question — and the horrible scenes and memories of the last few weeks. And as we think about how we embark on or how we use military force, these moments and the visions of the last several weeks or months or years should stick in us. And he made — stick in our minds.
?? Today CODEPINK, The Campaign for Peace, Disarmament, & Common Security, World Beyond War, and RootsAction.org delivered a letter Rep. Brad Sherman, who sits on the House Foreign Affairs Committee. The letter (which has over 3,000 signatures) calls on congress to stop the sale of $750 million worth of weapons to Taiwan. “These arms sales inflame tensions between Taiwan, China, and the United States, increasing the chances of an escalation of violence due to miscommunications or accidents that could easily result in the complete destruction of the island of Taiwan,” it reads. “Given China’s overwhelming military superiority over Taiwan, more weapons will do nothing to enhance Taiwan’s self-defense; instead they will further deepen Taiwan’s military reliance on the U.S., making U.S. involvement in a future China-Taiwan clash increasingly likely.”
?? The German publishing company Axel Springer recently purchased Politico for a crisp billion dollars. There’s an interesting paragraph in the New York Times story on the sale:
Axel Springer publishes the confrontational German tabloid Bild, but its chief executive, Mathias Döpfner, told me the Politico deal cemented the company’s American future. Mr. Allbritton noted that the Politico staff will not be subject to one notable feature of the German company — a mission statement employees are required to sign in support of the trans-Atlantic alliance and Israel, among other favored values.
The NYT’s Ben Smith relayed some relevant follow-up info in a series of tweets:
A coda to Politico column, in which I mentioned that Politico (like BI) staff won’t have to sign the Axel Springer “Essentials” — support for Israell, Atlanticism — unlike German employees. A Springer spokesman clarifies that they will stil be “core values” for the US companies.
Per Axel spokesman Malte Wienker: “Axel Springer’s five Essentials apply to all employees in all countries and all markets. However, they are not signed in contracts in non-German markets; they are regarded as core values of the company, in future also for Politico.”
Stay safe out there,
Michael
