As the Monitor reported Monday, Israel sees the WikiLeaks dump as a vindication of its concern about Iran. The leaked cables show that many of its Arab neighbors are also concerned and repeatedly asked the US to intervene.
An Israeli columnist for Ynet News, Sever Plocker, seems thrilled in his column titled “The world thinks like us,” which leads with the line: “Had WikiLeaks not existed, Israel would have had to invent it.”
Iran’s nuclearization is not Israeli paranoia, as certain camps try to argue. It makes all world leaders, from Riyadh to Moscow, lose sleep. The Iranian issue is the common thread in the hundreds of thousands of documents that were leaked and it produces a narrative whereby the world expects Israel and the United States, in this order, to do something to stop “Hitler from Tehran.”
His column and an editorial from the left-leaning Haaretz are both dismissive of the hysteria in the US government over the cables. In a country that is used to constant leaks to the media and off-the-record conversations, this kind of information wouldn’t have been private for long, let alone decades.
Haaretz implies that there will be little fallout and that the lack of consequences is because “the documents were created, sent and published within a constitutional framework that protects freedom of speech.” The comment may have been a dig at Israel’s government, which the left-leaning newspaper frequently criticizes for what it says is infringement on free speech and other civil rights.
