fugitive peace

For the crowd that filled Rabin Square in Tel Aviv tonight (Saturday night) for the annual memorial ceremony, there was what a friend of mine described as “a surrealistic irony, like something out of a Greek tragedy”: on Sunday, the actual anniversary of Rabin’s death, his assassin, Yigal Amir, will watch as his newborn son is circumcised.

Rabin’s son Yuval, who this year spoke at the ceremony for the first time, remarked that one of the names for the circumcision ceremony in Hebrew is the Covenant of Isaac, or Brit Yitzhak, since Abraham’s son Isaac was the first Jewish male to get snipped on the prescribed eighth day after his birth. Arranging for a man to perform a Brit Yitzhak on the anniversary of his murdering another Yitzhak sounds like the kind of nasty joke dreamed up by a deity who has had a particularly tiresome day.

Indeed, for the Israeli religious right this will probably pass into legend as a stroke of divine justice. Luckily for the people in the square, not too many looked like they believed in divine justice. Though Rabin’s death is sometimes compared to JFK’s in terms of the national trauma, the mourning of it, at least nowadays, is a strictly partisan affair, observed mainly on the secular left and centre. By my reckoning, a good one-third of the people were wearing the blue shirts of the Labour youth movement. Most of them would have been too young to remember the day he was killed.

There were no big names from parties to the right of Rabin’s Labour party (unlike two years ago, when Tsipi Livni, then in the Likud, caused quite a buzz by giving a speech). On the contrary, there were several not-so-veiled references to the fact that though Yigal Amir is in jail, nobody has punished those in the settler movement and the Likud who incited against Rabin; his son noted that “one finger pulled the trigger, but many hands brought it there”.

I confess that tears welled up a couple of times. One was during Yuval Rabin’s eulogy for his father, which was tough and moving. The other was the minute’s silence, when 150,000 (according to the organisers) yakking, jabbering Israelis suddenly went into a hush. You could have heard a mobile phone ring all the way across the square; I just prayed it wouldn’t be mine.

But then I remembered Barbara Plett, a BBC journalist who admitted to crying at the pathos of the moment when the helicopter carrying Yasser Arafat on his last journey to a Paris hospital lifted off from the presidential compound in Ramallah. She was roasted by pro-Israel media watchdogs such as HonestReporting: “Another BBC Mideast reporter displays open attachment to one side of the conflict”. Although her report was in the BBC’s “From our own correspondent” programme, which is meant to be a personal view — rather like this blog — the BBC partly upheld a complaint against her. She was transferred to Pakistan not long afterwards. When I started this blog, though it’s separate from The Economist, my editor warned me to “remember Barbara Plett”.

So should I be admitting that my eyes got damp for Rabin? They say Karachi’s quite nice this time of year. Somehow, though, I don’t think HonestReporting will jump on my “open attachment to one side of the conflict” for this one. Palestinian media groups might, but they seem to have less interest in hunting down such infractions, or maybe just fewer resources, and certainly less clout (I can’t immediately recall a case of a journalist being drummed out of her job for being too pro-Israel).

Nor do I think it’s somehow more legitimate for a journalist to shed tears over Rabin than over Arafat. Rabin may have made a greater leap towards peace than any Israeli leader before or since, but a lot of Palestinians remember him chiefly as the man who talked peace while letting the settlements grow faster than ever (as the book Lords of the Land, which I reviewed recently, points out, making it all the more ironic that the settlers hated him so). In political terms, settlement-building is to Palestinians what terrorist attacks are to Israelis: the deal-breaker, the actions that belie the other side’s claim to want peace. Arafat, at least before the second intifada, was a bit like Rabin, trying but failing to stop the extremist forces in his society. They both got the Nobel.

But in any case, what moved me, like Barbara Plett, wasn’t the memory of the man himself, but the emotion of the moment. Surely that’s legitimate for anyone.

You would think the launch party for a big Israeli defence firm would be the perfect place for me to find out exactly what happened during Israel’s raid in Syria. The Mikal Group, the new controlling company for a collection of defence suppliers with its eye on the export market, held a glitzy gathering tonight at the Tel Aviv port. There were hundreds of guests - weapons-business executives, army colonels, brigadier-generals, ex-brigadier-generals (identifiable by their close-cropped greying hair and gimlet-eyed gazes) and journalists. The drinks were free, and the bar staff were pouring them damn strong. Someone had to blab.

Not a chance. While the US and British press continue to dish up scoop after supposed scoop, the Israeli media remain censored and those in the know stay mum. Of course, it’s hard to tell who’s really in the know. All you get is little nuggets here and there - so-and-so’s friend in the air force told him they were preparing for this months ago, such-and-such heard that the pilots weren’t even told what they were going to bomb. I learned nothing. I felt terrible. I felt better after a military-affairs journalist with years of experience told me she had been pumping all her sources and learned nothing either.

I think it’s still OK to say that Israel launched a big raid and had good reasons for doing so. Beyond that, nothing is verifiable. The cheerleaders point to hints of something fishy, such as changes to the port records of a ship that docked in Syria three days before the raid carrying (supposedly) cement. Doubters turn up signs that what Israel hit, if anything, wasn’t nuclear. An Israeli journalist, Yigal Laviv, repeats the argument that if there were proof of nuclear material in Syria, Israel and the US would surely be trumpeting it to the skies (partial translation here). But then again, if there was nothing incriminating in Deir al Zur, surely Syria would be doing the same.

I mentioned to an Israeli acquaintance at the Mikal party how strange it was that, after this barrage of leaks and stories, we still knew basically nothing. “And that’s as it should be,” he said. From Israel’s point of view, the eerie silence at home mixed with tantalising media stories from abroad is working wonders. As I’ve noted before, when there is no hard information, rumours fill the gap, and he who controls the rumours controls the truth (Orwell forgot to include that one). Israelis are starting to believe in their army after its failures during last summer’s Lebanon war. Westerners are beginning to wonder whether there aren’t WMD in the Middle East after all. Arabs are fearful at the thought that Israel can still strike deep in their territory and get away with it. It may all be true; it may all be false; but in terms of the effect on the world, that’s irrelevant. “It’s not what you know,” my interlocutor said, “it’s what you think you know.”

All of which may answer my earlier question about why the Israeli media blackout on the event continues - and suggests that it may not be lifted after all.

Update (September 19th): I was wrong on two counts. One is that the official silence has already been broken - albeit by Bibi Netanyahu, who despite not being a member of the government, let alone one of the three ministers reportedly involved in the decision to attack, claims he was “involved… from the first moment”, whatever that means.

The second is that I apparently misheard over the noise at the Mikal party: the phrase was “it’s what they think you know”. I actually liked the wrong version better.

The mystery about Israel’s air strike against Syria on September 6th, which I wrote about in the current issue, continues to deepen. The story taking hold is that Israel hit material or equipment for nuclear weapons supplied by North Korea. But something still smells fishy.

For a start, the way this story has emerged in public is odd in the extreme. Well-connected Israeli journalists hinted from very early on that they knew what was going on but couldn’t say, a sign that censorship was in effect. (That is censored too, but it has become so obvious that they are now saying it openly.) All last week it was the American media - CNN, the Washington Post, the New York Times - which dripped out the story, mainly with off-the-record comments from American officials.

But today it’s Britain’s Sunday Times which carries it forward, with a lot of enticing details from unnamed Israeli sources about how an Israeli commando unit on the ground guided the bombers; how the Mossad found “evidence that Syria was seeking to buy a nuclear device from North Korea”; how Israel diverted a spy satellite from Iran to Syria; and, interestingly, how the mysterious rise in Israel-Syria sabre-rattling a few weeks ago - which I wrote about in my very first post - was actually the result of Israel’s sending more troops to the Golan “in anticipation of possible retaliation by Damascus in the event of air strikes.”

So, first question: why the Sunday Times? Letting details of the attack leak via Washington last week may have been a way to prevent a flare-up between Israel and Syria or other Arab states. But if Israeli officials have decided that it’s now safe to break silence, why not in the Israeli press?

Second question: is it true? Uzi Mahnaimi, the Sunday Times’s man in Tel Aviv, is a former Mossad man (correction: served in military intelligence) known for having excellent security sources. But as I’ve discussed before, journalists in that position are also susceptible to being fed misinformation and printing it, knowingly or otherwise.

The operational details he reveals are probably accurate. The nukes claim, which seems to have been fed both to Uzi and to his Washington colleague, is more questionable. Newsweek today reports that, yes, Israel showed satellite photographs of northern Syria to officials in Washington, suggesting that they revealed a nuclear project; but that other anonymous US officials “say they’ve seen no credible evidence yet of nuclear ties between North Korea and Syria”.

So the alternative view going around is that this news cycle is all part of a big conspiracy by Washington hardliners - with ex-UN ambassador John Bolton at the fore - and Israel to push the Iran-Syria-North Korea connection, with the media gullibly playing along.

Thus, the Sunday Times cites Bolton saying that “I’ve been worried for some time about North Korea and Iran outsourcing their nuclear programmes,” but Newsweek gets him to admit that he “never saw proof North Korea was sharing nuclear technology with Syria.” Joshua Landis, who has also clipped several other useful pieces on this issue, lists reasons to think that Bolton is “shooting from the hip”, and Blake Hounshell at Foreign Policy’s blog argues that quotes Joseph Cirincione saying that

If this sounds like the run-up to the war in Iraq, it should. This time it appears aimed at derailing the U.S.-North Korean agreement that administration hardliners think is appeasement. Some Israelis want to thwart any dialogue between the U.S. and Syria.

I’m suspending judgement. Launching an air strike at Syria, especially if there were indeed ground commandos, was risky. It’s hard to imagine Israel would have done it just to lend credibility to a neocon claim about nukes or prevent US-Syria dialogue (if anything, Washington is even more sceptical of Syria’s intentions than Jerusalem is). An alternative hypothesis is that Israel really believed that Syria might have the hot stuff, but only because the neocons led Israel by the nose. But I still can’t figure out why keep the Israeli media muzzled, unless it’s just that they’re less likely than the US press to buy into the spin. At any rate, stay sceptical. Not everything is clear yet.

This week’s story is about the likelihood of an Israeli war with Syria, and in part about the role of the media in hyping it up. Israel has some terrific journalists, whose reporting is cynical, spin-conscious and explicit about political agendas in a way that is rare in many other countries. Yet when it comes to what they hear from intelligence sources, quite a few are happy to sprinkle it liberally into their stories without making it clear where it comes from, let alone analysing their sources’ motives.

Intelligence sources are always dubious: spies know that journalists find anything with a whiff of secrecy very tempting, and what they tell you is, by its nature (and on purpose), very hard to check. There’s been a lot in the Israeli media over the past months about what they’re really thinking in Damascus and Teheran–stories like this and this, where it is hard to see how the information can have come from anywhere but the Israeli security establishment. I don’t think the establishment’s agenda is to provoke a war, but rather to cover its backside against accusations that it didn’t foresee one. But as the rash of pronouncements about “we don’t want a war and nor do they” this week showed, it realised that the media spin had started to take on a life of its own.