Israel Matzav

Israel's ruling class

Caroline Glick reports on a pattern in the US in which certain elites are always the elites regardless of who is in power. She notes that regardless of who the President is and what his views are on the Middle East, the same people always hold power. And she reports on their Israeli collaborators.

This week Ha'aretz - the trumpet of Israel's ruling class - gave us all a primer in how this sort of thing works. In an article titled, "Obama has ways and means to check on Netanyahu," military commentator Amir Oren disclosed the close collaboration between the Obama administration and a handful of hard-left retired IDF officers against the Netanyahu government.

Oren reported that ahead of Obama's meeting this month with Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, retired IDF brigadier generals Shlomo Brom, Udi Dekel and Baruch Spiegel met secretly in Rome with retired US rear admiral John Sigler who heads the Middle East research institute at the US Joint Chiefs of Staff. The purpose of their meeting was twofold.

First, as Oren put it, they were asked to "clarify whether in the dispute between [the Obama administration and the Netanyahu government] Netanyahu truly represent the majority in Israel." That is, they were supposed to tell Sigler how to drive a wedge between the democratically elected government and the Israel voters who elected it.

And second, they were supposed to furnish Obama with arguments to reject Netanyahu's arguments for why Israel cannot retreat to the 1949 armistice lines. As Oren put it, "When Netanyahu tells Obama there is something he can't do because it would be the death of him, experts like the three brigadiers general can map out Israel's ranges of flexibility to Sigler, and through him pass them along... to Obama."

Activities like those Oren reports are a permanent feature in Israelpolicy circles. Regardless of who is in office, the likes of Brom, Dekel and Spiegel and their leader Yossi Beilin are always working with the Americans and Europeans to force Israel to maintain allegiance to the failed land for peace paradigm. Year in and year out, these anti-democratic and strategically demented but well paid former officials maintain what they euphemistically refer to as "track two," contacts with their counterparts in the European and American ruling class to force the majority of Israelis who don't share their derangement to accept their policy dictates.

Codevilla predicts that a clash between the ruling class and the ruled in the US is just a matter of time, although he makes scant predictions or recommendations for how that clash will play itself out. Just so, the time has come for Israelis to confront our own ruling class and develop methods for weakening its chokehold on Israel's domestic and foreign policy.

Read it all.

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 11:23 PM