Pump the brakes on Iran, Joe: Biden must slow his rush to reenter the nuclear deal

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This article appeared in The Daily News on June 29, 2021. Click here to view the original article.

By John Bolton
June 29, 2021

Since taking office, President Biden has unswervingly sought to have the United States rejoin, as rapidly as possible, the 2015 Iran nuclear deal (the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or JCPOA). Through indirect negotiations conducted by other JCPOA parties, Biden has offered Iran concessions and adjustments that make an already dangerous agreement even riskier. He has been deterred only by the negative domestic political blowback he will justifiably encounter if and when America re-ups.

Now, however, significant new developments give Biden the opportunity to reverse the Gadarene haste with which he has pursued re-entering the JCPOA. He should seize the chance to pause his efforts, if not reverse them entirely.

Most importantly, Israel’s new government, led by Prime Minister Naftali Bennet, has expressed the urgent need to consult with Biden and his senior advisers. Bennett’s governing coalition is held together by little more than antipathy to former Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu. If the parties break apart, it could well precipitate new elections, resulting in significant losses of Knesset seats for many of them, and even bring Netanyahu back to power. Biden, like Presidents Obama and Clinton before him, is no friend of Bibi’s.

President Joe Biden speaks in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, Friday, June 25. (Susan Walsh/AP)
Bennett is at risk here. Formerly a senior Netanyahu adviser, he aligns closely with his predecessor’s Iran policy. Moreover, Israel generally is far readier to continue using force against Tehran’s nuclear program than Biden’s team may appreciate. If Bennett deviated from Netanyahu’s approach, it would be a mortal political mistake, perhaps fracturing his party and his coalition. Biden needs to tread cautiously, or he places Bennett in an untenable position.

For America, rejoining the JCPOA (which Donald Trump exited in May 2018) would be a massive mistake. Obviously, Iran wants Biden back in the deal to obtain relief from our devastating unilateral economic sanctions. Tellingly, however, there has never been a shred of evidence Iran has made a strategic decision to renounce its nuclear ambitions.

Instead, the basic playbook for rogue regimes seeking deliverable nuclear weapons calls for them to make extravagant, highly- publicized promises forswearing nuclear weapons, while never following through with actual performance. Like all prior iterations of this diplomatic performance art, the mutual pledges of “action for action” benefit the proliferator. North Korea and Iran have successfully followed this playbook for decades.

The economic steps directly benefitting the proliferator come first (ending sanctions and releasing frozen assets, as in the JCPOA, or providing economic assistance, as in the 1994 North Korea Agreed Framework). Coming only afterward is what Washington should seek, and what never seems to happen: the complete, verifiable, and irreversible destruction of the nuclear-weapons program, as prior presidents have described their North Korea goals.

“Reaching agreement” with Iran, especially the way Biden has pursued it, thus means giving the ayatollahs much of what they want. The result will endanger America and close allies and friends globally, not just in the Middle East.

Here is where Biden’s face-saving opportunity to cut his losses arises: Jerusalem has sought urgent, critically important, consultations with Washington on the implications of America rejoining the JCPOA. Israeli Foreign Minister Yair Lapid (also deputy prime minister and co-leader of the new government) met Sunday in Rome with Secretary of State Antony Blinken. Biden’s subsequent invitation for Bennett to visit the White House provides exactly the right moment to talk about Iran.

Moreover, Iran has a new president-elect, Ebrahim Raisi, a hardliner’s hardliner, and likely successor to Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. JCPOA supporters believe U.S. reentry can be agreed upon before Raisi’s Aug. 3 inauguration, arguing he would benefit from the economic good times expected to roll if U.S. sanctions are lifted. By contrast, blame for failing to resurrect the JCPOA, if that transpires, can be laid on Hassan Rouhani’s outgoing regime.

This approach is a trap for the United States, but one Biden can readily avoid. He can capitalize on the opportune coincidence of new governments in both Israel and Iran to implement a pause in the re-entry negotiations for extended consultations with Israel and Arab allies. He could use, say, six months to gauge whether there is any change for the better — or the worse — in Iran’s international performance, not just in nuclear matters, but in its support for terrorism and conventional military belligerence across the Middle East.

Washington need not be in a hurry to grace Tehran by jettisoning sanctions, which are its principal leverage. Even if Biden remains obsessed with returning to the JCPOA, he loses little by waiting until the end of this year, while appreciably aiding Bennett’s new government.

‘Iran’s Perilous Pursuit of Nuclear Weapons’ Review: In Tehran’s Nuclear Archive

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This article appeared in The Wall Street Journal on June 21, 2021. Click here to view the original article.

By John Bolton
June 21, 2021

The Biden administration is working hard to re-enter the 2015 Iran nuclear deal. Readers of David Albright’s “Iran’s Perilous Pursuit of Nuclear Weapons,” however, will realize that it is Washington, not Tehran, that is pursuing a truly perilous course.

Mr. Albright, since 1993 the president of the Institute for Science and International Security, neither advocates nor opposes re-entering the deal, formally known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). That is precisely why his careful, meticulous recitation of the full reality of Iran’s efforts, its “incessant dissembling and falsehoods” and its careful camouflage and concealment is so compelling.

Mr. Albright concedes that many years ago he was “skeptical of the seemingly exaggerated claims by Western governments” about Iran’s program. He now says that “the Iranian revolutionary regime is fundamentally a criminal operation.” For decades, “Iran has systematically violated its commitments under the [1970] Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.” Even nominal concessions from Tehran, including the JCPOA itself, occurred “under great pressure, with an underlying, unrelenting intention of preserving and advancing its nuclear weapons capabilities.”

“Perilous Pursuit” is the most comprehensive unclassified recounting of Iran’s nuclear aspirations ever written. Mr. Albright had generous access to the “nuclear archive” collected by Israel’s Mossad in an almost unimaginably daring 2018 raid on Tehran. This extraordinary archive embodies in detail the so-called Amad Plan, Iran’s late-1990s crash nuclear-weapons program. Mr. Albright and his team at I.S.I.S., aided by Israeli and U.S. intelligence analysts, found that the nuclear archive fills many gaps in the West’s knowledge.

As Mr. Albright shows, key Amad Plan activities continue today, both clandestinely and disguised as part of Iran’s “civil” nuclear efforts. Take the Natanz enrichment facility, discovered in 2002: “In a pattern that would repeat itself many times . . . Iran simply called it a civil site and allowed the IAEA [International Atomic Energy Agency] to inspect it.” This may seem like retreating, but Mr. Albright exposes the nuclear jujitsu: “While withdrawing from safeguards or cheating on them would incur a cost,” calling Natanz a “civil” facility and allowing inspections or monitoring “was a price [Iran] found worth paying to keep them.”

Until revealed in the nuclear archive, Iran successfully lied about, or concealed from the IAEA, its uranium conversion and enrichment facilities, nuclear-core development plants, exploding-bridgewire testing units, and more. It asserted that the Gachin uranium mine and milling facility was for domestic rather than military purposes, and concealed both the location and the military purposes of the Fordow underground uranium-enrichment facility.

“Perilous Pursuit” eviscerates the idea, central both to negotiating the JCPOA and rejoining it, that the IAEA, an independent agency part of the United Nations system, can adequately pierce the falsehoods and cover-stories Iran has woven for decades. Time after time in Mr. Albright’s account, Tehran stonewalls the IAEA, underlining the point that it is not an intelligence agency. IAEA depends vitally on its members to supply sensitive information, yet as a U.N. body, its membership includes the very countries, like Iran, suspected of violating the non-proliferation treaty. (Imagine a police department with a mafia office at its headquarters.) Enumerating all that the IAEA has repeatedly missed indicts not the agency, but those seeking to endow it with capabilities it has never had and never will. Relying on it for verification and compliance reveals naiveté about the ayatollahs and unfamiliarity with the IAEA. Serious verification must rest with U.S. intelligence, not U.N. agencies.

Unfortunately, our intelligence community’s credibility also gets its share of shredding here, having missed much of what Mossad purloined. The 2007 National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) of Iran, for instance, was perhaps the most intellectually dishonest, politically distorted U.S. intelligence “analysis” ever. It was not really an NIE but propaganda, intended to forestall harsh measures George W. Bush was thought to be considering. We need a forensic review of the NIE’s perverse tradecraft, especially examining whether the drafters were politically motivated, an anathema to intelligence professionals.

The NIE promulgated the dangerously mistaken notion that, in Mr. Albright’s words, “Iran’s nuclear weapons program ended in 2003, with no work taking place after that date.” At that time, Tehran faced U.S. troops to the east and west, in Afghanistan and Iraq, and growing international criticism. Hassan Rouhani, then secretary-general of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, now in his final days as president, promised full disclosure and suspension of key nuclear operations, all the while denying any were weapons-related. But, as Mr. Albright stresses, this “merely served as a tactical retreat, not an abandonment of [Iran’s] nuclear weapons ambitions.” Indeed, “Iran kept the international spotlight” on its civilian cover-story, “successfully using it as a distraction from [its] better hidden, unambiguous nuclear weaponization work,” as nuclear-archive documents clearly demonstrate.

Mossad’s haul deals a mortal blow to any fancy that Tehran ever came clean on nuclear issues. The archive, let alone what remains classified or still in Iran, also destroys the “What about Iraq?” riposte when discussing Iran’s nuclear-weapons program. As Mr. Albright says, the archive proves the program “can no longer be viewed as existing only in the past.” Obama’s JCPOA negotiators were profoundly wrong not to resolve the many unanswered questions about the euphemistically termed “possible military dimensions” of Iran’s nuclear work. We are still paying for that mistake.

Joe Biden is proceeding quickly and blindly to rejoin the nuclear deal. “Perilous Pursuit” should make him pause. U.S. sanctions and Israel’s kinetic activity against Iran’s program have done more to degrade and deter Iran than any diplomacy. That is the path to pursue, not more credulous deal-making.

Biden should use Raisi election for Iran course change

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This article appeared in The Washington Examiner on June 19, 2021. Click here to view the original article.

By John Bolton
June 19, 2021

Iran’s hard-line mullahs left nothing to chance in Friday’s presidential election.

The man they wanted to win, Ebrahim Raisi, did so handily against a carefully limited field of rivals. In 2017, Raisi lost to outgoing President Hassan Rouhani, and Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was obviously determined to correct that mistake. Western media call Raisi a “hard-liner,” as if conveying important information.

Since the 1979 Islamic Revolution, however, the spectrum of Tehran’s leadership has ranged broadly all the way from “hard-liner” to “extreme hard-liner.” Raisi falls in the latter category. Rouhani fell in the former, but it pleased many Westerners to consider him a “moderate,” essential to enacting the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action nuclear deal.

Yet, in 2005, as Iran’s chief nuclear negotiator, Rouhani mocked those very admirers. The New York Times, no less, reported that “in a remarkable admission, Mr. Rouhani suggested … that Iran had used negotiations with the Europeans to dupe them. … ‘While we were talking with the Europeans in Tehran, we were installing equipment … in Isfahan. … By creating a calm environment, we were able to complete the work on Isfahan.'”

Some things never change. Those who portrayed the “moderate” Rouhani as Iran’s real boss should contemplate whether the term “supreme leader” means what it says. It does have a certain ring to it.

Khamenei is only the second to hold the title, succeeding Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in 1989. Raisi is widely believed to become the third supreme leader; he is unlikely to forget the power of those two mellifluous words. Now facing a weekslong presidential transition period in Tehran, the Biden administration will undoubtedly worry most about whether it can beg its way back into the JCPOA, from which Washington withdrew in May 2018.

Resurrecting this deal is a near-religious priority for the Biden team, many of whose key figures were intimately involved (or at least entirely supportive) of President Barack Obama’s efforts to negotiate it. Although few specifics are publicly known, there is little doubt that the only limiting constraints on what Biden is prepared to give away to the mullahs are the negative domestic political consequences for surrendering. And make no mistake, those domestic U.S. political consequences could be enormous. Whatever minor modifications may occur to the deal, Iran will insist that key provisions and understandings remain unchanged. For example, there will be no renewed efforts to get the facts on the benignly termed “possible military dimensions” of Iran’s nuclear program. In 2015, Iran made this concession a precondition to any deal. And don’t expect international inspectors to get any more access than the inadequate levels they now enjoy. Most importantly of all, Biden isn’t even contemplating clawing back Obama’s critical concession that Iran be allowed to enrich uranium to reactor-grade levels, a giveaway without which Iran would have rejected any deal.

President Lyndon Johnson once termed an analogous provision “more loophole than law.” Once a country can enrich to reactor-grade levels of U-235, it is nearly 70% of the way to weapons-grade enriched uranium. Going from 3-to-5% to 20%, or even 60%, enrichment levels merely marginally worsen the original, fundamental mistake of allowing enrichment at all. The pattern is clear: Obama accepted Iran’s insistence on even debilitating concessions because he was so determined to “succeed” and achieve a deal, any deal.

During Biden’s first five months, no one in the White House has pretended that Iran has made a fundamental strategic decision to abandon pursuing nuclear weapons. With good reason. All the available evidence shows that Iran continues to do whatever it takes to possess deliverable nuclear weapons as soon as feasible.

Of course, Iran wants the United States back in the deal. Without that, Tehran will not get relief from America’s devastating sanctions, far more effective than any of the 2015 negotiators ever envisaged. The sanctions have created enormous public dissatisfaction inside Iran, but Biden seems blind to the leverage thereby provided, so zealous is he to rejoin. Nor is there any visible effort by Biden’s advisers to design or justify a “larger” deal to replace the failed JCPOA. If sanctions are lifted, and substantial economic benefits flow again, Iran will even more actively pursue nuclear weapons and ballistic missile programs; support for terrorism in Yemen, Iraq, and Syria; and increased conventional military activity across the Middle East.

Whether U.S. reentry happens before or after Raisi is inaugurated is immaterial. If there is any chance whatever Biden might be dissuaded from his crusade, Raisi’s election provides him a face-saving excuse to back away. Don’t hold your breath over he will avail himself of the opportunity.

Naive Biden is taking a huge risk going face to face with Putin

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The US President’s incoherent strategy makes the forthcoming summit a worrying one for the West

This article appeared in The Telegraph on June 13, 2021. Click here to view the original article.

By John Bolton
June 13, 2021

Joe Biden’s first summit with Vladimir Putin this week comes relatively early in his new administration, so early it is fair to ask whether Biden is ready for it. If he does not yet know his goals regarding Russia and how to achieve them, far better to wait than to risk making pronouncements untethered to reality.

Biden, though, doesn’t have forever, although since his inauguration, he has engaged in a random walk. He has, variously, called Putin “a killer”; gratuitously extended the deeply flawed New START arms-control agreement; imposed sanctions for Russia’s chemical-weapons attack against opposition leader Alexei Navalny; waived economic sanctions that would have stopped Nord Stream II, Russia’s undersea gas pipeline to Germany; responded inadequately to Russia’s egregious “Solar Winds” computer hack, and others; and sanctioned Russia for interfering in Ukraine, while stressing how restrained these measures were.

Biden says he wants “a stable, predictable relationship” between Moscow and Washington, but his actions and statements to date reveal no gyroscope. Accordingly, while the Geneva summit may produce new American initiatives, don’t count on it. Putin is no novice, and the odds favour him springing new Russian gambits, for example articulating his framework to negotiate New START’s successor. There is no indication that Biden is prepared to respond on this critical strategic issue between the two countries, one enormously important to the UK and other nuclear-weapons states.

In domestic political terms, Biden wants to be seen as tougher on Russia than his predecessor, which is not hard to do rhetorically. Donald Trump was unwilling to criticise Russia for fear of giving credence to the narrative that he colluded with Moscow in the 2016 election. Trump was wrong politically: legitimate criticism of Russia would have enhanced his credibility, not diminished it. And Trump did little or nothing operationally to stop Nord Steam II, where even his rhetoric was anti-Moscow.

Considering the recent deluge of cyber attacks in America we are entitled to wonder if, without publicity, Biden has reverted to Barack Obama’s dangerously naïve approach to cyberspace. The Obama Administration hog-tied potential offensive US cyber operations in a web of decision-making rules that, as a practical matter, essentially precluded significant offensive activity. Those rules were changed substantially in 2018. American officials publicly welcomed being unleashed to take steps that protected the 2018 mid-term Congressional elections from Russian cyber interference, and hopefully later ones as well.

Has Biden disarmed the US in cyberspace, and have the Russians taken advantage? If so, Washington is making a potentially fatal strategic mistake. No one is looking for more hostilities in the cyber world, but the way to prevent conflict is to discourage adversaries from taking belligerent action for fear of the costs Washington will impose upon them. If the costs are seen to be high enough, they will back off. This is deterrence, which works in cyberspace as in all other human domains. Putin understands this point, but Biden has yet to prove he does.

After the G7 summit, Biden will be attending a Nato heads-of-state meeting in Brussels before his meeting with Putin. This choreography is correct: confer first with friends and allies, and then meet with Putin. The G7 meeting has focused heavily on finally exiting the coronavirus pandemic and economic recovery, and also planning against the danger of future biological-weapons and epidemiological threats.

This is entirely appropriate, but it is hardly a platform for serious consideration of wider geostrategic issues, let alone for coherent consideration of facing Vladimir Putin across the table. At Nato, Biden will be a comfort compared to the aberrational Trump, but no alliance strategy on Russia is likely to emerge.

Other than returning to normalcy, albeit merely on process, what does Biden have to say at such meetings on, for instance, Belarus, a new focus of the bipolar Nato-Russia struggle for advantage in Europe? What is his view on the increasing Russian (and Chinese) military attention to the Arctic? Biden’s Russia policy simply has not come into focus, which is troubling, even if not-quite-yet debilitating.

In short, Biden is taking a substantial risk in meeting Putin if he is only following a process of choreography, while seeking diaphanous goals like “stability” in the Washington-Moscow relationship. The wily and well-prepared Putin will have a very clear agenda, specific objectives, and the focused attention and energy to pursue them. Biden should hope the luck of the Irish is with him in Geneva.

Why we might be closer to war than we think.

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By Dr. David Wurmser
June 14, 2021

Over the last week, there have been increasing signs that Hamas may be preparing to re-initiate hostilities, starting along the border at a trickle, and then more as they go along.

These threats should be taken seriously since the underlying tectonic forces that in part led to the last war are still in place.

And yet, in this particular situation, there is a new dimension that can further fuel the choice toward escalation by Hamas, as well as for the panoply of other actors that previously played a contributing role in detonating the region last month. It is likely that Hamas, the Palestinian Authority (PA), the Joint Arab List party ( HaReshima Meshutefet) in Israel and Iran and Turkey outside Israel all have a strong common interest in sabotaging the new government taking shape, which is most easily done via escalation, particularly because of their being threatened by Mansour Abbas and his United Arab List party (Raam). It is possible that even Jordan might harbor hostility, and not because the incoming Israeli Prime Minister, Naftali Bennett, is seen as a symbol of the settler movement, but because they cannot comfortably accept the success of Mansour Abbas.

Let me explain.

So, what does Mansour Abbas represent? First of all, what he is not. He is not a dreamy peace processor, nor is he a man given to grand theories of regional cooperation, nor even of some contractual permanent change that would demand an alteration of his basic system of Islamic beliefs. Nor would such leaders in any Arab society survive. The cultural root of Arab society is nomadic, and tribal traditions which even preexist Islam are as important as religious dogma. Any civilization anchored to a nomadic soul views its survival through the personal capability and following of leadership of the tribe, which is really a quite different matter than our image of tribes shaped by Hollywood in Westerns. Families, or clans, are part of the Middle Eastern tribe, a discussion of which is beyond the scope of this essay. Suffice it to say, though, that institutions in such societies are not envisioned as “trusts,” as they are in urban societies of the West, but are embodiments of the tribal leader, who in turn is not a custodian of a permanent institution or “office,” but its very essence. When Muhammad died, Abu Baqr was named the Khaliph, but the tribes revolted. This was not because they opposed Abu Baqr, but because they had no institutional loyalty to the the Khaliphate; Abu Baqr had to personally renegotiate the terms of loyalty with each tribe, each of which would continue in revolt until he did. It is a very personal affair between the leader and his “tribe” of followers. Contrast this with the concept of leader and institution in the West. While any leader in the West owes those in society that helped him rise to the top, the office he assumes and the institution which he heads have their own existence as a possession of all the people of community. A U.S. president, while obviously trying to realize policies that deliver for his supporters, is bound to talk about being the president of all Americans. He loses his personal validity the moment he tries to limit the office or institution to the narrow purview of clan or tribal head. And there are strict laws against such favoritism in U.S. politics. Not so in the Middle East. The inverse is true. A leader that does not pursue the interests of his tribe has betrayed their personal trust in him, and he has lost his claim to loyalty and following, and thus his personal validity.

In short, the mission or purpose of the tribal leader, and the clans which make up the tribe, is primarily to deliver the survival and welfare of that tribe. In an urban setting, traditional tribes, or the identity of having come from a tribe, still exist and are important but are weaker. Still, one’s tribal origins are part of one’s soul. Moreover, the patterns of politics and the nature of leadership remains baked into the culture despite having been urbanized. And is understood in those terms as well. The Prime Minister of Israel is seen as much in the Middle East in personal terms as the leader of the Jewish tribe, rather as he is understood in the West as the custodian of the institution of the Israeli state. Indeed, the United States president is seen in such terms as well and is expected to act as required along those lines. When Israelis or Americans talk in larger theoretical terms of global order or regional peace, it is simply confusing. What tribal leader would talk about regional structures of conflict resolution and “interests of the international community” which stand above the interests of the Jewish or American tribes they represent? What tribal leader in his right mind would give in to expectations to cede his tribal authority voluntarily?

Since survival as a community is the basic aim in a harsh environment, the legitimacy of one’s being the tribal leader is based on how well he protects and provides for the tribe. In turn, each tribe member understands that his survival and welfare is derivative of the tribe, so his purpose is to help his tribe survive, and in turn, he exists under the tribe’s protection. If some member wants to be individualistic, he can do so as a dead person.

The tribal leader thus, to provide and protect his tribe, must always be on the lookout for the strong horse to which he attaches his tribe and to whom he links their fate. The wrong choice, or some “principled” choice, represents a fundamental failure and abdication of authority. So the basis of all leadership and politics is seeking and signing with the rising power.

Mansour Abbas has made the choice — to some extent similar to the choice made by the tribal leaders of Abu Ghosh in 1948 — as such a “tribal” leader that identifies Israel as the strongest horse. It is the same choice the UAE has made as well. Mansour Abbas has attached his fate to Israel, based on the expectation of Israel’s being and remaining a rising power.

The other Arab leaders in this picture all hedge or think Israel will not prevail. They follow in the footsteps of so many Arab leaders before, who have climbed up and over the precipice into the abyss in viewing Nazism, Communism, China, Saddam’s Iraq, Iran, Turkey or ISIS and bin Ladin as the rising and prevailing power. So they, as these previous Arab leaders have done, attach themselves to any movement against Israel and the U.S.

As long as the U.S. and Israel understand that they are viewed in the region as the tribal leaders for their “tribes,” they can navigate the region successfully, and gather power and following along the way. But when we try to be above it all, and think like a detached academic or politic utopians who believe in conflict resolution or pacifism, or worse engage in self-denigrating or conciliatory actions, like the U.S. and Israel have often done before, and which the United States is now asking again of its ally, then we and Israel will lose all value as the strong horse. The U.S. and the Israelis become toxic and are to be fled from as fast as possible, and we will find ourselves alone and under attack even by those who just a moment ago were our “best friends.” In fact, in particularly by those who were just recently our best friends because they have to disassociate themselves the most from the catastrophic choice of having misread us as a strong horse.

Mansour Abbas is essentially now a “tribal” leader of a substantial group of Arabs, esoteric the Negev Arabs of whom most are Bedouin, and as his “tribe’s” leader, he relates to Israel as the strong horse with whom it is in his tribe’s best interest to align, assuming Israel understands and accepts its role as the strong horse. In this way, it is quite possible that Mansour Abbas sees PM Bennett’s pedigree as a hard liner and a graduate of the General Staff commando unit as advantages, not as an offense.

The participation of Mansour Abbas thus means several things for the other Arabs:

1. Mansour Abbas bartered his support for the Israeli strong horse in exchange for the real empowerment of an Arab party — something the Joint Arab List leadership has forfeited for decades by its choice to champion the Palestinian flag over the Israeli, and serve consistently as apologists for the violence and rejection of the state of Israel that this represents. In some ways, Mansour Abbas’ fate is tied and dependent on his gamble, namely on his bet on Israel’s success and remaining strong. Mansour Abbas, thus, is the domestic Arab opposite of the local Arabs who are the followers of the external rejection front led by Syria, Iran, the PLO, Turkey and others (in practice even Qatar) — namely Hamas, the Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) and the PLO’s many factions, including Fatah and Abu Mazen — some members of whom have even wound up in exile in the capitals of their preferred external “strong horses.” All these rejectionist forces, inside and outside, have staked the credibility of their leadership over their “tribes” and clans on Israel’s weakness, temptation to conciliation and peace processes, which it is assumed will lead to its retreat and ultimately to Israel’s demise. In contrast, Mansour Abbas can roughly be considered the internal Israeli Arab equivalent of the UAE and Abraham Accords — namely while his informing dogma may still not, and likely never will, accept the genuine legitimacy of the Jewish state, the “tribal” leader he represents — and his irreducible need to deliver protection and validation for his followers — drives him to reconcile and seek the fulfillment of his community’s interests through some sort of reconciliation and accommodation with Israel. As such, the success of Mansour Abbas essentially embodies the Abraham Accords.

In the process, Abbas has rendered himself the mortal enemy of these rival “tribes” and their leadership, namely those whose primary allegiance is to the various shades of the rejectionist front. This is a fight to the death, so they will do anything to tear Abbas down. As Iran and Turkey view the Abraham Accords as a mortal strategic threat, so too will they view Mansour Abbas.

2. The outside forces of the rejectionist front — which ultimately includes the PLO, as well, despite the fiction clung to by western elites of its moderation — have been forced to surrender their monopoly and with agony watch their rival, Mansour Abbas, leverage his access to Israeli power to deliver to his followers what they cannot. Mansour Abbas, like the UAE externally, annulled their veto over any movement toward reconciliation. Jews and Arabs, this time internally as opposed to regionally, could find formulas to work together when their interests converge even without having to first solve the “Palestinian issue” over which the rejectionist front held a veto. The other Abbas, Muhammad Abbas of the PA and head of the PLO had, once again had his rudimentary persona and purpose rejected. So apart from Muhammad Abbas’ having a new rival (Mansour Abbas) for the street from which he largely already is humiliatingly rejected, he also suddenly finds himself, his movement, and the balloon of the PA’s importance as “the indispensable factor” punctured. Mansour Abbas threatens Muhammad Abbas as much as the Abraham Accords did.

3. Hamas, Iran and Turkey invested immensely in creating the sort of fundamental breakdown of law and order that was expressed through the Arab Spring instigated during the recent war between Israel and Hamas. For the first time since 1948, the internal fabric of Israeli society was ripped and the very real danger of an Arab-Jewish communal civil war threatened within just last month. And now, only a few weeks later, the leader of a party whose platform stands to the right of the outgoing Israeli government, Yemina, embraced Mansour Abbas and invited him into the inner circle of Israeli power structures. Symbolically, the greatest achievement of the war for Hamas has been challenged, eroded, and potentially burst as suddenly as it exploded last month. They have been humiliated by Mansour Abbas.

4. Palestinians in Gaza, Judea and Samaria have increasingly looked with envy at the ability of Israelis to be free and express themselves. While still uneasy about accepting the image of political chaos as potentially an expression and form of strength rather than weakness, there is an increasing attraction to Israeli society among Palestinians when juxtaposed against the suppression, corruption and brutality of the governments they live under in Judea, Samaria and Gaza. This unnerves, and properly so, those governments and possess a threat to the legitimacy of their rule. This may also threaten other regional leaders since Mansour Abbas and Israel have managed to deliver the only genuinely democratic path to enfranchisement of Arabs in the Middle East, not the Arab Spring nor any other fashionable Arab ideological movement of the last century.

5. Iran and Turkey invested heavily in effort and coin in creating a new Palestinian Arab leadership that echoes and furthers their regional power ambitions. And then along comes Mansour Abbas out of nowhere and grabs the standard of leadership of Israeli Arabs, especially but not only the Bedouin. Another balloon bursts, and the vast resources spent by Iran, Turkey and Qatar go up in flames.

6. Mansour Abbas also places King Abdallah of Jordan potentially in a difficult position, largely because King Abdallah has spent the last decade making a series of grave mistakes. First among these, King Abdallah of Jordan has allowed himself to be defined so consistently as the cheerleader for the Palestinian camp led by Abu Mazen that he has become its shadow. But King Abdallah is not a Palestinian. He may be the decedent of the Prophet Muhammad, and thus a pan-Arab and pan-Islamic leader, but he also is essentially the current head of the Hejazi tribes from when he hails. As such, he gained little real following among the people of whom he is not — the Palestinians — but forfeited the following of the people of whom he is, the Hejazi Bedouin tribes. In the process, he offended the Hejazi Bedouin tribes which traditionally form the core of the Hashemite kingdom and without whose support the state of Jordan loses its raison d’etre. The symbol of this misplaced attention was in 2017, when King Abdallah intervened, mostly unhelpfully, in the Temple Mount unrest following a terror attack which was launched from within the Temple Mount complex that killed two Israeli police, while at the same time the Hawaitat tribe — which had been loyal to the Hashemite family since the Arab Revolt in World War I a century ago — threatened to withdraw its loyalty from the King for his prosecution of two of its members for a terror attack on American soldiers. King Abdallah chose to focus on the Palestinian crisis rather than his own regime-threatening one. In short, King Abdallah has been so busy entangling himself with the PLO-based Palestinian movement, and becoming Abu Mazen’s champion among Western establishments, that he forgot he was the tribal head of the Hejazi Bedouin tribal core of the state. He is acting like man without a tribe. This ultimately is what underlies the dangerous rift between himself and Prince Hamza, who clearly had powerful supporters among the Hejazi tribes.

Across the African rift valley in the Negev in southern Israel, Mansour Abbas established his leadership most by championing the cause of the Bedouin Negev tribes. Their concerns and issues formed the unsurrenderable core of the demands to which Mansour Abbas held in negotiating his entry into the Israeli government. He delivered. So in some ways, he is the tribal leader now de facto of the Negev Arab Bedouin tribes.

Despite the harshness and difficulty of the landscape of the African Rift Valley, there is effectively no border dividing the Hejazi tribes from the Bedouin of the Negev. Historically, indeed going all the way back to the ancient Nabateans, the tribal allegiances of today’s southern Jordan and Israel ran up and down from the north in Ma’an to south in the Hejaz, but equally from the east in Ma’an to the West in Be’er Sheva. It is unclear how solid the tribal connections are still now after 1948, but the rise of a de facto champion of the Negev Bedouin must register on the Hejazi tribal radar — which has been left dangerously abandoned and orphaned by the Palestinian-focused, British-groomed Jordanian King who still fits more comfortably in the meeting halls of Davos than a tent near Aqaba.

To note, when a tribal member or group is abandoned in Arab society his life or existence is forfeited. When the Prophet Muhammad fled Mecca to Medina, since his uncle had to surrender his protection, it was understood by both Muhammad and the Meccan establishment as tantamount to a death sentence. One can only imagine what the Hejazi tribes today feel as they sense their abandonment by King Abdallah for his Palestinian allies. They are looking for a champion, and the Saudis — who reside over those same Hejazi tribes on their side of the border — anxiously look at King Abdallah’s failure and probably hope the tribes find a new patron, perhaps one attached to a strong horse like Israel.

So, it is possible Mansour Abbas as the most prominent champion right now of Bedouin interests threatens even King Abdallah. The UAE and the Saudis fears over the unhinged status of the Hejazi tribes by Jordan’s straying — who drifting abandoned could easily wander to a new patron hostile to Riyadh or Abu Dhabi, like Turkey — could be somewhat allayed by the success of Mansour Abbas among the Bedouin Arabs. The drift of the Negev Arabs was dangerously close to Hamas and to regional malefactors, particularly Turkey whose nemeses are Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the UAE. It is dubious that Abdallah is shrewd enough at this point to realize this, but eventually he could see this as a threat.

In other words, the success of Mansour Abbas represents a catastrophe for powerful interests everywhere.

It is to be expected that interested parties, all of whom have the power to act, will in fact sabotage Mansour Abbas at all costs, the quickest and easiest route being escalation to violence or war.

Criticizing and sanctioning Lukashenko is no substitute for an actual strategy on Belarus

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This article appeared in The Washington Post on May 30, 2021. Click here to view the original article.

By John Bolton
May 30, 2021

The United States and the European Union made a strategic mistake last summer by mishandling the unprecedented protests against Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko’s autocratic regime. Now, after Lukashenko’s commission of air piracy on May 23 to kidnap an opposition critic, the West appears set on compounding its error by driving Belarus further into the welcoming arms of Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Western capitals reacted with essentially unanimous condemnation when the Lukashenko government forced a Ryanair flight transiting Belarusian airspace to land and arrested passenger Roman Protasevich, an opposition journalist, and his girlfriend, Russian activist Sofia Sapega. Both kidnap victims were soon displayed in “confession” videos possibly obtained by threats or torture.

Rhetorical condemnation of the seizures came quickly, and E.U. and U.S. sanctions on the Lukashenko regime were announced. Lukashenko responded by accusing the West of launching “hybrid warfare” against Belarus.

Since Soviet days, Belarus and Russia have had an integrated air-defense system, leading to speculation about Moscow’s possible role or at least acquiescence in the kidnapping. Putin’s spokesman called such suspicions “obsessive Russophobia.” Putin pledged support to Lukashenko when the two met in Sochi, Russia, on Friday.

There is no question the West rightly concluded that Belarus committed air piracy, behavior entirely consistent with the regime’s autocratic methods. And as Alexei Navalny and many others could testify, it has the hallmarks of Putin’s equally authoritarian state next door.

Unfortunately, however, virtue-signaling, even accompanied by economic sanctions, does not constitute a satisfactory Western strategy to resolve a vastly more important issue: What is the future for Belarus as a whole? Will it be encouraged to follow the path of former Warsaw Pact states and at least some former Soviet republics into the West? Or will it be allowed to suffer full annexation into Russia?

President Biden needs to decide the answers to these questions and how to make them happen before his June 16 summit with Putin. There is no sign he knows what his answers are.

Last August, amid huge protests in Belarus prompted by a thoroughly rigged Lukashenko election, demonstrators said they were inclined toward neither Russia nor the West and did not want to be pawns in any international struggle. That view was supported by the lead E.U. foreign-affairs official. The Trump administration, consumed by the 2020 election campaign, said and did little. The protests failed. Lukashenko remained in power, and quiet returned. Until now. Will we repeat this strategic mistake?

It may be true that Belarus’s dissidents simply want to end Lukashenko’s oppression, without regard for the geopolitical environment in which Belarus exists. If so, it is touchingly — and dangerously — naive. No one in Moscow, certainly not Putin, sees Belarus’s fate as anything but closely tied to Russia.

Caught between NATO’s easternmost reach and Russia’s border, Belarus and other former Soviet republics are in a gray space that invites insecurity and Russian interventionism. Simply looking at the borders Latvia, Lithuania, Poland and Ukraine share with Belarus, Western Europeans would see that Minsk’s future is intimately tied to their own.

Supporting Belarus’s political opposition is thus not simply about deploring the thwarting of human rights through corrupted elections or the kidnapping of dissidents, unpalatable as those transgressions are. The potential freedom of all 9.5 million Belarusian citizens is at stake, since integrating Belarus into Russia would all but extinguish the chance for real liberty.

The fact that the West’s attention turned away from Belarus after the unsuccessful anti-Lukashenko demonstrations last summer, and refocused only following the Protasevich air-napping, shows that ad hoc, piecemeal approaches to a strategic problem are unsustainable and unlikely to succeed. Nor does it advance the Belarusian opposition’s cause to ignore the larger strategic context.

One approach, undoubtedly distasteful to the high-minded, would be to develop a way out for Lukashenko. Secure exile for himself and a select few followers in some well-appointed venue might be attractive to him at the right moment.

But such an extrication doesn’t happen overnight. It requires complex planning, specifically in this case to deter any possible Russian military moves into Belarus, as in Moscow’s seizure of Crimea from Ukraine or its creation of other “frozen conflicts” on Russia’s periphery. One potential bargaining chip: Putin’s prized Nord Stream 2 pipeline to Germany still isn’t complete, and it can be stopped at will, assuming the West and Germany in particular still have one.

Some may sniff at the idea of “impunity” for Lukashenko, but other former communist countries have decided that looking to the future outweighs a backward-facing, prosecution-at-all-costs strategy. Nelson Mandela’s South Africa did something similar, employing a post-apartheid “truth and reconciliation” policy.

We cannot underestimate how difficult are the prospects facing Belarus. It is certain, however, that sanctions and one-off expressions of displeasure with Lukashenko will not change his behavior or regime. Merely driving him deeper into Putin’s embrace risks losing all of Belarus, essentially forever. Time was growing short after last summer’s rigged elections. It is even shorter today.

Until Hamas is confronted as a military force, it will go on stirring up violence in the Middle East

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Israel cannot hope to deter this terrorist organization by negotiation alone

This article appeared in The Telegraph on May 17, 2021. Click here to view the original article.

By John Bolton
May 17, 2021

Middle Eastern armed conflicts involving Israel inevitably produce outpourings of cliches and muddled thinking: “cycle of violence,” “call on both sides to exercise restraint,” “immediate cease fire.” The list is endless, most of it virtue-signaling “moral equivalence.”

Allegedly improper evictions of Arab tenants in East Jerusalem did not cause Hamas’s recent missile and drone attacks against Israel, nor did “longstanding historical grievances,” nor “frustration and alienation,” nor “the Arab street.” All these cliches together cannot justify terrorism against innocent civilian targets, let alone the roughly 1,500 missiles launched into Israel from the Gaza Strip. Hamas, and now perhaps Hezbollah (missiles having been recently fired from Lebanon) are not so irrational to believe that their aggression would produce anything other than the vigorous Israeli retaliation now underway.

More is at stake. For diverse reasons, but emphatically united by Israel as a common enemy, Iran and its terrorist surrogates concluded that this was a propitious moment to go for Israel’s throat. Why, and why now?
Tehran desperately wants relief from the economic sanctions Washington imposed after withdrawing from the 2015 Iran nuclear deal. Chaos in Israel suits its purposes. Hamas, hoping finally to eclipse the corrupt, dysfunctional Palestinian Authority as the dominant Arab voice in Gaza and the West Bank, had its own reasons to follow Iran’s lead.

Israel is currently seized by unprecedented political gridlock. Even if Bibi Netanyahu were rejected as Prime Minister, no potential successor could afford to be less hard-line on Iran than he. Accordingly, while Israeli parties centered upon Arab voters might have benefitted in the near term by supporting a new Israeli government, the interests of Iran, Hamas and Hezbollah are better served by continued turmoil and violence against Israel.

In fact, the hostilities appear to have terminated deal-making on a possible new Israeli coalition. Moreover, significant violence between Arabs and Jews inside Israel itself, massively under-reported by the press, could foreshadow long-term instability for Israel. More such violence only benefits terrorists and radicals across the Middle East. Further breakthroughs like the Emirati and Bahraini diplomatic recognition of Israel are highly unlikely for the foreseeable future, another win for Iran and the radicals. And while Israel is preoccupied, Iran is likely planning additional clandestine shipments of weapons and supplies into Lebanon, Syria, and Iraq.

Viewing America’s return to the nuclear deal in near-theological terms, President Biden feels pressured by Iran’s impending June elections. Moreover, Iran correctly sees that he faces major domestic political problems from the vehement opposition of Israel and the Gulf Arabs to any lessening of U.S. pressure on Tehran. Distracting Jerusalem reduces its ability to influence Washington in the nuclear negotiations.
Whether Iran instigated the current conflict, or merely took advantage of these circumstances to accelerate and expand it, we do not presently know, but the consequences are the same regardless. How should Israel and the wider West respond?

Negotiations are not the answer. Israel, fully justified by its right to self-defense, would instead be wiser to eliminate Hamas as a military force now, once and for all. Jerusalem had a similar opportunity to destroy Hezbollah during the 2006 Lebanon war, which was indeed Israel’s declared objective. Failing to follow through, however, left Hezbollah the dominant force in Lebanon, and allowed Iran to expand its presence in Syria. Hezbollah is a greater terrorist and conventional threat today than fifteen years ago. Israel should not ignore that lesson.

Moreover, what are negotiations and “commitments” from terrorists worth? In his December 29, 1940 fireside chat, best known for calling America “the arsenal of democracy,” President Franklin Roosevelt said, “No man can tame a tiger into a kitten by stroking it. There can be no appeasement with ruthlessness. There can be no reasoning with an incendiary bomb.” Some things never change.

The only point where negotiations with overzealous enemies makes sense is when the negotiation is one way. Many Americans and Europeans simply do not understand this approach, which, for Americans, ignores their own history. In the Civil War, General Ulysses S. Grant’s initials “US” were said to mean “unconditional surrender,” his trademark demand from defeated Confederate forces. And that was against fellow Americans. Israel can negotiate minor details of the Hamas surrender, but not whether there will be one.

Iran and Hamas crossed a real red line this time. Israel knows what it should do.

How Biden Can Turn the Tables on Putin

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He aggresses in a gray zone between NATO and Russia, so let’s remove it

This article appeared in The National Review on May 13, 2021. Click here to view the original article.

By John Bolton
May 13, 2021

The Biden administration billed Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s May 6 visit to Kyiv as showing support for Ukraine’s struggle against Russian aggression. Instead, Blinken served up only rhetorical pablum, retreating from what senior Trump officials (although not Trump himself) did to back Ukraine and re­turning to Obama-era blandishments. Vladimir Putin must be delighted.

Inexplicably, moreover, Blinken equated Russia’s belligerence with Ukraine’s admittedly substantial corruption problems, stating that there is “aggression from outside . . . and, in effect, aggression from within.” This moral equivalence is nonsensical. For both Washington and Kyiv, corruption is hardly as strategically important as Moscow’s threat. Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky won election by campaigning against corruption, and while he is struggling to prevail, lecturing him publicly will not improve his performance.

More fundamentally, President Biden still has no policy to deal with Russia (or China) in Europe. During his April 13 telephone call with Putin, for example, Biden raised a long list of issues and ended by inviting Putin to a bilateral summit. Strategic coherence, however, requires allocating priorities and resources among national-security problems, not just listing them. Absent substantive policy direction, process steps such as summits are theater at best and often counter­productive, highlighting the vacuum that lies beneath public rhetoric.

Biden’s inherited problems, complicated by the passage of time, nonetheless increasingly require urgent solutions. After the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact collapsed, NATO’s eastward expansion never reached a decisive conclusion. Six Eastern European and Caucasus countries were left in a gray zone between Russia and NATO’s new borders, thereby remaining vulnerable to Moscow’s desire to reestablish hegemony within the former USSR. (The five Central Asian states, having their own complicated relationships with Russia, deserve separate analysis.)

Following the USSR’s disintegration, Moscow vigorously sought to contest the gray zone: creating “frozen conflicts” in Moldova and Georgia through direct Russian military involvement, and manipulating Azerbaijani–Armenian hostilities over Nagorno-Karabakh. Russia kept Belarus politically and economically close, still its strategy today but an increasingly difficult one after 2020’s popular opposition to the Minsk regime.

The Kremlin tried to mirror its Belarus policy in Ukraine, because both are central to its vision of “Russia.” Moscow initially succeeded in Kyiv, but the 2004 Orange Revolution brought such dramatic changes that, in April 2008, George W. Bush proposed putting Ukraine and Georgia on a sure path to NATO membership. Germany and France rejected Bush’s proposal, and four months later Russia invaded Georgia. Russia subsequently subverted the Orange Revolution through fraud and skullduggery but was in turn reversed by another popular uprising in 2014. In retaliation, Putin seized Crimea outright and created a new frozen conflict in eastern Ukraine.

However messy the history, Russian aggressiveness within the former USSR harms U.S. interests by destabilizing the region and, left unchecked, threatens instability across Europe. Virtually all the states of “new Europe” — the post–Cold War generation of NATO members — believe, with good reason, that blocking Moscow’s interference is critical to their growth and stability. Old Europe, especially Germany and France, is still somewhat tone-deaf here, so the diplomatic heavy lifting ahead for Washington should not be underestimated — par for the course even at the Cold War’s height.

Russia’s belligerence in Europe also shows its increasing, disturbing closeness to China, a relationship reflecting Moscow’s importance to Beijing for supplying hydrocarbons and high-tech weapons and the regimes’ perception of common interests in shielding the likes of Iran and North Korea from U.S. pressure. Breaking this emerging axis should be a high U.S. priority and is entirely consistent with thwarting Russian interference across its European borders.

China’s effort to purchase Ukraine’s major aerospace firm Motor Sich, successfully blocked by Kyiv after considerable American effort, exemplifies this point. Standing up to China’s existential challenge to the West as a whole will also require diplomatic heavy lifting in Europe.

As long as a gray zone remains be­tween NATO and Russia, instability will persist. Shrinking this inherently dangerous geographic space reduces potential Russian mischief, and ultimately confronts Moscow again with the question whether to join the West or oppose it.

Ultimately, inclusion in NATO is the only way for the endangered countries to minimize the inevitable uncertainty and instability between the alliance and Russia. Previously, NATO has rightly shied from adding new members with foreign combatants on their soil, seeing that as inheriting a war and thereby triggering Article Five of the Washington Treaty. Reducing the gray zone does not immediately require any new NATO memberships, but the alliance can surely devise an appropriate status to handle today’s European problem.

To get there, our primary focus should be to substantially augment Zelensky’s diplomatic and military efforts to expel Russia from eastern Ukraine, and then to impose steeply increasing costs on Russia if it fails to respond diplomatically. Succeeding will not solve Crimea, but it will clear the decks to do so. Critically, we must keep Europe focused on rolling back Moscow’s blatant cross-border military action.

Moldova, tucked between Ukraine and Romania, is a frozen conflict ready for melting. Purportedly independent Transnistria, a Russian invention, exists separately from Moldova only through Moscow’s continued military presence. Simply raising international attention to this post–Cold War anomaly would startle the Kremlin, and a determined new government in Chisinau now provides the opportunity for Washington to step up.

Similarly, in Georgia, it is time to push back against Russia’s presence in Abkhazia and South Ossetia, with the aim of re-creating the April 2008 situation in which NATO membership for Ukraine and Georgia was serious and feasible. Ukraine and Georgia remain the two most strategically important gray-zone countries. In turn, taken more seriously after Biden’s acknowledgement of Turkey’s genocidal campaign during World War I, Washington can then address the Azerbaijan–Armenian conflict. Real progress, however, will likely have to abide Turkey’s 2023 elections. If incumbent president Recep Tayyip Erdogan loses, much will be possible. But if he wins, Turkey will be dangerously close to removing itself from NATO by spurning Mustafa Kemal’s post-Ottoman vision, and thereby badly undermining NATO’s position in the Caucasus.

Belarus is the hardest challenge of all, with alliance membership inconceivable for quite some time. Yet however difficult it may be, the U.S. cannot leave Belarus to Moscow uncontested. The map alone shows how geopolitically critical Belarus is for Poland, Ukraine, and the Baltic republics, and how grave a threat an offensive Russian military presence would be. Ironically, rising pro-democracy sentiment increases the risk of Russian military intervention, and perhaps an outright Anschluss, even as the popular discontent demonstrates that moving Belarus westward may be more feasible than previously thought. NATO needs more outreach into Belarus, and its Eastern European members should play a major role. Belarus also implicates the related question whether Sweden and Finland will finally accept the inevitable and join NATO, thereby bolstering the Baltic republics and others.

Russia’s promises not to intervene in its former republics — and its protestations that its intentions are benign — carry no weight. Russia will stop meddling when it knows that it cannot succeed and that crossing a NATO boundary (of some sort) will bring inevitable and highly damaging consequences. The sooner we make that clear, the better.

June’s back-to-back G-7 and NATO summits in London and Brussels, respectively, afford President Biden an opportunity to prove he has more to offer than recycled rhetoric. If he fails to deliver next month, there is trouble ahead for Ukraine, America, and Europe.

Anatomy of an intentional escalation: Israel’s Approaching Hot Summer

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By Dr. David Wurmser
May 12, 2021

Sadly, there seems to be an escalatory effort underway within Israel, in the administered territories in Judea and Samaria, along Israel’s northern and Gaza borders, and even globally which could lead to great tension, even war, in the coming months. This is not a mutually reinforcing cycle of violence between two sides, but a concerted offensive serving strategic aims of a number of Israel’s enemies.

There is no one cause for this escalation. Rather it results from a collection of forces and strategic interests converging. Like the epic art of Middle Eastern story-telling, the singular “umbrella” theme of escalation is actually the product of many separate sub-tales woven into other tales, which align into a shell or framework story. In this case, that unifying shell tying these separate tales together represents a very real moment of danger.

The signs of escalation were building for weeks. In early April, there was a sudden escalation of attacks on Jews, many of which were serious and violent enough to result in hospitalization. As the Palestinian Media Watch, and FLAME – an organization dedicated to accuracy in media – note, the Palestinian official media organs started to broadcast highly inflammatory and bloody rhetoric starting on April 2. Two particularly disturbing attacks, one a beating by three Arab youths of a Rabbi in Jaffa, the southern part of Tel Aviv, and another wherein an Arab spilled boiling liquid on a Jew entering the Old City of Jerusalem, were followed by violent Arab demonstrations when police attempted to arrest the perpetrators.

Palestinians conducting these attacks in early April filmed their exploits and posted them to TikTok to compete over the amount of “likes” and “approvals” they can draw. So prevalent was this wave of Palestinian attacks on unsuspecting Jews who were minding their business in normal daily circumstances that the whole escalation was dubbed the “TikTok Intifadah.”

After two weeks of these violent attacks, a small group of extremist Jews marched in the streets of Jerusalem calling for the harming of Arabs, and a small demonstration was organized in Jaffa on April 20, near the area of the Rabbi’s attack. There were no acts of Jewish demonstrations prior to that. There were also one or two localized acts of anonymous Jewish graffiti-spraying with hateful slogans, and even the destruction of a few trees. But these incidents were isolated, limited and Israeli authorities investigated and will prosecute them. Moreover, subsequent investigations, even by leftist human rights organizations like BeTzelem, have even much to their chagrin later been forced to admit they had been misled and thus must retract some of their accusations of Jewish violence, particularly arson, which turned out, in fact, to be acts of Palestinian arson. Actual Jewish demonstrations and disturbances were quickly suppressed by Israeli police and have largely disappeared.

In contrast, Arab demonstrations have accelerated, expanded, broadened geographically and become increasingly violent. And the leadership of the Palestinian Authority (PA) continues to use its media outlets not to calm the flames, but to pour high-octane fuel on them. Incitement includes songs and chanting of slogans calling for martyrdom and blood in their children’s programs across all age groups, even toddlers.

Another series of attacks focused on the Damascus Gate into the Old City. This campaign of violence, especially a series of beatings of Jews and riots in Jerusalem, Jaffa and at the Damascus Gate on April 12, led Israel to set up barriers on April 13, to control flow, keep potentially violent Jewish and Arab extremists separated and maintain pedestrian traffic control to segment and respond quickly to rioting attempts by either. When a large number of Arab agitators quickly surged toward the area that evening, the barriers proved inadequate, and several days of escalating nightly Arab riots against Israeli police ensued, which eventually provoked a smaller Jewish demonstration and unrest on April 20, after a week of Arab riots and numerous beatings of Jews.

It was not long before the border with Gaza heated up as well, and rockets began being launched from Gaza into Israel, with one night in late April registering nearly three dozen rocket attacks onto Israeli towns and cities near Gaza. The northern border heated up as well, with an increased pace of activity by Iran’s IRGC to establish its ability to attack Israel, followed by a series of Israeli strikes in Syria to diminish that capability. After one Israeli strike, a stray Syrian SA-5 missile flew nearly 200 km across Israel and landed near Israel’s nuclear reactor in Dimona.

In the first week of May, the escalation continued. The Palestinian Authority then formally cancelled its planned elections and blamed Israel for the cancellation, after which the long silent head of the Hamas military structure, Muhammad Deif, suddenly resurfaced to call for violent attacks on Israelis, to also include “hit and run” attempts to run over Israelis. On May 2, live fire weaponry was re-introduced when a Palestinian terrorist, Muntazir Shalabi and a driver, machine-gunned three Israelis waiting at a bus stop at Kfar Tapuah Junction in Samaria in the territories. One Israeli teenager, Yehuda Guetta, died and another is in serious condition. A third escaped with moderate injuries. Yehuda Guetta was the first Israeli to die as a result of live fire in a terror attack in months, even years.

Moreover, violent demonstrations also erupted against a cluster of Jewish houses in the southeast Jerusalem neighborhood of Shaykh Jarrah near the US embassy. The Jewish presence in this cluster of houses was not a new Israeli move; the claim was based on an old Jewish-held land-deed from early in the 20th century. But this Jewish presence in the heart of an otherwise Arab neighborhood in Jerusalem was quickly attacked as a target of opportunity in early May – a propaganda point which was quickly and unquestioningly adopted by some in the US on the left, as several major Democratic leaders, including Elizabeth Warren called the Israeli presence an “abhorrent” and “illegal” settlement.

These demonstrations in Shaykh Jarrah became more violent every day, with Arab arson attacks and the hurling of thousand of projectiles (chairs, bricks, rocks, etc.), which was met by the reinforced presence of armed Jews and police in the house cluster. Hamas warned that if the Israelis do not yield and leave the housing cluster, the violence will escalate.

Hamas delivered on its threats very quickly on another front. On May 5, Hamas from Gaza resumed their incendiary balloon attacks, which included this time not only incendiary devices attached to set fires in Israeli fields, but small bombs as well which could have caused considerable personal injury or death had any one of them had landed close to Israelis.

On Friday May 7, Israeli forces stopped a heavily armed squad originating in Tulkarem which was attempting to enter central Israel. Israeli forces identified the terrorists although they were driven in a minibus with stolen Israeli tags to facilitate entry into central Israel. When stopped, the three terrorists exited the minibus and initiated firing near the Salem military base checkpoint but failed to injure a single Israeli while two of the three terrorists were killed.

Finally, by nightfall on May 7, riots had erupted on the Temple Mount, with hundreds injured, including many police. Rioters retreated into the mosques on the Temple Mount, and police were forced to take positions up near them. This promises to put Israel in the difficult position of being accused of “aggressions” against the Temple Mount and threatening the “status quo.” Indeed, there is every indication already that this will soon cause a crisis in Israeli-Jordanian relations. In fact, the concept of status quo is odd to begin with since over the last two decades the status quo has been fluid rather than static. But the flow has always been in one direction alone. As any visitor to the Temple Mount over the last four decades can attest, the idea of a rigid “status quo” on the Temple Mount has proven to be an illusory concept masking the constantly expanding challenge to Israeli sovereignty, let alone Jewish and Christian access to the Temple Mount, at the hands of the increasingly restricting Muslim Waqf.

Finally, despite serious concerns over a complete loss of control Israeli police allowed Muslims to ascend the Temple Mount on Saturday night, May 8, to mark Laylat al-Qadr – one of the holiest days in the Muslim calendar, but one which is often marked by violence and emotion. With great effort and caution, the night passed without a serious eruption and loss of control, despite the fact that nearly 100,000 Muslims came to the limited space of the Temple Mount complex.

Indeed, despite all this escalation and violence over six weeks, not one Arab rioter has suffered serious injury, let alone be killed, although there are dead and critically wounded Israelis.

In short, Israel faces a concerted escalatory campaign which promises to deliver a hot summer. But why?

The context of this escalation is a willful policy of seeking to provoke a climate of tension which was first started by Muhammad Abbas (Abu Mazen), the head of the PLO and Palestinian Authority, but expanded to other players who had equal strategic reasons to seek upheaval.

Early this year, against the advice of most of his closest aides, Abu Mazen called for the first Palestinian elections in well over a decade for the end of May. Whatever Abu Mazen’s calculations were, it appears to have been a horrible miscalculation. By the end of March, it was painfully clear to him, his aides, his allies, his enemies, and to most international observers that not only will he not win the upcoming elections, but that he will be trounced with both Hamas’ and Marwan Barghouti’s faction of the PLO defeating him.

To avoid such a devastating humiliation, it was clear by very early April that Abu Mazen would have to cancel those elections, which he in fact eventually did the first week of May. And yet, cancelling the elections was not so simple, since both Abu Mazen’s aides and Hamas leaders made it clear that the latter would take to the streets in a violent upheaval against the PA and Abu Mazen were he to proceed to cancel the elections. Abu Mazen had no way out of this dilemma other than to proceed in cancelling the elections, but at the same time blame Israel and provoke a series of escalations that would externalize the anticipated violence and deflect it onto Israel.

A broader context also has intruded, about which there is building evidence. Several actors, both Palestinian factions as well as external actors such as Iran and Turkey, see a need and opportunity to incite escalation against Israel on many fronts, of which popular unrest was the first phase. In terms of need, the escalatory interests of the Palestinian Authority, Erdogan’s government in Turkey, the revolutionary regime in Iran — emanate from a sense of threat to their regimes from a fear of public rejection and internal unrest. All face grave crises internally that rattle their regimes in dangerous ways. On the other side, in terms of opportunity, the escalatory aspirations of all these actors emanate from the growing confidence that any increase in violence surrounding Israel will cause tension under the new Biden administration between Jerusalem and Washington, thus providing a strategic incentive to engage in just such an escalation. Other than the previous administration, and to some extent the Bush 43 administration, such a reflexive reaction to reign Israel in, and the resulting frustration of Israeli power and initiative, was a safe bet. As such, this sort of escalation, in the form of a test as well, has been a consistent theme greeting every new administration in which there was hope that they may be less pro-Israeli.

Finally, there is an internal Israeli dimension too. There is great shock and discomfort in traditional Israeli-Arab parties and elites in Israel. In the recent elections, an Arab party, the United Arab List (Ra’am) under Mansour Abbas, gained almost as many seats in the Israeli parliament (Knesset) as the traditional leadership represented by the Joint Arab List party led by Ayman Odeh. Mansour Abbas’ party gained this traction because the Israeli Arab population is facing a series of grave crises in such areas as crime, education, economy and so forth. There is popular erosion of support for the traditional leadership since it fails to deliver on such personally important issues. And patience is stretched for continued sacrifice for the elites’ obsessive, theoretical support for unattainable nationalist aspirations.

In a stark departure from the practice of reigning Arab-Israeli elites, Mansour Abbas’ party promised to work within the framework of any Israeli government as a normal parliamentary party to secure the interests of its constituents. Rather than respond competitively, however, the “establishment” Joint Arab List continued peddling an entirely disruptive, anti-Zionist pan-Arab nationalist agenda, which sacrificed its ability to enter the parliamentary power structure to leverage and barter for constituent interests, and instead continued to opt for international applause for its rhetorical, but entirely disenfranchising, nationalist behavior. As such, this internal Israeli Arab traditional leadership anchored to the Joint Arab List also instigated some violence in recent months in order to embarrass and undermine the rising support for the Ra’am (the United Arab List) party. The Joint Arab List under Odeh even provoked direct violent attacks on Mansour Abbas and some in his party in Umm al-Fahm last month. One of the aims of this tension then is to shame Ra’am’s leadership enough to force it into expressing support for the unrest, which would sabotage the party’s ability to deliver on its promise and enter an Israeli government.

As such, the interests of a panoply of actors now dovetail into a dangerously escalatory and mutually-resonating climate enflamed by the United Arab List, the PA, Hamas, Islamic Jihad, Turkey and Iran. Each player has contributed a sub-tale to this story, but the shell, or “umbrella” story is the larger and unifying tale of escalation.

Thus, the unprovoked Arab rioting, the climate of tension created by the impressive performance of the United Arab List in the Israeli elections, followed by the violence instigated at the behest of Abu Mazen and then Hamas and Islamic Jihad, are not the whole story. Given the interests that seem to be in play, it is likely that they are a prelude to attempts to lay the groundwork for a more dangerous escalation in the coming days and weeks, serving not only the interests of diversion noted regarding Abu Mazen, but foreign actors who seek to drive a wedge between Israel and the United States.

A final, disturbing and novel dimension of this current escalatory cycle is that it is attended by a considerable footprint from US territory. First is the advance propaganda campaign, clearly coordinated, to provide a proper background to set a narrative in the United States favorable to this escalation and multiply the tensions it will cause in US-Israeli relations. With blazing speed after the PA and Hamas had signaled there will be an escalatory cycle, pro-Palestinian voices in the United States mobilized to secure this narrative. The Middle East Institute’s Khaled Elgindy, publishing in Foreign Policy, is for example a revealing example of the effort, when he wrote:

“The unrest began on April 13—around the start of Ramadan—when Israeli authorities blocked off the steps to the Old City’s iconic Damascus Gate in Palestinian East Jerusalem. The seemingly arbitrary move sparked several days of clashes between Palestinian protesters and Israeli security forces.”

Of course, there was nothing arbitrary about Israel’s moves at the Damascus gate on April 13, since for weeks before the restriction, accelerating numbers of unprovoked attacks, as incited by Palestinian leaders, occurred on Jews in both Jerusalem and in Jaffa. A focal point of many of these attacks not only in recent weeks, but months and over the last year, which also included several incidents against police, was at the Damascus Gate. So the restrictive barriers set up at the Damascus Gate on April 13, are the inevitable consequence of the escalatory ramp the Palestinian leadership itself had ascended.

So why did the author set the date as April 13, to use his term an arbitrary mile-marker midstream in a series of escalating activities? Because it is the start of Ramadan. The implication is insidious: the Israelis chose to, out of the blue, attack Muslims in Jerusalem on that day of all days since it marked the beginning of the most holy month. In other words, Israel is subtly accused of launching a grave religious attack on Islam itself – a highly incendiary implication.

As such, Khaled Elgindy’s article must be characterized not as an attempt to illuminate, but much more as an attempt to serve as a calculated propaganda offensive coordinated with the determined effort of escalation started by Abu Mazen but now joined by Hamas and Islamic Jihad as well as Iran and Turkey. The use of the word “arbitrary” to characterize Israeli actions — a clever propaganda device used not only to obscure, but entirely erase all context and preceding causes to an action — betray this as an attempt at propaganda rather than effort to bring understanding.

A second, disturbing U.S. aspect of the current escalation is the role – the money to which must be followed –a village in the northern territories in Samaria played from which the terrorist that killed the Israeli citizen, Yehuda Guetta, early this week is from. Not only is the terrorist himself (Muntazir Shalabi) a US citizen, but 80% of the village (Turmus Ayyeh) from which he originated his action is inhabited by U.S. citizens, many of whom are generally absentee, coming only during the summer months. This village has also become a Mecca of sorts for Western pro-Palestinian activists and radicals. An effort to follow the money behind this is warranted.

The Shaykh Jarrah neighborhood issue has tremendous implications and any ruling or Israeli concession could have far-reaching and highly destabilizing repercussions. The issue of the Shaykh Jarrah neighborhood is complex. It is the site of the holy graves of a 12th century Muslim Shaykh who was Salahdin’s doctor, from which the area derives its modern name, and the 5th century BC grave of Simon the Just – the last of the original clerics who returned with the Jewish people from Babylon and started the interpretation structures that make up today’s Jewish liturgy called the Mishna. The sub-neighborhood, Shimon HaTzadik is named after him. There is historical importance, but indeed, there is even more legal and strategic importance to the area.

The neighborhood’s three sections housed about 125 Arab families in 1948, most of whom had moved there in the 1930s and 1940s — some of those families only used the houses as retreats such as the Husseini and Nashashibi families — and about 80 Jewish families who had lived there year-round since the Ottoman era. In early 1948, the area was successfully secured by the Harel brigade of the Haganah as part of the Jewish-Arab-skirmishing in advance of the declaration of the State, but British soldiers, not Arabs, attacked and removed the area from Israeli control, forcing the Jewish families to leave, and turned it over to Arab forces. Shortly afterwards, on April 13, 1948, a British “protected” Jewish resupply convoy to the Israeli enclave on Mount Scopus was attacked by Arab soldiers. The British remained neutral, despite their obligation to protect the convoy, and observed the resulting massacre of 78 Jewish doctors, nurses and civilians. This effectively left Mount Scopus and the Hebrew University cut off from the remainder of Israel. A few years later, when the area was under Jordanian control, UNRWA (United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East) and the Jordanian government transferred several Arab families into the vacant Jewish houses.

When Israel reoccupied the area in 1967, which is in the strategic triangle between the green line, the French Hill, and GIvat Hamiftar connecting Israel to Mount Scopus, the Jewish families who had been expelled two decades earlier asserted their land deeds. A decision by Israel’s Supreme Court in 1972 ruled the Jewish claims were valid, and thus ownership was theirs, but also ruled that for practical reasons, any Arab family that occupies a house will be protected from eviction if they agree to pay rent to the Jewish owners. Recently, Arabs have come forward with counterclaims, all of which are proving to be forgeries – which is not surprising since the land claims from the Ottoman era are in Ottoman archives in Istanbul, and the Turkish government under Erdogan several years ago launched an effort to cull all the land deeds in Israel from the Ottoman era, and are strongly suspected of systematically destroying original Jewish deeds and creating new forgeries.

At any rate, in 1972, a number of families did accept the Israeli Supreme Court formula and paid rent, but a much larger number of families simply ignored the rule of law and refused to pay. The current issue of eviction is about some of those families who have refused to pay rent since 1972 in houses whose Jewish title was incontrovertibly established.

The Shaykh Jarrah issue is strategic for two reasons. First the area connects the Jewish areas of Jerusalem to the Hebrew University, Mount Scopus and several large Jewish neighborhoods to the north. Second, and perhaps much more ominously, if the Jewish claims were annulled, then this would encourage a massive effort to challenge all Jewish claims to any property in Jerusalem, such as the Jewish Quarter of the Old City, and perhaps throughout Israel.

Equally disturbing are the highly incendiary and destabilizing claims of US Democratic politicians, such as Elizabeth Warren, that the Jewish land ownership deeds constitute an “abhorrent” and “illegal” act of occupation and settlement. Such statements either display such insensitivity to, or ignorance of, the history of the neighborhood that it effectively should annul the validity of their participation in discussions, or worse, an anti-Semitic outlook that holds that Jewish titles and land deeds simply do not count and are less valid than anyone else’s anywhere else in the world. One can only hope the motivation is ignorance. Nonetheless, the statements have encouraged the violence and greatly inflamed the situation as it encourages Arab rioters to believe their violence is gaining traction. The statements by the US government, while less flagrantly ignorant or prejudicial, have been weak and disturbingly neutral as well, which also enflames the situation.

The Israeli Supreme Court on May 9, decided to postpone the issue, clearly to buy time to avoid playing into the highly escalatory climate encouraged by Hamas and the Palestinian Authority, but this issue will rear again soon, if not immediately since postponing may not buy calm at any rate and the Arab rioters enjoy international support.

The coming months, thus, will be tense for Israel, and quite possibly very violent. The failure of the United States to preemptively and strongly signal that it will not allow a wedge to be driven between Washington and Jerusalem, and indeed the strong expectation that the opposite will occur, only further encourages the eruption of violence, which aligns with the underlying interests of the various Palestinian factions and surrounding ambitious Turkish and Persian neighbors.

The Zarif tape shows why Biden should abandon reviving the Iran nuclear deal

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This article appeared in The Washington Post on May 3, 2021. Click here to view the original article.

By John Bolton
May 3, 2021

A recording of Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif that leaked last week remains unverified, but his apology on Sunday and a key Iranian official’s dismissal provide confidence in its accuracy. Considerable ink has been spilled over whether former secretary of state John F. Kerry at some point leaked classified U.S. information (he denies it) to Zarif about Israeli strikes in Syria.

Far more significant, however, is Zarif’s assertion that he learned sensitive Iranian information from Kerry. This from the Iranian diplomat who would be Tehran’s chief negotiator as the Biden administration ill-advisedly moves to revive the Obama-era nuclear deal with Iran.

Remarkably, Zarif claims he was unaware of substantial increases in Iranian military activity in Syria that prompted the Israeli strikes in question. According to the Financial Times, after listening to three hours of the seven-hour recording that had been intended for an oral history project, “Kerry told Zarif that Iran Air flights to Syria had increased sixfold, a clear indication they were being used by the military to support Damascus in its conflict with the opponents of the Assad regime.”

When Zarif asked Quds Force commander Qasem Soleimani about the flights, Soleimani blew him off, saying, “if Iran Air is 2 per cent more secure than [another airline], Iran Air must be used even if this inflicts 200 per cent costs on diplomacy.”

Beyond Syria, Zarif had a long list of complaints about his irrelevance to fundamental national-security decisions made without his involvement or even his knowledge. He provided several examples of efforts by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, or IRGC, to sabotage the 2015 nuclear deal with the Obama administration, such as by seizing two U.S. Navy patrol boats in 2016, and by Soleimani’s direct intervention with Moscow in an unsuccessful attempt to persuade Russia to reject the agreement.

Zarif says he was not aware that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad visited Tehran in February 2019, until he saw Assad on television. This devastating exclusion from a head-of-state visit prompted his (temporary) resignation; he fretted that otherwise, “nobody in the world” would even “give me broad beans to carry, let alone negotiate with me.” Zarif also says the IRGC initially denied shooting down a Ukrainian passenger jet in 2020, although it later had to admit the truth. No one should be surprised if more emerges to this effect.

Summarizing his discontents, Zarif said, “in the Islamic Republic, the [military] field rules. I have sacrificed diplomacy for the military field rather than the field servicing diplomacy.”

Zarif’s confessions show why President Biden should abandon his dream of returning to the 2015 nuclear deal, which the United States exited during the Trump administration. In Iran, it is not the negotiators who matter, nor what they say. It’s increasingly the IRGC, which controls the nuclear-weapons and ballistic-missile programs, commands conventional military activities externally, and supports terrorists worldwide.

If Israel is pounding Iranian and allied units in Syria, it is hardly a secret to the Quds Force. The real news is that it was a secret to Iran’s foreign minister, and likely therefore his subordinates responsible for nuclear diplomacy. The killing of Soleimani with a U.S. drone strike in Baghdad in January 2020, while an enormous blow to Iran, does not change the picture. If anything, Soleimani’s demise simply reinforced the IRGC ethos that it alone can protect the 1979 revolution.

The extent of internal deception in Iran shows that its “commitments” on nuclear issues are inherently unbelievable and untrustworthy. It is easier to disseminate diplomatic untruths when an envoy believes that what he is saying is true. Flat-out lying is harder to mask. The ready solution for authoritarians is simply to conceal key facts from diplomats doing the negotiations. No one should find this surprising. Even in Washington, there is hardly seamless cooperation between the Defense and State departments.

With Tehran, we do not face a government where “trust, but verify” makes sense. We have no basis for “trust” in the first place, let alone confidence that verification measures can detect active Iranian violation and concealment.

Advocates of the 2015 nuclear deal tout its “enhanced” verification mechanisms used by the International Atomic Energy Agency, but these are grossly ineffectual. Iran has long stonewalled IAEA inspections and declared key facilities off limits, which alone makes a mockery of reliance on its efforts.

The United States’ real insurance is not international monitoring, but its own intelligence capabilities. IAEA’s total operational budget in this area is roughly 0.6 percent of current U.S. intelligence spending of approximately $85 billion. If our intelligence is inadequate, it is hardly credible to think that the IAEA will safeguard us from Iranian nuclear violations.

The Zarif tape tells us much about Tehran’s diplomatic mendacity. Unfortunately, however, the Biden administration is still incomprehensibly piling up broad beans for Zarif and his nuclear negotiators.