OK, Israel’s banker-in-chief didn’t put it quite that way in his keynote speech on the second day of the Herzliya conference, Israel’s premier national-security gathering. Fischer instead called the skyrocketing growth of these two distinct minorities “unsustainable.” He expressed particular concern about the ultra-Orthodox, who don’t work or serve in the army but receive a disproportionate share of government benefits.

While claiming to “very much appreciate our religion and our religious people,” he argued that having so large a group that does not work “cannot continue.” If it does, Fischer warned, “in the long run it’s going to be very difficult in our economy to supply our citizens with a standard of life that keeps improving.”

The numbers are all too well-known to Israelis, but less so abroad, where Israel is known largely as an economic miracle, given its small population and lack of oil and other natural resources. Indeed, most of the economists who spoke at a succession of panels yesterday highlighted aspects of Israel’s impressive economic performance, particularly in light of the global recession. The Jewish state enjoyed a growth rate of 4.8 percent in 2011, with low inflation (2.2 percent).

But Fischer stressed, and others agreed, that the country’s growth—not to mention its social cohesion—would be seriously jeopardized unless the country finds a way to address the challenge posed by these two burgeoning sectors of society.

The numbers he and others cited are truly staggering. In 1980, non-Orthodox Jews constituted 80 percent of the population. Since then, that population had dropped by some 12 percent. By contrast, in 1980 ultra-Orthodox Jews constituted 4 percent of the population; today they account for over 7 percent. While Israeli Arabs made up 15 percent of Israel’s population in 1980, they are over 20 percent today. Only 40 percent of ultra-Orthodox men are employed, while among Arab Israelis, less than a quarter of the women work. Such non-participation rates in the Israeli economy are stunning considering that unemployment in Israel hovers around 5 percent.

The growth of such large ultra-Orthodox and Arab families living off government pensions and other benefits has triggered a sharp rise in poverty in Israel, a situation that Prof. Alex Mintz, the dean of the Lauder School of Government at the Herzliya Interdisciplinary Center, called “intolerable” in his talk. The Israeli government, he said, had to declare a “war on poverty” before the gap between have and have-not Israelis grew even more dramatic.

Fischer and other economists stressed that poverty rates are tied to the growing number of unemployed ultra-Orthodox and Arab-Israelis: The larger the number of children a family has, the more likely it is that the children will be poor. In families where two parents were working, he said, there is little poverty. In families where no one works, poverty rates stand at 80 percent.

How is Israel’s middle class faring? Not great, it turns out.

A recent study by the Finance Ministry published by Haaretz found that wage mobility has been declining for decades and fell particularly sharply over the past 10 years. The study’s authors, Galit Ben Naim and Alex Belinsky, found that Israel had relatively little socioeconomic mobility compared to other Western countries. Tracking salary data for over a million Israelis between 2003 and 2009, the study showed that 65 percent of the people in the bottom 10 percent on average in a given year were likely to remain there in the following year. It also found that overall mobility decreased during the 6-year period they studied. While 49 percent of those in the lowest economic rung remained there a year later in 2004, 56 percent of those in that same category in 2008 remained there in 2009.

Dahlia Moore, dean of the department of behavioral science at the College of Management Academic Studies in Rishon LeZion, called this the “sticky floor.” But there’s apparently a sticky ceiling in Israel as well: Some 86 percent of the top 10 percent of earners were likely to stay there the next year. The lack of downward mobility was even higher for the top 1 percent and the top 0.1 percent. These lack of mobility rates are far higher than those of the United States and the European Union.

Such inequalities helped trigger the middle-class protests last summer in Tel Aviv and around the country—Israel’s own version of “Occupy Wall Street.” While the demonstrators did not openly blame the ultra-Orthodox for the growing financial pressures and rising housing prices they face, resentment about what secular Israelis consider a “leech” class, as one young student at the conference called them, runs deep.

The solution to such growing poverty and income inequality depends on “changes in behavior,” Fischer told the conference. Other experts spelled out what he implied: having smaller families, joining the army, and getting jobs. Some 6,000 ultra-Orthodox Israelis are now in college, Fischer said, a good indication that they might work after graduating. He added that there are already signs that reduced government welfare payments were having a positive impact on Arab-Israeli families: More Arab men are now starting their own businesses or seeking work.

Fischer’s tough warning is consistent with his blunt style. Greatly admired within the business community for his creative, but cautious, stewardship of the central bank, he is credited with having helped Israel avoid the financial bubbles that have swamped Europe in recent years by keeping credit tight and buying up billions of dollars in foreign currency reserves to ensure that, in a time of financial stress, Israel would not run short of hard currency reserves. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government has run a responsible fiscal policy, he has said. Such policies may serve Israel well in an unpredictable region where political earthquakes can easily trigger economic and financial upheavals.

***

Jan. 31, 2012: The hottest ticket in town right now is the revival of Cabaret, the iconic musical set in 1931 Berlin about a star-crossed romance between Sally Bowles, a young nightclub singer at the Kit Kat Klub, and a naïve young American writer named Cliff Bradshaw. While the play was staged in Israel over 20 years ago, this is the first original Israeli production of the Broadway classic. Based on euphoric reviews and word-of-mouth in a country that hates the sound of silence, the run at Tel Aviv’s Cameri Theatre is sold out for the next three months.

Continue reading: A sense of foreboding

If you live anywhere near New York City, save the money you might have spent on popcorn and the film rendition of War Horse, which galloped into movie theaters just in time for the predictable Oscar nominations. Race out instead to catch the play, which won five Tony awards in 2011, including best play.

Seeing the play and the film in close proximity reminds us of the magic that great theater can create, as opposed to most expensive, even well-crafted movies. Why are we moved more by the plight of a horse puppet than by a snorting and bucking horse in the flesh? The answer lies in the transformative power of theater, which, like great literature, stirs the imagination.

This Broadway play is everything that the Hollywood movie is not. The play is gritty, clear, nuanced, deeply moving, and intensely anti-war. “Here’s what war did,” wrote the book’s author, Morpurgo. “It burned flesh. It killed my uncle. It made my mother weep.” Its film counterpart allows that war may be noisy and dangerous but remains somehow noble. Good and bad people die in the play. In Spielberg’s saga, almost no one dies. While the play is ambitious and majestic, Spielberg’s War Horse is sentimental schlock—which is what this talented, skilled narrator has increasingly been dishing out of late.

The genius of the play is not the plot. National Velvet, the 1944 Liz Taylor vehicle, had more twists and subtlety. War Horse is, after all, a children’s fable, set in Devon, England, just prior to the outbreak of World War I. The story is fairly straightforward: Boy meets horse as newborn foal; boy falls for horse, whom he names Joey; boy tames and trains horse to pull a plow, something that Joey, a thoroughbred, was not born to do; boy loses horse to World War I conscription; boy goes off to war in search of horse. (You will have to see the play to learn if boy and horse survive and are reunited.)

The stage play is brilliantly adapted from the book by Nick Stafford in association with the Handspring Puppet Company. Its human characters are real. Their cruelty and flaws and the pain they inflict, deliberately and unconsciously, are poignantly evoked by a magnificent cast, directed with finesse and discipline by Marianne Elliott and Tom Morris, with Toby Sedgwick providing what is called “horse choreography.” Particularly memorable is Boris McGiver, as Ted Narracott, the stubbornly proud, often inadvertently cruel father of Seth Numrich, who stars as son Albert. In one of many drunken moments, Ted nearly loses the family farm by buying the thoroughbred colt instead of the plow horse the family needs just to one-up his well-to-do brother. Later on, he sneaks out of his house to sell his son’s beloved horse into cavalry service to stave off having to lose the family farm. The Narracott family’s desperation, of course, is born of Ted’s drinking, his foolish pride, and crushing poverty. Numrich gives a powerful performance as young Albert, whom we see transformed from an innocent boy into an agile young man and then into a somewhat hapless soldier whose devotion to his horse often seems stronger than to his drunken father, his family, or his country. Who can blame him? The British and German soldiers in this play are not archetypes, but complex characters, some of whom love horses and their fellow men, and others who relish brutalizing them.

In a uniformly superb cast, Peter Hermann gives a particularly stirring performance as Friedrich Muller, a German soldier who assumes a dead medical officer’s identity to save himself and Joey from having to go to the front and almost certain death. There is no glory or flag-waving in this play, and virtually no politics, just a desire by man and beast alike to survive. We are reminded that this was the world’s longest and most pointless of conflicts, in which an estimated 17 million soldiers and civilians, not to mention millions of horses, died.

In one particularly vivid scene, Joey confronts the future’s iron horse—the merciless tank, portrayed as lines drawn on a screen, against which the puppet horse rears pathetically, a portent of a century of mechanized wars to come.

Though a child’s story, War Horse is no play for children. Only at its conclusion does the play succumb to a childlike desire for happy endings. Not so the movie version. Spielberg stands the play’s anti-war message on its head. The British countryside has never looked so green or beautiful. There are sweeping panoramic shots of the fields and hills straight out of The Sound of Music and How Green Was My Valley. Spielberg never shows the grinding poverty of the play’s Narracott farm, or the desperate struggle to put food on the table and pay the rent. Even his occasionally arresting depiction of the guts, gore, and gas of trench warfare, the true horrors of World War I, has soft edges. His characters are more caricatures than people; Ted Narracott, for instance, is a sweet, well-intentioned drunken ex war-hero, not the play’s blustering, irresponsible wreck of a man whose alcoholism repeatedly threatens his family with ruin.

Almost no one dies in the movie version. And those who do are such thinly drawn caricatures that it is almost impossible to mourn their passing. Amazingly, all the characters speak marvelous English with country-appropriate accents—the two German boys who are shot rather offhandedly for desertion; a young French girl with an ill-defined illness; her doting, jam-making philosopher grandfather; the Germans who raid their farm. The one death that has dramatic punch is that of Topthorn, a huge black stallion whom Joey befriends at war. Topthorn is literally worked to death, starved and exhausted by pulling ambulances and finally artillery up muddy hills.

The most dramatic moment in both the play and the film is Joey’s frantic bolt for freedom through a bleak, battle-scarred no-man’s land, where he eventually entangles himself in ribbons of barbed wire that drag him down and nearly kill him. This is vintage Spielberg (but once again, more creatively portrayed on stage). But even this moving moment of true pathos is followed by a dud of a scene—an unconvincing truce between Germans and the English as a soldier from each side rises from his mud-filled trench to help free poor Joey from the wire. (In Spielberg’s production, we are quickly assured, the wire was made of rubber so that no horses would be harmed in production. Ditto, the wounds on the horses, which were the work of the film’s makeup artists—or, as they appear in the credits, the film’s “equine hair and make-up” unit.) But such episodes are few and far between in this seemingly endless, 146-minute epic, whose sentimentality is reinforced by John Williams’ sumptuous, omnipresent score, which swells over farms, fields, and battlefields. The play, by contrast, uses folk tunes mainly as punctuation.

There is plenty of what film buffs call “homage” in this Spielberg saga. An overhead shot of human and horse corpses littering the battlefield as the camera pans the scene of slaughter seems straight out of Gone With The Wind. Remember the iconic scene of the dead and dying in Atlanta’s railway station? So, too, is Spielberg’s shot of a hill overlooking the Narracott family farm as three main characters embrace in silhouette against a bright orange, Technicolor sky. Oh to be at Tara! Or, back at the Beaumont, or for that matter, just about anyplace else.

Playwright J.T. Rogers, the young author of Blood and Gifts, is obsessed with history. This is his third historical play—all of which have been critically if not commercially successful. And you don’t have to be an Afghan expert—or even deeply pro- or anti-America’s war in a land where “wartorn” is a gross understatement—to enjoy Rogers’ original, compelling play. But those who have followed the war closely will get more of his grim jokes and more easily track the play’s cast of warlords and their ever-shifting alliances.

This is a complex, politically subtle play without a simple message. It succeeds because it raises the most profound questions about how men of such good intentions—and all the major characters are male—could have gotten things so terribly wrong while seeming to get them right. Americans helped the Soviets in the decade the play examines, 1979 to 1989, when the spy services of the United States, Britain, and Russia were replaying the “Great Game,” the centuries-long power struggle in this historic crossroads. But the victory soon turns sour, as civil war erupts among the Western-armed Afghan war lords, after which the Pakistani-supported Taliban usher in yet more barbarous intolerance.

At a discussion with members of the Council on Foreign Relations after a performance last week, Bartlett Sher, whose disciplined, crisp direction maximizes the play’s emotional punch, said he believes that a dramatist’s role is not to preach for or against U.S. involvement in this 8-year-old war but to prompt an audience to “pose the question.”

Blood and Gifts makes you wonder how Americans failed to see that helping the Afghans expel the Soviets would strengthen the militant Islamists who would then target Americans once the Russians were gone. After the Islamic revolution in Iran, why did Washington not see that stoking religious fervor for short-term gain would end badly? Why did the United States let Pakistan decide which war lords to bless with U.S. “gifts”—increasingly sophisticated weapons that would soon be aimed at Afghans of other tribes, ethnicity, and religious beliefs and then at Americans? Why did the CIA think it had no further obligation to the Afghan people once the Russians were ousted?

But the play’s fictional characters raise questions beyond politics, among them, how could men who have worked so closely together for so long understand one another so little?

The play opens in 1979 with the arrival in Islamabad of the absolutely American James Warnock, a CIA veteran of Iran, whose mission is to arrange an alliance with Col. Afridi of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence, or ISI, the Pakistan Army’s notoriously treacherous intelligence arm. The idea is to supply U.S. money and arms to anti-Soviet Afghans without American fingerprints. But what Warnock calls “deniability, first and foremost” gives Pakistan a dangerous upper hand in the relationship. Simon Craig, Warnock’s British counterpart, a regionally savvy, whiskey-swilling junior partner in this mission, warns Warnock that Afridi’s determination to channel the weapons to Gulbuddin Hekmatyar—the Islamist fanatic who is now targeting American forces in Afghanistan—will backfire, given his penchant for wanton and savage treatment of Afghans who oppose his fanatical interpretation of Islam. As insurance, Warnock opens his own secret channel to the more secular Abdullah Khan, a warlord who appears to become not merely an ally of convenience but Warnock’s friend.

Rogers’ characters learn painful lessons in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Washington, the play’s three venues. Warnock comes to understand how hard it is to know men of another culture. Simon, his MI6 counterpart, learns that Americans can be just as devious and cynical as their Pakistani and Afghan allies. Afghans, as Simon tries warning his American partner, are “charming, semi-civilized and utterly untrustworthy”—“French, without the food.” And all the characters learn that even close friends and allies are rarely what they seem. “Secrets,” Simon says ruefully, “they do … corrode,” along with trust.

Simon turns out to be Jewish, a fact he does not advertise given the region’s prejudices and politics, but of which the insidiously anti-Semitic Afridi repeatedly reminds him.

Rogers’ play provides plenty of heartbreak, personal and political. His key characters all end up with some sorrow, professional as well as personal. Perhaps because, as Rogers observes, Russians seem to excel at suffering, and perhaps because the Western “victory” over the Soviets is the occasion for the Afghan sideshow destined to go terribly awry, Rogers has given a truth-telling role to Dmitri Gromov, a Soviet not-so-secret agent who strikes up a friendship of convenience with Warnock, whom he is charged with watching.

The cast is as sharp as the play’s dialogue. The gifted Jeremy Davidson plays Warnock perfectly—his controlled but confident gait and steely reserve mask to all but the closest of friends the pain of an earlier failure and professional uncertainty. Jefferson Mays is unforgettable as Simon, whose piercing irony about Middle Eastern and Whitehall politics gives the play humor and depth. Michael Aronov plays Gromov, whose Russian humor, as he confesses to Warnock, takes the form not of “ha-ha” jokes but of the Slavic “let me put a stick in your eye because life is not worth living” variety. Gabriel Ruiz is utterly believable as the slimy, corrupt Islamist sympathizing Col. Afridi. And Bernard White as Afghan warlord Abdullah Khan has a twinkle in his eye and an elegance about him that is destined to break one’s heart. John Procaccino, as Walter Barnes, Warnock’s CIA colleague, must have spent weeks at Langley learning how to impersonate an agency bureaucrat flawlessly, and Robert Hogan, as Sen. Jefferson Birch, gives another sterling smaller performance as the passionate southern senator who despite his vapid political platitudes is nobody’s fool. Special tribute must also be paid to Deborah Hecht, the play’s dialect coach, for her versatility in several languages.

Such a coach would have been of value to the cast of another historical drama—Captors, which closed over the weekend after a limited run. But the cast’s struggle with Israeli and German accents was only one of this potentially powerful play’s problems.

Evan M. Wiener’s play is an account of the 10 days that a team of young Mossad and Shin Bet agents spent with Adolf Eichmann in a safe house in the 1960s after his capture in Buenos Aires and before he was smuggled out of Argentina to stand trial in Israel.

Continue reading: ‘Captors’

Madoff, of course, has not ended his life. But he is destined to spend what remains of it in jail, an appropriate way-station on the road to the hell he so richly deserves. The published accounts of his apparent indifference to the emotional pain and financial suffering he caused trusting friends, mostly Jewish investors, and innocent bystanders in his quest for—what?—resonate throughout the words and deeds that Rattigan wrote for his play’s anti-hero, Gregor Antonescu, a Depression-era Romanian-born crook and con man, brilliantly interpreted in a new Broadway production by Frank Langella.

It’s easy to see why the Roundabout Theatre Company thought the moment had come for a revival of this creaky drama, originally performed in 1963, a decade or two after Rattigan’s best work had been written. The company’s bet on this lesser play is vindicated thanks mainly to the astonishing Langella, whose riveting, flawless performance almost gives depth and definition to a character who lacks both. Why anyone at all should love such a driven, egomaniacal monster is a mystery that Rattigan does not even attempt to resolve (just as recent books and the 60 Minutes interviews of Madoff’s wife and surviving son do little to explain how such an evil man could successfully impress others as a loving father and a respected member of his community). But Langella’s silky villainy makes him irresistibly charismatic to the audience and those destined to be manipulated and betrayed by him—namely, almost everyone in the play.

Nobody but nobody plays bad as well as Langella. I’ve been devoted to him ever since he seduced Kate Nelligan (Lucy Seward) in John Badham’s 1979 film version of Dracula. His sexy, sultry vampire was magnetic, making the prospect of feasting on humans and an eternity of night-life clubbing almost alluring. Then came his portrayal of the disgraced president in Peter Morgan’s Frost/Nixon, another theatrical villain to whom he gave not just jowls but complexity and a sort of grandeur. But Langella has a tougher challenge in Antonescu, another variety of vampire who preys on the financial blood of the living. Rattigan has written him as a stick figure—a “Romanian-born radio and oil king” whose motto for financial survival is “confidence and liquidity.” Unable to love—it’s a “commodity I can’t afford,” Antonescu says—he is hard to empathize with, or even to hate. But Langella performs the impossible: He makes an audience unable to stop watching him.

The play revolves around Gregor’s desperate effort to save his financial empire by using his illegitimate son to help persuade a potential merger target, American industrialist Mark Herries (expertly played by Zach Grenier), not to abandon the planned deal upon which his solvency depends. Herries, like the late author, has an inconvenient secret: He is gay, or “queer,” an old-fashioned word uttered in another context by Gregor’s son’s girlfriend, Carol Penn (the able Virginia Kull, who struggles mightily with a poorly drawn character). So, Gregor’s plan is to use his son, who calls himself Basil Anthony, by introducing him to Herries not as his offspring, but as sexual bait. In the course of this play-within-a-play, Gregor suggests to Herries that he, too, is similarly inclined and that Basil just might be available to Herries if the price is right—that is, if the merger goes through.

Gregor, however, has a problem: He hasn’t seen Basil since a quarrel five years earlier that seems to have involved a revolver, a half-hearted effort by Basil to shoot his ruthless father, and a subsequent escape to New York to tend bar, play music, and flirt with “goddamn Bolshie” politics.

After dropping in virtually unannounced on Basil in his meticulously depicted, grungy Greenwich Village basement flat and begging for his help, Gregor fails to clue him in on his precise intended role in this financial rescue scheme. Basil (Adam Driver) is furious and crushed when he finally understands how his father has used him—obviously not for the first time. Throughout the play, Basil, as weak as his father is ruthless, struggles with his instinctive devotion to a man he knows is evil and whom in a particularly compelling moment of the play he denounces as “nothing.”

By the play’s end, Gregor is very much alone. His elegantly transactional former stripper of a wife (Francesca Faridany), grandly attired and perfectly coiffed, a “countess” whose title has also been bought and paid for, abandons him to his fate. So too does his efficient, self-serving factotum, an omnipresent right-hand man and enabler named Sven Johnson (played by Michael Siberry, who in his own smaller role is as compelling, perplexing, and chilling a character as his boss).

Crisply directed by the Tricycle Theatre’s Maria Aitken, Man and Boy may not be a great play. But thanks to the extraordinary Langella and a strong supporting cast, it is superb theater. After they’ve stopped watching re-runs of Ruth Madoff’s treakly performance on 60 Minutes, the Madoff family should go see it.

An angry mob of some 3,000 Egyptians had arrived at the embassy from what had been a peaceful protest at Tahrir Square. Turning on his television, Levanon surveyed the scene. Carrying hammers, axes, and steel rods, the crowd was screaming anti-Israeli slogans and starting to breach a tall cement wall that Egyptian security forces had hastily built on a bridge overlooking the embassy entrance several days earlier, to secure the building. Egyptian police and military security—complete with armored tanks and cars—were deployed outside the apartment building in which the embassy is housed. But the live footage of the assault being broadcast by Al Jazeera showed that Egyptian forces were doing nothing to stop the attackers.

The 5 p.m. call to Levanon marked the beginning of a 13-hour drama, for him and other members of his 85-person staff, that has both intensified the deep gulf in Israeli-Egyptian relations and smoothed tensions between Israel and the United States. President Barack Obama; his newly minted ambassador in Cairo, Anne Patterson; and other American officials played a crucial role in mobilizing Egypt’s transitional government and taking other steps to save the besieged Israelis.

In an exclusive telephone interview today from Tel Aviv, Levanon described his role during the crisis—his fears for the six security guards trapped in his embassy, and some of his frantic efforts to save them. He says that after the first panicked call from embassy security guards, his phones rang off the hook. As Levanon tried to get Egpytian officials on the phone to seek their help in containing the mob, Israeli officials from a command center at Israel’s Foreign Ministry in Jerusalem monitored the growing crisis and called him constantly.

At about 7 p.m., the Israeli security guard called again. “He told me that the cement wall had been breached, that there was now a hole in the wall, and that it was just a matter of hours—maybe two or three—before the wall would crumble and the mob would enter,” Levanon recalled.

The situation had grown steadily worse after reporters from an Al Jazeera satellite channel called Al Jazeera Mubasher, or Al Jazeera Live in English, arrived at the embassy to broadcast the attack. The live footage seemed to encourage others to come out and join the mob, which grew steadily throughout the night.

Levanon said he managed to reach a few Egyptian officials, whom he would not identify. But other sources said they were relatively junior officials who were in no position to order Egypt’s ruling Supreme Council of the Armed Forces to help the Israelis.

In Jerusalem, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had arrived at the command post to personally monitor the deteriorating security situation at the embassy in Cairo. He and Levanon spoke about the unfolding situation by phone. When the wall was breached and the rioters entered the embassy, Jerusalem issued the order to evacuate the embassy’s diplomats and their families and staff, who had quietly made their way to the airport. There, they boarded a waiting military plane that Netanyahu had sent to Cairo—the same plane that President Anwar Sadat had used on his historic trip to Israel that led to the 1979 peace treaty.

“The phones were now ringing like crazy,” Levanon recounted. “We knew that time was running out. The security officer called again to say that ‘They’ve broken into the embassy! They’ve broken into the embassy!’ The situation was now grave. I was scared to death for them. I kept calling everyone I could reach, screaming, begging them to do something to stop the ransacking of the embassy.”

After Netanyahu failed to reach Field Marshall Muhammed Hussein Tantawi, Egypt’s defense minister and de facto head of state, or other senior security officials, he called Obama. Watching the attack on television, Levanon saw Hebrew-language documents being thrown out of the embassy windows to the cheers of jubilant Egyptians below. Levanon, who speaks fluent Arabic, understood their chants—and his alarm for the security guards exploded.

One of them had spoken earlier that night to Netanyahu. He asked the prime minister for a favor: If he were killed, would the prime minister personally break the news his parents rather than let them hear the news on the radio? The security guard’s name was Jonathan, the same as the prime minister’s older brother, who died in 1976 rescuing over 100 hostages being held by Palestinian terrorists at Entebbe. In reply, Netnayahu told him: “Yonatan, be strong. I promise you that the State of Israel will do everything in its power and will use all possible resources in the world in order to rescue you and your friends unharmed and whole from this situation. ”

Sometime after 10 p.m., U.S. Ambassador Anne Patterson called Levanon to recount her efforts to rouse Egyptian officials and to offer unspecified additional assistance. By now, Egyptians were running amok through one of the embassy’s two floors. Only a single reinforced metal door on the second floor, where the six embassy security guards were stationed, stood between them and the mob.

Then came the good news. The Egyptians had apparently answered calls from the U.S. ambassador, and commandos were on their way to the embassy to help extract the trapped Israelis. Coordinating with the commandos, the Israelis devised a code that would let the Israeli guards know when their rescuers had reached the door. “They had to determine that they were the good guys, not the bad guys,” Levanon said.

The commandos had with them galabiyas, the flowing robes that many Egyptians wear, head dresses, and other Egyptian garb. Disguised as Egyptians, the Israeli guards were spirited out of the besieged embassy and through the screaming mob outside.

Meanwhile, Levanon had assembled his staff and their families, including 27 children, on the plane at the airport. But he waited for word that the six Israelis were safe before permitting the plane to take off on the hour-long flight home. The plane touched down in Israel at roughly 6:30 a.m. In a Saturday night TV broadcast, Netanyahu publicly thanked both Obama and Patterson for their help, which was crucial in getting the six embassy employees out alive.

Egyptian officials now acknowledge that their security services’ initial lack of response to the assault on the embassy has created a “credibility crisis” for Egypt over its ability to protect diplomatic compounds as international law and tradition require and to maintain security within its own borders. The incident has “damaged Egypt’s image and its international reputation,” acknowledged Osama Heikal, Egypt’s minister of media, whose transitional military government has used the incident to extend a much-hated emergency law and take other steps to suppress free speech and other civil liberties for which the Egyptian protesters who overthrew Hosni Mubarak have campaigned.

While Israeli diplomats and other Israeli and American officials have declined to comment on some aspects of the rescue mission Friday night and Saturday morning, Levanon called the 13-hour episode among the most trying of his diplomatic career. But now that his ordeal is over, he says that he hopes to return to Egypt as soon as possible.

“What happened in Cairo was very serious,” Levanon told me. “It should never have happened. But we still have a peace treaty with Egypt and the framework of our relationship is intact. The prime minister and foreign minister have both expressed a desire for me to return—as soon as security and protection assurances are provided by the Egyptians.”

The days of remembrance, particularly in Washington and New York, did prompt a flood of documentaries, interviews, talk shows, newspaper and magazine articles, and books. It was difficult to escape the Sept. 11 anniversary on television last week. The Week counted no fewer than 40 Sept. 11 television specials in the month leading up to the opening of the memorial at ground zero on Sunday—everything from Animal Planet’s Hero Dogs of 9/11, to the Oprah Winfrey Network’s Twins of the Twin Towers, about twins who lost a sister or brother on that fateful day.

Some critics warned that the excessive programming would be overkill, so to speak, that all these hours of TV would trivialize the occasion. They need not have worried. The interviews and new material disclosed helped illuminate an event that many Americans with no familial or geographical connection had stopped thinking about long ago.

But this theater of the unfathomable will not trigger the catharsis the Greeks might have imagined. Nor will it provide the national clarity that makes it possible to “move on.” For despite the week’s rhetoric about American unity, the country remains bitterly divided about the meaning of the Sept. 11 attacks and the decade they helped spawn.

***

Commemoration is not a particularly American art form. While commemorations abound in Europe, particularly in Russia and Germany, which have endured and inflicted great suffering, in the United States people tend to focus on joyous occasions. The Fourth of July and Thanksgiving reflect the optimism of a buoyant, relatively young country. And while Americans commemorate Memorial Day, they have no designated national ceremony for the Civil War, the bloodiest war in American history.

Sept. 11 changed that. Each year since the attack, the families of the 2,983 victims have gathered, many of them near the spot where the towers once stood, to read aloud the names of those who perished there. Bells have tolled, and mourners have held moments of silence.

The spare style and content of this year’s gathering in New York was consistent with those earlier gatherings. The ceremony was conscientiously solemn, simple, and apolitical, yet it emerged from painstaking negotiations between the families of the victims—often deeply divided themselves—and the mayor’s office. There were no religious figures on the program to articulate or interpret the families’ sense of loss and grief; the bereaved insisted on doing that for themselves. Nor were self-serving politicians permitted to give speeches hoping to score political points with constituents.

In the weeks before the anniversary, there was pressure to rewrite the commemoration drama. Politicians and officials who had heretofore been excluded clamored for speaking roles. Some conservative pundits demanded that religious leaders be included in the program. But Mayor Michael Bloomberg held firm. After an ugly battle last year over whether a mosque should be built in lower Manhattan, he wisely resisted politicizing the ceremony by raising the divisive issue over whether to include a Muslim cleric among the religious representatives.

In the end, a few more officials and politicians were included in the program. But all of them—including President Barack Obama and former President George W. Bush—read letters, poems, or scripture. Obama read Psalm 46 for its message of perseverance, his spokesman said. Bush, who was cheered by the crowd, read an eloquent condolence letter that President Abraham Lincoln had sent to a mother who had lost five sons in the Civil War. The presidents and their wives stood solemnly side-by-side behind protective bullet-proof glass. (They left part-way through the reading of the victims’ names, under the cover of Yo-Yo Ma’s incomparable cello.)

The mayor, unprotected by a Plexiglas shield, was the event’s true master of ceremonies. “In all of the years,” he said, “we have shared both words and silences.” He lingered even after the reading of the names to greet families, many of whom he had come to know.

The families were the true stars of Sunday’s commemoration—the brothers, sisters, sons, daughters, fathers, mothers, and other relatives of those whose only crime was going to work that day, or rushing into the burning towers to save people they did not know. Relatives of the victims, from over 80 countries, included members of almost every nationality and religion, a microcosm of the city itself. They stood patiently beneath the podium in the sun, waiting for their loved one’s name to be called out—to be rescued, one by one, from the anonymity of having been killed in a mass attack.

Nancy Novaro, 52, of Mastic Beach, Long Island, said she came to the ceremony every year. “It still hurts,” she said, despite the passage of a decade. Her sister-in-law, Catherine LoGuidice, a 30-year-old broker, had worked on the 105th floor of the North Tower. Did it help to know that Osama Bin Laden was dead? “Who cares about him?” Ms. Novaro replied. “We’re here; he’s not. He can’t scare us. I’m a true New Yorker. They won’t take us down. We’ll always rebuild.”

Despite complaints about bureaucratic delays, cost overruns, and a general lack of urgency, the reconstruction of the site is now well under way. A giant American flag adorned the façade of 1 World Trade Center, formerly known as the Freedom Tower, now some 80 stories tall. And for the first time, the families got to see their loved one’s names inscribed in the bronze panels of the National September 11 Memorial, which also opened Sunday. Many used crayons and pencils to trace a name onto paper. Others just touched their relative’s name or left a memento on the panel—a photo, a ballet slipper, a fireman’s helmet. Still others stared silently into the twin reflecting pools, listening to the sound of the memorial’s giant, gushing waterfalls.

A grove of oak trees lines the memorial, along with one very special tree, a Callery pear tree that survived the devastation 10 years ago. Nearly dead when its badly burned root was pulled from the towers’ smoldering wreckage, the so-called survivor tree was struck by lightning two years ago and replanted at the site after being nursed back to life a second time.

***

Two days before the Sept. 11 commemoration, I attended another ceremony for the 23 New York Police Department officers who died at the towers. That toll turned out to be only the beginning of the department’s losses: In the weeks and months after, 50 more died from illnesses caused by exposure to the site. At the ceremony at Lincoln Center, Bloomberg and Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly honored these victims beneath a screen featuring the NYPD’s motto, Faithful Unto Death.

The first responders, most lacking masks or respirators, had dug through rubble, many for days, trying to find survivors. Later, they worked to recover their fallen comrades and other victims. Inhaling toxic smoke, dust, and debris, and the scent of burnt flesh, they developed rare cancers and other fatal illnesses. Cardinal Edward Egan, the former archbishop of New York, told the 1,700 policemen, families, and guests assembled in Avery Fisher Hall that a police supervisor at a rescue center had given the cardinal his own mask, warning him that breathing in the towers’ dust and debris might be lethal. Egan had asked the officer where his own mask was. He needed to see everything and everyone in the area clearly, the supervisor had replied, and the mask obstructed his vision.

But getting compensation for the sickened police and dying first responders has been inexcusably difficult. Congress stonewalled, resisting granting any assistance for years. At the end of last year, the legislators were finally shamed by the public and the press into passing the Zadroga Act, which enables the sick or relatives of those who fell ill in a now expanded “dust zone” to apply for compensation. Inexplicably, however, those suffering from cancer have been excluded.

***

Despite the mayor’s efforts to keep politics out of the ceremony, politics have dominated discussions of how Sept. 11 should be remembered. While there was one ceremony at ground zero on Sunday, almost unbearable in its sadness, two competing narratives of the event and its aftermath have emerged.

One depicts the United States as the largely innocent victim of an evil, unspeakably barbaric foe hell-bent on destroying the nation. In this version of events, America is a country of courage and resilience, one that sought justice rather than vengeance. While bolstering security at home and abroad, the United States remained faithful to its core principles of the rule of law, freedom, equality, and tolerance, despite some stumbles. This version was articulated Sunday by Adm. Michael Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who spoke at the commemoration at the Pentagon, where 125 civilians and military officers perished. The attacks enhanced American patriotism, he said, its people’s belief in one another, and their faith in their country. “They could kill our citizens,” he said, but “they could not kill our citizenship.”

The other, darker narrative, one favored by critics of American foreign policy, is that the United States somehow had it coming. Staunch U.S. support for Middle Eastern autocrats and Israel’s occupation of Palestinians had enraged young Muslims, who finally struck back at American symbols of power and wealth. The Bush Administration exploited the attack to unleash a decade of war and financial recklessness that has weakened the nation and helped its foes. The “sanitizing of 9/11 and the falsification of its genesis to jump-start a second war” in Iraq wound up “muddying and corrupting the memory of the event,” wrote Frank Rich, the former New York Times columnist, in an essay for New York magazine.

An even harsher assessment came from New York Times columnist and Nobel-winning economist Paul Krugman. Krugman wrote Sunday on his blog that the anniversary had become a marker of “shame” for America. Assailing Bush and former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani as “fake heroes,” he accused them of exploiting the attacks for their own personal and political gain. Many journalists, too, had lent “their support to the hijacking of the atrocity.” As a result, the memory of Sept. 11, he wrote, has been irrevocably “poisoned,” an “occasion for shame.”

In response to widespread outrage over his post, Krugman posted a second commentary on Monday. Reiterating his basic theme, he called the first two years following the attacks a “time of political exploitation and intimidation” for America that had culminated in the “deliberate misleading of the nation into the invasion of Iraq.”

He should also have written, Krugman added Monday, that Americans “behaved remarkably well in the weeks and months after 9/11.” There had been “very little panic, and much more tolerance than one might have feared,” he wrote. But he could neither “forget nor forgive” how the memory of the atrocity had been hijacked. Some readers could neither forget nor forgive Krugman for attempting to politicize a national commemoration in honor of innocent people who had died.

The four days of meetings were an exercise in gloom, as the complexity and enormity of the threats confronting Israel became increasingly evident. Egypt’s cyber-revolution—no matter how it turned out, several analysts suggested—could clearly threaten Israel’s three-decade-old peace with Egypt. Rather than a quasi-credible Jeffersonian democracy, warned Shlomo Avineri, a former director general of the foreign affairs ministry now teaching at Hebrew University, history taught us that a military dictatorship, or chaos, or a government dominated by the anti-Israeli Muslim Brotherhood, or a “combination” thereof were far more likely alternatives.

Plus, whether or not the Muslim Brotherhood eventually came to power as a result of Egypt’s uncertain political transition, several experts argued, any more “democratic” Egyptian government that more closely reflected the views of Egyptians would inevitably be much less friendly toward the Jewish state. It would also most probably be more supportive of Hamas and of Palestinian aspirations in general, less sympathetic toward the American-brokered peace process, and perhaps more reticent about challenging Iran.

While Egypt was the Arab state of most immediate concern, the gathering saw events in Tahrir Square as but a reflection of what analysts here spoke of as an underlying “virus”—the potentially destabilizing yearning for greater freedom in the Arab world, respect for human rights, and tolerance of dissenting views and ethnicities. Only at a gathering of proudly hard-nosed defense experts would such political goals be likened to a dreaded disease.

One of the less gloomy assessments involved Iran, the topic that had deeply depressed and divided last year’s gathering. Recent American and Israeli intelligence assessments were suggesting that a combination of tougher sanctions and covert action—the assassination of Iranian scientists; the sabotaging of sophisticated parts and equipment; and Stuxnet, the “virus” that most Herzliya participants seemed to love and for which they privately claimed some pride of ownership—had delayed Iran’s nuclear weapons ambition by two to four years. Dov Zakheim, a former American under-secretary of Defense, told the Jerusalem Post and conference participants that Israel did not have to attack Iran to stop its nuclear program. Thanks to its deployment of the Arrow 2 ballistic missile defense system, which relies on U.S. Navy Aegis missile defense ships in the Mediterranean, he said, there was now “less than a one percent chance that an Iranian missile would get through these defenses.”

The newly bolstered confidence, however, did not prompt Israelis to stop blaming the Obama Administration for having “wasted” a year, as one Israeli defense analyst put it, by trying to engage and coax Tehran into suspending or stopping its enrichment program and other activities consistent with weapons-making efforts.

The experts also continued blasting the Obama Administration for pressuring Israel to return to the peace table by insisting that Netanyahu freeze all settlement expansion activity, a demand that had forced the Palestinian Authority to adopt the same position.

While several Israelis seemed, if not content, at least willing to tolerate the lack of progress toward renewing peace talks with the Palestinians and Israel’s other foes—the status quo was the “worst alternative, except for all the others,” asserted Martin Kramer, of the Shalem Center—others warned that the perpetuation of the status quo was unacceptably dangerous for Israel. Those who blamed Israel for failure to make progress on the peace front would use the stalled process as yet another justification for delegitimizing Israel.

One indication of the sorry state of the on-again, mostly off-again, process was the no-show by Yasser Abed Rabbo, the secretary general of the Palestine Liberation Organization and the only senior Palestinian official who was scheduled to speak at the conference.

His was not the only empty chair, however. Defense Secretary Ehud Barak, who had recently quit the Labor Party to form a new center-Zionist faction called Independence in order to keep his thankless Defense post, flew to Washington to brief senior American officials on the Mubarak mess. Nor did Bibi Netanyahu attend—the first time in the conference’s 11-year history that an Israeli prime minister has not addressed the gathering. Israelis grumbled that Bibi felt that too many of the conference sponsors were hostile to him and his political agenda.

Senior officials who did attend were virtually unanimous in denouncing the Israeli government, arguing that Israel’s political system had become utterly dysfunctional. Weakness, selfishness, and greed jeopardized the state itself, warned Tzipi Livni, chairperson of the Kadima party, the former minister of foreign affairs, and the head of the not-so-loyal opposition.

Much of the conference gossip focused on Israel’s inability to take tough decisions given its corruption and increasingly bitter partisan divisions, a failure that has rarely been bandied about quite so openly.

At the session’s end, Uriel Reichman, the president of the IDC Herzliya, lamented the tragic deaths of three IDC graduates. Yossi Dahan had volunteered to serve in the paratroopers, where he was a first lieutenant. He helped support his family by working as a night watchman at a house in Kfar Shmaryahu. One night two motorcyclists drove by the house and sprayed it with bullets, killing Dahan. His killers were never caught. He was a victim of organized crime, Reichman charged, crime that had penetrated even high levels of government. He named no names; he didn’t have to.

The second victim, Roi Assaf, was on summer break in Sinai when he was killed by Muslim terrorists. He was 28 years old. He had done volunteer work in his hometown of Kfar Saba.

Nir Katz, 26, was a computer science major. He was killed in 2009 at the gay community center in Tel Aviv where he did volunteer work. His crime was being gay, Reichman said.

All three of these young men, Reichman said, embodied the spirit of Israel and had been killed for naught. Violence, he said, had become part of Israeli life. Israel needed not only a new system of government, one that was not paralyzed by religious and ideological divisions. It also needed a less violent, more moral and caring society.

It needed to rein in its own “fundamentalism,” he said, by refusing to permit groups who cared little for Israeli values to control the country’s education system and live off of tax-payer financial support. It needed citizens who would fight for their path and for a just state. It needed to recapture its vision.

***

February 8, 2011, 2:15 p.m.: So much angst, so little time. Here at the annual Herzliya conference, Israel’s premier international national security gathering, the gloom was so thick that it made me nostalgic for old-fashioned Southern California smog. In the second and third days of the conference, worry about Egypt gave way to anxiety about the rift with the Islamist government of Turkey, the growth of militant Islamist forces throughout the region, Israel’s growing vulnerability to cyber-attack, the global campaign to delegitimize the Jewish state, the increasing apathy of young Jews toward Israel, and above all, the threat posed by an increasingly assertive Islamic Iran, which will probably sooner or later go nuclear.

Herzliya is the Bataan death march of conferences. Roundtables start at 7:30 each morning and don’t end until after 9 p.m. Participants are given the luxury of 5-minute breaks between multiple, overlapping sessions. Lunch is less than an hour, and dinner is a rushed affair in a large tent at the exhausting day’s end. But this daunting schedule seems not to faze Israelis, for whom Herzliya is yet another opportunity to do what they love most: schmooze. The real news and gossip at this gathering is less likely to be exchanged in the formal meetings than in the corridors outside the meetings where Israelis huddle to drink endless cups of coffee, talk on their cell phones, and exchange news and views with friends and acquaintances.

Apart from the conference papers, there was plenty of news to digest. Late Monday afternoon, London’s Daily Telegraph published a Wikileaks cable reporting that Israel had long favored Egypt’s newly minted vice president Omar Suleiman to succeed President Hosni Mubarak. According to the U.S. State Department cable, written in 2008, David Hacham, an adviser to Israel’s military intelligence chief, told American diplomats in Tel Aviv that year that Suleiman, Egypt’s chief of intelligence, would be the most likely to serve as “at least an interim president if Mubarak dies or is incapacitated.”

“There is no question that Israel is most comfortable with the prospect” of Suleiman, wrote diplomat Luis Moreno, who quoted Hacham as saying that he and Suleiman’s deputy spoke on a “hotline” at least several times a day. The cable added that an Israeli delegation headed by Defense Minister Ehud Barak had been “shocked by Mubarak’s aged appearance and slurred speech” when it met with him in Egypt.

The leak of the cable at this delicate moment in Israeli-Egyptian relations is bound to embarrass both Israel and Suleiman, the official whom ailing president Mubarak has named to oversee Egypt’s political transition to an ostensibly more open, transparent system in the wake of mass protests.

“What we don’t need now is for Omar Suleiman to be seen by Egyptians and other Arabs as Israel’s poodle,” said one Israeli official at the gathering who asked not to be identified.

As Egypt’s intelligence chief, Suleiman handled two of the most sensitive portfolios for Mubarak—counter-terrorism efforts with Washington and relations with Israel. While Israelis were discussing Egypt’s political fate, Vice President Suleiman was continuing his meetings with opposition figures in Cairo, including the Muslim Brotherhood, the Islamist organization that is hostile to Egypt’s peace treaty with Israel and the parent of Israel’s Palestinian foe, Hamas.

Meanwhile, some Israelis at Herzliya disputed the widespread perception that no one predicted the current unrest in Egypt. Several conference participants told me that Israeli analysts have been concerned for some time about relations with Cairo in a post-Mubarak Egypt. Last March, one Israeli said, a respected Israeli specialist met with an elite group of American intelligence officers and Middle Eastern specialists in Washington to discuss scenarios that would challenge U.S. interests and capabilities in the Middle East.

The Israeli had presented the following scenario: As Mubarak falls ill and protesters take to the streets by the thousands, Gamal Mubarak, the president’s son, fails to win military support as his father’s successor. Intelligence chief Suleiman takes control. But taking advantage of the chaos, the Muslim Brotherhood uses the mass discontent and divisions within the ranks of Egypt’s opposition to come to power. The new government promptly distances itself from Egypt’s peace treaty with Israel, moves troops in violation of the treaty into the Sinai Peninsula, works closely with militant Hamas in Gaza, and flirts with Iran. Israel feels it must respond.

The Americans were clearly unimpressed with the presentation, the Israeli analysts recalled, pronouncing the entire scenario “far-fetched.” Now that Act I has been played out before the television cameras in Cairo, Israel finds itself sitting uncomfortably close to the stage, hoping that the Americans were right after all.

***

February 7, 2011, 1:00 p.m.: The 11th annual Herzliya Conference, usually a buoyant assembly of Israel’s brightest and most ambitious national security minds, globe-trotting security experts, and glad-handing politicians, opened Sunday under a cloud of gloom. Many of the attendees were openly anxious about the crisis in Egypt, the first Arab state to have made peace with Israel more than 30 years ago. Israelis had come to take the peace with Egypt and all the benefits that it brings—from diplomatic support and military coordination against Hamas to neutralizing what had been the Arab world’s largest army—for granted.

Israelis have criticized Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak for enforcing a cold peace and yearned to be not just accepted in the Arab Middle East, but embraced. Egypt’s seemingly eternal ruler had taught them they would have to live with less. Now, as newly minted Vice President Omar Suleiman, the former chief of Egyptian intelligence, opened meetings with some of the opposition factions and launched a transition to an uncertain future, Israelis whispered in the corridors of this prestigious conference that even their cold peace was now in jeopardy.

Israelis see the demonstrations against Mubarak not as an expression of a popular Egyptian yearning for freedom but through the lens of their own existential fears, and what they see frightens them, badly. They worry about the Muslim Brotherhood rising to power in free elections, and they are shaken by the speed with which the United States has abandoned a stalwart ally. Smadar Perry, a Yediot Ahranot Israeli journalist who has interviewed Mubarak many times, slammed the Obama Administration in an article Monday posted on “BitterLemons,” an English-language Israeli-Palestinian web site. Decrying the administration’s treatment of Mubarak as “crude and arrogant,” she likened the administration’s stance to that of “an elephant … sent to stomp on the Mubarak regime.” Perry was “shocked,” she wrote, by Obama’s abandonment of its ally. Obama and his Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, were “presiding over an anti-Mubarak agenda” almost as harsh as that of Al Jazeera, she charged.

Even Israelis who do not admire Mubarak understand his vital contribution to their security. Will a new elected Egyptian leader continue to help Israel enforce its embargo against militant Hamas in Gaza, which vows never to accept a Jewish state on sacred Islamic soil? Will any representative Egyptian government be willing to help contain Iran by granting Israeli warships free passage through the Suez canal? Will Israelis now need to worry about infiltration from Hezbollah and Hamas in the Sinai Peninsula? Will the next Egyptian government help neutralize Iran’s nuclear program? What about continuing to deliver the gas that keeps the lights on in Tel Aviv and Haifa?

The subtext of the concerns was an even less often articulated question: How could Israel depend on a superpower that would so easily “throw such a stalwart ally to the wolves”? as one veteran intelligence officer who worked for many years in Washington put it.

Israel is not Egypt, one Israeli analyst here comforted himself and fellow analysts by saying at a session on “Scenarios and Strategic Implications,” which encouraged senior Israeli officials to speak by assuring their anonymity, which I will honor. There is a sea of difference between Israel and Egypt, several panelists insisted. Israel is not only a democracy, one veteran Israeli diplomat asserted, but a country with a huge base of support in the U.S. Congress and among the American people. Egypt had never enjoyed comparable popular support.

The flip side of Israel’s concern was fear that the United States is withdrawing from the Middle East and turning inward—that its role as Israel’s guarantor and status as sole remaining superpower is being abandoned—along with market share and economic prowess—to China.

Lawrence Summers, President Barack Obama’s former assistant for economics adviser, now back at Harvard, assured the group that this was not the case. The Unites States is recovering economically, he said. American confidence in itself is being restored. Microsoft is worth more than all of America’s car, steel, and aerospace production, by a factor of 1.5. Only in the United States and Israel, he said, complimenting his hosts, “could you raise $100 million before buying your first suit.”

Nor is America turning inward, he asserted. While Europe and many non-Middle Eastern states had an interest in the outcome of the power struggle under way in Egypt, “only Washington felt it had an obligation to respond.”

But such reassurances seemed to do little to allay the anxiety so evident at Herzliya. Will the Egypt virus spread, and to which of Israel’s other Arab allies? What about neighboring Jordan, where demonstrators have also held large rallies to protest skyrocketing food, fuel, and housing prices? “We need to calm down and double check what is needed to shore up this moderate regime,” one participant suggested. Israel had already come to Jordan’s aid once before, during its 1970 civil war with the Palestine Liberation Organization. What if the moderate Hashemite ruler of Jordan were swept away by the current wave of protest engulfing the region? Would Egypt’s current plight embolden Iran?

Israelis have few illusions about the fragility of the autocracies surrounding them. “We have been sitting on a volcano since the end of the cold war,” said one veteran Israeli student of the Arab world.

At the end of the gloomy morning, one Israeli analyst wondered whether the crisis in Egypt might not ultimately play to Israel’s favor. Would Israel not emerge clearly now as the United States’ only reliable, dependable strategic “asset” in the otherwise volatile region?

“We are an island of stability in a sea of dictatorship,” Yael German, the mayor of Herzliya, told the gathering in an on-the-record plenary session.

President Shimon Peres, who looked two decades younger than his 87 years, also sounded upbeat, as usual, about Israel, and also Egypt. The Middle East is experiencing a genuine revolution, he said, “more spontaneous than organized,” from “the bottom up rather than the top down.” It was a revolution for “computers rather than flags.” Its proponents wear T-shirts and jeans, the “garb of equality,” and a manifestation of the “resentment of the gap between rich and poor.”

Peres’ sympathy for the pro-democracy protesters in the streets of Cairo and Tunis betrayed his Labor party roots, and not Israel’s modern version but the party of an earlier if not simpler time when Israelis of that persuasion called one another “comrade.”

Hosni Mubarak has done a lot for peace, said Peres, “but young Egyptians want democracy too.” They also want iPhones and the Internet. “You can lock the door,” he said. “But the Internet is a window.”

Modern technology has permitted young Egyptians and Arabs to know what was going on. A simple change of government would not solve Egypt’s problems, he warned. Thanks partly to technology, Israel has galloped ahead, alleviating the poverty that gripped much of the region. Though Israel was a “small country with only two lakes—“one dead and one dying”—its agricultural sector had the highest yield in the world. And 95 percent of Israel’s agricultural sector was high-tech. The region itself must follow Israel’s example and “free itself from poverty” for peace to prevail, he said.

Peres, occupying a ceremonial post that has nonetheless let one of the most talented, experienced politicians in the country continue to soldier on for the causes he has long embraced, also paid lip service to the need to negotiate a peace with the Palestinians that would result in “two states for two peoples.” Making peace, he said, was like crossing the Red Sea. Though difficult, he said, “the alternative is far more dangerous.”

His talk, however, highlighted the lack of priority on the peace process and the Palestinians. Patrick Clawson, a specialist on Iran from the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, was struck by the virtual absence of the peace process from the jam-packed Herzliya schedule and corridor talk. “Israelis seem to like things just as they are,” he said.

Last year, the Palestine Authority’s Mahmoud Abbas addressed the gathering. This year, there is but one panel scheduled on the long-stalled talks, and the most senior Palestinian planning to attend the gathering—indeed, one of the only Palestinian officials scheduled to attend—is Yasser Abed Rabbo, the Palestine Liberation Organization’s Secretary General.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who gave a much-criticized keynote speech last year, is not scheduled to speak. Nor is Defense Minister ]]> http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-news-and-politics/58263/herzliya-diary-2/feed/ 6 http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-news-and-politics/56970/blowing-smoke/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=blowing-smoke http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-news-and-politics/56970/blowing-smoke/#comments Wed, 26 Jan 2011 12:00:55 +0000 Judith Miller http://www.tabletmag.com/?p=56970 Modern terrorism has shaped our world in dramatic and obscure ways: Washington’s unbridled power to read our emails and tap our phones, President Barack Obama’s extraordinary decision to kill an American citizen hiding in Yemen because his sermons have inspired terrorist attacks, the lines at airport security as federal agents confiscate such potentially lethal items as toothpaste, cuticle scissors, and Diet Coke.

But long before al-Qaida and Sept. 11, long before virgin-seeking suicide bombers began blowing up embassies, U.N. offices, churches, mosques, and weddings, long before beheadings made Islamist terror synonymous with barbarism, long before IEDs and VBIEDs exploded into Western consciousness, and long before the lines of bearded fanatics were injected with tranquilizers and packed off to Guantanamo and CIA black-site prisons, there was Carlos.

“Carlos the Jackal,” as the press fawningly called Ilich Ramirez Sanchez, was the first modern terrorist superstar. For nearly 20 years beginning in the mid-1970s, he staged or masterminded spectacular, made-for-the-media attacks, initially for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a radical splinter of Yasser Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Organization. Then, after becoming a radical superhero on a par with Che, he took refuge in the Eastern Bloc and ended his career as a thuggish, bloated egomaniac paid to kill on a fee-for-service basis by some of the Mideast’s most odious regimes.

Now the attention he so fiercely coveted has finally been paid with Carlos, a five-plus hour French film that won acclaim at Cannes last spring. But he is still not satisfied. The film is not accurate, he recently complained in a jailhouse radio broadcast from Poissy high security prison, in France, where he is serving a life sentence for the 1976 murders of two French secret agents and an informer. His commando team, for instance, was not a bunch of “hysterical men waving submachine guns and threatening people,” as the film suggested, he said. They were “professionals,” he declared, “commandos of a very high standard.”

French filmmaker Olivier Assayas evidently disagrees. His bio-epic of the life and times of the Venezuelan-born revolutionary—brilliantly portrayed by Edgar Ramirez, another Venezuelan who is not related to his namesake—depicts Carlos as a brutal, charismatic narcissist who pleasures himself through violence. Members of his band of international revolutionaries are portrayed as vicious, fanatical amateurs.

Filling three DVDs at a running time of 5 hours and 19 minutes, Assayas’ film requires stamina and a strong stomach for violence and talk about political violence. But the film is far from hagiography—and it is, in its own way, a masterpiece that not only provides a riveting portrait of a celebrity-seeking killer but indicts the intellectuals and media promoters who helped transform a vain thug into a romantic figure, helping perpetuate the leftist myth of the terrorist as freedom fighter.

Though al-Qaida is never directly mentioned in the film, Assayas clearly sees a connection between the leftist assaults of the ’70s and the religiously inspired terrorism that would supplant it 30 years later. Although I haven’t seen the two-and-a-half-hour-long condensed version prepared for commercial distribution, the longer, uncut film is a nuanced portrayal of the descent from alleged revolutionary fervor into self-satisfied, self-serving violence justified in language long-stripped of meaning or relevance. Carlos may talk the talk, but he knows all too well that his ideological justifications for revolutionary terrorism are a simply a pretext for doing what comes naturally to him—killing.

Carlos has flaws. But it is hard to think of a better recent film about the nature of modern terrorism or its practitioners. In December, the New York Film Critics Circle awarded Carlos its prize for the best foreign-language film.

The movie, divided roughly into three parts, opens curiously, with Israel’s assassination of Mohammed Boudia, a leader of the militant Palestinian Black September group, in June 1973. The car-bomb murder outrages the brash young Carlos and prompts him to try to advance his fledgling career by asking to succeed the murdered martyr as the Popular Front’s London terror chief. No mention is made, however, of the massacre of Israeli Olympic athletes in Munich the year before—an outrage that stunned the world and led Israel to dispatch a hit team to kill Boudia and others who planned or conducted the operation.

Waddi Haddad, then the Popular Front’s Beirut-based leader, quickly senses possibilities in this brash young Westerner. Carlos is given membership in the Front, a small pistol, and only five bullets—yet another suggestion that this Palestinian terror group, which ran very profitable extortion and protection rackets in the Persian Gulf and received large subsidies from various Arab governments, was made up of desperate and impoverished fedayeen.

The film quickly shifts to “new left” London, where Ilich, the son of a Communist-sympathizing Venezuelan lawyer, has just chosen “Carlos” as his nom de guerre. In a posh restaurant, he argues revolutionary doctrine with his gorgeous girlfriend, a fellow leftist. Chiding Carlos for not having attended a protest against Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, she says the Chilean people need his support. Demonstrations bore him, he replies. They serve no purpose. Chile’s generals and the CIA don’t care about their protests. War demands action. She must commit to the revolution, which means supporting his new group and its as yet unspecified actions against the imperialists.

Guerrilla action against well-armed states is doomed to failure, she tells him. The balance of power is against the terrorists. But Carlos insists that the under-armed Viet Cong had crushed the “gringos.” His path, too, will lead to glory.

“Is that what you want?” she shoots back, accusing him of “petit bourgeois arrogance.”

True glory, he replies, is acting without credit on behalf of the revolution.

Anyone politically active in the late ’60s and ’70s will recall such heated discussions, which Assayas recreates with such perfect pitch that one feels the director’s own sense of nostalgia, if not for the violence that such conversations justified then for the rhythms of the talk. The heady counter-culture is faithfully depicted—the free, guiltless sex, the pounding strains of rock and seductive South American ballads. Carlos’ sideburns are neatly trimmed; his cream-colored suit, with no tie, exquisitely cut, his black leather jacket is well worn with a pistol shoved into his skin-tight jeans. The Belmondo of terror sports a black “Che” beret and trademark sunglasses. It’s all a far cry from the caves in Tora Bora.

Yet the idea of a more perfect form of human existence is equally alive to these amoral hedonists as it is to their dour successors. No TV sets are to be seen in Assayas’ version of the radical underground. Revolutionaries prefer playing guitar, dancing, and singing together as equals. Friends and fellow killers drink, talk, and chain smoke before and after sex and their terrorist attacks, which are portrayed in the film with equal demonic fervor. There are lengthy static shots of Carlos nude, basking in his own virility. The alternation of narcissism, white-walled art-gallery-like spaces, and sudden violence sucks the viewer into a cold place that destroys any romantic illusions about political violence that the art direction of the movie might nourish.

The second part of the film is a highlight reel of Carlos’ terrorist career, in which the achievement of deadly spectacles requires the intricate manipulation of—and finally, manipulation by—cynical Middle Eastern regimes, the former Soviet Union, its Eastern European satellites, and Palestinian revolutionary groups. The linchpin of this segment is Carlos’ notorious attack on OPEC headquarters in Vienna and his kidnapping of several dozen oil ministers in 1975. The attack is brutal, but this is a more innocent time—an era before concrete Jersey barriers surrounded official buildings and private security guards manned the entrances to company headquarters and wealthy homes. Carlos and his multinational crew of fanatics simply barge into the building and quickly seize control. (KSM, eat your heart out.)

After three guards are killed, Carlos flies his hostages to the Middle East in a borrowed jet. But he’s outmaneuvered by duplicitous Algerians and loses control of his operation. Cornered, he accepts a lucrative deal to release the hostages, and he is exiled to a popular Front terror camp in Yemen, where he is ousted by Haddad for insubordination.

Carlos and his mostly German comrades then go freelance and focus increasingly on finding work and well-funded patrons. Syria pays the tab for a while, helping Carlos create arms-shipment routes through eastern Europe in exchange for attacks on designated targets. For a brief time in Budapest and Damascus, Carlos lives what seems a semi-normal life—marrying Magdalena Kopp, his beautiful German-revolutionary companion, and fathering a child. He dotes on his daughter when he is not busy killing on demand and philandering in the name of revolution. While Carlos and his pals continue espousing their commitment to “fighting for socialism” and utter such slogans as “the only struggle that matters is between the oppressed and imperialists,” the words ring hollow. A sense of desperation builds.

The film’s turning point is the destruction of the Berlin Wall and collapse of the Soviet Union. Suddenly Carlos and his not-so-merry mercenaries are a risky embarrassment to their patrons. The world has changed, a cynical Syrian paymaster tells them coolly, ousting Carlos and his group’s German co-founder from their villas. Even the CIA considers him a “historical curiosity,” a “Communist windbag.” Carlos and his gang are forced to live by their wits and their not inconsiderable linguistic resources: English, German, French, Spanish, and Arabic are all spoken convincingly by Ramirez and the other actors.

The last third of the film depicts the betrayal and capture of an aging, paunchy Lothario, still sufficiently vain to undergo liposuction on his love handles in a Khartoum hospital. Magdalena has gone—taking their child to live with Carlos’ wealthy brother, Lenin, in Venezuela. Another younger revolutionary tends lovingly to his needs. He tells visiting Iranian agents that their struggle against American imperialism is his fight too, and that he and his new wife have become Muslims, a conversion of obvious convenience that fails to impress his polite but indifferent new patrons.

Carlos still pretends that he is the cock of the walk, but visions of feather-dusters now surround him. The era of leftist revolutionary terror has ended. Counter-terrorism is rising along with the new world order, which is closing in on him.

In fact, Carlos has long become indistinguishable from the prostitutes who pleasure him, all in the same business. The film deftly makes the point in Europe, when a prostitute he has struck for daring to demand more money turns out to be a confidential informer for a security service.

Sudan’s Islamic government, led by the suave, crafty Hassan al-Turabi, offers Carlos protection but then sells him out to France. In 1994, acting on an American tip, French police employ Sudanese soldiers to kidnap him from a Sudanese government guest house as he recovers from surgery. Bound and drugged, Carlos is bundled onto a private jet and flown to France, where he has been incarcerated since.

Although the movie ends with a scroll of the deaths, disappearances, and incarcerations of the various members of Carlos’ gang, France has permitted the Jackal, now 60, to operate his theater of the absurd from his cell. Earlier last year, Isabelle Coutant-Peyre, his latest wife and also his lawyer, sued the film’s producers to block its release because he had not been given the right to vet or edit it. The judge sided with the film’s producers. But Carlos would not relent. He didn’t give “a damn” about the “myth of Carlos,” he told his radio audience. But he did care about historical accuracy. It was Muammar Qaddafi, Libya’s erratic autocrat, and not Saddam Hussein who had ordered the OPEC attack, he insisted. And he didn’t smoke cigarettes. “I have smoked cigars since 1969,” he said in the radio interview. “Everyone knows that.”

A scene from Carlos, showing the 1974 bombing of the drugstore Saint Germain in Paris:

Though he apparently did not realize it, Mabhouh was being closely watched. Members of what is now estimated to have been an 18-person Mossad assassination squad were tracking his every move, from his home in Damascus to his hospital room in Dubai. Members of the team infiltrated the hospital and were prepared to assassinate him but the attempt was called off due to what was described as a “glitch.”

Last November, Mabhouh was in Dubai again, en route to yet another prospective purchase of weapons for Hamas. Once again, he was not alone. Throughout his brief stay in Dubai and when he boarded his plane for China, a member of a Mossad assassination squad accompanied the target, reporting on where he went in China, whom he met and contacted, and where he stayed, dined, and slept.

Israel has remained silent about the murder, in keeping with its longstanding policy of not commenting on such operations, but an Israeli source suggests that the near-miss in the Dubai hospital and the trip to China were only two incidents in an intense, protracted surveillance effort that preceded the Mossad’s meticulously planned assassination on January 19th of a man who had been on Israel’s “most wanted” list for almost two decades. Mahmoud al-Mabhouh had been on the run ever since he helped to kidnap and later kill two Israeli soldiers on leave in 1989.

But what put al-Mabhouh so prominently in Israel’s sights were not his past deeds, but his leading role in the supply of weapons from Iran. As an Israeli reporter put it to me, al-Mabhouh’s death was a “two-fer”—a man who from Israel’s standpoint deserved killing not only for having murdered Israelis in the past, but also because he was buying weapons from Iran that would be used to kill Israelis in the future.

Al-Mabhouh’s assassination in Dubai is the latest in a series of Israeli killings of individuals from Hamas or Hezbollah who traffic in arms and intelligence from the Islamic Republic. The assassination campaign, which would have been approved at the highest levels of government, seems to be part of a broader strategy to disrupt Iran’s nuclear program and confound Teheran’s efforts to surround Israel with militant enemies on its northern border in Lebanon and to the south in Gaza.

In December, two Hamas officials were killed in a mysterious blast in Beirut. Last year, Sudan, which is allied with Iran and openly hosts Hamas, accused Israel of attacking a convoy in a remote mountainous region in northeastern Sudan. The Associated Press and other news agencies reported that strikes were aimed at convoys that were allegedly filled with weapons bound for Hamas. The Mossad has also been linked to the disappearance of Iranian nuclear officials, though it is unclear whether they were killed or have defected to the West.

Most famously, the Mossad has been accused of having assassinated Imad Mughniyeh, the senior Hezbollah official responsible for the bombing of the U.S. Marine compound in Beirut in 1983, soon after he attended a gathering at the home of the Iranian cultural attaché in Damascus, not far from the headquarters of Syrian military intelligence. Mughniyeh, who was said to be hyper-attentive to his personal security, was decapitated in 2008 when the headrest of his car seat exploded.

Six months later, Mossad, in cooperation with special forces, struck again at the heart of the Syrian establishment. According to Uzi Mahnaimi, writing in London’s Sunday Times this weekend, General Mohammed Suleiman, Syria’s liaison to North Korea’s nuclear program, was shot and killed by a sniper firing from a yacht sailing by as he was relaxing in the back garden of his villa on the Mediterranean shore.

Yedioth Ahronoth, the Israeli daily, was first to report that members of the assassination team that killed Mabhouh on January 19th had made at least two prior visits to Dubai before the trip last month. Over the weekend, Emirati officials confirmed that 11 of the assassination squad members had used cloned foreign passports to visit Dubai at least twice before the January visit.

Also over the weekend, Emirati and Hamas officials, both apparently eager to blame the victim rather than themselves for failing to prevent the murder, criticized Mabhouh for having been lax about his own security. In Gaza, Salah Bardawil, a Hamas official, complained to reporters that Mabhouh had broken Hamas security rules by calling his relatives and telling them he was heading to Dubai. Moreover, he said, Mabhouh should not have been booking his hotel room over the Internet. Piling on, Lt. Gen. Dhahi Khalfan Tamim, Dubai’s loquacious police chief, scolded both Mabhouh and Hamas for having failed to take “basic security precautions” to protect so important an official. “If he had at least one person with him, [the suspects] would not have been able to kill him,” Khalfan Tamim told Gulf News, a Dubai-based English language paper. “It was clear that he had that feeling that he was anonymous and he was not careful enough,” the police chief charged in an apparent attempt to shift blame for the murder from his emirate to Mabhouh and his organization.

When the news first broke, senior Israeli officials neither confirmed nor denied an assertion by Dubai’s Lt. Gen. Khalfan Tamim that he was “99 percent certain” that Israel had dispatched a professional hit team of at least “seven or more people holding passports from different European countries” to kill Mabhouh in Dubai. Over the weekend, Khalfan Tamim elaborated, saying that several of the assassination team members had used their passports in Dubai at least twice before. About three months ago, he said, confirming the Israeli newspaper account, agents using stolen identities had followed Mabhouh from Dubai to China. About two months ago, he added, they had followed him on another visit to Dubai. It was unclear whether this was the trip Mabhouh had made for his medical treatment, which an Israeli source said took place last summer.

On Friday, Yedioth Ahronoth disclosed that the team had tracked its prey to Dubai at least twice for what Smadar Perry, the well-connected Israeli journalist, called a “training mission,” and in an earlier, interrupted attempt to kill him. On that second visit, only a “technical” glitch in the mission, the precise nature of which she did not disclose, enabled Mahbouh to escape death.

The prior visits to Dubai and the physical positioning of the team members strongly suggest that the Mossad was well aware of the CCTV cameras that Dubai has installed not only at this and other luxury hotels frequented by foreigners, but at airports, shopping malls, and throughout public spaces of the city known for intelligence intrigue and as a commercial entrepot for businessmen of all nationalities, including Israel. What apparently surprised the Mossad was the speed with which the Dubai police traced the movements of the Israeli agents in Dubai. The Emirati police have widely circulated a 30-minute video that outlines the Mossad plot and players as its officials understand it from the moment the agents entered the country until their departure a day later.

Watching the video, it seems clear that at least one female member of the hit team, a woman identified by the cloned passport she carried as Gail Folliard, an ostensible Irish citizen, knew she was being taped by the hotel’s security cameras. While photographed in several different guises, she was readily identifiable. At one point, in fact, she seems to be smiling coyly at the camera. But a second female team member was captured only briefly on video and remains unidentified due to her fleeting appearance in oversized sunglasses, broad-brimmed hat, and loose-fitting clothes.

Details are still emerging about precisely what happened in Mabhouh’s hotel room at the Al Bustan Rotana Hotel, where his body was discovered by the hotel’s staff a day after the murder. Although it is still unclear how the Israeli agents gained entry to his room and how precisely they killed him—contradictory reports suggest either electrocution or smothering—Mabhouh had taken some precautions to hide his movements since he had referred in an interview with Al Jazeera several months earlier to at least three Israeli attempts to eliminate him. Mabhouh had checked into the hotel using an alias and was said to have propped a heavy arm chair up against his hotel room door before retiring for the night. He had also requested a room without a balcony or external mode of entry.

It has been widely reported that the agents left a “Do Not Disturb” sign on Mabhouh’s door, a gesture intended to ensure that the body would not be discovered for several hours and to give themselves sufficient time for a clean getaway. In addition, they managed to latch the door to Mahbouh’s room from the inside. How this feat was performed is also unclear. One Israeli familiar with intelligence operations suggested that a woman agent’s tiny hand might have reached into the small gap between the door and its frame and fastened the chain after she had left the room. Perhaps the hand belongs to the still mysterious agent whom the CCTV cameras have failed to identify, by either her real name or her alias.

While Israeli reporters have continued their breathless reporting on the operation under the government’s tight censorship rules, facts and myths about the operation that has fascinated the world, infuriated Hamas, and been quietly condoned by many Arab states, have continued leaking out. The British government, for instance, has adamantly denied that it was tipped off in advance of the mission, or that it was aware that the Mossad had altered photos on genuine passports issued to British-Israelis for the Mossad agents to use. Given Mossad’s secretive modus operandi, Whitehall’s denials seem credible. It is unlikely that the spy agency would have alerted anyone, let alone a country that lambasted Israel two decades ago for having used stolen British passports in Mossad missions, to an operation that the spy agency clearly hoped might leave no fingerprints.

The same skepticism must apply to press reports that the Mossad was working with the Palestinian Authority to kill Mahbouh. Such reports fail what one Israeli source called the “smell test.” Yes, two Palestinians from Gaza—Ahmad Hasnin and Anwar Shekhaiber, both of whom had apparently worked for the Palestinian Authority in Ramallah—were arrested and quickly extradited to Dubai soon after the murder and their flight to the Jordanian capital, Amman. And yes, the two had lived in Gaza until Hamas seized control there in 2007 and expelled the P.A. The Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported over the weekend that Hasnin and Shekhaiber had moved to Dubai from Gaza and worked for a real estate company owned by a senior official of Fatah, the main P.A. faction headed by Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, Hamas’s bitter rival and foe.

Still, it is improbable that Mossad would have involved the P.A. in such a politically sensitive, potentially explosive operation. A more plausible explanation is that the two Palestinians, only one of whom was photographed talking to the putative head of the Mossad mission, were freelancing, that is, picking up some quick cash by providing logistical support for a member of the Israeli team. A source close to Jordanian intelligence suggested to me that “there are three possibilities here”: first, that the “Palestinians were affiliated with the P.A. and authorized to cooperate,” which is possible but not likely; second, that “they were freelancing for pay, which is most likely”; or third, that they were pawns in an internal struggle within Hamas, “which is preposterous—which doesn’t mean that it can’t be true.”

The swift extradition of the two Palestinians is easier to understand. Jordan and Dubai are close allies and politically like-minded. The rulers of the two countries are also linked by marriage. The second wife of Sheihk Mohammed bin Rashid al Maktoum, Dubai’s ruler and the United Arab Emirates’ prime minister and vice president, is Princess Haya bint Al Hussein, the daughter of the late King Hussein of Jordan and a half-sister of Jordan’s current ruler, King Abdullah II.

Moreover, Jordan has taken a dim view of operations by Mossad on its own territory ever since 1997, when Mossad agents tried and failed to kill Hamas leader Khaled Mashal during a visit to Jordan. On that botched mission, an Israeli Mossad agent blew poison into Mashal’s ear. But the two agents were caught and a furious King Hussein demanded that an antidote be handed over in time to save Mashal, who now leads Hamas’ more radical political wing in Damascus. The failed operation severely strained relations between Israel and Jordan, which remains one of the former’s key regional allies.

As for the rest of the Arab states, their silence about the alleged Mossad operation has been deafening. Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and even Syria have said little about the murder, perhaps preferring Israel’s policy of targeted assassinations to its more aggressive expressions of displeasure with programs or actions that endanger its citizens—including Operation Orchard, the 2007 military strike that destroyed Syria’s covert nuclear reactor, and its incursions into Lebanon and Gaza.

Meanwhile, countries whose passports were used as cover for the Mossad agents have continued to feign outrage and go through the motions of protest. Ron Prosor, Israel’s ambassador to London, for instance, was summoned to the Foreign Office for a dressing down. Dubai’s police chief Khalfan Tamim is still calling upon Interpol to issue a “red notice” for the arrest of Mossad chief Meir Dagan, the 65-year-old former military officer who emigrated to Israel from Novosibirsk, Siberia.

Appointed director of the state spy agency by former Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, Dagan has returned to the lethal covert murders for which the Mossad was once known. Such operations had fallen into disrepute, but they have been revived under Dagan’s stewardship, with Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu’s blessing. The prime minister, who meets with the Mossad chief at least once a week to review Mossad operations, would have had to approve an operation of this nature, as the Sunday Times reported this weekend. In response to Dubai’s call for the arrest and extradition of Dagan, an unnamed spokesman in Bibi’s office was quoted in the Israeli press as saying that the prime minister retained “full confidence” in Meir Dagan.

So when Bibi Netanyahu began his speech to the packed auditorium in prime television time by saying that he believed peace talks with the Palestinians, without preconditions, would begin in the next few weeks, participants perked up. But he did not elaborate. Instead, he delivered a rambling ode to the joys of rediscovering one’s Jewish roots and heritage. The government, he said, would soon begin building walking paths to link the hundreds of biblical sites throughout Israel. “Education begins first of all with the bible,” he said. “So get to know the land,” he counseled, urging Israelis to take to the roads with their children in tow to visit the country’s historic Jewish sites.

This being Israel, the jokes soon followed. Bibi’s oration quickly became known as the “mushroom speech,” as one of the student volunteers who had shepherded foreign guests through the conference called it.

“Sarah wrote it,” quipped another irate Israeli, referring to recent press reports about the prime minister’s wife, which accuse her of alleged undue influence over her husband’s policy and personnel choices and allege she demands free meals at some of the country’s best restaurants.

“Take a Hike, Israel!” screamed the first-edition headline of Yedioth Ahronoth, Israel’s largest-circulation daily paper.

While foreigners at the conference were puzzled by the prime minister’s choice of topics, Israeli participants were furious. For four days, guests had held wide-ranging, brutally frank, often hair-raising discussions about the myriad challenges facing the Jewish state. Conferees were told, for instance, that Israel might soon have to confront not only a historically unprecedented threat from a nuclearized, unstable, and militant Iran, but also a historic decision about whether to return territory Israel has occupied since the 1967 war to the Palestinians. And Hezbollah is said to have replenished its conventional arsenal with some 40,000 rockets and missiles and has proven willing to use them to overcome Israel’s overwhelming air superiority.

At home, participants here were told, domestic violence is increasing and questions are being raised about whether Israel’s strong economic growth can be sustained. For the first time, this conference expanded the definition of national security to include Israel’s social welfare and educational systems and its treatment of the elderly and Arab Israelis, who constitute almost 20 percent of the population.

“Yet Bibi picked this moment to tell us that we should reconnect with our heritage and take our sons on hikes?” said one angry Israeli.

Netanyahu’s limp performance and sophomoric lecture on the need for Jewish patriotism was particularly resented in light of the fact that Israeli prime ministers have often used the Herzliya gathering to deliver major national-security news. The prime minister’s own office, moreover, had spent days raising expectations about the speech, telling Israeli reporters that Netanyahu would deliver a major policy statement here. “We were expecting Churchill,” said one veteran commentator. “And Bibi was no Churchill.”

A more charitable interpretation of the speech was that, however ineptly, Bibi was trying to reconnect Israelis with their Zionist roots at a time when he may soon ask fellow Israelis to relinquish what many of them consider the sacred biblical land of Israel.

But there was little charity in the lobby of the auditorium after the conference’s close. It had been an intense week, participants agreed. Discussions here included the most varied program and some of the highest quality debate that the Herzliya Conference, now celebrating its 10th year, had ever staged.

The prime minister never once mentioned the topic that had dominated so much of the informal discussion here—the threat posed by a militant, nuclearized Iran. Earlier in the day, however, Israel’s vice prime minister, Moshe Yaalon, argued that to persuade Iran to end or suspend its nuclear weapons program, Iranian leaders would have to conclude that their own survival was at stake. The Iranian regime had suspended its nuclear program at least once before, he said—in 2003, when the United States invaded Iraq in response to allegation that Saddam Hussein was developing weapons of mass destruction. The program had been suspended for at least three years, he told conferees. It resumed only in 2006 after the U.S. war effort in Iraq seemed on the verge of failure and Israel faced withering internal and foreign criticism for its incursion in Lebanon.

Yaalon, a retired chief of Israel’s armed forces, seemed eager to keep Iran guessing about what Israel, which is widely believed to have the Middle East’s only nuclear arsenal, would or would not do if Teheran’s mullahs do not stop their own nuclear enrichment program and advanced to a nuclear-bomb threshold. “It is important to continue to make clear to the extremist Iranian regime that all options are still on the table,” he said, “and that ignoring the international demands can end in the worst way.”

Fayyad speaking at the Herzliya Conference.
CREDIT: Jack Guez/AFP/Getty Images

February 2, 11:20 p.m. ET: Israel’s favorite Palestinian showed up at the Herzliya Conference today. In an appearance many called courageous, Palestinian Prime Minister Salaam Fayyad, surrounded by a phalanx of Israeli and Palestinian bodyguards, accepted an invitation to be a keynote speaker at the annual gathering of Israel’s establishment, where he appealed for peace.

Ignoring threats and condemnations by his rivals in Hamas for his decision to appear here in the packed auditorium, Fayyad called upon Israel to stop expanding settlements on the land of the future Palestinian state.

His message was not particularly new. Nor was that of Defense Minister Ehud Barak, who also appeared to restate Israel’s official position. But both men made gestures that went beyond what the stalled peace process would seem to allow. Fayyad did that simply by showing up on Tuesday night, rather than canceling, as he has done before. And Barak delivered a shot across the bow of his fractious coalition government by warning that unless progress on the peace front occurred now, Israel would either become a “bi-national” or an “apartheid state” headed inexorably into global isolation.

A few participants gasped to hear the defense minister in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government use the language of Israel’s most virulent critics. Apartheid state? One of the panels here at Herzliya had described the effort to paint Israel’s occupation policies in the West Bank as analogous to South African apartheid as part of a “soft war” against the Jewish state.

One veteran European diplomat called the dueling appearances by Barak and Fayyad at the highly charged conference a “mood-changing moment.” “Both sides were signaling what they really wanted to do,” the diplomat said. Now they just have to figure out how to do it.

But some participants were decidedly less impressed. “An investment banker trying to calm a skittish board” is how Fayyad came across to Berel Rodal, the entrepreneur and former Canadian government official. But many here seemed willing to give Fayyad, the soft-spoken, articulate technician in a grey banker’s suit, the benefit of the doubt. “He was laying his cards on the table and in effect negotiating in public, saying what he would say if there were negotiations,” said Richard Gordon, president of the American Jewish Congress. But there aren’t any negotiations, of course—for reasons that both sides seem eager to blame on everyone but themselves.

A veteran Israeli official noted that both Barak and Fayyad were uttering the right words about the need for peace and compromise and to battle extremism and establish security and prosperity for both peoples. But while Barak, given his subordinate status in Bibi’s government, was unable to do anything to implement his strongly-stated opinions, Fayyad was working hard on the West Bank.

Fayyad stressed his determination to prepare the Palestinian people for statehood by building the civic and physical infrastructure of a state. He spoke of the accomplishments of his “bottom-up” strategy—the West Bank’s 7 percent growth rate and the more than 1,000 development projects completed under his administration. He alluded to the American-sponsored training for the Palestinian police and security forces that have helped stem terror and establish Palestinian law and order in West Bank towns long overrun by gangs and corruption.

Isabel Maxwell, an activist and philanthropist who has devoted enormous time and energy to understanding the dual narratives that have shaped the Israel-Palestinian struggle, said that Ramallah and parts of the West Bank were being transformed under Fayyad’s administration. Recently, for instance, Bashar Masri, a Palestinian developer, broke ground on Rawabi, a new community just north of Bir Zeit that’s designed to accommodate 750,000 Palestinians. New business ventures were springing up throughout Ramallah, she said. For the first time, the West Bank has a Yellow Pages.

Fayyad predicted that Palestinians would be more than ready for statehood by 2011, within two years. But Palestinians also had to believe that the occupation was ending and that the political, or “top-down” peace talks would ultimately deliver the two-state solution that both the Palestine Authority and Israel have endorsed. Yet the political track has failed to keep pace with bottom-up nation-building, he said, despite U.S envoy George Mitchell’s repeated trips here, and the efforts by Britain, France, and others to revive the negotiations.

The most obvious problem with imagining a true two-state solution of the kind that Fayyad expects is Gaza, mired in its misery under militant Islamic rule. Hamas refuses to accept a two-state solution or any Jewish presence in what it refers to as historic Palestine. Fayyad paid the requisite lip-service to ending the “separation” between the Palestine Authority and Iranian-supported Hamas, which needed less than five hours to evict its Fatah rivals from Gaza in 2007. But Hamas and Fatah are unlikely to reconcile anytime soon. Nor is Bibi, who is scheduled to close the conference Wednesday night, likely to yield to the Obama administration’s demands that Israel stop expanding settlements.

The Obama adminstration’s anger over Netanyahu’s recalcitrant behavior has prompted Washington to stage something of a no-show at the conference. While a deputy assistant secretary of defense is participating in several panels, the White House did not send its usual suspects here. Vice President Joseph Biden, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, veteran diplomat Dennis Ross, and other senior officials involved in setting Middle East policy were all invited, along with others, but none accepted. Several leaders of American Jewish groups insisted on Tuesday that relations between Israel and the United States are perfectly fine, but the strains between the two allies seemed all too evident.

Iran’s Sejil-2 surface-to-surface missile, prior to its test-firing on May 20, 2009.
CREDIT: FARS/AFP/Getty Images

February 1, 10:55 p.m. ET: The Herzliya Conference is not for the faint-hearted or weak of tongue. From 8:30 in the morning to 11 at night, Israeli and foreign participants at this national-security marathon talk, question, opine, challenge, decry, quip, assert, and rant. And, of course, complain: about the failing peace process, the strains in the U.S.-Israeli partnership, and Israel’s frustrations with the Arabs, radical Islamists, and their “moderate” Arab alternatives—if, as opposition leader and former Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni observed, one can use that term to describe people who “chop off the hands of thieves.”

On buses, over sack lunches, and in corridors, Israelis and their guests at this prestigious gathering engage in non-stop gab. But near the end of the second day of this four-day conference, several participants began to notice as Berel Rodal, a former Canadian defense official and an entrepreneur, astutely noticed, much of the talk was about not talking.

The elephant in all of the rooms at Herzliya is Iran. Yes, there is endless talk about the challenge that a nuclearized, militant Iran will pose not only to Israel but also to the stability of the region and the world. There is talk about what the United States might, or should, or is likely to do, and there is worry about what Obama is unlikely to do.

But there is precious little discussion about Israel’s actual strategic thinking and plans. Uzi Arad, the prime minster’s national security adviser, explained in Sunday night’s opening speech the reasons for Israeli officials’ uncharacteristic opaqueness. “More is happening than meets the eye,” said Arad, a man with backgrounds in both scholarship and the Mossad, who not incidentally was the founder of the Herzliya Conference a decade ago.

Arad stressed the need for patience, a posture not always associated with a man who has never been known for a shy, retiring style. Talk is sometimes cheap, he suggested. Not talking about things should not be interpreted to mean that nothing was happening on the Iranian front. Not talking did not mean that there was nothing to talk about. When he was not talking, he continued, we could assume that there might be things happening that he could not and would not talk about. “And that’s all I want to say about that,” he concluded.

Known for his acute analyses and blunt talk, Arad stressed the need for “prudence” and to avoid “noise and threats.”

There has been no talk by officials at Herzliya about Israel’s “red lines”—the points that Iran will reach in its nuclear program at which Israel may feel compelled to take military action. What constitutes a strategic threat to Israel, participants wondered. Would Iran’s possession of enough low-enriched uranium (which can be enriched to bomb levels within six months) be considered a red line? If so, that line has probably been crossed. Must Iran actually test a device to be considered a strategic threat to Israel? What will Israel do if Iran adopts the “Japanese model”—acquires the capability and material to build a bomb at any point, but refrains from actually building a weapon or testing one? Would Israel act without U.S. assistance or approval? Does it have the ability to destroy enough of Iran’s nuclear facilities to justify military action—and the political will and military ability to withstand Iranian retaliation? How would action absent American blessing affect the fate of Israel’s sometimes-tense relationship with Washington, the country’s most important strategic partner?

Israel’s relationship with Washington can still be talked about. Indeed, the morning’s keynote panel was entitled “U.S.-Israeli Relations: Still Special?” The panelists agreed that the ties between the two states and U.S. support for Israel remain strong, despite Israel’s refusal to yield to President Barack Obama’s demand that it suspend expanding settlements on occupied Palestinian land. Tzipi Livni argued that the relationship remained crucial, despite diplomatic strains. Pursuing peace with the Palestinians and challenging militant Iran were not favors Israel did for Washington, she asserted, but in both countries’ strategic interests.

There is a discouraging consensus that the peace process with the Palestinians is going nowhere, the result, many participants argued, of the disarray within Palestinian ranks, the domination of Gaza, or “Hamastan,” as one Israeli participant called it, by militant Islamic Hamas, and a weak Palestinian leadership on the West Bank, which more conservative Israelis, and all Israeli officials, continue to call by its biblical name, Judea and Samaria. Only Daniel C. Kurtzer, a former U.S. ambassador to Israel and Egypt now at Princeton, warned that it was unreasonable and self-defeating for Israel to insist that the Palestinians come to the negotiating table to discuss the fate of land that Israel continued to seize.

Tuesday’s schedule features very little talk about the irksome Palestinians and much more talk about Israel’s energy requirements and oil addition, its Jewish identity and heritage, the treatment of its elderly, and the quest for “effective governance.”

But the issue of what to do about Iran is likely to continue to dominate the corridor chatter, if not official speeches.

One Israeli official warned me not to expect too much enlightenment on the questions that are most likely to keep conference participants at Herzliya up at night. “Those who are talking don’t know,” he explained. “And those who know aren’t talking.”

Dagan, at left, celebrating his appointment as Mossad chief with then-Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and outgoing Mossad chief Ephraim Halevy on October 30, 2002.
CREDIT: Yaakov Saar/GPO/Getty Images

Feburary 1, 1:00 p.m. ET: For the tenth year in a row, anyone who is anyone in Israel can be found in this Tel Aviv suburb by the sea for the annual Herzliya Conference, the theme of which this year is the “Balance of Israel’s National Security.” The three-day conference features Israel’s political and intellectual movers and shakers—from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to the country’s irrepressibly energetic octogenarian president, Shimon Peres, from Defense Minister Ehud Barak to his fading political rival, Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, from academic superstars like the Nobel Prize-winning economist Thomas Schelling to American billionaire real estate magnate and publisher Mort Zuckerman.

As heavy-duty keynote speakers from around the world address the roughly 800 invitees in the Herzliya Center’s vast auditorium and panelists debate the state of Israel’s soul and its political and economic fortunes at invitation-only breakout sessions in classrooms, participants conduct the conference’s real business—the informal schmoozing and exchanges of embossed business cards—over coffee and in the corridors.

But this year, all of Israel is focused on a man who isn’t here. The man who is so vital to Israel’s security never comes to this prestigious event, even though his predecessors, acolytes, associates, and protégés are everywhere at this gathering: Meir Dagan hates small talk, but his name this week is on all of Israel’s lips.

Meir Dagan is the head of the Mossad, Israel’s secret security service, which struck again in January in Dubai with devastating precision in a raid whose details are only now dribbling out past Israel’s press censors. Israel, as is its custom, has neither confirmed nor denied a role in the death of Mahmoud al-Mabhouh, a senior Hamas operative and founder of the group’s military wing, in a hotel room near Dubai’s international airport on January 20. But his family and Hamas are blaming Israel for Mabhouh’s demise.

Smadar Perry, the Arab-affairs correspondent for Yedioth Ahronoth, revealed more details of the astonishing operation in an article today as the participants gathered for Herzliya’s opening ceremony.

The strike was vintage Mossad—precise, without fingerprints, and deniable, the kind of operation in which Dagan has specialized since becoming chief of the spy agency seven years ago.

According to the newspaper, al-Mabhouh was in Dubai for Hamas to arrange a shipment of arms from Iran, having entered under a false name with a phony passport. There are varying accounts of precisely what happened in al-Mabhouh’s room at the Al Bustan Rotana Hotel, where his body was discovered by hotel staff. But somehow, four Mossad agents, having entered Dubai with false passports, gained entry to his room, although Al-Mahbouh, no stranger to assassination attempts, had supposedly taken the precaution of propping a huge arm chair against his hotel door to prevent unauthorized entry. The paper reported that he was electrocuted by an unknown device and then strangled. The agents left a “Do not Disturb” sign on his door to ensure that the body would not be discovered for several hours, to give themselves sufficient time for a clean getaway.

Al-Mahbouh had been on Israel’s hit list for years. On the run since 1989, when he helped kidnap and kill two Israeli soldiers on leave, he and eventually his family moved to Damascus, where Hamas’ more radical wing under Khaled Mishal is based. According to The Times of London, al-Mabhouh traveled to Dubai on January 18 on an Emirates flight from Damascus using a false passport. Upon his arrival in Dubai, he was followed by two men who were described by local police as “Europeans traveling on European passports.” Yedioth Ahronoth reported yesterday that one member of the team was a woman.

Dubai police chief Dhafi Khalfan told the Agence France-Presse on Sunday that the apparent operation to kill the Hamas kingpin was perpetrated by “seven or more people holding passports from different European countries” and that the police are currently in contact with the countries in question to figure out who the passport-holders are.

The killing of al-Mahbouh is the latest in a string of assassinations and operations that are commonly believed to be part of the campaign to stop the flow of arms and other contraband to Gaza since Hamas seized control of the Fatah-led government there in June 2007. While questions have been raised internationally about the extent of arms shipments from Iran to Gaza, weapons apparently destined for Gaza have been captured at sea. In a recent interview on Hamas’ English-language website, movement official Dr. Khalil al-Hayah praised Iranian support for Hamas and did not deny that this support included weapons. “Iran supports us financially, politically and morally,” he said, “and stands beside the Palestinian people and his [sic] resistance, without going into unimportant details.”

In December, two Hamas officials were killed in a mysterious blast in Beirut. And last year, Sudan, which is allied with Iran and openly hosts Hamas, accused Israel of attacking a convoy in a remote mountainous region in the northeastern part of the country. The Associated Press and other media reports said the strikes were aimed at convoys allegedly filled with weapons bound for Gaza.

Israel has also been linked to the disappearance of Iranian nuclear officials, though it is unclear whether they were killed or have defected to the West. And most famously, the Mossad has been accused of having assassinated Imad Mughnieh, the senior Hezbollah official responsible for the bombing of the U.S. Marine compound in Beirut in 1983, soon after he attended a gathering at the home of the Iranian cultural attaché in Damascus.

Dagan, a 65-year-old military officer who was born in Novosibirsk, Siberia, and emigrated to Israel as a young child, does not give interviews and is known to despise the media. It goes without saying that he would not be comfortable or happy at the Herzliya conference, where he is everyone’s favorite subject of conversation.

And somewhere nearby, away from the reporters and politicians, a small group of men and women who work for Israel’s top spy may be gathering to celebrate their latest accomplishment with a glass of champagne.

Judith Miller is an adjunct fellow at the Manhattan Institute whose writings focus on the Middle East and counterterrorism. As an investigative reporter for The New York Times, she was part of a small team that earned a 2002 Pulitzer Prize for reporting on global terrorism. Her book God Has Ninety-Nine Names explored the spread of Islamic extremism in ten Middle Eastern countries, including Israel and Iran.