Bennett should beware of CIA director William Burns By Ruthie Blum
In a tweet on Wednesday, Prime Minister Naftali Bennett announced that he had emerged from a productive meeting with CIA director William Burns.
“We discussed the strengthening of intelligence and security cooperation between Israel and the United States, the situation in the Middle East, the emphasis on Iran and the possibilities for expanding and deepening regional cooperation. We will continue to cooperate with our closest friend,” Bennett wrote, signing off with an icon of an American flag next to an Israeli one.
Obligatory positive pronouncements aside, Bennett would do well to view Burns’s trip this week to Israel and the Palestinian Authority with wariness.
“The visit shows that the Biden administration is serious about restoring Washington’s relations with the Palestinians and strengthening the Palestinian leadership under President Mahmoud Abbas,” a PA official told The Jerusalem Post’s Khaled Abu Toameh on Tuesday.
Noting the CIA chief’s scheduled rendezvous with Abbas and PA General Intelligence Service head Majed Faraj, the official pointed to the PA’s “sharp financial crisis” that requires “urgent [US] aid,” without which “Hamas will come to power in the West Bank.”
If Israel had a shekel for every time the PA whined to the West about its victimhood, the Jewish state’s coffers would be overflowing. In case the most recent example of this incredible chutzpah has escaped attention, a review of the events leading up to Operation Guardian of the Walls is in order.
AWARE THAT he was certain to lose to Hamas in the PA elections slated for the end of May, Abbas resorted to his default position. Accusing Israel of forbidding the Arab residents of east Jerusalem to participate, he canceled the vote a month before it was supposed to take place.
In an attempt to save face and quell anger against him on the Palestinian street, he turned to his usual stunt of manufacturing a clash with Israel by declaring that Jews were about to storm and destroy al-Aqsa Mosque on the Temple Mount. He also took advantage of the controversy over the eviction of six Palestinian families squatting in Jewish-owned apartments in the Jerusalem neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah to fan existing embers.
Jerusalem Day, Israel’s celebration of the anniversary of its victory in the 1967 Six-Day War, provided an even better excuse for him to ramp up violent rhetoric and incite riots in the Israeli capital and other locations around the country. His campaign – the main goal of which was to show Palestinians that he and his Fatah faction were just as bent as Hamas on annihilating the Jewish state – was successful. Arab Israelis spent weeks assaulting their Jewish neighbors with fists, rocks and Molotov cocktails, in addition to setting cars alight and burning down synagogues.
Meanwhile, Hamas was playing the same game, drastically stepping up incendiary balloon and rocket attacks against Israelis. When the bloodthirsty group sent a barrage of rockets over Jerusalem on May 10, Israel launched its 11-day operation to target terrorists and infrastructure in Gaza.
By the end of the mini-war, Hamas and Islamic Jihad had fired more than 4,000 rockets into southern and central Israel, forcing innocent civilians to run for cover at the sound of every air raid siren.
When it was over, much of Gaza was left in rubble. Hamas nevertheless declared victory over the “Zionists,” and Abbas was still happily at the helm in Ramallah.
None of the above is how the PA chairman describes the situation to American envoys, of course. Despite making good on his repeated vow to continue his “pay for slay” policy to encourage and fund Jew-killing “martyrs,” he knows how to employ euphemism to paint a different picture. Not that it matters so much these days, with a friendly White House and State Department eager to hear and buy his lies.
WHICH BRINGS us to Burns. He’s not the first US official, from either party, to hold fast to the false notion that Abbas and Fatah are “moderates.” Nor can one entirely fault him for that, when many Israeli politicians have taken and still cling to that very position.
The justification for this, if any exists, is that Hamas – like the Lebanon-based terrorist organization Hezbollah – is backed by the mullah-led regime in Tehran. Newly instated Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi said as much this week. Embracing representatives from both groups, all given prominent seats at his swearing-in ceremony, he vowed to continue to provide them with all the support they need.
The key word here is “continue.” Indeed, Raisi’s predecessor, Hassan Rouhani, may have been a pragmatist, but he never was a moderate, despite Western wishes to see him as such.
Nor can any Iranian president govern without answering to Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, whose Islamist aim of global hegemony has not wavered. For him, Hamas and Hezbollah are crucial pawns in carrying out this objective.
Rather than weakening the resolve of US President Joe Biden and his appointees to return to the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), or some “improved” version of the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, Raisi’s reputation as the “butcher of Tehran” has enhanced it. If anything, Team Biden is hotter than ever to trot back to “indirect” talks in Vienna.
The ostensible logic behind this display of Western self-degradation is that without an agreement, Iran’s race to obtain nuclear weapons and bolster its ballistic-missile capabilities will proceed without “transparency.”
It would be funny if it weren’t so sad that Burns, who heads his country’s top intelligence agency, needs Iranian compliance with inspectors to know what’s going on at Iranian nuclear facilities. He ought to take lessons from Israel’s Mossad, whose agents infiltrated a warehouse in Tehran in 2018 and snatched a massive trove of documents detailing the Islamic Republic’s nuclear blueprints.
It was on the basis of the stolen archive that former US president Donald Trump withdrew from the JCPOA when he did. But the Biden administration, along with its appeasement-addicted European counterparts, is more interested in fiction than fact.
BURNS CERTAINLY belongs in that category. Before assuming his current role, he served as president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a left-wing think tank funded partly by the George Soros-established Open Society Foundations. A long-time career diplomat, he is the author of the 2019 book, The Back Channel: A Memoir of American Diplomacy and the Case for Its Renewal.
In other words, he’s not exactly the type to run covert espionage operations – being too busy sucking up to his country’s enemies to spy on them and all.
As it happens, his diplomatic acumen also leaves a lot to be desired.
In an op-ed in The Washington Post in May 2019, Burns exhibited a killer combination of ignorance about the Middle East and lack of vision about the plan that would lead to the signing of the Abraham Accords a mere year and a quarter later.
“In keeping with his disdain for conventional wisdom and his bent for disruption, Trump might bury what is still the only viable plan of action for Israelis and Palestinians, without offering anything resembling a workable substitute,” Burns asserted, referring to the “deal of the century” that had yet to be unveiled.
He went on to say that though “neither Trump nor his son-in-law and chief negotiator, Jared Kushner, invented the steady decay of the two-state solution… [they] appear to be animated by a set of terminally flawed assumptions and illusions.”
The first of these, Burns claimed, “is that they can maneuver over and around Palestinians in negotiating a peace deal. The administration has effectively abandoned dialogue with the Palestinian leadership… embracing instead the agenda of the Israeli right.”
According to Burns, “That can be seen in moving the US Embassy to Jerusalem; closing the East Jerusalem consulate charged with engaging Palestinians; sharply reducing lifesaving assistance programs; condoning settlement expansion; recognizing Israel’s sovereignty over the Golan Heights and hinting that the administration is prepared to do the same in the West Bank.”
Never mind that these moves were in the interest of America, as well as Israel. The refusal of the Left to acknowledge the evil of the PA is as old as its mantra about a “two-state solution” that Abbas never wanted in the first place.
Burns didn’t have anything original to contribute to the already humdrum discussion. He did manage, though, to highlight a stance that proved to be completely mistaken.
“It is tempting to think that shared animus toward Iran and Sunni Arab terrorists would give some Arab states an interest in working with the [Benjamin Netanyhau-led] government and the Trump administration to muzzle Palestinian political aspirations,” he stated smugly. “The growing intersection of interests between Israel and Arab states is a good thing, and a long-standing objective of US policy. But it is not a substitute for Israelis and Palestinians dealing directly with one another. Whatever the leaders of Arab states might whisper in private, there is zero chance that they would offer serious support for any peace plan that does not include a credible path to Palestinian statehood.”
In conclusion, he maintained that the “illusions of the ‘deal of the century’ seem only partly born of arrogance and the magical properties of fresh thinking. There is also an element that is purposeful and willful, apparently designed to make it impossible to resurrect hopes for two states for two peoples.”
ONE MIGHT possibly forgive Burns for not having believed that peace deals would soon be busting out all over the region, thanks to Trump, Netanyahu and the rulers of the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Sudan and Morocco.
He cannot be excused, however, for his failure to see through Abbas’s ploy: pretending to strive for statehood as a way of remaining relevant—and rich—both at home and abroad.
Bennett used to know this about Abbas and the apologists, Burns among them, who’ve been keeping the suit-and-tie-clad terrorist in business for decades. The Israeli public must not allow the members of the nascent coalition to cause him to forget that “cooperation” is Biden-administration code for pressuring Israel to make dangerous, nonreciprocal concessions.
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