“So That No One Can Say Later That I Didn’t Say Anything”

Meir Dagan, the man who until very recently headed Israel’s Mossad, now embraces the Saudi peace plan of 2002:

In a forthright contradiction of the position of the Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, that a withdrawal to 1967 borders posed an unacceptable security risk, Mr Dagan said Israel ”must present an initiative to the Palestinians”. ”We must adopt the Saudi initiative,” Mr Dagan said.

‘We have no other way, and not because [the Palestinians] are my top priority, but because I am concerned about Israel’s wellbeing and I want to do what I can to ensure Israel’s existence. If we don’t make proposals and if we don’t take the initiative, we will eventually find ourselves in a corner.”

Dagan has also described Netanyahu’s desire to strike Iran as insanely reckless. And compare Dagan’s sanity with the hysteria from the likes of Krauthammer, Hannity, Ailes, Palin, Romney, AIPAC, et al. Dagan is also open-minded and skeptical about the Fatah-Hamas agreement.

Some questions for the Washington pro-Israel faction. How can you dismiss Dagan as not knowing enough to have an opinion on the two-state solution? Do you regard him as a self-hating Jew? Or as a delusional peacenik? Ben Caspit in Maariv writes:

In really closed talks, Dagan says in a loud and clear voice, that the Netanyahu-Barak duo is dangerous for national security. He uses even stronger language that I don’t intend to print. He promised, upon his release, that from now on they would hear from him a lot, and he is keeping his promise, big time… These are not just ordinary red warning lights, these are enormous projectors that have been lighting up the black sky above us for quite a few months now. Nothing would make me happier than to discover that these three prophets of doom are wrong. The problem is that I have a more than a slight concern that it could very well be that they are right.

Notice that Dagan is willing to cede more territory than Obama proposed. There are no land-swaps in the Saudi peace deal. So, Mr Romney, has the former head of the Mossad just thrown Israel under the bus? And Mr Bret Stephens, is Dagan an “anti-Israel” head of the Mossad? Or was the hysteria of the last month entirely manufactured to prevent an Obama second term and buoy Netanyahu’s support at home? There is no strategy for Israel in the AIPAC mindset. Just knee-jerk defensiveness and a major role in leading Israel to self-destruction.