Binyamin Netanyahu’s Dangerous Vision

By Richard H. Curtiss

"There is only one thing more dangerous than an intelligence agency with a license to kill, and that is such an organization in the hands of a prime minister like Binyamin Netanyahu."

So writes former Mossad case officer Victor Ostrovsky in an article on the facing page of this issue of the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs dealing with what the Israeli press is calling "the Amman affair." Astonishingly, Ostrovsky pointed out in an interview with this writer, the Israeli prime minister is treating the bungled assassination attempt in Jordan against the political leader of Hamas, the Islamic Resistance Movement, not as the biggest failure in the troubled history of Israel's clandestine services, nor as a grave political miscalculation.

Instead, says Ostrovsky, who left the Mossad in disgust and returned to his native Canada several years ago, Netanyahu is treating the affair as an opportunity to get rid of a bitter political opponent, Mossad director Danny Yatom.

Israel's "Comeback Kid"

"Netanyahu thrives on such crises," Ostrovsky explained. "He thinks of himself as Israel's 'comeback kid.' The lower his fortunes sink, the higher he bounces back. Imagine, this is the third time the Israeli government has been caught issuing falsified Canadian passports to members of its hit squads for assassinations in friendly foreign countries. [Previously documented actions were in Norway and Cyprus.] Yet, although Canada has withdrawn its ambassador, David Berger, from Israel in protest, Netanyahu has refused to promise Canadian Foreign Minister Lloyd Axworthy that Israel will not do it again!"

Although Ostrovsky, a Canadian citizen, predicted that in retaliation Canada might lower the level of its diplomatic representation in Israel, history indicates otherwise. Canadian political leaders have their own problems with a well-heeled and militantly pro-Israel Jewish community that punishes politicians who criticize Israel by financing political opponents.

Bad as the Canadian situation is, it is only a pale reflection of the fear with which American political leaders regard leaders of national Jewish organizations—many of whom seem more dedicated to Jewish nationalism than Netanyahu himself—and Israel's militant supporters in the U.S. media. Some of the latter seem so deeply plugged into the U.S. government that they can produce transcripts of private telephone conversations and information or documents from the Justice Department, the FBI, the Internal Revenue Service, and from local police departments designed to embarrass U.S. political leaders who dare to criticize Israel.

"There are certain kinds of limits that do not exist here."

To illustrate this power, prior to her recent visit to the Middle East, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright asked Rep. Benjamin Gilman, chairman of the House International Relations Committee, to refrain during her trip from strongly pro-Israel resolutions or statements that might undermine American diplomacy. Instead of complying, Gilman allegedly informed the Israeli Embassy of her confidential request.

Then, while Albright was in Israel, Israeli President Ezer Weizman told her privately that in order to salvage the peace process the U.S. would have to "knock heads," meaning Netanyahu's. Even before she had left Israel, Weizman's private remark had been made public by State Department press spokesman James Rubin. (Weizman is a former Likud member himself, but he is a dove compared to Israel's current superhawk prime minister.) Therefore Weizman could only say weakly during his own subsequent trip to the U.S. that he thought it was "rude" of a member of Albright's State Department entourage to make public his embarrassingly frank and private remark about Netanyahu.

Even more recently, according to Ostrovsky, in the course of emergency conversations on the "Amman incident" between Clinton and King Hussein and Crown Prince Hassan of Jordan, Clinton warned that Netanyahu is "an impossible man to deal with." That, too, quickly found its way into the Israeli press and undoubtedly will be remembered by America's media and congressional Likudniks.

Clinton may have had that in mind on Oct. 7 when, during a White House joint press conference with visiting President Weizman, the U.S. president was asked to comment on assassination as a tool of foreign policy. Stiffly Clinton noted that U.S. intelligence agencies are barred by law from carrying out assassinations. But then, instead of calling upon Israel to enact a similar law, he shifted awkwardly to calling for renewed anti-terrorism measures to put the peace process back on track.

Even with the cooperation of the mainstream U.S. press, however, Netanyahu will have difficulty shifting all of the blame for the failed Mossad operation away from himself and onto Yatom. In fact, Ostrovsky's detailed account of the planning for the operation leads to exactly the opposite conclusion.

The bungled operation led to the return to Israel of the two triggermen being held by Jordanian authorities and also of other members of the hit squad, who had taken refuge in the Israeli Embassy in Amman. In exchange, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, the 61-year-old quadriplegic and nearly blind spiritual leader of the Hamas movement, was released and allowed to return, via Amman, to Gaza after eight years in an Israeli prison. Also released were 20 Hamas members accused of "terrorism," with 50 more supposedly still to come.

Predictably, Netanyahu's Labor Party rivals called for his resignation, more because he had botched the operation than because of its damage to the peace process. Their position was best articulated by Ze'ev Schiff, the prestigious military affairs analyst for Israel's Ha'aretz newspaper, who wrote: "It is inconceivable that a failure of such magnitude and such strategic blindness be allowed to pass without those responsible resigning or being fired."

Conspicuously absent, however, was any soul-searching by either major Israeli party as to how their country can ever expect to be integrated peacefully into a region in which it has carried out assassinations at will, in both friendly and unfriendly states, for half a century.

Linking this lack of revulsion at the concept of an assassination in the capital of a country with which Israel signed a formal peace agreement only three years ago to Israel's unblinking legalization of torture in the interrogation of arrested Palestinians, Israeli political scientist Yaron Ezrahi commented:

"It relates to the torture in the sense that there are certain kinds of limits that do not exist here, even though they're accepted elsewhere...It is based on a certain kind of metaphysics, and the metaphysics is there must be a penalty for killing Jews in this world, and if God doesn't take care of it we can do it on his behalf."

Clearly, therefore, Netanyahu has no intention of resigning, and other effects of the operation cannot be predicted. Some optimistic Israelis and Americans said the peace process might be strengthened by the weakening or possible resignation of its principal enemy, Netanyahu. However, this seems extremely unlikely since its other greatest enemy, the Hamas movement, has been immeasurably strengthened, at Arafat's expense.

Noted Ostrovsky in his article in this issue: "A leader must have a plan or a road map for a journey that, despite its twists and turns, will bring the leader and his people to a pre-determined destiny. In other words, a vision. Yitzhak Rabin was such a leader. Binyamin Netanyahu is not. His lack of personal integrity and common sense further complicates the matter. His opponents are unaware, as is he himself, of what it is he really wants."

It's a sobering assessment of the man who may have up to 400 nuclear warheads at his disposal, and chemical weapons and the means of delivering them to Arab capitals as well.

If he really believes that whatever he wants to do, he is doing on God's behalf, the sky's the limit. He might well decide that, in order to make his next comeback, what he wants is war with one or more of his Arab neighbors.

He has more than enough nuclear warheads for each Arab capital, and the means to deliver them. And if his American mentors object, he has bombs enough for them too—and also the means. In that case the word for the means is sayanim—Israel's voluntary helpers in the Jewish diaspora so vividly described in Ostrovsky's third book, The Other Side of Deception.

Here is a heavily armed prime minister, dangerously out of control, with one of the world's largest air forces at his disposal. If he concludes his people, or his government, are in grave danger, he literally can blow up the world, or large and heavily populated parts of it—and may believe he has a license from God to do so. He should be curbed, and it's time America's craven president, its corrupt legislators, and its co-opted journalists abandon their self-imposed silence and say so.

Richard Curtiss is the executive editor of the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs.