Israel vs. Iran: the kook's on the other foot

Soaked up any sage talk lately about whether the Iranian leadership is "rational"?  Two high-level  voices from Israel's military and security services have weighed in recently on questions of rationality and religious fervor, and their comments mesh interestingly.

First, Benny Gantz, head of the Israeli Defense Force, told Haaretz, in an interview published on April 25, that he did not think Iran would build a nuclear bomb -- not now, anyway. He scoped out Khamenei's thinking in some detail:

As long as its facilities are not bomb-proof, "the program is too vulnerable, in Iran's view. If the supreme religious leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei wants, he will advance it to the acquisition of a nuclear bomb, but the decision must first be taken. It will happen if Khamenei judges that he is invulnerable to a response. I believe he would be making an enormous mistake, and I don't think he will want to go the extra mile. I think the Iranian leadership is composed of very rational people. But I agree that such a capability, in the hands of Islamic fundamentalists who at particular moments could make different calculations, is dangerous."

And now, Yuval Diskin, former head of Israel's internal security service, casts a cold eye on current Israeli leadership. The Times' Jodi Rudoren reports:

Israel gulled

There is no doubt that the Israelis set themselves up for a trap by boarding the Mavi Marmara, that they were  foolish in so doing, and that the botched and ill-advised raid has greatly damaged almost all of their foreign policy aims.

But a trap it most assuredly was -- deliberately laid, with planned results perhaps even more violent than those that transpired. The Israeli Defense Force (IDF) has had to walk back (hat tip Sullivan) exaggerated and credibility-eroding claims, such as that the passengers on board the Mavi Marmara who attacked the boarding Israelis were members of al Qaeda.  But elements at least of the IDF's narrative of the planning on board for a confrontation are probably true. Here are those claims as relayed by the Jerusalem Post (distilled and at slight variance from the IDF press release that originally made the al Qaeda claim):

To the spielers go the victory

The PR wars accompanying and following contemporary asymmetric conflicts are growing more complex.

In TNR, Simona Weinglass has a fascinating account of rival tallies of the civilian death toll in the Israeli attack on Gaza early this year. In one corner, Khalil Shaheen of the Palestinian Center for Human Rights (PCHR), who during the war led a team of about 35 that "braved the crossfire to visit hospitals, interview victims' families, and document the location and circumstances of every single war casualty." The PHCR tally: 1417 dead, including 926 civilians, 255 non-combatant police officers, and 236 fighters .

In the other corner, retired Israeli intelligence officer Jonathan Dahoah Halevi, working from his home in Toronto, is meticulously working his way through PHCR's 1417 names, "comparing them to a database of thousands of terrorist operatives he has compiled, as well as whatever he finds on the Internet." So far, concentrating on the 255 police among the dead, he has compiled "a list of 171 people the PCHR defines as civilians that he claims he can prove are actually combatants affiliated with Hamas or other terrorist groups" -- for example, one whom past news reports describe as "a militant cleric who mentored suicide bombers and sent his own son on a suicide mission in 2001, killing two Israelis" and another who "was a Palestinian Resistance Committee operative and suspect in the terrorist attack against three American security guards in Gaza in October 2003."

Halevi's private research sheds some light on the assumptions and sources behind the Israeli Defense Forces' tally: 1,166 dead, 709 of them Hamas terror operatives, 295 'uninvolved Palestinians' and 162 men whose names had not yet been attributed to any organization.

Are Shaheen's methods suspect? No: they're just simple. Anyone who was not carrying a weapon when killed was a civilian. Are Halevi's methods suspect? No, they're just expansive: anyone who aided a terrorist or militant group was a combatant. The data he compiles is a matter of public record.

What's striking is the nature, duration and complexity of the battle personified by Shaheen and Halevi (whose names have a certain doppelganger resonance, given their two-syllable assonance). Here's Weinglass's endnote:

Both agree, however, that the war does not end when the fighting stops. "In every war there are two components," says Halevi. "The first is the battle itself, defeating the other side, and the second is presenting the facts of what happened." If a country is not vigilant, he warns, "The other side will rewrite your history."

An old truism has it that the victors write the narrative. Today, to an as-yet unmeasured extent, the dominant narrative writers become the victors.