This weekend brought news of the latest set of inflammatory comments by Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, spiritual leader of Shas — the ultra-Orthodox party that is currently the fourth largest party in Israel’s Knesset. Yosef — whose previous statements regarding Arabs and Gentiles have drawn similar controversy — said [...]]]> via Lobe Log

This weekend brought news of the latest set of inflammatory comments by Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, spiritual leader of Shas — the ultra-Orthodox party that is currently the fourth largest party in Israel’s Knesset. Yosef — whose previous statements regarding Arabs and Gentiles have drawn similar controversy — said the following during his sermon on Saturday, according to the Jerusalem Post:

“When we make the blessing on the dates that ‘our enemies and haters should be ended’ we should have in mind the Iranian regime, those evil people who threaten Israel,” the rabbi said.

“Do good, God, wipe them out, kill them,” he entreated, to which the assembled crowd answered “amen.”

“When eating the leek,” also traditionally eaten as part of the symbolic service for a good coming year, “and when we say that our enemies, foes and anyone who desires to do evil to us should be cut off, we should have in mind Hezbollah and Iran,” Yosef said.

“Destroy them God, obliterate them from the face of the earth,” he said… [emphasis added]

At +972, Ami Kaufman has more on the political implications of Yosef’s statement. Shas’s political leader, Interior Minister Eli Yishai, had been considered one of several members of Benjamin Netanyahu’s cabinet who are skeptical of an attack on Iran, but the Netanyahu government has been wooing Yosef to try to bring Shas (and thus Yishai) over into the war hawk camp. Last week, Yosef received a briefing on the Iran issue from Yaakov Amidror, head of Netanyahu’s National Security Council. The Shas leader’s recent comments may be a sign that he and his party have been persuaded to support an attack on Iran.

As for the comments themselves, I suspect that few will dispute the grotesqueness of Yosef’s call to “obliterate them [Iran and Hezbollah] from the face of the earth.” It’s worth noting that this is not the first time that Yosef has appeared to call for genocide: in 2001 he was quoted as saying of Arabs that ”it is forbidden to be merciful to them. You must send missiles to them and annihilate them. They are evil and damnable.”

As he did in 2001, Yosef’s supporters are arguing that his comments are being misinterpreted — that he is simply arguing for the obliteration of the Iranian regime, not Iran itself. Such a distinction provides scant consolation to Iranian civilians, large numbers of whom would most likely be killed in any attack on Iran.

More to the point, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad similarly specified that he was talking about the “occupying regime” when he made his notorious comments suggesting that Israel must “vanish from the pages of time” — the phrase more frequently, albeit inaccurately, translated as “wiped off the map”. Of course, few Israelis felt greatly comforted by this qualification, for understandable reasons.

As I wrote several years ago during the Netanyahu “Amalek” controversy, it’s striking how differently the Western media treat these sorts of comments when they come from Israelis as opposed to Iranians. If a prominent Iranian cleric made similar statements to Yosef’s, they would be held up in the press as evidence of the regime’s genocidal fanaticism. When Yosef does it, suddenly pundits feel comfortable invoking context to explain away what on any reading is a call for blood.

Ori Nir, at Americans for Peace Now, has a good analysis of Maj. Gen. Yaakov Amidror, who is apparently Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu’s new national security adviser. Replacing another ultra-hawk, Uzi Arad, Amidror seems to be a big-time hawk on [...]]]> It’s hard to know for sure, but he certainly doesn’t keep pleasant company.

Ori Nir, at Americans for Peace Now, has a good analysis of Maj. Gen. Yaakov Amidror, who is apparently Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu’s new national security adviser. Replacing another ultra-hawk, Uzi Arad, Amidror seems to be a big-time hawk on Palestinian issues. But what about Iran?

In Israel, Noam Sheizaf has been addressing this question with a deft touch — there is a split right now in the Israeli security establishment. Sheizaf long ago exploded Jeffrey Goldberg‘s notion of a “consensus,” but the combination of upheaval both in the region and in Bibi’s cabinet are forcing constant re-evaluation.

I saw Amidror speak in December at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies’ conference on Iran. The hard-line neocon think tank put the aged and bearded reservist general on its ‘bomb Iran’ panel, moderated by FDD honcho Cliff May. The panel featured Goldberg, the disingenuous Reuel Marc Gerecht, and Ken Pollack, the lone dissenter from the notion that a military strike in Iran could achieve any of its ostensible aims. As you can imagine, the panel was a lot of laughs (literally: the transcript lists 28 breaks for “LAUGHTER”).

At the FDD conference, Amidror’s stance on Iran basically boiled down to this: ‘Attacking Iran is a last resort that we will almost definitely have to use, so we are getting ready.’ Here’s his key comments, with my emphasis:

I believe that attacking Iran is a very bad situation, but there is something worse, that Iran will have a nuclear capability.

But we are not running to attack Iran. We want to postpone it as much as possible because we want to give the world, the Americans, everyone who is ready to help, to stop Iran without using military forces.

So it – it is not just an option. We prepare all of this very thoroughly, investing a lot of it, but we are not running to use it and we hope that someone will find another solution.

If you ask me as an expert for assessment that what I did 25 years, what is my assessment, my assessment is it is almost impossible to stop Iran without military force, but we should not run to use it before we be sure 100 percent and more that there is no other alternative.

It seems that, while Amidror pays lip service to the “last resort” of an attack, he is already gearing up to do it.

Amidror seems to have a ridiculously flawed understanding of the concept of “deterrence.” He thinks the Lebanon War in 2006 was a good example of Israel establishing such a deterrence. But, you know, that’s kind of funny, because deterrence is only a useful concept until force is unleashed — Damocles kept his head, after all. Nonetheless, here’s Amidror:

Deterrence includes two elements: the first is the determination to use your capability and the second is to have this capability. I think it was very important that Israel made the decision to go to war and sustained the war for more than a month, despite extensive Hizballah rocket attacks across northern Israel.

The determination of Israel’s government to respond and to retaliate is a very important factor in restoring deterrence. …As a small country, we cannot allow ourselves the luxury of reacting proportionally. Israel’s military action sent a very important message to the people around us.

I wonder what the Israeli hawks and neocon allies would say if you asked them today: “Why are you so worried about the Muslim Brotherhood?” Don’t they remember Lebanon 2006? (I’m sure that they would answer with something akin to the five-year-version of the Ledeen Doctrine.)

Nir has a primer on Amidror’s politics:

Amidror is associated with the ultra-right national-religions party “The Jewish Home.” In 2008, he headed a commission tasked with composing the party’s list for the general elections. The party, which is dominated by former National Religious Party (NRP) politicians, supports a “greater Israel” ideology and is considered the most authentic political representative of the ideological messianic settlers in the West Bank.

He adds that Amidror’s most recent opinion article is headlined: “Security is Preferable to Peace,” as if one has nothing to do with the other.

All of this is no surprise: Amidror is a such a close ally of the religious settler movement that he spoke at a 2006 event supporting one such settlement, Beit El, and its chief accomplishment: the Arutz Sheva conspiracy website. Also speaking at the event was then-Arutz Sheva personality Alex Traiman, a Beit El resident. Traiman wrote and directed Clarion Fund‘s latest propaganda film, “Iranium,” which aims to raise public support for attacking Iran.

So let’s see: Yaakov Amidror is in bed with the uber-hawks at FDD and with the religious settlers at Clarion who are all pushing hard (in concert) for an attack on Iran, and he thinks that a good deterrence policy is to attack. This does not bode well. I’ll toss this to Sheizaf for his informed thoughts…