From Homeland Security NewsWire:
The brief // by Ben Frankel
The past as prologue: The Galant affair
Published 18 February 2011
On Monday, General Benny Ganz replaced General Gabi Ashkenazi as the IDF chief of staff; in the four months leading to Ganz's appointment Israel witnessed a bitter fight over the government's preferred candidate, General Yoav Galant; pragmatists in the higher echelons of Israel national security establishment resolved to do all they can to prevent Galant, a hawk's hawk, from becoming chief of staff; the pragmatists' main worry: the moderate Ashkenazi served as a break on the government's more hawkish tendencies, and they were afraid that Galant would only reinforce these tendencies, leading to an unnecessary attack on Iran; the pragmatists succeeded, and Galant's nomination was killed, but it now appears that the more moderate elements in Israel's defense establishment took extreme measures -- including forging documents -- to achieve their goal
There are two on-going developments in the Middle East that should keep us focused on the region. The first is the popular uprising which is spreading throughout the Arab world. The second is Iran’s continuing nuclear activities.
At least on the second of these issues we may now relax a bit. We may do so not because Iran has stopped doing what it has been doing for more than two decades now, but because it appears that Israel is not on the verge of attacking Iran’s nuclear facilities militarily, with all that such an attack would entail for the region and for the world’s oil supplies.
Why is it that we say that Israel may decide to take its time when it come to a military strike on Iran? Because this past Monday a tense, taut drama at the top of Israel’s national security establishment came to an end, with the more pragmatic elements in that establishment having won a major victory over the more hawkish elements.
Better to understand the background of the bitter struggle in the Israeli leadership, I offer a short discussion of Allen Drury’s novel, Advise and Consent, to show that moderate, liberal, peace-loving people can engage in underhanded tactics to achieve their goals, and of the first five years of the Begin government (1977-82), to show what happens when dissenting voices disappear from decision-making circles.
1. Advise and consent
Moderate, liberal, peace-loving people can do dastardly things to advance the cause in which they believe. Here is an example: Allen Drury’s 1959 novel, Advise and Consent.
The novel’s plot:
The president of the United States wants to name a new Secretary of State in an effort to improve relations with the Soviet Union. His nominee is Robert Leffingwell, the darling of the liberal media, establishment, and academia. Leffingwell, however, is viewed as an appeaser of the Soviet Union by many of the more conservative senators who must vote on his nomination, while others have serious doubts about his character due to past performances before Senatorial committees
Senator Brigham Anderson of Utah, a conservative, is chair of the subcommittee holding the nomination hearings. He refuses to send the nomination to the full Foreign Relations Committee, enraging the president and the liberal senators supporting Leffingwell’s nomination.
One of the leaders of the liberal wing in the Senate is Senator Fred Van Ackerman of Wyoming, who heads the Committee on Making Further Offers for a Russian
Truce (COMFORT). He bitterly despises Anderson because of the senatorial respect and prestige Anderson enjoys and for Anderson’s conservative views.
With the nomination at an impasse, Van Ackerman receives an anonymous tip that Anderson, while serving in Hawaii during the Second World War, had a homosexual affair with a fellow soldier. That former solider, now living in New York, provides Van Ackerman with a few letters he and Anderson had exchanged during the war, giving a clear indication of the nature of their relationship.
Van Ackerman and his liberal COMFORT allies begin a whispering campaign about Senator Anderson. Van Ackerman, using the letters, then tries to blackmail Anderson into forwarding the nomination to the full committee.
Anderson, his past secret about to be exposed, commits suicide in his office. After his death, the Senate unanimously censures Van Ackerman for contributing to Senator Anderson’s death; after the vote, Van Ackerman leaves town for an “extended vacation,” his standing in the Senate all but gone.
2. The past
The pragmatists:
•Moshe Dayan (b. 1915) — foreign minister, 31 May 1977 - 23 October 1979
•Eser Weizman (b. 1924) — defense minister, 31 May 1977 - 25 May 1980
The hawks:
•Menachem Begin (b. 1913) — prime minister, 31 May 1977 - 15 September 1983
•Rafael Eytan (b. 1929) — IDF chief of staff, 16 April 1978 - 7 April 1983
•Ariel Sharon (b. 1928), minister of defense, 30 June 1981 - 14 February 1983
•Yitzhak Shamir (b. 1915), foreign minister, 10 March 1980 - 10 October 1983
Menachem Begin and his right-wing Likud Party came to power in Israel in May 1977, after twenty-nine years of Labor rule. To give his government a more moderate image, Begin appointed a Labor defector, General (ret.) Moshe Dayan, as foreign minister, and General (Ret.) Ezer Weizman, a former hawk but now a pragmatist, as defense minister.
Following the November 1977 visit by Anwar Sadat to Israel, the two countries signed a peace agreement requiring Israel to vacate the Sinai Peninsula and take concrete measures to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian issue.
Israel fulfilled the first part of the agreement, but in the view of Dayan and Weizman, Begin was dragging his feet on the second part of the agreement, thus not only prolonging the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but also making it impossible for Israel to use the Israel-Egypt peace agreement as a platform for improving Israel’s relations with other Arab countries.
Frustrated, both Dayan and Weizman resigned from the government — Dayan in October
1979, Weizman in May 1980.
They were replaced by two unreconstructed hawks: Ytzhak Shamir became foreign minister in March 1980, and General (Ret.) Ariel Sharon became defense minister in June 1981.
Begin, who, between 1977 and 1980 was surrounded by pragmatists, now found himself surrounded by ultra-hawks (the moderate chief of staff, Mordechai Gur, was replaced by the hawkish Rafael Eytan in April 1978, in what Weizman later described as the biggest mistake of his public life).
Begin, himself a hawk, moved Israel to a more hawkish and militaristic course, resulting in the June 1982 invasion of Lebanon.
3. The present
The pragmatists:
•Gen. Gabi Ashkenazi (b. 1954) — IDF chief of staff, 14 February 2007 - 14 February 2011
•Gen. Benny Ganz (b. 1959) — IDF chief of staff, 14 February 2011 - present
•Gen. Gadi Eisenkot (b. 1960) — head of the Northern Command, September 2006 - present
•Gen. Amos Yadlin (b. 1951) — head of Military Intelligence, 5 January 2006 - 5 November 2010
•Yuval Diskin (b. 1956), head of Shin Bet (internal security), 5 May 2005 - 5 May 2011
•Meir Dagan (b. 1945), head of Mossad , 10 September 2002 - 6 January 2011
•Boaz Harpaz (b. 1966), served in Military Intelligence and rose to Lt. Col.; left MA under a cloud in 2004.
The hawks:
•Benjamin Netanyahu (b. 1949), prime minister, 31 March 2009 - present
•Ehud Barak (b. 1942), defense minister, 31 March 2009 - present
•Tamir Pardo (b. 1953) — head of Mossad, 6 January 2011 - present
•Gen. Yoav Galant (b. 1958), head of the Southern Command, 21 October 2005 - 21 October 2010
Israelis worry about Iran’s nuclear program, but they differ about two issues: how soon will Iran have the bomb, and what should Israel do about it.
Both hawks and pragmatists see the Iranian nuclear program as a problem for Israel, but the hawks see it as an immediate threat better dealt with militarily, while the pragmatists see the problem as emerging farther down the line, and they also believe that a combination of diplomacy, economic sanctions, and a covert campaign is a better approach than an military attack on Iran’s facilities.
The pragmatists are also more willing to make concessions to Syria and the Palestinians in order to achieve peace agreements with both.
As the list of the main actors in this drama shows, the hawkish Netanyahu and Barak were out-numbered by the pragmatists at the upper echelons of the Israeli security establishment.
Both felt, however, that time was
on their side: the leading pragmatists — Ashkenazi, Yadlin, Diskin, and Dagan — were coming to the end of their tenure, offering Barak and Netanyahu the opportunity of replacing them with more hawkish individuals.
The linchpin of their strategy was the appointment of General Yoav Galant, a hawk’s hawk, as Ashkenazi’s successor.
It now appears that the more pragmatic elements in the upper echelons of Israel decided that they should do everything they could to prevent a repeat of the early 1980s: they knew first-hand of Barak’s and Netanyahu’s hawkish approach to Iran. The last thing the pragmatists wanted was to have these two hawks surrounded by even more hawks.
The most important goal in this strategy was to prevent Galant from succeeding Ashkenazi. The pragmatists supported the candidacy of General Benny Ganz — and, short of that, floated the idea of keeping Ashkenazi in office for one more year.
Barak and Netanyahu would have none of it. The result was the Galant affair.
Here are the main facts as we know them:
— In early August 2010, Defense Minister Ehud Barak announced he was beginning the examination of candidates for the position of chief of IDF, from which General Ashkenazi would retire on 14 February 2011.
— On 6 August, Israeli TV revealed the existence of a document, written on the letterhead of the PR firm of Eyal Arad, which contained a detailed strategy for promoting one candidate — Genera Yoav Galant —and tarnishing the reputation of the current chief, General Ashkenazi and one of the leading candidates to replace him, General Benny Ganz.
— Arad said that he had nothing to do with the document, and that it was forged. He pointed out that it was written on a letterhead — and using a logo — which his PR firms had stopped using a few years ago.
— Galant and Barak, too, said they had nothing to do with the strategy document. Both claimed that the purpose of the forged document was to paint the two of them as conniving manipulators who resorted to dirty tricks to secure Galant’s appointment.
— The police opened an investigation to find put who was behind the document, and the legal adviser to the government instructed the government to suspend the process of examining candidates to replace Ashkenazi..
— On 23 August, Lt. Col. (Ret.) Boaz Harpaz, a close family friend of Ashkenazi,
was arrested by the police as the main suspect in producing the forged document.
— On 30 August General Ashkenazi, in a meeting of the IDF general staff, admitted that he had received the document at the end of April — more than three months before it became public.
— On 2 September, Barak spoke to the general staff, saying: “I’m worried about the attempt by serving and retired officers to stop and delay the process of appointing the next chief of staff, and to influence the results of the process in an illegitimate manner. The effort almost succeeded.”
— On 5 September the government approved Barka’s recommendation to appoint Galant as Ashkenazi’s successor.
— When the government, on 5 September, approved Galant’s candidacy to replace Ashkenazi, he was already facing another problem: a legal challenge, launched a few weeks earlier, over his use of public lands near his home in Amikam. The Green Movement, which launched the challenge, would not say how they learned of Galant’s real estate problems.
— On 1 February 2011, the legal adviser to the government submitted the findings of his investigation into Galant’s land issue to the government. The adviser, Yehuda Weinstein, harshly criticized Galant for his conduct.
— Later that evening, Barak and Netanyahu announced that Galnat’s appointment was cancelled.
— On 14 February, Ganz was sworn in as Ashkenazi’s replacement.
The police and the government’s auditor are still investigating the origins of the forged Galant document, and who was behind Harpaz’s forgery.
Pundits and commentators, though, have not waited for the results of these investigations to suggest — some more openly than others — that what Israel has experienced in the last four months was serious: it may not have been a putsch, but it was an effort by current and former military officers to prevent the elected leaders from choosing their preferred new chief of staff.
Commentators say that regardless of the motives of those who fought the Galant nomination, the fact that they would engage in such a brazen campaign was troubling.
We should wait for the investigation into the Galant document to conclude so we can see whether or not there was a Senator Fred Van Ackerman — or several Van Ackermans — in the higher echelons of the Israeli defense establishment.
It appears that we can now also wait — perhaps wait for a long time — before an Israeli military attack on Iran takes place. With Ganz at the helm, there will be someone in the decision making circles who, as was the case with Ashkenazi before him, would remind Barak and Netanyahu and other decision makers of the perils of a military action against Iran.
Stay tuned.
Ben Frankel is editor of the Homeland Security NewsWire
The brief // by Ben Frankel
The past as prologue: The Galant affair
Published 18 February 2011
On Monday, General Benny Ganz replaced General Gabi Ashkenazi as the IDF chief of staff; in the four months leading to Ganz's appointment Israel witnessed a bitter fight over the government's preferred candidate, General Yoav Galant; pragmatists in the higher echelons of Israel national security establishment resolved to do all they can to prevent Galant, a hawk's hawk, from becoming chief of staff; the pragmatists' main worry: the moderate Ashkenazi served as a break on the government's more hawkish tendencies, and they were afraid that Galant would only reinforce these tendencies, leading to an unnecessary attack on Iran; the pragmatists succeeded, and Galant's nomination was killed, but it now appears that the more moderate elements in Israel's defense establishment took extreme measures -- including forging documents -- to achieve their goal
There are two on-going developments in the Middle East that should keep us focused on the region. The first is the popular uprising which is spreading throughout the Arab world. The second is Iran’s continuing nuclear activities.
At least on the second of these issues we may now relax a bit. We may do so not because Iran has stopped doing what it has been doing for more than two decades now, but because it appears that Israel is not on the verge of attacking Iran’s nuclear facilities militarily, with all that such an attack would entail for the region and for the world’s oil supplies.
Why is it that we say that Israel may decide to take its time when it come to a military strike on Iran? Because this past Monday a tense, taut drama at the top of Israel’s national security establishment came to an end, with the more pragmatic elements in that establishment having won a major victory over the more hawkish elements.
Better to understand the background of the bitter struggle in the Israeli leadership, I offer a short discussion of Allen Drury’s novel, Advise and Consent, to show that moderate, liberal, peace-loving people can engage in underhanded tactics to achieve their goals, and of the first five years of the Begin government (1977-82), to show what happens when dissenting voices disappear from decision-making circles.
1. Advise and consent
Moderate, liberal, peace-loving people can do dastardly things to advance the cause in which they believe. Here is an example: Allen Drury’s 1959 novel, Advise and Consent.
The novel’s plot:
The president of the United States wants to name a new Secretary of State in an effort to improve relations with the Soviet Union. His nominee is Robert Leffingwell, the darling of the liberal media, establishment, and academia. Leffingwell, however, is viewed as an appeaser of the Soviet Union by many of the more conservative senators who must vote on his nomination, while others have serious doubts about his character due to past performances before Senatorial committees
Senator Brigham Anderson of Utah, a conservative, is chair of the subcommittee holding the nomination hearings. He refuses to send the nomination to the full Foreign Relations Committee, enraging the president and the liberal senators supporting Leffingwell’s nomination.
One of the leaders of the liberal wing in the Senate is Senator Fred Van Ackerman of Wyoming, who heads the Committee on Making Further Offers for a Russian
Truce (COMFORT). He bitterly despises Anderson because of the senatorial respect and prestige Anderson enjoys and for Anderson’s conservative views.
With the nomination at an impasse, Van Ackerman receives an anonymous tip that Anderson, while serving in Hawaii during the Second World War, had a homosexual affair with a fellow soldier. That former solider, now living in New York, provides Van Ackerman with a few letters he and Anderson had exchanged during the war, giving a clear indication of the nature of their relationship.
Van Ackerman and his liberal COMFORT allies begin a whispering campaign about Senator Anderson. Van Ackerman, using the letters, then tries to blackmail Anderson into forwarding the nomination to the full committee.
Anderson, his past secret about to be exposed, commits suicide in his office. After his death, the Senate unanimously censures Van Ackerman for contributing to Senator Anderson’s death; after the vote, Van Ackerman leaves town for an “extended vacation,” his standing in the Senate all but gone.
2. The past
The pragmatists:
•Moshe Dayan (b. 1915) — foreign minister, 31 May 1977 - 23 October 1979
•Eser Weizman (b. 1924) — defense minister, 31 May 1977 - 25 May 1980
The hawks:
•Menachem Begin (b. 1913) — prime minister, 31 May 1977 - 15 September 1983
•Rafael Eytan (b. 1929) — IDF chief of staff, 16 April 1978 - 7 April 1983
•Ariel Sharon (b. 1928), minister of defense, 30 June 1981 - 14 February 1983
•Yitzhak Shamir (b. 1915), foreign minister, 10 March 1980 - 10 October 1983
Menachem Begin and his right-wing Likud Party came to power in Israel in May 1977, after twenty-nine years of Labor rule. To give his government a more moderate image, Begin appointed a Labor defector, General (ret.) Moshe Dayan, as foreign minister, and General (Ret.) Ezer Weizman, a former hawk but now a pragmatist, as defense minister.
Following the November 1977 visit by Anwar Sadat to Israel, the two countries signed a peace agreement requiring Israel to vacate the Sinai Peninsula and take concrete measures to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian issue.
Israel fulfilled the first part of the agreement, but in the view of Dayan and Weizman, Begin was dragging his feet on the second part of the agreement, thus not only prolonging the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but also making it impossible for Israel to use the Israel-Egypt peace agreement as a platform for improving Israel’s relations with other Arab countries.
Frustrated, both Dayan and Weizman resigned from the government — Dayan in October
1979, Weizman in May 1980.
They were replaced by two unreconstructed hawks: Ytzhak Shamir became foreign minister in March 1980, and General (Ret.) Ariel Sharon became defense minister in June 1981.
Begin, who, between 1977 and 1980 was surrounded by pragmatists, now found himself surrounded by ultra-hawks (the moderate chief of staff, Mordechai Gur, was replaced by the hawkish Rafael Eytan in April 1978, in what Weizman later described as the biggest mistake of his public life).
Begin, himself a hawk, moved Israel to a more hawkish and militaristic course, resulting in the June 1982 invasion of Lebanon.
3. The present
The pragmatists:
•Gen. Gabi Ashkenazi (b. 1954) — IDF chief of staff, 14 February 2007 - 14 February 2011
•Gen. Benny Ganz (b. 1959) — IDF chief of staff, 14 February 2011 - present
•Gen. Gadi Eisenkot (b. 1960) — head of the Northern Command, September 2006 - present
•Gen. Amos Yadlin (b. 1951) — head of Military Intelligence, 5 January 2006 - 5 November 2010
•Yuval Diskin (b. 1956), head of Shin Bet (internal security), 5 May 2005 - 5 May 2011
•Meir Dagan (b. 1945), head of Mossad , 10 September 2002 - 6 January 2011
•Boaz Harpaz (b. 1966), served in Military Intelligence and rose to Lt. Col.; left MA under a cloud in 2004.
The hawks:
•Benjamin Netanyahu (b. 1949), prime minister, 31 March 2009 - present
•Ehud Barak (b. 1942), defense minister, 31 March 2009 - present
•Tamir Pardo (b. 1953) — head of Mossad, 6 January 2011 - present
•Gen. Yoav Galant (b. 1958), head of the Southern Command, 21 October 2005 - 21 October 2010
Israelis worry about Iran’s nuclear program, but they differ about two issues: how soon will Iran have the bomb, and what should Israel do about it.
Both hawks and pragmatists see the Iranian nuclear program as a problem for Israel, but the hawks see it as an immediate threat better dealt with militarily, while the pragmatists see the problem as emerging farther down the line, and they also believe that a combination of diplomacy, economic sanctions, and a covert campaign is a better approach than an military attack on Iran’s facilities.
The pragmatists are also more willing to make concessions to Syria and the Palestinians in order to achieve peace agreements with both.
As the list of the main actors in this drama shows, the hawkish Netanyahu and Barak were out-numbered by the pragmatists at the upper echelons of the Israeli security establishment.
Both felt, however, that time was
on their side: the leading pragmatists — Ashkenazi, Yadlin, Diskin, and Dagan — were coming to the end of their tenure, offering Barak and Netanyahu the opportunity of replacing them with more hawkish individuals.
The linchpin of their strategy was the appointment of General Yoav Galant, a hawk’s hawk, as Ashkenazi’s successor.
It now appears that the more pragmatic elements in the upper echelons of Israel decided that they should do everything they could to prevent a repeat of the early 1980s: they knew first-hand of Barak’s and Netanyahu’s hawkish approach to Iran. The last thing the pragmatists wanted was to have these two hawks surrounded by even more hawks.
The most important goal in this strategy was to prevent Galant from succeeding Ashkenazi. The pragmatists supported the candidacy of General Benny Ganz — and, short of that, floated the idea of keeping Ashkenazi in office for one more year.
Barak and Netanyahu would have none of it. The result was the Galant affair.
Here are the main facts as we know them:
— In early August 2010, Defense Minister Ehud Barak announced he was beginning the examination of candidates for the position of chief of IDF, from which General Ashkenazi would retire on 14 February 2011.
— On 6 August, Israeli TV revealed the existence of a document, written on the letterhead of the PR firm of Eyal Arad, which contained a detailed strategy for promoting one candidate — Genera Yoav Galant —and tarnishing the reputation of the current chief, General Ashkenazi and one of the leading candidates to replace him, General Benny Ganz.
— Arad said that he had nothing to do with the document, and that it was forged. He pointed out that it was written on a letterhead — and using a logo — which his PR firms had stopped using a few years ago.
— Galant and Barak, too, said they had nothing to do with the strategy document. Both claimed that the purpose of the forged document was to paint the two of them as conniving manipulators who resorted to dirty tricks to secure Galant’s appointment.
— The police opened an investigation to find put who was behind the document, and the legal adviser to the government instructed the government to suspend the process of examining candidates to replace Ashkenazi..
— On 23 August, Lt. Col. (Ret.) Boaz Harpaz, a close family friend of Ashkenazi,
was arrested by the police as the main suspect in producing the forged document.
— On 30 August General Ashkenazi, in a meeting of the IDF general staff, admitted that he had received the document at the end of April — more than three months before it became public.
— On 2 September, Barak spoke to the general staff, saying: “I’m worried about the attempt by serving and retired officers to stop and delay the process of appointing the next chief of staff, and to influence the results of the process in an illegitimate manner. The effort almost succeeded.”
— On 5 September the government approved Barka’s recommendation to appoint Galant as Ashkenazi’s successor.
— When the government, on 5 September, approved Galant’s candidacy to replace Ashkenazi, he was already facing another problem: a legal challenge, launched a few weeks earlier, over his use of public lands near his home in Amikam. The Green Movement, which launched the challenge, would not say how they learned of Galant’s real estate problems.
— On 1 February 2011, the legal adviser to the government submitted the findings of his investigation into Galant’s land issue to the government. The adviser, Yehuda Weinstein, harshly criticized Galant for his conduct.
— Later that evening, Barak and Netanyahu announced that Galnat’s appointment was cancelled.
— On 14 February, Ganz was sworn in as Ashkenazi’s replacement.
The police and the government’s auditor are still investigating the origins of the forged Galant document, and who was behind Harpaz’s forgery.
Pundits and commentators, though, have not waited for the results of these investigations to suggest — some more openly than others — that what Israel has experienced in the last four months was serious: it may not have been a putsch, but it was an effort by current and former military officers to prevent the elected leaders from choosing their preferred new chief of staff.
Commentators say that regardless of the motives of those who fought the Galant nomination, the fact that they would engage in such a brazen campaign was troubling.
We should wait for the investigation into the Galant document to conclude so we can see whether or not there was a Senator Fred Van Ackerman — or several Van Ackermans — in the higher echelons of the Israeli defense establishment.
It appears that we can now also wait — perhaps wait for a long time — before an Israeli military attack on Iran takes place. With Ganz at the helm, there will be someone in the decision making circles who, as was the case with Ashkenazi before him, would remind Barak and Netanyahu and other decision makers of the perils of a military action against Iran.
Stay tuned.
Ben Frankel is editor of the Homeland Security NewsWire
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