How Israeli Intelligence Fabricated a Frequently-Repeated Myth to Justify Tel Aviv's Aggression

By Ira Chernus, Foreign Policy in Focus. Posted January 14, 2009.

But if these new revelations are true, the policy of unilateralism and brute force didn't originate with Sharon and his right-wing Likud Party. It goes back to 2000, when the Labor Party, headed by Ehud Barak, refused to agree with Yasser Arafat that the path of negotiation -- as difficult and tedious as it was -- should be pursued to a successful end. The one attempt to revive the negotiations, at Taaba in early 2001, collapsed when Barak withdrew.

Today Barak, as the Defense Minister in charge of the Gaza attack, sees his once-fading political fortunes rapidly rising again. Most of the Israeli public still believes what MI tells the political leaders in briefings often leaked to the press: Israel is a helpless victim of Palestinian violence, violence that Israeli policies did nothing to provoke. But now it looks like analysts in Israel’s own Military Intelligence service have long known how false this story is, according to former top MI officials.

When the story appeared in Ha’aretz in early January, it drew a quick rebuttal from General Yossi Kuperwasser, former head of the MI research unit: "MI never adjusted its assessment to what the leadership wanted." Of course if the charges are true, that’s just what would be expected: an official public story at odds with the privately known truth.

On the other hand, it’s possible that Eldar has uncovered the trail of an old internal dispute within MI. Speaking of the time when the Camp David talks collapsed and the second intifada began, Kuperwasser says: "I assume that all the assessments about Arafat's behavior in August and September 2000 were written by Lavie. In Central Command, where I was then serving as the intelligence officer, our assessment was that the Palestinians were bent on a confrontation." In other words, the experts in the Palestinian section of MI, headed by Lavie, saw Arafat as a potential partner for peace but their superiors reversed the assessment.

But even if only some key Israeli intelligence officers believed negotiations could yield a positive outcome, that news should be a shocking revelation. Yet in a Google News search a few days after the article appeared, found not a single mention of it anywhere in the world’s news media, and certainly not in the United States, where it matters most. It matters most here because Israel can't continue its military action without at least a tacit green light from Washington. Washington can give that green light only as long as the American public raises no serious objection. The public here isn't likely to object as long as the basic plotline of Middle East news coverage remains the same; namely, that Israel attacked Gaza in self-defense.

Though U.S. news coverage isn't as wholly sympathetic to Israel as it once was, the Israelis still managed to make their version of the story central to mainstream media coverage. Millions of Americans who know nothing else about the still ongoing conflict believe that the Israelis are "retaliating against Hamas rockets." What if those millions also knew the Israeli government ignores its own intelligence experts when they say Palestinian leaders are willing to make peace? That might change the entire picture of the Arab-Israeli conflict -- and push Americans to push their government to push Israel to negotiate in good faith a peace deal with the Palestinians.

See more stories tagged with: israel, propaganda, palestine, intelligence, gaza

Ira Chernus is Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder and author of Monsters To Destroy: The Neoconservative War on Terror and Sin.

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