The Israelis have never been short of chutzpah — after all, it is their word, meaning cheek of an often-outrageous kind. Thus after the Americans had sentenced a US Navy employee, Jonathan Pollard to life imprisonment for spying for Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu, then in his first term as premier visited President Clinton and asked for the spy’s release.
Pollard had spent years passing the Israelis thousands of pages of highly sensitive material. He had seriously compromised US security. Yet far from expressing any contrition for this betrayal of a trusted ally, the Israelis repeatedly demanded at the highest levels their spy be released. They even bestowed Israeli citizenship on him. Ten years ago an Israeli government minister actually visited Pollard in his jail.
Washington remained as unfazed by its treacherous friend as it was when Israeli jets deliberately attacked the unarmed American spy ship, the USS Liberty in 1967, killing 34 US sailors and maiming 174 others. Had it been warplanes from any other country involved in the attack, Washington would have taken a very different attitude, might even have struck back. But because it was the Israelis, the US protests were at best muted.
Now we have another Israeli spy operating in the US who has been caught and convicted in what the judge on the case announced were curious circumstances. Ben-Ami Kadish an 85-year-old man who had worked as a civilian in the army had been passing his Israeli spy masters secret information about missiles, nuclear weapons and fighters for years. His controller was actually the same man who ran Pollard. Yet as the judge remarked, the FBI held off arresting and charging Kadish for over 20 years. It was a mystery, he said.
Is it possible that Washington took the view that since Kadish had retired, there was no point in unmasking him, even though the secrets he had given the Israelis had damaged US interests? Such a supine attitude is astonishing. US leaders should be running policy in the best interests of US citizens, not those of an ungrateful and obstinate ally.
It appears, however, that Israeli intelligence is not having everything its way. The Lebanese authorities are currently busy rolling up what appears to be a network of spies built by the Israelis. This web is alleged to have furnished Israeli military planners with key information used in targeting a wide range of facilities and even individual Hezbollah leaders during the defeated invasion in July 2006. Sophisticated transmitters and bugging devices have been found at the homes of some of the suspects. It is currently unclear how the Lebanese broke this spy ring. Intelligence experts are puzzled the Israelis were not using a small cell system rather than a large network that can be broken link by link. It is suggested that Syrian or Iranian intelligence may have assisted the Lebanese authorities in what seems to be a major espionage coup. Or could it be that the US intelligence worm has finally turned, and paid back Israeli treachery with a trick of its own?
International aid: Help or handout?
Excerpts from an editorial in The Guardian yesterday:
If international aid worked then Africa, South America and Asia would be rich and Bob Geldof could retire. When a Zambian-born economist like Dambisa Moyo, in a much-debated new book, says aid is part of the problem, and gets a round of applause from many Africans, it is time to listen, although not to agree. Ms. Moyo does not dispute the South’s need of the North’s cash for economic development, but she wants it to come in the form of commercial loans for wealth-creating investment.
That way, she believes, its use will be effectively policed by the lender. The transparency and accountability that she rightly accuses aid of lacking would — she claims — be delivered by the market. So really her point is about how to transfer resources most effectively. And that is the question that everyone involved in development would dearly like to be able to answer.
Outside expert circles, the aid debate tends to appear only in headline terms. So India and Bangladesh, for example, are held to have experienced a homemade revolution in agricultural and economic productivity through improved crops, technological innovation and the use of microfinance loans that allow people with little or no capital to borrow small amounts for commercial purposes. There is some truth in both assertions but, like Dr. Moyo’s analysis, neither is the whole truth.
The purpose of development is to create the circumstances in which individuals can prosper. The debate is about how to get there. The claim that aid acts as a barrier nags at many of those who work in the field. It lies behind the growing recognition that people need to do development for themselves.
The danger of Dr. Moyo’s charge is not that it is not a valuable and provocative contribution to the debate but that it will make it easier for hard-pressed governments to renege on earlier commitments. She is right that aid does not always work. But looking around the global economy, the free market has weaknesses too.
