As might be expected of a former senior official with Israel’s
spy agency Mossad, Uzi Arad -- the most trusted political adviser to Benjamin
Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister -- has got used to being in the shadows as he
exerts influence.
But that is fast changing. Mr Arad was prominent in preparing Mr
Netanyahu’s tough positions as he headed for Washington this week to meet Barack
Obama, the US president, who is seeking to advance a Middle East peace plan.
Mr Arad, recently appointed the head of Israel’s revamped
National Security Council, will oversee an organisation that Mr Netanyahu
regards as the linchpin of the new government’s security and foreign policy.
One military analyst, Amir Oren, has noted that, given Mr
Netanyahu’s unstable coalition, Mr Arad “is likely to emerge as a strong adviser
to a weak government”.
Mr Arad has been outspoken both in rejecting Palestinian
statehood and in promoting the military option against Iran, positions believed
to be shared by the Israeli prime minister and that will be at the root of a
possible confrontation in the coming months with the Obama administration.
Mr Arad is also one of only a handful of senior figures on Mr
Netanyahu’s Iran Task Force, charged with devising a strategy for dealing with
Tehran and its supposed ambitions to attain nuclear weapons.
That will make some in Israel uneasy. The hawkish views that have
made Mr Arad indispensable to Mr Netanyahu have also earned him several
high-profile opponents.
Arik Carmon, founder of the Israel
Democracy Institute, has described Mr Arad’s proposal to arrange “territorial
exchanges” to strip some of Israel’s Palestinian minority of their citizenship
as “racist”.
Alon Liel, a former director-general of
Israel’s foreign ministry, has called Mr Arad’s efforts to derail recent talks
with Syria by demanding the continuing occupation of the Golan “ridiculous and
nasty”.
In 2007, before his rise to public prominence, Mr Arad also
fuelled worried speculation about Israel’s plans for a military strike on
Tehran, after he described it as “easier than you think”. A wide range of
non-military Iranian targets were legitimate, he added.
But despite Mr Arad’s espousal of opinions that in many respects
accord with those of Avigdor Lieberman, leader of the far-right Yisrael Beiteinu
Party and Mr Netanyahu’s foreign minister, few doubt the prime minister’s fierce
loyalty to him.
In a sign of that commitment, Mr Netanyahu pushed through Mr
Arad’s appointment as national security adviser, a post in which he will need to
be in almost continual consultation with the US, at the risk of provoking a
diplomatic crisis with the Obama White House.
He had been barred from entering the US by the Bush
administration after implication in a spying scandal. A Pentagon official, Larry
Franklin, jailed in 2006 for passing secrets about Iran to the Israel lobby
group AIPAC, was reported to have met Mr Arad frequently.
When the US secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, arrived in
Jerusalem in April for meetings with Mr Netanyahu, then prime
minister-designate, her staff quietly suggested he remove an official -- a hint
that Mr Arad’s presence was not welcome. Mr Netanyahu instead sent out Sallai
Meridor, the ambassador to the US, who resigned soon afterwards.
The Obama administration has since restored Mr Arad’s visa and
agreed to his political rehabilitation, not least so that he will be able
regularly to meet his US opposite number, Gen James Jones.
Mr Arad spent more than 20 years in Mossad, much of it working in
the intelligence section, before being appointed as Mr Netanyahu’s foreign
policy adviser in his first government in the late 1990s.
He was also closely associated with a leading neoconservative
think-tank in New York, the Hudson Institute, in the 1970s.
But paradoxically, his influence on Israeli thinking -- both
among policymakers and the public -- may have actually increased during his
years in political opposition, after the fall of the first Netanyahu government
in 1999.
It was then that he established an influential think-tank, the
Institute for Policy and Strategy, at the Herzliya Interdisciplinary Centre.
The institute stages an annual conference, dedicated to the
“balance of Israel’s national security”, that has become the most important
event in the Israeli calendar for politicians, generals and diplomats, as well
as attracting high-profile US guests.
Since the first meeting in 2000, the conferences have defined the
major security issues supposedly facing Israel, closely mirroring Mr Arad’s own
key obsessions.
Chief among these have been fears about the demographic threat to
Israel’s Jewishness from Palestinian birth rates both in the occupied
territories and among Israel’s own Palestinian citizens, and the danger posed to
Israeli hegemony in the region from Iran’s acquisition of a nuclear bomb.
In an indication of his implacable opposition to a Palestinian
state, Mr Arad recently told an interviewer: “We want to relieve ourselves of
the burden of Palestinian populations, not the territories.”
He has suggested that the Palestinians be required to become
economically self-reliant, in the hope that their leaders will be forced to
promote family planning methods to reduce the population. His motto is that the
Palestinians need “one man, one job” before they need “one man, one vote”.
He has also promoted a complex territorial exchange involving
Israel, the Palestinian Authority and Egypt that would see many Palestinians
relocated to the Sinai so that Israel could take control of chunks of the West
Bank.
But his greatest vehemence is reserved for Iran -- an antipathy
apparently shared by the Israeli prime minister. In the past he has called for
“maximum deterrence”, including threats to strike “anything and everything of
value” in Iran, including its “holiest sites”.
As Mr Netanyahu’s plane touched down in Washington on Sunday, Mr
Arad briefed reporters that Tehran posed an “existential” threat to Israel and
that “all options are indeed on the table”.
A
shorter version of this article originally appeared in The National (www.thenational.ae),
published in Abu Dhabi.
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