Don’t call it the week 200,000 New Yorkers laid out the unwelcome mat for the Republican Convention, call it instead the week an Israeli mole was ferreted out at the Pentagon.
It is indeed a tale about spies and spying, but only in a perverse way could you suggest that it is straight out of Le Carre, and that the protagonists are your tragic, garden variety spies who come in from the cold, tormented by existential doubts about their calling, as the popular British author often portrayed them.
Rather the tale follows the classic story line found in a certain genre of literature and cinema: the obsessive relationship between a man and a woman, where the one, regardless of the abuse heaped on him by the other, remains unfailingly devoted, knowing all along of the harm, grief and disruption caused in his life by the infatuation.
From literature we can single out the British novelist Somerset Maugham’s “Of Human Bondage,” the French memoirist Marcel Proust’s “In Search of Times Lost” (between the smitten Swan and the coquettish Odette) and the Italian short story writer Alberto Moravia’s “A woman of Rome.” And from film we need only refer to Martin Scorsese’s “Taxi Driver.”
There’s nothing more indicative of this obsessive relationship, were we to extrapolate from it to the interaction between nations, than that between Israel and the United States.
It begins with a kissy-face, lovey-dovey encounter at the White House between an Israeli prime minister and an American president where the special relationship between Israel and the US is re-affirmed, and ends with the former stabbing in the back its closest ally (indeed its only ally in the world today) by brazenly spying on it.
Icky pronouncements by officials in Washington and Tel Aviv, about how the scandal had been a “rogue operation,” then follow. All is forgiven, let’s move on.
It happened in 1967, under the Johnson administration, with the assault on the Liberty that resulted in the slaughter of 34 American servicemen and the wounding of 171. At the time, the White House, along with weak-kneed House and Senate Committees, whose members were averse to offending pro-Israel groups, swept it all under the rug. In 1987, while Ronald Reagan was president, Israel was again caught spying in the US when Jonathan Pollard, an ardent Jewish American supporter of Israel who was a US Navy Intelligence officer, admitted in court to selling state secrets to Israel and was sentenced to life. Did the terrible harm caused by Pollard create bedlam in the relationship between Israel and the US? Not in the least bit.
Last week it was revealed that the FBI had for some time been investigating Larry Franklin, a Pentagon official at the department’s Near East and South Asia Bureau, who specializes in Iran affairs, for passing classified information to Israel, via two employees in the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), a pro-Israel lobbying organization both of whose savoir faire and chutzpah on the Hill is legion.
That’s the second time in recent months that a case surfaced involving allegations of Israeli espionage against an ally. In July, New Zealand authorities charged four Mossad agents in a passport scam. Two were captured and are now serving time, one is on the run and the other is thought to have fled the country. Mossad has a history of obtaining foreign passports for its agents, including the time in October 1997 when two of its assassins, with forged Canadian passports, were arrested in Jordan following a botched attempt to a kill an exiled Hamas leader in the Jordanian capital — in broad daylight.
Some commentators are now suggesting that because of the involvement of AIPAC in espionage, the Franklin case could throw aspersions on, or raise doubts about the loyalty of, the Jewish community in the US.
“There’s a Republican convention going on in New York,” Michael Oren, an Israeli historian, told the Washington Post last week, “and the canard has been out there a long time that Israel and Israel’s supporters and the neoconservatives in the Defense Department have manipulated US foreign policy, especially on Iraq, to serve Israeli purposes, and this would tend to substantiate that canard.”
Yes, the canard, if canard it is, will make the rounds for a short time, but then watch an imminent kissy-face, lovey-dovey encounter between an Israeli prime minister and an American president in the White House, with high-fives flying, as this sordid scandal is swept under the rug, ideally to the tune of “Tea for Two.”
Call it “A Special Relationship — The Musical.”
