America's greatest adversary is not Iran, Islamic terrorism, or even Russia. It is China, and Israel is on the wrong side of those battle lines.
By YAAKOV KATZ AUGUST 13, 2021 14:10Email Twitter Facebook fb-messenger
Naftali Bennett during a visit to China in 2014 when he served as Israel’s minister of economy. (photo credit: Courtesy)
Naftali Bennett during a visit to China in 2014 when he served as Israel’s minister of economy.
(photo credit: Courtesy)
When Prime Minister Naftali Bennett flies to Washington in the coming weeks – a final date has not yet been set – he will meet a president who is riding high and ready to face off against America’s greatest adversary.
That adversary is not Iran, Islamic terrorism in the Middle East, or even Vladimir Putin’s Russia. It is China, and Israel is on the wrong side of those battle lines.
Bennett should bear this in mind, because while he will be entering the Oval Office hoping to secure security commitments on Iran and Syria, President Joe Biden and his senior staff are looking for Israel to cut back on its relationship with China. They will be happy to talk about Iran, the Palestinians, and retaining the IDF’s qualitative military edge, but they also want secure commitments about China.
“We need to wake up,” one top government official said this week.
That is the prism through which one should view the $1 trillion infrastructure bill that Biden pushed through the Senate this week. Yes, it will upgrade America’s deteriorating roads and bridges and fund new broadband initiatives; but it will also help the US remain in competition with China, which has been beating the West’s investments in infrastructure for years. As Biden warned a group of senators in February about Beijing: “If we don’t get moving, they are going to eat our lunch.”
While some see Biden just continuing Donald Trump’s anti-China policy, the new president seems to be led by a clear strategy and not just statements. He is working to undermine Beijing on multiple fronts – sanctions, advisories against doing business in Hong Kong, and openly accusing China’s Ministry of State Security of launching cyberattacks against the West.
Israel received a taste of that cyber threat this week when the international cybersecurity company FireEye announced that China had hacked dozens of public and private Israeli tech and infrastructure companies as part of a plan to steal technology and information.
This is the same China that has been eating Israel’s infrastructure for the last decade. Ports, power stations, bridges, tunnels and more have all been built by China. All indications are that Biden will bring this up with Bennett when the two meet. Some in Israel’s government have recommended convening the security cabinet to discuss the issue. It is that important.
While Trump officials tried to move the previous government to crack down on Chinese investments in Israel, former prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu did not do much except buy time, with the establishment of a weak oversight mechanism in 2019 that officials admit is impotent. The Americans have noticed too, and want to see tougher action.
Which brings us to the delay in announcing which construction companies won the tender to build the Tel Aviv light rail’s new Green and Purple Lines. NTA, the government-funded company responsible for the design and construction of the transit system – which is run by former Prisons Service officer Haim Glick – has been dragging its feet in making a final decision.
(Officially, NTA Spokesman Avi First claimed on Thursday that the company was waiting for the Finance Ministry to allow it to open the envelopes. Asked about the claim, Finance Ministry Spokesperson Lilach Weissman, who represents Dir.-Gen. Ram Belinkov who also serves as the chairman of NTA, refused to respond).
The delay in announcing the winner makes diplomatic sense for Israel, if the tender has been won by the China Railway Construction Company (CRCC), a member of one of the groups competing for the multi-billion-dollar deal.
CRCC is well-known in Israel, and has worked here for years. One of its subsidiaries, the China Civil Engineering Construction Corp (CCECC), dug the Gilon Tunnel in the North in 2014 at a cost of about $200m, worked as a subcontractor on the Carmel Tunnel project for about $150m. in 2010, and for the last couple of years has been working on the Tel Aviv light rail’s Red Line to the tune of $500m.
Biden issued an executive order in June banning these companies from receiving any US investment, due to suspected ties to the Chinese defense industry. So Americans cannot do business with the CRCC, but Israel seems to think that it can.
The winner of the tender was originally scheduled to be announced in June. Some industry experts have speculated that Bennett wants to delay the announcement until after his meeting with Biden.
If that is his strategy, the prime minister might want to rethink it. Yes, once the tender winner is announced it is almost impossible to annul the decision. But Bennett would be wise to avoid the NTA announcing that CRCC has won the tender just a few weeks after he returns from giving assurances in Washington that he will cut back Israel’s ties with China. That will only cause Israel greater trouble.
Whatever the case, Israel needs to tread carefully in the years to come. America is going up against China with all of its economic prowess. Israel won’t be able to say that it didn’t know.
=======================================================================================================================
Bennett should beware of CIA director William Burns - opinion
Bennett would do well to view Burns’s trip this week to Israel and the Palestinian Authority with wariness.
By RUTHIE BLUM AUGUST 12, 2021 22:22Email Twitter Facebook fb-messenger
CIA director William Burns meeting with Defense Minister Benny Gantz, August 11, 2021. (photo credit: DEFENSE MINISTRY)
CIA director William Burns meeting with Defense Minister Benny Gantz, August 11, 2021.
(photo credit: DEFENSE MINISTRY)
In a tweet on Wednesday, Prime Minister Naftali Bennett announced that he had emerged from a productive meeting with CIA director William Burns.
“We discussed the strengthening of intelligence and security cooperation between Israel and the United States, the situation in the Middle East, the emphasis on Iran and the possibilities for expanding and deepening regional cooperation. We will continue to cooperate with our closest friend,” Bennett wrote, signing off with an icon of an American flag next to an Israeli one.
Obligatory positive pronouncements aside, Bennett would do well to view Burns’s trip this week to Israel and the Palestinian Authority with wariness.
“The visit shows that the Biden administration is serious about restoring Washington’s relations with the Palestinians and strengthening the Palestinian leadership under President Mahmoud Abbas,” a PA official told The Jerusalem Post’s Khaled Abu Toameh on Tuesday.
Noting the CIA chief’s scheduled rendezvous with Abbas and PA General Intelligence Service head Majed Faraj, the official pointed to the PA’s “sharp financial crisis” that requires “urgent [US] aid,” without which “Hamas will come to power in the West Bank.”
If Israel had a shekel for every time the PA whined to the West about its victimhood, the Jewish state’s coffers would be overflowing. In case the most recent example of this incredible chutzpah has escaped attention, a review of the events leading up to Operation Guardian of the Walls is in order.
AWARE THAT he was certain to lose to Hamas in the PA elections slated for the end of May, Abbas resorted to his default position. Accusing Israel of forbidding the Arab residents of east Jerusalem to participate, he canceled the vote a month before it was supposed to take place.
In an attempt to save face and quell anger against him on the Palestinian street, he turned to his usual stunt of manufacturing a clash with Israel by declaring that Jews were about to storm and destroy al-Aqsa Mosque on the Temple Mount. He also took advantage of the controversy over the eviction of six Palestinian families squatting in Jewish-owned apartments in the Jerusalem neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah to fan existing embers.
Jerusalem Day, Israel’s celebration of the anniversary of its victory in the 1967 Six-Day War, provided an even better excuse for him to ramp up violent rhetoric and incite riots in the Israeli capital and other locations around the country. His campaign – the main goal of which was to show Palestinians that he and his Fatah faction were just as bent as Hamas on annihilating the Jewish state – was successful. Arab Israelis spent weeks assaulting their Jewish neighbors with fists, rocks and Molotov cocktails, in addition to setting cars alight and burning down synagogues.
Meanwhile, Hamas was playing the same game, drastically stepping up incendiary balloon and rocket attacks against Israelis. When the bloodthirsty group sent a barrage of rockets over Jerusalem on May 10, Israel launched its 11-day operation to target terrorists and infrastructure in Gaza.
By the end of the mini-war, Hamas and Islamic Jihad had fired more than 4,000 rockets into southern and central Israel, forcing innocent civilians to run for cover at the sound of every air raid siren.
When it was over, much of Gaza was left in rubble. Hamas nevertheless declared victory over the “Zionists,” and Abbas was still happily at the helm in Ramallah.
None of the above is how the PA chairman describes the situation to American envoys, of course. Despite making good on his repeated vow to continue his “pay for slay” policy to encourage and fund Jew-killing “martyrs,” he knows how to employ euphemism to paint a different picture. Not that it matters so much these days, with a friendly White House and State Department eager to hear and buy his lies.
WHICH BRINGS us to Burns. He’s not the first US official, from either party, to hold fast to the false notion that Abbas and Fatah are “moderates.” Nor can one entirely fault him for that, when many Israeli politicians have taken and still cling to that very position.
The justification for this, if any exists, is that Hamas – like the Lebanon-based terrorist organization Hezbollah – is backed by the mullah-led regime in Tehran. Newly instated Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi said as much this week. Embracing representatives from both groups, all given prominent seats at his swearing-in ceremony, he vowed to continue to provide them with all the support they need.
The key word here is “continue.” Indeed, Raisi’s predecessor, Hassan Rouhani, may have been a pragmatist, but he never was a moderate, despite Western wishes to see him as such.
Nor can any Iranian president govern without answering to Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, whose Islamist aim of global hegemony has not wavered. For him, Hamas and Hezbollah are crucial pawns in carrying out this objective.
Rather than weakening the resolve of US President Joe Biden and his appointees to return to the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), or some “improved” version of the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, Raisi’s reputation as the “butcher of Tehran” has enhanced it. If anything, Team Biden is hotter than ever to trot back to “indirect” talks in Vienna.
The ostensible logic behind this display of Western self-degradation is that without an agreement, Iran’s race to obtain nuclear weapons and bolster its ballistic-missile capabilities will proceed without “transparency.”
It would be funny if it weren’t so sad that Burns, who heads his country’s top intelligence agency, needs Iranian compliance with inspectors to know what’s going on at Iranian nuclear facilities. He ought to take lessons from Israel’s Mossad, whose agents infiltrated a warehouse in Tehran in 2018 and snatched a massive trove of documents detailing the Islamic Republic’s nuclear blueprints.
It was on the basis of the stolen archive that former US president Donald Trump withdrew from the JCPOA when he did. But the Biden administration, along with its appeasement-addicted European counterparts, is more interested in fiction than fact.
BURNS CERTAINLY belongs in that category. Before assuming his current role, he served as president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a left-wing think tank funded partly by the George Soros-established Open Society Foundations. A long-time career diplomat, he is the author of the 2019 book, The Back Channel: A Memoir of American Diplomacy and the Case for Its Renewal.
In other words, he’s not exactly the type to run covert espionage operations – being too busy sucking up to his country’s enemies to spy on them and all.
As it happens, his diplomatic acumen also leaves a lot to be desired.
In an op-ed in The Washington Post in May 2019, Burns exhibited a killer combination of ignorance about the Middle East and lack of vision about the plan that would lead to the signing of the Abraham Accords a mere year and a quarter later.
“In keeping with his disdain for conventional wisdom and his bent for disruption, Trump might bury what is still the only viable plan of action for Israelis and Palestinians, without offering anything resembling a workable substitute,” Burns asserted, referring to the “deal of the century” that had yet to be unveiled.
He went on to say that though “neither Trump nor his son-in-law and chief negotiator, Jared Kushner, invented the steady decay of the two-state solution… [they] appear to be animated by a set of terminally flawed assumptions and illusions.”
The first of these, Burns claimed, “is that they can maneuver over and around Palestinians in negotiating a peace deal. The administration has effectively abandoned dialogue with the Palestinian leadership… embracing instead the agenda of the Israeli right.”
According to Burns, “That can be seen in moving the US Embassy to Jerusalem; closing the East Jerusalem consulate charged with engaging Palestinians; sharply reducing lifesaving assistance programs; condoning settlement expansion; recognizing Israel’s sovereignty over the Golan Heights and hinting that the administration is prepared to do the same in the West Bank.”
Never mind that these moves were in the interest of America, as well as Israel. The refusal of the Left to acknowledge the evil of the PA is as old as its mantra about a “two-state solution” that Abbas never wanted in the first place.
Burns didn’t have anything original to contribute to the already humdrum discussion. He did manage, though, to highlight a stance that proved to be completely mistaken.
“It is tempting to think that shared animus toward Iran and Sunni Arab terrorists would give some Arab states an interest in working with the [Benjamin Netanyhau-led] government and the Trump administration to muzzle Palestinian political aspirations,” he stated smugly. “The growing intersection of interests between Israel and Arab states is a good thing, and a long-standing objective of US policy. But it is not a substitute for Israelis and Palestinians dealing directly with one another. Whatever the leaders of Arab states might whisper in private, there is zero chance that they would offer serious support for any peace plan that does not include a credible path to Palestinian statehood.”
In conclusion, he maintained that the “illusions of the ‘deal of the century’ seem only partly born of arrogance and the magical properties of fresh thinking. There is also an element that is purposeful and willful, apparently designed to make it impossible to resurrect hopes for two states for two peoples.”
ONE MIGHT possibly forgive Burns for not having believed that peace deals would soon be busting out all over the region, thanks to Trump, Netanyahu and the rulers of the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Sudan and Morocco.
He cannot be excused, however, for his failure to see through Abbas’s ploy: pretending to strive for statehood as a way of remaining relevant—and rich—both at home and abroad.
Bennett used to know this about Abbas and the apologists, Burns among them, who’ve been keeping the suit-and-tie-clad terrorist in business for decades. The Israeli public must not allow the members of the nascent coalition to cause him to forget that “cooperation” is Biden-administration code for pressuring Israel to make dangerous, nonreciprocal concessions.
