Maher Bitar and Israel’s ideological elections

Originally published by Israel Hayom

US President Biden’s choice to name an anti-Israel political activist as senior director for Intelligence at the National Security Council may place Israel in a precarious position.

Israel’s March 23 elections are being presented as a simple referendum on Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The media and Netanyahu’s opponents would have us believe that there is no ideological struggle. It’s all just a question of whether you love or hate Bibi.

But this is untrue. The coming elections are primarily about ideology. To understand why this is the case, we need to look no further than President Joe Biden’s appointments.

This week the White House announced that Maher Bitar has been appointed to serve as the senior director for Intelligence at the National Security Council. The position is one of the most powerful posts in the US intelligence community. The senior director is the node to which all intelligence from all agencies flows. He decides what to share with the President. And in the name of the President, he determines priorities for intelligence operations and collection.

The senior director of intelligence also determines what information the US intelligence community will share with foreign intelligence services. Likewise, he decides how to relate to information that foreign intelligence agencies share with the Americans.

As one former senior national security council member explained, “The senior director for intelligence controls the information everyone sees. And by controlling information, he controls the conversation.”

Usually, the sensitive position is reserved for a CIA officer who is detailed to the National Security Council. Bitar, however, is not an intelligence professional. He is an anti-Israel political activist.

As Daniel Greenfield reported at Frontpage online magazine, in 2006, as a student at Georgetown University, Bitar was a leader of the anti-Semitic, Muslim Brotherhood aligned Students for Justice in Palestine. As an SJP leader, he organized a so-called “boycott, divestment, and sanctions” campaign against Israel and its supporters on his campus. Greenfield reported that Bitar chaired a panel at a BDS conference where participants discussed how to indoctrinate Christians to believe that Israel has no right to exist.

After receiving a law degree from Georgetown, Bitar received a Master’s from Oxford in “Forced Migration.” He wrote a thesis about the “Nakba,” or catastrophe of Israel’s founding.

From Oxford, he moved to Jerusalem where he worked for UNRWA, the UN agency dedicated to keeping the descendants of Arabs who left Israel in 1948 in a state of perpetual limbo by blocking their naturalization in countries they have lived in for five generations. UNRWA’s efforts to eternalize their misery are motivated by its institutional commitment to preventing any resolution of the Palestinian conflict with Israel.

During the Obama presidency, Bitar served on the National Security Council as the Israeli-Palestinian officer. He was Samantha Power’s deputy. In 2016, as UN ambassador, Power played a key role in the passage of UN Security Council Resolution 2334, which labeled Israeli neighborhoods in unified Jerusalem and Israeli towns and cities in Judea and Samaria as a “flagrant violation of international law.”