The conventional wisdom of the anti-Bibi deep state.
[AlAhram] A new report from think tank the Israeli Institute for National Security Studies identifies external and internal threats to Israel’s security.
A team of experts in regional and international political and military affairs at the Israeli Institute for National Security Studies (INSS), which is affiliated with Tel Aviv University, has completed this year’s Strategic Assessment of Israel.
As the INSS is one of closest think tanks to decision making circles in Israel, it is not surprising that this important Strategic Assessment was submitted to Israeli President Isaac Herzog in a formal ceremony at his office.
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Israel’s political system was modelled on that of England: the president is a powerless figurehead, tasked like the monarch of Great Britain with christening ships, cutting ribbons, and meeting ceremoniously with visiting dignitaries and school children while the prime minister gets on with making decisions and running the country. Why would they hand the thing to President Herzog? All he can do is pass it on to Bibi with advice that will be ignored — I understand the two men are not at all fond of one another.
During this event, the team of researchers led by INSS Executive Director Manuel Trajtenberg and INSS Managing Director Tamir Hayman presented a summary of the assessment, which is a comprehensive analysis of Israel’s strategic environment through the prism of the country’s national security. It identifies potential threats and opportunities and offers a number of recommendations for Israeli decision makers.
Following the presentation, Herzog observed that the assessment had made it very clear that the future of the Middle East was largely contingent on the future of various partnerships. He identified Iran
...Formerly a fairly civilized nation ruled by a Shah, it became a victim of Islamic revolution in 1979...
as the greatest threat to Israel, yet one that was not limited to Israel alone. As such, he said, the threat of Iran should be prioritised as an area for cooperation with those he referred to as Israel’s friends in the Middle East.
Herzog said nothing new in this regard, since for years Israel has been insisting that Iran poses the gravest threat to regional security and has been urging Arab parties in the region to join it in a form of partnership to fend off the threat.
Does anyone else in the region have nukes? No they do not, mostly thanks to Israel. Though President George W. Bush gets credit for scaring Moammar Khadaffy silly. If the general director of the Egyptian Centre for Strategic Studies (ECSS) who wrote this little editorial thinks Egypt’s Russian nuclear power plants are going to enable Egypt to grow its own nuclear bombs, he isn’t nearly as smart as all this fancy analysis suggests.
However,
we can't all be heroes. Somebody has to sit on the curb and applaud when they go by...
this claim is a reductionist one. The parties that Israel has been addressing in making this claim could also cite a list of threats as grave as the Iranian one, but Israel has never shown an interest in dealing with them or in working in the framework of the partnerships Herzog mentioned to devise a mechanism for exploring arrangements that would realise real stability.
The Jewish state is not your servant, sirrah, to do what benefits you but not them.
Herzog was more consistent when he spoke about what he called the Strategic Assessment’s particularly disturbing findings on what he termed the "internal arena" and its implications for Israel’s national security.
Israeli society, Herzog said, was "in a period of crisis and particularly dangerous internal conflict" that was testing the state’s "national resilience."
That’s the kind of thing people say when they are no longer the ones running things.
"We have to be able to face and deal with the deepest differences of opinion, without giving up our belief in ourselves," he said, adding that "bridging divides, including political ones, is perhaps the most important step in protecting Israel’s security, stability and growth."
Despite the best efforts of the Israeli left, and despite all the outside help, Bibi is back in power, and his governing coalition is further to the right than ever — showing how the population is changing.
This accurately sums up the depth of the rifts that are now threatening to tear Israel apart following the rise of the most far-right government the country has ever seen. The INSS agrees, and its recent Strategic Assessment says that Israel’s national security has been stable and favourable with respect to its regional adversaries, but that there are now a host of new challenges that could upset this balance.
The assessment warns that the threat the agenda of the far-right in Israel is posing to the system of checks and balances underlying the country’s democracy and judicial system is aggravating the polarisation in Israeli society, thereby weakening the social resilience that it describes as "a critical component in Israel’s ability to cope with external threats."
Uh huh.
This internal conflict is also integrally related to what the Strategic Assessment regards as Israel’s greatest long term strategic threat, namely the deterioration in its relations with the Western nations and with the US in particular.
It’s only a problem when Democrats are in charge. Bibi got along fine with President Trump, and he’ll get along fine with President DeSantis when the time comes. As for the Europeans, they talk big, but they all want to do business with Israel. So do ever more of the the Arab countries, and ever more of the world beyond Western Europe. It remains to be seen whether Egypt will take advantage of having been the first to sign a peace treaty, or whether it will cling to the old ways and get left behind.
This threat has grown more acute due to character of the current Israeli government, which is perceived to be actively undermining democracy, the judiciary, and the existing relationship with the Paleostinian Authority (PA).
Whee! The propaganda is getting so thick you can see it! That line comes straight from the American Democratic Party, with only the slightest gloss for local consumption.
Hayman, a former head of Israeli Military Intelligence, has stressed what he has described as the grave threat to Israel’s strategic sphere arising from internal socio-political developments in the US.
It’s true most of the Democratic Party no longer supports Israel except superficially. But America is no longer Israel’s sole supporter in the world, and so Israel can wait for the pendulum to swing back to the Republicans.
He has also underscored the intense political polarisation in the US, especially over the nature of the Israeli state, which has led to a gradual decline in US public support for Israel.
How will that change when Twitter, et al no longer has their thumbs on the cultural scales?
The INSS Assessment warns that the discourse and actions of the current far-right Israeli government are angering the US and the West, putting the security of Israel at risk. It notes that the problem extends beyond public opinion to the perceptions of government officials. According to the assessment, the shift has been due to the growing influence of the progressive youth movement in the US.
*snicker* The ones who see themselves as somewhere in the alphabet and are too busy being offended to actually learn anything useful? How influential will they be without Covid unemployment checks?
This trend denies the legitimacy of Israel and Zionism, "which they see as expressions of white-colonialist supremacy," as the authors of the assessment put it.
Yes, but they also see whiteness as illegitimate, even though most of them are persons of pallor.
Although the INSS Assessment, like the Israeli president, rates Iran as the most "extreme" threat that Israel faces, it nevertheless also rates the "collapse of the Paleostinian Authority" as the most "urgent". It therefore says that "the continued existence of the Paleostinian Authority, despite its drawbacks, is clearly in Israel’s interest."
“The SCIENCE is settled!” Or not, given that the guys who don’t believe your party line are the ones in power. It’ll be interesting to see what happens when the PA finally admits it collapsed a while ago.
According to Hayman, against the backdrop of the lack of a viable solution to the Paleostinian-Israeli conflict, the approaching end of the era of the ineffectual Mahmoud Abbas
...aka Abu Mazen, a graduate of the prestigious unaccredited Patrice Lumumba University in Moscow with a doctorate in Holocaust Denial. While no Yasser Arafat, he has his own brand of evil, just a little more lowercase....
as PA chairman, and the growing discontent and frustration among Paleostinian young people, there is a risk of a surge in violence in the Occupied Paleostinian Territories.
You line ‘em up, Israel’ll knock ‘em down. What do you think they’ve been doing with their near-nightly raids arresting something like 2500 of the most active wannabe terrorists over the past several months?
This would aggravate the strategic threat of a slide into a "one-state" reality that would jeopardise Israel’s Jewish identity, Hayman says.
This statement assumes that under those conditions the Palestinians would get full civil rights as full citizens, whereas Bibi, at least, seems content to continue the status quo ante.
