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Nov. 1, 2013
A Middle East briefing
PM Netanyahu’s national security adviser speaks.
BERNIE BELLAN
Tel Aviv
“We find ourselves navigating in a world where we have two very dangerous camps committed to our destruction, but also committed to destroying one another.” That is how Col. Eran Lerman, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s national security adviser, described the current state of tensions in the Middle East. Lerman is a former intelligence officer who has spent many years advising prime ministers on security issues and who has a host of diplomatic, military and intelligence connections throughout the world.
The two camps to which Lerman was referring are the Iranians and their Sunni foes. While the most obvious instance in which the two camps are engaged in a vicious struggle is currently taking place in Syria, the threat posed by Iran to other Arab nations has led to a convergence of interest, between Israel and other Arab countries, most notably Saudi Arabia.
Lerman was speaking to a group of some 25 mostly American participants in a mission taking place in Israel from Oct. 21-28, which was sponsored by Shurat HaDin, the Israel Law Centre.
In her opening remarks to the mission participants, Shurat HaDin director Nitsana Darshan-Leitner explained how, ever since the second intifada in 2000, her organization has filed successful legal challenges to the international financiers of terrorism that have resulted in the awarding of more than $1 billion in damages by various courts throughout the world. It is through such attempts to cut off the flow of funds to terrorists that, Darshan-Leitner explained, the situation for Hamas in Gaza has become so precarious, for instance, that there is not even a single bank operating in that entire area.
However, Israel’s fight occurs on a variety of levels, Lerman went on to say. “We licked the challenge of terrorism,” he said. “It’s not gone, but we dealt with it in a way that was not thought possible…. The secret ingredient is the resilience of Israeli society and the willingness of our friends to stand with us.”
In analyzing how Israel has been so successful in reducing the threat that it now faces from terrorists, Lerman noted that the prime factor in achieving that task has been to convince terrorists “that they are going to die for nothing,” he noted. “They lose their determination” when they see how quickly, for example, Israelis were able to bounce back from the series of terrorist attacks that were most pronounced in the period of the second intifada, which was unleashed by Yasser Arafat. According to Lerman, calling that an “intifada” is a misnomer because the word intifada means popular uprising. That intifada, he suggested, was nothing more than a calculated campaign of terror that ultimately resulted in no demonstrable gains for the Palestinians.
“We have made the terror campaign unsustainable,” Lerman declared. Current Palestinian Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas, Lerman said, has “understood one thing: violence does not work.”
While there are many additional factors that have been at play in the reduction of the terror threat, chief among which was the disintegration of the former Soviet Union (which Lerman derisively referred to as the UFFR, the Union of Fewer and Fewer Republics), whatever the reasons, terrorism has proven to be a failed strategy.
It is not only the diminished threat emanating from those entities that were the principal sponsors of terrorism that has changed so remarkably in recent years, Lerman observed. It is the very nature of the understanding of basic geopolitical forces that are now at play in this region. To that end, he suggested three terms that need to be radically redefined: Arab Spring, intifada and the term Middle East itself.
Again Lerman pointed to the collapse of the Soviet Union as the key factor in understanding what has been happening in the Arab word. “There has been a tectonic shift” of forces throughout the Arab world, he said. “One young man in Tunisia,” who set himself on fire in protest of government corruption, “set the Arab world afire” … and the “old structures collapsed. New structures that had been buried reemerged.”
To understand what has been happening in Syria, Lerman explained, “the narrative you have to think of is not in terms of geopolitics, but ideology.”
There are six ideological forces currently at play in the Arab world, he suggested: three minor and three major.
The minor forces include Al Qaeda, which he called “deadly but incapable of taking power at the core”; liberalism, which he said is influential to a degree but clearly limited in what its proponents can do on their own
(Lerman did note, however, that by overthrowing the government of Mohammed Morsi, the Egyptian military was “assisting a mass movement” that was largely inspired by liberal forces in Egypt); and, finally, nationalism, something, Lerman observed, that drew much of its impetus from European national socialism, and which was seen most clearly in the figures of Gamal Abdel Nasser, Bashar al-Assad and Saddam Hussein, but also in Arafat’s approach.
The major forces in the contemporary Arab world are, according to Lerman, “The camp led by the present leadership in Iran, the Muslim Brotherhood and the conservative camp led by Saudi Arabia.”
What makes Iran so dangerous, said Lerman, is not just its pursuit of a nuclear bomb. In fact, there is another Muslim nation that possesses the bomb, Pakistan, but “Israel does not feel obliged to fear Pakistan. They’re not coming after us,” he said, “but Iran is.”
As for the media’s current “love affair” with newly elected Iranian President Hassan Rouhani, Lerman said that the response is “nauseating.” Echoing Netanyahu’s claim that “Rouhani is a wolf in sheep’s clothing,” Lerman insisted that the supreme leader in Iran, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, is committed to the destruction of the state of Israel. While former president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad may have been open in his obsession with destroying Israel, it is really just a matter of nuance.
Referring to the deadly struggle in Syria between forces aligned with the Iranian camp and forces aligned with the Muslim Brotherhood, Lerman noted that Israel, strangely enough, has found itself aligned with the third force, which is coming from Saudi Arabia.
“Ironically, the music coming from Saudi Arabia is the same music that is coming from Israel. We’re in the same orchestra. Saudi Arabia may be playing the piccolo and Israel may be playing the flute” but for both the “common enemy is Iran.” What both Saudi Arabia and Israel understand is the importance of keeping a “credible military threat” when it comes to dealing with Iran, he continued. To that end, Jordan is also part of that camp and is, therefore, an ally of Israel.
Even Turkey has come to the realization that the greatest threat in the region is Iran, Lerman added. In fact, Israel is assisting the shipment of goods from Turkey to Jordan through the port of Haifa. For that matter, even the Palestinian Authority and the government of Israel are on the same page when it comes to understanding the threat posed by Iran, he suggested.
As for the peace talks with the Palestinians, Lerman said that the “Palestinians still have to make up their minds about two things: Can there be another intifada? And can they accept the Zionist movement as a nationalist movement no more and no less than other nationalist movements?”
In looking forward to the future, notwithstanding the ultimate outcome of the current peace negotiations, Lerman was steadfast in his optimism for the state of Israel. “What gives us hope is not only our military capacity,” he said, “but our economic success.” For example, the American military buys “$1 billion” worth of arms from Israel. Add to that Israel’s recent discoveries of oil and gas offshore and Israel is now an economic powerhouse.
As for the term Middle East to describe where Israel is located, Lerman would rather see Israel as an extension of a Mediterranean region that includes such countries as Greece, Cyprus, Malta and, to a certain extent, France. “Israelis look like Greeks but curse in Arabic,” Lerman suggested to describe the realignment of forces that has created new opportunities for Israel.
In the question period that followed, this reporter asked Lerman whether it was perhaps wrong to rule out the possibility of some form of rapprochement with Iran.
Lerman responded that “it is not impossible to cut a deal, but you have to abandon the language of the bazaar” to do that. In the past, negotiations over Iran’s nuclear capability would start with the West saying that Iran could not upgrade its nuclear capability beyond a level of 20 percent; Iran would counter with an offer of 90 percent, and so would go the bargaining. “Now,” he said, “we should start with a level of 15 percent and say ‘That’s it – nothing above that level, no bargaining.’”
Lerman insisted that there are three essential areas of agreement between Israel and the United States in dealing with the Iranian threat: there is no contradiction between having a viable military deterrent and the use of diplomatic power; there can be no policy of “containment” of Iran – its nuclear weapon capability must be dismantled; and there can be no constraint on Israel’s ultimate right to make its own decisions when it comes to safeguarding its security interests.
Bernie Bellan is the editor of Winnipeg’s Jewish Post and News, where a version of this article was previously published.
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