Yossi Verter : Israeli Politicians Describe Incoming Mossad Chief as Netanyahu's Pet
This week's prime-time announcement by the PM of Yossi Cohen as
the spy agency's new head was itself full of intrigue and suspense – and
not a small dose of humiliation for the institution.
Yossi Cohen
is not one of the regular guests in this column, which deals with
politics. The same goes for the National Security Council, whose head he
will remain until he assumes his post as director of the Mossad
and becomes Israel’s top secret agent. But when someone punches a clock
for two years in the most political bureau in the country alongside our
No. 1 politician – by dint of his professional capacity and strong
personality – it would take an almost superhuman effort to preserve
one’s political virginity. Some fallout (to change the metaphor) is
bound to stick to you, even if it’s not to your benefit and not at your
initiative.
Much has already been said of the way Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu chose to inform the nation about its new Mossad chief
(who is accountable directly to the prime minister) on Monday night.
Never before has a new head of Israel’s espionage agency been appointed
like this: with the televised announcement at 8:15 P.M., the prime of
prime time, the buildup of tension as though it were the last episode of
“Dallas” and we were about to discover who shot J.R., and then the
repeated delays, Netanyahu-style, to 8:30 to 9:00 and then 9:06 – all
this bringing us back to that weird and nerve-racking evening when the
present coalition was announced to the Knesset.
Then came
the climax, the announcement of the winner – though not before we got
another concentrated dose from Netanyahu of “ISIS – Islamism, lying
religious incitement ... In Paris I met with many leaders, the Mossad
will continue to assist me to develop relations with various countries,
it was a tough choice.”
In
short, it was the essence of politics. Netanyahu, a proficient patron
of prime time, succeeded in making not only himself ridiculous but in
tarnishing and humiliating the Mossad and the position of its chief, a
serious post that deals with life-and-death issues. The lust of this
prime minister, who refuses to give interviews, for more exposure
(sterile, controlled and on his terms) and for another five minutes of
unedited “live broadcast” time, without his having to confront those
nagging journalists – knows no bounds. At the conclusion of his
statement Monday night, Udi Segal of Channel 2 News threw a question at
him. Netanyahu stopped for a moment, gave him a mocking look over his
left shoulder, and left. Segal can jump in the lake.
Some
reporters raised the possibility that the 50-minute delay was due to
post-11th-hour doubts that assailed Netanyahu about his choice.
Certainly something happened in the “aquarium,” the mysterious black
hole of the premier’s bureau, during the interim. Maybe one of those who
was passed over raised a ruckus? Maybe someone called Netanyahu to tell
him something? Another speculation is that earlier in the evening – in
other words, at 8:15, the original time set for the announcement – his
choice had been someone other than Cohen, and he changed his mind.
More
clues, anyone? Well, on that very evening and at exactly the same time,
hundreds of female members of Likud were waiting in Ramat Gan for Sara
Netanyahu to light the second candle of Hanukkah. Mrs. Netanyahu was
late (sorry, delayed) by two-and-a-half hours. She told the exhausted
women that she had heard about her husband’s decision “on the radio.” A
very likely story.
Bibi
and Sara have never been caught displaying excess consideration for
ordinary people. For them a schedule is not even a recommendation; it’s a
nuisance. But two-and-a-half hours is one heck of a delay. In
retrospect, there were those who wondered, and not by chance, whether
there was a connection between the prime minister’s minor tardiness and
his wife’s major tardiness.
That
question remains unanswered. What is known, however, is that two hours
before the name of the chosen Mossad candidate was announced, Yossi
Cohen’s photo and a brief bio of him appeared in Likudniks’ WhatsApp
groups, intimating that the decision had been made. It emerges,
therefore, that the industrious spies in the ranks of Likud knew the
identity of the new chief at 7 P.M., while senior commentators were
voicing learned opinions in TV studios and even conjectured and hinted
that Cohen, apparently, was actually not the man.
Bibi’s darling
About
half a year ago, NSC head Cohen spoke with a senior political figure.
Their conversation dealt with a sensitive and discreet matter relating
to a complex aspect of Israel’s foreign relations. Cohen was sent by
Netanyahu to clarify to the political figure a detail relating to
something the politician was dealing with. Cohen told the man that the
Mossad, too, was occupied with the affair. “Fine, you’re the next Mossad
head, no?” the politician asked. “Yes,” Cohen replied, according to the
politician, “I have Netanyahu’s promise.”
I spoke
this week with several politicians who have been in and out of the
premier’s bureau in the past year or so. All of them without exception
reported the same impression: Cohen was Netanyahu’s darling, his
favorite, his right-hand man, his personal emissary on secret
globe-trotting missions. “Yossi will talk to you” was often Netanyahu’s
parting remark to interlocutors in cases where some detail was still
unresolved. Another favorite utterance was “Get Yossi.” When Bibi met
with MKs, including from the opposition, he customarily summoned Cohen,
sometimes two or three times in an hour, to explain a point or shed
light on a particular issue.
“Whenever
I saw them together I said to myself that Bibi just loves the guy,”
related someone who met with the prime minister. “Bibi looked at him
lovingly and warmly. My feeling is that he likes his character, his
style, the way he dresses, the prestige and nobility he projects and the
way he expresses himself, but above all the absolute loyalty with which
he served him.”
In the
past two years, Cohen definitely surrendered his soul to Netanyahu. He
did so with his cool elegance and not in the sweaty, screaming, militant
manner that characterizes most of the leader’s gophers, both in his
party and his bureau. Cohen’s concluding public performance was his
testimony last week before the Knesset’s Economic Affairs Committee,
which was deliberating the subject of the natural-gas deal. He was
unimpressive, to put it mildly. He declaimed mechanically the familiar
messages, consistently harping on the phrase, “in our Middle East.” Some
committee members came away with the feeling that Cohen’s heart was not
in the words he was speaking. However, as MK Shelly Yacimovich (Zionist
Union) – who welcomes his new appointment – noted, there is no way he’d
have been given the job if he’d dared express a different opinion on an
issue that for Netanyahu is the be-all and end-all.
Another
event that MKs recall occurred in the Knesset’s Foreign Affairs and
Defense Committee, in the period after the signing of the nuclear
agreement between Iran and the world powers. Cohen’s deputy briefed the
committee on the agreement, but in addition to a dry, factual
presentation they also got a heaping dose of scorn and disdain for U.S.
President Barack Obama and the American officials who had struck the
deal. That unexpected “bonus” was strictly political and highly
unprofessional. MKs, and not necessarily from the opposition, wondered
whether it was the place of the National Security Council, as a
supposedly impartial security body, to echo the angry spin emanating
from Netanyahu’s bureau.
According
to a minister who has belonged to the security cabinet for the past two
years, during that period, Cohen “provided the perfect buffer for
Netanyahu against external interference. He has an ability to square
circles. He’s a human-relations whiz. He was able to accommodate
frustrations of MKs and ministers so that the prime minister would not
have to deal with them. He is not opinionated. In meetings of the
security cabinet he never floored us with an original or especially
subversive opinion. But he made order in the chaos he found in the
security cabinet.”
In the
same vein, more or less, another senior figure relates that ahead of
official trips abroad by the premier and his wife, Cohen would come to
the Prime Minister’s Residence in Jerusalem and sit with Mrs. Netanyahu
to discuss the planned routes, meetings and the like.
Coming
back to where we began: As Cohen told a certain figure, he apparently
did have Netanyahu’s promise that he would succeed Tamir Pardo as head
of the Mossad. But in the past few weeks something went awry. As the
date for the decision approached, Cohen apparently noticed a change in
the way the wind was blowing. Netanyahu’s attitude toward him projected
something chilly, reserved, indecisive. Reports surfaced in the media
that a search was underway for external candidates for the Mossad’s top
post. It’s would be typical of Netanyahu to “surprise” everyone, to come
up with some Jacob Frenkel or Stanley Fischer, and leave the media
speechless, unprepared, flabbergasted, bewildered and battered.
About a
month ago, Cohen asked Netanyahu what was happening with the Mossad. The
answer drove him wild. “You are one of the candidates,” the prime
minister told him. Cohen asked whether he should start preparing to
embark on a new course. “You are one of the candidates,” was the answer
again. Cohen told an interlocutor that Netanyahu looked down as he
spoke. Confidants of the NSC head say that during those weeks he was
edgy, frustrated and disappointed. He told ambassadors he met that he
was examining business opportunities. Unusually, Cohen did not accompany
Netanyahu on his visit to Washington to meet with Obama a few weeks
ago. Instead, he went on a trip to Thailand with his family.
It was
only 24 hours or so before the announcement that Netanyahu told Cohen
the job was his. People who work with him noticed the change of mood
immediately. Now he was calm and collected. The danger was over, the
tension had dissipated. Bibi had made his decision. The “model” was
about to step onto his coveted runway.
The
media’s occupation with Cohen’s good looks and stylish attire – he looks
like an Italian lover from a romantic movie of the 1970s – says
something about Israel, the country with the sloppy, neglected, scruffy
look of the A Team. A civil servant who shows up in a suit and tie, his
white shirt ironed, and groomed to perfection, looks like a visitor from
another planet.
Streams of consciousness
Education
Minister Naftali Bennett, who is also, and secondarily, Diaspora
affairs minister, performed what’s known in these parts as a “worthy”
act by visiting the Solomon Schechter School of the Conservative
movement, in New York this week. He also posted a clip of the visit and
of the reception he was given on his Twitter account, gushing at the
“love of Israel, love of Judaism” that the students displayed.
מפגש עם תלמידי בית הספר הקונסרבטיבי הנפלא ״סולומון שכטר״ בניו יורק. כמה אהבת הארץ, כמה אהבת יהדות. pic.twitter.com/ByMB3eI8sz
— Naftali Bennett (@naftalibennett) December 1, 2015
In
tolerant, enlightened, Israel, that tweet drew outrage and vilifications
– mostly in the Haredi (ultra-Orthodox) media, but also in so-called
“Hardeli” (a fusion of Haredi and national-religious) circles, which
characterizes the extreme right wing of Bennett’s Habayit Hayehudi
party.
The
height of the absurdity, though this should no longer surprise anyone,
came in the form of a reprimand to Bennett by Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi
David Lau. “He should not have visited there, this is behavior
unacceptable to klal Yisrael,” Lau said in a radio interview, referring
to the Jewish people as a whole. He added some sermonizing by
conjecturing that the wayward kippah-clad minister had not “consulted
with a rabbi” (such as Lau himself) before giving “a certain form of
recognition to a certain audience.” Bennett responded with a reprimand
of his own: “A public leader is duty-bound to bring Jews closer, not to
banish them.”
The
Haredi Lau has the reputation of being a non-extreme religious leader –
relatively speaking, of course. He’s the son of another former chief
rabbi, Israel Meir Lau, who has a similar image. The son was elected to
his post in July 2013 with the support of Netanyahu and Likud, United
Torah Judaism and Shas. Bennett backed Rabbi David Stav, the head of the
moderate Tzohar rabbinical organization. Obviously Lau bears Bennett a
grudge, that’s only human. But precisely because of that, he should have
said nothing. Since when do rabbis scold cabinet ministers who are
doing their duty?
Bennett
has a long account to settle with the Chief Rabbinate. In the previous
government, he set out to make changes and failed. Orthodoxy won.
Bennett considers the ultra-Orthodox establishment a corrupt, rotten
group, a money machine that creates jobs and is concerned mostly about
salaries for functionaries. The level of Judaism he found at Solomon
Schechter is far higher than in any state-religious school in Israel. He
was overwhelmed. As Diaspora affairs minister, he said this week, his
role is to embrace Jews from all streams, in order to reduce
assimilation and the abandonment of religion. In the past government, as
minister of religious services, he established Ezrat Yisrael at the
Western Wall – a third prayer area where men and women can worship
together. He also joined forces with the justice minister at the time,
Tzipi Livni, to pass a conversion law that was then repealed by the
current coalition. Now he’s visited a Conservative school for the first
time and after being bawled out by Rabbi Lau, has lashed back.
Who
hasn’t said a word about the subject? Who’s been silent in the wake of
Rabbi Lau’s defamation? Netanyahu, that’s who. For him, American Jewry
is a wallet, sometimes also a lever to put pressure on the
administration. The coalition is more important, and he wouldn’t dream
of riling stalwarts such as Arye Dery or Yaakov Litzman.
Haaretz Contributor
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