Letters? What Letters?

Netanyahu to a group of Israeli settlers in 2001: "I know what America is. America is a thing you can move very easily, move it in the right direction."

***

Yet another Israeli-monkey-on-America's-back story:

How four US presidents, including Obama and Trump, helped protect Israel's nuclear arsenal, Adam Entous, The New Yorker, 18/6/18)

"When a delegation of senior Israeli officials visited the Trump White House on February 13, 2017, they wanted to discuss several issues with their new American counterparts. Topping the list was a secret letter concerning a subject the Israelis had promised the Americans never to discuss publicly - Israel's undeclared nuclear arsenal. In a recent piece for The New Yorker, I described a tense scene in the West Wing as the Israeli delegation - which included Israel's Ambassador to the United States, Ron Dermer - tried to get the letter signed by President Donald Trump. By all accounts, the American Administration was eager to please the Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, whom Trump had promised to lavish with unprecedented support. But, at that chaotic moment, Trump's aides felt blindsided by the Israeli request. They knew nothing about the existence of any letters and were confused by the sense of urgency coming from the Israelis. The Americans had other pressing concerns - later that day, Michael Flynn, the national security adviser, would hand in his resignation letter - and they didn't appreciate feeling as though the Israelis were telling them what to do. 'This is our fuckin' house,' one of the Americans snapped.

"The White House's reaction was understandable. There had been a similar moment of surprise eight years earlier, when Barack Obama became President and received a similar request. The very existence of the letters had been a closely held secret. Only a select group of senior American officials, in three previous Administrations, knew of the letters and how Israeli leaders interpreted them as effectively an American pledge not to press the Jewish state to give up its nuclear weapons so long as it continued to face existential threats in the region. (American officials say the letters weren't that explicit and fell short of constituting a binding commitment.) When Trump's aides moved into the White House, they didn't find any copies of the previous letters left behind by their predecessors. The documents had been sent to the archives. The Israelis, however, had copies.

"Israel crossed the nuclear threshold on the eve of the Six-Day War, in 1967. At that time, it had three nuclear devices, according to Avner Cohen, a nuclear historian... Israeli efforts to build a bomb at the nuclear complex in Dimona had been a source of tension with Washington for nearly a decade, But, by the fall of 1969, when Golda Meir, Israel's Prime Minister, met with Richard Nixon at the White House, Israel's possession of nuclear weapons was a fait accompli and the two sides reached an unwritten understanding: the Israelis would not declare, test, or threaten to use their nuclear weapons, and the Americans would not pressure the Israelis to sign a landmark international nuclear-nonproliferation treaty known as the NPT. (Israel never became a signatory, and US efforts to inspect Dimona stopped.)

"Successive Israeli governments abided by the arrangement... often referred to as Israel's 'policy of ambiguity.' A joint document describing the agreement was never prepared. Instead, each side relied on its own notes, a former official said. President Gerald Ford abided by Nixon's deal... The Israelis first started to feel as though the unwritten Meir-Nixon arrangement was no longer sufficient during the Presisidency of George H.W. Bush, when, after the first Gulf War, in 1991, world powers talked about the possibility of creating a zone in the Middle East free of weapons of mass destruction, including nuclear arms.

"The first iteration of the secret letter was drafted during the Clinton Administration, as part of an agreement for Israel's participation in the 1998 Wye River negotiations with the Palestinians. In the letter, according to former officials, President Bill Clinton assured the Jewish state that no future American arms-control initiative would 'detract' from Israel's 'deterrent' capabilities, an oblique but clear reference to its nuclear arsenal. Later, Israeli officials inserted language to make clear to Washington that Israel would 'defend itself, by itself,' and that it would, therefore, not consider the American nuclear arsenal to be a substitute for Israeli nuclear arms. George W. Bush, when he became president, followed Clinton's lead, signing a similar letter, former officials told me.

"Then, in 2009, a new President, Barack Obama, took office. Almost from the start, Netanyahu was distrustful of Obama, and vice versa. 'With Obama, we were all crazy,' an Israeli official told me. That April, Obama delivered an aspirational speech in Prague, setting out 'America's commitment to seek the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons.' Obama's advisers subsequently learned 'how paranoid Bibi was that Obama was going to try to take away Israel's nuclear weapons,' a former US official told me, adding, 'Of course, that was never our intent.' Obama signed an updated version of the letter in May, 2009.

"While Israeli officials interpreted the letters as an effective commitment by successive American Presidents not to pressure Israel regarding its nuclear arsenal, US officials told me that they viewed the letters as less categorical. 'It was not a blanket 'We'll never ask Israel to give up its nuclear weapons.' It was more 'We accepted the Israeli argument that they're not going to disarm under current conditions in the Middle East,' a former US official told me...

"Ahead of a nonproliferation conference in 2010, Netanyahu became concerned, once again, that Israel would come under international pressure to disarm. In response, Obama made a public statement that echoed the contents of the secret letters, without revealing their existence. 'We discussed issues that arose out of the nuclear nonproliferation conference,' Obama said, after meeting with Netanyahu on July 6, 2010. 'And I reiterated to the Prime Minister that there is no change in US policy when it comes to these issues. We strongly believe that, given its size, its history, the region that it's in, and the threats that are levelled against... it, that Israel has unique security requirements. It's got to be able to respond to threats or any combination of threats in the region. And that's why we remain unwavering in our commitment to Israel's security. And the United States will never ask Israel to take any steps that would undermine their security interests'."

Dennis the Zionist Menace

Dennis Ross, you may remember, was Bill Clinton's Middle East 'peace' envoy. Mearsheimer and Walt see him as an integral of Israel's lobby in the United States, noting that, although Ross has "occasionally criticized specific Israeli actions," he "believes that the United States should give Israel substantial diplomatic, economic, and military support even when Israel takes actions the United States opposes" and that he "has devoted a significant amount of his professional life to encouraging this sort of support." (The Israel Lobby & US Foreign Policy, 2007, p 114)

Little wonder then at the Israel first content of his near 2-page spread in Saturday's Australian. Some gems - rebutted:

"The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is essentially one of two national movements competing for the same space."

No it isn't. The 'conflict' is essentially one of an indigenous people, denied self-determination in its ancestral home by the British, then set upon, driven out, or otherwise occupied, by a European settler-colonial movement - Zionism - introduced and fostered by the British." (Give them hope & peace, 19/5/18)

"In my talk [in 2005 to a few hundred Palestinians in Gaza before the Israeli withdrawal], I said that Palestinians had never been able to control their own destiny - the Arabs determined what would be done in 1948."

What rubbish! A US-manipulated UNGA set the scene in 1947 by disregarding the right of the Palestinians to determine the fate of their country and partitioning it into a Jewish and an Arab states. This, of course, gave the Zionist forces in Palestine the pretext they needed to overrun as much of Palestine as they could, and drive out as many Palestinians as they could, without any regard whatever for the borders laid down by the UN partition plan.

"Hamas said the protests would be peaceful even as it called them Demonstrations for Return - return to Palestinian homes in Israel."

To begin with, Hamas didn't organise the protests. And there is here the incredible suggestion that merely calling for the right of the Palestinians to return to the homes and lands stolen from them by Israel in 1948, and mobilising protests in support of that right, is enough to render those protests not peaceful.

"But, of course, those being mobilised don't have homes to go back to in Israel... "

And why is that Mr Ross?

"... and Israel is not the country it was in 1948."

Well, ain't that a COMPELLING reason for the Palestinians to kept in their Gaza Ghetto box?

"Hamas's leaders [want] to stigmatise Israel before the world as a way of also weakening Israel's ability to engage in self-defense and discredit it internationally."

So let me get this straight. Gunning down defenceless Palestinian protesters (we won't even mention journalists) with sniper rifles is self defence. And it's the protesters, not Israel's own actions, who are discrediting Israel. Right...

Ross pees on us but would have us think it's raining.

Bill Clinton's Handshake Charade

However appalling, Trump is really only the tip of the iceberg of American ignorance and narcissism. Take our latest US visitor, for example, Clinton/Obama diplomat Dennis Ross, currently wowing them at Murdoch's Australian:

"Ross grew up in a non-religious Californian household, the son of a Catholic father and Jewish mother. At 19, inspired by the Six-Day War, he became religiously Jewish." (Long road to Israeli-Palestinian peace littered with broken deals and lost will, Brad Norington, 15/7/17)

Note that Ross was radicalised at 19. It seems that, in the US, such radicalisation, from all American boy to Zionist fanatic, is the perfect qualification and starting point for a career in US-style Middle East diplomacy. Sort of puts Jared Kushner in perspective, doesn't it?

And here's the pinnacle of that career, according to Norington:

"During an impressive career, Ross... helped facilitate the historic White House handshake between Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat and Israel's Yitzhak Rabin."

Leaving aside discussion of the endless peace-process charade, and the preposterous, childish idea of Clinton's that this then (1993) 76-year-old colonial running sore could be solved by a cheap theatrical handshake, rather than by the hard yards of a decolonisation process and the rendering of justice to Palestine's dispossessed and occupied, let's just look at the minutiae of this supposedly "impressive" achievement, as described elsewhere by Ross himself.  Here he is interviewed by Jason M. Breslow of PBS's Frontline program (6/1/16):

Were you in the Rose Garden when [President Clinton] forged the handshake between [Yasser] Arafat and Rabin?

-Yes.

Tell me about that.

-There is an interesting back story to this... So we [Ross and Secretary of State Warren Christopher] get a call from Rabin... and he says, 'Look there's been a breakthrough with the PLO'... still... he's skeptical. He wants to know what our reaction to this is going to be. Well, our reaction is, this is a historic breakthrough between Israel and the PLO, two national movements competing for the same space, and for the first time they're prepared to recognize each other."

[Note here the false framing. The reality is otherwise. These are not two, long-resident communities living in one patch, in some kind of parity, but struggling to get along. This is the old story of a foreign, usurping settler-colonial movement vs an indigenous resistance movement trying to hold on to or reclaim its ancestral homeland.]

- Now [Israeli foreign minister Shimon] Peres tells us... that there should be a meeting at the White House to sign a Declaration of Principles, but it's too much for the Israeli public to see Arafat there. It's just too much to take.

[Yes, it's simply too much for the colons to stomach their PM meeting with the leader of the people they've been slicing and dicing for the past 76 years - eeeuw! What to do?]

- So it should be Peres and Abu Mazen [Arafat adviser, Mahmoud Abbas] who would come. We actually don't question this...

[Of course you don't, you've been a card-carrying Zionist since 1967 for Christ's sake! Those sniffy colons are your volk! Notice how, even in 1993, the Israelis had their eye on Abbas as a stooge?]

- ... but when we raise it with Clinton... he simply dismisses what we've told him, and immediately leaves the impression that if Arafat wants to come, he's welcome. And he's right... because his instinct is, the only way to bind the two leaders to this is to have this colossal event where they're kind of obligated before the world... We're telling him how uneasy Rabin is, first to even be there and secondly the idea that he's going to shake hands with this guy who, in Rabin's mind, is responsible for  all sorts of acts of terror that, for him, are just very hard to swallow. It's difficult for Rabin to overcome this.

[Notice the fact that Rabin's hands are covered in 76 years of Palestinian blood nowhere occurs to Ross as a possible difficulty for Arafat or the Palestinians? This is America's idea of honest brokerage.]

- Now Clinton kind of raises this in private with the two of them before they go out.

[Bill doesn't want anyone spoiling his show!]

So they both agree to kind of come, and they're hanging around the Oval Office?

- Well, you come in advance, before we go out.

OK

- To the last minute, Rabin is insisting that Arafat can't come in anything that looks like a uniform.

[And of course Ross cannot help but oblige. His Master's Voice after all:]

- We're telling Arafat, 'You can't come with a -- you don't bring a weapon.' You know, he always had a pistol. 'You don't bring a weapon to the White House.' So they come in, and the president talks to both leaders. He is already encouraging them...

[We wouldn't dare tell Rabin...]

Have they met before?

- No.

How are they with each other?

- Rabin is very uneasy. The idea of personally shaking hands with with this guy is physically difficult for him.

[With this guy...?!]

- He couldn't hide his feelings... So here is Clinton, who sees this guy give this remarkable speech on the one hand, and physically, it's hard for him to shake hands with this guy. So the iconic photograph - he literally envelops them with his arms. But he knows he has to create that image... to make peace, and how can you do that if you're not prepared to shake hands? (pbs.org)

Clinton Emailed

From John Pilger's interview with Julian Assange, Emails show Clinton Foundation funders also bankroll ISIS: the explosive interview with John Pilger, newmatilda.com, 5/11/16:

Pilger: The emails that give evidence of access for money and how Hillary Clinton herself benefited from this and how she's benefiting politically are quite extraordinary. I'm thinking of when the Qatari representative was given 5 minutes with Bill Clinton for a million dollar cheque.

Assange: And 12m from Morocco... For Hillary Clinton to attend [a party]

Pilger: In terms of US foreign policy, that's where the emails are most revealing, where they show the direct connection between Hillary Clinton and the foundation of jihadism, of ISIS, in the Middle East. Can you talk about how the emails demonstrate [that] those who are meant to be fighting the ISIS jihadists are actually those who have helped create it?

Assange: There's an early 2014 email from Hillary Clinton... to her campaign manager John Podesta that states ISIS is funded by the governments of Saudi Arabia and Qatar. This is the most significant email in the whole collection, and... because Saudi and Qatari money is spread all over the Clinton Foundation. Even the US government agrees that some Saudi figures have been supporting ISIS. But the dodge has always been that it's just some rogue princes, using their cut of the oil money to do whatever they like, but that, actually, the government disapproves. But that email says that no, it is the governments of Saudi Arabia and Qatar that have been funding ISIS.

Pilger: The Saudis, Qataris, Moroccans, Bahrainis... were giving all this money to the Clinton Foundation while Hillary Clinton was secretary of state, and the State Department was approving massive arms sales, particularly to Saudi Arabia.

Assange: Under Hillary Clinton the world's largest ever arms deal was made with Saudi Arabia, [worth] more than $80 billion. In fact, during her tenure as secretary of state, total arms exports from the United States, in terms of dollar value, have doubled.

Pilger: Of course, the consequence of that is that ISIS has been created largely with money from the very people who are giving money to the Clinton Foundation.

Assange: Yes.

(Assange goes on to reveal that Clinton is the public face of Wall Street and that "half the Obama cabinet was basically nominated by a representative from City Bank.")

Pilger: Why was she so enthusiastic about the destruction of Libya? What have the emails told us about what happened there, because Libya is such a source for so much of the mayhem now in Syria... and it was almost Hillary Clinton's invasion?

Assange: Libya... was Hillary Clinton's war. Obama initially opposed it, Hillary Clinton championed it. That's documented throughout her emails. She'd put her favorite agent, Sidney Blumenthal onto it. More than 1,700 out of the 33,000 of the emails we've published are just about Libya. It wasn't about cheap oil. She saw the removal of Gaddafi... as something she could use in her run-up to election as president. In late 2011, an internal document called the Libya Tick Tock was produced for her. It's a chronology of how she was the central figure in the destruction of the Libyan state, which resulted in around 40,000 deaths in Libya. Jihadists, ISIS moved in, leading to the European refugee crisis... As Gaddafi said at the time: 'What do these Europeans think they're doing, trying to bomb and destroy Libya? There's going to be a flood of migrants and jihadists out of Africa and into Europe,' and that's exactly what happened.

Still Controversial After All These Years

The SBS World News bulletin at 6:30 tonight ran an item on Syria by ABC America. In reporting the reluctance of US officials and politicians to put 'boots on the ground' there, despite the Syrian opposition "begging" for this, the reporter, Reena Ninan*, sought to explain the US administration's reluctance to get more heavily involved in Syria by referencing the US response to the al-Qaeda bombing of its embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998:

"Following the US embassy bombings in Africa, a cruise missile strike was launched on an alleged Sudanese chemical weapons factory in 1998 after soil samples came back positive for chemicals used in VX [nerve agent] but that intel. turned out to be controversial..."

Rubbish! There is no controversy regarding this episode whatever:

"On August 17, 1998, Clinton went on national television and admitted that he had had a sexual relationship with [Monica] Lewinsky. Three days later, Clinton ordered the cruise missile attack against al-Qaeda camps in Afghanistan and against the pharmaceutical plant in Khartoum, where the CIA believed al-Qaeda might be running a chemical weapons factory based on a soil sample scooped up by an agent that tested positive for a chemical component of VX nerve gas. Much of the 'actionable' intelligence that Clinton had relied on in these strikes proved to be faulty. The CIA was not able to establish that a high-level al-Qaeda meeting had in fact taken place at Khost. And the Al-Shifa Pharmaceutical factory proved to have no connection to either al-Qaeda or VX. It had been, however, a vital facility for producing desperately needed drugs for Sudan's civilian population and its destruction resulted in further deprivation for the Sudanese." (A World of Trouble: America in the Middle East, Patrick Tyler, 2009, pp 479-480)

It seems to be that, for corporate talking heads such as Ninan, USraeli terrorism is always and forever controversial but never the Arab variety.

[*Middle East correspondent for Fox News, 2007-20012]

Why Arafat Went Berserk

Instead of getting solidly behind the implementation of UN resolutions on the Middle East conflict without fear or favour, Western politicians have allowed themselves to be led up the garden path by the US-initiated, so-called peace process, which climaxed during the presidency of Israel luvvie, Bill Clinton. Embraced in one form or another by every subsequent incumbent of the White House, it goes without saying that the only beneficiary of the PP charade has been Israel, which has essentially used it to divert a gullible West while ramping up its colonization of the occupied Palestinian territories.

I was moved to reflect thus on the whole sorry PP business while flicking through The Clinton Tapes: Wrestling History with the President (2009) by Taylor Branch. One passage in particular struck me. But let me first set the scene. The year is 2000. Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak and Palestinian President Yasser Arafat are shacked up with Clinton at Camp David and the matter of who gets what in Jerusalem is up for discussion:

"In hard negotiation, said Clinton, the Palestinians were willing to internationalize the walled Old City, but Barak baulked out of distrust of the United Nations. Israelis felt outnumbered and consistently mistreated in most world bodies, especially that one, and Barak floated his own proposal instead. Israel, while retaining formal sovereignty over the Old City, would concede a zone of Palestinian control through its Muslim quarter to the high stone plaza at the heart, known to Muslims as Haram al-Sharif ('Noble Sanctuary') and to Jews as the Temple Mount. In return Barak proposed a gesture to compensate religious Israelis. On specified occasions, Jews would be permitted to offer prayers on the Temple Mount for the first time in nearly 2,000 years, since Rome had destroyed Herod's Temple after a first-century Jewish rebellion. 'Arafat went berserk,' said the president, and his fellow Palestinians cried that Jews never before had dared such blasphemy. Even during the military occupation since 1967, Israeli police had prevented Jews from congregating to pray on the Temple Mount, where Muslims had managed continuous religious observance since the year 1187." (p 612)

Of course Arafat went berserk. He could see the thin end of a wedge making rapidly for his jugular. Anyhow, so Branch's story goes, Clinton decided to deploy what he thought would be a killer argument with the Palestinian president:

"To Arafat, alone, he pleaded for counterintuitive understanding of a vulnerability that coexisted with Israel's military dominance. Clinton and Arafat belonged to religious cultures fortunate to preserve many ancient shrines. Christians had the Vatican, Bethlehem and the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, among others. Muslims revered the Kaaba in Mecca and the Tomb of the Prophet in Medina, plus the Dome of the Rock and Al-Aqsa Mosque there on Jerusalem's Haram. Jews, lacking such treasures, centered their faith memories upon a fragment of the Western Wall beneath the destroyed temples of Solomon and Herod. Devout Israelis hoped one day to find their biblical Ark of the Covenant underneath by excavation. Such ruins and relics were all Jews had, but they meant no less than did two of the glorious places sacred to Muslims on that same central spot in the Old City. Surely, the negotiators could figure a way to honor differences born of the same yearning." (ibid p 613)

Now there's no mention in Branch's book of Arafat's response to Clinton. However, my guess is he went berserk - again. After all, he wasn't only hearing a reiteration of Barak's talking point, but as a Palestinian who'd heard it all before, was he perhaps also hearing an echo of one of Zionism's oldest and most enraging talking points. This is from 1946:

"Another line of argument that maddened the Palestine Arabs was what may be called the 'you have so much and I want so little' line. The Arabs had all the Arab world and the Jews only wanted Palestine, a small corner of that world. Was it so much to ask for? Could not the Arabs be generous and let them have it? Could not the Palestine Arabs find a home in Syria or Iraq? To understand how the Palestinian Arabs felt about this argument, it is only necessary to imagine how the people of Devon or Cornwall would greet a suggestion that they should surrender their part of England to the Jews and find a new home in Scotland." (An Arab Tells His Story: A Study in Loyalties, Edward Atiyah, p 202)