Way back in the days of Ronald Reagan, Israel was very involved in supporting the Kurds in their struggle for independance. The Israelis saw the Kurds as a good tool against their enemies in Iraq and Iran. Well it seems to be deja vu all over again, with Israel using the Kurds to stick Israel’s nose in the Iraq mess (as a means of restraining Iran). This commentary on Seymour Hersh’s New Yorker article ties all the strings together. Scary and depressing reading.
What is ironic, when reading the Hersh article, is both the magnitude of Israeli leadership’s hubris and their inability to apply their obvious analysis skills to their own situation. On the one hand they understand that victory has to be on the political and not just military level. They even say that even though the Americans can’t be defeated militarily, they will lose politically. It is obvious to anyone without ideological blinders that the exact same words apply to Israel’s rule over the West Bank and Gaza. And yet Israel’s political and military leadership continues to insist that a miltary defeat of the Palestinians is both a possible and necessary prerequisite to political victory.
I also found the quote attributed to Ehud Barak astonishing: “Israel ‘had learned that there’s no way to win an occupation. The only issue,’ Barak told Cheney, ‘was choosing the size of your humiliation.’” Well if Barak is so bold as to counsel Dick Cheney that there is no way to win an occupation, why didn’t he apply this principle when he was a leader? This is the same Barak who came home from Camp David and refused to consider continued negotiations after Arafat couldn’t agree to his “final offer.” This is the same Barak who later changed his mind and realized there was still room to negotiate, but by that time it was too late. This is the same Barak who because he childishly slammed the door and took all his marbles home from Camp David, paved the way to the disastrous three years of war that followed.