March 1992, Page 17, 18

Special Report

Why Shamir is Threatening to Look for a "New Benefactor"

By Andrew I. Killgore

"We may have to find a new benefactor."
-Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir

Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir's "threat" last fall that his country might go looking for a "new benefactor" was, from his viewpoint, not as absurd as it sounds. To understand it, an American must penetrate the psyche of an ideologue, to whom nothing is sacred but Zionist dogma, and a terrorist for whom anything is possible through blackmail and a gun.

First it must be understood that Shamir counts on receiving, regardless of anything he says or does, the $3 billion in military and economic assistance that the United States gives Israel annually. This year, next year, every year. That $3 billion, plus any commercial loans that Israel can obtain using the certainty of U.S. aid as collateral, would permit Israel to get by.

Then, Shamir reasoned, if President Bush persists in putting conditions on the U.S. response to Israel's request for $10 billion in U.S. "housing loan guarantees" over the next five years to resettle Soviet Jews in Israel, Shamir can take countermeasures. No one, Shamir vowed, especially a soft American president like George Bush, would push Israel around. Ever. Israel would fight back. Inside and outside the United States. And in its own unique ways.

Its loyalists in Congress and the media would, of course, continue publicly to play the "Israel, America's traditional friend and ally and the only democracy in the Middle East" game. Privately, however, they would destroy President Bush politically.

They would not attack him openly on Middle East issues. Rather, they would exploit the economic slowdown that began in mid-1990 to create a mood of such national pessimism that Americans would perceive Bush as incompetent and unworthy of re-election. It had worked with Jimmy Carter. It could work again.

Although the U.S. might temporarily withhold the loan guarantees, Shamir is confident that Israel's basic assets will enable it to prevail. One such asset is the "myth of Jewish power." Popular opinion around the world accepts the "myth" as valid. Even the distant Japanese are obsessed with the idea that Jews set the media agenda for America. That they can start the Japan-bashing. And that they can stop it. Now, Shamir knows, Israel promotes and relies upon the "myth," turning it into reality.

Ironically, as Israel's press has pointed out, Israeli reality gives 20th-century credence to the 19th-century Czarist Russian fabrication called "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion." That was a forgery alleging that Jews had a plan to rule the world. Now Shamir seeks to demonstrate that Jews do rule-through Washington. Countries seeking favors from the one remaining superpower must go through Israel to get them.

Shamir is confident that Israel's basic assets will enable it to prevail.

Israel's second pillar of support is in the United States. It is the largest Jewish community in the world, effectively coordinated by Israel's American lobby, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), and an Israeli bureaucracy on American soil, the Jewish National Fund. AIPAC has created a concealed array of more than 100 political action committees to coerce Congress into giving Israel what it wants. Even more important, Israel's lobby provides cues to its entrenched supporters in the media, who can be relied upon to support Israel in any disagreement with the United States.

So, last fall, Shamir was not intimidated but only disgusted that AIPAC, American national Jewish organizations, and even Israel's American media supporters were afraid to confront Bush directly on the housing loan guarantees. Instead, their leaders had the effrontery to tell an Israeli prime minister he would have to choose between immigrants or settlements, or at least pretend to by slowing Israeli construction in the West Bank and Gaza.

None of Israel's leaders ever had let American Jews forget their alleged collective guilt for not saving European Jewry during the World War II Holocaust, and their individual guilt for not making aliya by emigrating to Israel. Now American Jews would learn from Shamir that their secular God, Israel, was just as vengeful as Yahweh, the God of the Hebrew scriptures.

They would support Israel. Or else. As Rabbi Arthur Hertzberg had put it, American Jewish leaders who do not support Israel without reservation soon discover they no longer are American Jewish leaders.

Shamir undoubtedly brushed off protests that American Jews who publicly support his more extreme positions endanger their own standing as loyal Americans. What was needed, anyway, was a strong dose of anti-Semitism in America that would convince American Jews they couldn't have it both ways, and drive many of them to Israel. Shamir accepted the basic tenet of Zionism that the goyim anywhere would, inevitably, turn on the Jews in their midst. It had happened in the past. Now, with the world's largest Jewish population living in their midst, American gentiles would prove to be no different.

Facing Reality

Shamir reasoned that the Zionist leaders who swooped in periodically from America to give Israeli leaders unsolicited advice would soon have to face reality. Especially AIPAC leaders. AIPAC's president would miss his half-million-dollar annual salary, and his aides would miss the fawning deference of Washington politicians.

It served them right. Shamir shared his own countrymen's distaste for Jewish leaders in America whose Israel-worship seemed to stop just short of giving up their own comfortable lifestyles to make aliya. A new bunch of leaders would have to be found to replace the present tired defeatists, and to restore the power of Israel's lobby in Washington.

Shamir might have been troubled that former Mossad agent Victor Ostrovsky, now living in Canada, had speculated publicly that Israel's secret intelligence service might even now be plotting to kill President Bush. It wasn't that Shamir no longer had the stomach for the kind of killing he first handled personally and later supervised as Stern Gang leader Yitzhak Yizernitsky in pre-Israel Palestine, and still later as Israel's Mossad operations chief in Europe. But the public attention given to Ostrovsky's charge pointed up the fact that ardently pro-Israel Vice President Dan Quayle certainly would qualify as a potential "new benefactor" if Bush were out of the way.

If, later, President Quayle could not win re-election on his own, no problem. The "myth of Jewish power" and Israel's media supporters combined to ensure that, to be described as "electable," any Democratic presidential candidate would have to support aid to Israel of the magnitude of the $10 billion in housing loan guarantees.

But, if things didn't work out in Washington, Shamir's Israel would play its own independent role, even if it ran diametrically counter to American interests. Israel's Washington setback evoked the Biblical story of Esther, niece of the Jewish gatekeeper to a fifth century B.C. Persian king whose prime minister, Haman, was persecuting Jews. After Persian King Xerxes I married Esther, however, her uncle, Mordecai, became prime minister himself. He hanged Haman, Haman's seven sons and 75,000 other "enemies of the Jews."

Turning the tables on Israel's American "former benefactor" long enough to build a new Jewish liaison with Xerxes's oil-rich successors would require no more diplomatic finesse than that required of the Jewish gatekeeper who put his beautiful niece in the Persian king's path. In fact, it had begun even before Shamir's public threat. Secretly, he had dispatched to Tehran Israel's most talented intelligence operative, David Kimche. Unfortunately, an American television producer had recognized Kimche coming out of the Iranian Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Tehran. Israel's American media gatekeepers, however, had kept the report from surfacing in the U.S., where embarrassing questions could arise about Israel's motives.

Recreating the Tehran-Tel Aviv Axis

A former top operative both in Mossad and in Israel's foreign ministry, Kimche was superbly equipped to recreate the Tehran-Tel Aviv axis which had been thwarted in 1979 when the Shah was deposed, before it had realized its full potential.

Israel, however, had proven its power to Iran's Islamic revolutionary regime by keeping a steady supply of forbidden American arms and spare parts flowing to Iran through the darkest days of its war with Iraq. To ensure that the U.S. would look the other way, it had even implicated the U.S. government in that arms traffic-both in the early months of the Reagan regime and again in 1985-1986, in what later became known as the "Iran-Contra" scandal.

Now, in the 1990s, a glittering prize could be seized by Iran and Israel working together. That was a dominant position in the Persian Gulf, with its 65 percent of the world's petroleum reserves and the trillions of dollars they represented.

But Iran first had to be made to understand that, unaided, it could not seize the prize. The Americans would not permit it. Israel's role in the axis was to utilize its two basic strengths to neutralize America's tendency to side with the Arabs for the cynical reason that they had the most oil and the practical reason that they were easier to deal with. Therefore, Iran could win in Washington only with the backing of Israel's own congressional and media loyalists. They would revive the old image of "moderate Iranians" to displace the Ayatollah Khomeini's menacing psychological legacy of "resurgent Islam."

The latter had failed, except temporarily in souther Lebanon, because 85 percent of the world's Muslims, including virtually all of the Arabs, are Sunni, not Shi'i, like the Iranians. It was only necessary to convince the rulers of Iran, therefore, that no matter how useful the banner of Shi'i Islam might look domestically, Iranian attempts to give it an extraterritorial dimension would be resisted by Gulf Arabs as an attempt at Iranian hegemony.

Playing the Israel Card

Israel's message to Iran was that there was nothing to stop it from achieving overwhelming economic and military power in the Gulf if it played the Israel card. Iran's population of 56 million was twice that of Iraq, Saudi Arabia and all of the other Gulf Arab states combined. It could count on getting from Israel America's latest military and industrial technology, which Israel would obtain either through overt American aid, or covert theft by sayanim, volunteer Jewish spies for Israel described in Ostrovsky's book, By Way of Deception. Given Israel's record in Washington during the Nixon, Carter and Reagan administrations, could anyone doubt Israel's ability to deliver?

Since the Shah's failure to achieve dominance over the Gulf in the 1970s, everything had changed to Iran's advantage. Iraq, the most powerful Arab state in the area, was wiped out militarily. Israel could keep it that way by utilizing its assets in Congress and the American media to secure Iraq's permanent breakup into mutually hostile Kurdish, Sunni and Shi'i mini-states. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, Iran no longer need fear Russian intervention. Iran could even realistically consider annexing Shi'i southern Iraq, with its rich oil fields.

Since the Arabs were both Iran's and Israel's principal enemies, should they not cooperate under the dictum that "the enemy of my enemy is my friend"? Through its influence in Washington, Israel could even see to it that Iran got nuclear weapons, and the Arabs didn't. Two Middle Eastern nuclear powers, working cooperatively, could dominate the area and blackmail hostile American presidents into abandoning their own tendencies to throw their weight around in the Middle East. Like Iran, China could be helpful, since it has its own interests in the Gulf. And Iran could not fail to not that China, too, was seeking to play the Israel card to gain influence in Washington.

Today, if he still is looking for "a new benefactor," Shamir may assume that Iranian President Ali Akbar Hashimi Rafsanjani has observed how Israel parleys its American assets and the ruthlessness of its leaders to get its way in the world.

American Jewish investigative reporter Seymour Hersh's new book, The Samson Option, relates how Israel was prepared even to target the mighty Soviet Union with nuclear weapons. That seemingly ridiculous gesture cleverly exploited American fears that, with a vengeful, surreptitious initial strike, Israel could purposely set off a mutually devastating Soviet-American nuclear exchange.

Nuclear Blackmail

Rafsanjani may also be aware of reports that the United States was forced to mount a giant military air and sea lift to save Israel during the October 1973 war because otherwise Israel threatened to destroy Cairo, Damascus and possibly other Arab cities with nuclear weapons. The alternative was to use America's own nuclear weapons to wipe out Israel's launching pads and airfields. That is something no U.S. president has been ruthless enough to do.

Yitzhak Shamir can convince Iran, China, or other potential benefactors that George Bush, like the American people, is soft. By contrast, Shamir, his predecessors and all of his potential successors in either the Likud or Labor political camps are hard as diamonds, like the Israeli body politic from which they emerge. To a man, they are ready to use nuclear blackmail, or nuclear weapons, as readily as any other asset at their disposal.

"Leaks" in Israel's press last fall about the inevitablity of an Israeli action to "take out" Iranian nuclear capability were just part of Shamir's campaign. The message to Iran was do it with us or we won't let you do it at all.

None of the Americans who spent 444 days bound and blindfolded in the U.S. Embassy in Tehran doubt the ruthlessness of Iran's present leaders. Nor do the American hostages who spent years chained in Lebanese basements. Nor do the students and faculty members picking their way today through the ruined buildings of the American University of Beirut. Separately, both Iran and Israel have been thorns in the side of the American superpower. Together, Shamir is threatening, they could become a mortal pain.

Andrew I. Killgore, publisher of the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, was U.S. ambassador to the state of Qatar when he retired from the career foreign service in 1980.

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