At worst, the P5+1 diplomats will actually be aware of the true nature of the Iranian regime, but will act out the script of “negotiating constructively” with it so as to further certain ancillary goals—like lowering oil prices, boosting political fortunes, and above all, forestalling a possible Israeli attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities.

This constructive, reasonable Iran, ready to strike a deal and essentially having the same aims as the P5+1 countries except for a few bridgeable areas of disagreement, cannot be the same Iran that just this week called for the “full annihilation of Israel,” that has taken a steady toll of American lives in Iraq, that bragged earlier this month of its navy’s ability to threaten New York City, that has been responsible for an ongoing string of terrorist atrocities for over three decades, and that continues to intimidate its Persian Gulf neighbors with subversion and very real threats of conquest.

There is, indeed, a situation in which a regime like Iran’s would sue for reasonable terms and real compromise—if it were truly on the ropes. But, while the sanctions are taking an economic toll, not even the most determined optimists claim that Tehran is anywhere near teetering. Not while its nuclear program continues at full speed, and while, as Israeli analyst Lt.-Col. (ret.) Michael Segall notes, it has been continuing a policy of strategic “buildup, defiance, and power projection” in the face of all Western blandishments.

IAEA director-general Yukiya Amano’s claim on Tuesday, then, about an imminent—but still-unsigned—deal with Iran allowing inspection of some of its nuclear sites was a kind of ominous prelude to the Baghdad talks. It was the IAEA whose report last November—confirming all of Israel’s warnings about Iran’s unceasing progress toward the bomb—seemed to create a more serious atmosphere regarding the threat. It was Amano himself who heightened the sense of crisis in March by warning that Iran had tripled production of higher-grade enriched uranium.

Yadlin—who now heads Israel’s leading defense think-tank, the Institute for National Security Studies—also said that while serving in his former post, “We expressed ourselves straightforwardly, with a great deal of integrity and professionalism.”

His words are significant because they contrast with those of two other ex-Israeli spy chiefs who served at the same time. Former Shin Bet (internal security) chief Yuval Diskin and, particularly, former Mossad chief Meir Dagan have made large international media waves by publicly trashing Netanyahu and Barak’s Iran policy and portraying the two as irresponsible extremists if not, in Diskin’s term, “messianic.”

Yadlin, indeed, slammed Dagan and Diskin in his weekend interview on Israeli TV, saying that “when we are regular citizens, we should impose on ourselves a cooling-off period, and not come out with explosive statements.” He could have added that it is Dagan and Diskin’s irresponsible behavior that threatens the viability of Israeli governance. Top-echelon security officials cannot function if they fear that in a few months their colleagues will be slandering them on CNN.

Nor was this the first time Yadlin has made important pronouncements on the Iranian issue. Speaking earlier this month at a conference of the Washington Institute in Virginia, he said Iran had a “sophisticated” strategy to pursue nuclear weapons that was “unfortunately” working. He added that, while he favored exhausting all other options before using military force, a

nuclear Iran is more dangerous than attacking Iran.

If they can’t be contained when they don’t have nuclear weapon[s], how can they be contained when they do?…

I am sure they won’t launch a nuclear bomb the moment they get it, but the possibility [that] as a result of miscalculations and lack of stability, they will launch [a] nuclear missile—it’s not a possibility you can ignore. The flying time of a missile from Tehran to Tel Aviv is seven minutes and the temptation for a first strike is huge.

If you really want all options on the table, you need to be very credible with the military option.

These, clearly, are dramatic words—but to say they didn’t get as much play as Dagan and Diskin’s claims that international diplomacy is indeed working, and Israel should take a back seat to it, is a great understatement. Which can be easily demonstrated by Googling: the result totals for “Meir Dagan,” “Yuval Diskin,” and “Amos Yadlin” came out at 608,000, 297,000, and 120,000 respectively.

It quotes a “senior military official in Israel’s northern command” saying that, while Hizbullah may not want another war with Israel, Iran would order it to attack Israel in case of an Israeli strike on Iran. In that case, says the official, the Israel-Hizbullah clash would go “much faster” than the 2006Second Lebanon War.

That conflict, which lasted 34 days, ended with Hizbullah somewhat shaken by the prowess shown by Israel’s air force, mainly in the war’s opening days when it took out Hizbullah’s long-range rocket launchers in Beirut.

But it also ended with Hizbullah still essentially in control of southern Lebanon. Since then—despite halfhearted efforts by a beefed-up UNIFIL—Hizbullah has only tightened its grip not only over the south but over Lebanon as a whole.

And most problematically, it has kept importing Iranian rockets, missiles, and other weaponry via Syria, and now—UNIFIL or no UNIFIL—has over 50,000 rockets and missiles that, as Hizbullah leader Hassan Nasrallah boasts, can hit any part of Israel.

Those considerations—the inconclusive results of the 2006 war and the power Hizbullah has amassed since that time—are undoubtedly what leads the senior military official to tell AFP that another conflict would be “much shorter, much faster…. The most important mission today is to win decisively in any kind of war in Lebanon. If you win, you win—everybody sees it.”

The official then cites what he says will be Israel’s “biggest challenge,” namely:

Hezbollah’s positioning of weapons in the heart of civilian areas in around 100 Lebanese towns and villages along the border.

“In the villages there are three-story houses: on one floor there are rockets, then there is a family on the next floor, then a (military) headquarters then another family. The people that live there are human shields….

“Every Shiite village has become such a compound. The great challenge will be to deal with all these compounds.”

Indeed, last year Israel released declassified maps to the Washington Post showing part of Hizbullah’s network of military facilities in southernLebanon. It was a way of signaling that Israel knows where these are and is capable of hitting them if necessary.

But apart from the operational aspect, what Hizbullah means to confront Israel with—by ensconcing itself in the homes of families, thereby dissolving any distinction between fighters and civilians, gun-toting warriors and mothers and babies—is a “moral” challenge.

For both of the main protagonists in the deal—Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and Kadima Party leader Shaul Mofaz—it makes eminent sense. While all polls showed Netanyahu easily emerging triumphant again from the putative elections, the deal saves him—and the country—the trouble and debilities of having to prepare for them, not to mention prolonged coalition negotiations once the results would have been in.

As for Mofaz—who wrested leadership of Kadima from Tzipi Livni in a primary less than two months ago—the polls showed his party plummeting, had elections been held, from its current 28 seats to about a dozen. While Kadima’s fate in the October 2013 (when Netanyahu’s four-year term runs out) elections will not necessarily be better, Mofaz—whom the deal makes deputy prime minister and member of the Forum of Eight (now nine) ministers, Israel’s highest policymaking body—gets a chance to make more of an impact on a public never particularly impressed with him.

But apart from Netanyahu and Mofaz, the deal—by creating a massive coalition immune to extortionate pressures by small parties—holds great potential for the country.

For two of Israel’s most intractable problems—refusal of military or national service by most of its growing ultra-Orthodox population, and dysfunctionalities of its parliamentary system—solutions are now eminently possible. In their joint press conference on Tuesday, Netanyahu and Mofaz pledged that the new coalition would tackle these issues without offering any specifics.

The problems are indeed complex. The draft exemptions for the ultra-Orthodox, which are contingent on yeshiva study, not only sow bitterness among the army-serving public but lead to large-scale unemployment among ultra-Orthodox men and a growing, worrisome drain on the economy. To date, ultra-Orthodox parties in fragile coalitions have prevented possible solutions. For the mega-coalition, though, the path appears clear to legislating some sort of mandatory service and remedying this longstanding malady.

This being linked, of course, to the issue of a parliamentary system that allows small parties of various—not just ultra-Orthodox—descriptions to proliferate and wield disproportionate influence. Again, the new coalition stands a real chance to cure the illness. Raising the electoral threshold and introducing regional elections are two often-mentioned ideas. Israel could emerge as a better-functioning, more representational democracy with much more stable governments.

Just last week Israel’s serving chief of staff, Benny Gantz, took up the slack by saying that “the Iranian leadership is composed of very rational people.” And the next day another disgruntled Israeli, ex-Shin Bet (domestic security) chief Yuval Diskin, suggested who might really not be rational, saying that Israel’s prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu and defense minister Ehud Barak—both at least verbal hawks on Iran—were “two messiahs” who make decisions out of “messianic feelings.”

The New York Times, one could say, ate it up. A day after Diskin’s pronouncements, it ran a piece called “Experts Believe Iran Conflict Is Less Likely,”claiming that the “threat of tighter economic sanctions,” the “revival of direct negotiations,” and a “growing divide in Israel between political leaders and military and intelligence officials” had led “American officials and outside analysts” to believe that the “chances of war in the near future have significantly decreased.”

And the Los Angeles Times has reported that the U.S. was signaling a “major shift on Iran[s’] nuclear program,” with Obama administration officials saying they “might agree to let Iran continue enriching uranium up to 5% purity, which is the upper end of the range for most civilian uses,” if Iran agrees to strict inspections and safeguards.

As the article notes, such a deal would be anathema to Jerusalem and probably most of Congress, since allowing Iran to continue any uranium enrichment means leaving the door open to clandestine work toward the bomb. Israel’s national security adviser Yaakov Amidror has, in fact, been dispatched to Europe for “extremely sensitive” talks on the possibility of such a deal emerging.

The Los Angeles Times article, however, quotes Michael Singh, former top Iran adviser to President George W. Bush, saying “There have been many signals lately that the red line has shifted and they’re no longer pushing for full suspension” of Iran’s uranium enrichment—a shift that Singh “strongly opposes.”

The problem with the Iran-rationality fest is that Iran refuses to join in.

This week Iran’s English-language Fars News Agency website—regularly scoured by Western Iran-observers—has run a report rather brazenly titled “Iranian Navy Able to Deploy Vessels Three Miles off New York Coasts.”

Those headlines—from the New York Times, Reuters, and CNN respectively—are typical of a media firestorm kicked up on Thursday by an Independence Day interview that Israeli chief of staff Benny Gantz gave to Israel’s left-wing daily Haaretz.

The reports contrast Gantz’s allegedly pacific statements with recent hawkish statements by his boss, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu.

In an interview to CNN on Tuesday, Netanyahu said sanctions were “certainly taking a bite out of the Iranian economy, but so far they haven’t rolled back the Iranian program or even stopped it by one iota…so if the sanctions are going to work they better work soon.”

On whether Iran’s nuclear program is for civilian purposes: “They said it’s for medical isotopes. Right? That’s why they’re developing ICBMs to carry medical isotopes to Europe or Israel or the United States.”

And on Iranian rationality: “When it comes to a militant Islamic regime I wouldn’t be too sure, because unlike, say, the Soviets, they can put their ideology before their survival. So I don’t think you can bet on their rationality.”

And in a Holocaust Remembrance Day speech last week, Netanyahu said Iran was “feverishly working to develop atomic weapons….”

Now, what did Gantz say, and was it indeed seriously at odds with Netanyahu’s words? If so, it could be of significance. The fact that Netanyahu and Defense Minister Ehud Barak, another Iran hawk, did not order a strike on Iran while Gantz’s predecessor as chief of staff, Gabi Ashkenazi, was in office has been attributed to the fact that Ashkenazi and other security chiefs at the time were Iran doves who opposed a strike.

Gantz begins his interview to Haaretz by saying: “If Iran goes nuclear it will have negative dimensions for the world, for the region, for the freedom of action Iran will permit itself.” Later, regarding American and Israeli perceptions of the threat, he says: “We aren’t two oceans away from the problem—we live here with our civilians, our women and our children, so we interpret the extent of the urgency differently.”

So far, then, no great daylight between Gantz and Netanyahu.

At least, that’s what some say, while others say it was only the Egyptian gas company that canceled the deal and not the Egyptian government.

Israel’s leading daily Israel Hayom cites “analysts in the Arabic press” who say “the national gas company could not have taken such a fateful decision without the go-ahead from the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces, which effectively rules Egypt.” Yet Israel Hayom also mentions “senior officials” in the Israeli Prime Minister’s Office who claim that “the Egyptian government had not been involved in the decision in any way, and that it was a purely commercial move.”

Indeed, one of those downplaying the development is Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, who said: “We don’t see this gas cutoff as something that is born out of political developments. This is actually a business dispute between the Israeli company and the Egyptian company.” Yet his finance minister, Yuval Steinitz, said: “This is a dangerous precedent that overshadows the peace agreements…between Israel and Egypt.”

One can sum it up simply by saying that: the cutoff is not a good development; and since the fall of former Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak in January last year, the Israeli government has consistently downplayed negative developments and held out hopes that the Israeli-Egyptian Peace Treaty will endure. Bumps in the road since Mubarak’s ouster have included:

● The bombing of Egypt’s gas pipeline in Sinai no less than 14 times

● Sinai’s deterioration into a badlands dominated by Bedouin gangs and terrorists, leading to last August’s terror attack on southern Israel

● The subsequent storming of the Israeli embassy by a mob in Cairo and near-lynching of six of its workers

● The overwhelming victory of Islamists in Egypt’s parliamentary elections

● The firing of a rocket from Sinai into Israel’s southern coastal resort of Eilat

● A furious backlash in recent days against Egypt’s Grand Mufti for merely visiting Jerusalem, with MPs and others demanding that he step down

No one seriously concerned about Iran’s ongoing enrichment of uranium, its ongoing transfer of centrifuges to its deep-underground Fordo site, its ongoing work on nuclear-weapons development, could be pleased with this result. As Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu put it bluntly: “My initial impression is that Iran has been given a freebie. It’s got five weeks to continue enrichment without any limitation, any inhibition.”

Some, though, were indeed happy with the meeting’s outcome.

One was EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton—who not long ago made waves when she reacted to the Toulouse terror by equating the Israeli army with mass murderers. Ashton called Saturday’s talks “constructive and useful” and rhapsodized: “We expect that subsequent meetings will lead to concrete steps toward a comprehensive negotiated solution which restores international confidence in the exclusively peaceful nature of the Iranian nuclear program.”

And another party that reacted with great satisfaction was the Iranians themselves. Their chief negotiator Saeed Jalili exulted that the talks were a “positive sign” compared with “the language of threats and pressure that do not work on the Iranian people.”

And AFP reported on Sunday that “Iran’s media, including outlets close to the leadership…hailed renewed talks with world powers as positive[.]” The government-run, English-language Iran Daily trumpeted on its front page: “EU Reaffirms Tehran’s Nuclear Rights.” The newspaper Jomhuri Eslami said the key to progress “is that America give up its political games and surrender to the realities”—that is, of Iran’s ongoing march toward the bomb.

are described [in Al Quds] as “living in a state of terror…. Salafis covered the cross of the church with garbage bags, telling the church members that they do not wish to see the vision of the Cross anywhere in the Islamic state of Tunisia.”

Ibrahim also points out that Tunisia has long been considered one of the most “secular” and “liberal” Arab countries—while now “its very few churches are not tolerated, and their crucifixes abhorred…. More evidence of the true nature of the ‘Arab Spring.’”

But it is not only minority groups in the region, like Christians in Tunisia and elsewhere, who suffer from this sort of abuse, and by no means only Salafi elements who perpetrate it. Jews are a majority in Israel, and they grant full citizenship to non-Jews in the country including those in East Jerusalem (who mostly decline it). But it doesn’t necessarily help.

A recent Jerusalem Post editorial lamented a difficult situation on the Mount of Olives—the mountain ridge in East Jerusalem that has served as a Jewish cemetery for over three thousand years. In an incident late last month,

a young bridegroom wished to say a short prayer at his mother’s grave on [the] Mount of Olives…. He was driven up by his friend Dror Klein.

As they neared their destination, a bucket of white paint crashed into the front windshield, obscuring Dror’s view. A hail of stones followed.

In minutes some 30 to 40 young Arabs surrounded the vehicle, rocking it menacingly and hurling large rocks, cement blocks and broken pavement fragments at the two.

The bridegroom was dragged out of the car, a boulder was smashed on his head and he was beaten up to the sounds of Alahu Akhbar (God is great). Dror somehow managed to maneuver his Hyundai directly at the attackers. As they momentarily scurried, the bridegroom and his resourceful driver got away by the skin of their teeth.

The two—who felt that they were threatened with death and started reciting a Jewish prayer for that situation—got out with what the police defined as “light injuries.”

But as the editorial notes, the incident was by no means unusual:

An Arab boys’ school is positioned directly alongside the road leading to the…cemetery. The majority of incidents originate there. The attackers are generally teenagers and they often prepare ambushes well in advance. The fact that they had paint at the ready, along with arsenals of heavy rocks, betokens unquestionable premeditation.

And violent attacks on the road to the cemetery aren’t the only problem:

Predations occur daily. Headstones are hammered and graves daubed with paint and tar, smeared with human feces, covered in garbage and debris and defaced with hate inscriptions. Even the numerous graves of some of the most famous Jews throughout the generations aren’t spared this deliberate despoilment.

The editorial concludes by asking angrily why, given this state of affairs, a police station promised by the Israeli authorities is still to be set up on the Mount. The Post, of course, is right—though it is not easy to accept that, even in the heart of the Jewish state, a Jewish cemetery should need round-the-clock police protection.

Called “U.S. intelligence gains in Iran seen as boost to confidence,” the article cites “officials” saying that “expanded intelligence collection has reinforced the view within the White House that it will have early warning of any move by Iran to assemble a nuclear bomb….”

Authors Joby Warrick and Greg Miller mention a “covert campaign by the CIA and other agencies to sabotage Iran’s nuclear program” and quote a “senior U.S. official” who claims “there is confidence that we would see activity indicating that a decision [to build a nuclear bomb] had been made.”

The article does include some qualifications, mentioning officials who “conceded that aspects of Iran’s nuclear decision-making remain opaque” as well as “the chastening experience of Iraq.” But its main thrust is that “Israeli officials [who] have pushed for a more aggressive response” are jumping the gun, with “White House officials contend[ing] that…it would take Iran at least a year to [build a nuclear weapon] if it were to launch a crash program now.”

Here it should be noted that this sanguinity clashes with statements just a month ago by IAEA chief Yukiya Amano, who warned that Iran had tripled its production of higher-enriched uranium since November and was again denying the IAEA access to Parchin—a site where Iran had done tests that the IAEA considered “strong indicators” of developing a bomb.

Meanwhile, also on Sunday, the New York Times ran a piece suggesting that Washington is somewhat closer to Israeli perceptions. Regarding the new round of negotiations the P5 + 1 countries are supposed to launch with Iran on Friday, David E. Sanger and Steven Erlanger cite “American and European diplomats” who say the “Obama administration and its European allies plan to…demand…the immediate closing and ultimate dismantling of Iran’s deep-underground Fordo enrichment facility,” which Israel has emphasized as a particularly troubling development.

According to Sanger and Erlanger, Obama and the Europeans are also “calling for a halt in the production of uranium fuel that is considered just a few steps from bomb grade, and the shipment of existing stockpiles of that fuel out of the country….”

Historically, the three main streams of Zionism were Labor (socialist), Revisionist (nationalist), and Mizrachi (religious) Zionism. Zionists belonging to these streams (and others, or no particular stream at all) engaged in activities like: coming to live in Israel, settling it including particularly dangerous areas, serving in its security forces, smuggling arms, smuggling refugees, and so on. Israelis today, of course, continue to live in Israel, settle it including particularly dangerous areas, and serve in its security forces; fortunately, because it’s now an established state, they need no longer smuggle in arms or refugees.

But boycott Zionists don’t have to do any of those things. Indeed, boycott Zionism need not be an activity at all; all one need do to be a boycott Zionist in, say, New York City (where Peter Beinart lives) is see an Israeli product on a shelf and not buy it. Thus, so long as the nonbuying is intentional and not just accidental, just about anyone can be a Zionist now—that is, anyone who lives anywhere that Israeli products are sold, which is a lot of places.

By now, readers familiar with Beinart’s position will be objecting that he doesn’t advocate boycotting all Israeli products, only those produced over the Green Line, in Judea and Samaria (the West Bank), or what he calls “nondemocratic Israel.” But what if, say, an Israeli company within the Green Line, in pre-1967 Israel, incorporates in its products parts that were produced in Judea and Samaria? Beinart is aware of the issue and says you shouldn’t boycott such companies, because “boycotting anything inside the green line invites ambiguity about the boycott’s ultimate goal—whether it seeks to end Israel’s occupation [of Judea and Samaria] or Israel’s existence.”

Azerbaijan is a small, mostly Shiite Muslim country on Iran’s northern border. It has long been concerned about Iran’s treatment of the ethnic Azeri population living there. Azerbaijan is also one of the few Muslim countries having close economic and strategic ties with Israel.

Perry claimed his inside information came from U.S. sources, particularly “four senior diplomats and military intelligence officers.” He quoted one intelligence officer as saying: “We’re watching what Iran does closely. But we’re now watching what Israel is doing in Azerbaijan. And we’re not happy about it.”

In a much-talked-about reaction to Perry’s article, John Bolton claimed the Obama administration had intentionally leaked the story “as part of [its] campaign against an Israeli attack,” weakening Israel’s hand by revealing “very sensitive, very important information.”

Bolton said that, while he didn’t have hard proof of it, “Clearly, this is an administration-orchestrated leak. This is not a rogue CIA guy saying I think I’ll leak this out.”

He added: “It’s just unprecedented to reveal this kind of information about one of your own allies.”

One major Israeli military analyst, Ron Ben-Yishai, reacted similarly to Bolton and went even further, writing that the Obama administration was carrying out a “targeted assassination of potential Israeli operations in Iran” with media leaks that had “caused Israel substantive diplomatic damage, and possibly even military and operational damage.”

Along with the Foreign Policy article, Ben-Yishai emphasized a report by the Congressional Research Service, also published last week, claiming an Israeli attack would only set Iran’s nuclear program back by about six months. “Any Iranian intelligence analyst” reading these two open sources, Ben-Yishai averred, “will find invaluable information there.”

And having served as a reporter in Washington for seven years, Ben-Yishai said he

kn[e]w very well that with a few exceptions, the U.S. administration knows how to prevent leaks to the media if it so wishes…. What we are seeing here is not a trickle of information, but rather, a powerful current, a true flood that leaves no doubt as to the existence of an orchestrated media campaign with clear aims.

The administration, for its part, denied leaking the information on Azerbaijan and said it would “gladly prosecute” those behind it if it knew who they were. An official told Israel’s Ynet that Washington and Jerusalem were cooperating more closely than ever on Iran and making “tremendous efforts.”

It is hard, then, to get anyone interested in Palestinians victimizing Palestinians—suggesting that the seeming preoccupation with Israeli-ruled territories has something to do with the great value many people find in the Jew-as-victimizer prototype. Similarly, once the United States—supposedly the oppressor—had left Southeast Asia in the early 1970s, it was hard to get any but a few of the opponents of that presence interested in the ensuing horrendous victimization of Vietnamese and Cambodians by other Vietnamese and Cambodians.

Last week, though, an Israeli outfit called the Jerusalem Institute of Justice (JIJ) tried to buck the trend. It presented to the European Parliament a report on “The Status of Human Rights on the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.” The reports notes that “a surprising silence prevails regarding the violation of human rights by the Palestinian government authorities in the Territories,” and that, even though these are by now widely documented, “the EU continues to push for full and immediate statehood for the [Palestinian Authority].”

And while the JIJ focuses mainly on Europe, it could, naturally, also have said similar things regarding the Obama administration’s preoccupation with getting statehood for the Palestinians—fast; which seems to have waned only recently in an election year.

The killer is Mohammed Merah, a 24-year-old Frenchman of Algerian origin who claims to be an Al-Qaeda member. Merah had been in Pakistan and Afghanistan. In Afghanistan in 2007 he was arrested for bomb making, but escaped months later in a large-scale Taliban jailbreak.

As for his recent attacks, he told police negotiators they were motivated by the French army’s involvement in Afghanistan and by a desire to avenge the deaths of Palestinian children.

In that regard Merah’s words were remarkably similar to those of EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton on Monday, the day of the school massacre. Speaking to a conference in Brussels called “Engaging Youth—Palestinian Refugees” that was sponsored by the Belgian government and the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, she said:

when we think of what happened in Toulouse today, when we remember what happened in Norway a year ago, when we know what is happening in Syria, when we see what is happening in Gaza and in different parts of the world—we remember young people and children who lose their lives.

These words—clearly connoting that children in Gaza are brutally murdered by Israeli forces—sparked enraged responses in Israel, including from the prime minister, foreign minister, and opposition leader. On Tuesday, Ashton’s office issued a purported “clarification.” It stated that she had “referred to tragedies taking the lives of children around the world and drew no parallel whatsoever between the circumstances of the Toulouse attack and the situation in Gaza.”

The problem, though, is that Ashton’s statement clearly did draw that parallel, and her “clarification” is a weak and unconvincing denial rather than a genuine retraction. Israeli officials reportedly—with justice—see it that way and remain “unwilling to forgive” her remarks. As Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu had put it, “What gets me especially incensed is the comparison between the targeted slaughter of children and the surgical, defensive activities of the Israel Defense Forces that are meant to hit terrorists who use children for human shields.”

The adviser is Dalia Mogahed. Yet another example of the strange company Obama has kept and continues to keep, he appointed her to serve on the White House Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships. On March 10 she tweeted on her Twitter account:

To those siding w/Assad: he cannot deliver stability, protection of minorities, or resistance to Israel. He is a killer w/o legitimacy.

It wasn’t Mogahed’s first venture in radicalism. Two years ago she advocated Sharia law on British TV, saying it provided “gender justice” even though, as Robert Spencer noted at the time, Sharia prescribes wife-beating, permits taking the vows with prepubescent girls, and discriminates against women in matters of testimony, inheritance, marriage and divorce.

Indeed, the show was hosted by a member of Hizb ut-Tahrir—banned as a terrorist organization by many countries—and included two Hizb ut-Tahrir guests who denounced Western society and called to make Sharia “the source of legislation.” Hizb ut-Tahrir’s alumni include 9/11 architect Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Jordanian jihadist Abu Musab Zarqawi, killed by U.S. forces in Iraq in 2006.

Mogahed was also coauthor with John Esposito of Who Speaks For Islam?: What a Billion Muslims Really Think—a book whose blatant distortions of poll data were exposed by Robert Satloff among others. Arabian Business magazine has named Mogahed one of the Arab world’s most influential women.

And what of her take on Assad? Does he indeed come up short on “resistance to Israel”?

She announced it just as Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu was in Washington trying to convince the U.S. leadership that neither diplomacy nor sanctions were coming anywhere near stopping Iran’s push to nuclear weapons.

Ashton had earlier—on February 14—received a proposal for talks from Iran’s nuclear negotiator Saeed Jalili. On Tuesday she said, “Today I have replied to Dr. Jalili’s letter….” What opportune timing.

And what a further blow to Israel.

Typical headlines have been saying Netanyahu told President Obama on Monday that Israel hasn’t yet taken a decision on attacking Iran. Yet, as described here and here, an “unnamed American intelligence official” has conveyed a different impression to Israel’s Channel 2 news.

Channel 2 reported on Monday night that the official said, “U.S. intelligence services believe that, in principle, Israel has already made the decision to bomb Iran.” According to Channel 2, the official warned that such an attack would entail thousands of casualties and spark a regional war or even World War III—in short, an all-out catastrophe. An official Israeli source dismissed these statements as “scare-mongering and psychological warfare.”

Just as there is a dissonance between the mainstream version—which says Israel hasn’t yet decided—and this apparent desperate attempt to bypass the Israeli leadership and scare its population silly via its most popular news channel, there is a dissonance between Obama’s words this week and what we read elsewhere.

In his AIPAC speech on Sunday: “I firmly believe that an opportunity still remains for diplomacy—backed by pressure—to succeed.”

And in Tuesday night’s news conference: “[Iran] understand[s] that the world community means business. To resolve this issue will require Iran to come to the table and discuss…how to prove to the international community that the intentions of their nuclear program are peaceful.”

Meanwhile IAEA chief Yukiya Amano says Iran has “tripled” its monthly production of 20-percent-enriched uranium since the IAEA’s previous report in November. That was the report that was seen as dramatically confirming Israel’s insistence over the years that Iran had never stopped working on the bomb.

Amano also expressed serious concern about the IAEA being denied, again, access to Parchin—the site where Iran has “built a large containment chamber” to “conduct high-explosives tests” that the IAEA considers “strong indicators” of nuclear-weapons development. That was according to November’s report. What’s going on in the chamber now? No one knows.

No wonder administration officials are so worried Israel will attack and trying to scare the Israeli people out of their wits about what will happen if it does. Seemingly it would make more sense for the administration—and the Western world as a whole—to get seriously scared about Parchin and drop the hang-up with Israel.

On Tuesday it was reported that Iran now says it will let the IAEA into Parchin—at an unspecified date. Even if that transpires, it will obviously be after Iran has had enough time to “clean” the site.

This week Israel’s Civil Administration approved a plan to build 500 housing units in the West Bank community of Shiloh. U.S. State Department spokesman Mark Toner complained like clockwork that such building is not “constructive.”

In so doing, he was following a U.S. practice of frequently publicly criticizing its ally Israel. No other U.S. ally gets this treatment; when was the last time you heard Washington publicly take Britain, Germany, or Japan to task? And this in a week when the U.S. is already heavily pressuring Israel both publicly and behind the scenes not to defend itself against a growing existential threat from Iran.

But is Toner right about the Israeli building plans not being “constructive”? In a world where there are mounting crises in Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Egypt, severe human rights abuses in America’s trading partner China, and so on, are housing units in Shiloh what Washington should fret about? In fact, these building plans not only pose no problem for the U.S. but are constructive, for several reasons.

1. They give people in Shiloh places to live. It’s natural for a community—especially a very life-affirming one like Shiloh, where people make a point of having children—to grow. One has to have a very crabbed perspective to want a place like Shiloh to freeze in place, so that parents can’t provide homes for their kids, no one can move in from outside the community, and so on. It’s a throwback to the early days of the Obama administration, when Secretary of State Hillary Clinton thundered against “natural growth” in such Israeli communities. Isn’t this supposed to be an election year, with the Obama administration cooling it toward Israel and wooing Jewish votes?

2. Shiloh is a modern-day iteration of the ancient biblical city of the same name, the center of Israelite religious and political life for about three hundred years before Jerusalem took that honor. Having a modern-day Jewish community there is a renewal and revitalization of one of the ancient roots of Western civilization.

Of course, many contemporary Western people no longer have the faintest idea or give a hoot what Shiloh was. This is particularly true in heavily secularized Western Europe, with its catastrophically low fertility rates and burgeoning Muslim presence. Can the United States and Israel—which still care enough about Western civilization to fight for it—afford this kind of contempt for its roots? Since taking office in 2009, the churchgoing President Obama’s behavior suggests that he sees any Jewish presence in Judea and Samaria as essentially scandalous and the Palestinians—part of the geographically starved Muslim umma—as the sole rightful possessor of this territory. Is Jew-free Judea (and Samaria) really an American desideratum?

The Obama administration is putting another full-court press on Israel. First it was “settlements”—not to build a single home for a Jew in Judea, Samaria, or parts of Jerusalem. Now it’s even graver—not to defend itself against a growing existential threat.

The pressure is both public and behind the scenes. On Sunday, Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman Gen. Martin Dempsey told CNN: “It’s not prudent at this point to decide to attack Iran. A strike at this time would be destabilizing and wouldn’t achieve their [Israel’s] long-term objectives….”

On Monday—what fortuitous timing—the New York Times reported that Israel was incapable of such a strike anyway because “its pilots would have to fly more than 1,000 miles across unfriendly airspace, refuel in the air en route, fight off Iran’s air defenses, attack multiple underground sites simultaneously—and use at least 100 planes.” The Times quoted various U.S. defense analysts who support that assessment.

Meanwhile National Security Adviser Tom Donilon has been the latest in a series of top U.S. officials to come to Israel and tell its leaders behind closed doors that they should trust in the god of sanctions. Israel Hayom reports that in an exchange between Donilon and Israel’s defense minister Ehud Barak and chief of staff Lt. Gen. Benny Gantz, “Israel…demanded that the U.S. challenge Iran to immediately put an end to its nuclear program.” The U.S.—not surprisingly—responded by “urg[ing] Israel to allow sanctions against Iran to do the job and cease planning for a military strike.”

And the confrontation is set to continue. Next in line to visit Israel is U.S. national director of intelligence James Clapper on Thursday. Meanwhile Donilon has invited Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu to come to the U.S. and meet with President Obama on March 5.

The U.S., in other words, sees stopping Israel as very serious, top-priority business. As the Wall Street Journal asks: “Is the Obama Administration more concerned that Iran may get a nuclear weapon, or that Israel may use military force to prevent Iran from doing so?”

But is the administration right? Would an Israeli strike on Iran be futile and fail to achieve its objectives? Can the sanctions be counted on instead?

As David P. Goldman reports, last week German security expert Hans Rühe—head of the German Defense Ministry’s planning department between 1982-1988—offered in Die Welt a diametrically different view of Israel’s capacity to hit Iran. Rühe, says Goldman, calling him “one of the toughest and most perspicacious analysts” of the Cold War period, is “highly confident that Israel could knock out Iran’s nuclear program for a decade or more with about 25 of its 87 F-15 fighter-bombers and a smaller number of its F-16s.”

Israeli commentator Aharon Lapidot notes that “the New York Times article failed to factor in the [Israeli air force’s] operational wisdom, its use of unexpected methods…that makes its operations such astonishing successes, often leaving the world slack-jawed.” Lapidot goes on to mention the IAF’s legendary exploits in the Six Day War, the Entebbe Raid, and other cases.

Haaretz, Israel’s left-wing daily, used to be Israel’s newspaper of record and comparable to the New York Times, read also by those who differed from its line. Today Haaretz is read by less than 6 percent of Israelis, overwhelmingly composed of the country’s left-wing “elite.” Haaretz comes in far behind successful newcomer, right-of-center Israel Hayom at 38% and left-of-center Yediot Aharonot at 36%.

Haaretz’s English website, however, gets a very high Alexa ranking—around the 3900^th most popular website in the world and currently neck-and-neck with the centrist Jerusalem Post’s site. Indeed, Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu allegedly called (his office later denied it) Haaretz and the New York Times Israel’s “two main enemies” and said:

They set the agenda for an anti-Israel campaign all over the world. Journalists read them every morning and base their news stories…on what they read in the New York Times and Haaretz.

Whether or not Netanyahu said it, he could have added that foreign diplomats as well base their views of Israel, and their perceptions—however skewed—of Israeli opinion, on what they read in Haaretz.

For his part, Israeli justice minister Yaakov Neeman has allegedly gone even further and likened Haaretz to Der Stürmer.

Are such charges justified? To get an idea on whether they are, I followed Haaretz’s English website’s op-eds and editorials through the Israeli workweek of Sunday, January 29 to Friday, February 3. Having done the same experiment eight years ago, I can say right away that Haaretz has, if anything, gotten worse since then. (While its reporting is also biased, the bias is easier to demonstrate in opinion articles.) This despite the fact that last August, Aluf Benn became Haaretz’s new editor in chief.

For years Benn was a thoughtful left-of-center columnist for the paper who made valid, if arguable, points. Under his tenure, though, Haaretz has kept publishing the same bevy of radical leftists. It appears inevitable considering that the Schocken family, which has owned the paper since 1937, still holds a dominant 60% stake of Haaretz. In an op-ed last November, current Haaretz publisher Amos Schocken portrayed Israel as a country verging on apartheid.

During the week in question, January 29-February 3, Haaretz published 30 op-eds. Fifteen of these could be called neutral on political, left-right issues. Exactly one—by Haaretz’s sole regular right-wing columnist, Israel Harel—was a discussion from a right-wing perspective. Of the other 14, 11 were virulently left-wing and 3 more moderately so. As for the editorials, all six were harsh attacks on Israeli policy, leadership, and institutions. The following is only a sampling from the week.

On Sunday, Gideon Levy published a piece on a recent poll finding high levels of religious beliefs in the Israeli Jewish population. For instance, 84% believe in God, 70% believe Jews are the chosen people, 76% eat kosher at home—figures far beyond the approximately 25% of the Jewish population that is formally observant. This poll, to put it mildly, did not sit well with Levy and other Haaretz pundits.

Levy, for his part, wrote:

Expressions of racism toward Arabs and foreigners, Israel’s arrogant attitude toward international opinion—these too can be explained by the benighted, primeval belief of the majority of Israelis (70 percent ) that we enjoy complete license because You chose us.… we are in the West Bank above all because the majority of Israelis believe that it is not only the land of the patriarchs, but that this fact gives us a patrimonial right to sovereignty, to cruelty, to abuse and to occupation—and to hell with the position of the international community and the principles of international law, because, after all, we were chosen from among all other peoples.

That is not a valid polemic but, rather, an anti-Semitic rant. As Shmuel Rosner notes regarding the traditional Jewish belief in chosenness,

There’s nothing wrong with such belief. When Americans were asked by Gallup if their nation “has a unique character that makes it the greatest country in the world,” 80 percent said yes. According to a Pew survey, “About half of Americans (49 percent) and Germans (47 percent) agree with the statement, ‘Our people are not perfect, but our culture is superior to others.’”

Israelis, of course, do not regard chosenness as a license to commit crimes, and Levy cannot cite any evidence that they do. He just asserts it, or “spits it” would be more accurate.

Also riding the antireligious tide on Sunday, Amir Oren complained that the Israeli army “was another kind of army [once], before the chief rabbi of the air force took office, before the religious takeover of aircraft hangars, and their takeover of the rest of the Israel Defense Forces.” Oren approvingly quotes an anonymous letter to the chief of staff by a secular air force pilot:

…maybe I should let you know that the members of the air force, at least from [a certain] base, will not be meeting with authors, or guides who would teach them about nature and about various places around the country, or scientists or philosophers, or journalists or historians, or people looking at future trends. Only with religious people, who my son describes as crazy. I find no reason to assume that this disease only exists on this one particular base…. Don’t be surprised if normal soldiers don’t find their place in your army of God.

If this sounds like hatred of religious Jews, it is; and it is no less clear that hatred of a category of Jews is anti-Semitism. It should be added that, whatever legitimate controversies may exist about religion’s role in the Israeli army, one reason it has become more prominent there is that religious Israelis now disproportionately volunteer to be officers and combat soldiers—a fact I didn’t come across anywhere in Haaretz’s rants.

And Sunday’s editorial weighed in on the “failed” (except that all serious commentators knew they didn’t stand a chance) Israeli-Palestinians talks in Jordan, saying these were intentionally scuttled by Israel and adding:

Netanyahu, with [Defense Minister Ehud] Barak’s help, has turned the Iranian nuclear threat into an impressive ploy to distract attention from settlement policy and the perpetuation of the occupation…. The death certificate of negotiations based on the two-state solution is a badge of shame for Israeli society. It’s hard to understand how a society that has so impressively brought social injustice to the top of the agenda has fallen victim to our nationalist-religious leaders’ criminal ploy.

Here it should be noted that neither Netanyahu nor—even less so—Barak is considered religious in Israeli terms. But these bad characters, we see—with “Israeli society” in tow—are leading the world by the nose on the Iranian-nuke issue so they can tighten their grip on the West Bank. If this reminds you of Walt, Mearsheimer, Patrick Buchanan, & Co., it should—and it’s coming from a made-in-Israel website.

That Israel is an “apartheid state” is, of course, another shibboleth of contemporary anti-Semitism. It was well represented in Haaretz on Monday by Druze writer and contributor Salman Masalha who, in another crude rant, drew direct parallels between Israel and apartheid South Africa. Then there was Akiva Eldar, whose tirade also featured the crafty, peace-destroying Netanyahu:

If Netanyahu had not existed, the settlers would have been forced to invent him. It has cost him peanuts to remove some of the roadblocks in the West Bank, to lift part of the blockade on the Gaza Strip, and to pay a bit of lip service to “the peace process.” And, he has managed to preserve all the settlers’ interests.

…Fact: It is possible to gobble up additional territories and also be depicted as a moderate leader while managing to keep relations with the United States and Europe intact.

The settlers can relax. The general positions outlined last week in Jordan to the Palestinians [were] nothing more than another exercise aimed at presenting Netanyahu as a partner to peace and the Palestinians as the ones who turn it down….

Tricky Jews at it again; all is subterfuge, don’t believe a word they say.

Terror struck—or attempted to strike—Israel in two foreign locations on Monday.

In New Delhi, a passing motorcyclist apparently slapped a bomb onto the car of an Israeli diplomat. He wasn’t inside, but his wife was, and she and the driver were injured—neither of them gravely. The Washington Post said the attack “bore eerie similarities” to the January 11 assassination in Tehran of Iranian nuclear scientist Mostafa Ahmadi-Roshan, which Iran blamed on Israel.

At about the same time, in Tbilisi, Georgia, a local staffer at the Israeli embassy realized something was stuck to the bottom of his car as he was driving it. He pulled over and, seeing it was a bomb fastened with duct tape, called the police who safely dismantled it.

The incidents were not surprising and came at a time when Israeli delegations throughout the world were on high alert. In addition to blaming Israel for the Ahmadi-Roshan and other nuclear-scientist killings, Iran and its Lebanese proxy Hizbullah charge Israel with the assassination of Hizbullah terror-master Imad Moughniyeh. He was killed in Damascus on February 12, 2008—for which Monday was almost exactly the fourth anniversary.

Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu immediately said Tehran was responsible for Monday’s events and called it “the greatest exporter of terror in the world.” He pointed to other recent incidents—the arrest on terror suspicions of a Hizbullah man in Bangkok after a tip-off from Israel, and the thwarting of an Iranian plot in Azerbaijan to assassinate the Israeli ambassador there.

Iran, for its part, again surprised no one by calling Netanyahu’s charges regarding New Delhi and Tbilisi “sheer lies.”

In actuality, the recent rash of incidents shows that neither Israeli nor American saber-rattling toward Tehran, the frequent talk of “options on the table,” is yet to achieve deterrence. Tehran’s brazenness reached a new peak with a plot, uncovered in October, to assassinate the Saudi ambassador to the U.S. It was planned for a Washington restaurant and could have caused multiple casualties. The U.S. is yet to carry out any known retaliation.