No love in Warsaw: 10 things to know for February 14



1. Fog of war: Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu headed to Poland this week with the not so subtle mission of meeting with senior officials from the Arab countries that agreed to join a vaguely defined summit called by the US.
  • How vaguely defined? While Netanyahu (and Iran) have continued to claim that the meeting is aimed at stopping Iran, organizers didn’t even mention the country in an opening statement, while Middle East peace, which Netanyahu insisted was just a tiny part of it, was on the official agenda.
  • Netanyahu’s gambit of  telling reporters as he headed to the summit that the countries were gathering against Iran backfired spectacularly, when his office translated a word that could both mean war and the less confrontational “combating,” as the former.
  • ToI’s Raphael Ahren writes that in the wake of the tweet and the translated comments sent to journalists, several senior officials “wondered whether Netanyahu had just openly called for open war with Iran.”
  • Among them are Iran’s foreign minister Moahmmed Javad Zarif.
  • Aside from call for war, even the mention of Iran was seen as poor form.
  • “Mr. Netanyahu clearly did not get the memo that Iran was supposed to be discussed obliquely,” The New York Times writes.
2. Hijacked confab: Al-Monitor calls Netanyahu’s comments, together with Rudy Giuliani calling for pressure on Iran during a rally with extremist Iranian exile group MEK, a hijacking of the agenda.
  • “To be honest, even today, speaking to some of the Europeans, they have no clue what is coming out of this tomorrow,” Ellie Geranmayeh of the European Council on Foreign Relations tells the news site. “The impression they had is the agenda is still a mess. … one diplomat said it really depends on how the US handles the discussions in Warsaw. If they really go into full Iran-bashing mode, it is going to be so unhelpful.”
  • The Washington Post notes that many European countries scratched their attendance or sent only low-level delegates over fears of the anti-Iran agenda.
  • “What [US Secretary of State] Mike Pompeo originally billed as a major conference to pressure Iran on its regional influence, missile testing and terrorism is now as likely to be defined by what it is not — and who is not coming. Several key countries appear to be engaging in a subtle diplomatic snub to protest the Trump administration’s policies toward Iran and Syria,” the paper reports.
  • Expectations have become so low that even Israeli tabloid Israel Hayom, seen as a mouthpiece for Netanyahu, pushes coverage of the conference way down to page 9, after an anodyne feature about an online quiz testing electoral knowledge.
3. Good Oman? A so-called family photo was supposed to be a chance for Netanyahu to be shown hobnobbing with the dauphins, princelings and other diplomats of the Arab world that had come to the summit at the US’s urging.

  • Instead, pictures showed Netanyahu, the only head of state at the confab, standing awkwardly at the front and center of the picture, with only Polish President Adrej Duda next to him. There were no pictures showing him hobnobbing with Saudis or really anyone else aside from US veep Mike Pence.
  • Netanyahu did manage to meet with Omani Foreign Minister Yusuf bin Alawi bin Abdullah. Coming months after Netanyahu actually visited Oman and met Sultan Qaboos in the open, the bin Alawi meeting was barely even a cherry on top.
  • There are also indications even that meeting was originally supposed to be secret. Bin Alawi did not use the front door of Netanyahu’s hotel, but rather a skeezy side entrance in the parking garage, where he was snapped by a couple Israeli journalists.
  • It could be that Tal Shalev and Barak Ravid just happened to be in the parking garage hanging out, or it could be that they were tipped off by an Israeli source, thus destroying any chance of the meeting remaining secret and allowing Netanyahu to convince bin Alawi to allow him to publicize it.
  • On Thursday, his office makes sure to tell reporters that Netanyahu sat next to the Yemeni foreign minister at a meeting.

    4. Riyadh’s message to Israelis: That wasn’t even the biggest scoop of Channel 13’s Barak Ravid’s day, with an interview he did with Saudi royal and former ambassador to the US Turki bin Faisal airing that evening.
    • Ravid himself acknowledges that he is being used as a conduit for Riyadh to reach out to Israelis directly. Faisal, who met with King Salman days earlier, accuses Netanyahu of deceiving the Israeli people by claiming that Saudi Arabia is willing to forge open ties with Israel before a peace deal is reached with the Palestinians.
    • “From the Israeli point of view, Mr. Netanyahu would like us to have a relationship, and then we can fix the Palestinian issue. From the Saudi point of view, it’s the other way around,” Faisal says.
    • He claims Israel has never responded to the Arab Peace Initiative and in Riyadh’s view, is not serious about trying to end the conflict.
    • “Israel has not been very cooperative as far as achieving peace in our part of the world.”
    • He also offers this doozy of a line, which would strike most as backwards: “With Israeli money and Saudi brains, we can go far.”