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“His greatest concern,” Bruck writes, “is to protect Israel, by strengthening the United States-Israel relationship.” When Bill Clinton was President and Ehud Barak was Israel’s Prime Minister, Bruck writes, “Saban, who was close to both men, occasionally provided a back channel for communications.” During the Camp David negotiations, Saban told Bruck, “I was involved, but only on the periphery. If Barak could not say some things to Clinton to his face, he would ask me to convey a message, and vice versa.” In early March, shortly before Vice President Joe Biden’s trip to Israel, Saban was part of a group of fifteen prominent Jews invited to the White House. “Most were leaders of Jewish organizations or close Biden supporters—and then there was Saban,” Bruck writes. In the meeting, Saban told Biden that the Administration “may want to consider the fact that their relationship with their Israeli wife is more valuable than their newfound relationship with their Arab mistress.”” (thanks Rania)

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MEPGS: Excerpts:

Continuing tensions between the United States and Israel were on display this week, first as Prime Minister Netanyahu skipped the Nuclear Security Summit in Washington and then in some comments by President Obama in a press conference at the end of the Washington meetings.  Ostensibly, the Israeli Prime Minister's "no-show" was attributed to a reluctance to Israel being singled out for its undeclared nuclear arsenal.  However, a number of well-informed observers argue that still unresolved issues left over from his less than successful visit here just three weeks ago led him to conclude it was not an auspicious time to be in town.  As one US official put it, "The last thing `Bibi' needed was another lecture from the Administration."      Adding to tensions between the two erstwhile allies have been the repeated hints from unnamed "senior Administration officials" that the President is considering abandonment of his "incremental" approach to Arab-Israeli peace making in favor of tabling an American plan.  Reports of this new thinking first surfaced in the New York Times and the Washington Post.  Recent comments by CENTCOM commander, General David Petreus

 to the effect that the long standing Arab-Israeli imbroglio exacerbated problems for the US military in the region were echoed by President Obama in this week's press conference when he called it "a vital national security interest of the United States," not just the parties themselves to resolve the conflict.      However, for the time being, according to a number of reliable sources, there has been no decision to change the current "step-by-step" approach being pursued by Special Envoy George Mitchell.  Moreover, key State Department officials sourly note that in his remarks at this week's press conference, the President invoked the words of former Secretary of State James Baker, "...the United States can't impose solutions unless the participants...are willing to break out of old patterns of antagonism.  "We can't want it more than they do."      So, veteran US officials and well-placed diplomats say it still may be some time before the President puts his own plan on the table.  At the National Security Council, senior advisor Dennis Ross, a long time advocate of an incremental approach, has become active as a back channel to the Israelis [much to the chagrin of State Department officials and Mitchell's staff].  US officials also note that the responses demanded to the questions put to Netanyahu go unanswered.  "We have told him [Netanyahu] that we need to know your strategic vision and how to get there," says one well-placed US official.  "We have also said we want a clear understanding of what your plans are.  And we say we are expecting an answer by `such and such' date.  But the date keeps changing."      US analysts say Netanyahu, in the words of one State Department official "...is paying the price of his coalition."  The current Israeli government is almost exclusively hard line.  And it will certainly fall, should Netanyahu, for example, agree to a settlement freeze that includes Jerusalem.  Some in the Administration also argue that pushing Netanyahu to make concessions will only cause the Arab side to make more demands.  However, if, as many expect, the current track leads nowhere, there is expected to be increasing pressure, according to State Department officials, not only from President Obama but also secretary of State Clinton, to put a US plan on the table.  As one State Department insider says, recalling the health care reform debate, "Incrementalism is not a game the President likes to play."  Recalls another senior Clinton aide, "Remember it was Bill Clinton, at Camp David, who put forth his own plan.      Meanwhile, US, Israeli and allied officials are furiously comparing notes and sharing intelligence of a burgeoning problem of Syrian supplied weapons to Hezbollah.  Last month tensions reached a peak when Israel asserted that Syria was on the verge of "crossing a red line" with the supply of advanced ground-to- ground and possibly ground-to-air missiles to its Hezbollah allies in Lebanon.  Representations were made to Syria, indirectly by Israel and directly by the US and several European governments.  At the same time, Senate Foreign Committee Chairman, John Kerry, delivered what one US official called a "consistent message" during a visit to Damascus.  The upshot apparently is that tensions have abated somewhat but one well- placed source, using a classic diplomatic turn of phrase, described the current situation as having a "residual elevated level of concern."      State Department officials would very much like to have the new US Ambassador to Syria, Robert Ford, in place, as soon as possible.  He sailed through his confirmation hearings but State Department officials fear his confirmation will be put on hold as a result of Syria's new shipment of arms to Hezbollah.  "This is exactly the time we need an ambassador in Damascus," said one frustrated State Department official this week.  What makes his presence there all the more necessary is the obvious distaste with which State Department officials feel when dealing with his Syrian counterpart in Washington, Imad Moustapha.      If further arming of Hezbollah leads to hostilities, it will surely center partly, if not exclusively on Lebanon.  And the Lebanese these days have troubles of their own, as the government of Saad Hariri, in the view of US officials, continues to underperform.  "Saad frittered away his victory and now is presiding over a government that lurches from Syria to Saudi Arabia to the US [where a visit to Washington is expected late next month]," said one veteran State Department official.  Further complicating matters for the young Prime Minister is the work of the International Tribunal looking into the 2005 assassination of his father, Rafik.  While prosecutors are not officially informing US officials of the status of their investigation, it is widely believed that they will, by year's end, issue indictments of several members of Hezbollah for complicity in the killing.      Yet another issue confronting Lebanon is its position on the proposed resolution for further sanctions against Iran.  With China now fully engaged in negotiations, a resolution could well be brought before the United Nations Security Council next month, when Lebanon, a rotating member, will assume the Presidency.  The Hariri government is already under pressure to resist this resolution by Hezbollah (Iran's protege).  US officials, are, however unsympathetic.  "We warned them to be careful about what they wished for," says one State Department official.  This official asserted that he preferred Lebanon to be "on the hot seat", since it could give the government a better excuse for going along with a resolution certain to gain overwhelming Council support.       While the US leads the charge on Iranian sanctions, it has seemingly left the political field in Iraq.  Perhaps that is because, as one State Department official says, We are only at the beginning of the game."  Still, that has not stopped some veteran US analysts from handicapping the outcome, which may be as far away as Ramadan in August.  The betting among these officials is that there will be a governing party that includes significant Sunni participation and excludes the radical cleric Muqtada-al-Sadr, but is, of course, led by the shia majority.  "They may all be trooping off to Iran, but at the end of the day they know they have no choice but to be in this together as Iraqis," says one veteran US official.

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Laura Rosen’ on Aaron Miller/ here

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Politico/ here

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Back in the late 1980s, when I was working in Washington as a writer/researcher on the Middle East, with several years of experience as a Beirut-based correspondent for The Christian Science Monitor and other serious MSM outlets, and two books (on the PLO and Lebanon) already to my name, there was another researcher in town, about my age, who was much better plugged-in to the corridors of power and to sources of seemingly endless funding than I was. His name was Martin Indyk. He hadn’t actually done any major writing or research projects by then. But oh, he had been deputy research director at AIPAC! (Working for the infamous Steve Rosen.) And he parlayed that into getting funding from some big California-based money people to set up his own, always staunchly pro-Israeli “think tank”, the so-called Washington Institute for Near East Policy…

Like me, Indyk had been born in England. He arrived in Washington via a childhood and education in Australia. I came via my seven years of on-the-ground-experience in Lebanon and other Arab countries. Then in 1993, on the eve of Bill Clinton’s inauguration as president, Indyk received extraordinarily rapid naturalization as a U.S. citizen and immediately went to work in Clinton’s White House as his senior adviser on Middle East policy.

You see, when it comes to the pro-Israeli crowd, having other nationalities or dual or triple nationalities is an easy-come-easy-go business inside the U.S. political elite. Australian to American? No problem– provided you’re well-connected with the pro-Israeli in-crowd, like Indyk. American to Israeli? Again, a matter of moments if you happen to be long-time “American” scholar turned suddenly Israeli diplomatic rep, Michael Oren.

At the time, when I wrote something about the rapidity of Indyk’s acquisition of U.S. citizenship, he picked up the phone and started screaming at me, accusing me of being an “anti-Semite.” “Oh,” I asked him, “I assume we are talking on the record here?”

He slammed down the phone. What a baby he was. I don’t think we’ve spoken since then.

So… Indyk went on to have a long and notable career working in the Clinton administration, first as the top “Middle East expert” in the Clinton White House and then as Clinton’s ambassador to Israel. He later wrote about those years in his stunningly mis-titled book Innocent Abroad: An Intimate History of American Peace Diplomacy in the Middle East. (The title is inaccurate in many ways… “Innocent”?? “Peace” diplomacy?? But it is also stunningly inappropriate. I mean, would anyone really want an “innocent” to be advising the president on an area as important as the Middle East?)

While working for the Clinton administration, Indyk bore a huge degree of responsibility for many outstandingly bad policies, including:

1. The administration’s complete failure to follow up on the diplomatic opening the Norwegians handed them on a plate with the Oslo Accords; and Washington’s complete failure, in particular, to hold both parties to the accord accountable for working in good faith to meet the deadline specified in it of May 1999 for completion of a final peace agreement.

With Indyk’s advice constantly ringing in his ears– and all his own insecurities as a young president who had weaseled his way out of military service in the 1970s– Clinton stayed trapped in a posture of complete subservience to Israel’s older, much more experienced, and battle-hardened Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. He never put an ounce of pressure on him. Rabin took his time implementing Oslo… and made numerous fatal concessions to the settlers along the way. But Clinton (and Indyk’s) adoration and provision of huge financial and diplomatic benefits to Israel continued unabated.

Only in his very last months in office– ways after the 1999 deadline had come and gone– did Clinton even start to stir himself to mention the idea of a final peace agreement. It was ways too late. The Second Intifada broke out… Oh, and Clinton then sided completely with the even more dreadful (but also “battle hardened”) Ehud Barak as they came out of the failed Camp David talks in 2000 and jointly blamed Yasser Arafat for its failure…

Thanks for all the “advice” you gave along the way there, Martin Indyk!!

2. In early 1993, the U.S. was still dealing with the aftermath of the it first war in the Persian/Arabian Gulf, the 1991 “liberation” of Kuwait. People in the US policy elite were debating what the correct U.S. “posture” in the Gulf area should be. Indyk’s signal contribution to that was to successfully persuade the president that the posture should be one of “dual containment”– containment, that is, directed against both Iraq and Iran. In both cases, that meant ratcheting up the sanctions that had long been in place against those countries. In the case of Iraq, the sanctions maintained throughout the entire Clinton presidency were so draconian that they resulted in the otherwise preventable deaths of around 500,000 of Iraq’s most vulnerable citizens, and the destruction of most of the country’s previously well-developed social and economic infrastructure… Not so “innocent” there, either, Martin Indyk…

Well, I could write about many more of the nefarious episodes in this man’s past… But now, I have to take a deep breath and recognize that he has recently, uh, been undergoing something of an interesting conversion in his attitudes and behaviors.

Here he is now, on the board of the generally excellent “New Israel Fund”, and defending it quite robustly (here, for an Australian audience) from the slings and arrows being sent its way by Gerald Steinberg and other representatives of Israel’s new hard right.

I welcome Martin Indyk to the ranks of reason and good values that he seems to edging toward, at this point. I don’t, however, think anyone should give him a free pass for his past record. The Clinton years, and the role he played in them, still need to be quite honestly examined.

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AFP – Former US president Bill Clinton on Saturday said he believes there would have been a comprehensive peace in the Middle East a decade ago if Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin not been assassinated.

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AFP – Former US president Bill Clinton warned of “dire consequences” if Palestinians do not believe that change is possible, in a speech to students at the American University of Dubai (AUD) on Wednesday.

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If you follow the Middle East online, unless you limit yourself to the Arab side of the fence, you’ve probably run across some of the commentary from pro-Israeli bloggers, Israeli media, neocon bloggers, and conservative bloggers generally denouncing Joe Stork of Human Rights Watch. I don’t normally get into personalities here at this blog: not my thing. I did write a couple of posts noting that Chas Freeman, back when he was nominated for the National Intelligence Council, was not the Israel-bashing ogre his opponents portrayed.

Now, like a lot of people who’ve been around the Middle East community in Washington for a long time, I know Joe Stork. Not well — certainly not as well as I know Chas Freeman, which isn’t all that well either — but I’ve known Joe since the late 60s or early 70s when he was a founding father of MERIP Reports, the ancestor of the current MERIP Middle East Report. Joe has always been somewhere to my left politically, often considerably so. In the earlier days, he and I were both no doubt farther left than we are today. I haven’t seen Joe in several years, and aside from random meetings at receptions or on the street haven’t had an extended conversation with him in this decade. So I’m not defending Joe’s positions today. He’s perfectly capable of doing that himself.

What I do want to note is that the attacks on him seem to be a classic case of shooting the messenger. Joe, Deputy Director for Middle East and North Africa at Human Rights Watch, was the author of a much-headlined report HRW issued, claiming that there were instances of Israel Defense Forces shooting white-flag-carrying Palestinians during Operation Cast Lead in Gaza.earlier this year. Here’s HRW’s press release, and here’s the 63-page report in HTML and also in PDF. And here’s an HRW response to criticisms of the report’s contents.

I have not read the full report. I intend to do so, but suspend judgment on its contents until I have read it, and Israel’s responses to it. When allegations of war crimes are made, they should be investigated and judged, based on evidence and testimony. If the allegations are unfounded, they should be dismissed. If otherwise, Israel should investigate them, as it often has when similar allegations of violations of the laws of war by the IDF have been raised.

But while there has been some effort on the Israeli side to refute the basic content of the charges or to impeach the witnesses, there has also been a concerted attempt to blame the messenger and attack Joe Stork ad hominem without addressing the content of his report. And most of the attacks focus on things he said or wrote over 30 years ago, and one thing he did not even sign, if he had any connection with it at all.

The Israeli daily Ma’ariv did a report on the HRW report which focused heavily on Joe Stork’s background, and made the rather sensational charge that he had personally defended the 1972 Munich Olympics massacre of Israeli athletes. The Ma’ariv article is translated in this Commentary piece by Noah Pollak. Others have noted that the “defense” of Munich was in an unsigned MERIP editorial which also said that the morale-boosting element did not justify the violence. But of course, quoting out of context is a common tactic in ideological disputes. But to directly attribute this to Joe Stork seems a bit extreme, but even if he signed off on it (as he well may have) it was 37 years ago. Has anyone asked if he agrees with the point today? The editorialists just seem to say he never “repudiated” his earlier statement, which wasn’t signed by him in the first place. Joe has never to my knowledge been a strong defender of Israel (especially its human rights policies), but I’ve also never heard from him the sort of radical ideas attributed to him in these attacks.

Now, MERIP in their early days were, indeed, old 60s radicals who first called themselves the “MERIP Collective” and were pretty Marxist in their rhetoric. Joe was one of them. But so were Joel Beinin, who has been President of the Middle East Studies Association; Judith Tucker, Editor of the International Journal of Middle East Studies and Director of Academic Studies at Georgetown’s Center for Contemporary Arab Studies; and Eric Hooglund, a predecessor of mine as Editor of The Middle East Journal. Bill Clinton didn’t inhale, but he figured out a way to finesse his 60s background. I doubt if very many Baby Boomers who graduated in the late 60s or early 70s would like their entire body of expressed opinion in that era to be aired publicly today.

I also remember, however, going to a party MERIP held in (perhaps) the late 70s or early 80s, though I’m not quite sure why I was invited. It may even have been at Joe Stork’s house. Much of the conversation was about mortgages. I realized then, that if MERIP was talking about mortgages, the 60s were over.

As I said, Joe can defend himself. But it strikes me as both disingenuous and downright unfair to 1) accuse Joe Stork of holding the same positions he held in the early 1970s; 2) attribute to him a position taken by an anonymous editorial in his magazine and then 3) leave out the qualifiers that denounce the violence.

Or, to put it another way: is this really your best response to the unwelcome message: to attack the messenger? Let’s leave Joe Stork out of it and respond to the allegations.

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