How to Avoid "Reassessment"

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will be the next Prime Minister of Israel. This we know. The world also knows how he campaigned in the final days of the election, and is repulsed by how he did so. After following an imperial "Rose Garden" tactic of avoiding the press, in the last 5 days of the campaign Bibi went on a media frenzy, and in the course of those 5 days he morphed comfortably into a right-wing demagogue, Lee Atwater style, in which he volunteered out loud a series of positions that revealed his inner ideological heart, including a last-minute racist scare warning that "Arab voters are streaming to the polling stations." It was ugly, it was shocking, and while it worked, it has caused the Obama White House to use the dreaded "R" word - "reassessment."  In order to win this election at all costs, Bibi purged his Likud party of the worst extremists, snubbed President Obama by holding a campaign rally in the halls of Congress, and in the end loudly retracted his 2009 commitment to a 2-state solution. It was a winning strategy, but it came with a painful price on the world stage.

Yesterday Bibi unconvincingly spoke again to the media - this time to Andrea Mitchell of NBC News, and this time in English, using his governing persona instead of his campaigning persona. He tried to walk it all back. It was a pathetic performance. Bibi won the electoral battle, but lost the bigger war for international legitimacy.

In the not so complicated schizophrenia that is Benjamin Netanyahu, there is the inner Bibi for domestic consumption (in Hebrew), and the public Bibi for the diplomatic community (in English). The two are not the same. And Netanyahu is smart enough to know that Israel needs the continued support of its principal ally, and that what he had to do to win has now placed his next premiership at risk with the European Union, with the White House, and even with American Jews.

There is only one path for Bibi to extract himself from the sullied victory he just achieved - a national unity government that projects some kind of softer image to the world. While Netanyahu can certainly say "fuck all of you" and opt for a narrow right-nationalist-religious coalition government, he knows that if he does so the international isolation and US administration anger will not abate. "Fortress Israel" will simply not work. Netanyahu will at least have to consider the option of a broader national unity government in order to paint lipstick on his pig.

For this he needs help from Isaac Herzog, leader of the Labor Party and co-chair of the newly created (for this campaign cycle) Zionist Union with Tzipi Livni. Tzipi Livni is a perennial failure, surpassing Shimon Peres for the title of Israel's "The Biggest Loser." Livni is another example of an Israeli politician much more popular abroad than at home.

She was a child of Likud all her political life, but like many others broke with her political home base when Ariel Sharon grew tired of Likud infighting and created the Kadima party. She actually once won an election in 2009 as head of Kadima, but because of her uncompromising negotiating style allowed a government to slip out of her hands. She was ousted internally from Kadima, temporarily retired from politics, and then reconstituted herself as a tiny vanity party - ha-Tenu'ah. Her odyssey from Likud royalty to moderate international diplomat eventually brought her to Labor - but not as a Laborite. For the umpteenth time, weakened Labor tried a "combina" - a sleazy opportunistic merger - in an effort to create a "big tent" centrist alternative to right-wing Likud. They called it the Zionist Union. Herzog and Livni even came up with their own internal "rotation" plan, promising the Israeli electorate that if they should win, the two would rotate the premiership over the course of its four-year life expectancy. The merger spectacularly failed, and as polling indicated just how reviled Livni was with the electorate, the two leaders gamely retracted the rotation plan on the eve of the election. It didn't help. So much for the big tent.

Of the 24 seats now held by the Zionist Union, 5 belong to Livni. Labor by itself would remain the 2nd largest party in the Knesset. The Zionist Union serves no further purpose. It is time to put a stake through its heart. Either Herzog should break the Zionist Union, or Livni should resign.

So here is a scenario - Bibi needs to repair the damage. Herzog leads a bloc of 19 seats without toxic Livni. Isaac Herzog as Foreign Minister would be precisely the antidote to Bibi's now thrice-revealed inner heart.

In order to manage and staunch the crisis of an American reassessment, Bibi needs a national unity government. But domestically, a good part of the purpose of this campaign was to be rid of Livni forever. For Netanyahu, Livni is the poison pill of national unity. If she were gone, Bibi could form a broad-based government. It doesn't hurt that Labor has served this junior role more than once in Likud- or Kadima-led governments. So try this:

Likud 30
Labor 19
Kulanu 10
Shas 7


And you have 66 seats. Add Yahadut ha-Torah and/or one of the two right-wing parties ha-Bayit ha-Yehudi or Yisrael Beytenu and you approach 80 seats. National Unity. A dysfunctional inner cabinet. Another two-faced self-contradictory government - but that is the only way out of the isolation chamber Bibi has created for himself.

I admit this is a long-shot proposition. But it is the only way the next 22 months of a Netanyahu-led government can hope to have any respectability in the international arena.

It's precisely the kind of chicanery that comes up in every coalition-building negotiation. It's sleazy and opportunistic, hypocritical and devious.

After all, this is Israeli politics.

Quick Post-#IsraElex Analysis

I suck at predicting American presidential politics. But I am pretty damn good when predicting Israeli politics. I've gotten every Israeli election right since I've undertaken this blog 10 years ago - which means I've been right four out of four. And today I will reveal my analytical secret as to why I always get it right.

If you were to believe all the wishful-thinking journalism generated over the 2015 elections in Israel, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu was fighting for his political life. I never believed it, not for a second. Fifty days before the election, even working off of incorrect polling numbers, I boldly predicted that Netanyahu would be the next PM of Israel. This turns out to have been an easy call.

And boy-oh-boy, were the numbers ever faulty. Throughout the entire election cycle, poll after poll pointed to a slight advantage in electoral strength to the Zionist Union combination of Buji Herzog's Labor and Tzipi Livni. Even the initial election day exit polls, in which voters in certain key demographic polling stations were asked to accurately indicate their choice, were all uniformly wrong - meaning that tens of thousands of voters regarded it as their civic duty to purposefully fuck with the media. Lesson one - there is no way to accurately gauge the modern Israeli electorate.

But here we are - highest turnout in 16 years; smallest number of parties in the 20th Knesset since 1988; lowest performance of religious parties since 1992; and best performance by the right wing bloc since 2003.

But the bottom-line reality is this - there are essentially 4 blocs of voters. 10% of the electorate is locked in as the Arab (and naturally characterized as leftist) vote. A bit less than 20% of the electorate is locked in as the religious (and naturally characterized as a kind of rightist) vote. A little less than a third of the electorate is locked in to the secular center-left. And a little more than a third of the electorate is locked in as secular right-nationalist. That leaves about 10% of the electorate as a perennial swing vote, which can break to the center-left or to the right depending on each individual election.

Lesson two - when the national security environment is non-threatening or hopeful, this 10% breaks towards the center-left. When the national security environment is threatening and inhospitable, this 10% breaks right.

The closest comparable election to 2015 is 2003, the year Ariel Sharon's Likud trounced Ehud Barak's Labor. The 2003 election was cast against the backdrop of the violent Second Intifada. The right-nationalist bloc picked up 14 seats and the non-Arab center-left lost 7 seats. Sharon then created a fairly stable secular right-center coalition.

The 2015 election was carried out against the backdrop of the inconclusive war with HAMAS of 2014, and the growth of Da'esh to the left (Sinai) and to the right (Syria). The floating 10% responded accordingly: the right-national bloc picked up 15 seats, and the non-Arab center-left lost 6 seats. Given that the previous government was already led by Netanyahu, it was easy to predict his victory.

And that's what I did.

And by the way, fifty days ago I wrote "I think the polling numbers for Bennett's ha-Bayit ha-Yehudi party are too high." I got that right too. The polls said 15; BY ended up with 8.

Now, with the final Knesset numbers fixed, the question is what kind of government will emerge. Most of the Israeli punditry has talked itself into the formation of a so-called narrow right-nationalist-religious government. It is easy to see how such a government can be formed.

Likud 30
Kulanu 10
ha-Bayit ha-Yehudi 8
Shas 7
Yahadut ha-Torah 6

gets one to the threshold of 61, and if you add Yisrael Beytenu's 6, you have a government of 67 seats.

But it isn't that simple. Netanyahu must dole out the legally mandated 18 (likely to be expanded to 22) ministries of his coalition cabinet in a way that satisfies his lesser coalition partners and his own Likud party. Netanyahu has already promised the pandora's box of Treasury to Kulanu's Moshe Kahlon. Shas's Arye Deri wants to return to the Interior Ministry from which he was forced out 23 years ago. But the biggest prizes are Defense and the Foreign Ministry - the so-called inner cabinet. Yisrael Beytenu's weakened Avigdor Lieberman wants Defense. ha-Bayit ha-Yehudi's Naftali Bennett wants the Foreign Ministry or Defense. Netanyahu would prefer keeping his current Defense Minister Moshe Ya'alon, and needs to find something honorable for his many Likud politicians, including most prominently the number 2 man on the Likud list Gilad Erdan.

The badly beaten Zionist Union or the smaller Yesh Atid might yet become part of the solution to Netanyahu's intricate sudoku puzzle. But since the point of Netanyahu's decision to go to the polls was to be rid of ZU's Tzipi Livni and Yesh Atid's Yair Lapid, I can only imagine him taking back at most one of the two. Livni, one of the most toxic politicians in recent Israeli history, might break away or be forced out from the Zionist Union, clearing a path for Labor to join.

That is the best one can hope for - a national unity government with ZU but minus both Livni and Lapid. If so, then attacking Iran remains off the table. But if a narrow right-nationalist-religious government with an inner cabinet of adventurous hawks is the order of the day, I expect Israeli jets over Natanz before the fourth premiership of King Bibi falls.

The Fashla - הפשלה

Today I'd like to start with a bit of Hebrew slang. Like much Hebrew slang, the etymology of the term under consideration comes from Arabic. I'm talking about the slang word fashla, which I best translate as "a complete disaster" or "an unanticipated (and probably predictable) fuck-up." It comes from the Arabic verb fashala, "to lose courage, to become cowardly, to despair, to fail, to become unsuccessful."

You are fortunate enough to be living in an age in which you can witness a perfectly executed Israeli fashla.

Sometime before the State of the Union speech, when President Obama declared he would veto any bill that proposed tougher sanctions on Iran, House Speaker John Boehner was approached with an idea - some published reports argue it was casino mogul and Republican mega-donor Sheldon Adelson who presented the idea - invite Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to speak before a joint session of Congress. Netanyahu would lay out the threat of "radical Islam" to the civilized world, and would specifically address the menacing nuclear threat of a fanatic and viciously anti-Semitic Shi'ite theocracy.

Boehner liked the idea. He contacted the Israeli Ambassador to Washington Ron Dermer. Ron Dermer is known, Karl Rove-like, to be "Bibi's brains." He has been a close political confidant and speechwriter for Netanyahu since 2008 until his appointment to the plum ambassadorship of Israel's closest ally in 2013. Before immigrating to Israel in 1997 he had worked for a time with Republican political consultant Frank Luntz. If either Dermer or Netanyahu had stayed in America, they would today be Republicans in heart and soul. Boehner knew he'd find a sympathetic ear and direct access to the Boss.

The three together planned a stunning Republican congressional protest, all within Constitutional bounds, against a threatened Presidential veto of a bipartisan call for more stringent sanctions on Iran. Bibi Netanyahu was a master of the Speaker's rostrum. Back in 2011 Boehner, then in grudging cooperation with the White House, had extended a similar invitation to Netanyahu, and Bibi was treated to energetic support from those seated in the House chamber. In fact, this would be the third time Bibi addressed Congress, an honor granted only Winston Churchill, one of Netanyahu's heroes.

For Netanyahu, the added benefit of appearing on domestic wall-to-wall media coverage of his "historic mission" to Washington just 2 weeks before an Israeli election was irresistible. Bibi has portrayed his principal political adversary Yizhak (Buji) Herzog as a weak-on-security neophyte and a bumbling amateur. On the other hand, Netanyahu imagines himself a cunningly wise leader, the absolutely right man for these dangerous times.

For creating a fashla, this was a perfect storm.

The too clever by half masterstroke, once it was finally revealed to the unsuspecting White House and the Democratic leadership less than 48 hours after the State of the Union speech, quickly turned into a classic fashla. No amount of spin or fudging the facts of the invitation would turn it around. Within a week of the announcement, bipartisan support for tougher sanctions against Iran - the very mission which Netanyahu had intended to reinforce - crumbled apart. Democrats had to choose between their President and the Prime Minister of Israel. It was an easy call.

Two weeks after the announcement, Democratic Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi was hinting at a wholesale defection of dozens of Democratic congressman from the audience. Vice President Joe Biden, who has missed only one joint session designed to host an invited foreign leader, announced suddenly he would be out of town that day. The image of a half-filled chamber, with Republican Senator and President pro tempore Orrin Hatch sitting in the left chair, will not make for a rousing moment reminiscent of Bibi's prior appearances.

In classic fashla fashion, the masterstroke has completely backfired. Iran has disappeared from the discussion, and instead the only discussion is the worsening relations between Netanyahu, Obama, the Democrats, and even American Jews, who view the entire matter with growing concern.

So there you go - a first-class, high-drama fashla.

And thus concludes today's lesson in Israeli slang.

Benjamin Netanyahu, the next PM of Israel

Crunch the polling numbers any way you want - the inevitable outcome, barring a seismic shift in Israeli voter sentiment over the course of the next 50 days, will be a government headed by current Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Two days remain before final party lists are published, and I can imagine yet another "surprise" joining together of currently separated lists. But barring that, we have the broad contours of the Israeli electorate in the winter of 2015. I think we're looking at a variation of the 2009 Israeli elections, in which Netanyahu's Likud came in second place, but still formed the government.

The best poll averaging web site is Project 61. Seven weeks out, the renamed Labor party - now calling itself "the Zionist Camp" - leads with a projected 25 seats. Netanyahu's Likud party comes in a close second, at 23. The remaining 60% of legislative seats are divided, in descending order, between right-wing, religious, centrist, Arab, and left-wing parties.

As in 2009, the winning party will not be called on to form a government. That task will fall to the leader who can convince Israel's President Ruvi Rivlin that he has the best shot to form a government. And that leader will be Netanyahu.

Take the long view. I've gone back 7 Knesset elections back to 1992, and broken down the political parties into 4 blocs: 1) secular-right-national; 2) secular-center-left; 3) religious-ultra-Orthodox; and 4) Arab. When the secular-center-left bloc gets above 49, it forms a government. It takes 43 seats for the secular-right-national bloc to form the government. According to Project 61, we're at 37 for the secular-right-national and 38 for the secular-center-left. No one has crossed the threshold for a certainty.

The newly united Arab parties' list is not a factor in coalition politics, because all Zionist players consider the Arab parties treyf. So in fact a leader must get to 61 from the remaining 107 seats.

The growing religious-ultra-Orthodox bloc will hold the key. It might surprise you, but various components of this bloc could go either way - it all depends on what is offered party leaders in the inevitable coalition negotiations that will ensue after elections.

One caveat - I think the polling numbers for Bennett's Bayit Yehudi party are too high.

Netanyahu will have two different paths to the required 61 seat majority in the Knesset. Most likely, he will attempt a so-called "national unity government." Despite the acrimony of the current election campaign (oftentimes quite personal), never underestimate the desire of Israeli politicians to have delivered to them control of massive governmental bureaucracies. I could easily imagine a secular center-right coalition made up of Likud, Zionist Camp, Avigdor Lieberman's Yisrael Beytenu, and Moshe Kahalon's new Kulanu party, for a total of 64 seats. Some of these parties could be dismissed for religious parties and still maintain a semblance of "national unity."  And if the "unity" fever becomes strong, one could imagine a not particularly stable government of over 75 seats. This unwieldy scenario would be the best outcome for hopes of holding in abeyance any military misadventure with Iran because of serious disagreements within the unity umbrella. But it would mean continued stalemate with the Palestinians, with a government of Israel torn internally on how to best move forward. One governmental crisis and the whole thing would collapse.

Or Bibi can go the "hard-right" route. Here he works with right-wing, religious, and ultra-Orthodox parties, with Avigdor Lieberman's dwindling Yisrael Beytenu vanity party. He would have 62-69 seats this way.  Then the chances of a military attack on Iran go way up, and re-energized opposition to any American-brokered diplomatic path to resolving Palestinian claims becomes the norm.

Another good web site is batelbe60.com. They try to "Nate Silver" the election polling, and they come up with similar results. While they don't break up the parties into the same blocs that I do, they argue that the current numbers give a very high chance for the formation of a national unity government, either secular or with some ultra-Orthodox components. Next would come a not too impossible center-left government, with some ultra-Orthodox. Least likely would be a hard-right religious ultra-Orthodox government. Impossible would be a center-left secular government.

What is abundantly clear is that these elections are a waste of everyone's time - and that just may be the point. It may have seemed to Netanyahu in December that a rearrangement of the political deck-chairs on the Titanic was in order. Or it may have seemed a convenient way to take a pause from dealing with Israel's security and domestic problems. Either way, the systemic and incapacitating divisions of the Israeli electorate remain. Nothing has changed: the Israeli electorate is as divided as ever, creeping to the right and towards God.

How to Follow Events in Israel/Palestine (Live Stream)

Israel Channel 1 HD

Sure, you can download the iPhone app Red Alert. Yes, you can follow whomever you want on Facebook and Twitter. But do you want to take it up a notch?
How about live TV from multiple Israeli and Arab-language news channels, all in one place? Don't have a DishTV satellite package that provides the Israel Channel or Arabic language channels?
All you need is an internet connection, and then install an amazing open source media control center package called xbmc.

Proper installation is a multi-part process. It doesn't matter if you are installing to Windows, OS X, Linux, Android, or jailbroken iOS. This video


https://www.youtube.com/watch?annotation_id=annotation_1114239593&feature=iv&src_vid=owX09Xxli3g&v=YcZpUV0vtxE

IDF Arabic spokesman on al-Jazeera

walks you through the necessary first few steps. It doesn’t explain how to get specifically Israel or Arabic-language channels, but it will allow you to install the repositories and add-ons that will get you there. Once you have done everything in
this video, and have installed the appropriate international add-ons (for Israel you want Israelive; for Arabic there are numerous add-ons; all can be installed by going to Programs -> World Repos), you are ready to specifically add Israelive or any of the Arab channels to your mix.


Essentially, to get Israelive, you can follow the Hebrew instructions on this page, beginning with 2.2.1 (this will allow Hebrew fonts) and then skipping to 3.4 (this will install Israelive):


http://www.hometheater.co.il/article04465.XBMC-%D7%94%D7%9E%D7%93%D7%A8%D7%99%D7%9A-%D7%94%D7%A9%D7%9C%D7%9D-%D7%9E%D7%90%D7%99-2014.html


The channels come and go with each update of the add-on service. Right now I am getting Channel 1 in HD and channel 10 in SD, for some reason no Channel 2 (Update July 24: now Channel 2 is available). Also, I’ve been able to look in on al-Quds, the channel of Hamas, but without sound. Israelive also gives you all the Israeli radio stations. From other addons you can get live streams of hundreds of world channels (CNN International, SkyNews, BBC World, to name a few) by poking around a bit after everything is installed. With the proper add-on, you can watch whole seasons of Israeli TV shows.

Actually, xbmc is a far more powerful platform designed to provide you with much more than live TV streams from around the world. It also serves as a media server for a home theater. That's the principal way I use it on a dedicated PC connected to my home theater. But you can use it in this limited way on any computer.

As we say in Kabbalah: ha-mevin yavin.

The Luxury of Iron Dome

Most of the Israeli tweeps I follow on Twitter are leftists. I follow them because I tend to agree with them. The occupation is morally indefensible and nationally suicidal, Bibi and his comrades are compass-less vile warmongers, yada, yada, yada. The whole 9 yards. This Operation Protective Edge is as stupid and morally indefensible as Cast Lead and Defensive Shield before it.
But...
What in God's name is a government and army supposed to do when 100 missiles a day are fired willy-nilly into your territory? Every single former interlocutor with Hamas reports that Hamas had ample time amidst unambiguous signals of restraint from the dithering Israeli security cabinet to try to ramp down this confrontation, and the universal and consistent message from Hamas, from the Islamic Jihad, and from the Popular Resistance Committees of Gaza was a defiant "NO!"

So I read someone like Noam Sheizaf, who so often I find myself in agreement, writing a piece under the completely accurate headline "Why I object to this military campaign, even as missiles fall on my city". But I have to ask Mr. Sheizaf, and all the others who hold the same opinion - yes, this bloodshed is the direct result of the blind & idiotic 47-year long occupation, but if there were no Iron Dome missile defense, and that M75 rocket that was intercepted over the Azrieli Towers had reached its target, would you still be able to pen such a piece? 

You see, Mr. Sheizaf, the missile hasn't actually fallen on your city. You have the luxury that your counterparts in Gaza don't - an army and a civilian government which protects you when you are under attack. It's true that this is the same government that has spurned peace overtures, that exacerbates the conflict, that defies international law. But today, having placed you in such grave danger, it is saving your life. 

Can't say the same for Hamas.

Operation Protective Edge vs. Operation Ramadan

I meant this to go up last night, and saved it only as a draft. In the meantime, both of my "indicators" came true today:

And so it begins, the next stage. In the wake of an attempted "pause" that fizzled out, rocketeers from Gaza - some certainly Hamas this round - fired nearly 70 rockets into Israel in the last 24 hours, and tonight the Israel Air Force and Navy launched a rain of fire on Gaza in an operation dubbed in English "Protective Edge" and in Hebrew צוק איתן, so the English is not exactly literal. Whatever its name, the coining of an operational name is meant to communicate to the Israeli citizenry that the Government of Israel has finally made up its mind. After 4 days of hemming and hawing (which brought the long-simmering feud between Netanyahu and his Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman to the breaking point) the folks at the Kiryah were instructed to produce another tough-sounding 2-word combina and let 'er rip.
For every onlooker who believes this tit-for-tat was orchestrated by an Israel chomping at the bit to torpedo the recently announced Palestinian unity government, there is a similar contingent who are convinced that Hamas was itching for a grand confrontation with the Zionist occupiers during the sacred month of Ramadan.
Both conspiracy theories sound wise and plausible; far more likely neither is true. Instead, the simple explanation seems best. The discredited US "peace processors" who argued  that the absence of even the hint of a diplomatic process would lead to certain disaster turn out to be exactly correct. In this conflict, take away the diplomats and all you have left are angry, humiliated people with long-festering grudges. 
Predictably, the Twitter-verse is immediately taking sides. In one corner are the #GazaUnderAttack people. who are blind to the horror of lobbing rockets willy-nilly onto a civilian population. In the other corner are the #IsraelUnderFire folks who are blind to the horror of lobbing not-nearly-as-precise-as-imagined munitions onto a civilian population.
If experience is a guide, the Islamic Jihad rocketeers will pull out their longer Fajr models, the ones that can put metropolitan Tel Aviv on edge. Two things to be looking for in the next 24 hours: 1) will anything be heard from Hezbollah in the north? and 2) how widespread will the next round of military mobilization (formally announced at a "mere" 1,500 so far) in Israel be? Watch for these two indicators - they will tell you if this pile-on will be more like 2009's Cast Lead (i.e., ground invasion) or 2012's Pillar of Defense (i.e., air alone). So far, less than 12 hours in, it looks like this confrontation will be more like the latter than the former.

Israel: The Ramadan Intifada?

I just returned from a 10-day visit to Israel, my first in 2 years - quite possibly the longest break in what has turned out to be more than 25 visits. My flight from Ben Gurion airport occurred on the eve of the discovery of the corpses of 3 Jewish teenagers who had gone missing 2 weeks earlier. This came after an over-the-top security crackdown in the Palestinian West Bank in which 5 Palestinians were killed in confrontations with the Israeli army.
Within 24 hours of the discovery of the 3 teenagers, a Palestinian teenager was found dead in a forest on the outskirts of Jerusalem, and the most reasonable conclusion is this murder was a revenge act carried out by Jewish civilians. The Israeli capital has since been witness to ongoing and growing skirmishes which have wrecked the municipal light rail connector to a northern Jewish suburb of Jerusalem. All this takes place during the first week of the Islamic commemoration of the first divine revelation to the prophet Muhammad - a time of increased religious sensitivity - coinciding with the Muslim month of Ramadan. Israeli authorities blocked the family of the slain teenager from congregating at the Noble Sanctuary of the Dome of the Rock, and this Friday morning's upcoming communal prayers at the Noble Sanctuary hold the potential for a new crescendo in intercommunal violence.
At the same time, and quite certainly unrelated to the savage death of these children, a barrage of Gaza-based rockets have been falling on southern Israel, with the predictable Israeli response: air attacks on targets in crowded Gaza with the attendant "collateral damage," a visible strengthening of ground forces around the Gaza ghetto, and behind-the-scenes consultations with Egypt, who convey Israeli demands to the leaders of Gaza, and provide assistance in closing off Gaza from the Egyptian side.
Israel is now descending into a cruel kind of hell - not unprecedented - but heavily laden with potential regional repercussions. Within hours of the discovery of the 3 teenagers, the inner sanctum Israeli security cabinet held an emergency meeting, where a significant rift emerged between one camp that wanted to "go medieval" on Hamas and the Palestinian territories, and one camp counseled a more attenuated response. The security cabinet has now met 4 times in the last 3 days, unable to reach a unanimous consensus on how to proceed. In the meantime, Israel's army anticipates a limited mobilization and contemplates far more.
Nothing of the last 4 days represents a change in the broader regional equation. There will be no truly destabilizing state-to-state conflict as a result of this blood revenge. Egypt's generals are not going to go to war even if Israel launches yet another full-scale assault on Gaza; Syria is completely consumed with her own struggles with ISIS, as is Jordan. There will be no war in Israel-Palestine this summer.
But there is the possibility of two kinds of unmanageable outcomes: a growing Palestinian expression of despondency and humiliation in the form of a new "shaking off"/intifada, which would mark a historic low point in the Israeli/Palestinian struggle; and a sudden escalation of the missile strategy on the part of Gazan rocketeers and possibly Hezbollah to the north, placing far more than the southern Gaza-ring Jewish citizens under potential threat. Either scenario is judged manageable by Israeli security analysts (armed with UAVs and Iron Dome), but if history teaches us anything, it is that events can often go careening off into trajectories not anticipated by the wisest of generals.
The "peace process" is dead. The Palestinian unity government, which is a precondition for any successful 2-state solution, is teetering, to the delight of Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu, who has no interest in consummating any kind of political deal at this time.
Both Israelis and Palestinians are frustrated and enraged, but both sides hold chess pieces in a complicated balance-of-terror calculus. What is true of this dangerous moment in the Arab-Israeli conflict is the same truth that has dictated the conduct of all sides since the struggle commenced. There are no peacemakers amongst the government in Jerusalem, the council of clerics in Gaza, and the technocracy in Ramallah. In any event, the general populace of Jerusalem, Gaza, and Ramallah are taking matters into their own bloody hands. All sides sadly must play out their bad positions until they conclude they must try another way. The history of this conflict is that each side is convinced that the other side only "understands" violence and threat. In the absence of a political process, communal violence and more-tit-for-less-tat reprisals are the standard operating procedure. 
This slow-motion descent into savagery will have to play itself out, until someone says "uncle." Innocents and guilty on both sides alike will die as a result. Be prepared for a rough, but not apocalyptic, Ramadan intifada for the month of July.

BDS and One Confused Jew

I think I need to clarify, if only for myself - a self-described liberal diaspora Jew who believes that Jewish nationalism is a convincing proposition - what I believe when it comes to BDS ("boycott, divestment, and sanctions") of Israel in the age of King Bibi. So here goes:

1. I am opposed to academic boycotts, and oppose specifically a boycott of Israeli institutes of higher education (with one exception, see #2). There are numerous reasons that lead me to a complete rejection of academic and cultural boycotts, including the anti-Semitic outcome of this particular boycott.

2. Until there is a resolution of borders between Israel and a Palestinian state, I will continue to observe a boycott of refrain from interacting with Ariel University. I think the existence of Ariel University in the West Bank monstros-city of Ariel is wrong, and I oppose the government of Israel wasting millions of dollars to support its existence at the expense of other Israeli institutions of higher learning, as reported today in Calcalist. All my public opposition to an academic boycott of Israeli institutes of higher education does not apply to Ariel University. If in a final disposition of the border, Ariel falls inside Israel, I will revisit this boycott self-imposed herem.

3. Many years ago I reached the conclusion that the entire Jewish settlement project of the past 40+ years is a disaster for both Palestinians and Israelis, and decided to not use my consumer purse to support it. When in Israel or not, I do my very best to not purchase settlement-based products. There is no Sodastream device in my kitchen, and I would only consider Sodastream if in a final disposition of borders, the factory of Sodastream ends up inside Israel. I do not "visit" West Bank Jewish settlements, and I regard - until a final disposition is carried out - the old Green Line as the demarcation between Israel and Palestine. When I do cross the Green Line, I try to do so at the invitation of Palestinians (and not Israeli Jews), or as a tourist/scholar. I don't exactly know how to carry out this policy while in Jerusalem, but I try to spend as little time in metro Jerusalem as possible. Roughly, I am hewing to what Peter Beinart called "Zionist BDS."

4. I believe that the present government of Israel is completely out of control in matters domestic and foreign, and in matters of style and conduct. It does not have my support. Until it changes, or changes its approach, I will not lend an effort on its behalf. I will not oppose an economic boycott of the current government of Israel with the same zeal I oppose an academic boycott. In the not too distant future, I think Israel will be a better and healthier place without US foreign aid. 

5. So much for what I won't do - here is what I will do: I will donate my time, my philanthropic money, and my limited influence as a public figure, to causes and organizations of my choosing which further the aim of ending the settlement project and the occupation, and advance the concept of bi-national coexistence. I will do what very little I can as a non-Israeli Jew to promote the constitution of an Israeli government which is serious about resolving the conflict fairly. That will keep me plenty busy and productive.

6. I do not feel aligned with either AIPAC (certainly) or JStreet (for different reasons, just as certainly), and will join up with them on a rare case-by-case basis.

7. One last point - none of these musings mean for even a single second that I hold Israel principally responsible for the lack of a resolution of the Arab-Israeli conflict. BDS advocates put the onus on Israel. I don't buy that proposition. BDS advocates seem to fall into 2 camps: the Israel-be-goners (and I include in this category the disingenuous self-styled "agnostics") and the end-of-occupation activists. Either way, they blame Israel alone and its settlements exclusively for the stalemate. That is also a proposition no reasonable student of the conflict could accept.

I am prepared to refine this list or modify these points as I think about these questions more. Let me know what you think, and how you resolve these competing impulses.

Israel Election 2013 - Iran off the Table

So it looks like there will be no Israeli attack on Iran in 2013. That might be the big takeaway from the January 2013 legislative elections just held in Israel.
What just happened?
First, overall turnout was slightly higher than in 2011. Possibly the longish hiatus between elections prompted more Israelis to cast a participatory vote after a decidedly uneventful and far from mesmerizing campaign. Rather than shifting to a more hard-line right-wing pose (as many had predicted), the country moved away a slight bit from the hard-line pro-settler, pro-muscular security and foreign policy orientations of "fortress Israel."
I've yet to see any turnout numbers by electoral sector, but it looks like the Arab-Israelis voted at a rate close to previous elections, bringing to a halt the long decline that has been noted by poll watchers. In fact - though the numbers aren't yet final - it looks like the 3 so-called "Arab" parties improved their standing, possibly picking up a seat between them.
Second - and here is what I think is the big story - an unprecedented 29 seats went to religious parties (though with a proviso). This is an unheralded new number - the last benchmark was 27 seats set in 1999. Almost a quarter of the Israeli electorate voted for parties that insist they have the interests of the Torah-observant as either their ultimate or central focus. The proviso is that it is hard to pin down precisely what Naftali Bennett's Jewish Home party is all about, and the likelihood that a sizable number of non-religious voters neverthless turned to Bennett's rebranding of what in the end is nothing more than the National Religious Party, version 2.0.
Third - the demise of incumbency. An unprecedented 53 new faces will be sworn into the new Knesset. That means more than a 40% changeover in lawmakers. Many pundits argue that the massive disgruntlement of the general population with the socio/economic condition of the country (remember the tent city protests of 2010?) resulted in the "out with the scoundrels" turnover of legislators.
Fourth - the collapse of Kadima, the vanity party created by Ariel Sharon in 2005, and the wholesale shift of the centrist voter from Kadima to the New Kid on the Block, Yair Lapid. This is being touted as the "big story" of election night. I'll have more on that later. 
And finally - elections 2013 was a serious setback for Netanyahu. Bibi will still  be selected to form a new government, though as a much weakened leader who in all likelihood will have to bring into his next government the 19 new faces which make up Lapid's Yesh Atid party (though at least 2 are seasoned security veterans). A domestically weakened Bibi, forced to turn to his left, will take an Iran attack off the table.
Until the next election...which will come much sooner than 2017.
Here is a not particularly outlandish prediction for the coming month of coalition negotiations: watch for at least one "rotten deal" - some improbably underhanded alliance between sworn political enemies - to be floated, or consummated.

Israeli Election Eve 2013 - No Change

It has been my practice on this blog to make predictions about American and Israeli elections. My track record on American presidential records has been simply awful. I was embarrassingly wrong in 2008 and wrong again in 2012. I should just stop trying.
But...when it comes to Israeli elections, I do much better. I got the 2006 elections pretty much right. The 2009 election was much harder to call, insofar as it ended with a dead tie favoring the right, but I didn't too badly.
Which brings us to 2013.
The last set of scientific polling has been published. The polls all point to an outcome that will require the President of Israel, Shimon Peres, to conduct his mandated consultations with party leaders and then designate Binyamin Netanyahu with the task of assembling a coalition government under his leadership.
What will Netanyahu then do?
This is the same question that emerged in February and March of 2009, after similar political consultations led Peres to reluctantly request Netanyahu to form a government. Normally, the President is mandated to turn to the winning parliamentary bloc with the task of forming a government. But back in 2009, even though Netanyahu's Likud party came in a close second in the race for Knesset seats, Peres learned that a coalition of smaller religious/nationalist and conventionally designated "right-wing" parties were prepared to join Likud, and not the leading bloc of Kadima. For Peres it must have been a bitter pill to swallow. It was also a disappointing outcome for the incoming Obama administration, which clearly preferred a Kadima-led government.
Netanyahu indeed assembled a comfortable coalition government in 2009. Starting with his 27 seats in the 120-seat Knesset, he reached an agreement with Avigdor Lieberman's Russian immigrant Yisrael Beiteinu ("Israel is Our Home") faction of 15 seats (=42), and then added to his total Labor's 13 seats and Shas's 11, as well as the 3 seats of the former National Religious Party, now renamed The Jewish Home (ha-Bayit ha-Yehudi) (=69). A day after he presented the government to the nation, the ultra-Orthodox United Torah Judaism added its 5 seats to the coalition, creating an unassailable majority of 74 seats.
Netanyahu's government survived for nearly its full 4-year term. A number of changes whittled away slightly at the coalition's majority. Many Laborites were unhappy with Ehud Barak's decision to join the Netanyahu government, forcing Barak out and withdrawing their support. Barak formed a rump party and took 3 Laborites with him. The remaining wreck of Labor (now a mere 8 seats) went into opposition.
In the early summer of 2012 Netanyahu attempted a short-lived "national unity government" with Kadima (after Kadima had ejected its leader in the 2009 campaign, Tzipi Livni, for her internal rival, Shaul Mofaz). That experiment, which created a super-majority of 96 seats and prompted Time magazine to call Netanyahu "King Bibi," lasted for all of 70 days. 
In the fall of 2012 Netanyahu calculated that new elections would strengthen his already strong hand. He announced a call for elections by dissolving the parliament, and immediately merged his Likud with Lieberman's party, beginning therefore with an unassailable bloc of 42 seats.
Two "new" parties have emerged this election cycle: one was formed by a popular former news reader and talkshow host, Yair Lapid, with the name Yesh Atid ("There is a Future"). A second party was cobbled together by Livni, with the simple and bombastic name ha-Tenu`ah ("The Movement"). The Jewish Home went through a rebranding, and for all intents and purposes can be regarded as a "new" political force. And finally, Barak's Independence party simply disappeared from the scene, with Barak "retiring" yet again from politics.
Internally, each of the parties held primaries to determine the order of their lists. Israeli elections are national, not regional, enterprises - a voter votes for a party, and then the vote is divided into 120. Every seat won is designated to a list - and if your party wins 17 seats, and you appear as number 18 - you're shit out of luck. So the higher you appear on a party's list, the more likely you will become a MK (member of Knesset). The newsworthy outcome of the party primary voting took place in Likud - a sizable number of current ministers and conventionally-described Likud "moderates" were ousted from their high positions, to be replaced by right-wing settler representatives. Likud turned harder to the right.
So that sets the stage for Tuesday's voting: a more right-wing Likud now merged with Yisrael Beiteinu, campaigning with the slogan: "A strong Prime Minister - a strong Israel"; a new Labor under the leadership of (yet another) former media star, Shelly Yachimovich; a collapsed and no longer relevant Kadima under loser Mofaz; a rebranded Jewish Home under the leadership of American immigrant and hi-tech tycoon Naftali Bennett; a new party led by the cipher Lapid; and a new party under perennial loser Livni.
It is simply too much to follow, all these comings and goings. So most pollsters and pundits neatly divide the squabbling parties into 3 blocs: the right-religious; the center-left; and the Arab parties (who never play a part in coalition formation). Looked at that way, the current situation of the outgoing Knesset is thus:

Right-Religious coalition - 67
Center-Left "blocking" opposition - 42
Arab parties - 11

First, notice the low numbers for Arab parties. Though Arabs constitute 20% of the population of Israel, they hold only 10% of Knesset seats (though there are a handful of Israeli Arab candidates scattered amongst the Jewish Zionist parties). This is because of the question of voter turnout. Essentially, Arab voters have given up voting in Israeli elections. But this question of turnout relates to a bigger trend: religious and nationalist Jews turn out at a much higher rate than either the secular Jewish Israeli or the Israeli Arab. In 2009, overall turnout was 65% (in fact slightly up from 2006) - certainly impressive when compared to other democracies. But there persists a wide gulf between the turnout of self-defined religious voters (over 85%) and secular voters (slightly more than 50%). Mobilized small-sector interest groups rule the roost in contemporary Israeli democracy. Put another way - if Israeli secularists were as interested in participating in democracy as the Orthodox, then the religious and right-wing camps would be proportionally smaller factions in parliament.There has been a concerted effort to stress the issue of voter turnout, but it is likely the results will vary little from historic patterns.
Noisy foreign protagonists and antagonists of Israel devote a great deal of time to her conflicts, and can get quit passionate in their advocacy. On the other hand, a sizable number of Israelis couldn't give a shit one way or the other.
That brings us to the polls. First, going in to the weekend the polls uniformly report that 15% of likely voters are undecided. This is not as newsworthy a number as it might first appear. Many undecided voters know what they believe - for them the question is simply which party in the Israeli political smorgasbord will best enable their vote.
Even though the larger outcome - an easy Netanyahu victory leading to a 3rd government under his leadership - is all but certain, there are still a few small surprises to be had.
Let's take a look at the numbers of the last round of polls (current size in parentheses):

Likud Beiteinu (merged parties - 42) - 32-34
Labor (8) - 16-17
Yesh Atid (0) - 12-13
Shas (11) - 10-12
Kadima (28) - 0-2
Jewish Home (7) - 12-14
Movement (0) - 7-9
Meretz (3) - 6
Arab Parties (11) - 11-12


So what have been the main story lines? First, it has been a dull and uneventful campaign - hardly an energizing civic exercise. Given all the fateful decisions facing a new government - Iran, continued tension with the US administration, the seething Palestinian powderkeg - this election campaign has generated minimal interest amongst Israeli voters. Unlike elections past, there hasn't been a single nationally televised candidates' debate. Imagine that - no debates.
Second, the merger of Netanyahu and Lieberman (sometimes dubbed "Biberman") has been a tactical failure - the constituent parts equal more than the combined whole by a wide margin.
Third, the surprise new party (and there always seems to be at least one each election cycle) has got to be Lapid's. Livni's new party and its single-digit results has been described as a bitter disappointment for her. What we are likely seeing is the scattering of Kadima voters (who might be described as right-centrists) for smaller factions. And the rebranding of the old NRP under Bennett is notable (Likud Beiteinu defections?).
Finally - it is worth noting the recovery of Labor under Yachimovich to at least semi-respectable size, and the apparent doubling of the leftist bastion Meretz party.
Now let's look at the final polling numbers by breaking them down into the 3 aforementioned big blocs:

Right-Religious coalition - approx. 66
Center-Left "blocking" opposition - approx. 42
Arab parties - 11-12



And look! - bottom line...nothing changes. Only if there is a serious divergence - a swing from bloc to bloc of 7 or 8 seats - does there emerge a serious opportunity for Peres to entertain the option of turning to anyone other than Netanyahu to form the next government. Highly unlikely.
Netanyahu always has the option of reaching out to some of the Center-Left opposition in order to abandon the religious-Orthodox (a persistent pipe dream of secularists - and hinted at for a time in his short-lived national unity government of 2012), but his likely route to a stable coalition is to turn to his "natural" partners. Depending on the final numbers, that is what he will do.
Will there be any surprises? In other words, polls have a history of getting something wrong. What will be the electoral surprise of 2013? I think that the numbers for Bennett are too high - Israelis are enamored with his personal story, but there are many unpalatable forces underlying his rebranded party, and I suspect he won't do as well as the polling suggests. Expect a better outcome for Likud Beiteinu than 32, and a poorer showing for The Jewish Home than 13.
Finally, there is an interesting rule in Israeli parliamentary elections - a party must garner a minimum 2% of the raw vote in order to gain one seat in the Knesset. Are there any current parties who will fall below the threshold? Yes, possibly Mofaz and Kadima - the party created by Ariel Sharon in 2005 as a vehicle for implementing his short-lived and new-found conversion. Good riddance to pointless Kadima.
Will any tiny party break through the threshold in 2013? I always hold out hope for Green Leaves (`Alei Yaroq) - the decriminalization of marijuana party, now trying to recast itself as an economic, anti-corruption party. Much more likely is Strength to Israel (`Otzmah la-Yisrael), a rightist splinter group.
Bottom line - to repeat - nothing changes. One of the most pointless and insubstantial Israeli elections in history. Then comes the month-long rug-trading to form a coalition. That's where the story - if any - will emerge.

First Look at 2013 Israeli Elections

One of the most volatile and fickle electorates in the world - certainly in the Middle East - is about to go to the polls. I've not ventured yet into the thorny subject of the 2013 Kenesset elections in Israel, as has been my wont in elections past, because I firmly believed this election would not be decided until the last few weeks of campaigning. I just didn't believe the story was worth my time - not until the shifting political players had finally dug in for the final push. And we've now reached that point.

Outgoing (and the smart money says incoming) PM Benyamin Netanyahu has been enjoying a comfortable lead in opinion polls, and the left-center potential opposition has been fractured, rudderless, and ineffective. Thus, every imaginable pundit and pollster has predicted a comfortable majority for an even harder right Netanyahu-led coalition once the voting takes place.

But as any seasoned Israeli election watcher ought to remember, there is a general rule of thumb that renders all early punditry meaningless: there is a solid, consistent 40% of the Israeli electorate which votes for the right/religious/nationalist parties (the "Fortress Israel" crowd), and a solid, consistent 40% of the Israeli electorate which votes for the left/secular/centrist parties (the accommodating "peace process" crowd). It is the 20% perennial undecideds, the moody feel-it-in-their-kishkes Israeli voters, who make the difference. These bipolar voters often do not decide until the final 48 hours of a campaign.

And this year, despite the collective wisdom of the pundits, the undecideds are definitely in play.

It looks for the moment like the undecideds are leaning to the right. That's why all the polls are showing an easy majority for "Fortress Israel." But now that the election, which has been bereft of issues and debate-free (not a single one has been scheduled between any of the principal contenders), is heating up, watch for some surprises. I'll try to highlight some of these surprises in the coming days.

Take this weekend: the most recent former heard of the General Security Service (known in Hebrew as shabak - think of the FBI with spycraft and special ops) gave an interview published Friday in Israel's largest circulation daily newspaper, in which he labelled Netanyahu and outgoing Defense Minister Ehud Barak as unfit to lead the nation. We've heard these complaints from other former Israeli intelligence chiefs - but the gravitas of Yuval Diskin's critique is a carefully timed body blow to Netanyahu's carefully messaged narrative of a strong national leader.

Will Diskin's charges have any effect on the undecideds? There are new and untested parties and political figures in the hunt, and thus there is no historical data for predicting how Israeli voters will respond to reading yet again of credible doubts concerning their current PM. Unfortunately, there has yet to emerge any Nate Silver-like authority who has an accurate read of voter preferences, and historically, pre-election polls are often wildly off the mark.

So I'll simply put it this way: it's time to start paying attention to the campaign. All the electoral verities of the last 2-1/2 months are melting away in the harsh light of the looming election scheduled for January 22.

Election Day may yet turn out to be an easy rout for Netanyahu. But don't lay odds just yet. The game has finally begun.

RIP Pillar of Cloud

It was four days ago when I first began tweeting that there would be no Israeli ground invasion of Gaza, and that not a single Israeli ground soldier would be put in harm's way by PM Benjamin Netanyahu. Before we go on to the more fanciful part of my analysis, let's just get that one fact straight - many of us simply KNEW with a certitude equal to that shown election night by the Call Desk at FoxNews how this would all end.
Let's also stipulate another simple truth not easily digested by the pundits: this was a fabricated military incident designed, created & completely instigated by Israel. Israel was the entity that heated up the Gaza-Israel border to an intolerable boil, Israel was the perpetrator of a targeted killing at a moment and place of its choosing. The question of why Israel did this thing at this time breaks into two schools of thought, both wrong.
The first school has a micro analysis: Israel wanted to flush out the Fajr missile arsenal sooner rather than later, so it initiated an irresistible string of events in order to "mow the lawn" at minimal cost to Israeli soldiers. By every measure, Operation Pillar of Cloud (or if you like - "Defense") was a far less lethal engagement to both sides as compared to Cast Lead 4 years ago. Most of the long-range missiles were either destroyed in storage or fired with little impact. So in this way of thinking Israel started a near-war to achieve (variously) a dressing down of HAMAS; or to engage the new Egypt in regional diplomacy and have it take greater ownership of Gaza; or to cajole the Obama administration to come to Israel's aid; or similar drivel. All wrong.
The second school is more cynical, and seemingly more knowing and wise as to the intricacies of Israeli domestic politics. This school contends that Netanyahu started this particular fight in order to enhance and solidify his electoral standing in anticipation of January 22, 2013 elections. They call this an "Elections War" and would have you believe that a perpetually risk averse Netanyahu would engage in warmongering in order to do just a bit better in an election he was destined to win in any event. Also wrong.
So what just happened? Why go through this noisy exercise of calling up first 16,000 soldiers so brazenly, and then announce with greater fanfare the authorization of 31,000, and finally 75,000 troops? To make the threat of war a likely alternative to failed diplomacy, even as HAMAS spokesmen were daring the future Gilad Shalits to come on in?
No, there is another answer. I laid it out in my previous blog entry. So far, nothing in my earlier prediction has been contravened by the unfolding ceasefire. See below...

Pillar of Cloud leads to Pillar of Fire

Operation Pillar of Cloud, which now seems to be winding down, is based on a biblical allusion from Exodus 13:21, which reports that during the day God led the Israelites in the Sinai wilderness as a pillar of cloud, and at night as a pillar of fire. The 2 are inseparable.
Operation Pillar of Fire is what I name the real purpose of this entire exercise, and it began early morning in Jerusalem, Nov. 7, just as back on the East Coast of the United States on the night of Nov. 6, the major networks were calling Ohio for Barack Obama and Karl Rove experienced uncontrollable dizziness.
The shock and pain was palpable in the Boston Romney HQ that night, but 6000 miles away there was another equally stunned group of election watchers - the fearsome threesome of Benjamin Netanyahu, Ehud Barak, and Avigdor Lieberman. Their best laid plans for the next 12 months to be in league - finally, thankfully - with a sympathetic White House lay crumpled on the floor.
There would now be no time to prepare an attack on Iran in tandem with a President Romney and Dan Senor. Instead, a countdown clock was triggered: a month or two, maybe 3 at most, before Hilary Clinton leaves State and someone else - maybe the perennially hostile Susan Rice - joins the Obama inner foreign policy circle. Ironically, an Obama reelection actually moved up the deadline for an Israeli go-it-alone strike on Iran.
There are many difficult problems associated with a strike on Iran. One of the first problems is achieving operational surprise, at least for the first sorties of the air campaign. How does Israel, an open society saturated with journalists and social media, call up its Air Force reserves without tipping its hand to Iran?
There is only one way I can imagine Israel can bring its IAF to full operational capacity without setting off a dozen warning flares: induce a situation in Gaza that would plausibly necessitate a massive call up of a sizable reserve force. The timeline beginning with Nov. 8’s Israel-Gaza border skirmishes, instigated by Israel, culminating in Ahmed al-Ja'abari's targeted killing, provided the contrived event. The entire world has suddenly forgotten Israel's supposedly existential nuclear nightmare and has become obsessively preoccupied with Gaza and the Iron Dome.
After you create the "crisis," you then resolve it diplomatically well before throwing your forces into a universally unwanted ground war. Then demobilize your reservists - EXCEPT your Air Force reserves. Take whatever time you need, within reason. (I assume that at least a certain number of these IAF reservists' absence from society & the workforce would eventually be noticed, so time isn't unlimited.)
Thus, I have convinced myself, and seek to convince you dear reader, that Pillar of Cloud is merely a feint, a ruse, and a necessary prelude to a much more dangerous and eventful and insane Pillar of Fire.

Is There A New NIE?

I've stuck my neck out on a very long limb by insisting that Israel will not attack Iran this year. I made my first public prediction back in February, when the "smart money" was betting on a June or July attack. Here we are in early August, and exactly as I predicted -- no Israeli attack on Iranian nuclear facilities.

One option I never considered was an American attack on Iran in 2012.

One of the pieces of evidence I used in support of my prediction that Israel would not attack in 2012 was the 2007 National Intelligence Estimate (NIE), produced during the warmongering Bush presidency, which concluded that Iran had suspended its military nuclear program in 2003, and would be capable of producing an atomic weapon no earlier than 2015. It was a controversial NIE, and it generated praise from doves and consternation from hawks both here and abroad. But I thought precisely because the 2007 NIE was produced for a White House that claimed "axis of evil" status for Iran it had the ring of bitter truth.

When you make a prediction as I did, you better be prepared to either stick with it or adjust it as circumstances warrant. And I am now trying to figure out if circumstances warrant.

What has happened in the last 24 hours is that an Israeli journalist who likes to break big stories but who has less than a perfect batting record (see Dennis Ross's "red phone") has reported that unnamed "Western diplomats and Israeli officials" have told him that a new NIE has been delivered to the Obama White House with alarming new information that confirms the more threatening portrait of Iran touted by Israeli intelligence for the past 6 months.

Writes Haaretz's Barak Ravid:

This NIE report on Iran was supposed to have been submitted to Obama a few weeks ago, but it was revised to include new and alarming intelligence information about military components of Iran's nuclear program. Haaretz has learned that the report's conclusions are quite similar to those drawn by Israel's intelligence community.
The NIE report contends that Iran has made surprising, notable progress in the research and development of key components of its military nuclear program.

Now if this report is true, it is -- excuse the pun -- a bombshell. A National Intelligence Estimate is a classified document that presents the findings of the top spooks/analysts in the US intelligence community. They actually become pillars of American foreign policy. When an NIE changes as radically as this Israeli journalist is suggesting, it is a game changer.  But, here we are nearly 24 hours into the publication of this "exclusive" news report and I cannot find anyone who has independently corroborated, with either named or unnamed sources, the story that a new NIE has been produced. Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak, who might have been one of Ravid's unnamed "Israeli officials," went on Israeli radio this morning to confirm the gist of the story -- that US intelligence now tracks "much, much" closer to Israeli intelligence, but Barak walked back from calling this new US intelligence an actual NIE.

To top things off, the reporter who broke the "exclusive" that has yet to be confirmed by any other news source went on an Israeli TV news show for a live interview, and then raised speculation (more like Israeli government wishful thinking) he has overheard that this new NIE might very well serve as the pretext for a possible "October surprise" attack by the Obama administration. And for me, at that point, we pass into a world of conspiracy theories and invisible goblins. You got my attention, working journalist, but your performance on the TV show is less than reassuring.

The truly foolish character in this episode so far is not the journalist, who has double-sourced his story. The foolish character is once again Ehud Barak. In Hebrew, there is a saying "ratz le-sapper la-chevreh" which means "run to tell your buds" and it refers to the rampant gossiping and loose lips of Israeli soldiers and politicians. There have been a string of high-level US administration visitors to Israel in the last few weeks (Scanlon, Clinton, Panetta), and it looks like Barak ran to breathlessly tell his buds, the local journalist du jour, that the US is now seeing Iranian intentions the same as Israel. And I have no doubt that it was Ravid's sources -- and not Ravid -- who used the words "National Intelligence Estimate."

This story could change by the minute or by the hour. So don't hold me to any of it. It seems intriguing, but it may turn out to be much ado about nothing.

So all I am saying is this: I still stand by my prediction -- no Israeli aerial attack on Iranian nuclear installations in 2012. If this report by Mr. Ravid is confirmed (and not simply bounced around the world as a headline, citing his lone story as the source), I will reconsider. And don't ask me about 2013...

Bibi and the Bomb

A different Jericho missile

I want to refer you all to a very interesting episode that transpired yesterday about an event that took place back in 1998 during Binyamin Netanyahu's first tour as PM of Israel, which was documented yesterday in a short posting that was written by Noam Sheizaf on the web magazine +972, and was also commented upon (in Hebrew) in an even shorter posting by the media monitor web site "The 7th Eye" of the Israel Democracy Institute.

Pinhas Lavon

It all began when the Haaretz columnist Sefi Rachlevsky published an article entitled (in Hebrew) "The 'Disastrous Affair' Syndrome" (Sindrom Eseq ha-Bish) and in English "The Secret Behind an Iran War Order" (unfortunately, behind the Haaretz English paywall). The Hebrew phrase Eseq ha-Bish is a well-known historical/political term for what is known in English as the Lavon Affair, a bungled Israeli "false flag" operation which took place in 1954, when a group of Egyptian Jews were recruited by Israeli military intelligence to blow up a string of Egyptian, British, and American sites in Egypt. The intent of the operation was to mobilize American and British leaders into a hostile attitude towards Egyptian President Nasser's new rule. The cell succeeded with a string of small explosions, including the US Information Agency facilities in Alexandria and Cairo, and was then uncovered. It is a very complicated episode, which resulted in damaged relations between Israel and the US and the UK, and caused a subterranean crisis in the Israeli government (which publicly denied any involvement in the operation), eventuating the resignation of the Israeli Defense Minister Pinhas Lavon, and the return of then-retired David Ben Gurion to the Defense Ministry, and eventually to the Prime Ministership.
Rachlevsky is a controversial journalist who first made a name for himself with a best-selling investigative book in 1998 entitled Messiah's Donkey, which has never been translated into English. Written in the aftermath of the Rabin assassination and on the eve of Netanyahu's rise to power, the book was an examination of the messianic and racist doctrines of contemporary Israeli religious Judaism and painted an extremely dark portrait for the future of liberal democratic values in the Jewish state. In 2008 he published a second book in a similar vein entitled No Limit. As best I can determine, Rechlevsky became a regular columnist for Haaretz in 2011.
The main point of Rachlevsky's column yesterday was to argue that Netanyahu intends to run yet another Eseq ha-Bish by unilaterally attacking Iran in October of this year -- just weeks before the US presidential elections -- in order to hopefully draw the much more capable yet reluctant American military into an unavoidable attack on Iranian nuclear facilities.
Wrote Rechlevsky:

The logic is simple. According to Netanyahu and Barak, Israel has the military power to delay Iran's nuclear project by only one year. This is the up-to-date estimate based on operations research by the body in charge of the matter in Israel: the air force. There is no significance to a delay of that length. There is, however, a force that can stop the Iranian project militarily: the United States. The problem, Netanyahu says, is that the U.S. administration is not willing to do so.

The solution is simple. A moment before the U.S. presidential elections, when Mitt Romney - the candidate of Netanyahu's patron, Sheldon Adelson - is breathing down Barack Obama's neck, and in the wake of the large number of casualties and the extensive damage that the Iranian response is likely to cause in the region and particularly in Israel, the American president will have no choice but to order his armed forces to join in the war.

Netanyahu is gambling that if Obama does not do so, he will lose the elections. Then Romney will replace him and, as a token of gratitude, will complete the military work. And if the gamble fails? For that there is no backup plan. 

Whatever the wisdom of Rechlevsky's editorial speculation (and I remain unpersuaded), there is a significant difference between the print version of the article and the e-version of the article. An entire paragraph from the Hebrew print version is absent from the online version, and therefore also from the English online version. This difference was (first?) noted by researcher Avner Cohen, author of two definitive academic studies of Israel's own nuclear program and policy and posted on his Facebook page.
Here is a translation of the missing paragraph:

In 1998, Saddam Hussein, weakened by the American no-flight zone, made one hollow threat. In response, [Prime Minister Binyamin] Netanyahu ordered to consider the arming of Jericho missiles. An order that wasn’t issued even during the [1973] Yom Kippur War, under a fear of destruction. Three people went to Netanyahu: Ariel Sharon, [former Chief of Staff and minister] Rafael Eitan, and CoS Amnon Lipkin-Shahak. They told him to relax, take a pill, and forget about it. Some things even a prime minister shouldn’t do. Will [Ehud] Barak be one of the three this time around? I don’t know.

Left unspoken is that the phrase "the arming of Jericho missiles" means only one thing -- nuclear warheads. The Jericho medium range ballistic missile isn't Tony Stark's fictional weapon; it is an Israeli weapons system that is apparently on its third iteration and reportedly has an accurate range which would include Iran. This 1998 incident, now reported by multiple sources, apparently generated an unusual editorial by the famed (and now deceased) Haaretz military correspondent Zeev Schiff in 2001 about the need to review nuclear release authority in Israel in the light of Israel's "extreme and unbalanced" political leadership. 
Online speculation has it that the military censor got wind of Rachlevsky's article in the print version, which had not been submitted to censorship review, and insisted that the online version not carry the paragraph. Haaretz, it is then speculated, complied with the order. The 7th Eye reports that neither the military censor nor Haaretz will comment on the article's treatment.
This of course raises the thorny issue of the Israeli military censorship regime. Aluf Benn, the current editor-in-chief of Haaretz, has in the past criticized the censorship regime regarding the nuclear question. There is a long history of combat between Israeli media and the military censor. Normally, it is the paper's responsibility to submit potentially offending news articles to the censor for review. Negotiations ensue, an administrative review might be held, but the censor's ruling is final. Occasionally a paper protests the censor's decision by publishing a blank paragraph or sentence to indicate to readers the hand of the censor. Sometimes an Israeli journalist will "pass" the item to a foreign journalist and get it printed with an overseas dateline. Foreign journalists who run afoul of the censorship regime (a very rare occurrence, insofar as foreign journalists rarely have access to truly sensitive information) have lost their press credentials and been required to leave the country.
It is safe to assume that Rachlevsky's op-ed piece was never submitted for review, insofar as the 1998 incident it recounts is a widely known "urban legend" that has been recounted in public many times. Yet the paragraph must have hit a nerve, as the debate over an attack on Iran has become more heated in recent weeks. One can imagine that there must have been a bit of an argument between Benn and the military censor Col. Sima Vaknin-Gil yesterday, but in the end Haaretz -- as it must according to the long-standing understanding between censorship authorities and the media -- relented. Not a great moment in the history of what many believe is "Israel's only 'quality' newspaper" and not a great moment for the military censor, who apparently demanded a change in an opinion piece before it was placed online. But the "missing" paragraph is nevertheless part of the public record, found in every paper copy of yesterday's edition, and on the internet for anyone who digs a bit.
So this entire episode raises a number of dark semi-secrets that touch upon Israel's plans for Iran, the nature of Israel's free press, and the competency of Netanyahu's judgment. You can draw your own conclusions.