Skeptical Israeli, weakening Assad, predictable UN

Dagan applied the same methods to other individuals deemed dangerous to Israel — in the last five years, their ranks included more than a dozen Iranian nuclear scientists whose life came to an abrupt end.

We mention this biography of Dagan because, since leaving service last year, he has emerged as one of the most persistent critic of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s and Defense Minister Ehud Barak’s approach toward dealing with the Palestinians, the Arab states, and the Iranian bomb.

• As we wrote above, Dagan does not believe that a permanent deal with the Palestinians is in the cards right now – but unlike Netanyahu, he supports a more creative approach to the Israeli-Palestinian issue and calls on Israel to make deeper and more meaningful concessions to the Palestinians. He supports transferring large areas of the West Bank to Palestinian control, and he calls for Israel to recognize a Palestinian state even before there is an agreement between the two sides on the precise delineation of the border.
• Dagan sees Saudi Arabia as a major player in Arab affairs with positive influence and moderate and reasonable policies. He supports the comprehensive peace initiative Saudi Arabia first proposed in 2002 at the Beirut Summit of the Arab League, and which was re-endorsed at the Riyadh Summit in 2007. He does not accept every detail of the Saudi proposal, but he criticizes Israel’s lack of response to it.
• He warns that an Israeli military attack on Iran nuclear facilities must truly be the very last option, for two reasons:
  • First, in his informed view, Iran is not going to have the ability to produce nuclear weapons until about 2015 – which means that a combination of an aggressive covert action against Iranian nuclear scientists and nuclear facilities and tough economic sanctions – to say nothing of a possible Iranian Spring which will bring down the regime — may yet be sufficient to prevent Iran from getting the bomb
  • Second, Israel may be able to destroy Iran’s nuclear facilities, but Israel will not be able to prevent a massive and sustained Iranian retaliation: Israel’s population and economic centers will be showered by thousands of missiles and rockets from Iran and its two local agents, Hezbollah and Hamas.

If necessary, Dagan says, Israel will have to absorb this punishment – and it will be able, painfully, to do so. The emphasis, though, is on “if necessary”: Dagan does not believe it is necessary to take this risk just yet.

He is talking openly now because he says he is worried that the current Israeli leadership – specifically, Netanyahu and Barak – is not sufficiently cool-headed, sober, and restrained to resist the temptation of attacking Iran prematurely.

The temptation will be great, says Dagan, when September comes around: the UN will vote to recognize a Palestinian state in the 1967 borders and will accept that state as a full-fledged member of the UN. Of the 192 members of the UN, the measure is already guaranteed around 150 votes, if not more. Yes, the United States will veto the measure in the Security Council and will join Israel in what will likely be the two lonely votes in the General Assembly against recognizing the Palestinian state – but Israel’s diplomatic isolation will be pronounced as never before.

Dagan is worried that the current leadership of Israel, feeling isolated and threatened, but also angry and frustrated, may lash out against Iran, and irresponsibly – and unnecessarily – use military means which will invite a painful – and unnecessary — retaliation.

Dagan’s forty years of military and intelligence service, and the fact that he is far from being a pacifist, mean that we should listen – carefully listen — to what he says.

2. Assad’s days are numbered

The 40-year rule of the Assad family in Syria is coming to an end. It may happen next month or may take a year, but the writing is on the wall. Take two examples:

• No other Arab regime has been more supportive of Hamas than the Syrian regime. Hamas’s headquarters have been in Damascus for years, and Syria and Iran are the organization’s main arms suppliers. Yet, despite repeated entreaties from Assad’s emissaries, Hamas has steadfastly refused to issue declarations of support for the beleaguered Assad. The majority of Syria’s citizens are Sunni Arabs (about 74 percent) – the Assad family belongs to the Alawite minority (the Shi’a and Alawites account for about 13 percent of the population) — and Hamas must calculate that since Assad’s days are numbered, the last thing the organization needs is to bet on a losing horse and pick a fight with the oppressed Sunnis. Hamas is now actively looking to move its headquarters to one of the Gulf states.
• After the 2006 Israel-Hezbollah war, both Iran and Syria rushed to re-arm Hezbollah. Israel’s ability to destroy all of Hezbollah’s long-range missiles in their hideouts during the first thirty-two minutes of the war is a story for another day, but the lesson Hezbollah drew from the experience was that it would be better to keep its most potent weapons not in Lebanon – but just across the border, in Syria. This way, if tensions mount between Israel and Hezbollah, Israel will face a tough choice: if it wanted to pre-empt and destroy Hezbollah’s more powerful rockets and missiles at the outset of the conflict, it – Israel – will have to bomb targets on Syrian soil, drawing Syria into the war. If Israel chose not to attack, Hezbollah could move its long-range weapons, two or three dozens at a time, from Syria just into Lebanon – and fire them at Israel’s population centers. Now Hezbollah has began to move its heavy weaponry from their warehouses in Syria into Lebanon, making Israeli decisions at the outset of a war easier to make. The fact that Hezbollah is taking this step tells us all we need to know about what Hezbollah leaders think about Assad’s chances of staying in power.

Assad is in a no-win situation. If he makes more concessions to the anti-government demonstrators, he will appear weak and alienate the hard-liners in his circle. If he continues to kill dozens of Syrian civilians a week – thirty-four civilians were killed today by live rounds in the city of Hama — his already-eroded legitimacy as the ruler of Syria will weaken even more.

Assad’s plight, up to a point, has divided the Middle East along familiar lines.

Saudi Arabia and Jordan, long-time adversaries of the Assad family, secretly – and not so secretly – support the anti-government forces and arm some elements in the anti-government camp.

Iran and Hezbollah support Assad, and in some cities and villages near the Lebanese border, Hezbollah militants have joined with Syrian military units to suppress protests (for what Hezbollah thinks about the effectiveness of these measures, see reference above to Hezbollah moving its weapons out of Syria)

Israel, the United States, and Turkey sit on the fence. There is no love lost between these countries and Syria, but these countries have not yet been convinced by the Saudi and Jordanian argument that post-Assad Syria will see a stable, Sunni-led regime. The worry is that the ethnic and religious composition of Syria will see a situation develop in Syria that resembles Libya or Yemen more than it resembles Egypt or Tunisia.

Either way, more and more observers agree that Assad’s days in power are numbered.

3. The circus is back in town

Here they go again. Nearly ten years ago, from 31 August to 8 September 2001, the UN held what was called the World Conference Against Racism (WCAR) in Durban, South Africa (the event became known as Durban I). As is the case with many such UN fora and gatherings, most of the deliberations – if “deliberations” is the right word here — were devoted to ringing denunciations of Israel.

What made the Durban circus stand out was the fact that this time delegates were not satisfied with attacking Israel and its policies, bet delved into pure anti-Semitism: the Palestinian Solidarity Committee of South Africa, for example, distributed copies of the anti-Semitic forgery The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

The United States, Canada, and Israel withdrew from the conference after giving up the effort to moderate the extremist tenor of its discussions. Colin Powell, the U.S. secretary of state, harshly criticized the “hateful language” dominating the conference and the documents it produced, language that “singles out only one country in the world, Israel, for censure and abuse.”

Separate from the WCAR was an NGO Forum, held at the same time in the nearby Kingsmead Stadium in Durban. More than 8,000 people, representing more than 3,000 NGOs from the around the world, took part. The language of the discussions, and of the final documents the NGO Forum produced, were even more hateful and venomous than the language of the WCAR. The final declaration described Israel as a “racist, apartheid state” that was guilty of “racist crimes including war crimes, acts of genocide and ethnic cleansing.”

At the conclusion of the Forum, representative of the NGO Forum tried to hand over the final declaration to the WCAR secretary-general, Mary Robinson (who was president of Ireland from 1990 to 1997), but Robinson refused to accept the document, citing its hateful language.

Robinson’s last-minute stand against the declarations produced by the WCAR and the NGO Forum was not enough to save her job, as the United States, critical of Robinson’s handling of the Durban conference, firmly opposed the continuation of Robinson as UN High Commissioner for Human Rights.

You may want to know that the WCAR and the NGO Forum received generous financial support from the Rockefeller Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, and the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation. In addition, the Ford Foundation provided $10 million in support to the WCAR and the NGO Forum

We should note several NGOs — including Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights – which publicly and pronouncedly disassociated themselves from the language of the NGO Forum’s Declaration that dealt with Israel and with Jews.

A follow-on conference, known as Durban II, was held in Geneva in April 2009.The conference was boycotted by Australia, Canada, Germany, Israel, Italy, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Poland, and the United States. The Czech Republic discontinued its attendance on the first day, and twenty-three other European Union countries sent low-level delegations.

Western countries – both those which stayed away and those in attendance – complained that the conference was used to promote anti-Semitism, and that support the conference gave to laws against blasphemy were contrary to the principles of free speech. Because of objections by Muslim states, the conference would not deal with discrimination against homosexuals. Muslim states also insisted that all criticism of Islam be banned. European countries also criticized the meeting for focusing on the West and ignoring racism and intolerance in the developing world.

The only head of state to attend Durban II was Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. In his speech, among other things, he referred to the Holocaust as an “ambiguous and dubious question.”

Why bring up this story? Because in September the UN is planning to hold Durban III — a 10-year commemoration of the Durban conference.

Fox News reports that the Obama administration on Wednesday announced it would boycott the event, to be held at the UN headquarters in New York, because of concerns about anti-Semitism.

The United States will not participate in the upcoming conference because the Durban process “included ugly displays of intolerance and anti-Semitism,” Joseph E. Macmanus, acting U.S. assistant secretary of state for legislative affairs, wrote in a letter to Senator Kirsten Gillibrand (D-New York).

Macmanus’s letter to Gillibrand also commended Canada’s earlier decision to boycott the event.

“In December, we voted against the resolution establishing this event because the Durban process included ugly displays of intolerance and anti-Semitism, and we did not want to see that commemorated,” Macmanus told the senator.

He added that in 2009 the U.S. withdrew from the planning of the conference because it reaffirmed the 2001 Durban Declaration, “which unfairly singled out Israel and included language inconsistent with U.S. traditions of robust free speech.”

Fox News quotes Macmanus saying that for this year’s event, “the United States delegation in New York has not been involved in the formal negotiations on the modalities resolution or the outcome document and has had a notetaker only in these proceedings….We share [Gillibrand’s] concern about the Durban commemoration’s timing and venue as just days earlier, we will have held solemn ten-year memorials for those murdered in the September 11 terrorist attacks.”

The letter said that the United States is “fully committed to upholding the human rights of all people and to combating racial discrimination, xenophobia, intolerance, and bigotry.”

Would that we could say that about the UN, the UN Human Rights Council, and most members of the UN.

Ben Frankel is the editor of the Homeland Security NewsWire