| Doubt and certainty – follow up
By Israel Shamir With Sunday Times’ disclosure of the Israeli security services’ involvement in the slaughter of the Russian kids in Tel Aviv, the clever by half plot began to unravel. From the first moment, there were reasonable doubts that it was an act of Palestinian terror. The crime had the bloody fingerprints of the Jewish supremacist all over it. It was perpetrated on Sabbath eve, when a ‘good Jew’ is not supposed to hang around a discotheque. It washed the Palestinian blood off Jewish hands with expendable Russian blood. It forced the hand of Arafat to surrender to Israeli conditions of a cease-fire. It created a miraculously ‘restrained’ General Sharon withholding his justifiable fury and sparing malfeasants. It pushed a hence neutral Russian community into the embrace of Arab-haters. The Qui Bono principle of criminal detection led directly to the high rooms of Israeli politics, who profited hugely from the explosion. An American activist voiced the initial suspicions noting that ‘the bombing took place the day of Husseini's funeral when the IDF had so "generously" left East Jerusalem and when spirits were so high at the demo. And then there was the convenient timing of this horrendous crime; exactly what Israel needed to win over public opinion’. The Sunday Times now reports that the impossible feat of delivering the bomber to the deep hinterland of Tel Aviv was done by a Shabak (Israeli Internal Secret Police) agent, al Nadi. Quoting a string of officials, an Israeli journalist Uzi Mahanaimi drew a portrait of a gullible Shabak agent who unwittingly became an accomplice in the murder. He supposedly understood the intentions of the bomber; but far too late. The Israeli Army spokesman also stressed innocence of al Nadi who did not know what he was doing. This scoop by The Sunday Times reminded me of a plot by the British thriller writer, Le Carre. When endangered by a pending disclosure, secret services usually prefer to leak their own doctored version of events. The damning report of the English paper appears to be an Israeli damage control procedure. Many Israel-based foreign journalists recently received additional detailed information from usually knowledgeable sources. The sources claimed that the suspected bomber Said Hotari worked for a branch of Jordanian security services until his defection to Israel. He apparently collaborated with Shabak, and that is why his Israeli visa was duly extended. This fact of visa extension was reported by Israeli newspapers before the court slapped a full publicity ban on the case. Hotari was probably unaware of his deadly load, as the explosion was caused by remote control. They also claim that there was an additional reason for the peculiar choice of the site: the nearby David Intercontinental Hotel had an unusual guest, the German Foreign Minister Joshka Fischer. It is not a popular hotel with high-ranking guests. Though it is a five star operation, it is not located in the most fashionable area of Tel Aviv. Purely by ‘chance’, Herr Fischer became a star witness of the outrage. He was emotionally swept away to the Israeli side and became an important player in the following diplomatic game that resulted in imposing the cease fire on Israeli terms. Ruthless use of terrorism for political and tactical purposes has always been a traditional tool of Israeli secret service operatives. Provocation is not below their dignity: in 1950s, in the infamous Lavon Affair, some local Jews enlisted by Israel were apprehended in Cairo while placing bombs in the American and British consulates. They tried to present their bombing as ‘acts of Islamic terror’ and cause hostility between Arabs and Americans. Israeli agents did not hesitate to kill Jews ‘for the cause’. Thus, on November 25, 1940, the Jewish Agency men sunk SS Patria and killed 250 Jewish immigrants. They did it in order to ensure sympathy to the plight of Jews who were refused entry to British-run Palestine. The perpetrators of the outrage admitted their crime in Israeli media a few years ago. The explosive charge was too powerful, they explained. Joachim Martillo recently wrote of possible Zionist connection with the bloody anti-Jewish riots in the Polish town of Kielce after the WWII. The riots sent a wave of Jewish immigrants to the shores of Palestine. Israeli bombings of Baghdad synagogues are by now a well known and declassified fact. They caused mass immigration of Iraqi Jews to Israel. In a more recent development, just over a year ago, Moscow was shaken by dreadful explosions that caused multiple casualties. Unknown terrorists exploded whole residential apartment buildings in the Russian capital. The explosions were blamed on Chechens, and brought about the Second Chechnya war, the destruction of Grozny, thousands of dead and wounded, but more importantly, they served as a turning point in Russia’s relations with Israel and the Muslim world. Russia’s media enforced the image of Islamic terrorism and of Israel as a guardian and ally of Russia. ‘We have a common enemy, Islamic terrorism’, was the line reiterated by Israeli politicians visiting Moscow, be it Sharansky, Lieberman or Peres. The comparisons of Chechnya with Palestine became commonplace in the Jewish-owned Russian press. The old Zionist dream of creating confrontation between Russia and Dar al Islam almost became true. Until now, the bombers have not been found. Russia’s influential Nezavisimaya Gazette openly expresses doubts of a Chechen connection to the explosions. Moreover, I am ready to risk anger of my readers and claim that the Palestinians are miscast for the role of terrorists. Surely some of them try to act the part the Jews gave them and dabble in ‘terror’. Their ‘terror’ is so timid, that a careful and objective observer would just pooh-pooh an idea of the ‘Palestinian terrorists’. Consider a suicide bomber, for instance, a quiet sophomore at Bir Zeit University, Dia Tawil. He exploded near a bus full of Israelis. He died while only a few Israelis were lightly wounded. Many suicide bombers die without killing a single Israeli, only a few manage to wound and kill. Even in their most successive and lethal wave of 1996, all of them together could not beat a single Jewish terrorist act, bombing of King David Hotel in 1947 with its 92 victims. When Jews deal in terror, their enemies die in droves. That is how they operated before the state of Israel was established. And that is how the Israeli state operates to this day. It is meaningless to even compare the Palestinian ‘terror’ with the organized terror of the state of Israel. They are not in the same league. For Israel, the killing of a hundred refugees in Kana, or bombing a school, or blasting a besieged Beirut for two months, or assassinating a leader, or strafing the USS Liberty, or shooting down a passenger airliner is a normal occurrence. Yet the Jewish dominated media machine manages to hang the terrorist label on the Palestinians. The Palestinians are inefficient killers because they have the peaceful souls of peasants and martyrs. They do not go out to kill, they go to die. They are similar to the kamikaze, the Divine Wind of Japan. The Japanese suicide flyers loaded their tiny planes with explosives, prayed to God, wrote a poem comparing themselves with falling petals of wild cherry, tied a white band over their forehead and took off to ram the American aircraft carriers in the blue waves of Pacific. More often than not they caused no damage, but they scared the hell out of McArthur. He could not understand this willingness to sacrifice one’s life for a higher cause. Nor can Israelis. The unusually ‘productive’ explosion at Dolphi just did not feel right from the start. We still do not know the answer, but the doubts grow. Some supporters of the Palestinian cause rushed to support the Israeli version and condemned the discotheque explosion. They were rewarded: the usually reluctant Jewish-owned American press published their letters and articles. In my view, in such dubious cases, when no known Palestinian organization claimed the act in real time, it is not wise to dish out blame hastily. |
