Author: Caroline Glick

Caroline Glick is an American-born Israeli journalist, newspaper editor, and writer. She writes for Makor Rishon and is the deputy managing editor of The Jerusalem Post.[2] She is also the Senior Fellow for Middle East Affairs of the Washington, DC-based Center for Security Policy.
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The Donald Trump Negotiations Academy

Trump’s playbook involves doing essentially the opposite of what American and Israeli negotiators have been doing for the past 30 years.

We didn’t learn this week whether North Korea will give up its nuclear weapons. Only time will tell.

But we did learn that US President Donald Trump knows how to negotiate.

All of the negotiations experts insist the opposite is true. “How could they agree to a presidential summit without first guaranteeing its end product?” they sigh, knowingly.

“Trump’s showmanship is dangerous and counterproductive,” they sneer.

“At the end of the day, for this to work, Trump will have to copy Barack Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran,” they insist.

Dennis Ross, who mediated the negotiations between Israel and the PLO that led directly to the largest Palestinian terrorism campaign against Israel in history, and Wendy Sherman, who negotiated Bill Clinton’s horrible nuclear deal with North Korea in 1994 and Obama’s disastrous nuclear deal with Iran in 2015, as well as all their esteemed colleagues have taken up their pens and stood before the cameras and clucked about how Trump’s Singapore show is amateur hour.

But what we actually saw in Singapore, for the first time since Ronald Reagan went to Reykjavik, was a US president who actually knew how to negotiate with America’s enemies.

Indeed, Singapore was the first time a Western leader from any nation has gotten the better of his opponent at the negotiating table.

There are three dangers inherent to the process of negotiating with enemies. And to understand how Trump succeeded where everyone since Reagan has failed, it is important to keep them in mind.

First, you have no guarantee that the other side will agree to a deal.

Trump can make the case for denuclearization to Kim. But he can’t make Kim agree to denuclearize.

Since the US has not defeated North Korea militarily, only Kim can decide whether to go along with Trump or not.

The first inherent danger of negotiating then, is that the other side walks away and – as PLO chief Yasser Arafat did in 2000 – chooses to make war instead of peace. Negotiations give credibility to the other side and may, as a consequence, make war a more attractive option for your opponent after a period of negotiations than it was when the talks began.

The last two dangers inherent to negotiations have to do with the actions of Western negotiators and leaders.

Democratically elected leaders have a greater tendency than dictators to become convinced that their political survival is dependent on their ability to deliver a deal. Once that happens, once a leader believes that the risk of failure is too great to accept, he becomes a hostage of the other side.

In 2000, then-prime minister Ehud Barak believed that his only chance of political survival was to convince Arafat to accept a peace deal with Israel. As a consequence, Barak stayed in the negotiations even after Arafat rejected his offer and tanked the Camp David summit in July. He remained in talks with Arafat and his deputies even after they launched the most murderous terror war Israel had ever seen.

The third danger inherent to negotiating with your enemy is related to the second danger. If a leader believes his future depends on getting a deal, the likelihood that he will accept a terrible deal skyrockets.

Obama made reaching a nuclear deal with Iran the chief aim of his second term. To achieve this goal, Obama abandoned every redline he set for himself. He let Iran continue enriching uranium.

He made no demand that Tehran curtail its ballistic missile development. He agreed to gut the inspections regime to the point of meaninglessness. And so on down the line.

Obama was so averse to coming home empty- handed that he agreed to a deal that far from blocking Iran’s path to a nuclear arsenal, paved Iran’s path to a nuclear arsenal. And he threw in $150 billion in sanctions relief to pay for Iran’s efforts to achieve regional hegemony as a sweetener.

With these risks in mind, we turn to the Singapore Summit. Trump’s playbook involves doing essentially the opposite of what American and Israeli negotiators have been doing for the past 30 years.

Five lessons stand out.

1. Don’t make light of your counterpart’s failings, play them up.

For decades, Israeli negotiators praised Arafat as a man of courage and Abbas as a moderate. Obama and his team praised Iranian President Hassan Rouhani as a moderate. By praising their opponents, the Israelis and Americans justified making concessions to their counterparts, without requiring them to reciprocate. In other words, Israeli and US negotiators put the burden to prove good intentions on themselves, rather than their opponents, who actually had no credibility at all.

Trump took the opposite approach. After North Korea tested an intercontinental ballistic missile last July, Trump called Kim “Little Rocket Man” and a “madman.”



By polarizing Kim and blaming him for the growing danger to US national security, Trump made the case that Kim had to prove his good intentions to Trump, not the other way around, as a precondition for negotiations. Kim was required to release three American hostages and blow up his nuclear test site.

He was the one who needed to prove his credibility. Not Trump.

2. Intimidate, don’t woo, your opponent’s friends.

Trump’s three predecessors all begged the Chinese to rein in the North Koreans. In doing so, Clinton, George W. Bush and Obama handed all the leverage to Beijing. To curb North Korea even temporarily, the Chinese demanded continuous US concessions, and they received them.

Trump on the other hand, threatened China. He linked US-China trade deals to Chinese assistance in curtailing North Korean threats and aggression and agreeing to a US goal of denuclearizing China’s client state.

To prove his seriousness, Trump managed to lob 58 missiles at Syrian targets in retaliation for Bashar Assad’s use of chemical weapons while he was eating dinner with Chinese President Xi Jinping at his golf club in Florida.

Trump’s linkage of US-China trade to North Korean denuclearization has paid off. Xi cut off North Korean coal exports to China and limited fuel shipments from China to North Korea. A month later, Kim announced he wanted to meet with his South Korean counterpart.

3. Make it easy for your side to walk away from the table and hard for the other side to jump ship.

Trump accomplished this goal through a series of moves. First, he and Defense Secretary James Mattis threatened to destroy North Korea. Second, Trump coupled the threats with the largest increase in defense spending in memory. Third, Trump has repeated, endlessly, that he has no idea whether talks with Kim will lead to an agreement, but he figures it’s worth a shot. Finally, after Kim insulted National Security Adviser John Bolton, Trump canceled the summit.

Not only did Trump’s polling numbers not suffer from canceling the summit, they improved. As for Kim, Trump’s nixing the summit taught him two lessons. First, he learned the price of failure.

Second, Kim learned that unlike his predecessors, Trump doesn’t fear walking away. Indeed, he’ll walk away over something that none of his counterparts would ever dream of jumping ship for. If Kim wants to negotiate with Trump, he will respect Trump’s choices.

4. Appoint hard-line negotiators.

Kim’s attack on Bolton was reasonable from his perspective. Ever since Clinton signed his failed nuclear deal with Kim’s father in 1994, Bolton has been the most outspoken critic of nuclear diplomacy with North Korea in Washington. Bolton opposed – rightly – every diplomatic initiative and agreement every administration adopted with Pyongyang. There is literally no one in Washington more skeptical of the chances that an agreement with North Korea will succeed than Bolton.

And there he was on Tuesday, sitting at the negotiating table in Singapore.

For the past generation, American and Israeli leaders engaging in negotiations with their enemies have given their opponents a say – indeed, they have routinely given them veto power – over the members of their negotiating teams. US and Israeli leaders used their team roster as yet another tool to appease the other side. This, while ignoring the concerns of their domestic constituencies.

Trump took the opposite approach. After setting up the talks in a manner that minimizes the cost of walking away from the table for him and maximizes the cost for Kim, he chose negotiators that would both minimize the chance of reaching a bad deal and assuage and encourage his constituents that he can be trusted. Both Trump’s supporters and detractors know that so long as Bolton is at the table, the chance of the US agreeing to a bad deal is fairly close to zero. Trump’s rising poll numbers and the fact that the majority of Americans support his negotiations with Kim show that his efforts have paid off politically.

5. Take control of the clock.

Reporters in Singapore were shocked when Trump informed them Tuesday afternoon that he and Kim were about to sign an “agreement.” But sure enough, shortly thereafter, they were shepherded into a grand hall for a formal signing ceremony.

A quick look at the “agreement” showed that there was really nothing there beyond platitudes.

Trump’s many critics were quick to take him to task for his “deal” because it was purely aspirational.

But they missed the point. The point wasn’t to reach a serious agreement. The point was to sign a piece of paper that said “Agreement” on it.

By signing the piece of paper, Trump took all time pressure off of himself and his team. They have their deal. He signed it. In a ceremony with a fancy fountain pen. They have all the time they need now to do what it takes to get Kim to cough up all of his nukes.

On the other hand, time is working against Kim.

US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said on Wednesday that the economic sanctions on North Korea will remain in place until after North Korea has denuclearized in a verifiable manner. In other words, assuming Kim cares about his economy and is in this for the money, Kim will want to reach a deal and implement it as quickly as possible.

Trump’s critics in the US ratcheted up their attacks against his summitry with Kim on Wednesday and Thursday. But everything they say just discredits them. Trump is only dealing with a nuclear armed North Korea because all of his predecessors enabled Pyongyang’s nuclear armament through feckless diplomacy. He’s only there to try a new approach because their old approach gave Kim the theoretical ability to nuke New York.

And now that he’s actually negotiating, it is clear that what they really fear is not that he will fail like they did. They fear that he will succeed, like only he – a loudmouthed real estate mogul and reality show star from Queens who couldn’t care less what they think of him and happened to write a book called The Art of the Deal – can do.

Originally Published in the Jerusalem Post.

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Trump’s North Korea Strategy Is Terrifying Iran

Originally Published on Breitbart
The North Korean media reported Sunday that Syrian President Bashar Assad is due in Pyongyang for an official state visit with North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un.

Much of the instant media commentary regarding the announcement claimed that it is nothing more than a testament to the deep, long-standing ties between the two isolated nations, whose rogue behavior has caused both to be shunned by the international community.

With the planned summit with President Donald Trump back on for June 12, Kim is about to score North Korea’s greatest diplomatic achievement since the hermit kingdom was established in the aftermath of the Korean armistice in 1952.

Last week, Kim received a visit from Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, who invited him to come to a summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin later this year. Kim has had two meetings with South Korean President Moon Jae-In, and has had two meetings with Chinese President Xi Jinping, in just the past three months.

Assad, for his part, just met with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Sochi on May 17. His forces and their Iranian/Hezbollah/Shiite militia allies have retaken the outskirts of Damascus, and so largely ensured the survival of his regime. Assad has made clear that his next moves will be to seize southern Syria along the Israeli and Jordanian border regions of Quneitra and Daraa from rebel forces. He also has his sights on the U.S.-allied Kurdish held areas in eastern Syria.

In other words, things are looking good for both men. Why would they risk their newly held credibility by meeting with one another? Kim will certainly score no points with Trump for meeting with the man the president referred to recently as “a monster.”

The answer, in a word, is: Iran.

In September 2007, the Israeli air force destroyed a nuclear reactor in Deir Azzour in Syria. The reactor was constructed by North Korea and paid for by Iran.

The Israeli operation placed Iran’s nuclear cooperation with North Korea in stark relief. Many Israeli officials viewed the Syrian reactor as an extension of the Iranian program. Iran constructed the Syrian reactor, they told reporters, as a means to replicate and expand its own capabilities.

According to an Israeli official who was intimately engaged in discussions with the Bush administration regarding the Syrian nuclear reactor both before and after the Israeli airstrike, rather than use the revelations of Iranian-North Korean nuclear cooperation to pressure Iran and North Korea to come clean about their collaborative efforts, and the extent of their nuclear cooperation, then-Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice sought to silence discussion of the issue.

Rice, who opposed the Israeli operation in Syria, was engaged at the time in nuclear talks with both Iran and North Korea. Rice was not interested in highlighting either regime’s role in building the Syrian reactor, because she apparently hoped to appease both.

Due to Rice’s efforts, little attention has been paid publicly to the issue of Iran’s nuclear ties to North Korea. But the fact that those ties exist is an undisputed fact.

Consequently, with North Korea apparently actively engaged in discussions of its nuclear program with Washington, the Iranian regime is likely in a state of panic about what Kim and his representatives are telling the Americans about their work with Iran.

And that is where Assad comes in.

If the North Korean media report of his planned visit is accurate, and if Assad soon shows up in Pyongyang, he won’t be there to show the world that he has friends, too.

Assad will be in Pyongyang as an emissary of the Iranian regime, which wants to find out what Kim is planning — and hopefully, coordinate policy with him before his June 12 meeting with Trump.

Iran’s apparent effort to coordinate its operations with its longtime partner, and its fear that North Korea may be in the process of selling out to the Americans, is not happening in a vacuum. The Trump administration is implementing an across-the-board strategy to isolate Iran from its economic and strategic partners.

In some cases, like Trump’s diplomacy with Pyongyang, and the decision to abandon the Iran nuclear deal, the U.S. is implementing its strategy directly. In other areas, the U.S. is using Israel to implement its strategy of isolating Iran.

If North Korea is Iran’s chief Asian partner, Assad and Putin are Tehran’s most important allies in the Middle East. Russia built Iran’s Bushehr nuclear reactor. Russia has sold advanced weapons systems to Iran. Since 2015, Russia has been Iran’s chief partner in preventing Assad’s defeat in Syria, and in winning back regions of Syria that rebel forces had successfully seized control over during Syria’s seven-year war.

But for the past several weeks, backed by air strikes against Iranian targets in Syria, Israel has been leading a diplomatic effort aimed at Putin to convince the Russian leader to attenuate, with the goal of ending his alliance with Iran in Syria. As Dore Gold, former director general of Israel’s Foreign Ministry, outlined in a policy paper this week, Israel has been making the case to Putin that now that the Syrian war is petering out, with the Assad regime in control over wide expanses that were previously held by rebel forces, Iran’s plans and interests are no longer aligned with Russia.

Russia wants stability in Syria to ensure its continued control over the Tartus naval base and the Kheimnim air base near Latakia. Assad gave Moscow the bases in exchange for Moscow’s military assistance in saving his regime from destruction.

Iran, on the other hand, has made no attempt to hide the fact that now that the war is winding down, it expects to use its position in Syria, where it controls some 80,000 forces, to pivot to war against Israel. Israel has responded to Iran’s threats by attacking Iranian military positions in Syria. And Israel has also made clear that if it is forced to go to war against Iran in Syria, the government will order the Israel Defense Forces to destroy the Assad regime.

In other words, the Israelis are saying to the Russians: If you do not rein in Iran in a serious way, and block the chance of war, the Assad regime that gave you your port and air base will disappear, and you will need to hope that the next regime, whatever it is, will let you keep the bases. In giving full backing to Israel’s military operations in Syria, the Trump administration has signaled to Moscow that the U.S. will back Israel in the event of such a war.



Understanding that Israel is coordinating all of its actions with the Trump administration, Russia has given partial support to Israel’s position. Over the past two weeks, Putin and Lavrov have made a series of statements calling for the withdrawal of foreign forces from Syria, and stating explicitly that Russia expects Iranian-controlled forces to withdraw from the border area with Israel. The border areas, the Russians have said, should be manned only by Syrian regime forces. Moreover, they have said, Russia is willing to deploy police forces to the border areas to ensure that no Iranian-controlled forces are deployed in those areas.

Israel, while thanking Russia for its recognition of Israel’s concerns, has insisted that Russia demand all Iranian-controlled forces withdraw from Syria. The U.S. backs that demand, which Secretary of State Mike Pompeo stated explicitly during his speech on the administration’s Iran policy at the Heritage Foundation last week.

So far, there is ample evidence that Russia is not speaking with one voice on Iran. On the one hand, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights announced Wednesday that Iranian and Hezbollah forces were preparing to withdraw from the border area with Israel.

On the other hand, while insisting that all Iranian-controlled forces abandon the border zones with Israel, the Russians are also telling Assad that as the “sovereign” in Syria, he has the power to decide whether foreign forces will operate in the country and where they will deploy. Shortly after Putin called for all foreign forces to withdraw from Syria, Russian and Iranian forces jointly constructed 17 fixed military posts around Idlib province.

And perhaps most damningly, on Thursday, Israel’s Hadashot news channel reported that Hezbollah forces along the border with Israel were sighted donning Syrian military uniforms.

But whether Putin is lying or telling the truth about his attenuation of his ties with Tehran, what is clear enough is that Russia’s warm embrace of Israel, including Putin’s decision not to block Israel’s air assaults against Iran’s military assets in Syria, is setting off alarm bells in Tehran.

Whereas a year ago, the Iranians believed their alliance with Putin was stable, today they are forced to worry that he will stab them in the back to improve his relations with Washington. And now, with Putin making at least an artificial separation between Syrian regime forces and Iranian-controlled Shiite forces, the Iranians also need to worry, if only at the margins, that Assad may feel he needs to distance himself from his Iranian sponsors.

The U.S., for its part, is doing everything it can both to reinforce this Iranian paranoia and to prod Moscow away from Tehran. The administration is working both indirectly, through Israel, and directly, through discussions of a summit between Trump and Putin.

It is far too early to know if the Trump administration’s strategy for isolating Iran and destabilizing its alliances will be successful. But both the announcement of Assad’s planned visit to Pyongyang, and the noises the Russians are making on Syria, indicate that Moscow is attenuating its ties with Tehran. Those are encouraging signs of progress.

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Netanyahu’s finest hour

Originally Published in the Jerusalem Post.

At the start of his cabinet meeting on Wednesday, President Donald Trump discussed his announcement Tuesday afternoon that he is removing the US from his predecessor Barack Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran and reinstating the nuclear sanctions that were suspended with the deal’s implementation in January 2016.

European and other international leaders responded angrily to Trump’s move. The EU’s foreign policy commissioner Federica Mogherini was downright indignant.

Apparently unaware that the US is a more important EU ally than Iran, Mogherini insisted, “The European Union is determined to preserve it. Together with the rest of the international community, we will preserve this nuclear deal.”

The liberal US media outlets were also aghast. Commentators joined the chorus of former Obama administration officials condemning Trump and insisting his move will isolate the US from the international community.

Trump brushed off his critics by noting, “You saw [Prime Minister] Benjamin Netanyahu get up yesterday and talk so favorably about what we did.”

In other words, as far as Trump is concerned, Israel’s support is just as valuable as Mogherini’s. He’s perfectly willing to suffice with Israeli support. Having Israel in his corner means that the US is not isolated.

From moving the US Embassy to Jerusalem, to walking away from the nuclear deal which guaranteed Iran’s eventual acquisition of nuclear weapons and financed its regional aggression and terrorism sponsorship, to unconditionally supporting Israel’s military operations against Iranian positions in Syria, Trump has demonstrated that he is the most pro-Israel president in US history. No other president comes close.

The difference between Trump and his predecessors is that Trump accepts Israel on its own terms. He doesn’t expect Israel to do anything to “earn” American support. So long as Israel is in America’s corner, he respects the Jewish state as America’s ally.

Trump has earned all the credit for transforming the US-Israel relationship into a full-blown strategic relationship. But it was another leader that prepared the groundwork for his actions.

That leader is Netanyahu.

For many Republicans, Netanyahu is the most important foreign leader of our times. In the ranks of their esteem he ranks a close second to Winston Churchill. Netanyahu’s high standing is all the more remarkable given that Israel has no British Empire behind it. In the vast scope of things, Israel is a tiny country with no coattails.

Republicans aren’t the only ones who admire him. World leaders from Russian President Vladimir Putin to Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi to Chinese Premier Xi Jinping welcome him to their capitals like a visiting monarch. Sandwiched between two major Israeli air assaults on Iranian military assets in Syria Tuesday and Wednesday night, Netanyahu flew to Moscow. He stood next to Putin in Red Square as the Red Army Band played “Hativka” during the parade marking the 73rd anniversary of the Allied victory over Nazi Germany.

What explains his meteoric rise? How is it possible that an Israeli politician from the political Right, a man castigated for decades by the local and Western leftist elites as a fanatic and an extremist, is so revered today?

To understand Netanyahu’s success, a comparison with the late Shimon Peres is in order. Until his death, the same elites who revile Netanyahu revered Peres as the greatest Israeli statesman of all time.

Peres had a clear formula for statesmanship. He identified the interests of key actors – first and foremost, the Europeans – and he adopted them.

Consider his central foreign policy initiative, the Oslo peace process with the PLO.

Since the 1970s, the Europeans sought to legitimize the PLO – at Israel’s expense. In 1993, then-foreign minister Peres turned their goal into an ideology of peace and adopted it as his own.

On Monday, Labor MK Eitan Cabel said that if the late Yitzhak Rabin had known the toll the Oslo process would take on Israel, he never would have adopted it.

In his words, “From my dealings with [Rabin], in my view, if he had known the price the State of Israel would pay for the Oslo agreements, he never would have agreed to them.”

Peres, of course, was different. As the Israeli casualties of his peace process mounted from the tens to the hundreds to the thousands, and as Israel’s international position sunk ever lower, Peres became more dogmatic in its defense.

For his efforts, Peres was personally glorified by the A-list crew of European and American elites. They came to his extravagant birthday parties and had their photos shot embracing him. But none of his triumphs were shared with the country.

Netanyahu, has a different approach to diplomacy. Netanyahu identifies Israel’s national interests. Then he scans the international community for actors with aligned interests. He uses his considerable power of persuasion to convince those actors to achieve common goals.

The discrepancy between the two men’s approaches is nowhere more apparent than in their divergent moves to develop ties with the Arab world.

Peres viewed the Arab world from a European perspective. The EU views the Arab world as a monolithic presence moved only by Israel’s willingness to give Jerusalem to the PLO. So long as Israel refuses to give up Jerusalem, the Arabs will reject the Jewish state. Once Israel has conceded its eternal capital – and Judea and Samaria along with Gaza – the Arabs will be placated in one fell swoop and immediately embrace Israel as a neighbor and friend.

This view, which Peres gave voice to in his book The New Middle East, bears no relationship whatsoever to the realities of the Middle East.

Consequently, rather than embrace his vision, the Arabs viewed it as a Jewish conspiracy to take over the Arab world.

In stark contrast, Netanyahu has built his regional strategy on the real Middle East. During the Obama years, Netanyahu realized that Obama’s policies toward Iran and the Muslim Brotherhood imperiled Sunni Arab states no less, and perhaps even more, than they imperiled Israel.

Netanyahu developed relations with Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the UAE on the basis of these shared concerns and shared interests in diminishing the deleterious consequences of Obama’s policies. Although Netanyahu’s moves are unlikely to generate extravagant signing ceremonies with doves and balloons, they did bring about a situation where the Saudis, Egyptians and the UAE sided with Israel against Hamas, Qatar and Turkey during Operation Protective Edge in 2014.

That united front prevented Obama from coercing Israel into accepting Hamas’s cease-fire terms in the war.

So too, the relationships Netanyahu built formed the basis of a united Israeli-Arab front opposing Obama’s deal with Iran.

Now with Trump in the White House, Netanyahu’s regional policies have fomented a strategic transformation of the US’s system of alliances in the Middle East. Whereas in 1990, then-president George H.W. Bush built a coalition of Arab states against Iraq at Israel’s expense, in 2017, Trump reframed the US’s alliance structure to one based on the common Israeli-Sunni front against Iran and the Muslim Brotherhood.

Throughout Obama’s eight years in office, politicians from the Left accused Netanyahu of destroying Israel’s alliance with the US. Yesh Atid leader Yair Lapid, for instance, chastised Netanyahu in 2015 insisting, “Your understanding of America is obsolete and irrelevant and it is causing damage to the State of Israel.”

Netanyahu did understand America though. He understood the Obama administration was incurably hostile to Israel and that Obama viewed Israel as the main obstacle to achieving his goals in the Middle East. Netanyahu understood that under those circumstances, he had to find partners inside the US – in Congress and among the general public – to lessen the damage Obama was causing Israel.

Netanyahu’s approach to the US during the Obama years, and indeed, during the Clinton administration as well, was to recognize that the administration, while a key actor, is just one actor in a much wider American society, which is by and large deeply supportive of Israel. This insight informed Netanyahu’s decision to bring his opposition to Obama’s nuclear diplomacy with Tehran to the American people directly, through his address before a joint session of Congress in March 2015.

Netanyahu was reviled and attacked brutally by the Israeli and American Left for his move. Both groups insisted that he was undermining and even destroying US ties with Israel.

But the truth was that to a significant degree, Netanyahu’s speech in March 2015 safeguarded and protected the US alliance with Israel.

Netanyahu recognized that the White House’s propaganda campaign on behalf of Obama’s nuclear deal was even more dangerous to Israel than the deal itself. Obama’s campaign centered on delegitimizing all of the deal’s critics, by castigating them as Israeli agents and warmongers. If Obama’s efforts had succeeded, US support for Israel would have crashed, as that support would have been effectively rendered toxic and somehow treasonous.

Netanyahu’s address to Congress stopped Obama’s efforts in their tracks. He preserved the political legitimacy of opposition to the Iran deal and of support for Israel. His speech presented a clear case for how the nuclear deal harmed America’s national interests and how support for Israel advanced America’s national interest. Although Netanyahu’s speech represented the most significant substantive challenge Obama’s foreign policy ever suffered, Netanyahu offered nothing but praise for Obama in his address. In so doing, Netanyahu insulated himself and Israel from charges that he was hostile to Obama or in any way disrespectful of the presidency.

By coming to Washington and preserving the legitimacy of Obama’s opponents, Netanyahu blocked Obama from securing the support of either a majority of US lawmakers or a majority of the US public for his nuclear accord. His speech was the foundation of the Republican Party’s rejection of Obama’s deal. It created the political space for Democratic lawmakers to oppose their president’s most important foreign policy initiative.

If Netanyahu had not deliver his speech, opposition to the nuclear deal might not have become the consensus view of the Republican presidential candidates in the 2016 primaries. If Netanyahu not ensured the continued legitimacy of opponents of the nuclear deal, Trump might not have promised to abandon it.

Trump is the only person who decides his policies and so he has earned the admiration of the people of Israel, who are rightly moved by his extraordinary, unprecedented acts of friendship and support since entering office. But the man who set the conditions that afforded Trump the opportunity to transform the US-Israel relationship into a fullboard alliance is Netanyahu.

Israel is now reaping the rewards of Netanyahu’s visionary statesmanship. For his efforts, over the course of 30 years, Netanyahu has roundly earned the ever growing acknowledgment at home and abroad that he is the greatest statesman in Israel’s history.

 

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Watching Netanyahu in Tehran

Netanyahu’s detractors in the US and Israel called his presentation as a dog and pony show. “He didn’t tell us anything we haven’t known for years,” they sniffed.

Moreover, they insisted, Netanyahu’s presentation was actually counterproductive because he couldn’t show evidence that Iran is in breach of the nuclear deal it concluded in 2015 and so did nothing to persuade the Europeans to abandon the deal.

None of these claims are correct. Mossad agents who seized a half ton of documents and computer discs from a secret warehouse in Tehran brought proof that Iran has been lying about its nuclear ambitions since 1999. The information was never more than surmised by nuclear experts.

As for the nuclear deal, the archive itself is a material breach of the nuclear deal. Paragraph T.82 of the deal bars Iran from conducting “activities which could contribute to the design and development of a nuclear explosive device.”

Since the only possible purpose of the archive was to enable Iran to build on the progress it already made toward designing and developing a nuclear explosive device, its existence was a breach of Paragraph T.82.

As for who was impressed, and who wasn’t, this too misses the point.

The Trump administration wasn’t simply impressed with Netanyahu’s presentation. The Trump administration was a full partner in Israel’s decision to make the presentation. Netanyahu reportedly briefed President Donald Trump and his top advisers about the operation and its initial findings during his White House visit on March 5. The same day, the Mossad gave the CIA a copy of the entire archive.

Netanyahu coordinated his presentation with Trump and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo last Saturday and Sunday.

As for the Europeans, they aren’t key players. If Trump abandons the nuclear deal, Congress will reinstate sanctions suspended in January 2016 when the deal went into effect. And then the Europeans will have an easy choice to make. Trade with the US or trade with Iran.

Which brings us to the soldiers singing a love song in Persian the day of Netanyahu’s speech.

Netanyahu had two main target audiences on Monday evening: The Iranian regime and the Iranian people.The power of his presentation rested on two key observations. First, the Iranian regime believes its antisemitic rhetoric.

At its base, Jew-hatred is a neurotic condition. Antisemites fear Jews. They perceive them as all powerful. This neurotic worldview makes rational analysis impossible for antisemites. Everything is a Jewish plot for them. Through circular reasoning, antisemites see Jewish fingers in everything bad that happens to them.

Netanyahu’s presentation pushed all of Iran’s leaders’ neurotic antisemitic buttons.

Netanyahu opened by revealing the existence of Iran’s secret archive of its military nuclear program.

“Few Iranians knew where it was, very few,” he began.

And without missing a beat, as if stating the obvious, he added, nonchalantly, “And also a few Israelis.”

In other words, Netanyahu told the Iranians that just as they fear, the Jews know everything about them. The Jews know their deepest secrets. It doesn’t matter how closely guarded a secret is. The Jews know it.

That would have been enough to send the likes of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps Commander Gen. Kassem Suleimani into a fetal position. But Netanyahu was just getting warmed up.

Netanyahu then showed photographs of the nuclear archive – first from the outside, and then from the inside. It was as if he just wrote, “Kilroy was here,” on Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s bedroom door.

And then came the coup de grace. Netanyahu pulled down two black curtains and revealed the files themselves. Two hundred or so binders filled three bookcases. Two panels contained row after row of CDs – all taken from Iran.

Many spectators scratched their heads at the seemingly archaic find. Why did the Mossad officers go to the trouble of removing the actual notebooks? Why didn’t they just scan them into a flip drive and carry them out of Iran in their pockets? That way, they could have gotten access to the archive without tipping the Iranians off. The files could have remained in place.

This line of questioning misses a key purpose of the operation. Israel wanted the Iranians to know its agents seized the files.

For years, Israel’s enemies and allies alike have recognized its technological prowess. But ironically, rather even as it raised the fears of its enemies, Israel’s technological superiority also fed their contempt.

Israel’s enemies insisted that Israel resorts to cyber warfare and other indirect assaults because it is too afraid to have its soldiers face the enemy on a physical battlefield.

The very existence of the nuclear archive indicates that the Iranian regime bought into this line. Khamenei and Suleimani wouldn’t have risked placing the physical archive of Iran’s illicit military nuclear work under one roof if it had feared that Israel would send its forces to seize it.

Under the circumstances, if the Mossad had simply scanned the documents onto a hard drive and not taken the trouble to physically seize the files themselves, the effect of the raid would have been significantly diminished.

When Netanyahu pulled back the curtains, he exposed not only the regime’s perfidy, but its weakness.

The Jews breached its vaunted defenses and made off with a half ton of incriminating documents without being discovered.

There can be no greater humiliation.

Channel 10 News Arab affairs commentator Zvi Yehezkely reported Wednesday that the Arab world responded with glee to Netanyahu’s speech.

This then brings us to the Iranian public. How did the Iranian people respond to Netanyahu’s presentation? Iran’s anti-regime protests in December and January were widely covered. But the protests didn’t end in January. They are ongoing – and spreading.

According to recently retired Pentagon adviser on Islamic affairs, Dr. Harold Rhode, the anti-regime protests span from one end of Iran to the other and include people and sectors from all walks of life.

“When you ask Iranians where anti-regime protests are taking place in Iran today, they respond that the list of cities where anti-regime protests aren’t taking place is shorter than the list of cities where they are taking place.”

Iranian women have had it with the regime’s religious coercion, which forces them to wear hijabs, forces them out of public events, and enforces misogynist regulations through female goon squads that patrol the streets searching for women with hair showing to beat and bludgeon.

Iranian traders have had it with the regime. Its proliferation of ballistic missiles and terror sponsorship caused the US to impose sanctions that severely limit Iran’s access to the international banking system.

Barred from open currency trading, the Iranian rial has sunk like a stone. Iranian traders cannot carry out commerce.

Their plight will only deteriorate and their anger at the regime will increase if the US reinstitutes its nuclear sanctions on May 12.

Residents of Isfahan have had it with the regime.

Its water policies have dried up the city’s river. For the first time in history, Isfahan is suffering from an acute water shortage.

Iran’s Kurdish, Baluchi and Arab minorities are sick of the regime that oppresses them due to their ethnic identities.

Anti-regime protesters who have taken to the streets since last December shout slogans attesting to their loss of fear of the regime. Israel’s stunning intelligence coup, and Netanyahu’s stone cold humiliation of the regime is not likely to persuade them to rally around their leaders. To the contrary, it will empower them to revolt.

And this brings us to Israel’s strategic goal. Netanyahu’s presentation indicates that Israel’s goal is to empower the Iranian people to overthrow the regime.

The first step toward achieving that goal is to make the regime lose confidence in itself. The US is Israel’s partner in achieving this step.

The day before Netanyahu made his presentation, massive air strikes attributed to Israel destroyed bases in Hama and Aleppo, Syria, that housed major Iranian assets. One base was a recruitment and training center for Iranian-organized Shiite militias. The other housed 200 precision-guided Iranian missiles.

Whereas Iran responded with threats of retribution after Israel attacked the T-4 airbase outside Palmyra on April 7, its response to Sunday’s attacks was muted.

Between the two attacks, a new reality presented itself to the Iranians.

Since the 1979 Iranian Revolution, the US consistently shielded Iran and its proxies from Israel. In 1982, the US compelled Israel to remove its forces from Beirut. In 2006, the US insisted that Israel accept cease-fire terms in the war with Hezbollah that left Iran’s Lebanese proxy in charge of south Lebanon and paved the way for its takeover of the government in 2008.

During the Obama administration, the US shielded Iran from Israel on multiple fronts.

Over the past several months, commentators have noticed that Israel has taken its gloves off in Syria.

Many have attributed the rising power of Israel’s air strikes to the heightened threat posed by Iran’s entrenchment in the country. While true enough, over the past three weeks, the Trump administration has made clear that it has no intention of restraining Israel. Central Command Commander Gen. Joseph Votel’s working visit in Israel last week was deliberately leaked to the media. The White House and State Department have repeatedly stated that Israel informed them of its plans to carry out various air strikes.

The Iranians now realize that Israel has been given a green light from the US to defeat its forces in Syria.

And they are terrified. This is why they insisted that there were no Iranian forces killed in Sunday’s air strikes against Iranian targets in Syria.

Netanyahu’s critics have claimed that his presentation Monday, along with Trump’s anticipated announcement that the US is abandoning the nuclear deal increase the threat of war. But this is not necessarily the case. Indeed, in all likelihood, his presentation, together with the strikes against Iranian targets in Syria and the US’s support for Israel reduced the prospect of war.

Hemmed in by an empowered US-backed Israel, and an angry, rebellious Iranian public that just watched its humiliation on Israeli television, it is hard to see the scenario where the regime embarks on a war it is now convinced it will lose.

The only way to prevent Iran from becoming a nuclear power without a major war is to overthrow the regime. Netanyahu’s presentation advanced that goal in a profound way. Declarations of friendship to the Iranian people, like the IDF’s Persian love song, further empower the people of Iran to bring down the regime that oppresses them and endangers the entire world.

Originally Published in the Jerusalem Post

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Caroline Glick: 5 Key Points About the U.S.-Led Syria Strike

The United States, United Kingdom, and France joined in a combined operation on April 14 that used “precision” strikes against Syria’s chemical weapons infrastructure. The following are key points about the raid.

1. Operationally, the strike showed the U.S. has the capacity to conduct airstrikes with allies, against significant targets, with minimal lead time.

It took less than a week for the U.S. and its allies to organize and position the air and naval platforms they used to carry out the missile assault. Indeed, according to the Wall Street Journal, Secretary of Defense James Mattis delayed the strikes twice, despite operational readiness.

This demonstration of operational speed and competence tells us two things. First, President Donald Trump is respected by U.S. allies. French President Emmanuel Macron and British Prime Minister Theresa May trusted Trump’s seriousness of purpose enough to join him in launching the missile strikes with little to no diplomatic jockeying.

In 2013, when then-president Barack Obama geared up to attack Syrian regime targets after Syrian President Bashar Assad killed 1,400 people in a sarin gas attack on East Ghouta, the British parliament refused to authorize British forces to participate in the planned strike.

The French, for their part, were left in a lurch by Obama. French bomber pilots were in their cockpits waiting to take off when they were informed that Obama had called off the airstrikes at the last minute.

In addition, Saturday’s strike showed that the U.S. has the capacity to degrade and destroy high value targets through indirect fire. U.S. pilots did not have to fly over their targets to bomb them. By the same token, if it chooses to do so, the U.S. can destroy the vast majority of Iran’s nuclear installations from a safe distance with Tomahawk and other precision guided weapons.

2. The operational success of the missile strike does not infer either tactical or strategic gains.

Tactically, US Ambassador to the UN Nikki Haley is correct that by bombing chemical weapons targets, the U.S. and its allies “set [the Syrians’] chemical weapons program back years.”

At the same time, the advance warning the U.S. provided the Syrians regarding the impending strike gave the Syrians the opportunity to remove significant assets and manpower from bases and installations before they were attacked.

As a consequence, high value materials and personnel were probably not at the installations when they were attacked on Saturday morning.

Haley said on CBS News’ Face the Nation that the U.S. was not interested in “killing anyone” in the attack. That is fine in and of itself. But by providing advance warning of the impending strike, the U.S. diminished the tactical losses that Syria incurred. This is doubly true given that according to Mattis and Marine General James Dunford, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the installations attacked were engaged in developing sarin gas. To date, the U.S. and its allies have said that they lack conclusive evidence that the April 7 chemical attack involved sarin. According to Mattis, they have only been able to determine conclusively that the Assad regime used chlorine gas in the attack. In other words, Syria’s ability to carry out further chlorine attacks was apparently not diminished on Saturday morning.

3. From a strategic perspective, it is difficult to know whether the strike was meaningful, largely because the Trump administration has given contradictory statements about its actual goals in Syria.

Officially, the Trump administration’s goal in Syria is the same goal that the Obama administration articulated: defeating the “Islamic State,” or ISIS. Mattis has been assiduous in opposing the expansion of that strategic goal. His insistence on preserving Obama’s strategy in place in Syria has confounded observers, who note that the purpose of Obama’s campaign against Islamic State was to protect the Assad regime to placate Iran in the hopes of developing a strategic alliance with Teheran. Obama’s keenness to align U.S. policy with Iranian interests made him blind to the threat that Teheran’s expansionism and nuclear proliferation constituted to the U.S. and its allies.

On Saturday, Mattis told reporters the missile strike was a “one-time shot.” Last Thursday, Mattis told  Congress, “Our role in Syria is the defeat of ISIS. We are not going to engage in the civil war itself.”

Following Saturday’s strike, chief Pentagon spokesperson Dana White said, “This operation does not represent a change in U.S. policy nor was it an attempt to depose the Syria regime.”

But then, it isn’t clear the degree to which Mattis speaks for President Trump.

Last week, the Wall Street Journal reported that Trump pushed Mattis and his generals to expand the range of the attack to punish Iran and Russia for enabling the regime’s use of chemical weapons. Trump was reportedly “unhappy with the more limited options they… presented to him.” The same report indicated that Mattis said that “anything other than a ‘show strike’ risked broader escalation with the Russians in particular.”

With former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson gone, the Journal report claimed that Mattis was the lone voice calling for the U.S. to take no strategically significant action. Haley, along with new National Security Advisor John Bolton and Acting Secretary of State John Sullivan, all supported a more expansive effort.

In her interview on Face the Nation, Haley contradicted Mattis’s position that Obama’s strategy in Syria must be preserved. Haley indicated that the U.S. goals in Syria extend beyond defeating ISIS. Haley said the US has three goals it needs to achieve before it can withdraw its military forces from the country. First, she said, the US needs to ensure that there can be no “chemical weapons usage anywhere.” Second, she said that ISIS needs to be fully defeated. Third, Haley said, “We want to make sure that the influence of Iran doesn’t take over the area. They continue to cause problems throughout the region and we want to make sure that there is a hold.”

Haley added, “The president has asked the allies to step up and do more when it comes to Syria.” Apparently, they are.

On Saturday night, the Syrian media reported loud explosions at an Iranian base south of Aleppo. According to reports – which were contradictory – unidentified aircraft executed the strike. Some reports alleged that the aircraft were Israeli. If Israel did strike the Iranian base, it would be the second Iranian position Israel has been accused of bombing in the past week.

Speaking to his cabinet Sunday morning, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said, “The element that is undermining the Middle East more than any other is Iran, and … President Assad must understand that when he allows Iran and its proxies to establish its military presence in Syria, he is endangering Syria and the stability of the entire region.”

4. The U.S.-led attack signaled that at least for now, the U.S. has made its peace with Russian power in Syria and the wider Mediterranean basin.

Mattis succeeded in blocking any action against Russian interests in Syria. As Dunford noted, the Pentagon was in close contact with the Russians to ensure that there was no conflict between U.S. and Russian forces in Syria. Mattis’s explicitly stated concern with avoiding conflict with Russia indicated that at least as far as the Pentagon is concerned, the U.S. must not challenge Russia’s entrenchment in Syria.

Regardless of the actual policy adopted regarding Russia, objectively, Russia’s presence in Syria is a problem for the U.S. for three main reasons. First, Russia views its deployment in Syria first and foremost as a means to restore Russia’s superpower status by challenging U.S. power. In other words, Russia’s main goal in Syria is to weaken the U.S.

Second, U.S. allies Israel and Saudi Arabia are no match for Russia. So long as Russia remains in Syria, it facilitates and protects Iran’s entrenchment in the country. Since neither Israel nor Saudi Arabia can contend with Russia, they cannot prevent Iran from effectively taking over the country both directly and through its Syrian and Hezbollah proxies. In other words, dealing with Russia is a job the U.S. cannot subcontract to its regional allies and they cannot achieve their regional goals so long as Russia remains unchallenged.

Finally, the Russian presence in Syria is a problem for the U.S. because it expands Russia’s influence over Turkey at America’s expense. It is true that Turkey has not been a credible U.S. ally for several years. But it is also true that the more Putin pushes Turkey away from the U.S., the more damage the U.S. will suffer to its strategic interests in the region.

The U.S. may very well lack good options for challenging Russia. Obama’s acquiescence to Russia’s entrenchment in Syria destroyed U.S. dominance in the Middle East in one fell swoop. Haley claimed Sunday that the U.S. intends to punish Russia for its facilitation of Assad’s war crimes by implementing new sanctions against Russian “companies that were dealing with equipment related to Assad and chemical weapons use.”

It remains to be seen how those sanctions will impact Putin’s cost-benefit analysis. But it is hard to see that sanctions, however harsh, will outweigh what Putin perceives as the benefits of maintaining Russia’s presence in Syria.

5. Saturday’s strike showed that the U.S. is again a force to be reckoned with in Syria.

Despite the limited if not altogether nonexistent immediate tactical and strategic significance of the strike, by undertaking it, Trump took another important step towards restoring U.S. credibility and power in the region. This is a necessary precursor to any tactically and strategically significant operation in the future. Since the administration is clearly revisiting its strategic posture and goals in Syria, this is an altogether positive achievement.

Obama wrecked U.S. credibility in the Middle East, and arguably worldwide, in 2013, when at the last moment he failed to enforce the red line he drew regarding chemical weapons attacks. It is not clear that his red line, according to which the U.S. would respond to chemical weapons attacks, was a reasonable one. By saying the U.S. would respond to chemical attacks, Obama signaled that conventional killing methods were fine by him. Assad, who used conventional munitions to kill nearly half a million people, understood the message and continued killing.

But whether or not Obama’s red line was rational is beside the point. Once Obama drew a line in the sand, and then failed to maintain it when it was challenged, he weakened America in a fundamental way.

As a consequence, Trump has to defend Obama’s red line to restore American power and credibility. By retaliating against Assad’s April 7 chemical attack in Douma — and doing so with Britain and France – Trump communicated clearly that the U.S. demands respect. This message was a necessary precondition for successfully implementing whatever strategic goal the president and his team adopt regarding Syria and its Iranian and Russia sponsors.

Originally Published in Breitbart.

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Why America Shouldn’t Leave Syria, and the Kurds, Behind

President Donald Trump may about to throw the Kurds under the bus – and with them, Israel, Saudi Arabia, and American interests in the Middle East.

If concerns for securing the Pentagon budget are what convinced Trump to sign the $1.3 trillion omnibus spending bill last month, Pentagon concerns about keeping Islamist Turkey in NATO seem to be informing Trump’s thinking about abandoning the Kurds.

To the dismay of America’s allies and the delight of its enemies, President Trump declared last Thursday, in a speech in Ohio focused on infrastructure renewal, that he will soon recall U.S. forces now deployed to Syria to fight the Islamic State (or ISIS).

In his words: “We’re knocking the hell out of ISIS. We’ll be coming out of Syria, like, very soon. Let the other people take care of it now.”

On its face, Trump’s statement seems reasonable. In 2014, then-President Barack Obama received congressional authorization to deploy U.S. forces to Syria to defeat ISIS, which had seized large swathes of territory in eastern Syria and western Iraq, and had set up its so-called capital in Raqqa, Syria. But Obama’s war against ISIS was lackadaisical and inconclusive.

During the 2016 campaign, Trump pledged to obliterate ISIS. Upon taking office, he loosened the rules of engagement for U.S. forces, and devolved authority for making attacking decisions from Washington to the forces on the ground.

The results paid off. In December 2017, Iraqi President Haider al-Abadi announced that ISIS had been defeated in Iraq.

In October 2017, U.S. forces working with the predominantly Kurdish Syrian Democratic Forces defeated ISIS forces in Raqqa.

If fighting ISIS were the only reason for US forces to be in to Syria, then a reasonable argument could be made for leaving and letting “the other people take care of it [Syria] now.”

But that’s the thing, ISIS was arguably the group in Syria that constituted the smallest strategic threat to the US and its allies. Indeed, while supporting Obama’s decision, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and senior Israeli defense and military officials saidrepeatedly that Iran’s entrenchment in Syria constituted a far greater threat to the region and to global security than ISIS ever did.

Which brings us to the issue of “the other people” in Syria that Trump expects to take care of things after he removes U.S. forces.

Those “other people,” are not American allies. To the contrary.

The forces in position to take over the areas where U.S. forces are now deployed are Turkish, Iranian, and Russian. Unlike the Israelis and Saudis, the Iranians, Turks, and Russians share none of America’s interests in Syria.

Which brings us to the Kurds, who will be the immediate casualty of an American withdrawal from Syria.

The US victory against ISIS in Syria and Iraq would never have happened without the Kurdish YPG and the YPG-dominated SDF militia in Syria, nor without the Kurdish Peshmerga forces in Iraq. The Kurds were the ground forces that won the war.

Through their successful operations in Iraq and Syria, the Kurds earned U.S. support for their political aspirations for an independent Kurdistan in Iraq, and an independent Kurdish region in post-war Syria. Such independent Kurdish zones serve the larger American strategic interest of blocking Iran’s imperial aspirations. An independent Kurdistan in Iraq would block Iran from controlling the Iran-Iraq border. An independent Kurdish province in a post-war Syria would prevent Iran from controlling the Iraqi-Syrian border and thereby from gaining the capacity to extend its hegemonic reach from Tehran to Lebanon.

For the past several months, at a minimum, the Pentagon has been Turkish president Recep Erdogan’s most powerful ally in his political and military campaign against the Syrian Kurds in Washington.  The Pentagon’s consistent preference for Turkey over the Kurdish forces that brought the U.S. victory against ISIS springs from its desire to keep Turkey in NATO. The U.S. directs its operations in Syria through NATO’s Incirlik Air Base in Turkey. The U.S. also stores nuclear warheads at the base.

After the failed military coup against Erdogan in July 2016, the regime cut off the power to Incirlik and effectively held the NATO personnel stationed there, including 2,700 U.S. military personnel, prisoner for several days. Rather than take the hint and make plans to remove U.S. nuclear weapons from the base and diminish American reliance on the base for NATO operations in the Middle East, the Pentagon worked to salvage U.S. relations with Turkey and Erdogan.

The argument has always been that no one wants to “lose” Turkey. But in the time that has elapsed since the failed coup, Erdogan has made clear that Turkey is already gone. In December, for example, he concluded a deal in to purchase Russia’s S-400 anti-aircraft missile defense system. The U.S. has repeatedly said that the deal is unacceptable given Turkey’s NATO membership.

Turkey has also been threatening U.S. forces in Manbij, Syria, for months, claiming the YPG forces there are terrorists aligned with the Turkish Kurdish PKK force, which the U.S. has designated a terror group.

US and Kurdish forces seized Manbij from Islamic State in 2016. Until then, the Manbij was the hub of ISIS’s supply chain from Turkey. Indeed, Manbij’s fall exposed Turkey’s key role in facilitating ISIS operations in Syria.

Turkey launched an assault against the Kurdish-controlled Afrin province along the Turkish border in western Syria in January. In the three-month operation, the U.S. provided no support for the Kurdish YPG fighters while the Russians permitted the Turks to bomb the population from the sky at will.

In mid-March, the Kurdish defenders were routed and a massive stream of refugees, including Yazidis and Christians as well as Kurds, abandoned the area to the Turks. Speaking to Reuters and other media outlets, a Kurdish spokesman said that the Turks’ aim was demographic displacement and ethnic cleansing, as fleeing Kurds, Christians, and others were replaced by Sunni Arabs and Turkmen.

Fresh on the heels of his victory in Afrin, this week Erdogan aannounced his intention to attack Kurdish PKK forces in Sinjar, Iraq. Kurdish forces in Sinjar have protected the Yazidis, who returned to the area after it was overrun by ISIS in 2014.

On March 28, Defense Secretary Mattis indicated that the U.S. supports the Turkish intention to remove the PKK forces from Sinjar.

But rather than demonstrating appreciation for the administration’s support, Erdogan is escalating his strategic embrace of Russia and Iran  – at America’s expense.

On Tuesday, Erdogan will host Russian President Vladimir Putin at the Mediterranean coastal town of Akkuyu for a ceremony marking the opening of a Russian-built nuclear power plant at the site. From there, the two leaders will travel to Ankara for a trilateral summit on the future of Syria with Iranian President Hassan Rouhani on Wednesday.

If the U.S. removes its forces from Syria, Iran and Turkey can be expected to annihilate the Kurds. And, as they did in Afrin, the Russians will stand on the sidelines.

A rout of the Kurds in Syria will be an unmitigated strategic disaster for the U.S. and its allies on two levels.

First in relation to Syria itself, without the Kurds, the U.S. will have no allies on the ground. The Turks, Iranians and Russians will divide the country between them. Iran will have accomplished its goal of controlling a contiguous band of territory stretching from Iran to Lebanon. With its gains in Syria consolidated, the prospect of war between Iran and Israel on the one hand, and Iran and Saudi Arabia on the other, will rise to near-certainty.

In the event of such a war, the damage will not be limited to America’s chief strategic allies in the Middle East, which will absorb devastating losses through joint attacks by Iran and its Hezbollah, Hamas, and Iraqi proxies.

As global financial analyst and strategic commentator David Goldman notes, the prospect of a global financial shock will rise to near certainty. “When you throw a lit match into a barrel of gas, you will get a big fire,” Goldman explains.

If Iran and Saudi Arabia go to war, they will target one another’s oil installations, he explains. “The price of a barrel of oil will rise to $200. Even though the U.S. is energy independent, the global price will still rise due to supply loss, and the global economy will be shut down.” Goldman continues.

“This will be the Trump Depression,” he concludes.

In other words, the 2,000 American troops in Syria are what stand between the U.S. and a meltdown of the global economy. They prevent war in the Middle East by denying Iran the ability to consolidate its victories in Syria and to launch wars directly, or through its proxies, against Israel and Saudi Arabia.

This brings us to the second problem with Trump’s appeasement of Turkey and his intent to withdraw from Syria.

If the U.S. betrays the Kurds in Syria, it will scupper any prospect of a popular rebellion inside of Iran that can destabilize and ultimately overthrow the regime. The Iranian Kurds, like the Syrian, Turkish and Iraqi Kurds, suffer from state-sponsored discrimination and oppression. They are geographically and culturally distinct from the rest of Iran. If inspired to do so, they would play a key role in a popular uprising against the regime. Without the Kurds, it is difficult to see how such a revolution could succeed or even begin.

If the U.S. abandons the Kurds of Syria, any chance that the Iranian Kurds would rise up is gone.

In the next five weeks, Trump will decide whether to remain in Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran or to abandon it. If the U.S. remains in Syria, then a U.S. abandonment of the nuclear deal coupled with a reinstatement of significant economic sanctions against Tehran would diminish Iran’s regional standing and economic prospects. But if Trump abandons the deal and abandons Syria, the moves would likely cancel one another out.

Iran will be so empowered by a U.S. abandonment of Syria that it will likely be in a position to abandon the nuclear deal in response to a U.S. move, reinstate its high-level uranium enrichment activities, and suffer few consequences. No longer concerned about U.S. responses, many nations will make their peace with a nuclear-armed Iran and defy American sanctions.

Trump is right to wish to bring the troops home from Syria. But the price American will pay – militarily, strategically and economically — for removing U.S. forces from Syria and abandoning the Kurds will far outpace the advantages of walking away from the mess.

Indeed, the price America will pay for “losing” the already-lost Turkey will be far lower than the price the US will pay for abandoning its Kurdish allies.

Originally Published in Breitbart.

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Firing Rex Tillerson Removed an Obstacle to Middle East Peace

As Secretary of State Rex Tillerson was being fired on Tuesday, his central assumptions about the Palestinian conflict with Israel, which are shared by the entire Washington foreign policy establishment, literally blew up in Gaza.

On Tuesday morning, Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Rami Hamdallah’s convoy was attacked by a roadside bomb during an official visit in Hamas-controlled Gaza.

Hamdallah was in Gaza to inaugurate a wastewater treatment facility sponsored by the World Bank. The facility was approved 14 years ago, but infighting between Hamas, which runs Gaza, and Fatah, the PLO ruling faction which controls the Palestinian Authority (PA), blocked its operation time after time.

The shuttered water treatment facility in northern Gaza has long been a monument to the Palestinian leadership’s incompetence and indifference to the plight of the people it is supposed to be serving. As the plant gathered dust, Gaza plunged deeper and deeper into a water crisis.

As the Times of Israel reported, Gaza has two water problems: insufficient ground water, and massive pollution of the existing supply due to the absence of sufficient sewage treatment facilities.

Untreated sewage is dumped directly into the Mediterranean Sea, and then seeps back into Gaza’s groundwater.

Gaza’s polluted acquifiers only produce a quarter of its water needs, and due to insufficient water treatment facilities, 97 percent of Gaza’s natural water sources are unsafe for human consumption.

Hamdallah’s visit to Hamas-controlled Gaza was supposed to show that the Fatah-Hamas unity deal Egypt brokered between the two terror groups last year was finally enabling them to solve Gaza’s humanitarian needs.




And then Hamdallah’s convoy was bombed, and the whole charade of Palestinian governing competence and responsibility was put to rest.

Later in the day, the White House held a Middle East summit that demonstrated Tillerson’s basic assumptions have the problems of the Middle East precisely backwards.

Under the leadership of Jared Kushner, President Donald Trump’s son-in-law, along with Jason Greenblatt, Trump’s senior negotiator, Israeli officials sat in the White House for the first time with Arab officials from Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Oman, and Qatar. Representatives from Egypt and Jordan, with which Israel enjoys open diplomatic relations, were also in attendance. Canadian and European officials participated as well.

Although they were invited, the Palestinians chose to boycott the conference. Their boycott was telling. The PA claimed it was boycotting the conference in retaliation for America’s recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and President Trump’s plan to move the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem on Israel’s 70th Independence Day in May.

But anger over Jerusalem doesn’t justify the snub. The purpose of the summit wasn’t to reach “the ultimate deal.” The summit was called to to formulate the means to contend with the humanitarian crises emanating from Hamas-controlled Gaza. The Palestinians boycotted a summit whose sole purpose was to help them.

As Palestinian commentator Bassam Tawil noted, the PA’s boycott while appalling, was unsurprising.

The White House summit was a threat to both rival Palestinian factions. It showed that the Trump administration, which both Fatah and Hamas hate passionately, cares more about the Palestinians than they do.

The humanitarian crisis in Gaza is entirely the product of Hamas and Fatah actions. In an op-ed in the Washington Post last week, Greenblatt laid the blame on Hamas. “Hamas’s utter failure to fulfill any of the most basic functions of governance has brought Gaza to the brink of collapse, which has necessitated the response of the international community.”

Fatah, Tawil noted, is just as responsible. The Fatah-controlled PA has used the Palestinians of Gaza as a pawn in its power struggle against Hamas. Rather than work to decontaminate Gaza’s water supply and provide for the basic needs of the population, for the past year the PA has imposed economic sanctions on the Gaza Strip.

Ostensibly imposed to induce the population of Gaza to rise up against Hamas, they have simply served to increase the misery of the residents of Gaza. Hamas’s power remains unchallenged as Qatar, Turkey, and Iran shower the terror group with cash and arms.

As Tawil noted, Hamas and Fatah are willing to fight one another until the last Palestinian in Gaza.

The conference showed that the attack on Hamdallah’s convoy was not a freak episode. The bombing was emblematic of the Fatah-Hamas leadership’s obsession with their own power, to the detriment of the people they claim to represent.

The events in Gaza and the White House on Tuesday tell us two important things.

First, they reveal that the primary obstacle to both peace and regional stability in the Middle East is the Palestinian leadership – both from Fatah and Hamas.

Not only did the PA refuse to participate in a summit dedicated solely to helping the Palestinians, but also the very day the summit took place, PA-controlled Voice of Palestine Radio reported that the PA intends to file a complaint against President Trump at the International Criminal Court. Trump’s recognition of Jerusalem, the PA insists, “violated all international laws and resolutions.”

The report also said the PA intends to sue Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Avigdor Liberman for “crimes against the Palestinian people.”

Tuesday’s second lesson is that while the PA is the primary obstacle to peace and regional stability, it is easily surmountable.

Tuesday’s conference was a diplomatic triumph for the Trump administration. For the first time, official representatives of five Arab states that have no diplomatic relations with Israel sat publically in the White House with Israeli officials. They were brought together due to their common concern for the Palestinians in Gaza, and for the instability that the plight of the Palestinians in Hamas-controlled Gaza might encourage.

Although it is still unknown whether anything discussed at the conference will turn into concrete improvements on the ground, the summit itself was a concrete achievement. It showed that the Arabs are willing publicly to bypass the Palestinians to work with Israel. The fact that the conference was devoted to helping the Palestinians served to transform the PA from the critical partner in any peace deal to an irritating irrelevance.

And that brings us to Tillerson, and the foreign policy establishment whose positions he channeled.

During his 14 months in office, Tillerson insisted on maintaining the establishment’s view that the Fatah-controlled PA is the be-all-and-end-all of Middle East peace efforts. The view that there can be no Arab-Israeli peace without the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLOP compelled successive U.S. administrations to continue to embrace it despite its support for terrorism, and despite its refusal to accept or even respond to any offer of peace by either Israel or the U.S.

The belief that there can be no peace without Fatah convinced successive American administrations to pour billions of dollars in aid money down the black hole of PA treasury accounts. Since the Israeli-PLO peace process began in 1993, the Palestinians have received more international aid per capita than any nation on earth has received in world history. And all they produced are an impoverished, sewage-filled terror state in Gaza, and a jihadist hub in Judea and Samaria that would explode in violence if Israel did not control security.

The view that the U.S. needs the PLO and its PA to achieve peace gave the Palestinian leadership an effective veto over every U.S. policy towards Israel and towards the peace process.

Trump’s decision to recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and move the embassy to Jerusalem was the first time any American leader since Bill Clinton had dared to reject the Palestinian veto on US Middle East policy.

Tillerson supported maintaining the PA’s veto. As a result, he all but openly opposedTrump’s decision.

So too, last June, in a bid to protect U.S. funding to the PA — despite the fact that fully 7 percent of its donor-funded budget is used to pay salaries to terrorists in Israeli prisons and their families — Tillerson falsely told the Senate Foreign Relations committee that the PA had agreed to end the payments. After the Palestinians themselves denied his statement, he only partially walked it back. The next day, he told the House Foreign Affairs Committee that the U.S. was in “active discussions” with the Palestinians regarding halting the payments.

In the event, the PA raised its payments to terrorists in 2017 to $403 million. In 2016, the PA spent $347 million to pay salaries to terrorist murderers and their families.

In other words, Tillerson is so committed to the view that there can be no peace without the PA, that he willingly misled U.S. lawmakers.

Trump administration officials keep insisting that they are almost ready to present their peace plan for the Palestinians and Israel. But whatever the plan may entail, the steps the White House has already taken – Tuesday’s summit, Trump’s move on Jerusalem, and his determination to sign the Taylor Force Act to end U.S. support for the PA if it maintains its payments to terrorists – have already advanced the cause of peace more than any American peace proposal ever has and likely ever will.

Those moves removed the principle blockage to all peace deals – namely, the Palestinian leadership from Fatah and Hamas alike. By bypassing the PA, the White House has focused its efforts on expanding the already burgeoning bilateral ties between Israel and the Arab states. It has encouraged the expansion of cooperation between these regional actors. That cooperation is the key to diminishing Iranian power in the region; defeating Sunni jihadists from the Muslim Brotherhood and its spinoffs; and to improving the lives and prospects for peace of Palestinians, Israelis and all the nations of the region.

Tillerson opposed all of these actions. Like the foreign policy establishment he represented, Tillerson refused to abandon the false belief that nothing can be done without PLO approval. By removing him from office, President Trump took yet another step towards advancing prospects for peace in the Middle East.

Originally Published in Breitbart Jerusalem

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THERE IS NO THERE HERE

So the case that spells Netanyahu’s doom is no case at all. It’s a policy dispute.

One of the distressing aspects of the police probes against Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu is that police seem to be attributing criminality to normal policy-making.

To date, the Bezeq-Walla investigation, dubbed Case 4000 by the police, is being presented as the mother lode – the probe that will sink Netanyahu.

Case 4000 exploded last week with pre-dawn arrests of some of the most powerful people in Israel. Telecommunications giant Bezeq’s owner Shaul Elovitch, his wife, Iris, and their son Or were nabbed in their beds. So was Netanyahu’s former communications chief Nir Hefetz and former director-general of the Communications Ministry and Netanyahu confidante Shlomo Filber.

The headlines screamed “Bribery!” And the reports were no calmer.

The media reported that the police have hard evidence Netanyahu and Filber colluded to give Netanyahu’s crony Elovitch hundreds of millions of shekels in tax and regulatory breaks for Bezeq. In exchange, Elovitch, who also owns the popular Walla Internet site, agreed to give positive coverage of Netanyahu and his wife, Sara, on Walla’s news site.

Before we could consider the evidence, Netanyahu’s fate was sealed. He was a goner.

But when the smoke cleared, it became apparent that there isn’t anything there.

Netanyahu and Filber did give Bezeq and its subsidiary, satellite television provider Yes, regulatory and tax breaks.
On the regulatory side, the Communications Ministry agreed to end the forced separation between the two commonly owned corporations.

As Eli Zippori noted last Friday in Globes, far from being a criminal conspiracy, the move was perfectly sound policy. By allowing the two companies to work together, the government improved the lot of consumers. Together they could offer the public discounted service bundles that include landlines, Internet service and television service.

Moreover, in exchange for permitting them to work together, Bezeq agreed to permit private Internet providers to operate off of its communications infrastructure. Today, Zippori noted, 550,000 Israelis receive Internet through such services.

Would another policy move have brought better results for the public? Maybe. But that doesn’t mean this policy was wrong or criminal.

As for the tax breaks, it is true that Yes received hundreds of millions in tax relief. Yet as Zippori noted, Yes’s corporate losses topped a billion shekels. The Income Tax Authority routinely gives tax relief to corporations that lose money. And the higher the losses, the higher the tax break.

Would it have been better for the government to discriminate against Yes? Maybe. But that doesn’t mean this policy was wrong or criminal.

So the case that spells Netanyahu’s doom is no case at all. It’s a policy dispute. It isn’t surprising that the police are trying to criminalize Netanyahu’s policies in Case 4000. They’re doing the same thing in Case 1000 and in Case 3000.

Case 1000 involves Netanyahu’s support for amending the so-called Milchan law. The law, passed in 2008 under the Olmert government, provides a 10-year income tax and reporting exemption for overseas income. The law was passed to encourage wealthy expatriates and immigrants to move to Israel. It is called the Milchan law because businessman Arnon Milchan pushed very hard to get it passed.

In 2013, Milchan sought to extend the law’s exemptions to 20 years. Netanyahu supported its extension.

The police allege that Netanyahu’s support for the law’s extension owes to the fact that Milchan gave him free cigars for a decade or so. The problem with the police’s claim is that Netanyahu’s position reflects the same economic positions he has held for decades. Moreover, his position was shared by the Immigration and Absorption Ministry, which like him, supported the law and the proposed amendment because it encouraged immigration of wealthy individuals and capital flows into Israel.

Then-finance minister Yesh Atid chairman Yair Lapid is the star witness against Netanyahu. Although like Netanyahu, Lapid and Milchan are old friends, and Lapid met with Milchan twice about the proposed amendment, Lapid eventually bowed to his ministry’s position that the law induced money laundering and is therefore problematic.

Was Netanyahu’s position wrong? Did the Finance Ministry’s position serve the public’s interest better? Maybe. But that doesn’t mean his policy was wrong or criminal.

In Case 3000, Netanyahu is accused of basing his support for Israel’s purchase of German submarines on his cronies’ monetary interests. Netanyahu’s attorney and cousin David Shimron represented the German shipyard.

The problem with this claim is that Netanyahu has publicly supported expanding and modernizing Israel’s submarine fleet for 20 years.

True, some senior officials in the IDF and the Defense Ministry oppose expanding Israel’s submarine fleet. Their position is not without merit. But that doesn’t mean that Netanyahu’s position was wrong or criminal.

Yet in all of these cases, the police leakers are telling the media that Netanyahu’s policy positions were criminal acts. Rather than reject these claims as absurd on their face, and recognize that they contradict the basic values of a free society, the media have been mindlessly parroting them.

Which brings us to Case 2000 and the second half of Case 4000.

These investigations revolve around the premise that Netanyahu engaged in criminal activity when he sought to receive less hostile coverage from the Yediot Aharonot media group and from Walla news portal.

Yediot publisher Arnon Mozes and Elovitch are accused of offering bribes to Netanyahu in the form of better coverage in exchange for governmental support for their business interests. In Mozes’s case, he asked Netanyahu to act against Israel Hayom, Yediot’s primary competitor. In Elovitch’s case, Netanyahu allegedly agreed to provide Bezeq/Yes with regulatory and tax breaks in exchange for supportive coverage in Walla.

There are two problems with these allegations. First, Yediot’s implacably hostile coverage of Netanyahu never improved. And, as an inquiry at Mida website this week demonstrated, like Yediot, Walla’s coverage of Netanyahu is relentlessly negative.

Investigations 2000 and 4000 are predicated on a draconian premise that rejects the very notion of freedom of speech and expression. The premise is that any time a reporter writes about a public figure, he is offering that public figure a bribe. His expectation in writing his article is that at some point, the politician will pay him back for his work.

Conversely, if a reporter writes negatively about a public figure, he is extorting him. Under this premise, Mozes and Elovitch gave Netanyahu bad coverage because that gave them a bargaining chip against him. In exchange for better coverage, they could expect him to do something for them.

In other words, these probes assume that all reporting is inherently corrupt and criminal.

All of the police probes suffer from another problem – they all scream out selective law enforcement.

As Zippori notes, whereas Case 4000 is premised on the notion that a pro-business regulatory environment is inherently criminal, investigators never probed an even larger tax break the Communications Ministry conferred on Yes’s top competitor, the HOT cable television provider.

According to Zippori, HOT received tax breaks totaling more than a billion shekels over several years. It received these tax breaks despite the fact that it failed to abide by its obligation to provide cable service throughout Israel.

During the period HOT received the tax breaks, Mozes and his partner Eliezer Fishman were major shareholders in the company. The tax breaks continued when Mozes’s close friend Patrick Drahi bought their shares.

In other words, Netanyahu and Filber are being treated like Al Capone for giving standard tax breaks to Yes, which is owned by his friend Elovitch. Fliber’s predecessor Avi Berger gave tax breaks to Netanyahu’s nemesis Mozes, and the media is treating him like a principled professional.

This brings us back to Case 2000. Netanyahu is accused of accepting a bribe of good coverage from Mozes and in exchange working to curtail the operations of Israel Hayom, Mozes’s chief competitor. Never mind that Netanyahu did no such thing, and preferred to bring down his own government in 2014 rather than harm Israel Hayom.

Forty-three members of Knesset voted in favor of the “Israel Hayom bill” that would have shut down Mozes’s competitor. They are not under investigation.

Lapid, the star witness against Netanyahu in the Milchan law probe, met twice with his old friend Milchan to discuss the law during his tenure as finance minister. Lapid never reported his meetings.

And he’s the star witness against Netanyahu, not the subject of a probe.

Lapid’s Yesh Atid party went out of its way to advance Mozes’s financial interests. Not only did more than half of Yesh Atid lawmakers vote for the “Israel Hayom bill.” Lapid’s ministers – then-education minister Shai Piron, then-minister of social affairs Meir Cohen and then-science minister Yaakov Peri, paid Yediot millions of shekels from their ministries’ budgets for advertising.

And they all received fantastic coverage.

And none of them is under investigation.

The final problem with the investigations of Netanyahu is that as we saw this week, the police’s openly obsessive desire to “get” Bibi is corrupting the law enforcement and judicial community.

This week Channel 10 published text messages sent between magistrate’s court judge Ronit Poznansky-Katz and Israel Securities Authority investigator Eran Shaham-Shavit. In their text exchange, the two discussed and agreed on the length of continued confinement of suspects detained in Case 4000.

It is possible to read their exchange, in which they discuss the police investigators’ obsession with keeping the suspects remanded to jail, as friendly banter. It is also possible to interpret their text exchanges more critically. Shaham-Shavit wrote: Police investigators “almost beat me up or arrested me.” He angered them because he supported releasing the suspects earlier than the police investigators did. Poznansky-Katz’s responded sympathetically, “I think there is nothing scarier than that.”

It’s easy to read this as two colleagues commiserating about out of control police investigators ready to run over anyone who stands between them and their prey – Prime Minister Netanyahu.

However you interpret their exchange, the fact is that their messages were a crime. They coordinated Poznansky-Katz’s rulings before the defendants were allowed to present their cases. Yet, whereas Netanyahu’s advisers and friends are treated like mafia bosses for advancing legal policies, Poznansky-Katz and Shaham-Shavit were let off with administrative slaps on their wrists.
And we’re supposed to believe in the justice system.

It is easy to get swept away in the flood of prejudicial leaks and biased reporting that have already indicted, tried and pronounced Netanyahu’s guilt. But when you analyze the actual cases being assembled against him, it becomes clear that not only is there nothing there, these probes themselves represent an unprecedented assault on the basic norms of Israel.

Originally Published in Jerusalem Post

 

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Trump, Netanyahu and the Post-Oslo era

If the peace process ends, Netanyahu will present his own plan.

You wouldn’t know it from the news, but this week, the probability that Israel will apply its law to areas of Judea and Samaria rose significantly.

This week was first time that either Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu or the Trump administration ever addressed the possibility of Israel applying its law to areas of Judea and Samaria.

Lawmakers from Bayit Yehudi and the Likud have prepared separate bills on the issue. MK Bezalel Smotrich’s Bayit Yehudi party bill calls for Israel to apply its law to Area C – the parts of Judea and Samaria located outside Palestinian population centers.

The second bill, proposed by Likud MK Yoav Kisch, calls for Israel to apply its law to the Israeli communities in Judea and Samaria. The Likud’s central committee unanimously passed a resolution in December calling for the government to implement such a policy.

On Monday, Netanyahu met with the Likud Knesset faction to convince the lawmakers to postpone consideration of Kisch’s bill. Netanyahu gave two justifications for his position.

First, he said that he wants to discuss the issue with the Trump administration. Netanyahu explained, “On the topic of applying sovereignty [in Judea and Samaria], I can tell you that for some time now I have been discussing the issue with the Americans.”

Netanyahu continued, “Our relationship with them is a strategic asset to the State of Israel and the settlement enterprise.”

Netanyahu’s statement was very general. The media chose to interpret it to mean that Netanyahu was lobbying the Trump administration to support the application of Israeli law to parts of Judea and Samaria.

But that is not at all what he said. He said that he is discussing the issue with the Americans and that he wants to maintain the good relations Israel now enjoys with the Trump administration because those relations are a strategic asset for Israel.

The second guiding principle Netanyahu said inform his position on applying Israeli law to parts of Judea and Samaria contradicts the notion that he wants the Trump administration to adopt the cause of applying Israeli law in Judea and Samaria as an American position.

Netanyahu said he opposes Kisch’s bill because he believes that applying Israeli law to the Israeli communities in Judea and Samaria is “an historic undertaking.”

Netanyahu said, “This has to be a government initiative and not a private one, because this is a historic undertaking.”

Before considering the implications of Netanyahu’s second guiding principle, we need to examine carefully consider the US position on the issue.




Netanyahu’s general statement to the Likud Knesset faction provoked a media maelstrom. The outcry compelled the Trump administration to respond. The manner it responded to the media storm was instructive.

The administration’s first response came at the conclusion of Secretary of State Rex Tillerson’s meeting with Egyptian Foreign Minister Sameh Shoukry in Cairo. Tillerson was in Egypt on the first leg of his regional tour to Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Turkey and Saudi Arabia. Given his hosts’ opposition to President Donald Trump’s recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital last December, the State Department was certainly not interested in having the US embroiled in Israeli discussions about applying Israel law to areas in Judea and Samaria.

And yet, in his media appearance, Tillerson ignored the issue. He told reporters, “The Trump administration remains committed to achieving a lasting peace agreement between the Israelis and the Palestinians.”

As the media storm in Israel and the region over Netanyahu’s remarks expanded with Palestinian condemnations of his statement, a senior diplomatic source in Jerusalem clarified Netanyahu’s remarks to reporters.

The senior diplomatic source explained that Netanyahu “has not presented the United States specific proposals for annexation, and the US has not expressed its agreement with any such proposal. Israel updated the US on the varying proposals that have been raised that the Knesset. The US expressed its clear position that it wishes to advance President Trump’s peace plan. Prime Minister Netanyahu’s position is that if the Palestinians maintain their refusal to negotiate, Israel will present its own alternative.”

This statement is the most revealing statement any senior official has made on the issue of applying Israeli law to areas of Judea and Samaria. The senior official told us several things we didn’t know.

First, Netanyahu plans to wait to present any new Israeli position on Judea and Samaria until after Trump presents his peace plan.
Second, Netanyahu will postpone consideration of any plan to present an independent Israeli initiative if the Palestinians agree to return to the negotiating table.

Finally, like Tillerson, the senior Israeli official did not say that the US opposes Israeli plans to apply Israeli law to parts of Judea and Samaria.

Later on Monday, in response to virulent criticisms of the US following Netanyahu’s remarks, the Trump administration stiffened its tone.

White House spokesman Josh Raffel issued what the media presented as a harsh rebuke of Netanyahu’s statement before the Likud Knesset faction members.

“Reports that the United States discussed with Israel an annexation plan for the West Bank are false, Raffel said.

“The United States and Israel have never discussed such a proposal, and the president’s focus remains squarely on his Israeli-Palestinian initiative.”

Did Raffel’s statement tell us anything new? Not really.

The senior diplomatic source said Netanyahu has updated the administration on the various proposals for applying Israeli law to areas of Judea and Samaria. He didn’t say Netanyahu held discussions with administration officials about the various proposals. And the senior diplomatic source said that the US remains committed to advancing Trump’s peace plan.

In other words, there is no inherent contradiction between Netanyahu’s statement at the Likud faction meeting, the statement by the Israeli senior diplomatic source, Tillerson’s statement and Raffel’s statement. None of them said that Israel is interested in having the US support applying Israeli law to Judea and Samaria. None of them said the Trump administration opposes applying Israeli law to Judea and Samaria.

They all said the Trump administration is committed to advancing its own peace plan.

The sense that the dispute between Netanyahu and the White House was more apparent than real was reinforced on Tuesday at the State Department press briefing.

State Department spokeswoman Heather Neuert had no response to the news that the Knesset passed legislation placing Ariel University under the auspices of the Council of Higher Education, instead of a designated special council that deals specifically with higher education institutions in Area C. Like everyone else, she restated the administration’s commitment to advancing its own peace plan.

And this brings us to the peace plan the administration is now preparing.

Diplomatic sources in Jerusalem say that Netanyahu has presented two positions that he believes must be incorporated in any peace plan to ensure that the plan, if implemented will produce peace rather than war.

First, Netanyahu insists that the Palestinians must recognize Israel’s right to exist.

Second, Netanyahu insists that Israel must maintain permanent control over the eastern border with Jordan.

These goals are eminently reasonable. Israel cannot share sovereignty west of the Jordan River with an entity that rejects its right to exist. So any peace deal must involve Palestinian acceptance of the Jewish state’s right to exist.

By the same token, even in an era of peace, Israel cannot surrender its ability to defend itself. Since Israel cannot defend itself without perpetual control over the Jordan Valley, Israel cannot sacrifice its control over the Jordan Valley. Any deal Israel strikes with the Palestinians that does not include perpetual Israeli control over the Jordan Valley is a recipe for war.

If Trump accepts Netanyahu’s position and incorporates it into his peace plan, then as far as Netanyahu is reportedly concerned, the negotiations can begin in earnest.

On the other hand, if the Palestinians refuse to accept these conditions, then the peace process will be over.

And if the peace process ends, Netanyahu will present his own plan. That plan, apparently will look a lot like the Likud central committee’s plan to apply Israeli law over the Israeli communities in Judea and Samaria.

Rather than supporting someone else’s bill, Netanyahu will present the plan to the cabinet for approval and then introduce it as a bill to the Knesset, just as then prime minister Menachem Begin applied Israeli law to the Golan Heights in 1981.

While all of these developments may appear odd, we have been here before.

In many ways, the situation today recalls the situation in 1992. In 1992, the US was sponsoring peace talks between Israel and its Arab neighbors in Washington. Without informing the Americans, after taking office in 1992, the government of Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres began carrying out secret talks with the PLO under the auspices of the Norwegian government in Oslo.

After the first Oslo deal was concluded in August 1993, Rabin sent Peres and then-Foreign Ministry legal adviser Joel Singer to the US to brief then-secretary of state Warren Christopher on the agreement. Rabin hoped Christopher would agree to present the deal as an American peace plan. Rabin believed that the Israeli public would be more supportive of a deal with an American imprimatur.

In a 1997 interview with Middle East Quarterly, Singer described the meeting with Christopher. Singer recalled that as Christopher read the agreement for the first time, a shocked look came over his face. “His lower jaw dropped, and for the first and last time in my life, I saw Warren Christopher smile.”

But Christopher rejected Rabin’s request, all the same.

“Secretaries of state are not supposed to lie,” he told Peres and Singer.

Just as the Clinton administration was not willing to take the lead on a new strategic trajectory that placed Israel and the PLO on equal footing, so the Trump administration is not willing to initiate a new post-Oslo Middle East.

That is Israel’s job today just as it was Israel’s job in 1993.

A close reading of Netanyahu’s statement to the Likud Knesset faction makes clear that he understands this basic truth. And a close reading of the statements and counter-statements from Jerusalem and Washington following his briefing to the Likud Knesset faction indicates that if and when Netanyahu embarks on a new course, like Bill Clinton and Warren Christopher in 1993, Trump and his advisers will not stand in his way.

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Israel’s ‘Deep State’ Targets Netanyahu with Bogus Charges

The Israeli police investigation against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu shows remarkable similarities with the Special Counsel probe against President Donald Trump in the United States.

During the prime time news broadcasts Tuesday evening in Israel, the dramatic news was announced that Israel Police investigators are recommending that Israel’s Attorney General, Avichai Mandelblit, indict Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on bribery and breach of trust charges in two investigations.

The news raises a number of obvious questions about Netanyahu’s political future. But it also raises an equal, if not greater, number of questions about the purity of the police service’s intentions and its trustworthiness.

Let us begin by considering the specific cases that form the bases of police recommendations against Netanyahu.

The first investigation has been dubbed Investigation 1000 by the Police’s main criminal investigations unit, Lahav 433. The investigation surrounds the relationship between Netanyahu and his old friend, Israeli businessman and Hollywood movie producer Arnon Milchen. The police have recommended that Milchen be indicted for paying bribes to Netanyahu. The police recommend indicting Netanyahu for taking bribes from Milchen and acting illegally on his behalf.

According to Israel’s Hadashot television news, this investigation was the top story in terms of volume of coverage during 2017.

The police allege that between 2007 and 2016, Milchen showered Netanyahu and his wife Sara with cigars, champagne, and jewelry, often purchased at their request. In 2014, Milchen’s business partner, Australian businessman James Packer, who was also a friend of Netanyahu and his family, allegedly began giving similar gifts to the Netanyahu family.

In exchange for those gifts, the police allege that Netanyahu supported extending a law passed in 2008, when Netanyahu was the head of the parliamentary opposition, that gave returning Israeli expatriates tax forgiveness for ten years of unpaid back taxes. That is, Israeli expatriates were not liable for Israeli income tax for their global income earned over the decade before they returned to Israel.

According to the police, after Netanyahu returned to office in 2009, Milchen lobbied Netanyahu’s finance minister at the time, Yair Lapid, to extend the tax forgiveness period. Lapid, who is now in the opposition, heads the center-left Yesh Atid party. If Netanyahu’s Likud party fails to win the next election, according to the polls, Lapid and his Yesh Atid party will form the next government.

In other words, today, Lapid is Netanyahu’s chief political rival.

On Tuesday, the police told reporters that Lapid is the key witness against Netanyahu in Investigation 1000.

In other words, Netanyahu’s chief political rival is the key witness against him.

Lapid reportedly told investigators that Netanyahu asked him twice to advance Milchen’s request to extend the period of tax forgiveness to returning expatriates beyond the ten years granted by the law. Lapid and the finance ministry opposed Milchen’s proposal, and his initiative went nowhere.

Netanyahu also allegedly intervened on behalf of Milchen in two proposed deals related to Israeli television stations that Milchen either owned or wished to own.

But then, neither of his proposed interventions, if they occurred, were successful.

The police report that Netanyahu intervened on Milchen’s behalf when the latter was experiencing difficulty renewing his residency visa in the U.S. Netanyahu called then-Secretary of State John Kerry and asked him to intervene on Milchen’s behalf to renew his residency visa.




Since Milchen stood to lose a significant amount of money if he was unable to remain in the U.S., the police claim that Netanyahu’s intervention on his behalf with Kerry represented the return on Milchen’s gifts.

Milchen himself has a long record of service to Israel’s Mossad — its foreign spy service — and reportedly has contributed significantly to Israel’s defense. Netanyahu claims that he acted out of respect for Milchen’s long service to Israel’s security. In addition,, Israel’s late president and prime minister, left-wing icon Shimon Peres, also intervened on Milchen’s behalf with U.S. authorities.

In the second probe, dubbed Investigation 2000, the police recommend indicting Netanyahu following a discussion he held – and recorded surreptitiously – in 2014 with Arnon Mozes, the publisher and controlling owner of Israel’s mass circulation daily, Yediot Ahronot. The police found the recorded conversation on the mobile phone of Netanyahu’s former chief of staff, Ari Harow, who is the subject of a separate and unrelated influence-peddling probe. Netanyahu claims he recorded their conversation on the advice of his attorney because he was afraid that Mozes would try to extort him.

The police claim that the conversation is proof that Mozes offered Netanyahu a bribe and that Netanyahu accepted the offer. They recommend charging Mozes with bribing Netanyahu, and charging Netanyahu with accepting a bribe from Mozes.

The odd thing about this claim is that no deal was struck. To the contrary.

Mozes is Netanyahu’s nemesis. Yediot Ahronot is the most influential newspaper in Israel. Its front page dictates the daily news programming for radio and television broadcasts. And Yediot Ahronot‘s coverage of Netanyahu is implacably hostile to the premier and to his family. To a lesser but significant degree, Yediot Ahronot is also deeply hostile to the Israeli political right.

According to the recording of the men’s conversation, which was leaked to the media by the police more than a year ago, Netanyahu and Mozes discussed an elaborate scheme to change the newspaper market in Israel in Yediot Ahronot‘s favor.

Israel’s largest circulation paper is Israel Hayom, a free tabloid that is owned by conservative American billionaire — and Netanyahu supporter — Sheldon Adelson. In their recorded conversation, Mozes raised the possibility of Netanyahu curtailing government advertising in Israel Hayom and working to cut back its circulation in order to increase Yediot Ahronot‘s market share.

In exchange, Mozes offered to scale back the negative tone of his paper’s coverage of Netanyahu.

In the event, nothing came of the conversation. Indeed, in late 2014, against Netanyahu’s expressed wishes, then-justice minister Tzipi Livni put forward a controversial media bill, which was based on a legal opinion written by Yediot Ahronot‘s legal advisor. The bill, which was dubbed the “Israel Hayom law,” would have forced the shutdown of the paper by barring its owners from not charging money for it.

The law passed a preliminary reading in the Knesset with 43 votes. Netanyahu and his Likud Party voted against the bill. Moreover, to prevent the bill from going forward, Netanyahu disbanded his government and the Knesset and called new elections a bit more than a year into his term.

In other words, to prevent any harm to Israel Hayom – and transitively, to prevent any advantage from being accrued to Yediot Ahronot — Netanyahu took the radical step of standing for election again.

For more than a year, the police refused to investigate any of the 43 lawmakers who voted in favor of the bill, or to analyze the coverage they received in Yediot Ahronot in following their support. Three weeks ago, the bill’s sponsor, Labor Party member of Knesset Eitan Cabel — who enjoyed extraordinary coverage in the paper — was brought in for a brief interview.

In other words, the police are recommending that Netanyahu be indicted for a conversation that went nowhere, which he recorded. And the police are not investigating 42 out of the 43 lawmakers that supported a move that would have given Mozes everything he asked Netanyahu for, but didn’t receive, while the 43rd lawmaker was subject merely to a brief interrogation.

This brings us to the police.

Since Netanyahu served his first term as prime minister from 1996 until 1999, he and his wife Sara have been the subjects of 19 police probes and or investigations. The Hebrew language website Mida.org.il has published a review of all of them earlier this month.

The police recommended indicting the Netanyahus in three probes in 1999. The attorney general rejected their requests.

In January 2017, the attorney general closed four probes of Netanyahu that had been ongoing since 2009.

In September 2017, the attorney general closed six police probes against Sara Netanyahu, which the police had opened in 2015. One probe, relating to an administrative, rather than criminal, charge that Mrs. Netanyahu ordered food from restaurants instead of using the services of the cook at the prime minister’s residence, is still under review.

Two other probes, related to accusations that a French businessman gave Netanyahu illegal campaign contributions, and that the Likud overpaid a secretary in the U.S., disappeared after leading the headlines for several news cycles in 2016.

Of the three open cases, the Milchen and Mozes investigations led to Tuesday night’s announcement of the police’s recommendations. A third investigation, of influence-peddling related to Israel’s purchase of submarines from Germany, is unrelated to Netanyahu, but since his associates are under investigation, his name was dragged into the discourse related to the probe.

The endless stream of criminal investigations against Netanyahu has involved investigating witnesses across the globe, and has cost tens of millions of shekels to Israeli taxpayers.

At the end of this long, 22-year road, what we have are just two charges — which, if anything, show that Netanyahu is probably most worthless bribe-taker in history. Aside from assistance with his residency visa in the U.S., Netanyahu provided Milchen with no meaningful support in any of his endeavors. The one piece of legislation that passed, the law that entitles returning Israeli expatriates with ten years of debt forgiveness, passed when Netanyahu was out of office.

Over the past eight years of Netanyahu’s tenure as prime minister, none of Milchen’s proposals in either the media market or tax laws was advanced even slightly.

As for Investigation 2000, it is almost impossible to understand the basis for the charge against Netanyahu. Mozes apparently offered him a bribe, in the form of diminished hostility in his newspaper in exchange for a larger market share for Yediot Ahronot. But Netanyahu did nothing to advance his offer. To the contrary, he preferred new elections to curtailing Israel Hayom‘s operation.

Over the past year, as the police investigations dragged on, investigators fed the media with a never-ending stream of negative leaks that all disparaged and vilified Netanyahu.

The police campaign against Netanyahu reached its peak last Wednesday night. Police Commissioner Roni Alscheich, whom Netanyahu appointed in 2015, gave an hour-long interview on Israel’s leading television magazine Uvda, or “Fact.”




Alscheich claimed that Netanyahu was behind three separate, arguably felonious conspiracies against the police. Netanyahu, he alleged, had arranged for private detectives to “sniff around” the families of his investigators to try to find dirt on them.

Netanyahu, he claimed, conspired with a female police officer who in 2011 brought sexual harassment charges against her commander, Police Superintendent Roni Reitman, the head of Lahav 433, the unit responsible for investigating Netanyahu. Alsheich claimed that Netanyahu was behind the police officer’s decision to petition Israel’s Supreme Court against Reitman after the Attorney General chose to close the investigation against him without indicting him in 2015, due to the passage of time since his alleged acts of harassment took place.

Alsheich also claimed that Netanyahu had offered himself a sort of bribe. The Commission of Police alleged that when Netanyahu appointed him to serve as police chief, Netanyahu knew that Alsheich really wanted to serve as Director of the Israel Security Agency, where he was serving as deputy director when Netanyahu asked him to take over the police. Netanyahu, Alsheich alleged, told him that if Netanyahu was still prime minister when Alsheich finished his tour of duty, Netanyahu would appoint him the head of the Israel Security Agency.

Even the police’s most fervent media supporters were aghast at Alsheich’s allegations – coupled with the fact that he has refused to investigate any of them. To summarize: just as the police were set to announce their recommendations, Alsheich made clear that he has a personal vendetta against Netanyahu and is prepared to overthrow his government.

Alsheich’s wild charges that Netanyahu was actively conspiring against his investigators gave credence to the allegations of bias, verging on animus, leveled against the police by Netanyahu and his supporters.

And so the parallels between the indictment of Netanyahu and the witch hunt against President Trump are remarkable. But there is a key distinction.

The U.S. is governed by a constitution that places checks and balances on the executive that extend to the permanent bureaucracy. In Israel, there are no constitutional checks on the bureaucracy. The Knesset cannot compel civil servants to appear before its committees. It cannot force civil servants to testify under oath. It cannot hold them in contempt.

After his scandalous interview last week, Likud Party lawmakers requested that Alsheich come before the relevant committee and explain his charges against Netanyahu. Although he tentatively agreed to appear this week, on Tuesday night, reporters said that Alsheich has no intention of appearing before lawmakers to answer their questions.

Some commentators claimed on Tuesday night that the police deliberately threw every possible charge at Netanyahu to pressure the Attorney General into indicting him for something. The bias against Netanyahu that Alsheich revealed so extravagantly in his interview last Wednesday night, and the thousands of hours and tens of millions of shekels that the police have invested over the past 22 years in their endless pursuit of Netanyahu and his family, now stand in the balance.

If Netanyahu is cleared — and given the weakness of the charges against him, it’s hard to see how he can be indicted — then the police will lose their credibility and the public trust.

Then again, given that Israel’s elected officials have no oversight over the civil service, it could be that Alsheich and his officers don’t care.

Originally Published in Breitbart.