IDF hails ‘excellent’ intelligence cooperation with US amid diplomatic spat

A senior army officer said Tuesday that Israel’s intelligence cooperation with the United States – amid swirling recriminations between Washington and Jerusalem — remains untainted, and that, “on the strategic level, the dialogue is with partners [and is] deep and fertile.”

The administration of President Barack Obama, the officer added, “is investing more resources in the security of Israel than in previous years.”

In a background briefing largely focused on internal budgetary affairs, he termed the intelligence sharing between the two countries “excellent” and said it “has not been harmed at all.”

The comments came on the heels of a Wall Street Journal report alleging that Israel not only spied on US officials engaged in the P5+1 negotiations with Iran over its nuclear program but also used the information to “undermine US diplomacy” by sharing the information with members of Congress, who, apparently, had not been fully briefed on the parameters of the deal-in-the-making.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in a March 3 address to both houses of Congress, delivered despite Obama’s overt opposition, called the deal that is being cobbled together in Switzerland “very bad,” and asserted that “It doesn’t block Iran’s path to the bomb; it paves Iran’s path to the bomb.”

Since then a feud that was once kept within the realm of deniability, as Israeli officials sometimes say, has come center stage, with Israeli officials alleging that the administration sought to unseat Netanyahu during last week’s election and senior members of the Obama administration asserting that “an occupation that has lasted for almost 50 years must end” and that the US, in light of Netanyahu’s pre-election statements, would have to “re-think” its approach to Arab-Israeli peacemaking.

The deadline for the nuclear talks is March 31.

The IDF officer also said that the army’s new chief of staff has “scratched from the protocol” the notion of stopping training as a means of saving money, a stop-gap measure that was used in 2014.

“I don’t care how you do it but the IDF will continue to train,” the officer said, quoting Lt. Gen. Gadi Eisenkot.

The directive means that several long-term projects will have to be frozen. The officer said that Israel has tried “to do it all” — active defense, an “unparalleled” UAV force, while building the best tanks and armored personnel carriers in the world, alongside home front protection, border fences, a strong air force, robust intelligence service, and a cyber-warfare unit that is up to the challenges of today.

Since war could break out at any given time, he said, “the foremost matter of importance is that we be trained and afterward everything else.”

The officer suggested that in the north “there is no player whose interest is war” but that a series of events “that gets out of control,” rather like the quid pro quo killings near the Syrian border in January, could cause a full-scale conflict.

Hezbollah, he said, “knew rather early” that it had killed “only two” soldiers in its retribution strike on January 28 in the Mount Dov region, but the organization decided not to ratchet up the death toll any higher for fear of all-out war. “I imagine that the government of Israel would have acted differently to the incident if the number of dead was high,” he said.