As you probably heard, on Monday, The Wall Street Journal reported, Israel Spied on Iran Nuclear Talks With US. And they used the information they got to funnel it the Congressional Republicans in an effort to destroy the deal. This resulted in Israel stating unequivocally that they do not spy, Netanyahu’s Office Denies Nuke Talks Snooping. But it was a curious denial. It’s kind of like being accused of robbing a 7-11 store and responding, “I’ve never killed anyone in my life!” The information that was being used so inappropriately is not technically spying. And the real sin here is that the Israeli government is actively trying to screw with our foreign affairs — just like all of us liberals have been saying the last few weeks.
But it is worse than that. At The Intercept, Glenn Greenwald and Andrew Fishman wrote, Netanyahu’s Spying Denials Contradicted by Secret NSA Documents. You know, those Snowden leaks are the gift that keeps on giving. All throughout these NSA documents are discussions of what a threat Israeli spying is on the United States. They are ranked third after Russia and China. A lot of this is exactly what we are seeing with the Iranian negotiations. It would seem that the Israeli government is quite paranoid, despite the fact that it couldn’t have a more constant and true ally.
Interestingly, another problem is that Israel does a lot of industrial espionage focused on us. That doesn’t come as a surprise to me. Last year, I wrote, Spam Geography at Frankly Curious. In it, I described a method I had developed to determine whether a visitor was a real person or a spammer. Users coming from the US, UK, Canada, and India are pretty much all real. So are the vast majority of users from Indonesia. But Israel, which I would have guessed then would also have been mostly real, was as big a spammer as the eastern European countries. In fact, Russia is actually substantially better than Israel.
The fact that Israel isn’t quite as “western” as we’ve been led to believe isn’t that big a deal. But Israel’s behavior toward the United States is really unacceptable. It reminds me of a younger brother who is always depending upon his older brother to protect him. Yet the younger brother does everything he can to undermine his older brother. This is exactly the dynamic I created between Steve and Darren in “The Post-Postmodern Comedy Hour.” Except that in it, Darren (the “younger brother”) is a puppet and he gets his comeuppance at the end of every episode. Darren wouldn’t be a likable character in real life.
We don’t know about what Israel is up to just based upon the NSA leaks. The Intercept also noted:
I don’t know where all of this leaves me with regard to Israel. It’s been clear to me for a long time that the Israeli government has no interest in a two-state solution because of the way that it has encouraged the illegal settlements. More and more I’m thinking that the United States is more than enough of a safe haven for the worldwide Jewish population. Maybe Zionism just leads to the kind of conservative jingoism that Israel now represents. I’m not suggesting that we abandon Israel. But big brother is starting to think of little brother as a selfish brat who needs to learn some manners. Maybe a couple non-vetoes on the Security Council might help the Israeli government to grow up.
