The rising tensions between Washington and Jerusalem have led to mutual disgust on both sides. And, as if that weren’t enough, an anti-Israeli campaign has been taking place simultaneously over the past few weeks, marking Israel as a country that frequently crosses the line of espionage against the United States. This is not a media campaign, because the media carries out its role in disseminating the information it receives from the relevant sources.

“We are talking about entities or agents within official bodies,” I was told by a high-placed diplomatic source in Jerusalem over the weekend. “They are spreading the information with precise timing so as to cause as much damage as possible to the already-rocky relations between Israel and the United States. They also want to reap side benefits such as obstructing the initiative to exempt Israelis from needing visas when visiting the United States, and blocking the initiative to free Jonathan Pollard.”

The open question that remains is: To what extent is this activity of the information disseminators coordinated with senior sources in the White House, the State Department and the Pentagon? At this stage, there is no clear answer to this question.

The leading story this week seems to have been lifted from Walt Disney’s world: an American secret agent was sitting in the bathroom of the hotel suite of American Vice President Al Gore when the latter visited Israel 16 years ago. Suddenly, the agent heard a scraping sound and discerned a suspicious figure crawling in the air-conditioning ducts, trying to find his way into the room through the layer separating the ducts from the suite itself. According to the story, the agent cleared his throat and the mysterious Israeli crawled right back where he came from. Thus America’s intelligence database was spared from snooping foreign eyes.