Why is Israel spying on US?

Back to Opinions Page

 At first glance, Israel seemed believable when it declared that it has abandoned for good spying about the United States after the mid-eighties scandal of Jonathan Jay Pollard, the American navy intelligence analyst who confessed to spying for Israel and is now serving a life sentence.

After all, Israel's relationship with the United States nowadays could not be any better. Ariel Sharon has visited President George W. Bush nine times, more than any other head of foreign government, cementing a close relationship and earning an unbelievable title for the Israeli prime minister, "a man of peace". Sharon's policies, even when they contradict an American-co-sponsored "road map" for a Palestinian-Israeli settlement as when he was given the green light to build more housing units at Israeli colonies in the West Bank, were unresistantly endorsed by the Bush administration.

Israel and the Bush administration almost see eye-to-eye on major developments in the Middle East: Iraq, the threat of terrorism, Iran's nuclear objectives and Syrian policies in the region.

Moreover, Israel enjoys greater influence here thanks to the achievements of many in the American Jewish community who are very active in their support of Israel. Take for example the case of the 59-year-old Egyptian-born Jew, Haim Saban, who came here in the early eighties after living in Israel and France. He was described by The New York Times last Sunday as one of America's "richest and most improbable media magnates". More significantly, Saban has become "one of the largest individual donors in the country to the Democratic Party and its candidates giving millions over the past decade $7 million in just one donation to the Democratic National Committee in 2002."

Saban recently hosted Democratic presidential candidate Senator John Kerry at his chateau-style home in Beverly Hills, and the paper reported in a major article that "he regularly spends hours at a time on the phone with Ariel Sharon (and) he vacations with Bill Clinton," the former president. The paper said that Saban, who had pledged $13 million to the Brookings Institution to establish the Saban Centre for Middle East Policy run by former Ambassador Martin Indyk, spends "hours every week drumming up support for a variety of charitable causes and, especially, for Israel, sponsoring lunches and dinners at his home and around the country to raise money for candidates who he believes will support his cause."

Most important

But the most important supporters for Israel has been the cabal of prominent neo-conservatives embedded in the Bush administration, particularly at the White House and the Defense Department where Lawrence Franklin, a Pentagon desk officer, has reportedly passed a secret draft policy document on Iran to officials of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, AIPAC, the influential pro-Israel lobby group, who in turn handed them to Israel. (The chief political officer at the Israeli embassy, Naor Gilon, has been under FBI surveillance as well.) The document, according to news accounts, has advocated support for Iranian dissidents, radio broadcasts into Iran and other efforts aimed at destabilizing the regime in Tehran.

But why would Israel, considering its good ties to the Bush administration and the support of prominent members of the American Jewish community as well as senior officials of the administration, would want to spy on the United States?

Interestingly, an Israeli cabinet minister, Natan Sharansky, may have inadvertently hit the nail on the head but not as he has described it an internal conflict between the Pentagon and the Central Intelligence Agency. Rather, the conflict is believed to be between the Defense Department and the State Department - the two have been at loggerheads for some time, especially over Iraq - which does not favor a head-on clash with Iran over its ambitious nuclear program, much as the neo-conservatives would like to be the case in the manner of Iraq. Israel is undoubtedly very eager to know where the administration is heading once it exhausts its diplomatic wrangling with Iran over this sensitive and dangerous issue and obviously would want to steer the discussion towards its own confrontationist line.

Whatever the two-year-old FBI investigation reveals, the image of Israel has once again been tarnished; and President Bush, fighting desperately for a second term at the White House, may find himself at a disadvantage explaining the scandal engineered by his neo-conservative friends at the Pentagon - Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith (in whose office Franklin works) and David Wurmser, an adviser to Vice President Dick Cheney, all of them Jews.

In the past, President Bush was effusive in his praise of AIPAC. Last May at its policy conference, he praised AIPAC for "serving the cause of America" and for highlighting the nuclear threat from Iran.

In fact, Fortune magazine ranks AIPAC forth on its list of Washington's 25 most powerful lobbying groups ahead of such organizations as the AFL-CIO, the labor union, and the American Medical Association.