‘Netanyahu authorized Dubai assassination in early January’: Haaretz
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu authorized in early January the assassination of Hamas commander Mahmoud al-Mabhouh, according to the Sunday Times.
Based on information obtained from “sources with knowledge of Mossad,” the paper reported that Netanyahu gave Mossad chief Meir Dagan the green light for the Dubai operation during a meeting at the Midrasha – the intelligence agency’s headquarters, in the northern suburbs of Tel Aviv.
The sources also said that the Mossad hit squad trained for the Dubai mission by secretly rehearsing in a Tel Aviv hotel.
Haaretz has learned that German officials are examining the identity of Michael Bodenheimer, the name that appeared on a genuine German passport allegedly used in last month’s assassination of Hamas commander Mahmoud al-Mabhouh in Dubai. The authorities in the city of Cologne, where the passport was issued, began a probe, and federal authorities are now considering a move of their own.
According to German weekly Der Spiegel, Bodenheimer, an Israeli, applied for a German passport from the Cologne authorities. Bodenheimer presented documents that proved German lineage, including his grandparents’ marriage certificate. He also showed his Israeli passport that was issued to him a year earlier in Tel Aviv.
The German passport was issued on June 18, 2009. That document was used by one of the assassination suspects in Dubai on January 19, a day before the killing.
According to Der Spiegel, Bodenheimer does not live in Cologne, as he had claimed in his application, and no other person by that name lives there. The magazine claims a man by that name lived in Herzliya until June last year.
Haaretz has learned that a Michael Bodenheimer lives in Bnei Brak. His wife told Haaretz in a telephone interview that “he has no German passport and he never asked for such a passport. He never visited Germany, except perhaps in transit on the way to the United States.”
His wife added that the ultra-Orthodox family does not have any family in Herzliya and that even though Bodenheimer’s grandparents were born in Germany, they emigrated to the United States, from where he immigrated to Israel 30 years ago.
“We are quiet people and are not used to so much attention,” she told Haaretz yesterday. “The past week since the news of this story broke has been difficult for us. The fact that someone is using his name does not make him involved in this story.”
Bodenheimer studies at a kollel, a yeshiva for married men. He has said he was astounded to see his name on the list of suspects, supposedly belonging to a German citizen.
“At first we didn’t understand what everyone was talking about,” Bodenheimer’s daughter said. “The picture that was published doesn’t look like him at all. He is always busy with Torah study,” she said, adding that he holds no citizenship other than Israeli and American.
The German media have reported that the intelligence services of the country are certain that the Mossad was involved in the killing and that the foreign minister demanded that Israel explain why it used a German passport.
Israel’s ambassador to Berlin, Yoram Ben-Ze’ev, was summoned to the Foreign Ministry, where he was asked about information that can shed light on the killing of Mabhouh.
Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon said yesterday that he does not expect relations between Israel and European countries whose passports were used in the assassination to deteriorate as a result of the incident.
“I do not expect a crisis in relations because there is nothing linking Israel to the assassination. Britain, France and Germany are countries with shared interests with Israel in countering terrorism,” Ayalon said, naming three of the four countries whose passports were used. At least three of the suspects used Irish passports.
Meanwhile, Hamas blamed Israel again yesterday for the hit. At a press conference, Salah al-Bardawil, one of the group’s Gaza-based leaders, said he does not suspect that the Palestinian Authority was involved in the killing and that the entire affair was the responsibility of Mossad.
However, the Hamas official said that the two Palestinians arrested in Dubai in connection with the killing are former officers in the Palestinian security services and were employed in a firm owned by a senior member of rival Fatah.
The London-based newspaper Al-Hayat reported that this company is owned by Mohammed Dahlan, formerly a Fatah strongman in the Gaza Strip before its takeover by Hamas two and a half years ago.
Bardawil said that Mabhouh had put himself at risk by booking his trip through the Internet and risked a security breach by telling his family in Gaza by telephone which hotel he would be staying at.
Also yesterday, the daily newspaper Al-Bayan reported that Dubai police had new evidence implicating the Mossad in Mabhouh’s assassination, which included credit-card payments and suspects’ phone records.
“Dubai police have information confirming that the suspects purchased travel tickets from companies in other countries with credit cards carrying the same names we have publicized [from the passports],” Al-Bayan quoted Dubai police chief Dahi Khalfan Tamim as saying.
Meanwhile, a Qatar news agency reported that Egyptian officials promised Dubai counterparts that they would try to persuade Israel to officially apologize for the assassination of Mabhouh in their country.
Egyptian diplomats told the newspaper Al-Arab that Dubai has asked Egypt to formally reprimand Israel for the hit.
Dubai police last week released photographs of 11 of the suspects. Interpol said on Thursday it had issued “red notices” for the suspects’ arrest in any of its 188 member countries.
On Friday, Britain offered new passports to six British citizens living in Israel whose identities were used by the suspects. This would protect them from inadvertent arrest by Interpol.
Report: German passport tied to Dubai hit wasn`t forged: Haaretz
German intelligence services investigating the assassination of Hamas commander Mahmoud al-Mabhouh in Dubai have found that one of the suspected members of the assassination team carried a genuine German passport, according to reports Saturday in German media outlets, including Der Speigel.
According to the findings of German federal investigators, in June 2008 an Israeli man named Michael Bodenheimer – who shares the name of an Israeli whose identity was used in the Dubai operation – came to immigration officials in Cologne with the pre-World War II address of his grandparents. Bodenheimer acquired German citizenship on the basis of this data.
After his name was listed as one of the suspected members of the Dubai assassination squad, Bodenheimer, who lives in Bnei Brak and is of American origin, said that he did not know how his identity was stolen.
Dubai authorities have said 11 European-passport holders were involved in the assassination, and last week published their names and photographs. The list included six people with British passports, three with Irish passports, and one each from France and Germany.
Bodenheimer, who immigrated to Israel from the United States more than 20 years ago, studies at a kollel, a yeshiva for married men. He said he was astounded to see the UAE list contained his name, supposedly belonging to a German citizen.
“At first we didn’t understand what everyone was talking about,” Bodenheimer’s daughter said. “The picture that was published doesn’t look like him at all. He busies himself with Torah study,” she said, adding that he holds no citizenship other than Israeli and American.
A Hamas legislator on Saturday said Hamas strongman Mahmoud al-Mabhouh, who was assassinated in a Dubai hotel last month, put himself at risk by booking his trip through the Internet.
The Hamas legislator, Salah Bardawil, also told a news conference Saturday that Mabhouh took additional risk by informing his Gaza family by telephone at which hotel he would be staying.
Mabhouh’s family on Saturday denied that he acted recklessly, according to Army Radio.
Dubai police and Hamas have blamed Israel’s Mossad spy agency for the killing. However, Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon said Saturday that there was no evidence tying Israel to the killing of Mabhouh at a luxury Dubai hotel on January 20.
“I don’t forsee a crisis with European allies because there is nothing that ties Israel to the assassination,” Ayalon said at an event in Rehovot.
“Britain, France and Germany all share our interests in the battle against global terror,” Ayalon added. “Therefore, there will be no crisis. Instead our relations [with these countries] will continue to deepen,” Ayalon added.
Also on Saturday, Arabic-language daily newspaper Al Bayan reported that Dubai police had new evidence implicating Israel’s intelligence agency Mossad in the assassination of the Hamas commander, which included credit card payments and suspects’ phone records.
“Dubai police have information confirming that the suspects purchased travel tickets from companies in other countries with credit cards carrying the same names we have publicized [in the passports],” Al Bayan quoted Dubai police chief Dahi Khalfan Tamim as saying.
The newspaper did not provide further details. Mabhouh was found dead in his room in a luxury Dubai hotel on January 20, a day after arriving in the emirate.
Meanwhile, a Qatar news agency reported that Egyptian delegates promised Dubai officials that they would try to persuade Israel to officially apologize for the assassination of Mabhouh in their country.
Egyptian diplomats told Al-Arab newspaper that Dubai has asked Egypt to formally reprimand Israel for the hit.
Dubai police last week released photographs of 11 of the suspects. Interpol said on Thursday it had issued “red notices” for the suspects’ arrest in any of its 188 member countries.
On Friday, Britain offered new passports to six British citizens, living in Israel, whose identities were used by the suspects, to protect them from inadvertent arrest by Interpol.
Other suspects identified by Dubai used forged passports from Ireland, France and Germany.
Dubai says new evidence links Israel to hit: Ynet
London Times’ sources suggest former Fatah members may have led Mossad agents to Hamas’ Mahmoud al-Mabhouh, while Dubai’s al-Bayan daily says emirate’s police have credit cards info, phone records implicating spy agency in assassination
Two Palestinians suspected of collaborating with Israel may be linked to the assassination of Hamas operative Mahmoud al-Mabhouh in Dubai, the Times reported Saturday.
According to the report, the two – Anwar Sheibar and Ahmad Hassanain, both former members of the Fatah security forces – may have led the alleged Israeli assassins to their target.
A senior Palestinian intelligence official quoted by the Times, said that it was “highly likely that both men had known al-Mabhouh personally during their time in military intelligence in the Gaza Strip.”
According to the Times, the US’ Federal Bureau of Investigation may also weigh in to the investigation, following reports that American credit cards were used in the operation.
Meanwhile, Dubai authorities said they have uncovered new evidence incriminating Israeli agents in the hit, including credit card payments and phone calls made by suspects, an Arabic-language Al Bayan daily reported on Saturday.
Police have already said the 11 suspects used forged passports in the names of innocent individuals of several European nationalities.
“Dubai police have information confirming that the suspects purchased travel tickets from companies in other countries with credit cards carrying the same names we have publicized (in the passports),” Al Bayan daily on Saturday quoted Dubai police chief Dahi Khalfan Tamim as saying.
“The new evidence… includes telephone communications between the culprits who have been detected,” Khalfan told the state-governed newspaper.
Following the release of the suspects’ photographs by Dubai authorities, Interpol issued “red notices” for their arrest in any of its 188 member countries.
Syria warns war would have ‘catastrophic results’: Ynet
Damascus cautions Jerusalem that armed conflict between two nations would ‘be catastrophic for the region and beyond’
Syria’s prime minister warned Israel Saturday that any new Mideast war would be catastrophic for the region and beyond.
For weeks, Israel has traded some of the sharpest words in years with Syria and another key adversary on its northern border, the militant group Hezbollah in Lebanon.
In meeting with French prime minister, Syrian president says Europe must take up active role in regional talks, stresses peace process must be based on international resolutions
Premier Naji al-Otari said a new war will have dangerous repercussions not only in the Middle East but also on the international level.
He spoke to reporters Saturday after meeting with French Prime Minister Francois Fillon.
Syria’s foreign minister warned Israel earlier this month that any new war would reach Israeli cities.
Israel’s foreign minister told Syria its army would be defeated and its regime would collapse in any future conflict.
Meanwhile, French Prime Minister Francois Fillon, who is on an official visit on Syria, said that world powers would have to take new action against Iran if Tehran made no further gestures.
“We have read the new report (on Iran) by the IAEA (International Atomic Energy Agency) … and it is very worrying,” Fillon said.
“We proposed dialogue to Iran for several months and for the moment all the propositions have been turned down,” he said. “If the situation does not change, we have no other solution but to look into new measures in the coming weeks.”
IDF fires at Palestinian cell near Gaza border: Ynet
Gaza vicinity residents report waking up to sounds of gunfire. Army confirms strike on militants spotted near security fence; Palestinians say three injured
IDF helicopters fired at several armed Palestinians spotted near the security fence in central Gaza Saturday morning.
According to Palestinian reports, three people were injured in the strike. The Palestinian further said that the IDF used both artillery and helicopter fire to target the men near Kissufim.
The IDF Spokesman’s Unit confirmed the strike, adding it was looking into the Palestinian report of injuries. .
Earlier Saturday, residents of the security fence-adjacent communities in southern Israel reported hearing massive aircraft movement, as well as mortar and gunfire echoing at Gaza’s direction. According to the residents, a military helicopter was seen firing at a target in Gaza.
“It sounded a lot like things did during Operation Cast Lead,” Avi Yakar of Kibbutz Nirim told Ynet. “It looked like the IDF was in mid operation, and we were told that an apparently, a cell readying to fire rockets was detected and the IDF acted accordingly.”
While residents at Nirim are not ruling out Palestinian retaliation to the military’s action, Yakar said that “We feel mush safer than we did a year ago, since we now have secure rooms, so if we have to – we have someplace to go. We can already tell by the sound whether (a rocket) will fall on our side or the (Palestinian) side.”
Irit Heffetz, also from Nirim, added that the residents received a text message from the kibbutz’ security officer, telling them that the fire heard was IDF fire, “and that we had nothing to worry about.
“Personally, I think something must be done about this because this is a David and Goliath-like never-ending war. We’re strong,” she added, “but we’re tired of dealing with these wars.”
Mossad, an Israeli chutzpah: Al Jazzera TV
By Marwan Bishara, February 18th, 2010
As the storm over the assassination of Hamas leader Mahmoud al-Mabhouh picks up momentum, I am not buying into the whole business of lack of competence and ambiguity.
I don’t think the Israeli spy/killing agency – the Mossad is that sloppy, or Israel that lax.
True, Israel’s mounting arrogance did lead to a number of security screw-ups over the years, and this could be such a repeat. But this operation looks more like a deliberate act of arrogance than not.
If it was merely a question of mistakes or failures, the Mossad would have had to go out of its way to behave so unprofessionally or so incautiously.
Nor do I buy the theory that a less competent foreign agency or group has carried out the operation in a way that implicates Israel. That’s just adding insult to insolence.
Generally, assassinations carry double meanings. The first is answered by ‘why’ and the second ‘how’.
The “why” is rather obvious: killing a Hamas leader, regardless of whether he’s trying to buy arms from Iran or not, is a continuation of Israel’s 60 year war on the Palestinian resistance and its leaders.
The more complicated question is “how” he was assassinated. The choice of the method, the timing, the place could be coincidental or it is meant to send a more important signal than the killing itself.
Questionable questions
So why did they carry it as unmistaken murder, instead of say, causing heart failure; or suspected suicide; or leave him in a scandalous situation that make it hard to publicise?
Why would they send 11 or perhaps 17 different individuals carrying forged passports when in past assassination attempts they used far fewer?
Why did they have to look so amateurish with their faces on camera, and their moves so suspect?
Why utilise stolen identities instead of manufactured identities, with real foreign Israeli nationals, instead of fake IDs and fake passport numbers.
Why insist on repeating the conspicuous ‘politics of ambiguity’ when silence or no comment would have done the job better?
The murdered Hamas leader will be replaced in no time, and whatever he was doing in Dubai will be executed by another. But what is the message being sent by this flagrant assassination in Dubai of a Hamas leader against the backdrop of so many other killings over the last several months and years?
Claim to fame
Israel’s military and intelligence establishment is not the reactive type. It wouldn’t use British passports or Emirati territory to carry its assassinations worrying that they will get all cheeky about Israel’s ‘war on terror’.
It has long demonstrated that its political system is mostly proactive in the domain of ‘security’, and the latter trumps all other considerations, be it domestic politics or foreign policy.
In fact, its security takes on an inflated interpretation that justifies the most expansive, even flagrant definitions of deterrence, prevention, and pre-emption.
And it never made any apologies for it. It has always put its security priorities above all others, friends and foes alike.
For Israeli leaders, Israel will do what Israel must, and the world can talk as much as it wants. Its motto: if you can’t be conveniently famous, then be abrasively infamous.
The security establishment, especially the Mossad and the internal security intelligence, the Shabak would rather be feared than respected or admired.
Israel doesn’t think linearly in terms of actions and reactions, but rather strategically and systematically. Its objectives and actions, means and missions, work within a certain broad strategy.
Mission possible
Judging from the way Israel seems to implicate into this affair the Palestinian security, Britain, the United Arab Emirates and possibly others, it’s clear that its operation theatre against Hamas is once again not constrained solely to Gaza or the West Bank.
If these countries are true partners in the ‘war against the terrorists’, then Israel expects them to cooperate not conspire. You’re either with Israel or with the ‘terrorist’!
This operation is a continuation of the same logic behind other recent assassinations, including killing Hezbollah leader Imad Moghaniyyeh, which aims at all the links between Hamas, Hezbollah and their regional allies.
Obviously, Israel’s War on Terror is not constrained to the occupied territories. Rather, Israel will continue to make similar claims to those of the US war on violent extremists or terrorists to use the less recent American lingo.
Why, the Israelis argue, is it permissible for the US to carry extra-judicial killings of its enemies’ leaders in Pakistan, Iraq, or Yemen using drones and other means, but not for Israel?
Why has the so-called international community been conspicuously silent about American renditions and torture, but not with regards to Israel’s similar ways and means?
While some of this might explain Washington’s silence, it doesn’t answer the more provocative Israeli question: Why is it ok for the United States to turn the world into its theatre of operation, and not for Israel?
Until it’s answered, Israel will continue to act dangerously and with impunity.
EDITOR: New book about the Israeli Zionist left and its political blindness
The new book by Prof. Yehuda Shenhav, of Tel Aviv University, is of great interest for those of us who are considering solutions to the Palestine conflict, which go further than paying lip service, and sticking to the rotten corpse of the “Two States” solution. Below is an interview with the author.
One space for two peoples: Haaretz
By Yotam Feldman
Eliyahu Shaharabani, the late father of Prof. Yehouda Shenhav, was a persistent and eloquent critic of Israeli rule in the territories, and enjoyed a thriving career in the intelligence community and the military administration. Shenhav remembers accompanying his father, an Arabic-speaking immigrant from Iraq, on missions to confiscate notebooks in the West Bank after 1967, and hiding pencils and pens taken from Palestinians in his book bag. A cousin of Shenhav’s who lives in Ma’aleh Adumim earns a living doing remodeling jobs in the area, and other relatives also live beyond the Green Line and enjoy the benefits of what Shenhav (like Danny Gottwein of Haifa University) calls “the Israeli welfare state in the territories”: full employment, discounts on municipal tax, cheaper housing.
In Shenhav’s view, the vast majority of the Zionist left is estranged not only from the political demands and the needs of the Palestinians, but also from those he calls the “Third Israel”: ultra-Orthodox settlers, Mizrahi Shas supporters and immigrants from the former Soviet Union who support Avigdor Lieberman. This month, his book “Bemalkodet Hakav Hayarok” (“In the Trap of the Green Line”) is being published by Hakibbutz Hameuchad. In it, Shenhav jettisons the standard distinctions between left and right in Israel in favor of a dichotomy between those who see the foundation for the conflict in the 1967 conquest of the territories east of the Green Line, and those who trace it back to the 1948 conquest of the territories west of the line.
The first camp includes most of the Zionist left, the political center and many members of the radical Jewish left. The second camp, says Shenhav, is a coalition comprised of Palestinians who live inside Israel, Palestinian refugees, rightists who believe a compromise based on the Green Line borders is not possible, leftists who support a binational state, and settlers who wish to remain in their homes even after an agreement with the Palestinians.
“As a Jew who enjoys the privileges of a Jew, as a Mizrahi [a Jew with family origins in the Middle East] who possesses a Mizrahi consciousness, and as someone who was raised and largely educated in Israel,” he writes in the book’s preface, “for many years I have felt alienation toward [the left’s] positions regarding the conflict and regarding questions of class, ethnicity and identity. In the past two decades, I have found myself criticizing the leftist bloc just as harshly as the rightist bloc.”
Interviewed at his home in Tel Aviv, Shenhav presents a historical viewpoint that sees the 1948 war as the formative event, the ground zero from which subsequent historical developments directly stemmed. Thus, he depicts the Qibya (1953) and Samu’a (1966) raids as a continuation of the “ethnic cleansing” of Palestinians in the area, which began in 1948. He sees the Six-Day War as a well-planned extension of the achievements of ’48 and settlement in the territories as a direct continuation of Jewish settlement inside the Green Line.
The Green Line, drawn up at the armistice conference in Rhodes in 1949, is nothing more than an arbitrary administrative boundary, says Shenhav. As he sees it, the true foundations of the conflict – the 1948 war and the expulsion of Palestinians who lived west of the Green Line – are also the most heavily denied.
“Many otherwise intelligent people living here who are quite knowledgeable about Western civilization, have no idea what happened here in 1948. They talk like creatures who never lived here. This is the result of immediately shutting up the myth of 1948 in the closet. We refuse to take it out of there.”
Why single out 1948 as the starting point of the conflict? That’s rather arbitrary, too. One could cite other significant junctures, like the Balfour Declaration in 1917, or the Arab Revolt in 1936.
“This is a question that bothers me: Why not 1917, for instance? The process of the writing of the Balfour Declaration isn’t interesting either. But there is something about this point [1948], and I deliberately chose it because I don’t think that the State of Israel should be obliterated. I chose 1948 precisely because I want any historical analysis to include the achievements of the State of Israel.”
Why pin every historical development on one event?
“I chose a starting point out of a recognition of the possibility of presenting a counter-factual history, a history that didn’t happen – what would have happened if another development had occurred from the point you define as a crossroads. At the point I chose as a starting point, I stop all the ramifications and accept everything that happened up to then as natural. From this standpoint, the place you choose is the place upon which you form your political position. I posit Israel’s existence and its characteristics as a necessary part of the analysis, because I don’t want to destroy it.”
Option for integration
The analysis may appear incomplete and one-dimensional at times, but it also poses a challenging alternative to the conventional thinking of the “moderate” left and right in Israel.
“Let’s imagine that we’re sitting here 150 years from now,” says Shenhav, “and we’re reading a history book. It will say that the Jewish forces managed to conquer parts of Eretz Israel, or Mandatory Palestine, and to carry out ethnic cleansing – a standard term used in regard to Israel in the international scholarly literature – and that the process occurred in two stages: in ’48 and ’67. All the mechanisms along the way – such as wars, demographic monitoring, voluntary transfer, repression of political desires, education – are consequences of that two-stage process.”
For this reason, Shenhav is averse to the popular notion among the left that Israel was “corrupted” in 1967, and that the occupation east of the Green Line defiled Israelis’ moral values. It was not just that Israel had already forfeited its moral values in the massacres and expulsions that took place in 1948, argues Shenhav; the occupation of the territories and the creation of a contiguous entity between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River were a happy development for many who had been adversely affected by the arbitrary separation imposed by the Green Line.
“The 1967 war granted independence, standing and the possibility of advancement to an entire generation of Jews from Arab countries who celebrated the opening of the space,” writes Shenhav. “It made possible a new definition of Mizrahi identity in Israel, not as an antithesis to Ashkenazi identity, but as an option for integration within the space, even if in this case the circumstances were of oppressive integration.”
Shenhav demonstrates the differences in regard to 1967 by analyzing the works of three writers: David Grossman (Ashkenazi), Shimon Blass (Mizrahi) and Ghassan Kanafani (Palestinian): “David Grossman doesn’t understand how this happened to us. How we suddenly became nationalist, how we suddenly became the Palestinians’ stormtroopers. This is what he writes in ‘The Yellow Wind,’ and creates a new dogma – that within the ’67 borders Israel is just, because only after 1967 did we start to be ‘yellow’ to the Palestinians. But did Israeli rule over the Palestinians only begin then? Until December 1966, Israel instituted a military administration of the Palestinians inside the Green Line.
“Shimon Blass writes a month after the war that this is our opportunity to get out of the ghetto state, in other words, what Grossman depicts as the terrible defining moment, Shimon Blass, as a Mizrahi author, celebrates as the moment of opening. Not just because of the ideological vision of coexistence, but also because of economic and political matters: He can publish in Arabic, he has someone to talk to in Arabic, someone to argue with in Arabic.
“The third writer is Ghassan Kanafani. In ‘Returning to Haifa,’ he describes the exciting moment in which the Green Line border collapses and he can travel to see his house and his son who stayed behind. In other words, there are three different approaches, and we adopted Grossman’s approach. And this is a stance that denies the fact that Israel exists within an Arab world.”
Shenhav’s analysis, which sees an undivided territory on either side of the Green Line, disregards the vast difference between the status of Palestinian residents of Israel and Palestinian residents of the territories; the privileges afforded the former and the nature of the military rule imposed on the latter. The irregularity of this rule justifies the criticism of the occupation that he denounces. In his view, the difference between the attitude toward the Palestinians of ’67 and those of ’48 is not necessarily significant.
“Citizenship does not guarantee equality, and there are partial citizenships,” he maintains. “When you send teachers to an Arab school west of the Green Line only after they’ve been investigated by the Shin Bet, you’re creating a distorted education system. A Palestinian woman I know bought a house with her husband in Carmiel and she asked me to sign in her stead or together with her on the land registry. When I asked her why, she told me she wasn’t sure it would remain in her hands, that it was possible that one day there would be a population transfer. This threat of violence is an inseparable part of the conception of citizenship. Most of the Palestinians inside the Green Line are afraid of such a possibility. From this standpoint, Lieberman and the idea of ‘No loyalty, no citizenship’ is not dissonant. It’s the authentic representation of an idea of the Jewish and democratic state, of the way in which it is possible to define citizenship by new means.”
Coming out of the closet
Shenhav was born in Be’er Sheva in 1952 as Yehouda Shaharabani, to parents who had come from Baghdad. His father, who came from a family of merchants, had a very successful career in the intelligence community thanks to his command of Arabic. The neighborhood where he grew up was designated for people in the security establishment, and two families of Iraqi immigrants lived there and served as Arabic teachers.
Shenhav’s family later moved to the Neve Mishkan neighborhood, near Tzahala in Tel Aviv, and then to Petah Tikva, where he attended school until he was expelled in 10th grade for setting fire to a hostel.
“I was quite the delinquent,” he says now. “I remember that we put mattresses inside the hostel and burned it.” Afterward he went to work in construction, and didn’t complete high school until just before he enlisted. In the army, he served as an NCO in the intelligence corps and then as an intelligence officer in the Northern Command. At 22, he married a woman from an Ashkenazi background. Before the wedding, her mother began pressing him to change his surname, and he subsequently persuaded his parents and brother and sister to do the same.
For years, very few people knew Shenhav’s original name. In 1995, when he was interviewed on Kobi Meidan’s program on Channel 2, he was asked for his original surname and felt he had no choice but to respond.
“Do you have any idea how hard it was to come out of the closet?” he asks now. “I told him ‘Shaharabani’ and I started to perspire as if I’d just been forced to say a dirty word on television. It was really like coming out of the closet. It gave me new energy and a feeling of liberation and relief. The ability to transform your name from something limiting to something expansive.”
Today Shenhav is translating from Arabic the poems of Lebanese writer Michael Naimeh, and when the book is published he will sign for the first time as Yehouda Shaharabani (Shenhav). “When I called my mother and told her I had something to tell her that I thought would make her happy, that I was going back to the name Shaharabani, her response was: ‘What for?’ I told her I thought the change had been a mistake, but she replied firmly: ‘It was no mistake. You wouldn’t have achieved the status you have without it,’ with an emphasis on the word ‘status.'”
After his army service, Shenhav earned a bachelor’s degree in sociology at Tel Aviv University and also studied industry and management at the Technion, with the aim of working as a management consultant. He went on to work on a master’s degree and then a doctorate at Stanford University. When he returned to Israel he started teaching sociology at Tel Aviv University and headed the department there from 1995-98. In the 1990s, he also headed the group that founded the journal Teoria Ubikoret (“Theory and Criticism”), which he currently edits (the forthcoming issue will be the final one edited by Shenhav).
In 1996, Shenhav published an article in Haaretz magazine (in Hebrew) entitled “Kesher Hashtika” (“Conspiracy of Silence”), in which he accused the “new historians” of ignoring discrimination against Mizrahi Jews. The article caused a big stir and the newspaper printed more than 20 pages of responses. The problem Shenhav sought to define was “a rift between two different arenas: the new historians of ’48 and the new historians of the Mizrahim. Whoever deals with the conflict doesn’t deal with the Mizrahim and vice versa. There is no intellectual connection between the two.”
Why should there be?
“Because of the connection between Palestinians and Mizrahim. You can’t understand the conflict without talking about this connection between two types of Arab refugees. How is it possible to talk about questions of refugeehood without talking about the Jewish Arab refugees? The fact that Benny Morris talks about refugees without talking about Mizrahi refugees is an expression of Benny Morris’ Ashkenazi-ness, of the structure of the discourse about the conflict. Similarly, the anthropologists and sociologists who’ve been researching the Mizrahim for 60 years, who talk about immigrant moshavim and about Mizrahi culture, cut the issue of the Palestinians out of their analysis.”
The new nostalgia
The position Shenhav criticizes, the position typified by Grossman and many others on the left, most of them Ashkenazi, is characterized by a yearning for the State of Israel as it was before the occupation of the territories in 1967. This longing, or “the new nostalgia,” as Shenhav calls it, “is a cultural state of Jewish elites from the liberal middle class and a silent individual majority of professionals.”
As he enumerates in his book, the list is composed of “technocrats, civil servants, the State Prosecutor’s Office, academics in the social sciences and humanities, Foreign Ministry personnel, retired generals and journalists, a majority of Kadima, Labor and Meretz voters.”
Shenhav names numerous representatives of this new nostalgia, including Yossi Beilin, Dan Meridor, Haim Ramon, Tzipi Livni, Talia Sasson, Aharon Barak, Ruth Gavison, Ami Ayalon, Ari Shavit, Amos Schocken, Dan Margalit, Amnon Dankner and many others. He writes that what those gripped by the “new nostalgia” really long for is not just an Israel devoid of the West Bank, but also a more Ashkenazi and less religious Israel. He presents a long list of quotations in which those who miss the pre-’67 period express their aversion to the settlers’ irrationality. A great deal of their criticism of the settlements refers to the settlers as an undifferentiated, homogenous bloc and attributes to them irrational behavior that is counter to the values of the state’s Ashkenazi founders.
“Hence, the liberal left’s 1967 paradigm does not derive from a fear of the Palestinian demographic increase,” Shenhav concludes, “but from a fear of Israel becoming a society with a Mizrahi majority … This is the language of someone who has come to the Middle East for a brief time, not in order to become integrated, but to exist there as a guest. Not only is this position immoral toward the Palestinians, it is also disastrous for the Jews themselves. It imposes upon them life within a ghetto with a conception of democracy that is based on race laws and a constant state of emergency.”
This is why Shenhav feels alienated from the most prominent group in Israeli academia and from Tel Aviv intellectual life, and even farther removed from them than he feels from the extreme right and West Bank settlers. This feeling was behind his involvement in the Sephardi Democratic Rainbow, a political coalition he helped found in 1996, which demanded equal rights for Mizrahi Jews. The group fought against the inequality that was the lot of Mizrahim in the Israeli economy and in the distribution of national assets, primarily land.
Shenhav says today that the establishment of the Sephardi Democratic Rainbow was facilitated by the Oslo Accords, which gave rise to the feeling that it was now possible to engage in political struggles that were unrelated to the Palestinians. Some of his partners in the movement were rightists whose views on the conflict with the Palestinians were quite far from his own.
“My recollection of myself is as a banal leftist,” says Shenhav. “I had the outlook of an ordinary Ashkenazi leftist, and my experience in the Sephardi Democratic Rainbow gradually taught me where the obstacles for the Asheknazi left were. I remember speaking at a political event in October 2000 in which Shulamit Aloni and Uri Avnery and others took part, and not one of my companions from the Rainbow was there. I went home and couldn’t sleep that night. I remember that when I got up in the morning, I thought: ‘What am I doing? How can there be such an abyss?’ When I was invited to speak at a Yesh Gvul conference, out of 500 conscientious objectors, there were just four Mizrahim there. This is something that cannot be ignored. Who has the privilege of being a conscientious objector?”
Those crazy settlers
The insight Shenhav wishes to convey through his book is that the social left in Israel – represented by Meretz, for example – is also a political right. “When [the playwright] Shmuel Hasfari tells Ari Shavit [in an interview in this magazine], ‘Green Line nationalists sounds fine to me. I am not apologetic about my country, about its borders or the Green Line, which has been recognized by the entire world,’ he’s reflecting the way in which the Zionist left is in many senses more nationalist than other parts of the public, and this nationalism is especially striking in terms of the skeleton it keeps in the closet, the question of ’48.”
And the right isn’t nationalist? Rightists don’t want a strong Jewish state?
“Not necessarily like the left. Eliaz Cohen from Kfar Etzion says that if we don’t draw the border on the Green Line, then the right of return for the Palestinians and Jews will be reciprocal: ‘Just as I have a right of return to Kfar Etzion, he says, ‘there’s no reason that Palestinians from Nablus shouldn’t have a right of return to Jaffa.’ It’s a utopia, but this is a group that is a lot more leftist than Amnon Rubinstein and Ari Shavit and Yossi Beilin and David Grossman. This is where the categories have to be overturned and recreated in a new way.
“For the Zionist left, all the settlers look alike and think alike. But there are at least 250,000 people in the settlements, which are the lower classes that should have been and could be a central part of the Israeli left. These people who live in the territories, they’re the main victims of a Mapai regime and of the neoliberal economy; they were pushed there as a direct result of the structure of inequality within Israel. Making the Green Line permanent and instituting a solution in accordance with that is a threat to them, a threat that evacuation will deprive them of the welfare state they received.”
Therefore, asserts Shenhav, a future accord needn’t hinge upon the evacuation of all the settlements, an idea that he describes in his book as “a fantasy of the left that denies the political reality.” For now, it’s hard to envision any Palestinian partner to a solution that does not include an evacuation of the settlements, as the struggle against them currently plays a key part in the Palestinian resistance, but Shenhav is optimistic about this too. Historically speaking, he does not see any difference between settlement on either side of the Green Line; the only difference is that the Palestinians have recognized the settlement to the west of it.
“The left cannot see the injustice that is being done to the settlers,” he says. “I’m not certain that it’s moral to evacuate generations of people who live there. I don’t think one moral injustice has to be remedied with another.”
Do you believe there are Palestinian partners for this demand? What Palestinian would agree to an accord that didn’t include an evacuation of the settlements? A significant part of the Palestinian resistance has to do with lands stolen by the settlements.
“If there is a mutual demand that will make possible some kind of exchange of territory and lands, I don’t see any special reason why the settlements can’t be left there. Settlers are having these kinds of discussions all the time. I read in Nekuda and Makor Rishon questions about their presence there; is it moral and what does the future hold in that regard. It’s just that the wider public is not aware of it.”
At the end of the book, Shenhav proposes three possible solutions to the conflict, based on the premise that it began with the war of 1948 and not 1967. He presents the model of “a state of all its citizens” comprising all of the territory and jointly run by Jews and Arabs. In the same breath, he says that this is the less preferred model, since it does not take into consideration the different interests of the two sides and creates a demographic race between them to achieve a majority.
Shenhav’s preferred model is what he calls a demokratiya hesderit: a division of the region into smaller territories in which various religious and civic communities would live, in a loose federation of independent cantons. Even if these solutions seem quite far-fetched today, Shenhav believes that the changes of recent years have made the two-state solution even more unrealistic and argues that future solutions are continually being shaped. “It’s not like everything is on hold, still waiting for Ben-Ami to come back from Camp David with an agreement. In the meantime, the occupation and control of the territories has deepened. The control of Gaza from the outside and via humanitarian organizations is the best possible control there could be. These changes fortify the one space. We’re not living in a Jewish and democratic state, we’re living in a single space in which Israel exerts de facto sovereignty from the sea to the Jordan River, including Areas C, B and A, in Gaza and Ramallah. A situation is being created that cannot be divorced from solutions.”
Maybe there won’t be a solution? Why shouldn’t the present situation just continue?
“People may continue to live for some years in a situation of laissez-faire, laissez-passer from the sea to the Jordan River, perhaps even for 50 more years. But eventually the revolution will come. I have no doubt that the process that is happening today will continue to deepen and will preclude a return to two states.”
Meir Dagan: the mastermind behind Mossad’s secret war: Sunday Times: Sunday Times
IN early January two black Audi A6 limousines drove up to the main gate of a building on a small hill in the northern suburbs of Tel Aviv: the headquarters of Mossad, the Israeli secret intelligence agency, known as the “midrasha”.
Binyamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, stepped out of his car and was greeted by Meir Dagan, the 64-year-old head of the agency. Dagan, who has walked with a stick since he was injured in action as a young man, led Netanyahu and a general to a briefing room.
According to sources with knowledge of Mossad, inside the briefing room were some members of a hit squad. As the man who gives final authorisation for such operations, Netanyahu was briefed on plans to kill Mahmoud al-Mabhouh, a member of Hamas, the militant Islamic group that controls Gaza.
Mossad had received intelligence that Mabhouh was planning a trip to Dubai and they were preparing an operation to assassinate him there, off-guard in a luxury hotel. The team had already rehearsed, using a hotel in Tel Aviv as a training ground without alerting its owners.
The mission was not regarded as unduly complicated or risky, and Netanyahu gave his authorisation, in effect signing Mabhouh’s death warrant.
Typically on such occasions, the prime minister intones: “The people of Israel trust you. Good luck.”
Days later on January 19, Emirates flight EK912 took off from the Syrian capital Damascus at 10.05am. On board, as Mossad had anticipated, was Mabhouh, who was also known by the nom de guerre of Abu al-Abd. The Israelis suspected he planned to travel from Dubai to the Iranian port of Bandar Abbas to arrange for an arms shipment to Gaza.
As the Airbus A330 rose into the wintry sky and headed south, Mabhouh, an athletic 49-year-old, could see the minarets of the ancient city — his home since he had been deported from Gaza by Israel more than 20 years before.
He had made the trip to Dubai several times before on Hamas business and had little reason to think that in less than 12 hours he would be dead.
From a highway below a Mossad agent watched the departure of EK912. Knowing from an informant at the airport that Mabhouh, who was travelling under an assumed name, had boarded the flight, the agent sent a message — believed to be to a pre-paid Austrian mobile phone — to the team in Dubai. Their target was on his way.
A few hours later, as the world now knows, Mabhouh was murdered in his hotel room — and the Israeli spy agency nearly got clean away. For days the death appeared to be from natural causes.
When suspicions did arise, it was only because of Dubai’s extensive system of CCTV cameras that the work of the assassination team was revealed.
The cameras recorded the hit-team’s movements, from the moment its members landed in Dubai to the moment they left. Last week their photographs were released by the Dubai police and splashed across the world’s newspapers and television screens.
Mossad is now deeply embarrassed. Its use of the identities of British, French, German and Irish nationals as cover for agents to carry out the hit has angered western governments. In the ensuing diplomatic fall-out, sources close to Mossad said yesterday that it had suspended similar operations in the Middle East, mainly because of fear that heightened security would put its agents at greater risk. Dagan’s job is also on the line.
Howver. few believe that Mossad will give up the secret war it has long waged against Israel’s enemies.
Mossad has had a reputation for ruthlessness since it hunted down the Black September terrorists who massacred 11 Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics in 1972. Time and again its vengeful arm has reached out across the Arab world and into Europe, too, smiting enemies.
Under Dagan’s leadership, such operations have increased. Dagan differs markedly from his predecessor, the London-born Ephraim Halevy, a nephew of the late writer and philosopher Isaiah Berlin.
Halevy was dubbed the “cocktail man” for his long chats with foreign diplomats. He shrank from brutal covert operations. Eventually the then prime minister, Ariel Sharon, removed him and appointed Dagan in his place.
The new chief soon began to restore Mossad’s reputation for lethal operations. The tone of his directorship is set by a photograph on the wall of his modest office in the Tel Aviv headquarters. It shows an old Jew standing on the edge of a trench. An SS officer is aiming his rifle at the old man’s head.
“This old Jew was my grandfather,” Dagan tells visitors. The picture reflects in a nutshell his philosophy of Jewish self-defence for survival. “We should be strong, use our brain, and defend ourselves so that the Holocaust will never be repeated,” he once said.
One hit he masterminded was in Damascus two years ago against Imad Mughniyeh, a founder of Hezbollah and one of the world’s most wanted terrorists. Mughniyeh was decapitated when the headrest of his car seat exploded — close to the headquarters of Syrian intelligence.
Six months later, Mossad, in co-operation with special forces, struck again at the heart of the Syrian establishment. General Mohammed Suleiman, Syria’s liaison to North Korea’s nuclear programme, was relaxing in the back garden of his villa on the Mediterranean shore.
His bodyguards were monitoring the front of the villa. Out to sea a yacht sailed slowly by. No noise was heard, but suddenly the general fell, a bullet through his head.
One of Dagan’s most recent concerns has been the rise of the Iranian threat to Israel, both directly and through its links with Hamas. It is in that context that the operation to eliminate Mabhouh should be understood.
Preparations appear to have been in train for months. When Mabhouh landed in Dubai, Mossad agents were waiting for him. They had flown in from Paris, Frankfurt, Rome and Zurich in advance using their forged passports, some based on the details of British nationals living in Israel who were unaware their identities had been stolen. The agents had also obtained credit cards in the name of the identities they had stolen.
Yesterday Dhahi Khalfan, the Dubai police chief, said investigators had found that some of the passports had been used in Dubai before. About three months ago it appears Mossad agents using the stolen identities followed Mabhouh when he travelled to Dubai and then on to China. About two months ago they followed him on another visit to Dubai.
In January, after he had landed and collected his luggage Mabhouh headed for the exit and a taxi for the short ride to the nearby Al-Bustan Rutana hotel. A European-looking woman in her early thirties waiting outside saw him leave and sent a message to the head of the team.
Dubai is a hub of international commerce and intrigue. Scores of Iranian agents are active there and its hotels are often used as meeting places for spies and covert deals. The main concern of the Mossad squad was to corner Mabhouh, alone if possible.
They divided into several teams, some for surveillance of the target and others to keep a look-out, and one for the hit. Some changed their identities as they moved about the city, putting on wigs and switching clothes.
When Mabhouh checked in to the hotel, at least one Mossad agent stood close to him at the front desk trying to overhear his room number. Then two others, dressed in tennis clothes, followed him into the lift to confirm which room he was going to.
According to an Israeli report yesterday he specifically asked for a room with no balcony, presumably for security reasons. The Mossad team booked the room opposite.
Mabhouh left the hotel in early evening, tailed by two of the Mossad team. Hamas also knows where he went and whom he met, but is not saying.
The Dubai police have not released CCTV footage showing exactly what happened next in the hotel, but the available evidence and sources point to two possibilities.
One is that while Mabhouh was out, the hit team entered his room and lay in wait. To do this they would have needed a pass key or would have had to tamper with the lock. It is known that while Mabhouh was out someone had tried to reprogramme the electronic lock on the door to his room.
However, they may have failed to gain entry. If so, the second possibility is that one of the team lured Mabhouh into opening the door after he had returned to his room. Perhaps a woman agent, pictured in CCTV footage in the hotel wearing a black wig, knocked on the door posing as a member of the hotel staff, allowing the hit team to force their way in.
Exactly how Mabhouh was killed remains unclear. The Dubai police said he was suffocated; other sources say he was injected with a drug. But at first sight there was no evidence of foul play.
When the killers left they relocked the door and left a “Please do not disturb” sign on it. Within hours the Mossad agents were flying out of the emirate to different destinations, including Paris, Hong Kong and South Africa.
Nobody suspected anything was wrong until the following day when Mabhouh’s wife called Hamas officials to ask about her husband. He wasn’t answering his mobile phone, she told them. The hotel management was alerted and the room entered.
THERE were no signs of struggle or any violence to Mabhouh, who appeared to be asleep. When he couldn’t be woken, a doctor was summoned from a nearby hospital.
In the room some medicine for high-blood pressure was found — planted by Mossad, say Israeli sources — and the doctor decided that the Palestinian had died of natural causes, possibly from a heart attack. In Gaza and Damascus 40 days of mourning began.
Mossad appeared to have got away with it, though some in Hamas had their suspicions that Mabhouh had been poisoned. They well-remembered a previous Mossad plot in 1997 in which an Israeli agent blew poison into the ear of one of its leaders on a visit to Jordan — an operation authorised by Netanyahu during a previous term as prime minister. The Hamas leader, Khaled Mashal, survived only because two agents were caught — and Jordan demanded that an antidote be handed over.
Some Palestinians also suspect that Yasser Arafat, the long-standing leader who died in 2004, was poisoned, though there has never been any evidence to prove it.
When results of Mabhouh’s post-mortem came through, they were still inconclusive. Yesterday one source claimed that burns from a stun gun were found on his body and that there were traces of a nosebleed, possibly from being smothered. However, no firm evidence of exactly how Mabhouh died, either from natural causes or foul play, emerged.
The uncertainty alone was enough for Hamas to declare that Israel had killed their man. The police investigated, CCTV images were gathered and and the affair began to unravel.
One well-informed Israeli source said: “The operative teams were very much aware of the CCTV in Dubai, but they have been astonished at the ability of the Dubai police to reconstruct and assemble all the images into one account.”
For Israel, the fallout has been considerable and the reverberations continue. The real owners of the stolen or forged passports, several of them Britons living in Israel, have complained that they were innocent victims of a murder plot.
The Mossad agents who used their names have been put on Interpol’s wanted list, and the real individuals are worried that they will now always be associated with the murder of a Hamas official.
Dubai can no longer avoid being embroiled in the Arab- Israeli conflict. It is calling for an international arrest warrant to be issued against Dagan and says it will release more information confirming that this was a Mossad killing.
In Britain there were initial suspicions that the government had been tipped off about the operation, or had even quietly condoned it. William Hague, the shadow foreign secretary, demanded to know when the Foreign Office had first found out that British passport holders were involved in the affair.
A spokesman for the Foreign Office insisted there was no mystery or cover-up. “Suggestions that the government had prior warning or was in some way complicit in this affair are baseless,” he said.
“The Dubai authorities told us of the role of British passports on February 15 and we were able to tell them the passports in question were fraudulent the very next day.” This account was backed up by a statement from Dubai’s police chief.
However, the broader question of Britain’s response to Israel’s activities remains unresolved.
Gordon Brown has announced an investigation by the Serious Organised Crime Agency into the identity theft, and David Miliband, the foreign secretary, is expected to address the House of Commons on the issue tomorrow.
Israel is a key ally for Britain in the Middle East and an even closer ally of the Americans. Brown and Miliband will hope that the affair will fade away, though the pro-Arab lobby will try to ensure the matter is not easily buried.
Hugo Swire, MP and chairman of the Conservative Middle East Council, said: “These allegations against the Israeli government need to be answered. This is not something that can just be swept under the carpet. You cannot conduct foreign policy at this extremely sensitive time by this sort of illegal behaviour.”
In Israel the reaction is mixed. Few shed tears over the death of one of Hamas’s top men, but there is dismay that Mossad may have damaged the country’s reputation abroad. Though in time the furore will no doubt blow over, critics of Dagan have renewed their demands for him to go.
The mastermind of Mossad may yet find himself a casualty of his own secret war.
EDITOR: Palestinian state to be declared in Europe…
This bizarre report sounds like another mastermind plan of Israeli politics. A Palestinian state is declared before negotiations start, and then there is nothing to negotiate about – it consists of those bits of the Bantustan the PA now controls – a counntry connected only by the internet… That EU governments would collude should suprise no one.
France, Spain push bid to recognize Palestinian state within 2 years: Haaretz
French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner and his Spanish counterpart Miguel Moratinos are promoting an initiative by which the European Union would recognize a Palestinian state in 18 months, even before negotiations for a permanent settlement between Israel and the Palestinian Authority are concluded.
According to senior European diplomats and senior Israeli officials, Israel has relayed its opposition to the initiative – warning that it would undermine any chance of a successful peace process.
A senior European diplomat noted that Israel was informed about the initiative several weeks ago, a fact confirmed by a senior Israeli official. The Israeli official said the initiative is being spearheaded by Kouchner who recruited the support of the Spanish foreign minister, whose country also currently holds the rotating European Union presidency.
Israeli sources say the two foreign ministers are preparing an article they intend to publish together in some of the main European dailies. The main message of the article is that the European Union should recognize a Palestinian state before the completion of negotiations, under the assumption that such a declaration will be made by Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas.
The initiative is based on a plan by Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad to establish a Palestinian state in two years, which is the time he estimates is needed for the development of state institutions, economic reforms and a completion of the necessary training of Palestinian security forces that would bring law and order to the West Bank.
The Fayyad plan was developed more than six months ago and the Franco-Spanish initiative is meant to bolster it, promising recognition by the European block.
Israel has responded to Kouchner and Moratinos by expressing clear opposition to the initiative, noting it was contrary to the principles of the peace process. “An imposed solution will not achieve the goals,” Israel stressed in its message.
“If the European Union will determine the results of the negotiations in advance and promises the Palestinians recognition of a state, they will have no motivation to resume negotiations,” the Israeli message states.
“The issue before us at the moment is the building of a reality,” Kouchner told the Journal du Dimanche in an interview published yesterday. “France is training Palestinian police, businesses are being created in the West Bank… It follows that one can envision the proclamation soon of a Palestinian state, and its immediate recognition by the international community, even before negotiating its borders.”
“If by mid-2011, the political process has not ended the [Israeli] occupation, I would bet that the developed state of Palestinian infrastructure and institutions will be such that the pressure will force Israel to give up its occupation,” he added.
Barak to visit U.S. in bid to nix Goldstone Gaza report: Haaretz
Defense Minister Ehud Barak will travel Tuesday to the United States for meetings with high-ranking U.S. and UN officials.
Barak is due to meet with UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates and other Pentagon officials.
On Barak’s agenda are the Iranian nuclear threat and prospects of renewing negotiations with the PA.
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At UN headquarters he is expected to discuss the Goldstone report on the Gaza war. Last month Israel issued a document on investigations it has made since the report and said it hoped UN pressure for further steps could be avoided.
Brazen hardliners and ardent critics: the Israel I have seen: The Observer
As he prepares to leave Jerusalem after four years as a correspondent, Rory McCarthy reflects on a new, harsher climate of thought that is apparent in the wake of the Dubai assassination. But this attitude is not universal: dissent thrives in the most unlikely places
A striking advertisement appeared in several Israeli newspapers recently. It depicted Professor Naomi Chazan, former deputy speaker of the Knesset and respected political scientist, wearing a horn strapped to her forehead. It was the latest offensive in a campaign against the New Israel Fund, of which she is president. Its apparent crime: financing Israeli human rights groups who challenge violations by their country’s government and security forces and whose tenacious questioning, you might think, would be hailed a pillar of the vibrant democracy Israel insists it is. Instead, the fund is derided as “anti-Israel”.
Living here for the past four years, it is hard for me to escape the sense that there is a new climate in Israel, one in which dissent is marginalised and any criticism from abroad robustly shouted down. In part, it is the result of the election of a staunchly right-wing coalition government. It also plays on a sense long shared by many Israelis that they are embattled, misunderstood and find themselves in an increasingly unsympathetic world.
Look at the response in the past week to the extraordinary unravelling of the assassination in Dubai of a Hamas militant. Most voices in Israel have been defiant, with a proud wink and a nod to the much-vaunted secret service, the Mossad, and strikingly little sympathy for those seven, fearful Israeli citizens who had their identities stolen for use by a brazen hit squad.
Israeli officials seem unruffled by the anger in the British, Irish, French and German governments, whose passports have been forged to enable a high-profile extra-judicial killing in which the Mossad is the prime suspect.
Take the new hardline approach of the Israeli foreign ministry. Last month Danny Ayalon, the deputy foreign minister, called in the Turkish ambassador for a diplomatic dressing-down over a Turkish television show. It turned into a public humiliation when he sat the ambassador before him on a low sofa and egged on the camera crews to highlight his guest’s discomfort. That required two apologies to avert a full-blown diplomatic crisis. Then in a speech last week Ayalon compared the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, one of the most moderate of all Palestinian leaders, to the Taliban.
The next day Ayalon refused to meet a delegation of US congressmen simply because they had travelled with J Street, a new American lobby group which is “pro-Israel, pro-peace”. It was, said Congressman William Delahunt, “an inappropriate way to treat elected representatives of Israel’s closest ally”.
When the Obama administration demanded Israel halt all settlement construction as a prelude to peace talks with the Palestinians last year, the Israeli government simply refused. In the end, it offered only a partial, limited curb, but construction continues. As a result, Abbas is now profoundly, perhaps fatally, weakened. The prospect of a just, conflict-ending, two-state peace agreement has almost gone.
In my time here, Israel has fought two major wars – in Lebanon and Gaza – which killed more than 2,500 Lebanese and Palestinians and about 170 Israelis. Most Israelis thought the wars were justified acts of self-defence. However, particularly after Gaza, the international community began to disagree. And of this, Israelis are acutely aware.
Last month, the prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, listed the “Goldstone effect” as one of Israel’s top three security challenges. It was a reference to the highly critical UN report authored by the South African judge Richard Goldstone which called on Israel and Hamas to investigate what he found to be credible evidence of war crimes during the Gaza war.
Israel’s approach has been to refuse all participation in the Goldstone inquiry – not even allowing the judge himself into Israel – and to see all the criticism and legal challenges that have followed as a new existential threat, something Netanyahu last week described as “lawfare”. In other words, legal challenges are now to be regarded as just as unconscionable as militant violence. It is what one Israeli thinktank, the Reut Institute, called the “de-legitimisation network”, which “operates in the international arena in order to negate Israel’s right to exist and includes individuals and organisations in the west, which are catalysed by the radical left”.
But now I have interviewed hundreds of Israelis, from professors to anarchists, generals to refuseniks, settlers to peace activists, Jews and Arabs, and the Israel I have seen is not formed of the one overarching narrative its government would impose. Scratch beneath the surface and there are people asking awkward questions. Sometimes it is just a hint of disagreement. When I asked one professor last week about the Dubai assassination, he said Israel would be better off making peace with Syria and the Palestinians than killing terrorists. This month, Ehud Barak, Israel’s defence minister and no dove, warned that failing to reach a peace deal risked creating an “apartheid” regime that ruled over millions of stateless, voteless Palestinians.
True, it is a far cry from the past when the Israeli left was a significant force. Who now remembers the extraordinary moment in September 1982 when 300,000 Israelis stood in a Tel Aviv square to protest at their government’s complicity in the massacre at the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps? Or the Four Mothers’ movement which in the late 1990s did so much to precipitate Israel’s withdrawal from that bitter 18-year occupation in Lebanon?
But even as recently as 2006, after another Lebanon war, I was among a Tel Aviv crowd that heard the novelist David Grossman deliver an impassioned denouncement of Israel’s “hollow” leadership and call for Israel to talk to the Palestinians and “acknowledge their ongoing suffering”. And there is Meron Benvenisti, the former deputy mayor of Jerusalem, who argues that Israel and the occupied territories are already a “de facto bi-national regime”.
Sometimes the questioning comes from the most unexpected places. Breaking the Silence, one of the groups supported by the New Israel Fund, is an organisation of former Israeli combat soldiers who want a public debate about the “moral price” paid by Israeli society for the occupation. They gather testimony from Israeli soldiers about their experiences, and it is hard to think of a group of people less anti-Israel than Israeli soldiers. But read their most recent report, containing the stories of dozens of female soldiers.
A lieutenant, posted in the Gaza Strip with the education corps, says: “The truth is that I only confronted it in retrospect, after leaving: suddenly I realised to what extent I had not been a human being out there … It’s like a movie with a lot of death around you, an unreasonable reality, with soldiers doing inhuman things to others and to themselves.”
A sergeant from the Nahal unit: “I knew I was not real, I knew that something here was not right. If I pass a seated person and spit at him, and call him a terrorist because I’ve decided he’s a terrorist, then something here is just not right. And that’s what I tell everyone: come take a look at the blood of someone who’s dead, it’s not right.”
Then there is the minority prepared to come out and protest. Friday marked the fifth anniversary of the demonstrations in the village of Bil’in against the West Bank barrier. More than two years ago, even Israel’s supreme court ordered the state to re-route the fence and return much of the land lost by the village. It has still not happened. In recent weeks another regular protest has begun in Sheikh Jarrah, the scene of Palestinian evictions and Israeli settler expansion in east Jerusalem. At first it was met with a heavy-handed police crackdown, in which several peaceful protesters were arrested until the courts came to their defence.
The crowd on Friday was small, a few hundred perhaps, but a mixture of old leftists, many academics among them, and a younger generation. Standing in the fading winter sun was Avraham Burg, former head of the Jewish Agency, who described angrily the segregation and discrimination he saw in today’s Jerusalem. He said he was concerned about the new stifling of free speech, for which the best challenge, he thought, was continued popular dissent. “Technical democracy is functioning,” he said, “but substantial liberties are not here.”
One of those arrested in the early protests was Hagai El-Ad, head of the Association for Civil Rights in Israel, another group supported by the New Israel Fund. “It is very easy to portray those who don’t support the party line as enemies of the state, but I think that horribly weakens the state,” he told me. “If this society is finally to start changing course for the better, maybe it will be inspired by what is happening here.”
Mossad: Inside the spying game: The Independent
Accusations of assassination are hardly unusual Israel’s security service over its 60 years of covert operations
By Donald Macintyre, Sunday, 21 February 2010
If the Dubai police are right – not only in asserting that last month’s lethal hit on the Hamas commander Mahmoud al-Mabhouh was the work of Mossad, but also that it was run from Austria – a template is on hand to help us imagine the atmosphere among those controlling the assassination before it happened.
“Their operations room… was a hastily rented ground-floor office in the Walker and French Investment Company GmbH, one of dozens that Gavron’s secretariat kept permanently registered. Their communications equipment had more or less the appearance of commercial software; in addition, they had three ordinary telephones, courtesy of Alexis, and one of them, the least official, was the… hotline to Kurtz. As for Gadi Becker, he was finally back at war…. The introspection that had haunted him in Jerusalem had lifted; the gnawing idleness of waiting was past…. Becker stood sentry at the Venetian blinds of the wide window, gazing patiently upward into the snow-clad hills….”
True, this description of the preparations for another extrajudicial execution of a Palestinian militant on foreign soil was written more than quarter of a century ago when there were no throwaway SIM cards to help, and no CCTV or modern passport computer databases to hinder, operations like this. True, the target was closer at hand, in Europe itself. And true, too, it is fiction rather than fact.
But the account by John le Carré in The Little Drummer Girl of how Mossad goes about the task of what its own website laconically describes as “planning and carrying out special operations beyond Israel’s borders” is more vivid, lasting and authentic than most of the dozens of novels, histories and plays the agency has spawned during its 60-year history.
That Mossad should be the subject of such lasting international interest is testament to the almost mythical reputation the agency has built up since it was founded via a letter headed “Secret” to the Israeli foreign ministry from David Ben-Gurion in December 1949. Some see the agency as fearsome, others as romantic. Partly this stems, no doubt, from the sheer daring of its known exploits; partly from a belief, at least in the early years, that intelligence about, and sometimes the elimination of, its enemies were essential to the survival of the young Jewish state.
Oddly, the coup that first placed Israel in the international intelligence premier league was almost certainly the work of Mossad’s domestic counterpart, Shin Bet, although Mossad’s legendary director Isser Harel claimed the credit and certainly became involved in its transmission. (If Mossad’s closest UK equivalent is MI6, Shin Bet’s is MI5.) This was the acquisition in 1956 of a Polish translation of Nikita Khrushchev’s famous “secret speech” denouncing the evils of Stalinism to the 20th Soviet party congress, which came to Israel by way of a Polish journalist. The decision, approved by Ben-Gurion, to pass this sensationally valuable intelligence property to Washington did more than anything else in the 1950s to cement relations with the CIA and the rest of the US security apparatus.
After an initial period in which one of Mossad’s driving forces, the future prime minister Yitzhak Shamir, devoted multiple efforts against former Nazi scientists, helping Egypt with its weapons programme, what really made the agency’s name was its success in 1961 in locating, capturing and bringing back to Israel for trial the Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann. He remains the only man to have been judicially executed in Israel.
In a sense the operation, which occupied Israel’s best intelligence minds for many months, had nothing directly to do with the security of the country at the time, as some of Mossad’s critics noted. But it had a profound psychological impact in Israel, not least in helping more Israelis who had not lived through the Holocaust confront and understand the suffering of those refugees who had.
Mossad certainly made an important contribution to Israel’s ability to win the Six Day War in 1967. (It also took part of the blame for the intelligence failures that led to Israel coming close to defeat in the Yom Kippur War six years later.)
The exploits of its agent Eli Cohen, an Egyptian-born Israeli who spent three years in Damascus before he was caught and hanged by the Syrians in 1965, are well known in Israel. Seemingly, he had first-class contacts at every level of the Syrian political apparatus. And although his bravery was sometimes criticised as rashness, according to Israel’s Secret Wars, the authoritative study by Ian Black and Benny Morris: “During the three years he spent in Damascus Cohen provided Tel Aviv with a mass of high-grade political and military intelligence, including a great deal of detail about the front-line belt of Syrian fortifications in the Golan Heights, which were conquered by the IDF [Israel Defence Forces] in June 1967.”
The agency had other successes, known and unknown. Its comprehensive debriefing in 1967 of the hostages freed from the hijacked Air France flight from Tel Aviv to Paris helped to inform the planning of the raid at Entebbe airport, where the plane eventually fetched up. And whether or not the raid carried out on a French nuclear plant near Tou-lon in 1979, when Israel was vainly trying to persuade France to stop helping Iraq’s nuclear programme, was productive, Mossad certainly had good intelligence which aided Menachem Begin’s decision in 1981 to bomb the Osiraq reactor near Baghdad.
But Mossad, formally the Institute for Intelligence and Special Operations, has Steven Spielberg to thank for showing a generation in the West how far its arm stretches in the wake of an atrocity against Israelis. The 2005 film Munich, which applies considerable licence to the facts, tells the story of how the agency reacted to the massacre in 1972 of 11 Israeli athletes by the Palestinian Black September group in the Olympic village, an event that provoked outrage across the world.
Targeted assassinations did not begin with Munich – a spokesman for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, Ghassan Kanafani, was killed in a car bombing in Beirut in 1970 – but, over a period of 20 years, the agency killed more than a dozen exiled operatives and activists in three Palestinian factions as part of its post-Munich operation, in France, Italy, Cyprus, Spain, Greece and Lebanon.
The most comprehensive account, Striking Back by Aaron Klein, who interviewed dozens of Mossad agents, estimates that the majority killed were not directly linked to the massacre. Many who were had taken refuge in the communist bloc where even Mossad found it difficult to reach them. But Klein says the agency, which believed it was having a powerful deterrent effect, was not always fussy about its targets. “Our blood was boiling,” Klein quotes one intelligence source as saying. “When there was information implicating someone, we didn’t inspect it with a magnifying glass.”
Klein narrates in vivid detail the Paris hit on Atef Bseiso, who was directly involved in Munich; but Mossad did not catch up with him until 1992. The operation was personally run from a safe house in the 11th arrondissement by the then head of the agency, Shabtai Shavit – travelling, it is topical to note, “on a borrowed identity: a different name was on the passport in the pocket of his blazer”.
Bseiso, on a trip from the PLO headquarters in Tunis, was under continuous surveillance as he checked into the Meridien Hotel in Montparnasse, as he went out to dine with a local PLO bodyguard and “an unidentified Lebanese woman”, and as he was driven back at around midnight in the new Jeep he had bought on his trip. Two young hitmen ambled towards him as he walked to the hotel doors, before one, Tom, opened fire – noiselessly, thanks to the silencer on his Beretta 0.22 – pausing only to collect the hot cartridge cases before heading back to the getaway car, parked, as is Mossad practice, two 90-degree turns away.
Interestingly, as many – including Yasser Arafat – jumped to the correct conclusion that Mossad was responsible for Bseiso’s killing, the suggestion was denied as “totally ridiculous” by the office of the then prime minister, Yitzhak Shamir, who had approved the operation. This did not convince the newly appointed head of French internal security, who, at a “courtesy” meeting with Shavit a few months later, pounded the table as he told the Mossad chief: “We know you killed Bseiso. We’re still working on the proof. When it comes through, you’ll get what’s coming to you. In no way am I willing to allow you to turn Paris into your stage for acts of war and assassinations. We’re not going back to the early Seventies, when you did whatever the hell you wanted. I will not allow it to happen.”
Whatever the French might say, Mossad regarded the Bseiso killing as an unqualified success. The same could not be said of all the operations it conducted in supposedly friendly countries in the wake of Munich.
The Lillehammer mission, less than a year after the massacre, was an unqualified fiasco. The choice of a small Norwegian town, where strangers stood out and no murder had been committed for 40 years, was not best suited to a targeted assassination in the first place. The hit team assembled by Mike Harari, the 46-year-old head of Mossad’s operations branch, proved itself inexperienced and flaky under pressure. But, above all, the Arab hitman gunned down as he took a walk home from a bus stop with his pregnant wife after an evening at the cinema was not, as Mossad thought, Ali Hassan Salameh, the brains behind the Munich massacre, but a Moroccan waiter called Ahmed Bouchiki.
Subsequent attempts to hush up Mossad’s role were sabotaged when, in an elementary breach of tradecraft, two agents used the Peugeot escape car – which had been spotted by police – 24 hours later to drive to the airport. When the two were arrested, one, a woman, broke down and confessed to working for Israel, while the other was carrying an unlisted number that led police to the safe house where one of the three agents hiding out was discovered with a detailed Mossad cable of instructions in his possession. Among other things, the cable explicitly ordered the team not to carry any compromising material on them.
The interrogation, public trial and imprisonment of five of the agents “dealt a heavy blow to the undercover infrastructure of Mossad in Europe” according to the well-informed, if understated, assessment of two Israeli experts, Michael Ben-Zohar and Eitan Haber. Agents who had been exposed had to be recalled, safe houses abandoned, phone numbers changed, and operational methods modified. Whatever lessons Mossad learned from this temporary shattering of its reputation, it did not, contrary to assumptions at the time, stop the agency from assassinating other Palestinian militants.
It is the fate of security services to be known better for their failures than their successes because mistakes are more likely to come to light. One early one was the Ben Barka affair – which, while operationally impeccable, was politically anything but. With a common enemy in Egypt, Mossad had enjoyed a warm but secret relationship with the security service of Morocco’s King Hassan. In 1965 an emissary from Hassan approached Mossad with a simple request: to find and kill Mehdi Ben Barka, the king’s leading opponent.
Unbelievably, in a scheme hatched by Mossad, the exiled politician was lured to Paris, captured by a team of French and Moroccan agents, and driven to the home of a prominent man in France’s criminal underworld. There he was interrogated, tortured and killed in the presence of General Mohamed Oufkir, King Hassan’s interior minister. Although the affair did not become more widely public until February 1967, the French were furious and it produced serious immediate ructions and buck passing within Israel, of the sort that may now be taking place over the assassination of Mahmoud al-Mabhouh.
The most signal failure, both operationally and politically, was probably the botched attempt in 1997, during Benjamin Netanyahu’s first term as prime minister, to poison Hamas’s political bureau chief, Khaled Meshaal, in Jordan. Two of the assassins, using Canadian passports, were caught, and four others were holed up in the Israeli embassy there when Ephraim Halevy, a friend of the outraged King Hussein, was brought back from his post as Israel’s ambassador to the EU to try to sort out the mess.
Halevy’s own assessment was that Netanyahu probably prevented a consuming crisis with Jordan by quickly dispatching a doctor with an antidote for Meshaal as soon as he realised the operation had gone badly wrong. But it took an initially resistant Netanyahu another 24 hours to accept Halevy’s proposal for mending relations with King Hussein: the release of the Gaza Hamas leader Sheikh Ahmed Yassin.
Although most of the criticism of the Dubai operation within Israel has concerned its exposure by the authorities there, rather than the assassination itself, there have once again been a few voices questioning the role of such assassinations.
Some newspaper commentators, such as Ofer Shelah, have cast doubt on whether the replaceability of figures such as Mabhouh, and the prospect of retaliation, call into question the value to Israeli security of extrajudicial killings. Indeed, Shelah quoted a senior IDF officer as saying that Hezbollah’s Imad Mughniyeh – whose assassination produced quiet congratulation in Israel two years ago despite the absence of any admission that it was responsible – has been replaced by a hard-line Iranian official answering to the Revolutionary Guard.
There are, finally, former members of Israel’s security establishment who think it could be worth actually talking to Hamas. As one account of the Meshaal affair points out, King Hussein was especially angered because he had recently relayed a message from Hamas to Israel that it was seeking a 30-year truce.
As the writer, who still holds the near-heretical view that negotiations should take place with Hamas, said in his account, conventional wisdom remained at the time as it is does now: “that Hamas was a deadly terrorist group which has to be dealt with by force and force alone”. But, he adds with some exasperation: “We will never know whether this method of dealing with them was the only valid one, for there was never discussion of the offer of a truce at the time it could have been operative.”
Who was this writer? Why, none other than the same Ephraim Halevy, who just happens to be a former and distinguished head of Mossad.
Timeline of an assassination: A month of international speculation and tension
19 January Senior Hamas official Mahmoud al-Mabhouh, 50, flies from Damascus to Dubai. He is killed about five hours after arriving at the Al Bustan Rotana hotel.
20 January Mabhouh’s body is discovered by hotel staff.
29 January Hamas announces Mabhouh’s death and accuses Mossad of being responsible. Dubai police report that several “European passport holders” have been identified as suspects in the killing.
1 February Israeli police search stretches of coastline after two barrels packed with explosives wash ashore. Palestinian militants claim responsibility for the failed attacks, planned as revenge for Mabhouh’s assassination.
15 February Dubai police confirm the arrest of two Palestinians suspected of providing logistical support in the killing, and reveal the names and pictures of the 11 European suspects.
16 February The British-Israeli citizens whose names had been used on the passports insist they had nothing to do with the killing, and the British and Irish governments claim the passports were fakes.
17 February Israel’s Foreign Minister, Avigdor Lieberman, says there is no proof that the country’s secret services carried out the killing.
18 February As tensions rise, the Israeli ambassador to Britain, Ron Prosor, is summoned to a meeting at the Foreign Office. Meanwhile speculation mounts when Dubai police state they are 99 per cent certain of Mossad’s involvement in the assassination, and the 11 people suspected of the killing, are placed on Interpol’s wanted list.
19 February The British government denies claims that it had prior knowledge of the fake British passports used by the suspected killers. Pressure increases on Israel, with Dubai’s police chief calling for the head of Mossad, General Meir Dagan, to be arrested if Israel’s security agency was behind the assassination.
Jonathan Owen