Entrance to Ayalon prison facility, near the city of Ramla, where Ben Zygier was held (photo: Activestills)

These are the main details which have been made public in the affair of Ben Zygier, also known as ‘Prisoner X’: Zygier was probably recruited by the Mossad in the years following his immigration to Israel; the Australian secret service grew suspicious of Zygier after he changed his name and took out new passports four different times; according to the latest reports, Zygier gave the Australians details regarding the identity of Mossad agents and of at least one operation in which he was involved.

Zygier was arrested in Israel upon his return from Australia in 2010. His identity and the details of his arrest and trial were kept secret, but his family was informed. Reports on his arrest in the Israeli press were censored and Knesset members who asked for details about his case were made to believe that he was well taken care of.

After more than nine months in which he was detained in complete isolation, Zygier’s lawyers presented him with a plea bargain carrying a very long prison sentence. At that point, he asked to meet famous human rights attorney Avigdor Feldman, whom he probed about alternative options. The following day, he was found dead in his cell. His death wasn’t reported by the Prison Service through the usual channels, and media stories were censored yet again.

A complete media blackout was maintained until details of the case were published by Australia’s ABC news network last week. I wrote about the censorship effort here. It is worth noting that as more and more details emerge, it is becoming less and less likely that the publication of the Zygier affair will put the lives of Israeli agents in danger today. The whole affair seems more like an attempt to cover up the Mossad’s and – more troubling – legal system’s failures, starting from using friendly countries’ passports for covert operations and all the way to the secret trial, isolation and mysterious events surrounding the prisoner’s death. The last bit is important: “legal sources” spoke to the Israeli media last week, promising that this was a “unique case,” with unique circumstances, which led judges to permit the state to keep him isolated and his identity secret. Yet this one-in-a-million prisoner was not guarded with extra care. Rather, he allowed to die so easily.

But this is just the tip of the iceberg — the common-sense part of the issue. The heart of the matter lies with the security establishment’s special status in Israel, and with the liberties the heads of the security agencies take.

Anat Kamm in court October 2011. Kamm’s house arrest was kept under gag order for three months (Activestills)

Here are a few other famous cases that occurred around that time period (2010).

In December 2009, shortly before Ben Zygier was arrested, former soldier Anat Kamm was arrested and later secretly put under house arrest. Kamm was found to be the source that leaked 2,000 documents from IDF Central Command (the eastern command, not the chief of staff) to Haaretz reporter Uri Blau. Blau used two of those documents in an investigative report suggesting that senior IDF officers, including former Chief of Staff Gabi Ashkenazi, initiated unlawful assassinations of Palestinian militants.

The gag order covering Kamm’s arrest included, as usual, a clause banning publication of the gag order itself. Only after details of the arrest were made public outside the country was the gag order lifted. Kamm was put on trial, and she is now serving a 4.5 year-prison sentence.

Reporter Uri Blau moved to London to avoid imprisonment. He later returned and despite an agreement reached between Haaretz and the Internal Security Service (Shin Bet), was put on trial for obtaining secret documents. Blau is now serving a four-month community service sentence.

The Kamm investigation was carried out by the Internal Security Service, which was led at the time by Yuval Diskin. There is also reason to believe that Diskin, a friend of then-Mossad chief Meir Dagan, was involved in the arrest and secret imprisonment of Zygier, since it took place on Israeli soil. The two of them were also close political allies of IDF chief of staff Gabi Ashkenazi.

Writing about the Diskin-Dagan-Ashkenazi connection, Makor Rishon journalists Amnon Lord and Haaretz‘s Amir Oren bring up another affair from 2010: the Shabak decided to revoke National Security Advisor Uzi Arad’s security clearance, which led to his resignation from the Prime Minister’s Office. Arad was accused of leaking information but was later cleared; he never regained his position. At the time, Arad was among the most vocal supporters of an attack on Iran, and a known rival of the Dagan-Diskin-Ashkenazi trio.

It doesn’t end there. In August 2010, Israel’s Channel 2 revealed a document supposedly written in the office of Defense Minister Ehud Barak – Chief of Staff Ashkenazi’s main political rival – discussing ways to promote the image of a general Barak backed, and to destroy the credibility of his rivals. But the document was forged and the subsequent investigation into the leak led directly to many of Ashkenazi’s proxies in the army’s high command. Tamir Pardo, the current Mossad chief, was also consulted by the team of generals who executed the plot against Barak. In the background of this story was a mixture of personal rivalries in the security elite and a dispute over national security policy, mainly regarding the Iranian issue.

The Israeli press has hinted at the existence of more stories from this period in which the Ashkenazi-Dagan-Diskin trio exercised power in ways that extended beyond the mandates of their organizations, to say the least. Naturally, discussing some of their actions is problematic due to the work of the military censor, which might not directly cover their tracks for them, but tends to be more active when the secret services are involved.

Yet even those details that were made public are troubling, to say the least. It could be summed up like this: around the same time period, the Shin Bet and Mossad kept two citizens in secret detention (the claim that both Kamm and Zygier agreed to the terms of their arrest, which was brought up by security officials, wouldn’t stand the scrutiny of a first-year law student. Almost any prisoner can be intimidated into giving up his rights, especially when he is so young – Kamm was 23, Zigyier was 34 – and when his arrest is hidden from the public). One of those prisoners died in his cell. This fact was also kept secret; even the Knesset Committee for Secret Services, whose hearings are closed to the media, wasn’t informed.

Around the same time, the Shin Bet got the national security advisor to resign while the army chief of staff, along with other officers, was linked to a plot that was meant to discredit the defense minister. And this is only what we know.

Former Mossad head Meir Dagan (R) with former IDF Chief of Staff Gabi Ashkenazi (L) (Photo: Israel Defense Forces, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

I happen to support the positions of Dagan and Diskin on Iran and I have opposed almost everything Netanyahu and Barak did in the last four years. But the bigger story here has to do with the unchecked power of the security establishment in Israel.

The courts failed miserably in all the above cases, allowing the security services to hide people from the public eye, approving a secret trial and covering up the suicide (?) of a prisoner. All the evidence suggests that Gabi Ashkenazi plotted against his elected political superior, Defense Minister Barak, not to mention the orders he gave regarding the targeted assassinations that were at the heart of Uri Blau’s piece. The prosecution failed to investigate or clarify those issues.

The media failed too. In some cases, it was prevented from properly covering those affairs. Mostly, it was simply played. By the time the true details emerged (all the information in this post is from public sources), the public had long forgotten about the affairs at hand.

More importantly, the media and the public simply didn’t want to know. The aura around the security establishment is so far-reaching that it’s almost impossible to criticize those institutions. You can write almost anything you want about politicians in Israel but only a failed war is considered reason enough to judge the chief of staff, and the security services are almost always right. The effect of the security establishment on policy is immeasurable, to the point that it sometimes operates as a shadow government (add 2010 to the list that includes the Six-Day War and the first weeks of the second Intifada, among other things). Some members of Knesset have called for a formal independent inquiry into the Prisoner X affair. I doubt they will get it.

One final note. Former Mossad head Meir Dagan became an international hero due to his opposition against war with Iran (including an admiring profile in The New Yorker); former Shin Bet chief Yuval Diskin is the star of the film The Gatekeepers, where he assumes the role of the philosopher-in-chief, criticizing Israeli strategy on the Palestinian issue. Ashkenazi, they say, is about to join the Labor Party, and perhaps try and lead the peace camp.

Yet it is not only that these are no men of peace — they seem to lack the most basic respect for democracy, civil rights and freedom of the press that is required in their positions. Their actions make them the problem Israeli society is suffering from, rather than the solution.

Palestinian refugees ‘making their way from Galilee in October-November 1948′ (Fred Csasznik, copyright expired)

A few weeks back I watched The Gatekeepers, a movie which interviews six of the chiefs of Shin Bet, from Avraham Shalom to Yuval Diskin. The movie is shocking and well worth your time. The most surprising character was Diskin, who obviously underwent a great change upon leaving the service: at the end of the movie he adamantly agrees with Yishayahu Leibowitch’s famous dictum that the occupation will turn Israel into a ”Shin Bet state.” And over the weekend we learned Diskin went through another metamorphosis: he recommended to the Turkel Committee that the Shin Bet start video-taping its interrogations, which the service has long resisted.

Diskin is merely the latest in a series of senior security officials who, as soon as they leave office, see the light and understand just how ruinous the office they headed was, and how they represented positions that were damaging to the country. The last great show in this genre was the bunch of senior commanders of the IDF’s Northern Command, who upon retirement were astonished to find out that the Security Zone in Lebanon was a huge mistake – often, after defending it in uniform as vital to security just a few weeks prior.

In that regard, the most interesting speaker is certainly Avraham Shalom, the oldest interviewee. Shalom thinks strategic errors were made, particularly by the politicians, but he himself regrets nothing. When asked about moral problems, he laughs. “Morality?” He asks, “Morality? Look for it first among the terrorists.” One assumes former chiefs, assuming they would even bother to be interviewed, would supply similar remarks. It’s very hard to see Issar Har’el, for instance, the closest thing we’ve got to J. Edgar Hoover, providing the camera with anything aside from a mocking, world-weary grin, saying in effect “you’ll never understand, so don’t even try.”

Superficially, Shalom, born in 1928, and Diskin, born in 1956, are separated by just one generation. Actually, they come from different worlds. Diskin grew up in Givatayim, possibly Tel Aviv’s most secure suburb. Shalom was born in Vienna. It was not a safe place for Jews even then, and in 1938 came the Anschluss, the annexation by Nazi Germany, which the Viennese used as an excuse for an orgy of violence against resident Jews. Shalom was lucky: his family understood early on where things were going, and fled to Palestine in 1939. They arrived penniless – this was Adolf Eichmann’s specialty, how he made his name – but they survived.

Not everyone was that lucky. Uri Ben-Ari, who would one day create the IDF’s doctrines of tank warfare, saw as an eight-year-old child in Berlin (he was still called Heinz Benner) how a gang of SA gunmen severely beat his father, after which they urinated on him. On Kristallnacht, the father and son saw the synagogue where he had recently celebrated his bar mizvah being set on fire. Several days later, Benner was kicked out of his school in a humiliating public spectacle: “Heinz Benner! You are a member of the Jewish race which committed heinous crimes against mankind and against the German people! The school vomits you from its ranks and you are hereby expelled! Go through our gate and be gone from our sight forever. Forward march! Heil Hitler!” Ben-Ari emigrated to Palestine, alone, in March 1939. His father was left behind.

In that regard, Ben-Ari was more typical than Shalom. The Palmach generation is often described as composed of native-born, but a significant number of them were European refugees, not natives. For a generation, the symbol of the Palmach sabra was Dan Ben-Amotz. He was actually born in the Ukraine under the name Moise Tehilimzuger. Like Ben-Ari, he too came to Palestine alone; his family, too, was murdered. The number of Jews then residing in Palestine who lost their family in Europe was staggering. To the rest of their trouble – the relative poverty and primitiveness of Palestine, at least when compared to central Europe; the conflict with the Arabs; the significant suffering inflicted on teenaged refugees by teenage sabras and often even by the grown-ups, who couldn’t comprehend what was happening “over there” – must be added survivor’s guilt. The refugees who made it to Palestine prior to 1941 believed they were pioneers, and that their family and friends would join them after a while; many of them saved money diligently to aid in this immigration. At the end of 1945, most of them would realize they were either the last survivors of their family or very nearly so. The fact that they not merely survived, but lived in relative comfort, must also have been a burden.

Ben-Ari and Shalom joined the Palmach in 1946, the year the organization began preparing itself for the coming independence war, which would come within 18 months. This was the same period in which Eastern Europe convulsed in a series of terrifying national struggles which followed the border changes the Soviet Union forced on the region following its victory over Nazi Germany. These struggles – a more apt title would be “ethnic cleansing” – were bloody, and included the murder of possibly millions of people: Ukrainians, Poles, and many Germans. The Czechs murdered, in a savage outburst of hatred only occupied people who felt their chains slip away can understand, some 20,000 Germans in the days immediately following liberation. Most of the victims were women, children and the elderly. The Czech don’t talk much about it nowadays, nor are they fond of speaking of the expulsion of some 1.5 million Germans, or the pillaging of their property. During a tour in Prague two months ago, the tour guide described what happened there as ‘genocide.’ Most of his people prefer to look the other way. The Poles made it clear to Jews who thought they could return home, with the pogrom in Kielce and by hundreds and thousands of terror killings on the roads and on trains, that they, too, are an ethnic minority whose historical role is over. Without understanding these events, it’s impossible to understand some of Alterman’s most haunting, poisoned lines in “The Child Avram”:

Before him stand, then, the Seventy Nations,
And say: We are upon you!
With seventy acts of laws and seventy axes,
We shall return you to this house!
We shall make you lie down in the ready bed,

And you slept in it as still as your father!

Orwell understood what was going on in 1946, in his Politics and the English Language, so reminiscent of Tacitus about the ways the Roman used language: “Defenseless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification. Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry: this is called transfer of population or rectification of frontiers.” Orwell was speaking of the need of newspapers written in English to speak about what their governments agreed to, without making the readers understand what is it that they mean. In Eastern Europe, it was well understood. There, a “mass of Latin words falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outline and covering up all the details” would simply not be enough; hence they spoke of the events as little as possible.

As far as its Jewish population is concerned, Palestine in 1947 was a branch of Eastern Europe, and it can be argued that its history in 1947-1948 simply cannot be understood without knowing what happened, two years earlier, in Europe. What took place there, echoed here, and when “normal” acts of hostility exploded, in November 1947, into war, tens of thousands of people who could not bring their families back, and who could not avenge themselves on the Germans – for other people already did that, yet another so-called proof of Jewish powerlessness – did on their new land what Eastern Europeans carried out on their side: they acted out an ethnic cleansing and looted the property of the other people. Afterwards they removed everything which might remind them of the people who lived here before them. And when the refugees tried to return, they shot at them. And that, not the expulsion during wartime but the refusal to let them back at peacetime, was the true birth of the refugee problem.

And then came the great silence. There are things of which you cannot speak, because you cannot live with the words. The generation of Ben-Ari and Shalom was famous for its silence. Even the well-known expulsion order, Ben-Gurion’s famous hand gesture when he was asked what to do with the captured population, was a wordless order.

“Hold on to that,” sang the Biluiym (for full English lyrics, click here),

“We tried very hard,
We covered all the ruins,
Changed the names of the streets,
We tried very hard,
We silenced the rumors…”

We silenced the rumors. Anyone who wanted to know, could. The ethnic cleansing of 1947-1948 was an ill-kept secret. But most of that generation did not want to know. And several years later massive waves of immigration changed the country irrecoverably. Many of those immigrants came from Eastern Europe, where people were experienced in entering a house whose occupants abandoned it in a hurry, leaving most of their property behind. A decade after 1948, and Ben-Ari and Shalom’s generation was already a minority. Most of the people did not know on whose lands they were sitting and liked it that way. A common legend arose, which said that the Palestinians left of their own will. A Czech history textbook, published recently, sums up the events of 1945-1946 with the words “and then the Sudeten Germans returned to their homeland.”

Shalom, as a representative of his generation, knew full well why he must not enter a debate about morality. It would open the gaping bottom under Israel’s feet, expose it as a country whose very existence relied on ethnic cleansing. It would open the question whether, given for instance Israel’s way of treating the Negev Bedouin – it now wants to expel thousands of them from the places to which it expelled them in 1948 – can we speak of the Nakba as a finite, finished event, or is it an ongoing process.

The East European ethnic cleansing had a certain advantage over the one carried out by Shalom and his generation: they were final. The German groups in Eastern Europe, which caused much of the instability following the First World War, ceased to exist. Eastern Europe, which until Stalin’s victory was a bubbling cauldron of minorities, some of them with delusions of grandeur, became homogenized. The process was murderous and agonized, caused the death of millions and brought untold suffering to many millions – only the war itself caused more suffering – but it is over. There are no active nationalist conflicts in Eastern Europe today.

The conflict in what used to be Mandatory Palestine never ended. To a certain extent, this was for two reasons: Israel was too weak to conquer the West Bank in 1948, and 1967 was not 1948. While a minor ethnic cleansing took place in 1967, Moshe Dayan knew it was too late to do in the West Bank what the IDF did in would-be-Israel in 1947.

When the Czechs prefer to keep silent and repress their history, it’s a problem, but it is not an imminent danger to the country, just to its national character; and a young and aware generation is trying to raise the issue. When Israelis prefer to pretend there was no ethnic cleaning here, it’s a wholly different question: the conflict won’t end unless Israel admits to the injustice it caused.

But it is so deep, so basic, that many Israelis would prefer to give up a solution so long as they don’t have to face the injustice and admit to it. We would be better off were Shalom’s generation to open its mouth at last; they would be believed. But he who grew accustomed to silence for so long, will not break it easily. Perhaps he is afraid of what he might say.

Last night, after the Israeli election was set for September 4, I saw a guy wearing a T-shirt that I thought summed up the public mood, which the main ”opposition” candidates have been and will be catering to. The T-shirt showed a comically wide-eyed, frightened John Cleese and his classic line from Fawlty Towers: ”Don’t mention the war!”

Perfect. The prime minister has the whole world scared to death that he’s going to bomb Iran, every poll shows that a great majority of Israelis don’t want him to do it – but it’s not an issue in Israeli politics and it almost certainly won’t be in the campaign. People don’t want to talk about it or hear about it. They sit silently as Netanyahu drips the fear of another Holocaust into their brains, softening them up for the war he’s waiting for the opportunity to start, then they go on about their business, a little more tenderized than before.  Except for the marginal left and a couple of rogue ex-Mossad and ex-Shin Bet chiefs, nobody challenges this “duty” of every Jew and every non-anti-Semitic gentile to choose war over a nuclear Iran.

Look at how the opposition and the public have reacted since ex-Shin Bet head Yuval Diskin accused Netanyahu and Barak last Friday of being “messianics” who can’t be trusted to deal reasonably with Iran. None of the three candidates purporting to offer a centrist alternative to Bibi - neither Kadima’s Shaul Mofaz, Labor’s Shelly Yacimovich nor Yair Lapid of Yesh Atid (There Is A Future) – grabbed the flag Diskin raised. His words, like those of Meir Dagan before him, caused a huge storm in the media, even overseas - but didn’t have the tiniest effect on the Likud and right wing’s control of the political arena. A Haaretz-Dialog poll published yesterday showed Netanyahu being more popular than Mofaz, Yacimovich and Lapid combined. It also showed him enjoying 2-1 public support against Diskin and his accusations.

In their hearts, Israelis would prefer that their government not start a war with Iran, but if somebody, such as the prime minister, tells them he’s going to do it anyway, they’ll go along. When push comes to shove, they’ll support it. The Israeli public is so weak, so intimidated by anybody who might stand up and accuse them of cowardice and treason if they don’t nod their heads to the proposal of the day for screwing the Arabs. They’re putty in the hands of a guy like Netanyahu.

The ”opposition” leaders know this, so they run from any issue in which they would have to position themselves to the left of Bibi (since right-of-Bibi is, of course, already overcrowded). They don’t challenge him on Iran, they don’t challenge him on the occupation, they don’t have anything to say about what most everyone else in the world thinks of when they hear the word “Israel” – war-mongering, trampling on Palestinians, militant Jewish fanaticism. These are the things that define Israel, the whole world knows it, and you won’t hear about any of this in this election campaign.

What will you hear about? Drafting the Haredim (ultra-Orthodox) and high prices. These are the hot-button issues in the country today, this is what people want to hear about, this is what it’s safe for both voters and politicians to scream and yell about – because it’s not right wing and it’s not left wing, it’s consensus, nobody will call you a coward or a traitor, everybody agrees, the goddamn haredim should serve the country like everybody else and these prices are too goddamn high.

Again, perfect. This is what Israelis really want, this is what Netanyahu, Mofaz, Yacimovich and Lapid are going to promise to deliver - and everybody knows everyone’s jerking each other off because nobody’s going to draft the Haredim – they won’t go and nobody’s going to make them go – and nobody’s going to lower prices, either, because this country’s economy is a piggish capitalist one and Netanyahu, who everybody knows will win the election, is the last guy on earth who wants to change that.

So the issues shaping up as the central ones of the campaign are not just trivial, they’re not  issues at all because in Israel 2012, nothing can or will be done about them.

As for the real issues, it’s not that there’s an elephant in the room that everyone’s pretending not to see, it’s that there are several elephants - war with Iran, the occupation, war with Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, Egypt and/or Turkey, the rise of McCarthyism, the dread that Israel doesn’t have a future – which will continue to go unmentioned in polite, mainstream company during this supposed season of decision.

Boy, what a vibrant democracy we live in.

This is just about unprecedented in Israeli history, these public attacks on the reliability of the prime minister and defense minister by the security chiefs who served under them. On Friday, Yuval Diskin, who headed the Shin Bet from 2005 until last May, joined the club by describing Netanyahu and Barak as two super-rich ”messianics” who are not to be trusted with such a fateful challenge as that of Iran.

Last year, Diskin and ex-IDF chief Gabi Ashkenazi were named by ex-Mossad director Meir Dagan as having been his partners in ”stop[ping] Bibi and Barak” from setting out on “any dangerous adventure.”  Later, Uzi Arad, who was Netanyahu’s closest ally for 15 years before being forced out of his post as National Security Council head in one of the endless intrigues in the Prime Minister’s Office, said that because Bibi was “easy to scare,” aides constantly whispered in his ear to turn him against their rivals. The origin of his break with Netanyahu, said Arad, was when he began raising doubts about an attack on Iran. Such doubts were also what brought on Ashkenazi’s ferocious power struggle with Barak, and his at-best correct relations with Netanyahu.

So here we have the leadership duo of Israel described as being basically unfit for office by the former Mossad, Shin Bet and National Security Council heads who worked for them for years, with the former IDF chief’s similar views remaining off-the-record yet known to everyone.

Did Ehud Olmert’s military/intelligence heads slag him off while he was prime minister? No. Did Sharon’s? No. Did Barak’s when he was prime minister? No. Did Peres’, did Rabin’s, did Shamir’s, did Begin’s – did any previous prime minister’s security chiefs go public about his fundamental untrustworthiness and unsuitability for the job?

Actually there is one precedent - Netanyahu, during his first term as PM, from 1996-99. Amnon Lipkin-Shahak, after retiring as IDF chief, annouced his run for the premiership by saying, “Netanyahu is dangerous for Israel.” Defense Minister Yitzhak Mordechai, who quit the cabinet and also ran for premier, was completely open about Netanyahu’s lack of honesty, challenging him in their election debate to ”look me in the eye, Bibi.” Dan Meridor, another senior minister who quit Netanyahu (though he’s come back to him now), announced his run for prime minister by saying Bibi had brought a “culture of lies” to government.

No Israeli prime minister but Netanyahu has ever faced such attacks on his character by witnesses like these. No Israeli defense minister but Barak has faced them, either. Bibi and Barak, in a league of their own. What is it about them that draws out such contempt from such unlikely sources?

I think it’s their own contemptuousness, above all toward those who disagree with them. Each one, as Diskin said, thinks he’s the “messiah,” a superior man of superior intelligence, strength and vision come to save the rabble, not to listen to them, not to respect them, either. Netanyahu shows this in his self-adoration, together with his transparent lying, manipulation of people’s fears and flattery, the last of which he reserves mainly for Americans. He thinks he’s God and other people are far, far lesser beings - useful, maybe, but nothing more.

Barak, for his part, wasn’t always like this. While he was already known in his first term as “Napoleon,” as an extremely headstrong fellow, he wasn’t despised like he is today. It was after his brief stint as prime minister blew up with the second intifada that he seemed to become deeply resentful; he divorced his wife, went off to America to get rich and returned as this imperious, intimidating junta type. If he couldn’t be prime minister again, he’d be defense minister for life. He turned into a cold and scary guy, once storming a Labor Party stage and ripping the microphone out of a party elder’s hand, turning every media interview into a lecture by raising his voice menacingly whenever the interviewer tried to get a word in. Olmert said Barak used to humiliate IDF generals, cutting them off and putting them down, at cabinet meetings. If Bibi tries to cover his contemptuousness with an earnest facade, Barak doesn’t bother; he’s not interested in people’s votes anymore, just their obedience.

When you’ve got two people with serious superiority complexes not only running the country, but planning to start a war that every other head of state and security chief in the world - along with most of those in Israel – thinks is a global threat, then we’re in Dr. Strangelove territory. Strange-thinking people -  ”messianics” – are playing with bombs, so somebody has to do something. And so you get the extraordinary alarm of a recently retired Shin Bet director and Mossad head, along with the “deafening silence” of a recently retired IDF chief. The extremity of their reactions tells you how extreme the situation is. (Arad, though, spoke out to clear his name after being accused of compromising national security, not to protect Israel from its leaders.)

It’s natural to wonder how two men who think they’re God can work together, and seemingly so well. My guess is that it’s simple mutual convenience – Bibi wants the best military technocrat he can find who wants to bomb Iran, and that’s Barak, while Barak wants to be defense minister for whoever’s prime minister, and that’s Bibi. But the power lies with Netanyahu – he doesn’t need Barak while Barak needs him desperately, which means, I think, that even if Barak has or will have doubts about the need to hit Iran, he won’t press them with Bibi because his political career will be over.

“I’ve seen them up close,” Diskin told some 50 people in Kfar Saba at a weekly public affairs meeting. “They’re neither of them messiahs and they’re not people that I, at least on a personal level, trust to have the ability to lead the State of Israel into an event of that scale [war with Iran] and also out of it. These are not the people I would like to see holding the wheel when starting something like that.”

It really is like watching a movie, only this isn’t a movie.

A review of public surveys on the Iran issue shows that even prior to the damning critique on Friday by Yuval Diskin, former head of the Internal Security Agency, the public already diverged sharply from the leadership’s policy: Survey after survey, as I wrote in March, showed that only a minority – somewhere between 19 percent and 31 percent – favors a unilateral Israeli attack on Iran. The majority – at least half (here’s a similar survey in Hebrew), and up to nearly two-thirds (Hebrew) – is against a unilateral attack.

There are a few reasons why Diskin’s words could open a crack in the myth among the public that Netanyahu is good for security: First, Diskin voices the public’s basic divergence with government policy, as stated above. Second, Diskin joins a growing list of senior security figures who have expressed reservations about an attack, and that’s hard for the public to ignore. Third, commentary and speculation from some of the most influential (and most importantly, non-left wing) opinion-forming columnists in the Hebrew press have largely defended Diskin’s integrity.

At the very least, Diskin’s words and their reverberations could raise reasonable doubt in the public mind about Netanyahu’s competence on security. If so, citizens may then re-visit their own positions, instead of placing unqualified trust in the government. And if the public looks at itself, here’s what it will see (this revisits the polls I wrote about in March):

• Just one-fifth of all Israelis (22 percent) – and only 19 percent of Jews – believe that a strike would delay the nuclear program by five years or more. All the rest believe it would delay it only by one to five years (31 percent). Some think it would actually accelerate the program (11 percent) and one-fifth (19 percent) say it would have no effect at all. (Telhami)
• Three-quarters of Israelis believe that if Israel strikes, a major war would erupt in the Middle East. (Truman)
• Half the population believes that the ensuing conflict would last months or years; nearly half believes it could strengthen the Iranian government; and almost 70 percent (actually, a full three-quarters among Jewish respondents) believe that Hezbollah would join a retaliatory effort by Iran. (Telhami)

One newer survey showed quite different results – and it’s one of the more biased reports I’ve seen, by the usually-respectable Camil Fuchs (who polls for Haaretz). The survey was conducted on behalf of the right-wing Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, an outfit which helped found NGO Monitor, is headed by Dore Gold and has Gerald Steinberg (the head of NGO Monitor) on its list of fellows. The respondents are Jews only; remarkably, the sample contains a disproportionate number of ultra-Orthodox (see the survey information notes, below). The survey stated hawkish positions and asked people to agree or disagree, rather than presenting two opposing views and asking them to state a preference. According to the data:

• When told that “The only way to stop Iran from becoming nuclear is through a military strike,” 60 percent agreed (37 percent disagreed).
• When told that “Israel will pay a higher price for living under the shadow of an Iranian bomb than it will for attacking Iran’s nuclear facilities,” 65 percent agreed (the question did not clarify whether the attack would be unilateral or in concert with any other actor).
• But when asked to compare American versus Israeli military capacity to substantially harm Iran’s nuclear program, the gap becomes apparent even here: 87 percent agreed that America has this capacity, compared to 66 percent who agreed with relation to Israel.

Close monitoring is needed, but the public has spoken clearly against an Israeli unilateral strike and knows categorically that it will cause a major, protracted war. Personally I’d be happier if the numbers showed more doubts about a military strike in general.

But when surveys prior to Diskin’s critique repeatedly show Netanyahu and Likud running high, affirmed again by a survey published today in the pro-Netanyahu daily paper Israel Hayom (a classic case of shoddy poll reporting, free of sample size, description and dates), and the New York Times called Netanyahu’s popularity “all but impenetrable,” it’s clear that the venting of economic frustrations last summer never touched the current government. A crack in the armor of Netanyahu/Barak’s security defense (of themselves, that is) is probably the only thing that stands to chip away at their support.

 Survey Information:

• Telhami: Survey authored by Professor Shibley Telhami at University of Maryland. Dates: February 22-26, 2012. Sample: 500 adult Israelis, national representation (Jews and Arabs); error: +/- 4.5%
• Truman: Survey authored by Professor Yaacov Shamir as part of the Israel-Palestine poll project at the Truman Institute at Hebrew University. Dates: March 11-15, 2012. Sample: 600 adult Israelis, national representation (Jews and Arabs), interviewed in Hebrew, Arabic, Russian; error: +/- 4.5%
• Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs: Authored by Camil Fuchs, March 2011 (no precise dates given). Sample: 505 Jews, no margin of error given. Sample critique: the demographics show that 15% of the sample self-defined as Haredi (ultra-orthodox), the most right-leaning group in Israel – and the group with the highest support for an attack. I have never seen statistics from the Central Bureau of Statistics or in any survey I’ve conducted that shows their number higher than nine percent. The report says the numbers in the analysis are weighted according to CBS data; but since Haredim invariably under-respond to surveys, the sample is quite hard to explain.

Correction appended: Nearly half the Israeli public believes a strike on Iran would strengthen the Iranian government, not the Israeli government as originally written.

Yesterday, a plea bargain was signed in the Anat Kamm case, and she pled guilty (Hebrew) to felonies she obviously committed: unauthorized possession of secret information and unauthorized delivery of it to unauthorized personnel. In return, the prosecution will not claim she did so “with the intention of harming state security”, which could have sent her to a life sentence. Today, the court eased her house arrest (Hebrew), allowing her to leave her house – probably because it finally realized she is unlikely to use the time to break into the computer of another general.

One has to keep in mind how it all started, some ten months ago: with a gag order gagging a gag order, i.e. not only forbidding publication of details of the case, but also forbidding a report about the forbidden report. Kamm was detained and interrogated, and the GSS – AKA Shabak, Shin Bet, ISA – started a hunt for the Haaretz journalist Uri Blau – and Israeli media was forbidden to write a single word about it. The Israeli blogosphere rumbled with rumor and counter-rumor, but people who wanted to read a clear sentence about the case had to look outside of Israel.

Then, in May, GSS chief Yuval Diskin held a press conference, where he bandied the term “aggravated espionage” about, and described the affair as one of the most severe in the history of Israel, comparing Kamm unfavorably to Tali Fahima. Even at the time, it was a sure bet (Hebrew) that this was merely noise, an attempt to scare the victim and turn the public against her, and that this will turn end in a much, much lighter plea bargain – just as the prosecution made a point of not demanding the death penalty for Fahima at the beginning of the legal process and finished with all of its claims shot, and had to settle for a sentence of three years. Diskin said at the time that enemy organizations “could only dream” of the documents Kamm copied; he knew, as did any sensible observer, Kamm had no contact whatsoever to any enemy organizations; that she gave the information to an Israeli newspaper, which is subject to the military censorship – and that the information showed IDF generals allowed themselves to make a mockery of Supreme Court decisions, and ordered killings when arrests were feasible.

But Diskin, in his presser, turned Kamm into an enemy of the people, and such she shall remain as far as most Israelis are concerned until her last day. The official sentence will matter but little; Diskin has demonstrated what happens to someone who exposes the nakedness of the security system, and did so twice: once by exposing the fact generals disregarded court decisions, and once by showing how laughable was the security in General Naveh’s office, which allowed Kamm to simply copy his entire directory of documents. Our hush-hush apparatus was exposed, as usual, as oscillating between stupid carelessness and full system panic.

Anat Kamm is a leaker, a conveyer of knowledge, not a spy; a spy wants the knowledge he gained specific information kept secret. We now know she was another victim of a GSS smear campaign, like Fahima and many, many others. Not the Israeli public would care: 52% of it believe (Hebrew) freedom of expression should be curtained if the information “harms the country’s image”, which most assuredly happened; and 64% would accept limitation on freedom of expression in case of a “security threat”, which is very, very vague – especially when it is used as an excuse for shutting up people.

For a leak to be effective, it needs a large segment of the public willing to accept the information, to allow it to enrage it, and to do something about it. When the public willfully refuses to listen, when he treats the generals and the secret policemen as totems, turning the person exposing the truth into an enemy of the public is a piece of cake.

Public? As if. There is no Israeli public. What we have is a stampede-prone herd.