AND DM YAALON? Column One: The fruits of subversion

[Dr. Aaron Lerner - IMRA: Unfortunately, DM Moshe Yaalon is missing from
this most important presentation. Yaalon, who has been PM Netanyahu's
closest ally. The only man in the government who had a clue besides
Netanyahu what was actually going on during the operations in the Gaza Strip
as the Cabinet and Defense Cabinet were basically debating societies. And
yet, in the recent rounds Yaalon has openly defied Netanyahu. That;s SEVERAL
times. Not just once. So we have this bizarre situation that Netanyahu is
completely alone.]

Column One: The fruits of subversion
By CAROLINE B. GLICK The Jerusalem Post 05/12/2016 22:24
http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Column-One-The-fruits-of-subversion-453875

For the Obama administration, Israel’s security brass is an alternative
government.

That is the lesson from an article published this week in Foreign Affairs by
David Makovsky, a member of Secretary of State John Kerry’s negotiating team
during his failed peace process two years ago.

Makovsky wrote that the security brass’s unbridled vilification of Sgt. Elor
Azaria, for killing a wounded terrorist in Hebron in March, “captures the
IDF’s growing involvement in the Palestinian issue.”

“Seeing a diplomatic vacuum in Israeli politics,” he wrote supportively,
“the IDF has increasingly worked to assert itself as a guardian of
democratic values and a stabilizer of the Israeli-Palestinian arena.”

The article tells us two things. First, for the administration, “Israeli
democracy” means the Left is in charge.

The “diplomatic vacuum,” Makovsky referred to after all wasn’t an oversight.
The public elected leaders who shared its view that the “peace process” is a
fraud. We elected leader who agree that Israel making unreciprocated
concessions to terrorists is not a peace process. It’s a process of
destroying Israel.

If the voters had wanted a government that felt otherwise, they would have
voted the Left to lead.

So the “diplomatic vacuum” is just the government doing what it was elected
to do.

The General Staff is the Left’s representative, and has in recent months
served as its surrogate government, taking steps that advance the Left’s
agenda against the wishes of the government and the public that elected it.

For instance, the General Staff “inadvertently” returned the body of a dead
terrorist to his family despite an explicit cabinet decision to end the
practice.

Likewise, our generals continuously pressure the government to agree to
relinquish security control over the Palestinian population centers, and
transfer security responsibility to terrorism-supporting Palestinian
militias. This despite the fact that the government has repeatedly rejected
their position.

These actions are bad enough on their own. But when seen in the context of
recent events, they lend the impression that for our generals, gross
insubordination to the Netanyahu government is the rule, rather than the
exception.

Deputy Chief of General Staff Maj.-Gen. Yair Golan compared Israeli society
to the Nazis on Holocaust Remembrance Day. This was a direct assault on the
government’s policy of fighting, rather than joining, Israel-bashers who
deny the right of the Jewish state to exist. And his comrades in the General
Staff and in the Left praised him for his appalling behavior.

Then there is the late Maj.-Gen. Meir Dagan, the retired director of the
Mossad.

Last Thursday Channel 2’s investigative news program Uvda broadcast an
interview with Dagan, conducted shortly before his death.

Dagan told the host Ilana Dayan that in 2010, he committed espionage.

Dagan revealed that in 2010, he went behind Prime Minister Benjamin
Netanyahu’s back and informed then-CIA director Leon Panetta that Netanyahu
and then-defense minister Ehud Barak were about to order the security
services to attack Iran’s nuclear installations.

Panetta, who Dayan also interviewed, substantiated Dagan’s remarks.

Dagan gave three justifications for his behavior. He claimed that whereas he
acted out of Israel’s national interest, Netanyahu acted out of “political
motivations.”

Dagan insisted that had Israel attacked, the US would have used force to
protect Iran’s nuclear installations from Israel.

Dagan argued that Netanyahu is to blame for President Barack Obama’s
decision to cut a deal with the Iranian regime that effectively paves the
way for Iran’s emergence as a nuclear power and a regional hegemon.

Had Netanyahu played along with Obama, Dagan argued, Obama wouldn’t have
opened negotiations with Iran.

Dagan’s actions and his justifications for them indicated that he trusted
Panetta, and through him, Obama, more than he trusted Netanyahu, a man whom
he loathed.

Shortly after his interviewed aired, The New York Times posted an article
repudiating Dagan’s faith in Obama and showing that Netanyahu’s judgment was
far superior to that of his spy chief.

David Samuels’s profile of Obama’s Deputy National Security Adviser Ben
Rhodes, “the single most influential voice shaping American foreign policy
aside from [Obama] himself,” revealed that Obama’s Iran policy was
determined well before he entered office. And it had nothing to do with
anything Netanyahu did or didn’t do.

Samuels also exposed that Dagan’s confidante Panetta was little more than a
marionette controlled by Obama and Rhodes.

In a candid interview with him, Panetta revealed that Obama tasked him with
convincing Netanyahu not to strike Iran’s nuclear installations.

As Samuels put it, Panetta, said that as secretary of defense, “one of his
most important jobs was keeping… Netanyahu and his defense minister Ehud
Barak from launching a preemptive attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities.”

Panetta said that he convinced them not to strike Iran by telling that if
push came to shove, Obama would order US forces to strike Iran’s facilities
to prevent the regime from acquiring nuclear weapons.

Panetta then admitted that today he does not believe that he was telling
them the truth.

For his part, Rhodes revealed that from the outset of his presidency, it was
Obama’s aim to cut a deal with Iran while ending the US’s alliances with
Israel and the Sunni states.

In Rhodes’s words, from Obama’s perspective, reaching a deal with Iran was
“the center of the arc” around which Obama’s whole vision of a transformed
US foreign policy ran.

Rhodes said that Obama believed, “We don’t have to be in cycles of conflict
if we can find other ways to resolve these issues. We can do things that
challenge the conventional thinking that, you know, ‘AIPAC doesn’t like
this,’ or ‘the Israeli government doesn’t like this,’ or ‘the Gulf countries
don’t like it.’” He continued, “It’s the possibility of improved relations
with adversaries. It’s nonproliferation. So all these threads that the
president’s been spinning – and I mean that not in the press sense – for
almost a decade, they kind of all converged around Iran.”

Rhodes said the administration’s claim that talks with Iran only began after
the 2013 election brought the supposedly moderate Hassan Rouhani to power
instead of outgoing president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was a deliberately
concocted lie.

The myth of Iranian “moderates” locked in a struggle with “extremists” was
invented, Rhodes said, to “eliminate a source of structural tension between
[the US and Iran] which would create the space for America to disentangle
itself from its established system of alliances with countries like Saudi
Arabia, Egypt, Israel and Turkey.”

Panetta and other senior Obama administration officials told Samuels that
Obama ignored their advice, using them as “cover” to push through his
radical foreign policy agenda.

Netanyahu understood all of this intuitively. But Dagan refused to see it.
Driven by his personal animus toward Netanyahu and by egomania, he chose to
trust Panetta, and through him, Obama, more than he trusted the man he was
legally bound to serve.

And so, Dagan willfully subverted the premier’s authority. He unlawfully
revealed Israel’s most classified operational secret to Obama’s puppet.
Through his action, Dagan cleared the final obstacle to Obama’s pursuit of
his anti-Israel agenda.

Since his final interview was broadcast, Dagan’s many supporters have argued
that his behavior is beside the point. It is Netanyahu’s fault that Israel
didn’t attack Iran at the time or since. Netanyahu, they say, could have
fired Dagan and replaced him with someone who agreed with his assessments.

Although valid in theory, these arguments insult the intelligence of even a
casual observer of the routine insubordination of senior security officials
with dovish conceits toward right-wing politicians.

Netanyahu allowed Dagan to retire with honor from the Mossad despite his
appalling behavior.

And still, the minute he was out the door, Dagan denounced Netanyahu.
Projecting his own behavior on the prime minister, Dagan castigated him as
irresponsible, untrustworthy and dangerous. Perhaps hoping to help Obama’s
reelection, on the eve of the 2012 election, Dagan told Dayan that he had
informed the Americans of Netanyahu’s planned attack on Iran’s nuclear
installations.

Far from being punished for his espionage, Dagan was the toast of the town.
He was the hero of the Left and a star of the international lecture circuit.

Like Golan, the Left celebrated him as a guardian of Israel’s “democratic
values.”

The Left’s response to Dagan and Golan shows the real balance of power
between a right-wing prime minister and left-wing, insubordinate generals.

Had Netanyahu fired Dagan, he would have acted just as he did upon his
retirement. And he would have been idealized as a martyr just as he was upon
retiring. Perhaps Netanyahu hoped that by not firing Dagan he had a better
chance of being able to attack Iran’s nuclear installations after he was
gone. Whatever the case, the blind Dagan was more powerful than the
clear-sighted Netanyahu.

It is difficult to assess the damage Dagan caused Israel’s security. But it
is clear that harm he did us was immense, strategic, long-term and
multi-dimensional.

And national security wasn’t the only victim of Dagan’s behavior. His
insubordination, like that of his comrades on the General Staff, struck a
devastating normative blow to the country as well.

From the perspective of democratic norms, the worst part of Dagan’s
subversion is that he was proud of it.

By insisting his final interview be broadcast posthumously, Dagan showed
that he wanted his subversion of the government to be his legacy. Dagan’s
final act was to tell his countrymen that it is legitimate to place
themselves above the law and above the lawful government and take
independent actions that will obligate the entire country.

Ironically, there is no substantive difference between Dagan’s actions – or
the generals’– and the actions of the so-called Hilltop Youth in Samaria
whom the generals continuously condemn as the greatest threat to Israel.

Like the generals, right-wing extremist teenage outlaws reject the authority
of the government. Like the generals, denizens of “the state of Judea”
believe that they know how to advance Israel’s national security better than
our elected officials.

True, the damage the generals cause the country by revealing state secrets
to foreign governments and libeling the nation of Israel as Nazis is several
orders of magnitude greater than the damage wrought by fanatical teenagers
who vandalize Arab property. Indeed it is far greater than alleged acts of
murder that a handful of Hilltop Youth stand accused of committing.

And by acting lawlessly and showing bottomless contempt for our elected
officials, Dagan, Golan and their comrades tell the Hilltop Youth and the
rest of us that the law is what they say it is.

Sixty-eight years ago, after declaring Israel’s independence, David
Ben-Gurion set about dismantling the underground militias to ensure the
survival of the state as a coherent political unit.

Sixty-eight years later, it works out there are still competing gangs trying
to obligate the rest of us with their unlawful, anti-democratic and immoral
behavior. If Israel is to survive for the next 68 years, we need to act
firmly and forthrightly to end this state of affairs.

www.CarolineGlick.com