Lewinsky Seen as Policy Savior

• Israel's fingerprints lie all over the possible political corpse of Bill Clinton, and Israelis are calling Monica Lewinsky a 'God-send."

Proclaiming the "G-d has sent this young woman to save Eretz Iarael," Chief Rabbi Ovada Yosef, spiritual leader of the ministate's Spehardic faithful, welcomed the crippling crisis faced by President Bill Clinton over revelations of his relationship with former White House intern Monica Lewinsky.

Naming Ms. Lewinsky as "one of the historic women" whose intervention helped rid Israel of hostile rulers in "moments of danger," Chief Rabbi Yosef made it plain that Zionist hard liners now considered Clinton an enemy and a threat to their plans for a greater Israel.

A number of principals on the affair, including Lewinsky herself, are reportedly driven by deep ethnic and emotional ties to Israel -- and, in the case of at least one key player, long standing links with its secret service the Mossad, a SPOTLIGHT investigation has confirmed.

Knowledgeable diplomats and intelligence sources expressed doubt that the scandal was inspired by divine providence.

"Clinton's own improvidence is responsible for much of this mess," said Otto Alinsky, a public affairs adviser for the U.S. Catholic conference of democratic Clubs.

The problem goes beyond the president's adulterous affairs, Alinsky asserted. "He has fostered an amoral atmosphere in his administration and what I can only call a climate of corruption among its financial and corporate supporters."

Much of this, however, including some of the worst about Clinton's degenerate dalliances, had been known for years. It was not until the White House found itself on a collision course with the Israeli government that the scandals came to a head and threatened to undercut the president, diplomatic observers say.

These sources listed five major issues over which Clinton and Binyamin Netanyahu, Israel's hardline prime minister, are now in bitter conflict.

• The huge U.S. handouts going to Israel every year will be capped -- and eventually reduced -- if Rep. Sonny Callahan (R-Ala.), chairman of the House Appropriations subcommittee on foreign operations and a determined budget-cutter, gets his way.
• That he will get it became more likely in recent months when the White House lent its support to Callahan's proposal to limit the total of all U.S. aid to the Middle East to 5 billion next year, prompting an engry outburst by Israeli Finance Minister Yaakaov Ne'eman.
• Netanyahu has made repeated personal appeals to Clinton to free Jonathan "Jay Pollard, a deep-penetration spy for Israel serving a life sentence in a federal prison. But Clinton, after telling Israeli President Ezer Weizman that "a pardon was in the works," refused to let Pollard go, largely because of his growing dislike for what he once reportedly called "The lying, two-faced Netanyahu and his thugs."
• The Israeli prime minister, in turn, was said to be enraged by the slights and thinly veiled insults he had to endure in Washington. These included a presidential order not to let Netanyahu stay at Blair House, the official residence for honored visitors of state, Clinton's pointed decision to shun the Israeli leader while both were in Los Angeles last month, and to deny Netanyahu the customary White House dinner reception during his most recent official visit.
• During his first term, Clinton allowed well known Israeli agents such as Martin Indyk, Dennis Ross and Stephen Grossman to shape his administration's Middle Eastern policies. Now the president must confront the miserable failure" of this experiment, intelligence sources say.
• It has inflamed tensions throughout the region and threatens to trigger renewed violence, insurgency and possibly an all-out war at key flash-points, including Palestine, the Gulf and even the Mediterranean, where infiltrated Mossad agents are fanning a campaign of brutal repression against Turkey's majority Islamic faithful.
• Israeli demands for stepped-up economic warfare against Iran now threatens a rift between the U.S. and its European allies who have no trouble getting along with the Islamic regime in Teheran, and have made large investments in Iranian oil exploration. Clinton has been told that the Netanyahu administration is leaking doctored and fabricated intelligence information to leading American news organizations about Iran's efforts to arm itself with nuclear weapons and other weapons of mass destruction -- a buzzword also widely used to ignite a new war against Iraq.

The so-called "dual-containment" strategy, formulated by Martin Indyk, the hardline Israeli agent whom Clinton put in charge of Middle Eastern and Arabian Peninsula affairs, "has been nothing but trouble," says a veteran foreign service officer who, like other diplomatic sources, requested anonymity before discussing sensitive issues.

"The result is that we face another armed conflict over Iraq and a bitter confrontation with our European allies as well as the Islamic world over Iran," commented this knowledgeable observer, who recently resigned his post at the U.S. Embassy in Cairo in protest against the appointment of Dan Kurtzer, a known Israeli loyalist, as the new U.S. Ambassador to Egypt.