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BY MELVIN GOODMAN

Question: How do you know when Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is
lying?

Answer: He moves his lips.

Israel’s history over the past 76 years is replete with examples of
deceit. This was true from the start, when the Israelis denied their
role in expelling hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from their
homes during Israel’s War of Independence. The Arab world refers to
the expulsion as the “nakba” (the catastrophe), which is largely
denied in Israel. The Israeli legacy of denying the “nakba” is no
different from those who deny the Holocaust.

The mainstream media bends over backwards to defend Israel’s case, and
over the years it has said very little about the history of Israel’s
deceit and deception. As recently as last week, for example, the
Washington Post carried a bizarre headline that read “Israel is on its
honor to comply with U.S. intelligence limits.” The accompanying story
was a significant one, detailing the importance of the U.S.
intelligence provided to Israel to conduct the rescue of four Israeli
hostages, an operation that took the lives of nearly three hundred Palestinians, mostly women and children. By any definition of the
requirement for proportionality in wartime, this was indeed a war
crime.

The Post article went on to cite National Security Adviser Jake
Sullivan, an apologist for Israel since the start of the war on
October 7th, who explained that the United States has “provided an
intense range of assets and capabilities and expertise to Israel,” and
that the provision of intelligence is “not tied or conditioned on
anything else. It is not limited. We are not holding anything back.
We are providing every asset, every tool, every capability.” These
remarks are dispositive of our complicity in Israel’s brutal and
unconscionable assault against Palestinian civilians.

At the same time, U.S. officials disingenuously claim that Israeli is prohibited from using U.S. intelligence for targeting in Gaza in any
military operations, including airstrikes.” They argue that there are “long-standing formal arrangements that are scrutinized by lawyers in
the U.S. intelligence community, as well as directives from the White
House following the October 7th attacks.” This is particularly
disingenuous because of the long record of deceit and deception from
both the U.S. intelligence community regarding U.S. wars in Vietnam,
Iraq, and Afghanistan, and the Israeli lies over the years regarding
their wars in 1956, 1967, 1973, and 1982. I’ve written extensively
about U.S. and Israeli lies in my articles for CounterPunch and my
various books and articles. And I will return to this deceit in
future articles.

The idea that Israel is “on its honor” not to use U.S. intelligence
for proscribed purposes, which is described by current U.S.
intelligence officers, is laughable. The Israelis have regularly
broken agreements with the United States regarding the use of certain
weaponry as well as the supply of U.S. weapons technology to third
countries. There is legislation on the books that requires the
Director of National Intelligence to notify Congress if U.S.
intelligence to any third country leads to civilian casualties, but
this law is observed only in the breach. U.S. oversight regarding
Israel is virtually nonexistent.

The Israeli pattern of deceit is particularly important because Prime
Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is currently engaged in a new round of
false accusations in order to embarrass the Biden administration and
divide the American public on the Gaza war as well as the U.S.
election. At least, the Biden administration has responded to
Netanyahu’s outrageous charge by canceling an important meeting of the U.S.-Israeli Strategic Consultative Group regarding policy toward Iran
in return for Netanyahu’s “stunt.”

Nevertheless, National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan did not cancel
or postpone his meeting with his Israeli counterpart, Tzachi Hanegbi,
and the U.S. Ambassador to Israel, Jack Lew, went overboard in
stressing to Netanyahu there there haven’t been any delays in
providing weaponry. Also, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, who
arrived in Israel early in the war and announced that “I’m come before
you not only as the U.S. secretary of state, but as a Jew,” assured
Netanyahu that U.S. weapons were “moving as it normally would move.”
The only exception has been the hold on 2,000-pound bombs, which have
killed thousands of women and children and should never have been
provided to Israel in the first place.

These mixed signals over Netanyahu’s remarks were reminiscent of the
so-called “red line” that Biden proclaimed to lighten an Israeli
assault in Rafah, where more than a million refugees were threatened.
Israeli Defense Forces stormed Rafah on May 6, and Biden threatened to
withhold weapons on May 8. But there was no interruption of U.S.
weapons deliveries, and the consequences in Rafah over the past six
weeks have been devastating. The assault is still ongoing, but
national security adviser Sullivan announced that the “red line” had
not been broken.

The fact that the U.S. Congress is rolling out the red carpet for
Netanyahu in July is particularly ludicrous in view of his history of manipulating American public and congressional opinion. Have we
forgotten his address to the Congress in 2015, designed to embarrass
the Obama administration and stop the completion of the Iran nuclear
accord? On this occasion, the congressional invitation is shameful
because Netanyahu is a war criminal whose policies are killing and
starving innocent civilians.

Netanyahu has spoken privately about his ability to manipulate
Democratic administrations because he has the power of the Jewish
lobby behind him, and Democratic presidents are fearful of
antagonizing the Jewish vote and Jewish fund raising on behalf of
Democrats. He has insulted American presidents, vice presidents, and secretaries of state over the years, and has never missed an
opportunity to demonstrate that he has the upper hand in negotiations
with the United States. Netanyahu has always played hard ball with
the United States. Now, it’s time for the United States to do the
same.

Melvin A. Goodman is a senior fellow at the Center for International
Policy and a professor of government at Johns Hopkins University. A
former CIA analyst, Goodman is the author of Failure of Intelligence:
The Decline and Fall of the CIA and National Insecurity: The Cost of
American Militarism. and A Whistleblower at the CIA. His most recent
books are “American Carnage: The Wars of Donald Trump” (Opus
Publishing, 2019) and “Containing the National Security State” (Opus Publishing, 2021). Goodman is the national security columnist for counterpunch.org.

https://www.counterpunch.org/2024/06/21/biden-team-ignores-israels-history-of-deceit-and-deception/

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