| December
10, 2007
Ahmadinejad
Has Screwed Us Again!
How
They Stole the Bomb From Us
By URI
AVNERY
It
was like an atom bomb falling on Israel.
The earth shook. Our political and
military leaders were all in shock. The headlines screamed with
rage.
What happened?
A real catastrophe: the American intelligence
community, comprising 16 different agencies, reached a unanimous
verdict: already in 2003, the Iranians terminated their efforts
to produce a nuclear bomb, and they have not resumed them since.
Even if they change their mind in the future, they will need at
least five years to achieve their aim.SHOULDN'T WE be overjoyed?
Shouldn't the masses in Israel be dancing in the streets, as they
did on November 29, 1947, sixty years ago? After all, we have been
saved!
Until this week, we have been regularly
hearing that - any minute now - the Iranians will produce a bomb
that threatens our very existence. Nothing less. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad,
the new Hitler of the Middle East, who announces every second day
that Israel must disappear from the map, was about to fulfill his
own prophecy.
A small nuclear bomb, even a teeny-weeny
one like the ones dropped on Japan, would be enough to wipe out
the whole Zionist enterprise. If it fell on Tel-Aviv's Rabin Square,
the economic, cultural and military center of Israel would be vaporized,
together with hundreds of thousands of Jews. A second Holocaust.
And lo and behold - no bomb and no
any-minute-now. The wicked Ahmadinejad can threaten us as much as
he wants - he just has not got the means to harm us. Isn't that
a reason for celebration?
So why does this feel like a national
disaster?A TWO-BIT psychologist (like me) might say: Jews have become
used to anxiety. After hundreds of years of persecution, expulsions,
inquisition, pogroms and then the Holocaust, we have little red
warning lights in our heads, which come on at the slightest sign
of danger. In such a situation, we feel at home. We know what to
do.
But when the lights stay off and no
danger appears on the horizon, we get the feeling that something
suspicious is going on. Something is wrong. Perhaps the lights are
out of order. Perhaps it's really a trap!
There is one little consolation in
the new situation. While it seems as if the immediate danger of
annihilation has disappeared, there is a feeling that we are alone,
on our own again.
That is another sign of Jewish uniqueness:
We are facing the entire world alone. As in the days of the Holocaust,
all the Goyim have forsaken us. Face to face with the Iranian monster
which threatens to devour us, we now stand here alone.
All our media are repeating this in
unison, like an orchestra which does not need a conductor, because
it knows the music by heart.
True, other peoples, too, can derive
satisfaction from standing alone. Engraved in my memory is a British
poster that was hanging on our walls in Palestine in the dark days
after the fall of France to the Nazis, when Britain was left quite
alone in the war. Under the grim face of Winston Churchill the slogan
proudly proclaimed: "Alright then, Alone!"
But with us this has almost become
a national ritual. As we used to sing in the good old days of Golda
Meir: "The whole world is against us / That is an old melody
/ …And everybody who is against us / Let him go to hell…"
At the time, one of the army entertainment teams even turned it
into a folk dance.
In the last few years, a broad coalition
against Iran has come into being. The Iranian bomb has become the
heart of an international consensus, led by America, Queen of the
World. With the consent of all its five permanent members, the UN
Security Council has decreed sanctions against Tehran.
Now, before our very eyes, this coalition
is crumbling. President Bush is stammering. Gone is the excuse for
an American military attack on Iran, the dream of the Israeli government
and the neocons. Gone is even the pretext for more stringent sanctions.
God knows, perhaps even the existing
feeble sanctions will be abolished tomorrow.THE FIRST reaction of
the Israeli leadership was vigorous and determined: total denial.
The American report is simply wrong,
all the media proclaimed. It is based on false information. Our
own intelligence community is in possession of much better data,
which prove that the bomb is well on its way.
Really? All the intelligence in the
hands of the Mossad is automatically transferred to the CIA. It
is part of the mass of data on which the American report is based.
It must be remembered that the published part of the report constitutes
only 3% of the complete document.
So the American intelligence agencies
must be deliberately lying.
There is no escaping the conclusion
that murky political motives must lie behind their unequivocal findings.
Perhaps they want to make up for the false reports which President
Bush employed to justify his invasion of Iraq. Then they overestimated,
now they underestimate. Perhaps they want to take revenge on Bush
and believe that the time is ripe, since he has become a lame duck.
Or they are adapting themselves to American public opinion, which
cannot stomach another war. And, besides, their chiefs are, of course,
all anti-Semites.
Even if the American intelligence
operatives innocently believe that Iran has stopped work on the
Bomb, it just shows how naive they are. They cannot imagine that
the Iranians are fooling them. Who knows better than us how easy
it is to hide an atomic bomb and deceive the whole world? After
all, we have been at it for years.
But all this does not change the fact:
this report pushes American policy in a new direction and changes
the entire international constellation.
The war on Iran, which was to be the
defining event of 2008, has turned for the time being into a non-event.WHAT
ARE the results, as far as Israel is concerned? Why have our leaders
been in a state of shock since the publication of the report?
The possibility of an independent
Israeli military strike against Iran has vanished. Israel cannot
wage war without the unreserved backing of the US. We tried once
- the Sinai War of 1956 - and then President Dwight D. Eisenhower
kicked our ass. Since then we have taken great care to obtain the
blessing of the US before every war.
For the military and intelligence
services, the report is an unmitigated disaster for another reason
too. The Iranian bomb plays an indispensable part in the army's
annual fight for its massive chunk of the budget cake.
For right-wing demagogues, the effect
is even more disheartening. Binyamin Netanyahu has built his whole
strategy on the Iranian scare, hoping to ride the Bomb right into
the Prime Minister's office.
Furthermore, when the Iranian issue
cools down, the Palestinian issue warms up. That is especially true
in Washington DC. President Bush is in trouble, his fiascos in Afghanistan
and Iraq are still dragging on. Any American effort to install a
stable government in Iraq, with its Shiite majority, depends on
the backing of Shiite Iran. Bush's dream of delivering a lightning
stroke against Iran and thus leaving his imprint on history is going
up in smoke.
What can he do in order to leave any
positive legacy at all? The default alternative is Israeli-Palestinian
peace. Perhaps he will now give stronger backing to poor Condoleezza.
Perhaps he himself will get more involved. Fact: he is soon going
to visit Israel for the first since entering the White House.
True, this effort has not much chance
of success, but people in Jerusalem are worried nonetheless. That's
just what we need - Bush acting like that anti-Semite, Jimmy Carter,
who twisted Begin's arm and forced him to make peace with Egypt!
So what to do? One can instruct Israeli
diplomats abroad to redouble their efforts to convince the governments
that the situation has not changed, that one must fight against
the Iranian bomb, whether it exists or not. But tell that to the
Russians and the Chinese! The world's governments are happy to see
the end of Bush's pressure - all except that happy couple, Nicolas
Sarkozy and Angela Merkel, the new White House poodles now Tony
Blair has gone.THE NEW situation poses a thorny dilemma for Ehud
Olmert.
On the way back from Annapolis, he
uttered some amazing statements. If the "two states solution
collapses," he declared, "the State of Israel is finished".
Nobody in the peace camp has yet dared to go as far as that.
Does he believe what he says, or is
it just a new spin? That is the question that is now dominating
the discourse in Israel. In other words: is he just trying to win
time, or is he really going to work for a peace settlement?
All indications suggest that he is
in no position to take any step whatsoever. If he tries to carry
out the first phase of the Road Map and dismantle some settlement
outposts, he will face not only the determined opposition of the
settlers and their supporters, and the silent (but highly effective)
opposition of the military, but also obstruction by his government
colleagues. Before the first outpost is dismantled, his coalition
will break apart.
Olmert has no other coalition handy.
Ehud Barak has been trying again and again to outflank him on the
right and cannot be relied upon in a crisis. The Labor Party is
a chaotic, spineless and unprincipled body. The shrunken Meretz
party has a faction of only five Knesset members, four of whom are
competing with each other for the party leadership. The ten members
of the Arab factions (that's what they are generally called, even
though one Hadash Knesset member is a Jew) are outcasts, and no
"Zionist" government could be seen to rely openly on their
support. And in Olmert's own faction there are several extreme-right
members who would obstruct any peace effort.
In such a situation, the natural tendency
of a real politician like Olmert is to do nothing, to issue pronouncement
left and right (in both senses) and try to gain time.
This week, the government announced
plans to build 300 new homes in the odious Har Homa settlement,
near Jerusalem. For someone like me, who has spent many days and
nights demonstrating against the building of this particular settlement,
that is bitter news indeed. It certainly does not indicate a turn
for the better.
On the other hand, I have heard an
interesting thesis from one of Olmert's inner circle. According
to this, knowing that he is going to lose power, Olmert may tell
himself: if I must fall, why not enter history as somebody who has
sacrificed himself on the altar of a lofty principle, instead of
just vanishing as a good-for-nothing political hack?
If he has no other way out, he might
choose this solution - particularly as his immediate family is pushing
him in this direction.
I would evaluate this possibility
as "unlikely" - but stranger things have happened.
In any case, perhaps the peace forces
should overcome their understandable reservations and try to influence
public opinion in a way that would help Olmert turn in this direction.EITHER
WAY, one thing is certain: that son of a bitch, Ahmadinejad, has
screwed us again.
He has stolen our most precious possession:
the Iranian Atomic Threat.
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