Rhetoric versus reality

Editorial

If Israel seems to be the most diplomatically isolated democracy in the world today, the approximately 250,000 classified documents dumped onto WikiLeaks this week indicates that some of that, at least, is mere posturing.

Among those perceived as Israel’s enemies – notably a number of Arab Gulf states that do not have diplomatic relations with Israel – there are those who have a far more sympathetic, or at least pragmatic, attitude toward the Jewish state than their outward remarks would suggest.

Interestingly, Israel’s prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, observed that he and his colleagues don’t have much to worry about, apparently, since there is little difference between what they say behind closed doors with their allies and what they tell the public. This is a somewhat amusing side effect of the very public diplomacy that has taken place. The normally reserved lingo of diplomats has been cast aside on several notable occasions in recent months and, given that Israel’s most important relationship is with the United States, it is interesting to learn that the interaction seems as frank and transparent as it appears.

Not so with some other countries. It has been assumed that some Arab countries are concerned with the Iranian madman, but it comes as a bit of a surprise that, according to analyses of the leaked materials, many Arab countries have actually urged the United States to stop Iran’s nuclear ambitions. This reveals a chasm in regional relations that are often too simplistically viewed as monolithic.

Netanyahu saw this as another bright spot in the WikiLeaks phenomenon.

“More and more countries realize that Iran is the central threat, but the countries in the region have a gap because they publicly are attached to the Israeli-Arab conflict, but privately they realize that this narrative is not true. They realize that the central threat is from Iran, and now this has been revealed, even though it was known,” Netanyahu said Sunday. “It can eliminate the theory that Israel is the obstacle to peace and show that we have mutual interests,” he added.

Not as dramatic or as earth-shattering as WikiLeaks, certainly, but a small effort by some local activists using a Facebook page called StopStopWar demonstrated in a different way how people’s statements can differ from what they really think. Around the beginning of the Iraq War, local activists formed StopWar, seeking to prevent the conflict and thwart Canada’s potential involvement, but the organization, whose name suggests that they are against war, must not be misconstrued as a peace group. For instance, last month, they brought to Canada George Galloway, whose views are anything but peaceful. A friend of Hamas and Hezbollah, Ahmadinejad and all things radical, Galloway’s visit was the impetus for StopStopWar’s creators to ask StopWar’s endorsers to do a head check.

The “174 endorsing members” of StopWar included some prominent individuals and groups. StopStopWar urged the public to contact the endorsers and ask if they knew with what their names were being associated. Dr. David Suzuki quickly demanded that his name be removed. The United Church of Canada did the same. The federal and provincial Green parties yanked their support. A provincial politician, clergy people and genuine advocates of social justice followed suit.

The lesson from these two seemingly diverse cases is that we should not always believe what we read and hear, but rather we should always think critically. To construct clear divisions of who is the enemy and who is an ally may be helpful in selling an idea, a product or a war, but it does not aid our understanding of geopolitics at large.

In the case of StopWar, there were many people who may have endorsed the antiwar agenda of the group a few years back, but were repulsed by the extreme causes StopWar has taken up since. Until someone told them that their names were being used in service of an un-peaceful ideology, many were simply unaware that they were inadvertently “endorsing” extremists and moved to remedy the situation.

While the WikiLeaks case raises several serious moral issues, including the very real potential to put allied soldiers and intelligence operatives, among others, in harm’s way, it provides a strange satisfaction to know that Israel has a few more friends, or at least convenient, if frosty, allies in common cause.

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