Israeli Foreign Policy: Everyone is in Charge and No One is In Command

By Piki Ish-Shalom, July 1st, 2013
Benjamin Netanyahu caricature © DonkeyHotey | Flickr

In an oft-quoted remark Henry Kissinger observed that “Israel has no foreign policy, it has only a domestic policy.” Israel keeps on proving Kissinger right and by now his bon mot has become a sad truism. But recently the truism has turned to farce as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu relentlessly takes apart Israel’s Foreign Ministry and its professional Foreign Service.

In an act of political payoff, Netanyahu did not appoint a Foreign Minister in his new cabinet at the request of Avigdor Lieberman, the former Foreign Minister, who is currently standing trial for Breach of Trust and fraud. Netanyahu has decided to keep the position open for Lieberman until the end of the trial. In the meantime, he himself is acting as the Foreign Minister. Needless to say, the Prime Minister hardly has the time to manage the daily matters of the Ministry, though he started his public career as a diplomat, and a very adept one.

Additionally, to further weaken the ministry, Netanyahu redistributed many of the traditional responsibilities of the Foreign Ministry among other ministries, some of them new and bogus creations, such as the gimmicky Ministry of International Relations. Other related ministries include the Ministry for Regional Cooperation, a Minister for Diasporas, and a Justice Minister, Tzipi Livni, who is also responsible for diplomatic initiatives and peace talks with the Palestinians. Considering that Prime Minister Netanyahu keeps for himself and in his office some key aspects of Israel’s foreign relations, what we get is a beheaded and enfeebled Foreign Ministry, lacking political backing, which competes with several artificial and bogus ministries. Why is this so? Why does Netanyahu sacrifice the Foreign Ministry with its years of experience and professionalism?

One may argue that by weakening the ministry and establishing evermore competing entities, Netanyahu is trying to divide and rule, a well-worn strategy of playing all against all, so as to ‎secure his own agenda. However, in my judgment, there is no agenda as it appears that in Israel, everyone is in charge and no one is in command.

There are two possible alternative reasons for the establishment of . . .

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July 1st, 2013 | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , ,

The Megapower Elite

By Eugene Halton, September 28th, 2011
Book cover of The Power Elite by C. Wright Mills, 2000 paperback edition © Oxford University Press

“Power is the ultimate aphrodisiac.” Henry Kissinger, 1973

I recently returned to teaching selections from C. Wright Mills’s 1956 book, The Power Elite. The book was written in the midst of unprecedented prosperity in America, what economists Claudia Goldin and Robert Margo have called “the great compression,” when the levels of social inequality that peaked in 1929 and muddled through the next two decades were lowered and stabilized in the 1950s and 60s. It was the “good times” fifties. But Mills saw acutely that something had changed in America; that an unprecedented centralization of power “not before equaled in human history” had also been set in motion as the aftermath of World War II, whose continued development would undermine democratic institutions.

Mills claimed that “the Big Three” institutions—Corporate, Government, and Military—powered up into an interlocking directorate. Though he does not mention them, two coups of that era engineered by the CIA provide ample evidence of what Mills was describing. The overthrow of the Iranian government in 1953, which installed the Shah of Iran, was undertaken to secure British and American oil interests. Corporate oil, political, and military (particularly the burgeoning CIA) institutions realized their common interest in overthrowing the democratically elected regime of Mosaddegh. The long-term consequence was the empowerment of Islamic fundamentalism in the overthrow of the Shah in 1979.

In 1954 the CIA directed the overthrow of the democratically elected government of Guatemala, in order to keep the profits of United Fruit at their maximum. The secretary of defense, John Foster Dulles, his brother Allen Dulles, the head of the CIA, and the UN ambassador, Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr., all had investments in United Fruit, and as David Halberstam states in his book The Fifties: “The national security complex became, in the Eisenhower years, a fast-growing apparatus to allow us to do in secret what we could not do in the open. This was not just an isolated phenomenon but part of something larger going on in Washington—the transition from an isolationist America . . .

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