Obama blinks in first test with Israeli lobby

Returning to Israel from a very short visit to London, I found the country in the grip of uncontrollable emotions.

No, it was not about the looming danger of the radical right gaining control. It is now almost certain that the next government will consist of an assorted bunch of colonists, explicit racists and perhaps even outright fascists. But that does not evoke any excitement.

Nor was there much excitement about yet another interrogation of the (still) incumbent Prime Minister of Israel, Ehud Olmert, in his various corruption affairs. That is hardly news anymore.

All the excitement was about a 'press conference' given by the former president of Israel, Moshe Katsav, after the attorney general announced that he might be indicted for rape.

Katsav was accused by several of his female staff of persistent sexual harassment and at least one case of rape. He had to resign.

Because of this, Charles Freeman got hardly a mention. Yet his affair was a thousand-fold more important than all the sexual activities of Israel's ex-president.

Freeman was called by the US President Barack Obama's newly-appointed Chief of National Intelligence, Admiral Dennis Blair, to the post of Chairman of the National Intelligence Council.

In this position, he would have been in charge of the National Intelligence Estimates (NIE), summarising the reports of all the 16 US intelligence agencies and composing the estimates that are put before the president.

In Israel, this is the job of the Directorate of Military Intelligence, and the officer-in-charge has a huge influence on government policy.

Throughout the 1990s, the man-in-charge of Israel's intelligence estimates, Amos Gilad, deliberately misled the government into believing that Yasser Arafat, the Palestine Liberation Organisation leader, was deceiving them and was actually plotting the destruction of Israel.

Gilad was later openly accused by his subordinates of suppressing their expert reports and submitting estimates of his own, which were not based on any intelligence whatsoever.

In the US, the intelligence chiefs famously supplied George W. Bush with the (false) intelligence he needed to justify his invasion of Iraq in 2003.

All this shows how vitally important it is to have an estimates chief of intellectual integrity and wide experience and knowledge.

Admiral Blair could not have chosen a better person than Freeman, a man of sterling character and uncontested expertise, especially about China and the Arab world. And that was his undoing.

As a former ambassador to Saudi Arabia, Freeman is an expert on the Arab world and the Israeli-Arab conflict. He has strong opinions about American policy in the Middle East, and makes no secret of them.

In a 2005 speech, he criticised Israel's "high-handed and self-defeating policies" originating in the "occupation and settlement of Arab lands", which he described as "inherently violent."

In a 2007 speech he said that the US had "embraced Israel's enemies as our own" and that Arabs had "responded by equating Americans with Israelis as their enemies."

Charging the US with backing Israel's "efforts to pacify its captive and increasingly ghettoised Arab populations" and to "seize ever more Arab land for its colonists," he added that "Israel no longer even pretends to seek peace with the Palestinians."

Another conclusion is his belief that the terrorism the US confronts is due largely to "the brutal oppression of the Palestinians by an Israeli occupation that has lasted over 40 years and shows no signs of ending."

Naturally, the appointment of such a person was viewed with great alarm by the pro-Israel lobby in Washington. They decided on an all-out attack.

No subtle behind-the-scenes intervention, no discreet protestations, but a full-scale demonstration of their might right at the beginning of the Obama era.

Public denunciations were composed, senators and Congressmen pressed into action, media people mobilised. Freeman's integrity was called into question, shady connections with Arab and Chinese financial interests "disclosed" by the docile press. Blair came to his appointee's defence, but in vain. Freeman had no choice but to withdraw.

The full meaning of this episode should not escape anyone. It was the first test of strength of the lobby in the new Obama era. And in this test, the lobby came out with flying (blue-and-white) colours. The administration was publicly humiliated.

The White House did not even try to hide its abject surrender. It declared that the appointment had not been cleared with the president, that Obama had no hand in it and did not even know about it. Meaning: of course he would have objected to the appointment of any official who was not fully acceptable to the lobby.

The portrayal of the power of the lobby by Professors John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, has been fully vindicated.

This has a significance which goes far beyond the already far-reaching implications of the affair itself.

Many people in Israel, who view the establishment of the new rightist government with apprehension, cite as their main fear the danger of a clash with the new Obama administration.

Such a clash, they believe, could be fatal for Israel's security. But the rightists deride such arguments. They assert that no American president would ever dare to confront the Israeli lobby.

The captive Congressmen and senators, as well as the supporters of the Israeli government in the media and even in the White House itself, would sink on sight any American policy opposed by even the most extreme right-wing government in Israel.

Now the first skirmish has taken place, and Obama has blinked first. Perhaps one should not rush to conclusions, perhaps the US president needs more time to find his bearings, but the signs are ominous for any Israeli interested in peace.

It may be too early to call this episode the rape of Washington, but it is certainly vastly more important than Katsav's sexual escapades.

Uri Avnery is an Israeli writer and peace activist with Gush Shalom.He is a contributor to CounterPunch's book The Politics of Anti-Semitism.