Warning to Trump Transition Team About Pre-Inaugural Netanyahu Messages
Dr. Aaron Lerner 18 December 2016

This period before the end of the Obama Administration is incredibly
delicate.

So:

Don't take messages from my prime minister at face value.

Not even from his closest advisors and representatives.

Not even necessarily messages directly from Binyamin Netanyahu himself.

This is not the first time that my prime minister felt it was necessary to
keep literally everyone in the dark.

Back between the summer of 2009 and the summer of 2011 he went through the
motions of preparing to attack Iran in order to compel the world to act.

Billions were spent on the ruse.

Hundreds of tense hours were devoted to meetings of the security cabinet and
other top security forums.

And the only person in the room who knew it was a ruse was Prime Minister
Binyamin Netanyahu.

Not Chief of Staff Ashkenazi. Nor the heads of the Mossad and Shin Bet.
Certainly no one on his own staff. In fact many later bragged they they
were the ones who stopped the attack!

I am embarrassed to share this with you: senior security officials have
complained that if the whole thing was a ruse that we shouldn't have spent
the billions required to prepare for the real thing. These "experts" didn't
understand that the noise and activity generated by spending billions played
a crucial role in convincing the world that we were indeed serious.

Why am I sharing this warning with you now?

To an outsider, President-elect Trump's remarks about Syria appear to
indicate preparations underway for major deals in the region exploiting,
among other things, Putin's great interest in having the sanctions against
Russia dropped.

My concern is that Israeli pre-inaugural messages may unintentionally cause
your team to think that we somehow want to be a part of some grand deal.

This especially when our minister of defense Liberman has always strived for
an arrangement under which some third party would take responsibility for
security in Judea and Samaria.
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IMRA - Independent Media Review and Analysis

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Arab-Israeli relations

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