The world thinks like us

Op-ed: WikiLeaks boosted Israel by revealing that most world leaders share our views

Published:

Had WikiLeaks not existed, Israel would have had to invent it. The massive leak of US diplomatic documents produces a clear, unequivocal picture: The whole world, and not only Israel, is terrified by the Iranian nuclear threat.

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.”
Some people feared WikiLeaks’ leaks because of the embarrassment to American diplomacy and the fears that the lives of US agents would be jeopardized. Yet that was a false alarm. The leak does not hurt America’s foreign policy, with the exception of a few tales recounted by junior diplomats.
The leak reinforces the main message of two US administrations - which turned out to be incredibly similar to the main message conveyed by Israeli governments: Iran constitutes the clear, immediate and greatest threat to the world’s stability, and the world needs to act towards uprooting this malignant tumor. All the rest is dwarfed by it.

Israel largely unscathed

Some media outlets indeed tried to make a big deal out of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s supposed order to US diplomatic staff to spy after senior UN officials. However, scrutinizing the documents makes it clear that this had to do with concerns about close cooperation between some UN officials and Hamas/ Hezbollah. This theme had been frequently raised by Israel too.

In fact, the ocean of leaks has not yet produced an item that casts a negative light on Israel.
Netanyahu came out of it (relatively) ok, Olmert came out of it (relatively) ok, and even Mossad Chief Meir Dagan’s statement about the US need to encourage the protest of intellectuals and students in Iran is commensurate with a liberal, democratic worldview and with accumulated experience in toppling dictatorships.
It is doubtful whether in recent years Israel’s foreign and defense policy received such significant backing and reinforcement as happened Sunday. At least on the Iranian front, and apparently in respect to quite a few other issues too, world leaders – including the Arab world – think like us but are ashamed to admit it. WikiLeaks exposed this shame.