http://freebeacon.com/national-security/inside-the-white-houses-secret-campaign-to-scapegoat-israel/
Top diplomats planted
anti-Israel reports in lead up to peace talk
collapse
U.S.
Secretary of State John Kerry / AP
The Obama administration
has been waging a secret media war in capitals
across two continents blaming Israel for the recent
collapse of peace talks with the Palestinians,
according to former Israeli diplomats and
Washington, D.C. insiders familiar with the peace
process.
Multiple sources told the Washington Free Beacon that top
Obama administration officials have worked for the
past several days to manufacture a crisis over the
reissuing of housing permits in a Jerusalem
neighborhood widely acknowledged as Israeli
territory.
Senior State Department
officials based in Israel have sought to lay the
groundwork for Israel to take the blame for talks
collapsing by peddling a narrative to the Israeli
press claiming that the Palestinians were outraged
over Israeli settlements, the Free Beacon has learned.
These administration
officials have planted several stories in Israeli
and U.S. newspapers blaming Israel for the collapse
of peace talks and have additionally provided
reporters with anonymous quotes slamming the Israeli
government.
The primary source of
these multiple reports has been identified as Middle
East envoy Martin Indyk and his staff, according to
these insiders, who said that the secret media
campaign against Israel paved the way for Secretary
of State John Kerry to go before Congress on Tuesday
and publicly blame
Israel for
tanking the talks.
“The Palestinians didn’t
even know they were supposed to be abandoning
negotiations because of these housing permits, which
are actually old, reissued permits for areas
everyone assumes will end up on the Israelis’ side
of the border anyway,” said one senior official at a
U.S. based pro-Israel organization who asked to
remain anonymous because the Obama administration
has in the past retaliated against critics from
inside the pro-Israel world.
“Then Martin Indyk
started telling anyone who would listen that in fact
the Palestinians were angry over the housing issue,”
the source said. “Eventually, the Palestinians
figured out it was in their interest to echo what
the Americans were saying.”
Indyk, who served as the U.S.
ambassador to Israel during the Clinton
administration, as well as in several other roles,
was appointed by Obama to act as the U.S. special
envoy for peace negotiations.
One former Israeli
diplomat familiar with Indyk’s tactics said that he
is a crass political player who has a history of
planting negative stories about Israel in order to
undermine the Netanyahu government and bolster his
hand in the talks.
“I’ve seen this before
and see his fingerprints,” said the source, who
referenced a separate story two weeks ago in which
U.S. government sources implied that newly installed
Israeli Ambassador Ron Dermer was not performing his
job effectively.
“It’s certainly in
Indyk’s interest now [to undermine the Israelis],
but this was a game he also used to play when he was
ambassador twice,” said the former diplomat. “This
is part of Indyk’s playbook.”
“There was only one
person who would do this kind of thing and it’s
Martin Indyk and his staff,” the former diplomat
added.
Another Washington-based
source familiar with the talks said that Kerry’s
peace team has a track record of trashing Israel
anonymously.
“It’s one of the
worst-kept secrets in Jerusalem that Kerry’s team
leaks anti-Netanyahu quotes and claims to the
Israeli press—not that is should be a mystery why
Israeli reporters based in Israel keep producing
anti-Bibi quotes from ‘American officials,’” the
source said.
“But just imagine the
outrage if the roles were reversed and Bibi had a
team on the ground in D.C. trashing Obama to the Washington Post on
background,” the source said.
The Indyk-led campaign to
turn the old Israeli housing permits into the main
obstacle to peace began more than a week ago, when
signs emerged that the Palestinians were poised to
pull out of the peace talks.
“When talks fell apart
and the State Department needed a scapegoat, of
course they chose Israel, except they picked the
dumbest explanation imaginable,” said the source who
serves as a senior official at a pro-Israel
organization.
The Obama administration
seized on an announcement by the Israelis that 700
apartments would be built in Gilo, a Jerusalem
suburb widely recognized as Israeli territory.
The housing news was
actually a reissue of an earlier pronouncement
permitting these new apartments to be built, meaning
that the substance of the decree had not changed for
months and had not been a roadblock to the peace
talks.
It is not the first time
that the Obama administration has expressed outrage
over construction in Gilo.
Atlantic writer
Jeffrey Goldberg dismissed the notion in late 2009.
“The building of
apartments in Gilo is irrelevant to eventual
disposition of Jerusalem because everyone—the
Americans, the Palestinians, and the Israelis—knows
that Gilo, the suburb that is the latest source of
tension between Washington and Jerusalem, will
undoubtedly end up in Israel as part of a negotiated
solution (not that that’s ever happening, by the
way),” Goldbergwrote. “It
doesn’t matter, then, if the Israelis build 900
housing units in Gilo or 900 skyscrapers: Gilo will
be kept by Israel.”
The New York Times on Tuesday noted in a report
of the talks that the issue of Gilo had “seemed a
much less provocative issue,” even for the
Palestinians.
Morris Amitay, a former
executive director of the American Israel Public
Affairs Committee (AIPAC), said that it is
ridiculous to claim that Gilo housing units killed
the talks, which had been faltering for weeks under
demands from the Palestinians that Israel release
more terrorists from prison.
“To say that’s what
ruined the peace process shows a complete lack of
understanding on how long they’ve [the Israelis,
Palestinians, and the Americans] been peace
processing,” Amitay said.
Indyk’s bid to pin the
blame of the Israelis may have paid off.
Reports emerged on
Wednesday that Indyk had “raced to Jerusalem” to
lead a bid aimed at salvaging the peace process.
When
asked about the news, Amitay said, “the fact Kerry
is leaving it up to him [Indyk] is a sign they’ve
had to give up.”
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