Foreign Policy In Focus

Trying to track—let alone make sense—of recent developments around Iran is enough to make one reach for that stuff they just found lots of in Afghanistan: lithium. While the element is essential for a host of electronics, it is also a standard treatment for bipolar behavior.

Take the issue of Iran’s missile force. The conservative International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) in London concluded that the threat the missiles pose to Israel, the U.S. or its allies has been vastly overstated. “While such attacks might trigger fear, the expected casualties would be low—probably less than a few hundred,” the study found. Iran’s Shehab-1 and 2 cannot even reach Israel, and it will be at least three years before the longer range Shahab-3B and Sejjil-2 are deployed. In any case, according to the study, the missiles are inaccurate.

But while the IISS was pooh-poohing the danger, U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates told the Senate Armed Services Committee that Europe was threatened by “hundreds” of Iranian missiles, although Iran doesn’t have a missile that can come close to hitting Europe. Gates was on Capitol Hill pumping the Obama administration’s new sea and land-based “ phased adaptive approach” to missile defense.

In the meantime, the U.S. was sending an aircraft carrier and almost a dozen support ships into the Red Sea. Rumor has it that the fleet will try to intercept Gaza aid ships organized by the Iranian Red Crescent Society. Several Israeli submarines are currently deployed in the Gulf of Iran as well, along with a newly arrived surface warship. While it seems extremely unlikely that the U.S. would actually try to halt the Iranian ships, U.S. State Department spokesman Philip Crowley said, “ I don’t think that Iran’s intentions vis-à-vis Gaza are benign.”

The London Times reported that the Israelis and the Americans had come to an agreement with Saudi Arabia to allow Israeli warplanes to cross the desert kingdom without being challenged on their way to bomb nuclear sites in Iran. While Riyadh called the story “slanderous, the Times was holding to its sources in the Israeli and U.S. militaries. And Tzahi Hanegbi, chair of the Knesset’s Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee, said that “time was running out” for Iran. 

As I said, people are talking very crazy these days in the Middle East. 

If Israeli planes did decide to bomb targets in Iran, conventional thinking is they would hit enrichment facilities at Natanz and Qom, a gas storage unit at Isfahan and the heavy-water reactor at Arak. Planes might also target the light-water reactor at Bushehr. To do so, of course, would require crossing Jordanian and Saudi airspace, but there is very little either country could do about it. Challenging the Israelis in the air is a very bad idea.

Even with mid-flight refueling, it would be a stretch, but it would be hard to knock out Iranian targets using just their missile firing submarines. Unless, of course, the Israelis are willing to cross the Hiroshima-Nagasaki line and use nuclear warheads. It seems like madness, but then some people are talking pretty crazy these days. 

In a recent Christian Science Monitor article, “Does Israel suffer from ‘Iranophobia’?”, reporter Scott Peterson examines the Israeli mindset and found some pretty scary things. “There’s something utterly irrational and exceedingly disproportionate in Israeli understandings of the Iranian threat,” says Haggai Ram, a professor at Ben Gurion University and author of “Iranophobia: The Logic of an Israeli Obsession.”

“Iran is perhaps the most central issue [in Israel], yet there is really no critical debate about this,” says Ram, and for those Israelis who do challenge the idea that Iran is an “existential threat” to Israel, “they are immediately rendered into these bizarre self-defeating, self-hating Jews, and seen as a fifth column.” 

According to Ram, “For Israelis, anti-Iran is a consensus. You don’t have to be a neoconservative to wish for the destruction of Iran.” Polls show that Prime Minister Netanyahu is growing in popularity, and that Israelis are circling the wagons on everything from the attack on the Gaza flotilla to the embargo of Gaza Strip. 

Iranian President Ahmadinejad has also said that one day “Israel will vanish,” but much of his bombast is for internal consumption and the need to divert people from the economic crisis at home. Netanyahu’s comparison of Ahmadinejad to Hitler, and of the current situation to 1939, serves much the same purpose. Focusing on Iran keeps the world’s eyes away from the ongoing occupation of Palestinian lands and the strangulation of Gaza.

How much of this is real is hard to sort out. The U.S. talks about Iran as a “threat,” even though Iran has neither the military nor the economic capabilities to inflict serious damage on Americans. Iran can also talk about Israel vanishing, but can do nothing to actually facilitate that. Even if Iran acquired a nuclear weapon, to use it would be national suicide, and the Iranians have never exhibited a desire for self-destruction.

The danger is that rhetoric and bombast can create its own reality and lead to a mistake. The Israeli attack on the Turkish ship was just that. When people with nuclear weapons talk in apocalyptic language, it’s something to pay attention to.

Looked at from a diplomatic point of view, Israel’s attack on the Gaza aid flotilla was an act of astonishing stupidity: it burned bridges to Israel’s one friend in the Middle East, Turkey; it drew world-wide condemnation for what many call an act of piracy; and it shifted the focus from Hamas to the inhumanity of the blockade.  What were Tel Aviv’s decision makers thinking?

Well, a leading Jerusalem Post columnist suggests “a possible way to explain Israel’s decision to stop the flotilla to Gaza…was the Israeli government’s readiness to accept the development of a potential war with no other than Teheran.”

While the idea of jumping from the Gaza disaster into an Iranian frying pan seems insane, Shira Kaplan argues that Israel has used such “casus belli” in the past as a rationale for making war: the 1956 Suez Crisis sparked by an Egyptian move to nationalize the Canal; the 1967 Six-Day War in response to Nasser’s closing of the Tiran Straits; and the 2006 invasion of Lebanon following the seizure of two Israeli soldiers.

“Israel may very well be meaning to seize this regional crisis as a casus belli to challenge Teheran, “she writes.

There are a few developments that give one pause.

First, Israel recently deployed Flotilla 7 in the Persian Gulf, consisting of three submarines—the Dolphin, the Tekuma, and the Leviathan—armed with nuclear tipped missiles. According to an Israeli naval officer quoted in the Sunday Times, “The 1500 kilometer range of the submarines’ cruise missiles can reach any target in Iran.”

Second, the Netanyahu administration has elevated the use of unreasonable force to its standard modis operandi.  The recent debacle in Dubai is a case in point. The Israelis sent a team of 27 assassins to kill a mid-level Hamas official who didn’t even merit a bodyguard. The hit not only deeply angered Dubai—which at the time had a cordial relationship with Tel Aviv—but annoyed Australia, Great Britain, Ireland, and Germany by counterfeiting their citizens’ passports. 

According to the Financial Times, the Gaza flotilla calamity bears a lot of similarity to the disastrous 2006 decision to invade Lebanon. Yehezkei Dror, a member of the Winograd Committee that examined the 2006 invasion, concluded that a major reason things went wrong was that the Israeli cabinet deferred to the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF), which long has had a tendency to underestimate an enemy.

In the case of Gaza, however, the key decision-makers didn’t have to defer to the IDF. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Ehud Barak are both former members of the Sayeret Matkal special forces, and the Minister of Strategic Affairs, Moshe Yaalon, is a former IDF chief of staff. According to the newspaperMaariv, Netanyahu and Barak never even bothered to hold a full cabinet discussion about the Gaza operation, and even cut out the cabinet’s five member inner core. To Netanyahu and Barak—two hammers—the Gaza flotilla was a nail.

Kaplan suggests that the Israeli government “has probably decided to come nearer to a point of no return with Teheran.” Certainly things are not going Tel Aviv’s way right now.

The Brasilia-Ankara initiative to ship 1,200 kilos of Iranian nuclear fuel to Turkey for reprocessing is gaining support, and Brazilian President Luiz Inacio “Lula” da Silva is launching a full-court press aimed at getting Russia, China and France on board.

Israel has never been this internationally isolated, and its charge that the Gaza blockade is aimed at preventing Iran from establishing a foothold on the Mediterranean is gaining few supporters.  But rather than backing off, Netanyahu has pulled the wagons in a circle and stepped up the rhetoric about the Iranian threat. All the talk about Iran being an “existential threat” and references to the Holocaust is the kind of language that leads people to make very bad decisions..

Right now the last thing the Obama administration needs is a war with Iran, because a war between Teheran and Tel Aviv would almost surely involve the U.S. on some level. But the Israelis are not listening much these days to Washington. The White House said it told the Israelis not to “over-react” to the Gaza flotilla, a plea that was clearly ignored.

Polls show two out of three Israelis disapprove of the attack on the flotilla, but are the two military men running the Tel Aviv government listening? Or are they about to take advantage of a crisis to launch a regional war that would make the Gaza boat attack look like a glass of spilled milk?

The offensive by the Congressional Democratic leadership against the Gaza humanitarian aid flotilla has now moved beyond just rhetorical support for the Israeli attack on the unarmed convoy.  Rep. Brad Sherman (D-CA), chair of the House Foreign Relations Committee’s subcommittee on terrorism, nonproliferation and trade, has called upon U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder to prosecute U.S. citizens who were involved or on board the flotilla.

Because the Gaza Strip is currently ruled by Hamas, according the Sherman, any humanitarian aid to the people of that territory is “clearly an effort to give items of value to a terrorist organization,” which is prosecutable under the 1996 Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act.  Despite the active support of the humanitarian aid effort by a number of pacifist organizations in the United States and Europe, Sherman insists that the organizers of the flotilla have “clear terrorist ties,” dismissing critical analysis of such charges as part of the ideological agenda of “the liberal media.”

Sherman also announced he would be working with the Department of Homeland Security to ensure that the more than 700 non-U.S. citizens who took part in the flotilla would be permanently barred from ever entering the United States.  This would include European parliamentarians, Nobel laureates, as well as leading writers, artists, intellectuals, pacifists, and human rights activists, virtually none of whom are in the least bit sympathetic with Hamas or with terrorism.

Given the very real threat of terrorism from Al-Qaeda and other groups against the United States, it is very odd that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and other Democratic Party leaders would choose -- out of 255 Democrats in the House of Representatives -- a paranoid right-winger like Sherman to chair the critically important terrorism subcommittee.  Rather than focus on the real threats from Al-Qaeda and other dangerous organizations, it appears that Sherman is putting his energy into going after  the motley group of Quaker pacifists, left-wing Jews, and other like-minded activists who boarded the ships attempted to bring medicines, school supplies, toys and other humanitarian aid to children of the Gaza Strip.

Indeed, it raises serious questions about whether the Democratic Party Congressional leadership is really concerned about international terrorism or, like the Bush administration, is attempting to use the threat of terrorism as an excuse to suppress nonviolent dissent against the policies of the U.S. government and its rightist allies.

Organizers and endorsers of the flotilla include such reputable American peace groups as Code Pink, Jewish Voice for Peace, Pax Christi, the American Friends Service Committee, Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, the Resource Center for Nonviolence, War Resisters League, Women in Black and others.  Supporters of this nonviolent effort to bring humanitarian aid to the people of the Gaza Strip also include such Israeli groups such as Yesh G’vul, Coalition of Women for Peace, New Profile, and the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions, among others.

Despite this, Rep. Barney Frank (D-MA), insists that these groups are “pro-Hamas people.”  Rep. Elliot Engel (D-NY) claims that the organizers of the flotilla have “links to Hamas and reportedly played a role in the attempted Millennium bombing in Los Angeles.”  Rep. Ron Klein D-FL) insists that the real agenda of these peace and human rights organizations is “to bolster the terrorist Hamas government in Gaza.”  Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-NY) argues that Israel’s attack on the unarmed flotilla laden with humanitarian supplies part of an effort to “defend herself against terrorism.”

When prominent Democrats -- including the head of an influential House subcommittee concerned with national security -- begin implying that leading America and Israeli peace groups are linked to terrorism, it is no longer simply an issue of over-heated rhetoric in support of an allied right-wing government, but a McCarthyistic attack on nonviolent dissent.  Indeed, it could only be a matter of time before we see Medea Benjamin, Mitchell Plitnick, and other leading nonviolent activists who have supported the flotilla hauled before Sherman’s subcommittee regarding these alleged ties to terrorism.

In many respects, however, Israel’s attack on the unarmed flotilla last weekend could be a “Kent State moment.”  At the time of the 1970 shootings, National Guardsmen and police had been killing African-Americans and Hispanics with some regularity for years.  When white middle class students were gunned down on a college campus, however, it woke up a whole new segment of American society, goading them into active resistance.  Similarly, while the Israeli military has been killing Arab civilians for years, now that they have attacked European and American peace activists -- with the support of Congressional leaders -- it has created a whole new dynamic, one I witnessed personally this past Friday evening, at the annual dinner of the Resource Center for Nonviolence in Santa Cruz, California.

Roughly 150 people gathered in the fellowship hall of a local Congregational Church this past Friday evening, including prominent liberal members of the city council and county board of supervisors, area clergy (including a local rabbi), professors, small businesspeople and other community leaders.  The main speaker was Nomika Zion, founder of kibbutz Migvan in Sderot, Israel, a community which had suffered from relentless bombardment for many months from Qassam rockets fired from the Gaza Strip.  Zion -- a leader of the Sderot-based peace group Other Voice, which opposed Israel’s war on Gaza -- argued that it was the ongoing siege of Gaza which was the biggest threat to the security and called for an end of the Israeli blockade RCNV staffperson and former Santa Cruz mayor Scott Kennedy then called on the city to come together to organize a boat to send relief supplies to Gaza Strip in an effort to end the siege, adding that he would write Rep. Sherman and Attorney General Holder and dare them to investigate and prosecute the hundreds of people in this coastal community who would support such an effort.

Israel’s rightist government and their allies in the U.S. Congress have clearly miscalculated.  By claiming that the hundreds of dedicated peace and human rights activists on board those ships -- most of whom in no way support Hamas or any terrorist group -- as supporters of terrorism, they are mobilizing what could become a major backlash.  It is a particularly bad calculation for the Democratic Party, which is going to need the support of the peace and human rights community -- a key constituency of the party’s base -- going into the mid-term election this fall.  There are already plans for additional ships to try to run the blockade, most of which will have active participation from nonviolent activists here in the United States. We’ll see if Rep. Sherman and other Congressional leaders can stop them.

Would the Washington Post feature a columnist writing a weekly column which was frequently anti-Semitic? No, of course not -- the Post will not have such a columnist and rightfully so. But, the Washington Post has Charles Krauthammer spewing hatred, falsehoods, and much more anti-Arab and anti-Islam rhetoric frequently. He demonizes Arabs and Muslims by his falsehoods. In fact, he was one of the most effective voices in calling for the invasion of Iraq causing hundreds of thousands of death and over a million wounded.

I am a loyal reader of Mr. Krauthammer’s column in the Post. I like to know what the other side is saying -- or maybe I like to torture myself! But, Krauthammer's most recent column on Friday June 4, 2010 got my blood boiling. He was trying to defend the Israeli commando raid of the humanitarian flotilla. He ends his article with:

The world is tired of these Jews, 6 million – that number again – hard by the Mediterranean, refusing every invitation to national suicide. For which they are relentlessly demonized, ghettoized and constrained from defending themselves, even as the more committed anti-Zionists – Iranian in particular – openly prepare a more final solution.

He claims the humanitarian aid is an invitation to national suicide! Could he be more absurd? Israel has over 200 nuclear bombs, the strongest regional military power, supported by the only superpower, and the strongest economy. But if they allow a humanitarian aid ship through it is suicide. He claims that all Israel wanted was to search the cargo for weapons. Well, why then has Israel had a total blockade in force on Gaza’s 1.6 million Palestinian Arabs for the past four years?

During that time, couldn't Israel have arranged for an international inspection of all humanitarian aid into Gaza? Or is it that Israel wants to prevent food and medicine from reaching the Palestinians as a collective punishment? Or is it that Israel, as one official said, wants to starve them but not kill them. The sewage system in Gaza was destroyed by Israel two years ago. The water purification system, too, was destroyed or rendered dysfunctional by the blockade. The children of Gaza are dying from diseases and malnutrition.

The Gazans live in the highest population density area in the world. They have been living under such conditions for the past sixty years since the creation of Israel, which now has one of the highest living standards in the world. So tell me: who is living in a Ghetto?

Mr. Krauthammer wants to demonize the Palestinians as an ungrateful people. But they only want freedom from mass starvation. How dare they want to attack Israel in order to attain the resemblance of livelihood? Moreover, how dare the world support a flotilla that seeks to prevent the starvation of 1.6 million people?

If the security of Israel is the issue, then why doesn't Mr. Krauthammer support the two-state solution called for by the UN, United States and the Quartet? I would support a fully secure and safe Israel within its 1967 borders with an unarmed state of Palestine. Israel and Mr. Krauthammer would not be satisfied until all of the Arabs and Muslims become subservient to the wishes of Israel and the United States.

It would have been more appropriate if the ending paragraph of Mr. Krauthammer’s recent column stated:

The world is tired of these Palestinians, 6 million – that number again – hard by the Mediterranean, refusing every invitation to national suicide. For which they are relentlessly demonized, ghettoized and constrained from defending themselves, even as the more committed anti-Arabs and anti-Muslims – Israeli government and Mr. Krauthammer in particular – openly prepare a more final solution.

Were it not for the ongoing humanitarian tragedies, it would be amusing to watch Israel self-destruct. For a regime that once seemed the embodiment of competence and self assurance, it now appears to be suffering some sort of terminal grand mal, thrashing around and blindly smashing the crockery and furniture.

Israel seems clearly bent on demonstrating what its opponents have long claimed -- that it is a dangerous and illegitimate regime operating beyond the confines of international law and moral principle. The attack on the Gaza flotilla -- with lethal force, in international waters -- is the latest demonstration of its apparently infinite counterintuitive capacity. The offered defense of these indefensible actions -- "They made me do it!" -- would embarrass even a petulant five-year-old.

Complexity science heads don't do prediction. In a non-linear system, where slight changes in initial conditions, agent interactions and perturbations across systems boundaries combine to generate unpredictable outcomes, the future is always uncertain. But we can learn over time to see patterns and probabilistic vectors, and therefore better anticipate surprises. 

So, taking all that into account, let me suggest that Israel as we know it, will cease to exist in the foreseeable future. Its own internal inconsistencies -- multiplied by demographics, and the continuing evolution of sociopolitical and humanitarian norms -- will administer the coup de grâce.

Here's why.

Social systems -- which include communities, companies, marching bands and nation states -- succeed or fail because of their relative coherence, which is what underpins their adaptive capacities. Adaptiveness is key, because as anthropologist L.S.B. Leakey put it so beautifully, "The lesson of evolution is, change . . . or perish!"

System coherence is determined in large part by:

• The strength of shared "identity." (Who are we? Why are we here? What are our values?)
• The relative facility or friction of interactions. (How easy or hard is it to take concerted action?)
• The strength and clarity of networks and information flows. (Does the intelligence necessary to make informed decisions get to those who need it in a timely fashion?)
• The strength of relationships within and across system boundaries. (Because structures and actions are relationships made visible.)

These are all "nested" within a complex stew of interconnected and often fluid boundaries, continually evolving "initial conditions" and the (often contradictory) rules of the overlapping systems.

In a nutshell, Israel lacks coherence. The narrative that has held it together for the past 60 years -- and blinded the outside world to the uglier realities -- is eroding rapidly. The political divisions within the country make concerted action almost impossible. The social networks lack "requisite variety," so objective realities are ignored. And relationships are dissolving as even traditional supporters back away from a regime increasingly seen as rabid and isolated.

Bottom line, Israel has become "condensed" and non-adaptive. And if a system can't adapt -- if it can't "co-evolve" with its environment -- it dissolves.

Time frames are always uncertain. Sometimes they are longer than one would imagine, because the system has more resilience than expected. More often, however, they tend to be shorter, because of another characteristic of complex systems, which is "iteration." What that means is that small changes can have significant effects after they have passed through the emergence-feedback loop a few times. This is sometimes called the "snowball" effect. (A snowball gathers more snow on each roll and quickly goes from a ball the size you throw, to one that throws you.)

Israel cannot survive as a pariah/apartheid state. Like any modern state, it is entirely reliant on trans-boundary relationships and flows, from diplomatic recognition to raw materials and export markets. Its vaunted high-tech industry is worthless without willing foreign buyers. Because those markets can be served by a number of competitors, client loyalty is vital to success. As Israel slips further beyond the pale of civilized behavior, that loyalty will prove both highly transient and nearly impossible to recover once it's gone.

So what will emerge in Israel's place? After all the pushing and pulling, a bi-national, and perhaps even a bioregional state seems most viable. (See "The Only Path to a Middle East Picnic?") After all, Palestine (like all the nations surrounding it) is a made-up entity. A vestigial remnant of European colonial days with arbitrary, and often irrational, boundaries. Redrawing those lines with goals of equity, diversity and social justice would have profound benefits for residents of the region and beyond.

One way or another, Israel appears to be on the way out. The big question is whether it will be with a bang or a whimper.