It was an unlikely setting for Yuval Diskin to break his silence.
A small
forum called Majdi, named after a Kfar Saba restaurant where it meets regularly,
gathered to hear the ex-Shin Bet (Israel Security Agency) director as he
unleashed stinging attack after stinging attack on Prime Minister Binyamin
Netanyahu and Defense Minister Ehud Barak, challenging their very legitimacy as
national leaders and their ability to steer the country through the turbulent
waters of 2012, and the tinderbox issue of Iran’s nuclear program.
Within
a short time, someone who had filmed the event posted a video of Diskin making
the comments on YouTube. Soon afterwards, they became the headlines in all news
sites, a result that Diskin has surely envisaged and planned for.
Diskin
left little room for question about his views on the people he had worked under
for half a decade, but he did leave open the question of the timing of his
remarks. Why now? There is of course the “official” explanation, that the timing
was preselected by Diskin as being the optimal period for speaking
up.
Yet for the targets of Diskin’s attacks, and those who viewed them as
base and inappropriate, an entirely different explanation was easy to find. As
the rumblings of general elections grow louder, they said, Diskin was preparing
his own entrance to the political arena.
Similar “charges” were leveled
at Meir Dagan last year, after the former Mossad chief broke his own silence and
lambasted the idea of an Israeli strike on Iran at this time.
A third
explanation is also possible, though it is not apparent to the public eye. It is
certainly possible that Diskin is aware of unknown factors that prompted him to
unleash his fire at Netanyahu and Barak on Saturday.
Only time might shed
more light on the timing of Diskin’s intervention.