Out of the 250,000 secret U.S. documents that Haaretz has obtained, 10,000 are particularly important vis-à-vis Israel. While their contents do not constitute any serious security threat per se, they do reveal some startling attitudes – on the part of both local leaders and their interlocutors.By Yossi Melman and Sefy Hendler
The flutter of a butterfly’s wings that led to the biggest storm in the history of modern diplomacy began in the deserts of Iraq. Private 1st Class Bradley Manning, a computer expert who was serving at a secret U.S. Army base about 50 kilometers from Baghdad, was responsible for the first, imperceptible movement. Out of boredom or perhaps ideological motives (the desire to expose the injustices of the American occupation), he is alleged to have downloaded a quarter-of-a-million secret State Department documents onto two discs that also contained Lady Gaga songs and given them to Julian Assange, founder of the WikiLeaks site.
Assange gave this mountain of documents to a few newspapers in various countries and the imperceptible breeze became a storm that is still shaking capitals and leaders. Indeed, many people attribute the fall of Tunisian dictator Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali to the publication of the American cables dealing with his and his wife’s terrible corruption.
With the first publication of part of the cache of documents last November, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu hastened to draw conclusions. The first, which was indeed supported by the documents, was that most Middle East leaders had adopted Israel’s claim that Iran is the biggest threat to stability in the region. The documents revealed that in their conversations with American ambassadors, leaders of several Arab countries supported the idea of a military attack on Iran to prevent it from developing nuclear weapons.
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http://www.haaretz.com/news/haaretz-wikileaks-exclusive/wikileaks-the-israel-file-1.354874
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