{"id":102630,"date":"2023-03-06T17:05:00","date_gmt":"2023-03-06T15:05:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/?p=102630"},"modified":"2023-03-05T14:01:33","modified_gmt":"2023-03-05T12:01:33","slug":"11-00-84","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/?p=102630","title":{"rendered":"Biden Sets Israel on Fire"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>Biden Sets Israel on Fire<\/a><\/strong><\/span><\/span><\/h5>\n

BY
\nLEE SMITH<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

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U.S. support for demonstrations in Tel Aviv isn\u2019t about the future of Israel\u2019s judiciary. It\u2019s about handcuffing Israel while Iran gets the bomb.<\/strong><\/span><\/h4>\n

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\u2018The Obama officials running Biden\u2019s Middle East policy are set on bringing down Bibi\u2019AMIR LEVY\/GETTY IMAGES<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

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Is the current Israeli government truly on the verge of an authoritarian turn? No, of course not. The mass protests and over-the-top rhetoric from Israel\u2019s domestic opposition, Joe Biden\u2019s warnings that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu\u2019s reform agenda will curtail minority rights, gleeful announcements by the U.S. ambassador about his right to interfere in domestic Israeli politics, group letters from 50 former commandos and 75 economists who all oppose judicial reform, the financing of Palestinian groups with terror links, public harassment of Netanyahu\u2019s wife: These are among the details of a single blueprint. The fact that this blueprint is designed in Washington, D.C., gives courage and direction to the demonstrators acting out their color revolution fantasies on the ground in Tel Aviv. And it\u2019s evidence that Bibi is in Washington\u2019s crosshairs, for regime change has come to Israel.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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The world has learned a lot watching America\u2019s Middle East freedom agenda wind its way through the Fertile Crescent, North Africa, and then up the Nile, first under George W. Bush and then under Barack Obama. The first of these lessons is that when U.S. policymakers selectively deploy the rhetoric of democracy and human rights against target governments, their words are typically accompanied by practical measures to destabilize those governments, including U.S. allies.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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When the Freedom Agenda debuted after September 11, it described a set of dangerously wishful beliefs about how some of the region\u2019s most repressive governments could become more democratic, provided their new leaders, like the Americans calling the shots, ignored historical reality and political culture. Then the concept transitioned, and by the time the Arab Spring rolled around, democracy promotion became cover for an arsenal of techniques deployed by U.S. intelligence services and NGOs to undermine governments that the White House, the State Department, and the CIA didn\u2019t like.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Perhaps most famously, the Barack Obama administration\u2019s pro-democracy campaign helped push out Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak in favor of a government run by the Muslim Brotherhood, hardly an exemplary force for universal human rights. Then, during the Trump administration, the same Obama officials working while out of government partnered with foreign spy services to\u00a0target<\/a>\u00a0Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman with the goal of forcing him out of the line of succession in favor of a royal more likely to feather the retirement nests of agency officials.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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A\u00a0similar operation<\/a>\u00a0is now underway in Israel, where the Biden administration has departed from diplomatic protocol by repeatedly advertising its meetings with the political faction seeking to undo Israel\u2019s newly elected right-wing government. More significantly, Biden\u2019s State Department is now\u00a0directly funding<\/a>\u00a0local activists organizing the protests. By publicly putting its prestige and money behind the coalition that lost the latest Israeli election, Washington is openly advertising its desire to bring down Netanyahu.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Maybe it seems strange that the current U.S. presidential administration considers Israel\u2019s government hostile to American interests. Why, it was just months ago that Biden aides mediated an arrangement between Israel and Lebanon over their maritime border. Even practical, hard-minded Israeli officials said the deal enhanced security and may even lead to more positive steps with the Beirut government. Surely that\u2019s indicative of good relations between Washington and Jerusalem, no?<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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By publicly putting its prestige and money behind the coalition that lost the latest Israeli election, Washington is openly advertising its desire to bring down Netanyahu.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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In reality, the maritime agreement was just the latest in a series of initiatives to realign U.S. interests with those of the terror regime in Tehran while alternately sweet-talking and threatening traditional U.S. allies like Israel and Saudi Arabia to fall into line. Accordingly, an Israeli prime minister like the one Bibi replaced, Yair Lapid, who wanted to ingratiate himself with the Obama-Biden faction by integrating Israel into its pro-Iran security architecture that augments Hezbollah\u2019s power, was indeed a friend of the current White House.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Netanyahu, however, is a problem for an administration still determined to reenter the nuclear deal from which Donald Trump withdrew. Netanyahu has opposed the deal since the Israelis got wind of it early in Obama\u2019s second term. Yet in his previous tenure as prime minster, he passed on several opportunities to disrupt Obama\u2019s negotiations and destroy Iran\u2019s nuclear facilities. But there\u2019s no guarantee the famously cautious Netanyahu wouldn\u2019t launch an attack now, especially with a right-wing government at his back and the U.S. seemingly preparing to accept Iran as a member of the nuclear club, so long as the terror regime\u2019s capacity is limited to just one bomb, or maybe just a few.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Betting that Netanyahu will continue to sit on his hands is not a strategy. So, the Obama officials running Biden\u2019s Middle East policy are set on bringing down Bibi. Their instrument is his domestic opposition, galvanized to thwart his proposed judicial reforms.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Netanyahu aides and supporters argue that far from weakening Israel\u2019s democratic processes, his reforms would make the country\u2019s democracy more dynamic by further empowering legislators, the elected representatives of the Israeli public. Thus, what Netanyahu\u2019s opponents hysterically describe as an anti-democratic putsch is in reality a plan for a modified version of the \u201cchecks and balances\u201d system that would distribute power among equal and independent branches of government\u2014i.e., an Israeli rendition of the U.S. Constitution. And whatever experts may think about the pros and cons of the proposed reforms, the fact remains that Israel\u2019s judiciary is less responsive to any kind of democratic restraint than the judicial system of any Western democracy.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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The issue then is not that Bibi\u2019s reform agenda endangers the rights of its citizens, Jews and Arabs alike. Rather, it attenuates the vast powers of the judiciary, a corps of lawyers tapped by their professional colleagues to serve lifetime terms in posts where they are unaccountable to the electorate at large. Instead, they represent the interests of a political, corporate, and media establishment determined to impose its will on the country.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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In Israel the judiciary fills the role of the national security establishment in the United States. As American elites revere domestic U.S. intelligence services for waging an unlawful and ongoing campaign to ruin Trump and his supporters in order to, in their words, \u201csave\u00a0our<\/em>\u00a0democracy,\u201d the anti-Bibi rebels esteem the judiciary as the thumb tilting the scales of justice against those they detest.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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For more than two decades, Israeli judges have imposed \u201congoing investigations\u201d on right-wing leaders to cripple their agendas. They developed the method with Ariel Sharon, then used it on Ehud Olmert (now, apparently converted by his experiences in prison, a hardline leftist) and repeatedly against Netanyahu. In 2019, he was indicted under charges so vague and elastic\u2014including the assertion that a politician seeking better coverage from a media organization is a crime\u2014that it is clear the judiciary molded them only for the purpose of asserting its authority over Israel\u2019s longest serving prime minister.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Israel\u2019s judiciary cornered Bibi the same way U.S. intelligence services framed Trump: Any attempt at self-defense against an element of the deep state is refashioned by the establishment media as evidence of guilt. Unable to get Bibi out of power at the ballot box, his enemies used the courts, until Bibi outmaneuvered them. With his November reelection, he won a mandate to reform the judiciary. And that\u2019s why the opposition has gone to the streets in much the same way U.S. progressives rioted alongside Democrat-supported street gangs in the spring and summer of 2020. The point is to make the majority beg for an end to the chaos, a plea the motivated minority is glad to accommodate but only on its terms: Help us get rid of the man you elected.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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The anti-Bibi coup looks and feels like the anti-Trump operation because it\u2019s run by the same people\u2014the Obama operatives who hunted Trump and now run the Biden White House. It was Obama\u2019s spy chiefs who fabricated Russiagate, the politically funded smear campaign designed to destabilize the Trump presidency. And it\u2019s Obama\u2019s State Department that created the machinery to take down Netanyahu nearly a decade ago by funding anti-Bibi election campaigns with\u00a0U.S. taxpayer dollars<\/a>.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Obama\u2019s button men have made the \u201cGet Bibi\u201d machinery a permanent part of the Israeli political landscape: It\u2019s how they dress their never-ending Iran deal campaigns in the garb of domestic Israeli politics. After Obama\u2019s second term ended, his ambassador to Israel, Dan Shapiro, stayed in country to service the anti-Bibi infrastructure while warning Israelis that no matter how good Trump was for Israel\u2014crashing the nuclear deal, moving the embassy to Jerusalem, etc.\u2014they better not get too close to the Republican president, for there would be a price to pay once the Democrats returned to power. And now they have.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Netanyahu brought some of this punishment on himself. His March 2015 speech before a joint session of Congress warning against the Iran nuclear deal was celebrated by Republicans at the time as a bold gesture of defiance. They likened Netanyahu to Winston Churchill, with Obama scripted as the grand appeaser, Neville Chamberlain.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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In retrospect Bibi\u2019s speech was a mistake. First, it was an announcement to the world that having gone all out\u2014short of taking out Iran\u2019s nuclear facilities\u2014Bibi lost. Second, it signaled that the crucial decisions about Israel\u2019s future were made not in Jerusalem but in Washington. This is what galvanized Bibi\u2019s domestic opposition.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Israel\u2019s anti-Bibi establishment was pleased to do Obama\u2019s bidding. It didn\u2019t matter that he was empowering Iran. If America wanted a deal with the clerical regime, they would have it. What Bibi\u2019s domestic foes wanted was an imperial patron who would back their confrontation with the near enemy, Netanyahu, even as they continued to lose elections.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Now that there is no mistaking who is driving the coup against him, Bibi at least has a clearer picture of the game board before him. He can\u2019t do much about the \u201cally\u201d that has legitimized BDS on a grander scale than its academic proponents in the U.S. could ever hope for by filling Israeli streets with opponents threatening to take capital out of the country and shirk military service. The only way out of this mess is to reassert his freedom of action by zeroing in on the Obama-Biden faction\u2019s favored foreign constituents, the regime in Tehran. If America wants to set fires in his backyard, Bibi can set fires, too.<\/span><\/p>\n

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Lee Smith<\/strong> is the author of\u00a0The Permanent Coup: How Enemies Foreign and Domestic Targeted the American President<\/a>\u00a0<\/strong>(2020).<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Biden Sets Israel on Fire BY LEE SMITH U.S. support for demonstrations in Tel Aviv isn\u2019t about the future of Israel\u2019s judiciary. It\u2019s about handcuffing Israel while Iran gets the bomb. . \u2018The Obama officials running Biden\u2019s Middle East policy are set on bringing down Bibi\u2019AMIR LEVY\/GETTY IMAGES Is the current Israeli government truly on […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[6],"tags":[26,24],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/102630"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=102630"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/102630\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":102644,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/102630\/revisions\/102644"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=102630"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=102630"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=102630"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}