During their meeting, timed to coincide with the AIPAC confab, Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu presented President Obama with a copy of the Book of Esther. As Nathan Guttman noted in The Forward:

Benjamin Netanyahu’s gift to Barack Obama summed up his message at their White House meeting Monday. The Israeli Prime Minister gave the President a copy of he Book of Esther, which tells the story of the Jews fighting back against a genocidal plot by the ancient Persians. Netanyahu sees the nuclear threat posed by modern-day Iran as no less existential to Israel…

As the biblical novella recounts the tale, a  Jewish young woman by the name of Esther is taken into the harem of the Persian King Ahasuerus during a roundup of pretty young virgins, after the uppity Queen Vashti is deposed for defying her husband. Esther keeps her Jewish identity secret for five years until Haman, now the king’s vizier, becomes enraged when Mordecai, Esther’s uncle/cousin (depending on the translator), won’t bow to him. Haman persuades the king to allow him to organize the mass extermination of the Jews of Persia on grounds that they refuse to observe the king’s law. Ahasuerus gives Haman his signet ring, to use as he wishes in promulgating edicts.

Urged by Mordecai to intervene, Esther risks her life by going before the king without having been summoned and inviting him and Haman to two sequential banquets. At the second banquet, Esther reveals Haman’s dastardly plot, and Haman and his ten sons are hanged. Mordecai becomes the king’s vizier in his stead, and all live happily ever after–except for the 75,800 people in Persian empire who are massacred when Esther convinces the king to allow the Jews to avenge the plot against them.

“For as long as I can remember, I never liked the holiday of Purim, with its story of the massacre of the gentiles and its message of revenge and rejoicing at the downfall of others,” writes author Ruth Meisels in Haaretz. “And so every year all that’s left for me to do is to grit my teeth during the synagogue reading of the Megillah, taking comfort in the fact that historically, at least, the veracity of this story is very much in doubt.”

Although many apologists for the Book of Esther have claimed its author was familiar with the intimate details of life at the Persian court, such claims don’t hold up in light of what we now know of Persian history (559-331 BC), apart from the copious Greek propaganda produced during the Greco-Persian Wars (492-449 BC).

A Persian king sleeping with a virgin every night? This sounds remarkably like premise of the tale of Sharazad in Hezar Afsaneh, a collection of ancient Persian folk tales. According to Elias Bickerman, a highly respected scholar on Jewish literature of the Achaemenid Persian period,  “We have here a typical tale of palace intrigue that could as well find a place in the Persian histories of Herodotus and Ctesias, or in the Arabian Nights. The only Jewish element of the tale is that, according to the author, Mordecai is a Jew.” “Mordecai” was not a Jewish name in ancient times (it is now); nor was “Esther.” In fact, it has been noted numerous times that the two names bear a remarkably close resemblance to those of the Babylonian deities Marduk and Ishtar.

A Persian king marrying a mysterious Jewess who kept her origins secret for five years (especially with her known to be Jewish cousin/uncle lurking around outside, exchanging messages with her through courtiers)? No way! A Persian king’s marriages, as Maria Brosius explains, were alliances with the daughters of foreign potentates and the leading families of the Persian empire for reasons of statecraft. The Achaemenid Persian tradition seems to have been postponing the designation of any of the king’s wives as what might best be translated as “queen” until after she had given birth to his designated heir. Neither Esther nor Vashti is mentioned as having been the mother of Ahasuerus’ children. Furthermore, a Persian monarch’s mother and his wife were entitled to see him whenever they wished.

Finally, there is no historical record of any King Ahasuerus or a Queen Vashti, and, most significantly, no record of a plot to ethnically cleanse the Achaemenid Persian Empire of its Jews. Nor is there any account by any ancient historian of vengeful Jewish mobs slaughtering nearly 76,000 residents of the Persian Empire.

As for Jews living according to their own rules, Darius the Great (ruled 522-486 BC) had institutionalized hagiarchy (rule by priests) over the various and distinct peoples of his empire, not only allowing, but requiring that each of the ethnic groups in his domain live according to its own religious code, promulgated and enforced as da’t–“The King’s Law.” The Second Temple in Jerusalem, for which Jews mourn in their liturgy and for whose restoration observant Jews today pray three times daily was built by returning Jewish exiles with the full support of Darius. The Temple was a center not only for sacrificial worship, but for bureaucratic administration, including the the collection of taxes. Darius and subsequent Achaemenid Persian emperors institutionalized the various religious codes by which his subjects lived. The enactments of Ezra, which became the core of Jewish ritual observances (halakha) still practiced by orthodox Jews to this day, were enforced as though they had been decreed by the emperor himself.

During the Hasmonean revolt against the Seleucid Empire (165-162 BC, commemorated by the Jewish festival of Chanukah), Judeans battled the Greek overlords who had seized control of Judea with Alexander the Great’s defeat of the Achaemenids (331 BC), demanding the right to live according to the Jewish “law of the ancestors,” codified as d’at hundreds of years earlier while Judea under Persian rule. The Parthians, the successors of the Achaemenids in Persia after an interlude of a century or so after Alexander, aided the Maccabees–heroes of the Jewish Chanukah story–in their resistance against Greece, and their Hasmonean descendants in their revolt against Rome.

The closest that most scholars can come to identifying the historical setting of the Book of Esther is the reign of Xerxes, who ruled from 486-465 BC. A staunch and uncompromising monotheist, Xerxes eliminated all government subsidies that non-Zoroastrian religious cults in the Persian empire had been receiving from his father. According to scholar Robert Littman, writing in the Jewish Quarterly Review, it was actually Babylonians, not Jews, who were the original victims in an incident that would be recast as the tale of Esther and Mordecai in the Megillah.

Xerxes took the 18-foot solid gold statue of Bel Marduk, the chief idol of the god, whose hands monarchs seized to gain title as King of Babylon, and whose hands the pretenders had seized to gain legitimacy for their rule and revolt, and carried it off to be melted down for bullion. When the priest of Esagila protested, he was killed. Without the idol of Marduk, no pretender could so easily legitimize and claim divine sanction for his position.

None of this historical background would matter very much, if at all, were Purim were just a fun-focused festival of eating, drinking, whirling noisemakers (groggers) at the sound of Haman’s name, and pretending to really like the triangular-shape pastries, filled with prune jam or poppy seed puree, that grandma baked, the way that the overwhelming majority of Jews who have heard even of Purim recall the festival  from their childhood.

But Purim has a darker side, unencumbered by historical facts, that has impacted the relations between Jews and their neighbors, as Elliot Horowitz, a professor at Bar Ilan University, chronicles in his book Reckless Rites: Purim and the Legacy of Jewish Violence. In recent years, Purim has taken on an increasingly ominous aspect, with Israeli settlers belligerently sparking confrontations with Palestinians in whose midst they have entrenched themselves. The most deadly of these took place in 1994, when the holiday of Purim coincided with the first Friday of the holy month of Ramadan. Muslim worshipers packed the Tomb of the Patriarchs in Hebron, a shrine sacred to Muslim as well as to Jews. An American-born Israeli settler, Dr. Baruch Goldstein, opened fire on them with a semi-automatic rifle, killing 29 and wounding more than 100 others.  “Since then, for me and for many others, Purim has never been the same,” Horowitz writes.

Goldstein’s mentor, Dov Lior, the government-salaried rabbi of the Kiryat Arba settlement near the site of the Hebron massacre, has been frequently accused of incitement of, and involvement in, terroristic acts of violence directed against Arabs, including a plot to blow up six buses, loaded with explosives, with the objective of killing the hundreds of passengers on them. Israel’s Shin Bet security service foiled the plot at the last minute. Lior endorsed a book, Torat HaMelech (Law of the King) which countenanced the slaying non-Jews, and not surprisingly drawing upon the Book of Esther for justification. His arrest incited outrage among his followers. At the beginning of February of this year, Israeli Army Radio reported that Lior had derisively referred to the US president as a kushi (a biblical term denoting a person of African descent, the modern Israeli equivalent of “nigger”) and compared him to Haman.

Since his election as Iran’s president in 2005, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has been depicted both in the U.S. and Israeli media as a modern-day Haman, who will stop at nothing to achieve his genocidal objective. In 2006, Sarah Posner of American Prospect pointed out that Texas televangelist John Hagee, founder of CUFI (Christians United for Israel, an AIPAC for evangelicals) had “a huge following, the ear of the White House, and a theory that an invasion of Iran was foretold in the Book of Esther.” Hagee’s 2005 book Jerusalem Countdown, is described by its publisher as “an incendiary new book purporting to show that the Bible predicts a military confrontation with Iran.” In the Purim apocalypse envisioned by Hagee, Posner noted, “he glossed over the obstacles faced by Tehran in creating a viable nuclear weapon, arguing that ‘once you have enriched uranium, the genie is out of the bottle,’” a view adopted not only by Israeli hardliners but also recently by the US Congress.

Last year, revelers waving groggers with Ahmadinejad’s picture on them created a ruckus at a Megillah reading outside the Iranian Mission to the UN. Now Netanyahu has given Obama a Book of Esther as a gift and a guide, which Netanyahu’s aides have stated is intended to be “a form of ‘background reading’ on Iran.” “Then too, they wanted to wipe us out,” Netanyahu told Obama, according to an Israeli official quoted by the Jerusalem Post. “…’And the Jews smote all their enemies with the stroke of the sword, and with slaughter and destruction, and did what they would unto them that hated them.’”

As Ami Eden points out, “there’s the uncomfortable wrinkle that in Megillat Esther the Jews can’t/don’t launch their successful preemptive strike against their enemies until they secure the king’s permission — not quite the ‘Israel has the right, the sovereign right to make its own decisions’ message that Netanyahu has been hammering home during his trip this week to Washington.”

Beyond that wrinkle, there’s a much larger question. Is it really a good idea for a US President to look to a biblical novella (especially one whose “happy ending” is the death of tens of thousands of people), or to any religious text, as his guidebook on foreign affairs? Robert Wright doesn’t think so, and proposes an intriguing “thought experiment” to answer this question:

Suppose that an Arab or Iranian leader of Muslim faith met with President Obama and told him about some part of the Koran that alludes to conflict between Muhammad and Jewish tribes. For example, according to Muslim tradition, the Jewish tribe known as the Qurayzah, though living in Muhammad’s town of Medina, secretly sided with Muhammad’s enemies in Mecca. Suppose this Muslim said to Obama, “Then, too, the Jews were bent on destroying Muslims.” What would our reaction be?

The Book of Esther is bad history. Bad history–especially when it masquerades as a relevant guide to foreign affairs–makes for bad policy.

And bad policy is what you end up with when you can no longer tell Mordecai from Haman.

Israel has both medium and intermediate range Jerichos. The medium-range Jericho I would not have the range to reach many Iranian targets  but the intermediate-range Jericho II’s, capable of hitting targets 1,500 miles away, would have no problem.  The Jerichos would be equipped with high explosives, not nuclear warheads. Asked if the Jericho would have the accuracy and the explosive power to take out a hardened bunker of the sort believed to be protecting Iran’s most-sensitive underground nuclear facilities, one official replied, “You would be surprised at their accuracy” and that the high explosives involved is a special mix of chemical explosives that could conceivably penetrate the Iranian fortifications.

Missile attacks would be coordinated with fighter-bomber attacks (presumably  the Israelis’ extended-range F-15I Strike Eaglet) as well as drone strikes. The fighter bombers would use what one official described as  “high-low, low-high” flight paths — high first to increase fuel efficiency, then low for most of the trip to evade radar, then climbing high again as the weapons are released in what is known as a “flip toss” on the target.  The Israelis would be prepared to lose aircraft if necessary, the officials said.

Windrem amalgamates and synthesizes the views of various unidentified “US and Israeli officials” about a more than likely Israeli attack on Iran in the next several months into a tidy and digestible question-and-answer format. One question he neither asks nor answers is whether Israel is actually capable of successfully carrying out a winner-take-all high tech attack on Iran that could destroy or (more likely) delay the development of Iran’s budding nuclear program, at minimal costs–financial, environmental or in casualties–to itself and anyone else except Iran.

Whether it’s due to technical glitches or human error, military hardware doesn’t always function the way it’s supposed to. A mysterious Yasour helicopter  crash on July 26, 2010, during a training exercise in the Carpathian Mountains of Romania was, according to Jerusalem Post military analyst, Yaakov Katz:

…a blow to the IAF’s image and raises two serious questions – first, whether the transport helicopter, which has been in IAF service for over 40 years, is still a reliable and sturdy aircraft, and second, if this is what happens during a regular training exercise in Romania, what will happen in a future IAF long-range operation.

Katz went on to ask and answer the obvious question:

One might wonder why an Israeli helicopter was in Romania in the first place. The answer is that every long-range IAF operation today, wherever it may take place in the world including in Israel, takes into consideration ‘third-sphere threats’ like Iran, which are far from Israel.

On Nov. 10, 2010, two Israeli pilots were killed in the Negev Desert when their F15-I crashed. Last Sunday (Jan. 29)  a state of the art Israeli Heron TP unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), also known as the Eitan, crashed in central Israel. No further reports have emerged to date regarding the cause of the disintegration of “the drone that can reach  Iran,” believed to be the first such Israeli UAV crash of its kind.

The huge drone–the size of a Boeing 737, with a wingspan of 86 feet, and capable of carrying a one ton payload and reportedly capable of staying aloft for as long as 45 hours–went down near the Tel Nof Air Force Base not far from the town of Gedera in central Israel, about 20 miles southeast of Tel Aviv. According to the Associated Press, the Heron TP is “the largest unmanned aircraft in Israel’s military arsenal” and would “be featured prominently in any potential Israeli operation against Iran and its expanding nuclear program.” It can be aloft for as long as 45 hours, “making it capable of conducting a wide variety of missions.”  Last September, Katz had reported that the Israeli Air Force’s  claim that the deployment of the Heron TP by the end of 2011 would “boost its intelligence-gathering capabilities” and that “foreign reports” said the drone also had the ability to launch missiles.”

Early press reports about the downing of the UAV were inconsistent as to whether the UAV test flight was “routine” or “experimental.” A “flagship product” of Israeli Aircraft Industries, the Israeli business daily Globes assessed the cost of the downed  UAV at $10 million. Y-Net cited the figure as $5 million, and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty at $35 million. Israel is currently trying to market the drone to other countries and France recently decided to  purchase Israeli Heron TPs instead of US Predator drones for use in NATO operations.

There hasn’t been much coverage of the investigation regarding the cause of the drone crash since it occurred. Initial reports stated that the cause was attributed to either human error or technical malfunction or some combination of the two. One possibility raised was that the one ton weight-bearing capability of the drone had been exceeded.  (A GBU-28 “bunker buster” bomb weighs between 4500-5000 lbs.) Katz cited an explanation from military sources that the aircraft was flying with a new navigation component that might have disrupted the drone’s automatic flight systems. Yoav Zitun of Y-Net reported that a highly-advanced device on the wing  was being tested during the drone’s flight.

Drones seem to offer the potential–and very real possibility–of wreaking enormous damage on an enemy  from far away, with no military casualties to the country and with no loss of life to the military forces of the state launching the attack. On the other hand, UAVs don’t always reach their intended targets. Their “precision,” like that of a video game, depends upon the human hands on the controllers, and the choices made. These, in turn, are guided by the intelligence data they have available to them, at least some of which is gathered by UAVs.

The implications of last week’s crash of the Heron TP is a reminder that UAV technology, despite its increasing use, is far from perfect–a point that has received no discussion in the Israeli or global media. Presumably the fact that it is flawed is implicit. Nonetheless, the ramifications (and potential unintended consequences) of its deployment are staggering.

Iran (in case you were wondering) has its own UAV program, the domestically produced Kerrar. With an estimated range of 620 miles, a payload of 500 lbs. and a maximum speed of over 600 mph, the Kerrar is not (yet) capable of reaching Israel. This is good news for Israel for two reasons. The first–that Israel is out of reach–is a no-brainer. But there is another one too. An Israeli drone en route to Iran but shot down or otherwise crashing in Iraq or Bahrain might be declared to be Iranian, and be used as a pretext for war under international law.

What if, in the next test, an Israeli drone were to go further from its base but fall short of its target, causing widespread loss of life and property damage in Iraq, the Arabian peninsula, Turkey, or within Israel itself? If a malfunctioning Israeli drone en route to Iran were to crash and cause a disaster, would Israel accept responsibility, or would it point the finger at Iran, raising the specter and stakes of international retaliation? It might take days, weeks or months, possibly even years, for the truth to become known–long after a retaliatory strike had taken place.

Blogger Richard Silverstein has already suggested that last week’s crash was not that of a Heron TP but a Hezbollah drone targeting Israel. While Silverstein’s claim isn’t being taken seriously by anyone but himself and some of his readers (see Dimi Reider’s rejoinder on +972), it’s certainly within the range of possibility that a similar incident and accusation, coming from the lunatic right instead of the left, might be taken at face value, and drag the US into yet another war before the facts were even known.

Could the consequences of an Israeli attack on Iran that didn’t succeed be almost as bad–or even worse–than one that did?

As reported last Friday in the Huffington Post by M.J. Rosenberg, Robert Baer, a former CIA operations officer (1976-97), told radio talk show host Ian Masters on July 12:

There is almost “near certainty” that [Israeli Prime Minister Bernjamin] Netanyahu is “planning an attack [on Iran] … and it will probably be in September before the vote on a Palestinian state. And he’s also hoping to draw the United States into the conflict…”

Baer is now expressing astonishment that anyone could have construed his comments as predicting an Israeli strike against Iran. In Time Magazine today, Baer offers his version of the unfolding of events since the  radio interview was picked up and publicized:

Last week, my friend Ian Masters, who hosts the Los Angeles talk-show Background Briefing, called me up to talk about the Arab spring, and especially what would happen if Israel were to attack Iran. He was struck by the comments of recently retired Mossad chief Meir Dagan, saying that an increasingly paranoid and isolated Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was considering launching a reckless attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities, and doing that soon… I noted there have been other recently retired senior Israeli security officials who’d said much the same thing, including the well-respected chief of staff, Gabi Ashkenazi.

Then “as these things go on radio, fact quickly turned to speculation,” Baer explains:

Warming to the subject, I chattered on about how I’d heard there was a “warning order” at the Pentagon to prepare for a conflict with Iran. I was about to add that that this was not unusual; there are warning orders all the time, and it could have nothing to do with Israeli or anything it was or wasn’t planning for Iran. (Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, after all, is accusing Iran of being behind the sharp uptick in deadly attacks on U.S. forces in Iraq.) But time was short, and the host needed to finish up for the next guest.

According to Baer, the easygoing banter had no reliable basis in fact, and was purely speculative:

This was a wide-ranging speculative conversation on a local radio station, two like minds kibitzing, as media pundits so often do, with no inside information to back our interpretations of the significance of the flood of former senior Israeli security officials warning that Netanyahu is crazy and likely to do something rash. “If I was forced to bet,” I ventured, “I’d say we’re going to have some sort of conflict in the next couple of months, unless this is all just a masterful bluff — which I can’t believe the Iranians would succumb to — I think the chances of it being a bluff are remote.” Not exactly claiming to know any more than any other tea-leaf reader.

And when Masters asked me when I thought this hypothetical attack might hypothetically occur, I blithely suggested September. I was only adding two plus two: a September attack would allow Netanyahu to destroy Iran’s nuclear facilities and wreck plans for a U.N. vote on Palestinian statehood, which is slated for September. I would have added that in the Middle East, two plus two rarely adds up to four. But I was definitely out of time.

Baer insists  his offhand remarks not only were taken out of context, they were disseminated as though he were “some sort of unimpeachable authority, talking with the certainly of an insider looped into the plans and intentions of the key decision-makers.”

…what I’d said was a tedious rehash of various media reports. I would have forgotten it altogether were it not for the blogosphere’s version of a Pacific hurricane. I don’t know where it started, but soon the choice bits of our conversation were being rebroadcast as a danger signal flashing bright red: “Former CIA Official: Israel Will Bomb Iran in September,” read the headline in the Huffington Post.

This was followed by hate mail, accusations that he had “gone rogue” and become “a loose cannon,” and a tweet by former State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley  that Baer didn’t know what he was talking about:

Crowley is right about me speculating about things I don’t know a lot about. (Isn’t that what commentators do more often than not?) … I wondered why Crowley and everyone else didn’t notice I hadn’t drawn a government check in more than 12 years, and therefore wasn’t bringing any inside knowledge to the subject. And I’d certainly never claimed a back-door access to Netanyahu’s inner circle that would give me any privileged knowledge about a planned attack.

But Baer has apparently staked his entire post-CIA career on being taken for an expert on matters about which, he now confesses, he doesn’t know very much. Baer’s claim that he doesn’t promote himself as an expert with inside knowledge or privileged access, however, rings hollow.

After leaving the CIA in 1997 after two decades as an operative in India, North Africa, Central Asia, Bosnia, Lebanon and Northern Iraq, Baer’s first literary venture was his memoir  See No Evil: The True Story of a Ground Soldier in the CIA’s War on Terrorism, published in January 2002.  The book was generally well received. In the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, Baer  proffered a plausible explanation, based on personal experience, of how and why the U.S. government could have allowed such a catastrophic attack to take place on U.S. soil.  The book won praise from New Yorker investigative journalist Seymour Hersh, who wrote its Foreword and gave See No Evil his endorsement with the review quote, “Robert Baer was considered perhaps the best on-the-ground field officer in the Middle East.”

Saudi Arabia was the subject of Baer’s second book,  Sleeping with the Devil: How Washington Sold Our Soul for Saudi Crude, published in July 2003. Baer then tried his hand at writing a novel, Blow the House Down (2006), a supposedly fictional “alternative account” of how the events of 9/11 had transpired, with Iranian involvement as its major premise.

“The scenario that he sets forth reads in these pages like an alarming hodgepodge of the plausible, the speculative and the absurd,” wrote Michiko Kakutani in an acerbic New York Times book review. “…(I)f Mr. Baer’s intention in his new novel is to goad readers into a serious consideration of Iran’s possible terrorist connections (a timely subject, given current worries about Iran’s nuclear program), he fails in this mission by cavalierly mixing fact and fiction, the credible and the preposterous.”

While promoting the novel, Baer  hinted that his “alarming hodgepodge” of speculations about Iran ought  to be taken more seriously than those of a thriller novelist. Baer told Seymour Hersh (New Yorker, April 17, 2006) that Ahmadinejad and his Revolutionary Guard colleagues in the Iranian government “are capable of making a bomb, hiding it, and launching it at Israel. They’re apocalyptic Shiites. If you’re sitting in Tel Aviv and you believe they’ve got nukes and missiles—you’ve got to take them out. These guys are nuts, and there’s no reason to back off.”

Baer apparently concluded that mixing the plausible and the speculative with the absurd would be more easily  tolerated in pseudo-punditry than in fiction. In September 2008,  The Devil We Know: Dealing with the New Iranian Superpower, Baer’s fifth book, was published. Baer outlined three policy options the U.S. has for dealing with Iran” 1) permanently stationing U.S. troops in Iraq; 2) instigating a Shia-Sunni civil war; or 3) negotiating with Iran: “(T)reat it like the power it has become, and see what it has to offer.” Baer himself recommended the third strategy. While not an unreasonable approach, it contrasted sharply with other assessments Baer was offering about Iran.

An  op ed piece for the New York Daily News,  “Bet on Israel Bombing Iran” (Sept. 27), 2008,  offers an interesting parallel to the current kerfuffle. Baer wrote, “What many Americans miss is that Iran is a threat to Israel’s very existence, not an imagined danger used by politicians for political advantage. Every Israeli city is within range of Iranian/Hezbollah rockets. To make matters worse, since the July 2006 34-day war, Hezbollah may have as much as trebled the number of rockets it has targeted on Israel.”

Three weeks later, a promotional blurb for  lecture by  Baer with the title “Iran’s Grip on America’s Future,” for the Commonwealth Club of California on Nov. 5, 2008, breathlessly hyped the event:

Don’t miss this opportunity to hear from and meet the man who was the basis of George Clooney’s character in “Syriana” — and find out why reality is even more riveting than film. Considered one of the world’s foremost authorities on the Middle East, Baer will explore the gap of information between what is going on in Iran and what Americans know. Bear [sic] visited Iran to interview suicide bombers [sic], a grand ayatollah, the hard-line chief of staff of Iran’s military forces and the terrorist chief of Hezbollah. Baer will discuss how and why Iran will control the most vital oil and gas trade routes, how it became a hero to the Palestinian Sunnis, and how it plans to seize oil from the Persian Gulf.

Yet in an Inter Press Service interview in Jan. 2009, Baer told Omid Memarian that  an Israeli attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities was “totally out of  the question.” Commenting on a New York Times report that US President George W. Bush had vetoed such an attack despite the urging of Israeli leaders to launch one, Baer emphasized the futility of a military approach to resolving the clashes of interest between the U.S. and Iran:

We could bomb Tehran, but what does that get you? Nothing…You can bomb all military bases in Iran over a period of two weeks, but Iran is still there – it still has the ability to project power, project its will and maybe even come out of that type of conflict even stronger.

Baer is currently promoting his sixth  book, The Company We Keep: A Husband-and-Wife True-Life Spy Story, published earlier this year, and co-authored with his wife Dayna. The couple met in Sarajevo, while both working for the CIA and married to other spouses.  In a Fresh Air interview with Terry Gross on NPR back in March, Baer  described writing the book as a “purgative.” (Apparently the first five books hadn’t done the job.)

After Baer said that he and the U.S. intelligence community had been taken by surprise by the “Arab spring,” Gross asked him,  “So, do you expect you’re going to be surprised by Iran?” Baer responded, “I think now the street rising in Tehran is a neocon fantasy. I talked to people com[ng out] of Tehran, it’s not quite as bad as the exiles say. Yes, the regime has repressed the street and this Green Revolution, but I think what we’re going to see in Iran is a much more stable state…”

Exactly what that might mean for Iran’s future wasn’t at all clear, but then again, as we’ve just found out in Time today, Baer really doesn’t know what he’s talking about anyway. He is, however, selling his books.

No one is coming out of this story looking good. Not the reporters and the editors of the News of the World newspaper, who hired a private detective to “hack” into the mobile phone messages of the subjects of their investigations – actors, celebrities, footballers, but also families who lost soldiers in wars and victims of murder. Certainly not the top brass of Rupert Murdoch’s News International, who pushed the Sunday tabloid into the murky depths of the journalism swamp, chasing down sensationalist headlines and higher sales.

The power of the News International empire – which in Britain controls not just the tabloid with the biggest circulation, The Sun, but also “institutional” papers The Times and Sunday Times, as well as the BSkyB satellite television channels – was so extensive that, when the police caught a glimpse of the phone hacking affair more than five years ago, a decision was made that there were more important issues to investigate.

Pfeffer’s piece was yanked off the Haaretz English website after less than 24 hours, where many older pieces often linger for days, even weeks. Equally noteworthy is that  the article is now very difficult  to locate in the Haaretz archives. Querying the Haaretz website search box for “Murdoch” or “Pfeffer,” the default “sort by relevance” results bury Pfeffer’s article about Murdoch, which can be located easily only if searching by date.

Haaretz‘s generally slipshod archiving of its published articles is irritating to researchers and writers, and is particularly unfortunate for a newspaper whose English language edition is published in coordination with the International Herald Tribune. The most interesting and provocative articles seem to be most difficult to find and to have the shortest shelf life, sometimes vanishing in a matter of hours. (This author learned long ago to print out any item  of interest appearing on the Haaretz site before it disappeared.)

Israel’s other English language news sites thus far have been offering no original commentary about Murdoch, and providing only reports or brief excerpts from wire service coverage. Curiously, neither Pfeffer nor the wire service reports point out that Murdoch is considered staunchly “pro-Israel.” In the past two years, Murdoch has been an honoree of at least two prominent  pro-Israel groups in the U.S..

On March 4, 2009, the American Jewish Committee (AJC) presented Murdoch with its “National Human Relations Award.” (This author posted this detail in a reader comment to Pfeffer’s piece that Haaretz chose not to publish just prior to the article’s disappearance,  and also pointed it out in an e-mail to Pfeffer himself, to which he has not replied.) Speaking at the AJC awards dinner, Murdoch refuted the widely-believed myth that he himself  is Jewish, but took the opportunity to reiterate and endorse some other myths prevalent in the Jewish community:

In Europe, men and woman who bear the tattoos of concentration camps today look out on a continent where Jewish lives and Jewish property are under attack – and public debate is poisoned by an anti-Semitism we thought had been dispatched to history’s dustbin.

In Iran, we see a regime that backs Hezbollah and Hamas now on course to acquire a nuclear weapon.

In India, we see Islamic terrorists single out the Mumbai Jewish Center in a well-planned and well-coordinated attack that looks like it could be a test run for similar attacks in similar cities around the world.

On the first point, Murdoch ignored the inconvenient truth that the resurgence of European anti-Semitism has proceeded in tandem with European Islamophobia. Less than six months before Murdoch received his AJC award, the 2008 Pew Survey of Global Attitudes had revealed that Islamophia and anti-Semitism were both on the rise in Europe. As Ian Traynor of the Guardian noted at the time, “The survey found that suspicion of Muslims in Europe was considerably higher than hostility to Jews, but that the increase in antisemitism had taken place much more rapidly.” The rise in European anti-Semitism is a byproduct of Islamophobia at least as much as (and perhaps more than) it is a consequence of it.

Debate over whether or not Iran is seeking a nuclear weapon receives ample coverage on this blog and elsewhere, and elaboration of this issue would be a digression from the topic at hand. Suffice it to say that Murdoch (or any other speaker) could not, and would not dare to, address a Jewish group, particularly one that devotes so much of its abundant resources to anti-Iran rhetoric as AJC, without invoking “the Iranian threat.”

Murdoch’s mention of the attack on the Chabad House in Mumbai, India strongly implied  that the Jewish house of workshop had been singled out for an Islamist terrorist attack. At least 150 people were killed and hundreds more injured in a series of coordinated terrorist attacks Nov. 26-28, 2008, on a crowded train station, two luxury hotels popular with foreign tourists, a hospital and several other crowded Mumbai sites, with the Chabad House an apparent afterthought. The initial Fox News report did not even refer to the Chabad House as having been a target. Murdoch’s AJC speech also didn’t mention that Mumbai has nine synagogues attended almost exclusively by locals, which were not attacked; the only one targeted by the terrorists was the Chabad center, which was both run and frequented by foreigner visitors from Israel and Western countries.

Not to be outdone, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) chose Murdoch as the recipient of its “International Leadership Award” on Oct. 13, 2010, which was presented to him by ADL Director Abraham Foxman:

“I have come to know the man, not his image,” Mr. Foxman said in presenting the award to Mr. Murdoch.  “I learned that he cared deeply about the safety and security of Israel.  I learned that he was as distressed as I was about efforts to delegitimize the Jewish state, to hold it to a double standard, and to seek its demise by some.”

In his acceptance speech (reproduced in full by the arch-neoconservative Weekly Standard, which Murdoch’s NewsCorp had helped to get off the ground and had run at a loss for 14 years before selling it in 2009 to Philip Anschutz), Murdoch blamed anti-Semitism on Muslims, and leftists for the “soft war” being waged against Israel, conflating criticism with armed assault:

Now the war has entered a new phase.  This is the soft war that seeks to isolate Israel by delegitimizing it. The battleground is everywhere:  the media … multinational organizations … NGOs.

In this war, the aim is to make Israel a pariah.

The result is the curious situation we have today:  Israel becomes increasingly ostracized, while Iran – a nation that has made no secret of wishing Israel’s destruction – pursues nuclear weapons loudly, proudly, and without apparent fear of rebuke.

Israel “ostracized” by the media? Criticism of Israel as the latest manifestation of  terrorism? Iran pursuing nuclear weapons without fear of rebuke? Murdoch ought to have spent a bit more time reading his competitors. Israeli policies and perspectives receive largely deferential treatment by western international wire services that are still dominant in global news flows — and, of course, the US new media.

Murdoch also used the occasion to take a swipe at US President Barack Obama:

I was pleased to hear the State Department’s spokesman clarify America’s position yesterday. He said that the United States recognizes “the special nature of the Israeli state. It is a state for the Jewish people.”

This is an important message to send to the Middle East. When people see, for example, a Jewish prime minister treated badly by an American president, they see a more isolated Jewish state. That only encourages those who favor the gun over those who favor negotiation.

Obama’s alleged mistreatment of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was another myth purveyed by Murdoch-owned news media. Fox News fueled the hysteria about Obama “insulting” Netanyahu by conversing with him on the telephone on June 9, 2009 while his  legs were stretched out on his White House desk, revealing the soles of his shoes, at which an Arab might take umbrage. (Since neither Obama nor Netanyahu is Arab, it was unclear why this was considered to be of any relevance.) Accompanying the article was a photo released by the White House, showing Obama at ease while communicating with the Israeli Prime Minister.

All this has apparently earned Murdoch and his empire the unswerving loyalty of Israelis and the major institutions of the “Israel Lobby” here in the U.S. Last February, a group of 400 American rabbis objected to the Holocaust terminology used and misused by then-Fox News Channel commentator Glenn Beck. In an open letter published in the Wall Street Journal and the Forward, the rabbis appealed to Murdoch to sanction Beck and Fox News Chair Roger Ailes. The Jerusalem Post depicted  American Jews as critical of the rabbis, rather than of Beck, Ailes or Murdoch. JP quoted the  ADL’s  Foxman as saying that he found the rabbis’ public stance  against Beck and Ailes to be bizarre: “They’re not our enemy, and they are certainly not Holocaust deniers.”

A new accusation by former British Prime Minister Gordon Brown asserts the Murdoch media empire may have used known criminals to conduct  illicit surveillance activities such as hacking and wiretapping in order to obtain personal information. Heartlessly shoddy and amazingly under-handed (and illegal; not to say, immoral) journalistic practices at his news sites? Who cares, as long as he’s “good for Israel”? And if Murdoch is “good for Israel,” they’d all best shut up about him.

The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) initially released this statement on Tuesday morning:

A short while ago, IDF Navy fighters intercepted the cargo vessel “Victoria” loaded with various weaponry. According to assessments, the weaponry on-board the vessel was intended for the use of terror organizations operating in the Gaza Strip. The vessel, flying under a Liberian flag, was intercepted some 200 miles west of Israel’s coast. This incident was part of the Navy’s routine activity to maintain security and prevent arms smuggling, in light of IDF security assessments.

The force was met with no resistance from the crew on-board and the vessel is now being led by the Israeli Navy to the Israeli port in Ashdod for further searches and detailed inspection of the cargo.

The vessel was on its way from Mersin Port in Turkey to Alexandria Port in Egypt. The IDF would like to note that Turkey is not tied to the incident in any way.

The operation was approved as necessary in accordance with government directives in light of the Chief of the General Staff’s recommendations.

This press release isn’t just about finding hidden weapons on a ship, and exculpating the crew and the country of Turkey. It’s a declaration that Israel considers its maritime domain to extend 200 nautical miles or more beyond its Mediterranean coastline. Within it, Israel claims the right to board, inspect, intercept and impound the cargo ships of other nations at will–a unilateral Mediterranean Monroe Doctrine of sorts.

One of the reasons that forcible boarding and seizure of  the Mavi Marmara — the lead ship in the flotilla that attempted to break the Israeli blockade of Gaza Strip last May to deliver humanitarian aid — was so controversial because Israeli naval commandos had raided the convoy when its ships were  40 miles out at sea, in international waters. In a Washington Post article by Colum Lynch last June, Mark Regev, a spokesman for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, cited the San Remo Manual on International Law Applicable to Armed Conflict at Sea in support of Israel’s right to enforce its blockade of Gaza, and “to intercept even on the high seas, even in international waters.”

Anthony D’Amato, a professor of International Law at Northwestern University School of Law disagreed, challenging Regev’s interpretation and declaring the raid on the Gaza flotilla an illegal challenge to the principle of “freedom of the seas.” D’Amato said the laws of war between states didn’t apply between Israel and Hamas, which is not even a state. Phyllis Bennis, of the Institute for Policy Studies, noted that  “Israel is now claiming a new international law, invented just for this purpose: the preventive ‘right’ to capture any naval vessel in international waters if the ship was about to violate a blockade.”

The interdiction of the Victoria takes this claim even further. Israel is now testing its right to seize a cargo vessel of a neutral country 200 miles off its coastline, whose destination (Egypt) is not subject to Israel’s blockade. It claims this right on grounds that the ship’s cargo is weapons that might eventually be smuggled into Gaza. It’s particularly helpful if Israel can demonstrate that Iran is behind the arms shipment, since UN Security Council Resolution 1747 prohibits Iran from supplying, selling or transferring arms to other states. While Israel generally takes a dim view of UN resolutions that apply to itself, it takes UN resolutions against Iran far more seriously, having just announced it will file a complaint with the UNSC about the Victoria’s clandestine cargo.

In the process, Israel can claim it is doing the world a favor by helping to enforce a UN resolution.

The initial IDF announcement of the seizure of the Victoria and its cargo didn’t mention Iran, but the identification of Iran as the source of the cache of weapons quickly became the focus of subsequent Israeli news releases and press reports. Military spokesman Brig. Gen. Avi Benayahu offered a teaser when he told Israeli Army Radio that Syria’s fingerprints were all over the shipment, predicting Israel will “find more evidence of the Iran, Syria, Hezbollah axis.”

Shortly afterwards, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared, “We are currently collecting information and the one thing that is certain is that the weapons are from Iran with a relay station in Syria.”

The evidence?

Rear Admiral Rani Ben Yehuda initially hinted that it might be more than coincidental that the Syrian weapons shipment had occurred shortly after two Iranian vessels had transited the Suez Canal en route to Syria in late February:

Just days before the cargo was loaded aboard the ship, two Iranian warships crossed the Suez Canal for the first time since the 1979 revolution. Ben-Yehuda said that he did not know if the Iranian ships brought the weaponry that was loaded onto the Victoria but that the timing raises serious questions.

“This needs to be considered,” he said.

So let’s consider it: Two Iranian warships transited the Suez Canal, for the first time in 32 years, on February 22. The Israeli Deputy Naval Commander suggests that, bypassing the Sinai peninsula, the ships transported Iranian arms to Syria. Those arms were to be shipped back to northern Egypt, past an Israeli naval blockade in the Mediterranean, so they could be smuggled into Gaza. Then the ships sailed back in early March, passing the Sinai coast and again transiting the Suez Canal. Hmmm….Sounds more like “the gang that couldn’t shoot straight” than “the most dangerous nation on earth.”

Among the weapons reportedly found aboard the Victoria were C-704  anti-ship missiles. Ben-Yehuda initially said,“The missile is made in China and it is in the possession of the Iranians, and this adds to suspicions that it came from Iran.” The Jerusalem Post‘s newly re-headlined piece, “Navy Intercepts Iranian Weapons Bound for Hamas“, on Wednesday stated that among the weapons were C-740s with “Nasr 1 written on them,” noting that “Nasr is what Iran calls the missile.” Although Iran opened a factory last spring to mass produce Nasr-1 missiles, which are identical to the Chinese C-704s, it wasn’t until Thursday morning that Adm. Eliezer Marom stated that the C-704s had been made in Iran.

But on Wednesday, Ben Yehuda was still basing the claim of Iranian responsibility for the arms shipment on the accompanying how-to manuals, which were written in Persian:

…guidebooks in Farsi had been found on the ship, along with other symbols of the Army of the Guardians of the Islamic Revolution, another indication that the Victoria was an Iranian attempt to shift the order of power in the Middle East.

Exactly what use Arabic-speaking Gazans would have had for Persian language manuals is unclear. Farsi is written in Arabic characters, but is otherwise unintelligible to a reader who only knows Arabic.

The IDF also asserted that “the identification document for the anti-ship missiles was in Persian and contained emblems of the Iranian government throughout…This incident further demonstrates Iranian and Syrian involvement in strengthening and arming terror organizations in the Gaza Strip and elsewhere.” Again, if true, not very smart!

Foreign correspondents invited by the IDF to view Victoria’s secret” cargo Wednesday morning were apparently unimpressed, especially after being held up at a security checkpoint for over an hour before being allowed to view the Victoria’s clandestine cargo. According to Y-Net, 30 reporters and photographers “left the Ashdod Port outraged.”

Is Iran involved in arms smuggling? It’s quite possible that it  is. But like the previous interceptions of the Francop and the Karine A, the Victoria interception coincides with pressure on Israel to move forward in making peace with the Palestinians by creating a Palestinian state. All three interception narratives attest to Israeli determination to keep its tensions with Iran front and center on the stage of world events, regardless of what else is happening, in order to explain why peace with the Palestinians can’t and won’t happen.

But the ho-hum quality of the interception narratives, and the yawns they are beginning to elicit, should not be allowed to distract from Israel’s increasingly radical reinterpretations of international law, which it justifies with the specter of “the Iranian threat.” That’s Victoria’s real secret.