EDITOR: After intense pressure by a large number of organisations and individuals, led by BRICUP (British Committee for Universities in Palestine) the well-known botanist, David Bellamy has pulled out of a ZF event. The ZF now threaten to sue him… nice guys. It is also interesting to find how opponents to Israel are treated.
Zionist Federation may sue David Bellamy over talk pull-out: Jewish Chronicle
The British Committee for the Universities of Palestine (Bricup) has claimed its campaign led TV botanist David Bellamy to pull out of a Zionist Federation science event.
Prof Bellamy was scheduled to be guest speaker at the Israel Blue White and Green event last week, but withdrew offering no explanation for his absence.
The JC understands that the ZF is now considering taking legal action against Prof Bellamy for breach of contract.
Bricup’s Jonathan Rosenhead said there was a “reasonable inference that his withdrawal is related to our letter to him asking him to do so”. Nevertheless, he admitted that the organisation had not had a response from Prof Bellamy.
Bricup supporters including Lord Ahmed and Baroness Tonge had earlier written to the botanist and academic saying he should be “outraged” by the “greenwashing of the occupation”.
Prof Bellamy’s agent, Olivia Guest, this week again declined to clarify why he had not attended the event.
Naomi Wimborne-Idrissi, secretary of Jews for Boycotting Israeli Goods, (JBIG) was evicted from the session with Israeli scientists after shouting questions about Israel not allowing Palestinians fair access to water. She claimed she was “physically dragged out of the meeting” by CST security staff and “frog-marched up the stairs”.
A second JBIG activist said he had been “carried out” by CST. The pair said they were considering getting legal advice over the evictions.
But a CST spokesman said: “Bricup’s claims are exaggerated and untrue. Nobody was ‘carried’ anywhere.”
Alan Aziz, ZF director, said: “Two people were making speeches and shouting. People asked for them to be removed, we decided to remove them and CST carried out our wishes.”
He said discussions with Prof Bellamy’ agents were continuing.
EDITOR: A film by an Israel ex-paratrooper, Yariv, interviewing his colleagues from the army unit, and getting them to tell the truth about the brutalities and torture involved daily in the occupation, about the sadistic pleasure of oppressing the Palestinians they met every day. After 8 years he brings together some of them to exchange views about the formative experience of their twenties. The details, limited as they are in this 23-minute film, are still horrifying in their brutality; The banality of evil is staring at us from the screen. They admit not just to torture, but to multiple murders of Palestinians by beating this up.
When you watch this film, please do not expect a critique of Israel. It isn’t. Even for those who are prepared to admit the crimes they committed daily, it is not ever possible, it seems, to question the system that brutalised them, that made them into torturers and murderers; they look back with nostalgia, and in the last scene, meeting their commander who is now a Lieutenant Colonel, they all bond as if nothing wrong ever took place. “nothing has changed” they say to each other, as they join an army patrol after 8 years. Nothing indeed has changed to the better, and many things have become worse. Those Israelis cannot, and will not bring change; what they wish for is absolution, the grace of the murderer who is forgiven, but without asking for forgiveness, without facing the fact that they were the system of death and destruction, and the system continues with their support. Deeply depressing.
A Video by an Israeli Ex-soldier
EDITOR: As there are no good news stories to be had this week, the NYT has no news from Israel. Again. Why are we surprised? It is, after all, one of the most potent instruments of the Zionist Lobby, all the more potent for being underplayed and sophisticated. Check for yourself – no Dubai murder, no troubled public:
The New York Times
ne of the most potent instruments of the Zionist Lobby.
http://www.nytimes.com/
Omar Barghouti speaks on the BDS campaign
Omar Barghouti, a key member of PACBI, speaks in a YouTube video about the reasons for the boycott campaign and talks about the progress we have made and what we need to do next.
Daily realities in Palestine: The battle of Al Massara
EDITOR: Video of Israeli military attack on Palestinian nonviolent demonstration at Al-Masara on Friday, February 19, 2010. Without warning the Israeli army shoots concussion grenades and tear gas canisters. These daily brutalities are totally ‘normal’, and happen every day across Palestine.
Today there were demonstrations and confrontations in a number of locations in the occupied West Bank with three enduring particularly vicious Israeli attacks: Ni’lin, Bil’in, Al-Ma’sara. It is impossible to be in many places at one time so I chose to go to Al-Ma’sara for their weekly demonstration.
There, the demonstrators decided to go on the main street and as soon as we got there, the occupation army attacked the peaceful demonstrators. There were no warnings but immediate volley of concussion grenades and tear gas canisters. The soldiers chased people into the village and continued firing. I stayed close to the soldiers and tried to reason with them. In one instance they used a stun grenade to prevent me from talking to soldiers who are mindlessly obeying officers. I could not help think of Nazis and Apartheid soldiers. I persisted in trying to reason with them. As we were leaving, a higher ranking military intelligence officer stopped me and did get my name and coordinates.
Dr. Mazin Qumsiyeh
EDITOR: The Desecration of the Mamila cemetery in the name of ‘Tolerance’
This horrid story would be funny and bizarre, if it wasn’t so cruel and terrifying. The Simon Wiesenthal Centre is building its ‘Museum of Tolerance’ right on the Mamila ancient Moslem cemetery in Jerusalem. Imagine someone building such a museum on a Jewish cemetery somewhere… The Israeli government sees no problem with this – after all, hundreds of such Palestinian cemeteries were desecrated since 1948. The Tel Aviv Hilton and the city’s Independence Park are built on another such cemetery, so what’s the problem, really. Tolerance, naturally, does not extend to Arabs. Tolerance, indeed.
Jerusalem families come out against museum built on ancestors’ graves: The Electronic Intifada
Marian Houk, 19 February 2010
Members of prominent Palestinian families from Jerusalem came out last week in protest against plans by the Simon Wiesenthal Center to build a Museum of Tolerance on top of part of the ancient Mamilla Cemetery where their ancestors are buried.
The initiative includes filing a petition in Geneva to various United Nations human rights bodies and to UNESCO, the Paris-based UN agency responsible for protecting the world’s cultural heritage. The petition was also addressed to the Swiss Government, which is the repository for the Geneva Conventions.
One family member behind the initiative said it is not just symbolic, but instead a full-blown campaign. He expects this issue to be included in a resolution being drafted for a March session of the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva.
In the East Jerusalem press conference at which this initiative was announced last week, petitioner Asem Khalidi noted that a number of men from Salah al-Din’s army, who liberated Jerusalem from the Crusaders, were buried in the Mamilla Cemetery.
Much of the momentum behind the initiative comes from Palestinians who grew up and who still live in the Diaspora, many of them in the United States. Press conferences were held in Jerusalem, Geneva and Los Angeles, home of the Simon Wiesenthal Center (and the first Museum of Tolerance, built in 1993), which says it is moving forward with its plans despite passionate legal and moral opposition.
Mamilla Cemetery
The corner of the Mamilla Cemetery slated for construction was paved over in the 1960s, and used as a car park. When excavations began on the site in 2005, human remains were found, and the chief archeologist stated that he believed there were many thousands of graves in many levels in that section of the cemetery.
The cemetery is situated in West Jerusalem, which fell under Israeli control during the fighting that surrounded the proclamation of the self-declared Jewish state in mid-May 1948. There have been no new burials since that time. From the May 1948 war, until the June 1967 war when Israeli forces captured East Jerusalem and the rest of the West Bank, the cemetery was inaccessible to many if not most of the Palestinian families concerned, who were living under Jordanian administration.
The Simon Wiesenthal Center claims that it has spent a lot of money on reburying — in “a nearby Muslim cemetery” — the remains it has excavated there. However, a press release announcing the initiative of the Palestinian families said that “It was an active burial ground until 1948, when the new State of Israel seized the western part of Jerusalem and the cemetery fell under Israeli control … The construction project has resulted in the disinterment and disposal of hundreds of graves and human remains, the whereabouts of which are currently unknown.”
The Los Angeles-based center broke ground for the Jerusalem branch of the Museum of Tolerance in a corner of the Mamilla Cemetery in May 2004. California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger delivered the keynote address.
Families denied justice
There are 60 individual Palestinian petitioners from some 15 Jerusalem families including Adnan Husseini, the Palestinian Authority’s appointed Governor of Jerusalem; AbdulQader Husseini, the son of the late Faisal Husseini, who was the Palestine Liberation Organization representative in Jerusalem; and Sari Nusseibeh, head of Al-Quds University in Abu Dis.
Rashid Khalidi, Professor of History at Columbia University in New York, who is also a petitioner, has been closely involved in organizing this effort. In an interview with Democracy Now! he explained that the petitioners are asking that the Mamilla Cemetery be treated as a heritage site. “This is a cemetery where people have been buried since the 12th century … The fact that it is still being desecrated, not just by this Museum, but by vandalism of the remaining tombs, is a scandal”. He said the families were also asking for “reinterment of the excavated remains under religious supervision”, with information provided to the families about exactly where “within the cemetery.”
Palestinian and Israeli co-petitioners include the organizations Al-Haq, Addameer, Al Mezan Center for Human Rights, the Arab Association for Human Rights, Badil and the Zochrot Association.
Because it is in West Jerusalem, Palestinians have been hesitant to take any high-profile action asserting either physical or moral claims.
Until now, much of the opposition to the building plan has come from Israeli and Jewish rights activists who have argued, in part, that the construction on this site offended their Jewish beliefs and values. They have worked through the Israeli court system, and through appeals directed mainly to Israeli and international Jewish public opinion.
Gershon Baskin, co-director and founder of the Israeli Palestinian Center for Research and Information (IPCRI), told this reporter that the first he heard of the Museum of Tolerance project was in newspaper reports of the ground-breaking ceremony. “We came in only after the whole thing was licensed and all the legal proceedings were finished — and this is one argument that the court used against our petitions.”
The Israeli high court has recently dismissed another challenge and ruled that the Museum of Tolerance construction project is legal, and can proceed. Baskin believes that the legal avenues in Israel are now basically now closed.
Meanwhile, a private Palestinian offer to donate an alternative location for the Museum of Tolerance hasn’t been taken up by the Wiesenthal center.
At a public discussion sponsored by IPCRI in East Jerusalem in March 2009, attended by lawyers representing the Wiesenthal Center and the Museum of Tolerance project in West Jerusalem, Dr. Mohammad Dajani of Al-Quds University in Abu Dis offered to donate alternative land for construction of the museum in Anata near the concrete wall that Israel is currently building around the Jerusalem area. The offer was for 12 dunams (one dunam is approximately 1,000 square meters). At that alternative site, Dr. Dajani said to the public meeting, both Israelis and Palestinians could visit the future Museum of Tolerance — which many Palestinians would not be able to do if it were built in the heart of West Jerusalem, as is currently planned.
The lawyers for the Simon Wiesenthal Center and the Museum of Tolerance merely smiled, without replying.
About six months ago, Dr. Dajani said, he was surprised by an Israeli military decision to confiscate, “for security reasons,” about half of the parcel of land he had offered for the museum project. Just this past week, he said, he received a new notification that the military intends to take the remaining six or so dunams as well. He said he is challenging the order.
Marian Houk is a journalist currently working in Jerusalem with experience at the United Nations and in the region. Her blog is www.un-truth.com.
EDITOR: No more petty difficulties for War Criminals!
Good news at last! War criminals will no longer have to worry about coming to the UK! The Tories, who have already decided they have won the election, are now busy making promises, and of course war criminals are high on the list. An early bid for Jewish votes, no doubt. Well, Labour can scoop them by deciding to offer special prizes for war criminals, as the election is still some way off. It is really difficult to tell who is more disgusting, Labour or the Tories, and also quite hard to tell the difference…
Tories tell Livni: we’ll change ‘arrest’ law: The Jewish Chronicle
By Martin Bright, February 18, 2010
Senior Conservatives have assured opposition leader Tzipi Livni that a Tory government would change the law that allows magistrates to issue arrest warrants for foreign politicians accused of war crimes.
Shadow business secretary Ken Clarke and shadow attorney general Edward Garnier met her in Israel as part of a party charm offensive.
Mr Garnier said: “The Tories will change the law if this government doesn’t, although we remain happy to co-operate if there is still an appetite for reform. There is support this from David Cameron and William Hague downwards. Our courts will not be used as the venue for street protest.”
The government has set itself a new March deadline to push through the legislation. But senior sources in the Jewish community and the Foreign Office have told the JC they believe the chances of it reaching the statute book before the election are slim.
Foreign Secretary David Miliband promised a change in December after an arrest warrant was issued for Ms Livni. She has since said she will travel to Britain and face arrest if the government does not resolve the issue.
The change could still be added at the report stage of the Crime and Security Bill, which has a deadline of March 1 for tabling amendments.
Justice Secretary Jack Straw has invited the Board of Deputies and the Jewish Leadership Council to discuss the issue on February 23. He will meet Labour Friends of Israel the same day.
It is understood the organisations will demand a definitive answer from Mr Straw before going public about their dismay at the mixed messages coming from government.
Mr Straw denied he was blocking the law change under pressure from Muslim groups.
His spokesman said: “For the record, this is completely untrue. Jack has not spoken to the Muslim Council of Britain about this issue, or to any of the Muslim leaders in his constituency or elsewhere.”
MCB will have ample opportunity to lobby the Justice Secretary before his meeting with the Board and the JLC, however, as Mr Straw is the guest of honour at the organisation’s fundraising dinner on February 22.
Cartoonists in Israel take aim at Mossad: Ma’an News Agency
February 19, 2010 – 12:00am
Political cartoonists working for Israeli newspapers this week turned their attention away from Rafiq Husseini, the Palestinian Authority official who disgraced by a sex tape.
The new target of the cartoonists is a subject that is usually off-limits: Mossad. The shift in focus took place as suspicion mounted that the spy agency was involved in the assassination in January of Hamas leader Mahmoud Al-Mabhouh in Dubai.
The details of the plot itself provided ample fare for satire: CCTV footage showed the assassins were dressed as tennis players. Dubai police said the operatives used wigs and false beards.
In keeping with its policy of “ambiguity” on the matter, Israel has neither confirmed nor denied involvement in the killing. But the cartoons, like Israeli press at large, simply assume that Mossad was behind the hit.
A caricature in the newspaper Haaretz depicts Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu asking Mossad chief Meir Dagan, “I have one question about the Mossad operation in Dubai: Why do all the agents wear the same kind of glasses?”
He replies, “this operation was sponsored by Opticana Vision.”
Another cartoon shows former Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni warning her Kadima rival Shaul Mofaz, who is wearing tennis clothes, “Do not forget that I can easily detect all of Mossad’s games.”
Other cartoons made light of another aspect of the story: the apparent revelation that some Israelis with dual nationalities had their identities stolen.
The Hebrew newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth printed a cartoon showing an Israeli woman is crying while telling her husband: “I can’t believe you’ve been touring Dubai with blond women!”
He replies, “For the tenth time I tell you it’s not me, they’ve stolen my identity.”
The Ministry for Isolating Israel: Haaretz Editorial
The stupidity that has overtaken the Foreign Ministry under the leadership of Avigdor Lieberman and Danny Ayalon sank to a new low this week. When a delegation of American congressmen, who came to Israel at the initiative of the leftist Jewish lobby J Street, asked to meet with senior Foreign Ministry officials in Jerusalem they encountered obstacles and delays. Then, at the last minute, the Foreign Ministry agreed to arrange the meetings – but said the congressmen had to come alone, without their J Street escorts. The guests refused and convened a press conference at which they called the behavior of Israel’s government a disgrace.
It is hard to imagine a more harmful and unnecessary blow to Israel’s foreign relations than boycotting U.S. congressmen and their escorts from a Jewish organization. No bureaucratic justification – such as “the professionals advised against meeting with the group,” which the Foreign Ministry is now claiming – can excuse this. The support of Congress and the U.S. Jewish community are Israel’s greatest strategic assets; over their dozens of years in Congress, the delegation members have voted to continue American military aid to Israel. The fact that senior Foreign Ministry officials even hesitated about whether to meet with the visitors from Capitol Hill attests to a serious flaw in their judgment.
But the government headed by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Foreign Minister Lieberman is more concerned with ideological purity, and it views J Street as a hostile organization – in the same way it goes after local left-wing groups and human rights organizations by painting them as “anti-Israel.” Israel’s ambassador to Washington, Michael Oren, boycotted J Street’s conference several months ago. Relations between the organization and the embassy have improved since then, but the top brass in Jerusalem still favor boycotting it. Intelligence and Atomic Energy Minister Dan Meridor was the only senior Israeli official who agreed to meet with the delegation, which also met with the king of Jordan and even settler leaders.
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J Street defines itself as a pro-Israel, pro-peace lobby, established to serve as a counterweight to the veteran pro-Israel lobby AIPAC, whose views are to J Street’s right. According to J Street officials, the new lobby represents some 150,000 Jews and enjoys close ties with Barack Obama’s White House. The Israeli government was angry over the group’s calls to exhaust diplomatic negotiations with Iran before stepping up sanctions against it, and for an internal Israeli investigation into the Goldstone report’s allegations. But instead of trying to explain its positions and convince J Street, the Foreign Ministry preferred to reject its legitimacy.
The congressmen and their escorts deserve an apology from the government. Even more urgently needed is a reassessment of Israel’s foreign relations in the Lieberman era. Instead of bolstering Israel’s international standing, it seems the foreign minister and his deputy seek to deepen its isolation. Under their leadership, the Foreign Ministry has turned into a thought police and a ministry for silencing criticism. Following angry outbursts against the Scandinavians and the Turks, Israel is now humiliating U.S. congressmen, whose support is essential. Before any more harm is done, Netanyahu must rescind his problematic appointments at the top of the Foreign Ministry and find replacements for both Lieberman and Ayalon.
EDITOR: While the UK government is busy covering its pudenda and pretending to be tough, and the UK Tabloids press is full of adoration for the ‘John Le Carre’ type operation, some of the Israeli media pundits, and we are not here speaking of the left by a long chalk, started dealing with reality, and Nehemia Shtrasler is one of the clearest voices. His criticism is not based on morality, which one is safe in assuming he does not possess, but on simple tactical and unprofessional errors in the murder operation. While this may not lead to a change in itself, it is really interesting to read the debunking of Israeli propaganda about the Mossad as some brain trust of pure genius, instead of a being bunch of bumbling murderers. The next three items discuss the myth and the reality.
Amateurs who live in the past: Haaretz
By Nehemia Shtrasler
Until the beginning of the week, it sounded like a great success – entering an Arab country in secret, liquidating a well-known terrorist, and leaving quietly. No one has taken responsibility for the assassination but, according to foreign sources, we are talking about the Mossad (and this will be the assumption, whether correct or not, throughout this piece). The initial result was applause for the sophisticated Mossad, which had acted at the highest level possible.
But then the Dubai police produced the best detective thriller in town – a full-length feature film with clear photographs of the anonymous actors. Thus it transpired that the super-professional Mossad, which supposedly acts like a sophisticated high-tech organization, is nothing more than an outdated agency that acts with worrisome amateurism.
The planners of the operation did not take into account that technology has advanced swiftly in the past few years. Once upon a time, in the analog world, it was sufficient to fake a passport, glue on a beard and dress up like a tennis player with a baseball cap. That’s what is written in spy novels. But the world today is digital, computerized and connected to the media, with everything filmed – and those facts were apparently not taken into account by the Mossad.
It is therefore amusing to hear how the Dubai police have been praised for their success in solving the mystery. Would it have been possible to not succeed? After all, the large hit team left behind so many clues it would’ve been impossible for even a blind detective not to find them.
They arrived in Dubai a short while before the murder, making it easy to recognize them from the incoming flights. They handed over their passports to be scanned at the airport and their faces were photographed. After that, they used the same passports to register at their hotels. Is there any difficulty in identifying them at every spot en route?
Later on, the Dubai police sifted through the large number of security cameras installed at the airport and at various hotels. And if anyone says it’s impossible to avoid security cameras, why did they decide to stay at the big hotels in the center of the city? Are there no other accommodations where they would be slightly less conspicuous?
During the operation, the members of the hit team spoke with one another on cellular phones – and everyone knows that a cellular device is like a detection device. It reports every few minutes where the speaker is located, and every call from it is registered. To top it all off, they all left the hotel at the same time, immediately after the assassination had been carried out, making it quite easy to trace them on their departing flights.
And if someone nevertheless would have thought we were referring to another spy organization and not the Mossad, the group took pains to prevent such a possibility by stealing the identity of seven living Israelis, who have since been left astounded.
This is why the Dubai police does not deserve a medal. It was handed the solution to the mystery on a platter, by amateurs. After all, what chance does an old-fashioned disguise and glued-on beard have when up against advanced telecommunications and digital cameras?
Paul Keeley, a British immigrant who today lives on Kibbutz Nahsholim, could not believe what was happening to him. He has been in Israel for 15 years already, but continues to hold a British passport along with his Israeli citizenship. “I have been walking around like a zombie since finding out they used my identity,” he said. “What I’m experiencing is a terrible nightmare – I fear for my life.” That sentiment holds true for the six others whose identities were stolen.
A series of crimes of forgery and invasion of privacy, as well as a serous violation of every citizen’s right to security and freedom of movement, has taken place. Will these seven people ever be able to travel abroad again? Was the violation of their rights not too high a price to pay? Do none of us have protection against the violation of our privacy by the Mossad?
We have to hope that the Mossad does not view every citizen of this country as if they have joined its ranks. This is reminiscent of the apocalyptic prophesy by Professor Yeshayahu Leibowitz, who said the continuation of the occupation and the wars would turn all of us into Shin Bet security service operatives. Today it is members of the Mossad.
The big question is whether the prime minister, who is responsible for the Mossad, took into account both the profits and losses involved when he gave the go-ahead for the operation. Because it’s already clear that the damages caused by the operation are greater than its advantages. Mahmoud al-Mabhouh will be replaced by another Hamas leader, perhaps more cruel than he. But 11 people (and perhaps more) from the Mossad’s hit team can no longer work abroad. Moreover, the methods used by the Mossad have also been exposed.
Dubai, a moderate country, will not be keen to continue any kind of ties with Israel, and no one will envy the Israeli businessman who needs to travel there in the near future. Ireland has approached Britain, France and Germany to cooperate in investigating the affair. The Israeli ambassadors in Britain and Ireland were called to the foreign ministries for clarification. The British prime minister has ordered a thorough investigation of the affair. People in Europe do not like it when a foreign organization endangers the well-being of their citizens. It is also clear that Israel’s status in European public opinion has been damaged; to them Israel appears to be a country without restraints, that breaks the law.
This is how the big success story turned into a resounding failure. This is how the all-powerful Mossad has turned into an amateurish organization that lives in the past.
The truth about the Mossad: Haaretz
The recent, outlandish assassination in Dubai may prove the most damaging yet in the Mossad’s history of high-profile, bungled operations. How did it squander its reputation for ruthless brilliance?
by Ian Black
No comment was forthcoming from the Israeli prime minister’s office, which formally speaks for – but invariably says nothing about – the country’s world-famous espionage organisation. The bungling bomber was just a brief item on that evening’s local TV news.
There was, however, a far bigger story – one that echoed across the globe – two years ago this week, when a bomb in a Pajero jeep in Damascus decapitated a man named Imad Mughniyeh. Mughniyeh was the military leader of Lebanon’s Shia movement Hizbullah, an ally of Iran, and was wanted by the US, France and half a dozen other countries. Israel never went beyond cryptic nodding and winking about that killing in the heart of the Syrian capital, but it is widely believed to have been one of its most daring and sophisticated clandestine operations.
The Mossad, like other intelligence services, tends to attract attention only when something goes wrong, or when it boasts a spectacular success and wants to send a warning signal to its enemies. Last month’s assassination of a senior Hamas official in Dubai, now at the centre of a white-hot diplomatic row between Israel and Britain, is a curious mixture of both.
With its cloned foreign passports, multiple disguises, state-of-the-art communications and the murder of alleged arms smuggler Mahmoud al-Mabhouh – one of the few elements of the plot that was not captured on the emirate’s CCTV cameras – it is a riveting tale of professional chutzpah, violence and cold calculation. And with the Palestinian Islamist movement now vowing to take revenge, it seems grimly certain that it will bring more bloodshed in its wake.
The images from Dubai follow the biblical injunction (and the Mossad’s old motto):”By way of deception thou shalt make war.” The agency’s job, its website explains more prosaically, is to “collect information, analyse intelligence and perform special covert operations beyond [Israel’s] borders.”
Founded in 1948 along with the new Jewish state, the Mossad largely stayed in the shadows in its early years. Yitzhak Shamir, a former Stern Gang terrorist and future prime minister, ran operations targeting German scientists who were helping Nasser’s Egypt build rockets – foreshadowing later Israeli campaigns to disrupt Iraqi and (continuing) Iranian attempts to acquire nuclear and other weapons.
The Mossad’s most celebrated exploits included the abduction of the fugitive Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann, who was later tried and hanged in Israel. Others were organising the defection of an Iraqi pilot who flew his MiG-21 to Israel, and support for Iraqi Kurdish rebels against Baghdad. Military secrets acquired by Elie Cohen, the infamous spy who penetrated the Syrian leadership, helped Israel conquer the Golan Heights in the 1967 Middle East war.
It was after that that the service’s role expanded to fight the Palestinians, who had been galvanised under Yasser Arafat into resisting Israel in the newly occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip. The 1970s saw the so-called “war of the spooks” with Mossad officers, operating under diplomatic cover abroad, recruiting and running informants in Fatah and other Palestinian groups. Baruch Cohen, an Arabic speaker on loan to the Mossad from the Shin Bet internal security service, was shot in a Madrid cafe by his own agent. Bassam Abu Sharif, of the Marxist Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, was badly disfigured by a Mossad parcel bomb sent to him in Beirut.
Steven Spielberg’s 2006 film Munich helped mythologise the Mossad’s hunt for the Black September terrorists who massacred 11 Israeli athletes at the 1972 Olympics. Eleven of them were eliminated in killings across Europe, culminating in the small Norwegian town of Lillehammer, where a Moroccan waiter was mistaken for Ali Hassan Salameh, the Munich plot’s mastermind. Salameh was eventually killed by a car bomb in Beirut in 1979 – the sort of incident that made Lebanese and Palestinians sit up and notice last year’s botched training episode in Tel Aviv.
Some details of the assassination of Mabhouh last month echo elements of the campaign against Black September – which ended with the catastrophic arrest of five Mossad agents. Sylvia Raphael, a South African-born Christian with a Jewish father, spent five years in a Norwegian prison; she may have been among the young Europeans in Israel who were discreetly asked, in nondescript offices in Tel Aviv, if they wished to volunteer for sensitive work involving Israel’s security. Other agents who had been exposed had to be recalled, safe houses abandoned, phone numbers changed and operational methods modified.
Over the years, the Mossad’s image has been badly tarnished at home as well as abroad. It was blamed in part for failing to get wind of Egyptian-Syrian plans for the devastating attack that launched the 1973 Yom Kippur war. Critics wondered whether the spies had got their priorities right by focusing on hunting down Palestinian gunmen in the back alleys of European cities, when they should have been stealing secrets in Cairo and Damascus. The Mossad also played a significant, though still little-known, role in the covert supply of arms to Ayatollah Khomeini’s Iran to help fight Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, as part of the Iran-Contra scandal during Ronald Reagan’s presidency.
It has, in addition, suffered occasional blows from its own disgruntled employees. In 1990, a Canadian-born former officer called Victor Ostrovsky blew the whistle on its internal organisation, training and methods, revealing codenames including “Kidon” (bayonet), the unit in charge of assassinations. An official smear campaign failed to stop Ostrovsky’s book, so the agency kept quiet when another ostensibly inside account came out in 2007. It described the use of shortwave radios for sending encoded transmissions, operations in Iran for collecting soil samples, and joint operations with the CIA against Hezbollah.
But the worst own goal came in 1997, during Binyamin Netanyahu’s first term as prime minister. Mossad agents tried but failed to assassinate Khaled Mash’al – the same Hamas leader who is now warning of retaliation for Mabhouh’s murder – by injecting poison into his ear in Amman, Jordan. Using forged Canadian passports, they fled to the Israeli embassy, triggering outrage and a huge diplomatic crisis with Jordan. Danny Yatom, the then Mossad chief, was forced to quit. Ephraim Halevy, a quietly spoken former Londoner, was brought back from retirement to clear up the mess.
The Dubai assassination, however, may yet turn out to be far more damaging – not least because the political and diplomatic context has changed in the last decade. Israel’s reputation has suffered an unprecedented battering, reaching a new low during last year’s Operation Cast Lead in the Gaza Strip. “In the current climate, the traces left behind in Dubai are likely to lead to very serious harm to Israel’s international standing,” the former diplomat Alon Liel commented yesterday.
Even though Israel is maintaining its traditional policy of “ambiguity” about clandestine operations, refusing to confirm or deny any involvement in Dubai, nobody in the world seems to seriously question it. That includes almost all Israeli commentators, who are bound by the rules of military censorship in a small and talkative country where secrets are often quite widely known.
It would be surprising if a key part of this extraordinary story did not turn out to be the role played by Palestinians. It is still Mossad practice to recruit double agents, just as it was with the PLO back in the 1970s. News of the arrest in Damascus of another senior Hamas operative – though denied by Mash’al – seems to point in this direction. Two other Palestinians extradited from Jordan to Dubai are members of the Hamas armed wing, the Izzedine al-Qassam brigades, suggesting treachery may indeed have been involved. Previous assassinations have involved a Palestinian agent identifying the target.
Yossi Melman, the expert on intelligence for Israel’s Haaretz newspaper, worries that, as before the 1973 war, the Israeli government may be getting it wrong by focusing on the wrong enemy – the Palestinians – instead of prioritising Iran and Hizbullah.
“The Mossad is not Murder Inc, like the Mafia; its goal is not to take vengeance on its enemies,” he wrote this week. “‘Special operations’ like the assassination in Dubai – if this indeed was a Mossad operation – have always accounted for a relatively small proportion of its overall activity. Nevertheless, these are the operations that give the organisation its halo, its shining image. This is ultimately liable to blind its own ranks, cause them to become intoxicated by their own success, and thus divert their attention from their primary mission.”
From an official Israeli point of view, the Mossad has an important job to do. Its reputation for ruthlessness and cunning remains a powerful asset, prompting what sometimes sounds like grudging admiration as well as loathing in the Arab world – where a predisposition for conspiracy theories boosts the effect of the disinformation and psychological warfare at which the Israelis are said to excel.
The government’s official narrative, of course, is that Hamas is a terrorist organisation that pioneered horrific suicide bombings, fired thousands of rockets at Israeli civilian targets and – despite occasional signs of pragmatism or readiness for a temporary truce or prisoner swap – remains dedicated to the destruction of the Jewish state. It refuses to admit that its ever-expanding West Bank settlements remains a significant barrier to peace.
In western countries, including Britain, there was widespread anger at the 1,400 Palestinian casualties of the Gaza war. Barack Obama has declared the occupation “intolerable”. Netanyahu heads the most rightwing coalition in Israel’s history; his famous quip that the Middle East is a “tough neighbourhood” no longer seems to justify playing dirty.
Yet Israelis, and not just those on the right, worry that their very existence as an independent state is being de-legitimised. And, judging by the jobs section of the Mossad website, there are still plenty of opportunities for Israel’s wannabe spies: challenging positions are available for researchers, analysts, security officers, codebreakers and other technical work. Speakers of Arabic and Persian are invited to apply to be intelligence officers.The work involves travel abroad and a “young and unconventional” environment.
It is a novelty of this episode that ordinary Israeli citizens are angry that their identities appear to have been stolen by their own government’s secret servants – one reason why the Mossad chief Meir Dagan may find his days are numbered. But it is hard not to detect an undercurrent of popular admiration for the killers of Mabhouh. The day after the sensational CCTV images and passport photos were shown, the Israeli tennis champion Shahar Pe’er reached the quarter-finals of a major international competition in the emirate. “Another successful operation in Dubai,” the Ynet website headlined its story.
Ofer Kasti, Haaretz’s education correspondent, did not have his passport cloned, but he does bear a striking resemblance to the hit-squad member named as Kevin Daveron. “My mum rang and asked gently if I’d been abroad recently,” he wrote. “Friends asked me why I hadn’t brought back any cigarettes from the duty free shop in Dubai. I thought I sensed admiring glances in the street. ‘Well done,’ said an elderly woman who came up to me in the supermarket and clapped me the shoulder. ‘You showed those Arabs.'”
Soul-searching within Israel at ‘amateurish’ operation
Officials thought to be embarrassed by series of clues left behind by Mossad agents
Soul-searching within Israel at ‘amateurish’ operation: The Independent
Officials thought to be embarrassed by series of clues left behind by Mossad agents
By Donald Macintyre and Kim Sengupta
The Foreign Office yesterday angrily denied that Britain had been tipped off by Israeli agents before the killing of a Hamas commander in a luxury Dubai hotel by a team which included assassins using UK passports.
The British Government insisted that it only knew about the role of the passports just hours before it was revealed in a news conference held by the Dubai police last Monday. It has offered new passports to six dual Israeli-British nationals whose names appeared on the “fraudulent” passports on which the assassins travelled. The latest moves came as European and US security sources suggested that serious questions were being raised inside and outside the Israeli intelligence services after what is being increasingly regarded as the “hugely problematic” consequences of the assassination of Mahmoud al-Mabhouh.
Dubai police say they are “99 per cent if not 100 per cent” certain that Mossad was behind the execution. There has been no official confirmation or denial from Israel. But officials in Jerusalem are said to have indicated to their US counterparts that the assassination, and the use of false Western passports by the hit squad, has raised concern among other “friendly services”.
The sources say that some senior Israeli officials have suggested the operation is being viewed as “flawed” and “amateurish”, given the fact that the Emirates police and intelligence service, who are not regarded as among the elite in the field, have been able to put together a detailed picture of what happened, and point the finger directly at Israel after agents allowed themselves to be captured in CCTV footage and left a trail of documentation.
In the past Mossad, in most cases, had been able to cover its tracks after carrying out successful overseas assassination missions, giving it deniability even when all the indications were that the service was responsible. “On this occasion that is not the case, there were too many loose ends left behind,” said a US official. “The way it was done was certainly dramatic, with a large cast. But in the security world these things, if they have to be done, are done with as little drama as possible.”
Reacting to a Daily Mail report that the British Government had had a tip off “very, very briefly” before the assassination last month, the FCO declared: “Any suggestion that we knew anything about the murder in Dubai before it happened, including about the misuse of British passports, is completely untrue.”
The statement added: “As we have said already, the Dubai authorities told us about the role of British passports on 15 February, several hours before their press conference. We told them the following day that the passports used were fraudulent. The head of the Dubai police has also made clear that embassies were not contacted until shortly before the identity of the suspects was revealed.”
Meanwhile the British embassy in Tel Aviv told Reuters that consular staff had contacted five of the six British passport holders living in Israel whose identities were used to offer them new documents. It said the purpose was to prevent their inadvertent arrest because of the alert by Interpol, which has circulated details of those wanted in connected with the hotel slaying.
Embassy spokesman Raffi Shamir said that staff had reached all the affected British passport holders except one, Melvyn Adam Mildiner. Earlier this week, shortly after it was revealed his identity had been used, Mr Mildiner expressed shock and anxiety.
With debate about the Dubai operation still prominent in the Israeli media, some commentators have reported that Israel is confident that the operation will not cause a protracted diplomatic row. But one veteran mainstream commentator Yoel Marcus in Haaretz questioned whether the operation was itself wise, adding: “On the assumption that every victim of assassination has a replacement, is the assassination worth the revenge, which is sometimes very cruel?”
Iran in the cross-hairs: Haaretz
If anyone still had doubts about an imminent conflict with Iran, it was removed this week by the arrival of the U.S. army chief in Israel and the threats from the Iranian president and Hezbollah secretary-general.
Something sinister is in the air.
If the international community’s collision course with Tehran leads to harsh sanctions meant to halt its nuclear program, the spring and summer months will be especially sensitive. It would be impossible to rule out a scenario in which the increasing tension leads to all-out open war. Tehran and Jerusalem regularly exchange threatening messages via various channels, but with Beirut, Gaza and Damascus in the middle, the situation is liable to get out of control.
At a time when Iran is deliberately inflaming the situation, the U.S. is seeking to cool things down. Interestingly and strangely enough, the two rivals seem to have a similar read on Israel’s current role in the drama. Both believe Israel could lose patience and implement its policy of “a leadership gone mad” that former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert took great pride in during the Second Lebanon War and Operation Cast Lead in Gaza. This belief serves as the backdrop for Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s remarks implying that Israel is readying for war (which Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has steadfastly denied) and for Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah’s threats to attack strategic infrastructure in Israel.
The possibility of unleashing Israel’s “bull in a china shop” approach is also behind the recent flurry of visits from senior American officials, including the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Adm. Michael Mullen, and U.S. Vice President Joe Biden, who arrives next week. The visits are intended to explain to the Netanyahu government why an attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities is unwanted at the moment ? and also to clarify what Israel seeks in return for sitting quietly and allowing the Obama administration to build an international coalition to impose sanctions on Iran.
Mullen landed here at the beginning of the week – on the hottest day of Israel’s winter – with an unambiguous warning. His visit opened with a brief press conference at the U.S. embassy in Tel Aviv, to which journalists were summoned on short notice, and that was characterized by something of a culture clash. Some of the Israeli journalists showed up in T-shirts, and Mullen seemed a bit surprised by the casual atmosphere and by the strident tone of the questions.
Despite this, he stuck to the message he was sent here to convey: that he is concerned by the “unexpected consequences” of an Israeli attack on Iran. Mullen’s remarks, made in public even before his first meeting with his Israeli hosts, immediately dictated the tone of Israeli media would adopt to cover his visit.
In recent weeks, especially since its announcement that it has begun production of 20-percent-enriched uranium, Iran has not even bothered to claim its nuclear program is intended for peaceful means, as it had in the past. Iran’s true intentions are clear to everyone from Washington to London to Beijing. China, however, is more concerned about its oil supply than the Iranian threat, and sees its refusal to impose sanctions as an effective means of challenging U.S. power.
It’s possible the concern over an Israeli strike has come too soon. Israel will only attack as a last resort. But if Iran continues its enrichment and the U.S. fails to consolidate sanctions, or if the sanctions are ineffective down the line, the military option becomes more relevant. In this case, Israel also has more legitimacy to act in self-defense and cannot be blamed for the failure of diplomacy.
This week, Nasrallah broadcast another message from his bunker and, for the first time, mentioned the “axis of evil.” He warned of a four-pronged attack against Israel by Iran, Syria, Hezbollah and Hamas ? which those parties have avoided outlining explicitly until now in an effort to maintain the appearance of independence. At the same time, Nasrallah presented Hezbollah’s planned response to Israel’s “Dahiya doctrine” (a term used to describe a conventional army targeting civilian infrastructure used by terrorists) by saying his group would destroy Ben-Gurion International Airport and attack Tel Aviv.
EDITOR: The Israeli PR offensive
While it is difficult to change reality, Israel crucially believes that the main task is to change perceptions. This line has worked for many decades: argue your line un til all are tired, pay and support political allies, pump the Zionist Lobby in each country, and the rest is history. Again, after a major blunder which has followed so many blunders, Israel is gearing its mighty prpaganda machine, with agents everywhere, trying to cleanse its tarnished image. Will it work this time?
Israeli agents go on PR offensive: The Independent
By Ben Lynfield in Jerusalem
Israel is sending more agents abroad, this time on an even more difficult mission: to project a peaceful and positive image of the Jewish state.
As part a new government campaign every citizen travelling overseas becomes an ambassador. But launched in the same week that images aired of suspected Mossad agents preparing to assassinate a Hamas leader in a luxury Dubai hotel, the timing couldn’t be worse.
The only training necessary for those wanting to be part of what Information Minister Yuli Edelstein is calling the “Israel Explanatory Force”, is perusing a government website or pamphlets handed out as they board planes. The literature stresses Israel is a peace-loving state that developed the cherry tomato and won the Eurovision song contest in 1998 – information Israelis are invited to share during their overseas vacations and business trips.
There has been growing government concern about Israel’s image, but the ministry believes the image problem stems not from Israel’s actions towards the Palestinians, but from the perception it is a backwards country.
In one TV ad, a fictional British journalist leads a camel, a “typical Israeli animal used to transport water, merchandise and ammunition”, through the desert. A Hebrew voice-over cuts in: “Sick of seeing how we’re portrayed in the world? You can change the picture.”
But Uri Avnery, head of the dovish Gush Shalom group, said: “The only thing that can change the image of Israel is to make peace and stop assassinating people abroad”.
Dubai killing awakes ghosts of assassinations past: BBC
Jeremy Bowen assesses the fall-out in the Middle East from the alleged assassination of Hamas commander Mahmoud al-Mabhouh by Mossad agents in a luxury Dubai hotel.
“Shame you are not filming on a Friday,” said a local resident.
Jimmy, the BBC cameraman, was trying to get some decent pictures of the Dubai skyline, but there was a haze that was not helping.
“Why Friday?” we asked.
“Well, there is less building on a Friday,” he said, “so the air is not so dusty.”
Even with Dubai’s well-advertised economic problems there is still a lot of construction going on, by the standards of most places.
This is my first proper trip to Dubai since the late 90s and it is unrecognisable.
Back in the 1960s, according to my uncle who was here with the British army, the runway lights at Dubai airport were barrels of burning tar.
The long war, the century or so of conflict between Arabs and Jews, cannot be defeated by property developers
When I was here first, on my way to Afghanistan in the late 80s, a fairly compact city was surrounded by a sweep of open desert, which just is not there any more.
They must have poured tens of millions of tonnes of concrete to build this sprawling city state.
As I write, I can see a burnt orange sun setting behind the Burj Khalifa, the new skyscraper that is the world’s highest building. It is extraordinarily tall.
Acres of gardens and golf courses in Dubai are green and lush, in a place with almost no rain, thanks to hugely expensive desalination plants.
The climate is wonderful right now, but in the summer it is appallingly hot and humid.
Never mind, everywhere is air-conditioned, especially the indoor ski slope, where they make real indoor snow and have a black run for experts.
‘Unobtainable dream’
Love it or hate it, they have tamed nature to build an incredible city.
Perhaps they never thought they could tame the Middle East too, though minds that could conceive the Burj Khalifa are not short of ambition.
But if not tame it, they were hoping to insulate this place from its dark, violent ways.
The assassination of the Hamas official Mahmoud al-Mabhouh proves that was one unobtainable dream.
The long war, the century or so of conflict between Arabs and Jews, cannot be defeated by property developers.
Its capacity to generate and export violence is unparalleled in today’s world.
Was Mr Mabhouh killed by Mossad, the Israeli secret service?
I do not know. But there is circumstantial evidence that he was.
Bloody hands
And he was an enemy of Israel, according to the press there, involved with arms shipments into Gaza.
In the kind of phrase Israelis use, he had Jewish blood on his hands.
Hamas gave him a hero’s funeral.
Mossad has form. Assassination has been one of its specialities since the time that Israel was killing Nazis in the 1950s.
If Israel was behind the assassination, then its Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu might well be troubled by the ghosts of assassinations past.
In 1997, during his first stint as prime minister, he authorised a Mossad hit on an up-and-coming man in Hamas, a Palestinian called Khaled Meshaal.
Two Mossad agents approached Mr Meshaal as he was walking down a street in Amman, the Jordanian capital.
They sprayed poison into his ear, but they bungled their escape and were found to be carrying false Canadian passports.
King Hussein, who hadn’t long since signed a peace treaty with Israel, was outraged. For him, it wasn’t just a breach of trust.
Rumours started that he was somehow complicit in the attack. With Mr Meshaal close to death, King Hussein demanded that Israel gave his doctors the formula for the poison and the antidote.
To get their two captured agents back, the Israelis was forced to release dozens of Jordanian and Palestinian prisoners.
They included the spiritual leader of Hamas sheikh Ahmed Yassin. He was a thorn in Israel’s side until he too was assassinated in an air strike in Gaza in 2003
Khaled Meshaal survived and is now the most senior political figure in Hamas, living behind heavy security in Damascus.
Netanyahu’s ‘fiasco’
So it was not a good time for Mr Netanyahu.
King Hussein refused to see him when he went to Amman to apologise and the then head of Mossad was forced to resign.
Israelis viewed the affair as a costly fiasco. It was one of the factors that contributed to a comprehensive defeat of Mr Netanyahu in an election two years later.
There is one very significant difference between then and now.
In Amman in 1997 the would-be assassins were apprehended, along with their false Canadian papers.
This time round the alleged assassins’ faces have been published, along with their assumed names.
If they are Israeli agents, or freelance killers, then their identities have been blown.
But they are not in custody and that makes it much harder to prove that Israel did it.
If Israel had nothing to do with the killing, or with the theft of the identities of six British-Israelis for the alleged assassins’ passports, then Mr Netanyahu, now in his second term, has nothing to worry about.
But if Mossad is responsible, and that is the assumption in Israel as well as here in Dubai, then he has some sweating to do in the next few weeks.
Deputy FM: No proof Israel tied to Dubai hit: Haaretz
Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon said on Saturday that there was no evidence tying Israel to the assassination of Hamas strongman Mahmoud al-Mabhouh in Dubai last month.
“I don’t forsee a crisis with European allies because there is nothing that ties Israel to the assassination,” Ayalon said in Rehovot.
“Britain, France and Germany all share our interests in the battle against global terror, therefore there will be no crisis, instead our relations [with these countries] will continue to deepen,” Ayalon added.
Ealier Saturday, the Arabic-language daily newspaper Al Bayan reported that the 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 daily on Saturday quoted Dubai police chief Dahi Khalfan Tamim as saying.
The newspaper did not provide further details. Senior Hamas commander al-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 convince Israel to officially apologize for the assassination of al-Mabhouh in their country.
Egyptian diplomats told Al-Arab newspaper that the Emirate nation asked Egypt to formally reprimand Israel for the hit in Dubai.
Dubai police have released photographs of the 11 suspects. The international criminal police organization Interpol said on Thursday it had issued “red notices” for the suspects’ arrest in any of its 188 member countries.
Dubai’s police chief said on Thursday he believed Israeli agents were responsible for killing al-Mabhouh, a senior member of the Islamist group which rules Gaza, and called for the Mossad spy agency’s chief to be arrested if its responsibility was proven.
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 cloned passports from Ireland, France and Germany.
Earlier, Britain denied that Israeli agents tipped off British intelligence that they were going to carry out an ‘overseas operation’ using fake British passports.
A Mossad operative said the U.K. Foreign Office was also told hours before Mahmoud al-Mabhouh was murdered in his hotel room by a hit squad the had entered the United Arab Emirates using fake foreign documents, the Daily Mail reported on Friday.
The tip-off did not say who the target would be or even where the hit squad would be in action. A British security source who met the Mossad agent was quoted by the Mail as saying:
“This is a serving member of Israeli intelligence. He says the British Government was told very, very briefly before the operation what was going to happen.”
The source added: “There was no British involvement and they didn’t know the name of the target. But they were told these people were travelling on UK passports.”
According to the paper’s source, the tip-off was not a request for permission to use British passports but more a “courtesy call” to let the security services know “a situation” might result from the operation. The Mossad man said Israeli intelligence chiefs understood British authorities would have to “slap them on the wrist” and added:
“The British government has to be seen to be going through the motions.”
French FM: Dubai killing proves need for a Palestinian state: Haaretz
The Foreign Minister of France said in an interview published Saturday that the January assassination of Hamas commander Mahmoud al-Mabhouh in Dubai demonstrates the need for an immediate recognition of a Palestinian state.
“[The case] shows the need for peace and a Palestinian state, immediately,” Bernard Kouchner told the French Journal du Dimanche.
Kouchner added that the assassination, which Hamas believes was carried out by the Israeli Mossad, underscores the need for peace in the Middle East.
The French foreign minister also commented on Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas’ acceptance of a United States proposal to mediate indirect talks with Israel, saying that he could envision the establishment of a Palestinian state even before the borders were negotiated.
“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,” Kouchner said in the interview.
Kouchner’s comments came ahead of a visit to Paris by Abbas next week, and after Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad said he could see an independent Palestinian state in 2011 regardless of whether peace talks have advanced with Israel.
“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,” Fayyad said in an interview published in French media on Friday.
Abbas is due to meet with Kouchner in Paris on February 21 and with French President Nicolas Sarkozy the following day, a senior Palestinian official said this week on condition of anonymity.
Syria warns Israel new Mideast war would be catastrophic: Haaretz
Syria’s prime minister warned Israel Saturday that any new Middle East war would be catastrophic for the region and beyond.
Premier Naji al-Otari told reporters after meeting with French Prime Minister Francois Fillon in Damascus, that a new war will have dangerous repercussions not only in the Middle East but also on the international level.
Syria’s foreign minister warned Israel earlier this month that any new war would reach Israeli cities.
On Friday Syrian President Bashar al-Assad met with the French Prime Minister for discussing bilateral political, economic and cultural relations, Syria’s official news agency SANA reported Saturday.
The leaders, who met late on Friday, also discussed the political developments in the region and the stalled peace process.
During the talks, al-Assad highlighted “the need for European countries to assume an active role to force Israel to commit to the requirements of peace,” SANA reported.
The meeting was attended by Syrian Foreign Minister Walid al-Moallem as well as the delegation accompanying Fillon.
French Economic Minister Christine Lagarde and Culture Minister Frederic Mitterrand accompanied Fillon for the 24-hour visit, along with a delegation of top businessmen.
A number of agreements are expected to be signed Saturday between the two governments to boost the economic relations between the two countries.
The bilateral trade is estimated to be around 800 million euros.
Syrian-French relations have witnessed growing development since al-Assad visited Paris in July 2008 and French President Nicolas Sarkozy visited Syria a couple of months later.
Fillon will head to Jordan late on Sunday, where he is due to hold talks on Sunday.
Geoffrey Wheatcroft: Our differing approaches to terror: The Independent
The word ‘racist’ is overused, but when dealing with terrorists it is all too accurate
Israel “is not a country about aggression and targeted assassination, it’s a country about science, hi-tech and shopping malls”. This arresting definition was proposed on Channel 4 News on Thursday evening by Rami Igra, a former Mossad agent, although he rather spoiled the effect by what he said later.
In fact, everyone assumes that Mossad did it. The authorities in Dubai believe the Israeli secret service assassinated Mahmoud al-Mabhouh, the Hamas official, last month. The British Government agrees that it was Mossad, or at least wagged a finger at the Israeli ambassador because British citizens’ passports stolen in Israel had been used by the hit squad.
And most Israelis, with varying degrees of approval, agree. Igra contradicted himself by adding that the battle line nowadays wasn’t the Maginot Line or Stalingrad (not an argument one had recently heard) but the streets of London and Jerusalem, and that in this great conflict “Western civilisation” was obliged to find new methods – “including targeted assassinations”.
Not that this was a revelation. For years Israel has openly proclaimed that it will take revenge on those who kill its citizens. Those responsible for the 1972 Munich massacre were all hunted down and killed, along with the odd bystander. The “targeted killing” of suspected terrorists has long been avowed policy. A few years ago, the then deputy prime minister, Ehud Olmert, said he did not exclude the option of assassinating the elected president of the Palestinian Authority.
All of which highlights a blatant double standard, between the treatment of terrorists of different nationalities and hues. The word “racist” is overused, but in this context it applies all too accurately.
Tomorrow evening we can watch the remarkable spectacle of a television programme about Jesus presented by Gerry Adams, the impenitent former leader of the IRA who was responsible for some of its worst atrocities. This is one more case where television companies as well as politicians weigh with two weights and judge with two measures.
Some years ago, the contrarian Belfast journalist John O’Farrell (not a Protestant unionist) was writing about the career of Martin McGuinness, which had taken him from head of the IRA to minister of education. As O’Farrell said, thanks to the Belfast agreement and settlement, “the children of Northern Ireland will have their futures in the hands of a man who, if he were a Serb, would be indicted at The Hague”.
Or try another comparison, the respective fate of two terrorist leaders. One is a white Catholic Irishman, the other a dark-skinned Muslim Palestinian; one is asked to present a programme on Jesus, the other is brutally bumped off – an assassination which, like all such by Mossad, will never be publicly condemned by the US. Suppose that, at the height of the IRA violence, Adams and McGuinness had been the objects of “targeted killing” by MI6. It’s interesting to speculate what the American reaction would have been.
The British media are sometimes accused of a bias against Israel. But would Channel 4 ask an unrepentant Islamist terrorist who had killed ordinary Israelis to present a programme on the Prophet Mohamed? Or, for that matter, Ratko Mladic to talk about Orthodox Christianity and the Serbian monastic tradition?
This comparison – the question of why some terrorists are more terrorist than others – has indeed been addressed before, by Tony Blair. It was highly pertinent at the time he was doing everything he could to appease the IRA with one hand while the other was waging a savage “war on terror” in the Middle East.
And he addressed it with his usual glib speciousness concealing a feeble case. “I don’t think,” he said, “you can compare the political demands of republicanism with the political demands of this terrorist ideology we are facing now.” Why not? Why is there any difference in kind between the ideologies, as well as the methods, of Adams and al-Mabhouh?
Compare and contrast, as exam papers say. The IRA and its front organisation Sinn Fein want to undo the partition of Ireland that was effected by the creation of a separate province of Northern Ireland in 1920. To that end the IRA deliberately murdered many people, including ordinary Protestants, and that end, if not the means, “is shared by many of our citizens”, Blair says, as well as by millions of Irish Americans.
Hamas wants to undo the partition of Palestine that was effected by the creation of a separate state of Israel in 1948. To that end it has deliberately murdered many people, including ordinary Jews. And that end, if not the means, is shared by hundreds of millions of Arabs and Muslims as well as others in Asia and Africa. Why does their support not equally validate the objective?
When Blair spoke he was still prime minister. He has since gone on to highly paid fresh fields and lucrative pastures new. One of his supposed jobs is as envoy to “to promote an end to the [Israeli-Palestinian] conflict in conformity with the road-map”, which was one of the justifications with which he previously sold the Iraq war to his deluded followers.
He has totally failed in that role, as the eminent Israeli historian Avi Shlaim observes, not least because of “his own personal limitations; his inability to grasp that the fundamental issue in this tragic conflict is not Israeli security but Palestinian national rights”. Shlaim adds that this is precisely what has endeared Blair to the Israeli establishment, so that at the very time, a year ago when the people of Gaza were mourning their dead, Blair received an award from Tel Aviv university as “laureate for the present time dimension in the field of leadership”, accompanied by a modest cheque for $1m.
As Shlaim says, the award was absurd in view of Blair’s “silent complicity in Israel’s continuing crimes against the Palestinian people” – but it was no less so in view of his indulgence towards Adams and McGuinness.
But then perhaps all this is too elaborate. It might be that the shade of Mahmoud al-Mabhouh, and for that matter of any of the Taliban men recently extirpated by CIA drones, could contemplate tomorrow night’s repulsive programme and simply ask, like Ali G: “Is it ‘cos I is black?”