Solidifying the network’s Jewish street cred, expect an interview with Steven Spielberg next month.

‘Jewish al-Jazeera’ Going on the Air [Ynet]
Jewish News Network to Broadcast from Tomorrow [Guardian]

Israel’s stable state structure and advanced military have gained significant new advantages over its neighbors in Egypt and Syria simply by standing pat. The Qataris, meanwhile, have become the flagship of revolution through the influence of the television broadcaster Al Jazeera, privately owned by the Qatari Emir Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani. Al Jazeera
helped overthrow Hosni Mubarak, protected the government of Bahrain through its silence regarding the Shia-majority uprising there, and has now turned against its onetime ally Syria. The victory over Libya—won in part with Qatari money and weapons and fighters, in addition to the soft power of Al Jazeera—may have been the crowning touch. Needless to say, Qatar allowed no street demonstrations at home, and somehow pulled off the incredible feat of overthrowing U.S. allies throughout the region with the acquiescence of Americans—while continuing to host U.S. Central Command, the strategic headquarters of the two Middle Eastern campaigns the United States is waging in Iraq and Afghanistan.

So, why of all times has Israel chosen now to pick a fight with Qatar, this clearly rising power?

Last week the Israeli daily Maariv relayed a report from the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs explaining that Israel is incensed with Qatar and intends to break off relations with the spunky Persian Gulf emirate. Among other complaints Jerusalem has with Doha is its unyielding support of Hamas and efforts to delegitimize the Jewish state, like funding lawfare against Israel, including legal actions regarding the Mavi Marmara incident.

It wasn’t always like this between Jerusalem and Doha. Qatari officials are among the few Arab statesmen who have openly met with Israeli leaders, including Ehud Barak, Tzipi Livni, and Shimon Peres. Israel even opened an interest office in the Qatari capital in 1996 following a visit by then-Prime Minister Shimon Peres.

But in the wake of Operation Cast Lead in the winter of 2008 and 2009, regional pressure mounted on Qatar, which expelled the Israeli delegation from Doha. And so, it is in fact beyond Jerusalem’s ability to break off relations with Qatar—since it was Doha that cashiered the relationship first, more than two years ago. So, why has Israel waited until now to bare its teeth? It’s not like Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu doesn’t have more pressing concerns, like a domestic protest movement, Iran’s nascent nuclear program, and the uncertain future of the 30-year-old peace treaty with Egypt.

As part of its campaign against Qatar, the Maariv report claimed that the Israeli government would no longer allow journalists employed by Al Jazeera, the Qatari emir’s de facto public diplomacy wing, to operate within its precincts. However, the station’s bureau chief is still working from Jerusalem and is in little danger of being chased out of the country. Nonetheless, by shining the spotlight on Al Jazeera, Israel is illuminating the satellite network’s negative influence in the region.

***

In one of the stolen Wikileaks cables, former Mossad chief Meir Dagan told an American diplomat that Al Jazeera might start the next war in the Middle East. Indeed, during the course of the Arab Spring, a piece of conventional wisdom has emerged: Once Al Jazeera turns its attention to despotic regimes, their days are numbered.

Mainstream Western opinion of Al Jazeera started to turn rosier with the introduction of Al Jazeera English (which Time Warner Cable now offers to its New York City subscribers). Media critics and policymakers remarked on the useful international programming, informed commentary, notable guests, and the appreciably moderate tone of the station. And it’s true that AJE generally avoids the anti-Semitic, anti-American, and anti-Shia invective of Al Jazeera Arabic, but this is only because the entire purpose of AJE is to legitimize the Al Jazeera brand in the West, and therefore legitimize the goals of the emir and his country’s foreign policy, which included toppling regional rivals like Hosni Mubarak.

To be sure, in the end it is the United States that topples Arab rulers: Either Washington turns its firepower on enemies like Saddam Hussein and Muammar Qaddafi or turns its back on allies like Mubarak and Tunisia’s Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali and compels them to relinquish their power. And it is Western and not Arab media that shape world opinion, including that of the White House. But beginning with the Egyptian revolution, the U.S. press has been challenged to match AJE and its tireless reporting, story by story. Otherwise, it is hard to see how an event taking place in Tahrir Square, two continents removed from the East Coast, could have come to dominate the news cycle for more than a week. When it did, the Obama Administration had little choice but to call for Mubarak to step down.

The most peculiar effect of the Arab Spring is that the Qataris have managed to leave the Obama Administration with the impression that they have been with the United States every step of the way. Doha, via Al Jazeera, also called for Mubarak and Ben Ali to step down; in Libya and Syria there has seemingly been little daylight between American and Qatari policy; and in Bahrain, the United States and Qatar both kept their mouths shut as a friendly, and strategically vital, Sunni government squashed its Shia opposition. Nonetheless, these coincidences hardly mean that Qatar is on the same side as the United States.

***

Two years before Doha broke off relations with Israel, Meir Dagan was telling U.S. diplomats that Qatar was a problem. If it seemed that the Qataris were playing both sides and engaging all comers, the reality, according to Dagan, is that the Qatari emir was “annoying everyone” in the region. Qatar had relations with both Hezbollah and its pro-democracy March 14 opponents in Lebanon, it dealt with Hamas and Fatah as well as Israel, and, most provocatively, Qatar hosted CENTCOM even as it shared the world’s largest natural gas field with Iran. Washington, Dagan advised, “should remove [its] bases from [Doha].”

The Maariv report essentially echoes the warning that Dagan relayed. Israel is airing out its differences with Qatar in public, but not because the Qataris themselves are ignorant about the state of relations with Jerusalem. The intended recipient of the message is Washington. Perhaps Jerusalem fears that the Obama Administration sees Doha as a more useful ally at present than Israel, or because the Israelis are concerned that the Americans do not understand that Qatar is not a benevolent actor. It seems that Jerusalem believes this is the one place where it can offer its advice to Washington, however obliquely.

From the American perspective, Qatar is extremely appealing. In the Arab Spring, Doha has picked nothing but winners for the last six months. Moreover, an Arab government with ties to the region’s likely rising powers—especially the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, Libya, and perhaps Syria—may be a valuable friend as the new regional order begins to take shape. But just because Qatar has dropped the role of middleman and mediator—made evident by its severing of ties with Israel—and is now choosing sides in the region doesn’t mean that it has really opted to side with the United States. From the Israeli perspective, the Americans have been fooled at least once in the last six months, when they misread Egypt as the Qataris, via Al Jazeera, set the tempo and obfuscated the situation. Qatar is also lined up against Israel, which wants to remind the Americans that it is still a U.S. ally—America’s one real friend in the Middle East.

• Russia is semi-secretly working to restart nuclear talks with Iran. [AP/WP]

• Roughly one-fifth of the House of Representatives is visiting Israel during summer recess, especially notable given the poor relations between President Obama and Prime Minister Netanyahu. [NYT] Texas

• An advocacy group accused Israel of arresting an Al Jazeera journalist and holding him without charges. [AP/WP]

• Glenn Beck, in Israel in advance of next week’s rally, called the #j14 protesters the “hard left” and repeatedly insisted referred to “Judea and Samaria.” [Ynet]

• Sen. Patrick Leahy, Democrat of Vermont, is sponsoring a bill to halt U.S. funding to three elite IDF units (including the famed Shayetet 13), which he says engage in human rights violations in the Palestinian territories. [Haaretz]

According to the president, the way to empower America’s friends is to “get all the groups together in Egypt for an orderly transition and the one that is a meaningful transition.” As if Egypt’s liberal current isn’t weak enough already, Obama believes that the best way to ensure the sharks don’t come out on top is to throw a whole bunch of liberal guppies into the tank as well.

While the parallels between Iran in 1979 and Egypt in 2011 can be overdrawn, it is foolish to pretend that they are not there. Cairo doesn’t have to literally become a Sunni version of Tehran to do terrible damage to U.S. interests and prestige in the Middle East—and to the hopes and dreams of its own people. And the Egyptians already have their own prospective Khomeini: Yussuf al-Qaradawi, the Qatar-based Muslim Brotherhood preacher who exiled himself from Egypt in 1961.

***

Assertions that the Muslim Brotherhood and its leadership are too disorganized and uncharismatic to gain a hold on power in Egypt unaccountably ignore the world’s most popular and authoritative Sunni cleric—an Egyptian by birth and member of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood whose son currently lives in Egypt. Where the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, who led the Iranian revolution, made radio broadcasts in exile from Paris, Qaradawi hosts one of the region’s most famous talk-shows on Al Jazeera, Sharia and Life. Qaradawi has cultivated among some American analysts a reputation for moderation with his fatwas, permitting masturbation and condemning Sept. 11 (while supporting suicide bombers in Israel). But in the Middle East his popularity resides in his stringent criticism of Arab regimes. His public support for violence, combined with the fact that he is a principal shareholder in and adviser to the al-Qaida-associated Bank al-Taqwa in Switzerland, led to him being banned from entering the United States in 1999 and from Great Britain in 2008.

What makes Qaradawi most worth watching is the fact that the Egyptian party system is badly decayed, and no credible opposition figures have stepped up to fill the gap. Mohammed ElBaradei is entirely a creation of Western opinion leaders and has no constituency in Egypt. Amr Moussa has some popular appeal, but his job as general secretary of the Arab League is not a position that showcases an ability to get things done. Moreover, as Mubarak’s former foreign minister he has deep ties to the old regime. The local Muslim Brotherhood was slow out of the gate, and its 68-year-old leader, Muhammad Badie, is not exactly charismatic.

As a media personality with a presence on TV and the Internet—and who is far out of reach of Egyptian internal security and free from Egyptian censors—Qaradawi is perfectly positioned to play the role of Muslim Brotherhood publicist or even kingmaker over the coming months. Nor is there any particular reason to think that Qaradawi’s willingness to embrace facets of modernity while promoting violence and hatred makes him less than dangerous to the dream of a future liberal society in Egypt and to Western interests in the region. The idea that Qaradawi is a moderate because he favors a relatively liberal interpretation of the status of women within Islam, for example, disregards his belief that homosexuality is a crime that should be punished by death and his embrace of the Holocaust as a divine punishment of the Jews that will hopefully be repeated soon.

Here, for example, is Qaradawi speaking about the Holocaust to the audience of his popular Al Jazeera television show on January 30, 2009:

Throughout history, Allah has imposed upon the [Jews] people who would punish them for their corruption. The last punishment was carried out by Hitler. By means of all the things he did to them—even though they exaggerated this issue—he managed to put them in their place. This was divine punishment for them. Allah willing, the next time will be at the hand of the believers.

***

Of course, many foreign and Egyptian observers contend that Egyptians, a moderate people by nature, don’t want anything like the Iranian regime running their country. That may be true, but the only real evidence we have, aside from questionable polling, suggests something different. After all, supposedly secular and moderate Palestinian voters were not impressed with the regional failure of Islamist politics—they voted for Hamas, the Gaza branch of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood. Or consider Lebanon, where at least 30 percent of the Christian community has aligned itself with the Khomeinist project in their country via Christian leader Michel Aoun’s alliance with Hezbollah. Presumably Middle Eastern Christians are among the last people who want to live under an Islamist regime, but what they fear and despise most now is the country’s Sunni community. That is to say, there are many reasons that people might choose to go with an Islamist party, many—but not all of which—are irrational. Mubarak’s departure will almost inevitably leave the ruling National Democratic Party’s organizational structure in shambles, which means that the best-organized political party in Egypt will be the Brotherhood.

And it would be strange if, given free elections, the Brotherhood did not eventually rule Egypt, for it has not only been a pillar of Cairo’s political, cultural, and intellectual life since its founding in 1928; it is also the flower of Arab political modernity, which began with Napoleon’s 1798 invasion of Egypt.

Napoleon’s conquest left Muslim intellectuals and activists in a bind: If the ummah was, as the prophet of Islam said, the best of all people, then why had it been overrun so easily by the infidels? The answer, said the 19th-century Egyptian intellectual Muhammad Abduh—the one-time mufti of Egypt and rector of Al Azhar, a traditional seat of authority in Sunni Islam—is that Muslims had veered away from the true faith. By the end of the 19th century, Abduh believed, Islam had become riddled with fatalism and superstition; therefore, since Islam was the lifeblood of the Muslims, it was hardly surprising that the ummah was weak. The answer, Abduh argued, was to purge Islam of its non-Islamic excesses—particularly Sufi practices like the veneration of saints and other beliefs associated with traditional Egyptian folklore—and return Islam to the way it had been practiced by the prophet Muhammad, his companions and his earliest followers, collectively known as al-salaf, or the righteous forebears. Thus Abduh and his followers were known as the salafis, and their movement was the precursor of Islamism, or political Islam. Abduh’s biographer was Rashid Rida, the godfather of the Islamist movement, whose most famous disciple was Hassan al-Banna, the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, who in turn inspired Yusef al-Qaradawi.

The fact is that the movement Abduh pioneered is now in the mainstream of Muslim belief, if not always practice. It was Abduh who said Muslims needed to adopt the science and technology of the West, while not abandoning their faith, as Christendom had forsaken their own beliefs for secularism. And this is precisely how the Muslim Middle East has engaged with modernity for more than a century—to take the West’s technology, arms, and consumer goods, but eschew the values, such as freedom of inquiry and freedom of speech, that made those products possible.

No one embodies this cultural schizophrenia better than Qaradawi, a media mogul who has risen to fame on the back of information technology and yet whose information is essentially medieval. Qaradawi approves of wife-beating, he defends female genital mutilation and signs off on female suicide bombers, and he attacks Shia for trying to subvert Sunni nations. To the Iranians, Qaradawi is perhaps not the ideal voice of Sunni Islamism, but insofar as he rises and the Americans suffer, Tehran will make its accommodations.

Yes, it is possible that even though Egypt gave birth to the Islamist movement that is synonymous with Muslim political modernity, maybe the Muslim Brotherhood would find itself thwarted at the polls. It’s a big decision for U.S. policymakers and the president. After all, what right do Americans have to tell the Egyptians who they can and cannot vote for? It is the height of hypocrisy for a liberal democracy to stand in the way of the freely won aspirations of another country. Egyptians have the right to choose their own government and their own future, just as we have the right to call them our friends or not on the basis of the policies that their government adopts.

However, the other argument is that it is not the job of the American president to promote the natural rights of others. Rather, it is his task to protect and preserve U.S. interests around the world, and peace in the Eastern Mediterranean is an important U.S. interest, as is preventing a larger regional war that might ensue from conflict between Egypt and its neighbor Israel. We might as well face the fact that the more political power that the Muslim Brotherhood wields will make that war much more likely—a war that would be not only bad for U.S. interests but also potentially catastrophic for our ally Israel, as well as to our ally Egypt.

The Bush White House believed that the problem with the Arabic-speaking Middle East was in the nature of repressive Arab regimes: In this view, Sept. 11 was the product of a political culture that had been strangled by its rulers, allowing their people no form of political expression except extremism. Deposing these regimes would unleash the native political energies of Arab peoples, went the argument, who would turn their attention away from anti-American and anti-Israeli sentiments to the thoughtful participatory governance of their own societies. Accordingly, promoting democracy in the region was not only good for the Arabs, but also in America’s national interest. The first test for this Freedom Agenda was Iraq, followed by Lebanon and then the Palestinian Authority. Egypt is the fourth test—and the most consequential yet, for Cairo is the linchpin of Washington’s Middle East strategy.

Egypt was once commonly referred to as leader of the Arab world—an honorific denoting Egypt’s leadership in the arts, intellectual life, and media, as well as its enormous population of 80 million. And unlike other Arab states—Syria, say, or Saudi Arabia—Egypt has a real history and identity dating back thousands of years. Primarily, however, “leader of the Arab world” referred to Cairo’s political status, specifically its role in the wars against Israel.

When Gamal Abdel Nasser, Egypt’s second president, was in office, all his political capital rested on the fact that Egypt, unlike U.S. allies Saudi Arabia and Jordan, clamored for war with the Zionist entity. When Anwar Sadat, his successor, brought Egypt from the Soviet to the American side after the 1973 war, it represented a Cold War victory for Washington that paid huge strategic dividends. However, it is one of the paradoxes of U.S. Middle East policy that by signing a peace treaty with Jerusalem, Sadat took Cairo out of the front-line camp and thereby weakened the regional prestige of a key American ally. Of course that treaty also put Sadat in the crosshairs of the Islamists, who killed him at Cairo stadium in 1981, with Mubarak beside him on the reviewing stand.

That peace has not only been good for the United States, securing our hegemony in the Eastern Mediterranean, but also of course for Israel. It is that treaty with Cairo that allows Israel the relative luxury to worry primarily about a Persian adversary far from its borders and two terrorist groups, Hamas and Hezbollah. The prospect of Egypt, with a large U.S.-trained and equipped army, air force, and navy, once again becoming “leader of the Arab world” is a nightmare for Israel’s leaders.

The U.S.-backed order in the Middle East is founded entirely on Cairo’s position as an ally—and on keeping the peace, as Mubarak has. If Egypt moves out of the American fold, it might well align itself with Iran. Mubarak has known well enough to fear the Islamic Republic—a street in Tehran is named after Sadat’s assassin. Or perhaps it would challenge the Iranians, in the way regional competition has worked since 1948—by seeing who can pose the greatest threat to Israel. Therefore, this fourth test of the freedom agenda could not be more important.

***

Unfortunately, after the first three runs, it’s hard to be optimistic this time. What we’ve seen so far is that the political energies unleashed by the Freedom Agenda are not democratic but tribal, sectarian, and violent. In Gaza, the Palestinian electorate voted for Hamas. In Lebanon, while the majority voted for the pro-democracy March 14 movement, Hezbollah still won power in government even as it embarked on a bloody campaign culminating last week in the party’s takeover of the state. After U.S. forces brought down Saddam Hussein, Iraqis turned on each other, fueled by more than a thousand years of a sectarian rage that was further aggravated by Saddam as Sunnis and Shiites shed blood at a clip typically associated with the grislier sectors of central Africa.

It is true that Egypt is not Iraq. And yet as many seem to have forgotten, only a month ago Islamist militants attacked a church in Alexandria, killing 23 Coptic Christians. To be sure, many Muslims rallied to defend their Christian neighbors, and today there are Christians in the street alongside the Muslim majority, but anyone who thinks sectarian tensions are simply the fault of “extremists,” or the Mubarak regime’s inability to protect Christians, is missing the point: The execution of minorities strongly suggests that a society might not be ready for democracy.

The relevant minority here are the liberals and democrats, for they do indeed exist and Egypt is the historical capital of Arab liberalism, from the novelist Taha Hussein to the journalist Farag Foda. Today there are a number of bloggers, intellectuals, and journalists, like the playwright Ali Salem and Hala Mustafa, editor of the political journal Dimoqratiya (Democracy), who keep the liberal flame alive. The former wrote a book about his trip to Israel and the latter met with the Israeli ambassador, and both were punished for it and ostracized by their colleagues. This is an indication not only of their lack of popularity but also the temperament of Egyptian intellectual culture: illiberal and populist—in other words, undemocratic.

There is some truth to the idea that Mubarak has choked off his liberal opposition, leaving only the Muslim Brotherhood to challenge him, but arguably the Egyptian liberal movement came to an end with the 1926 publication of Taha Hussein’s work on pre-Islamic poetry, which dealt with the historical and literary foundations of Islam. Under pressure from the religious authorities and death threats from Islamists, Hussein removed the passages deemed offensive, and the precedent was set: Men with guns make the rules, which liberals must abide by or be killed. Nonetheless, more than half a century later, Foda challenged the Islamists, and they reminded him how precarious liberalism is in Egypt by gunning him down in a Cairo street in 1992.

The Islamists, represented now by the mainstream Muslim Brotherhood, are one of only two political institutions that would survive Mubarak’s downfall; the other is the military. Indeed, Egypt has been run by military rulers more often than not—from the Muslim conqueror of Egypt Amr ibn al-‘As to the Albanian soldier Mohamed Ali, whose dynasty fell to Nasser’s Free Officers in a 1952 coup. Mubarak’s son Gamal’s presidency would have represented something like a coup d’etat against the military, which is why they got him out and chief of military intelligence Omar Suleiman was named vice president, making him Mubarak’s official successor. The awful irony is that Gamal and his gang of young financiers and businessmen probably represented Egypt’s best chance to move away from military rule. At least this is what much of the Washington policy establishment believed, with the hope of getting Gamal to pick up the pace of political reform to match the country’s notable economic reform. If Mubarak goes down, the security forces, the military and the Islamists, including the Muslim Brotherhood, will fight each other, or cut a deal, or both.

***

Consider the other options. The United States wants national dialogue, which seems to include Mohamed ElBaradei. By virtue of his name recognition alone, the former IAEA head has been hailed by the Western press as one of the leaders of the democratic opposition. However, at the IAEA this so-called reformer distorted his inspectors’ reports on Iran and effectively paved the way for the Islamic Republic’s march toward a nuclear bomb. Now the Muslim Brotherhood has named him as their interlocutor. In other words, ElBaradei is nothing other than a shill for Islamists.

There’s also Ayman Nour, leader of the liberal Ghad (Tomorrow) party, who finished third in the last presidential elections before he was jailed on trumped-up charges. Then there’s Saad Eddine Ibrahim, the Arab world’s most famous democratic-rights activist, who was also imprisoned by Mubarak and is now living abroad in the United States. During Hezbollah’s 2006 war with Israel, Ibrahim came down on the side of the Lebanese militia. Ibrahim’s posture was hardly surprising given that his onetime jailer despised Hezbollah. But it is odd that a democratic advocate should applaud war with Israel, a country with whom Cairo has had a peace treaty for more than 30 years.

Maybe this should be one of the tests for Egypt’s democrats in the streets: Where do you stand on Israel? If they are really democrats, or just pragmatists, the young among them protesting for higher pay would answer that warmer relations with an advanced, European-style economy—like, say, Israel’s—would provide jobs for the millions of Egypt’s unemployed. Of course that is not the answer you’re going to get from the young men now filling the streets of Cairo. Or forget about Israel and ask them instead about Hezbollah. Do they support the Islamic resistance? Of course they do, because Egypt’s most famous democrat Saad Eddine Ibrahim supports Hezbollah, the outfit that has turned the remnants of Lebanese democracy on its head while killing its opponents.

No doubt there are real liberals and democrats in Egypt, and some may even be in the streets today, but they are not going to come out on top. In part that is because the United States is not going to help them. Indeed, Washington showed how seriously it takes Arab liberals and democrats two weeks ago when it watched silently from the sidelines as Hezbollah toppled Saad Hariri’s government. Plenty of Arabs hoping for a democratic Lebanon died over the last five years since the assassination of Rafik Hariri, and it is important to note that the million-plus Lebanese who went to the streets on March 14, 2005 demonstrated peacefully, unlike the Egyptians, and all the destruction and violence was caused by Hezbollah and its pro-Syrian allies.

That the United States will not come to the aid of its liberal allies, or strengthen the moderate Muslims against the extremists, is one reason why the Freedom Agenda is not going to work, at least not right now. The underlying reason then is Arab political culture, where real democrats and genuine liberals do not stand a chance against the men with guns.

Scheuer was the CIA’s first point man on Bin Laden in the 1990s, and his new biography is based on years of following the Saudi terror mastermind in and outside of the agency. His Bin Laden is a man motivated not by hatred of American values or obsessed with our freedoms, sexual or political, but by deep anger at American policies. It is not about whether we vote or what we wear but about what Bin Laden believes we have done to the Islamic world, the ummah, over the last century. The Crusaders, as Bin Laden calls us, have pillaged the ummah for decades. Above all the other “crimes” Bin Laden rails against is American support for the creation of Israel and for supporting it ever since.

Bergen, who is one of the few Westerners to have met Bin Laden face to face, and who interviewed dozens of his close followers for this book, comes to the same conclusion. Bin Laden grew up in a household where his father, a multibillionaire construction magnate, was in charge of remodeling the three holiest mosques of Islam—in Mecca, Medina, and Jerusalem. The family would fly to each to pray at all three in one day sometimes. Defense of Islam was a family duty. For the young Bin Laden, the Palestinian cause was a centerpiece of life from youth. He named one of his daughters Safia, after a girl “who killed a Jewish spy.”

For al-Qaida Israel is the root of all evil, Bergen’s book reports. The Jewish state is the Crusader’s key ally in suppressing the ummah and is used to keep the Muslim world divided and weak. It literally separates the ummah into African and Asian parts. It prevents the Muslim world from developing nuclear weapons by bombing its reactors in Iraq, Syria, and maybe Iran to protect its own monopoly of nuclear weapons in the region. The United States provides it with $3 billion in aid each year, the latest high-performance weapons, and diplomatic protection. The answer to the Crusader-Zionist alliance must be jihad until America is driven out of the ummah for good, just as the Soviets were driven out of Afghanistan. Then the traitorous regimes in Cairo, Riyadh, and elsewhere will be overthrown, and Israel will be driven into the sea and destroyed forever.

Thus Bin Laden’s deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri started his career in terror with a plot to assassinate Anwar Sadat for making peace with Israel, Bergen notes. When the two declared war on America in 1998, they set as their top goal to “liberate” Jerusalem from “the petty Jewish state.” The Sept. 11 Commission concluded the mastermind of the attacks, Khaled Shaykh Muhammad, was motivated by “his violent disagreement with U.S. foreign policy favoring Israel.” In 2008, Bin Laden made it crystal clear “the Palestine issue is my central issue. It is why the incidents of September 11th took place.” After the failed 2009 Christmas attack on a Detroit-bound plane, Bin Laden said more attacks would come until America stops supporting Israel.

***

Scheuer and Bergen agree that the intellectual mastermind who shaped Bin Laden and al-Qaida’s worldview more than any other was the Palestinian preacher Abdullah Azzam. He was born near the West Bank town of Jenin, and his family fled to the Jordanian town of Zarqa after the 1967 war. Recruited into the Muslim Brotherhood and briefly a fighter with Fatah, Azzam studied in Damascus, Amman, and then at the prestigious Al Azhar University in Cairo. His religious credentials were impeccable. At the start of the war in Afghanistan in 1980 he was teaching in Jidda, in Saudi Arabia, but, outraged by the Soviet invasion, he moved to Peshawar, Pakistan, and began assisting the mujahedin.

Azzam became increasingly involved in the cause of the Afghan mujahedin, spending time in their camps along the Pakistani border and writing pamphlets urging Muslims from all over the Islamic world, especially his fellow Arabs, to join the jihad. In 1984, he wrote a book crucial to the expansion of jihad, The Defense of Muslim Territories, in which he argued that every Muslim had an obligation to join the Afghan struggle. Afghanistan was the place to defeat the unbeliever and enemies of Islam, Azzam emphasized, not only because the invaders posed the greatest threat to the ummah but also because the pay-off in defeating a superpower would be vastly increased stature for Muslims throughout the world.

Azzam even visited the United States in the 1980s to raise money for the cause. His book became as important to the Afghan jihad as Thomas Paine’s Common Sense was to the American Revolution. Azzam followed it with dozens of articles and other books urging support for the jihad. Soon he broke with the Muslim Brotherhood, declaring it too timid, and began spending all his time in Peshawar with the mujahedin or traveling around the ummah urging Muslims to join the jihad in South Asia.

To assist jihadis arriving from all points of the ummah, Azzam created the Maktab al Khadamat, or Service Bureau, in Peshawar, to provide them with housing and food. The cofounder of the Service Bureau was Osama Bin Laden, a fabulously rich young Saudi whom Azzam had met in Jidda. Bin Laden had come to Pakistan to join the jihad and brought with him financial support for an army of jihadi volunteers. Initially Azzam and Bin Laden set up hostels for jihadists in Peshawar, then they graduated to training camps where Arabs and others could “learn jihad” and go off to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan.

Azzam has rightly been called the father of the modern global jihad by a former chief of the Mossad. He was assassinated in 1989 in Peshawar just as the Soviets were leaving Afghanistan in defeat. By then Bin Laden was launched on his own career in jihad.

***

Both authors credit the George W. Bush Administration’s decision to invade Iraq with saving al-Qaida. Scheuer calls it “a godsend” for Bin Laden not just because it diverted American attention and resources away from finishing the job in south Asia but also because it validated Bin Laden’s claim to be “an acute analyst of American intentions.” Osama had been saying for years that America intended to invade the Arab Middle East to topple its governments, impose puppets, and force them to accept Israeli dominance. On February 11, 2003, Bin Laden sent a letter to the Iraqi people, broadcast via Al Jazeera, warning them to prepare for the “Crusaders war to occupy one of Islam’s former capitals, loot Muslim riches, and install a stooge regime to follow its masters in Washington and Tel Aviv to pave the way for the establishment of Greater Israel.” He advised the Iraqi nation to prepare for a long struggle against the Crusaders and in particular to engage in “urban and street warfare” and to “emphasize the importance of martyrdom operations which have inflicted unprecedented harm on America and Israel.” In Iraq all his predictions seemed to come true.

Al-Qaida also found a new hero in Iraq: another Jordanian citizen, also from Zarqa, named Ahmad Fadil al-Khalayilah, better known as Abu Musaib Zarqawi. Zarqa is a tough, mean, and small working-class city close to Amman. It is a city of small industries and manufacturing with little charm. There is a large Palestinian population in the city and a very large Palestinian refugee camp nearby created after the 1967 war when tens of thousands of West Bank Palestinians fled the Israeli occupation of their homes into Jordan. The camp is dirty, without adequate sewage or electricity. It is a place where extremism and fanaticism grow.

Zarqawi got in trouble with the law early in life. As with many other inmates in jail, Zarqawi became a more clever and dangerous criminal. He also found Islam and became a convert to extremist jihadism. He spent several years in prison before being released in a general amnesty in 1988. Upon his release, he went to Afghanistan to join the mujahedin in 1989. He arrived too late to fight the Soviets and instead witnessed the struggle between the various mujahedin factions for control of Kabul.

Zarqawi was a junior partner in an al-Qaida plot in December 2000 to blow up the Radisson Hotel in Amman, and he built his own jihadist training camp in Herat in Afghanistan, where he operated independently of al-Qaida but as a close complement to it. In 2002, he created an infrastructure in Iraq to prepare for the Americans. His network carried out its first operation by killing a USAID officer, Laurence Foley, in Amman on October 28, 2002.

As Bergen relates, Zarqawi then took Iraq to the brink of civil war. He sent dozens of suicide bombers to kill Americans and Iraqis alike and a couple to blow up the Radisson during a wedding celebration in Amman as well. Even the al-Qaida core hiding in Pakistan found him too violent, and his excesses ultimately did in the Iraqi al-Qaida as Iraqis rejected its wanton cruelty. But it kept America bogged down in Iraq long enough for the old core of al-Qaida to regenerate in Pakistan.

These are accounts of a war in progress, and so there is much we still don’t know about both Bin Laden and his organization. We know far too little, for example, about the dynamics of the relationship between Bin Laden and the self-proclaimed Commander of the Faithful, Mullah Omar, to whom Bin Laden swears allegiance. Neither Scheuer nor Bergen speculate on what connections Bin Laden had at that time with the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence directorate, which ran the mujahedin war. It is impossible to believe the ISI was not closely monitoring the rich Saudi’s activities in their back yard. This is an area that still cries out for more research and analysis by al-Qaida watchers. Nonetheless, these two books complement each other well and help us better understand our enemy, which is the first key to victory.

Bruce Riedel is a senior fellow in the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution. He has advised four presidents on the National Security Council staff in the White House. His latest book is Deadly Embrace: Pakistan, America, and the Future of Global Jihad.

• Crowds of Palestinians reacted angrily to the Palestine Papers, blaming their leadership for being willing to give so much away (as well as, in some cases, blaming al Jazeera for trying to discredit their leadership. [WP]

• Iran is “no longer interested” in a fuel-swap deal, it said at talks last weekend. [NYT]

• While insisting that they are unverified, the State Department reported that the Palestine Papers makes peace negotiations more difficult. [Haaretz]

• Despite the official Palestinian Authority line that the Papers are a “pack of lies,” a former negotiator admitted to al Jazeera that they are valid. [Ynet]

• In new Papers, President Abbas admits that asking Israel to absorb one million refugees would be “illogical,” and that the leadership would settle for 100,000 under a final deal. This news is likely also not to be received well. [Haaretz]

Resolution of the “right of return” issue for a merely token price was also on the table.

It seems safe to say the leak did not come in an official capacity from the P.A., since it will hurt the credibility of the West Bank’s governing authority: As the New York Times reports, the P.A. has (un-credibly) called the documents “a pack of lies,” while Hamas, the P.A.’s chief rival for allegiance in the territories, said the documents showed the P.A. was “attempting to liquidate the Palestinian cause.” And indeed, if your definition of the Palestinian cause includes at least some form of sovereignty over much of East Jerusalem (and it should), then it is actually difficult to dispute Hamas’s allegation.

The document dump is also unrelated to WikiLeaks. But much like that group’s revelations, the news here is less the substance itself and more the evaporation of plausible deniability. Close followers of the peace process have known that the two sides actually did get close in 2008, as the documents prove; almost by definition, “getting close” would have meant the Palestinians offering in private far more than they have in public and the Israelis still turning it down. What the leak has done is ensure that everyone knows that the P.A. was willing to offer this much: News not likely to play well at home. (According to the Guardian, more documents, touching on matters like Palestinian cooperation with Israeli security authorities—also a touchy subject on the streets of Nablus, and also one already reported on—will be rolled out in the coming days.)

Critics of Israel will argue that the documents reveal an Israeli leadership—one even less obstinant than the current one—that was not willing to meet Palestinian leadership more than halfway. As the Guardian’s Jonathan Freedland argues, “International opinion will see concrete proof of how far the Palestinians have been willing to go, ready to move up to and beyond their ‘red lines,’ conceding ground that would once have been unthinkable.”

But was that willingness truly there—or, more importantly, was it truly credible? Supporters of Israel will rightfully note that Israeli negotiators may have had reason to be skeptical of the P.A.’s ability to convince its constituents to go along with these generous concessions—a skepticism confirmed by the wide gap between what the P.A. says in public and what, we now know, it says in private. In other words, if Israel had said yes, the offer would no longer have been secret, and it would have had to be sold to the Palestinian public; and the fact that the P.A. felt the need to keep it private, and has now felt the need to deny it (“pack of lies”), indicates that the P.A. believes the Palestinian public will overwhelmingly react to the deal negatively.

So while I want to agree with Freedland’s analysis, I predict international decision-makers will not be able to help from noticing that this Palestinian willingness to make broad concessions was strictly private, and that, made public—as it now has been—it will be so unpopular as to require backtracking—as it already has. As Freedland himself reports, “These texts will do enormous damage to the standing of the Palestinian Authority and to the Fatah party that leads it.” Given that the alternative to these is Hamas, I don’t see how these revelations actually represent further bricks on the road to a peaceful, internationally accepted Palestinian state.

One would like to imagine an Israeli leadership daring enough to call the Palestinian bet and force all hands on the table—whether in the form of agreeing to the 2008 deal or, in 2010, extending the settlement freeze, whether to East Jerusalem or past its September expiration. Such a concession would have either demonstrated to the world the fundamental stagnancy of the peace process, or—maybe?—have taken a real step toward its fulfillment. We’ll never know.

Among the revelations:

• Erekat tells the Americans that the Palestinians have offered “the biggest Yerushalayim in Jewish history”—his ostentatiously choice of Hebrew word—“plus symbolic number of refugees return, demilitarized state” [sic]. Under this secret Palestinian proposal, Israel would annex all of Jerusalem except for the Jewish district of Har Homa—the most expansive offer the Palestinians have been known to have made.

• Speaking of the refugees, the deal that seems to have been on offer regarding right-of-return was articulated, in August 2008, by then-Prime Minister Ehud Olmert; under it, Israel would acknowledge “suffering of” but “not responsibility for” Palestinian refugees and would absorb 5,000 such refugees over five years on “humanitarian” grounds.

• Were Israeli-Syrian talks, conducted through Turkey, more advanced than we know? Here, in May 2008, Tzipi Livni remarks, “We’re giving up the Golan.”

• Former Palestinian prime minister and negotiator Ahmed Qureia insists on the need to maintain contiguity between Arab parts of Jerusalem and the Arab town of Bethlehem in the West Bank “to address natural growth”—“natural growth” being a key Israeli buzzword in terms of settlement construction. Funny!

• In the same document, Erekat confirms the offer of “the largest Jerusalem in history.”

• In May 2008, Livni acknowledges, “I appreciate how hard it was for you to make the suggestion.”

The Palestine Papers: The Documents [Guardian]
Al Jazeera Cites Palestinian Offer of Concessions [NYT]
Palestine Papers: Now We Know. Israel Had a Partner. [Guardian]

With all due apologies to Oliver Stone (and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran and Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey), what the Wikileaks documents reveal is not a conspiracy of any kind but a scary and growing gap between the private assessments of American diplomats and allies in the Middle East and public statements made by U.S. government officials. The publication of these leaked cables is eerily reminiscent of the Pentagon Papers, which exposed a decade-long attempt by U.S. officials to distort and conceal unpalatable truths about the Vietnam War, and manipulate public opinion. The difference is that while the Pentagon Papers substantially vindicated the American left, the Wikileaks cable dump vindicates the right.

Here are eight of the most obvious examples from the initial trove of documents that has appeared online:

1. While the Israelis are deeply concerned about Iran’s march toward a nuclear program, it is in fact the Arabs who are begging the United States to “take out” Iranian installations through military force, with one United Arab Emirates official even proposing a ground invasion. Calling Iran “evil,” King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia repeatedly urged the United States to “cut off the head of the snake” by attacking Iranian nuclear installations.

2. It is not just Israeli leaders who believe Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is reminiscent of Hitler; U.S. officials think so too, as do Arab leaders, who use the Hitler analogy to warn against the dangers of appeasing Iran.

3. North Korea, an isolated country that enjoys substantial diplomatic and economic backing from China, is supplying Iran with advanced ballistic missile systems that would allow an Iranian nuclear warhead to hit Tel Aviv—or Moscow—with a substantial degree of accuracy. Taken in concert with the North Korean-built nuclear reactor in Syria, it would appear that North Korea—acting with the knowledge and perhaps direct encouragement of China—is playing a significant and deliberate role in the proliferation of nuclear equipment and ballistic delivery systems in the Middle East.

4. Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan is not a model Middle Eastern leader who has found the right admixture of religious enthusiasm and democracy, as U.S. government officials often like to suggest in public, but “an exceptionally dangerous” Islamist. U.S. diplomats have concluded that Erdogan’s anti-Israel rhetoric is not premised on domestic Turkish electioneering or larger geo-strategic concerns but rather on a personal, visceral hatred of Israel.

5. Tehran has used the cover of the ostensibly independent Iranian Red Crescent—a member of the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, whose pledge of neutrality allows it access to war zones—to smuggle weapons and members of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards’ Qods Force into Lebanon during the 2006 Hezbollah-Israel war, and into Iraq, to fight against U.S. soldiers.

6. Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak and his intelligence chief Omar Suleiman are more worried about Hamas than about Israel and are staunchly opposed to the expansion of Iranian influence in the region.

7. The Amir of Qatar is a dubious ally, who plays Washington and Tehran off each other. “The Amir closed the meeting by offering that based on 30 years of experience with the Iranians, they will give you 100 words. Trust only one of the 100.”

8. America’s Arab allies do not believe that the Barack Obama Administration can separate Syria from Iran through any foreseeable combination of carrots and sticks. According to one cable, the UAE’s Sheik Mohamed Bin Zayed “showed no confidence that Syria could be separated from the Iranian camp” and quoted him directly as saying “If you want my opinion … I think not.” He advised that Syria would continue hedging on key regional issues (Iran, support for Hezbollah, the Israeli-Palestinian peace process) for the foreseeable future.

If these cables make many on the right look prescient, or at least in touch with reality, it is hardly a surprise that their domestic U.S. rivals are trying to spin the Wikileaks cables to their own advantage. For instance, leftwing academic specialists on the Middle East who have argued that the peace process is the key issue in the region and that the Gulf Arab states do not want the United States or Israel to bomb Iran are nonetheless celebrating the Wikileaks documents, even as their argument is now vitiated. Some university professors claim that their analysis is better than those of Washington’s Arab allies anyway. The New York Times is trying to make the case that in the wake of George W. Bush’s mismanagement the Obama Administration has managed to build a strong sanctions regime against Iran that includes Russia and China. Unfortunately, the cables prove only that Russian envoys are working to frustrate the U.S. effort by selling the Iranian position to the Arabs.

What comes through most strongly from the Wikileaks documents, however, is that U.S. Middle East policy is premised on a web of self-justifying fictions that are flatly contradicted by the assessments of American diplomats and allies in the region. Starting with Bush’s second term and continuing through the Obama Administration, Washington has ignored the strong and repeated pleas of its regional allies—from Jerusalem to Riyadh—to stop the Iranian nuclear program. Perhaps the most disturbing revelation in the documents is the extent to which both the Bush and Obama Administrations have concealed Iran’s war against the United States and its allies in Iraq, Lebanon, Israel, and the Arab Gulf states, even as those same allies have been candid in their diplomatic exchanges with us. U.S. servicemen and -women are being dispatched to combat zones in Iraq and Afghanistan where they are fighting Iranian soldiers and assets in a regional war with the Islamic Republic that our officials dare not discuss, lest they have to do something about it.

Members of the Washington policy establishment should be considerably less worried about how the foreign ministries of allied countries respond to the leaks than how the American electorate does. Even in a democracy, we accept that a key part of our diplomacy depends on concealing the truth, or even lying, in order to advance the interests of one’s own country. But it is hard to see how the public, mendacious, face of U.S. foreign policy, especially in the Middle East, serves American interests. By systematically misleading the American people, our policymakers have undermined the basis of our democracy, which is premised on the existence of a public that is capable of making informed decisions about a world that is only becoming more dangerous.

It’s an interesting idea—a Jewish half-ownership in the Arabic news network. Saban’s spokeswoman declined to comment one way or the other. But we’re a bit skeptical: If a huge media deal were in the offing, what are the odds that the story would be broken not by any of the media reporters who cover Saban and the TV business—either here and in the Emirates—but instead by an Egyptian site we’ve never heard of? (And one which, if our Google Translator steers us right, only launched last year, and looks more the Huffington Post than Wall Street Journal.) Plus, if Al Jazeera is losing money, as the story claims, is it really likely that the Qatari emir would turn to an Israeli billionaire for help? And why would Saban—the world’s 261st-richest person, according to Forbes, but also, as the single largest donor to the Democratic Party, an extremely politically astute individual—want to invite the kinds of headaches that would be involved in taking on this particularly thorny, supposedly cash-strapped overseas enterprise? After all, if he wants another television channel he could just, like, buy out Al Gore over at Current or something.

Report: Saban wants to buy al-Jazeera [Ynet]
Related: Morphed [Tablet]

‘Jews Harvesting Algerian Kids’ Organs’ [JPost]
Palestinians in 2010 Deserve No Less than Jewish Yemenites in 1990s [Al-Jazeera]