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Hard Questions and Tough Answers with Yossi Alpher- December 20, 2010

Alpher focuses on regional issues, with questions about Hezbollah's actions in Lebanon and Jordan's interactions with Iran.

Q. The Lebanese Army announced last week that it had uncovered Israeli spy cameras and laser spotting equipment high in the mountains in the center of the country. Hezbollah took credit for discovering the equipment. What's behind this?

A. The equipment was presumably designed to assist an Israeli military offensive against Hezbollah by pinpointing targets for artillery or aircraft. Hebrew markings offer fairly conclusive proof that the observation gear is Israeli--not that there are any other likely candidates for implanting and camouflaging such sophisticated equipment in the Lebanese mountains. It is hardly surprising that Israel has made preparations for taking further military action in Lebanon at some point in the future, given that southern Lebanon is seen as an Iranian front against Israel and that both Iran and Hezbollah constantly preach Israel's destruction. Over the past two years, Lebanese forces have also uncovered an unusual number of alleged Israeli spy operations in the country. 

Yet by all indications, the equipment was actually uncovered and neutralized several years ago. The real question is, why did Hezbollah choose the current timing to publicize the alleged Israeli spy preparations? The answer appears to lie in Lebanese anticipation of an accusation against Hezbollah by the international commission investigating the 2005 Rafiq Hariri assassination, the Special Tribunal for Lebanon. The Lebanese Shiite movement is clearly nervous about how to deal with an authoritative claim that its senior operatives were behind the killing, and seeks to deflect public attention toward the Israeli "threat" and Hezbollah's role in countering it. It has even gone so far as to accuse Israel of the Hariri assassination.

One way or another, Israel will be on high alert when the commission issues its report, lest Hezbollah try to rebuff internal-Lebanese and broader Arab anger by provoking renewed conflict along Lebanon's southern border.


Q. Apropos Iran, why did Jordan announce an impending meeting of King Abdullah with President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad? Isn't Abdullah in the pro-western, anti-Iran camp?

A. Indeed he is. In fact, Abdullah invented the term "Shi'ite Crescent" to describe his fear of Iranian influence extending westward through Baghdad and Damascus into Lebanon, thereby flanking Jordan on two fronts.

But Jordan has a large Palestinian population and the king is highly sensitive to the potential repercussions of a failed Israeli-Palestinian peace process, both domestically and regionally. Hinting at a rapprochement with Iran is one sure way to signal his discomfort. 

On the home front, Abdullah has to justify ongoing Israeli-Jordanian peace and particularly security arrangements against the backdrop of the Netanyahu government's hard line on the Palestinian issue and its settlement construction, which lately was reported to include a provocative plan to remodel a Jordanian-owned hotel on the Mount of Olives without consulting the king. Regionally, the king has to contend with the fallout from a renewed "Jordan is Palestine" campaign by the Israeli far right, which recently hosted Dutch anti-Islamist parliamentarian Geert Wilders in this context. 

While most Israelis tend to dismiss these extreme-right fringe calls to "Palestinize" Jordan as of little importance, the Hashemite throne is as sensitive to them as are Israelis to international campaigns to delegitimize the Jewish state. The king fears lest a frozen or failed peace process add fuel to the "Jordan is Palestine" campaign and eventuate in the mass migration of West Bank Palestinians to the East Bank, i.e., to Jordan, thereby further exacerbating an already problematic demographic balance.

It's hard to believe that Abdullah has truly decided to upgrade Jordan's relationship with Iran. But the signal he is sending--that the Jordanians cannot be depended on to acquiesce in Israeli indignities and to absorb the fallout of a failed peace process--must not be ignored.


Q. So what has happened with the administration's "reset" peace process?

A. Little or nothing so far. Special Emissary George Mitchell came and went and the parties seem no closer to substantive negotiations. Meanwhile the two relevant leaders appear to be preoccupied with putting out internal fires. 

PM Binyamin Netanyahu is hustling to keep both secular Yisrael Beitenu and ultra-orthodox Shas in the same coalition. He is offering Avigdor Lieberman's party guarantees for liberal IDF conversions for soldiers from the Former Soviet Union. In parallel, Netanyahu is offering Rabbi Ovadiah Yosef's party improved ways for yeshiva students to dodge the draft. And all the while, the prime minister appears to be successfully avoiding a serious investigation of the many failings that produced the Mt. Carmel mega-blaze.

In parallel, PLO leader Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen) appears to be concerned with an apparent challenge to his rule from former security chief Muhammad Dahlan, who is accused of trying to form his own West Bank militia. This is just one more factor constraining Abbas' capacity to display flexibility in responding to Mitchell's attempt to renew negotiations, which in any case was termed disappointing in Ramallah. 

All this just provides fuel for the Arab League/PLO internationalization campaign, in which the latest gambit is an attempt to obtain a United Nations Security Council condemnation of the settlements. Here it will be hard for the Obama administration, which spent the past 18 months demanding a settlement-construction freeze, to justify a veto.


Q. Yohanan Danino has just been appointed the next chief of the Israel Police. What challenges await him?

A. Of course there are the seemingly constant tasks: reorganizing the police command structure and improving pay scales in order to enhance the quality of operations and manpower; the war on traffic fatalities; and combating organized crime. But Danino may be ushering in a new era for the Israel Police on two fronts. 

Danino is a lawyer who has specialized in rooting out corruption in the highest places. He was involved in building the cases against President Moshe Katzav, PM Ehud Olmert and others. So one area that the police will presumably concentrate on under his stewardship is corruption. That Minister of Internal Security Yitzhak Aharonovich of Yisrael Beitenu appointed an expert on corruption to head the police even as his party head, Avigdor Lieberman, faces possible indictment for corruption is an encouraging sign.

Secondly and perhaps most important, Danino will be involved in the emergency services reforms the need for which became so painfully obvious in the recent Mt. Carmel mega-fire. Conceivably the police, or at least the Internal Security Ministry that commands the police, will now absorb the country's fire and rescue services. Because Israel is almost constantly at risk of war in which the civilian rear will be targeted by Hamas and/or Hezbollah rockets, the Israel Police and emergency services bear a burden that most countries' national police forces can ignore. Yet traditionally, the IDF and issues of "external" security have drained away budgets. That approach is changing, and Danino could therefore conceivably preside over a genuine aggrandizement of Israel's internal security forces that, by improving emergency services for the civilian rear, will help deter attack by Iran and its militant Islamist allies.