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Haaretz Reveals African Nations Israel Secretly Approached to Accept Expelled Refugees

by Richard Silverstein on June 10, 2013 · 2 comments

African refugees protest outside Netanyahu’s residence

During a lawsuit by an Israeli NGO against the State opposing its plans to expel African refugees from Israel, attorneys for the State revealed that it had approached several African countries in an attempt to negotiate their acceptance of 2,000 Eritreans it planned to expel. Because of the supposed delicacy of the subject, Israel refused to name the countries. Apparently, they might get cold feet if their involvement was made public (and justifiably so!).

Now, Haaretz, has exposed the identity of those countries in this throw-away line towards the end of an article on the subject:

Hadas, who was appointed to coordinate talks with African states a year ago, has personally approached several African states, offering that Israel establish agricultural farms in their territories for refugees from Eritrea. The obvious benefit to the African states is Israeli assistance in promoting agriculture. The states included, South Sudan, Ethiopia and probably Uganda.

This is one of those situations in which you can’t tell whether the exposure of these names was a deliberate attempt to circumvent government censorship (or a gag order) or whether there was an error of some sort in naming the names. At any rate, it sure did bury the lede.

But the Israeli public is the better for knowing which African nation is willing to sell its principles (if it has any) for a mess of porridge. These states should be ashamed. Israel is violating international law in expelling refugees. Thus, the African states are aiding and abetting Israel’s impunity.

Not to mention, that one possibility Israel is exploring would send Eritreans to be settled in Ethiopia. I can’t think of a stupider idea. These countries fought a vicious, bloody, long-term war in which hundreds of thousands were killed on both sides. Now Israel thinks it can send Eritreans to live in the country of the enemy??

If Israel is thinking of sending the Eritreans to South Sudan, that too is idiotic. Israel already has thousands of South Sudanese who emigrated in order to escape the violence and poverty of that country. Now, Israel would send Eritreans to live in a country whose own residents have already fled to Israel?

The benefit Israel is offering is minuscule: it promises agricultural aid over a five-year period to teach the expellees how to farm. That’s it.

Israel Bribes Unnamed African Country to Accept African Refugees in Return for Military Aid

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Top-Secret IAF WMD Unit Exposed

by Richard Silverstein on June 9, 2013 · 9 comments

in Mideast Peace

Screenshot from Amuton announcing the reunion of personnel from the IAF’s Unit 155

It’s one thing when a brave whistleblower like Edward Snowden musters the courage to expose some of the most destructive secrets this country owns. That takes enormous nerve and dedication to principle. It’s quite another when someone within the belly of the beast spills the beans on secrets which they should know better than to expose. That’s mere sloppiness. But regardless of the way the secret is exposed, the exposure itself is worthwhile because it tells us more about the secret life of the national security state: in this case, Israel.

Amuton, the publication of the Israeli Air Force veterans association, listed a series of reunions for personnel who served in various units. One in particular (page 4) was striking because, to the knowledge of Israelis I consulted (including this published reference at the Fresh forum), it’s never been mentioned publicly before. It is Unit 155. The copy from Amuton says it existed “from 1968-1987.”

A query to a highly-placed Israeli source knowledgeable about military and intelligence matters elicited the news that Unit 155 was “nuclear-related.” In 1987, it was replaced by a “more modern” unit with a “similar mission.”

So let’s do a little speculating: in 1967, Israel hurriedly produced its first crude nuclear device. It was meant as a fail-safe weapon that would offer Israel a “last chance” in the event it lost the 1967 War. Any IAF unit that was nuclear-related and created the year following, in 1968, would have to have involved the delivery of Israel’s nuclear weapons to enemy targets. Thus, the unit has to have been something like the USAF’s Strategic Air Command.

I want to ask you: if you lived in a real democracy, why would such a country find it necessary to maintain secrecy about a military unit which ceased to exist 25 years before? Can you imagine, if you’re American, the U.S. trying to keep secret that SAC exists? Of course, there are many intelligence functions that the U.S. does keep secret as does Israel. There may or may not be legitimate reasons for doing so. But a unit the equivalent of SAC seems an awfully big elephant to conceal from an entire country.

I don’t know why the unit was disbanded or what replaced it.

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IDF Unit 8200 Cyberwar Veterans Developed NSA Snooping Technology

by Richard Silverstein on June 8, 2013 · 13 comments

in Mideast Peace, Politics & Society

A little known footnote to the brewing PRISM scandal, in which the NSA has for years harvested Americans’ personal data via eight of the largest social media and technology companies in the world, involves special technology developed by two Israeli companies founded by veterans of the IDF’s cyber-warfare Unit 8200:

If America’s tech giants didn’t ‘participate knowingly’ in the dragnet of electronic communication, how does the NSA get all of their data?

One theory: the NSA hired two secretive Israeli companies to wiretap the U.S. telecommunications network.

boeing narus Verint and Narus created programs which offered the NSA backdoors to all the major U.S. telecommuications and technology companies including Facebook, Microsoft, Google. That’s how the companies could deny that they explicitly knew or approved of PRISM’s harvesting their data:

Both Verint and Narus were founded in Israel in the 1990s. Both provide monitoring and intercept capabilities to service providers and government organizations, promoting claims that their equipment can access and retain large amounts of information on a vast number of targets.

From Robert Poe of Wired:

Narus’ product, the Semantic Traffic Analyzer, is a software application that runs on standard IBM or Dell servers using the Linux operating system. It’s renowned within certain circles for its ability to inspect traffic in real time on high-bandwidth pipes, identifying packets of interest as they race by at up to 10 Gbps.

“*Anything that comes through (an internet protocol network), we can record,” Steve Bannerman, marketing vice president of Narus, a Mountain View, California company, said. “We can reconstruct all of their e-mails along with attachments, see what web pages they clicked on, we can reconstruct their (voice over internet protocol) calls.”

With a telecom wiretap the NSA only needs companies like Microsoft, Google, and Apple to passively participate while the agency to intercepts, stores, and analyzes their communication data. The indirect nature of the agreement would provide tech giants with plausible deniability.

And having a foreign contractor bug the telecom grid would mean that the NSA gained access to most of the domestic traffic flowing through the U.S. without technically doing it themselves.

This would provide the NSA, whose official mission is to spy on foreign communications, with plausible deniability regarding domestic snooping.

Thus, the arrangement is nifty for all those involved…except for those Americans who are victims of this intelligence shell game.

Let’s now get to Unit 8200 and its role: this IDF entity is responsible for Israel’s cyber-warfare capability. It developed Stuxnet and Flame along with its colleagues in the NSA, who also shared “credit.” Unit 8200 veterans have founded numerous start-ups that commercialize their military applications for security use by companies, intelligence agencies, and entire nations:

In 2007 a former commander of the highly secret Unit 8200 (i.e. Israel’s NSA) told Forbes that the technology of Comverse (i.e. the company that owns Verint) is based on Unit 8200 technology.

One of the founders of Verint, Jacob “Kobi” Alexander, is a former Israeli intelligence officer. [ed., this portrait of Alexander's alleged bank and stock fraud, which led him to seek refuge in Namibia, is instructive]

A co-founder and former chairmen [sic] of Narus, Ori Cohen, told Fortune in 2001 that his partners have done technology work for Israeli intelligence.

In 2011 another former chief of Unit 8200 acknowledged to the Israeli paper Haartez that high-tech firms around the world employ both Unit 8200 equipment and its veteran personnel.

From Bamford Wired (emphasis ours):

“Cautious estimates indicate that in the past few years… Unit 8200 veterans have set up some 30 to 40 high-tech companies, including 5 to 10 that were floated on Wall Street.” Referred to only as “Brigadier General B,” he added, “This correlation between serving in the intelligence Unit 8200 and starting successful high-tech companies is not coincidental: Many of the technologies in use around the world and developed in Israel were originally military technologies and were developed and improved by Unit veterans.”

Unfortunately, when it comes to riding roughshod over the rights of citizens, when it comes to developing and maintaining the national security state, it seems the IDF and its veterans are right in the thick of it. If the NSA ever needed any lessons taught, it had only to turn to Israeli cyber-warriors who’ve been given carte blanche in the war on terror to do whatever it takes to fight the “enemy,” whoever that may be.

The IDF has brought us targeted killings via drone and many other methods. Another Unit 8200 veteran created the financial services company Payoneer, whose bank-card product was used by the Mossad Dubai assassins who murdered Mahmoud al-Mabouh.

Now they bring us the means to spy on our own citizens without leaving any fingerprints. How convenient both for the NSA and companies involved. They don’t do anything, at least not actively. They are merely passive receptors for the dirty work done for them by our Israeli friends at Narus and Verint.

To which I say: if you want a society like Israel’s obsessed with national security and willing to pay any price for it, then don’t object to PRISM or the wholesale harvesting of virtually everything personal you might have (except your thoughts, which they haven’t figured out how to harvest yet). If this is not your vision of what society should be, then yell your head off.

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U.S. Exposes Location, Layout of Top-Secret Israeli Arrow 3 Missile Base

by Richard Silverstein on June 6, 2013 · 5 comments

in Mideast Peace

New Arrow 3 missile launchers to be built at Sdot Micha

As a follow-up to a post I wrote a few days ago, Cryptome has published maps and drawings of Israel’s top-secret Sdot Micha air base. This is where the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers will build an even more secret (until Jane’s Defense Weekly spilled the beans) underground launch facility for Israel’s newest generation of anti-ballistic missles, the Arrow 3. The purpose of the Arrow 3 which will be fully operational in their new base in 2015, will be to shoot down Iranian missiles that might carry the so far non-existent nuclear weapon meant to destroy Israel (if you believe Bibi Netanyahu).

The facility is to cost about $25-million to build. In December, the Washington Post revealed the U.S. is also building an entire new airbase at Nevatim for $100-million.

The Army Corps, in putting the project out for bid, included architectural drawings of the plans for the missile launch facility including a map of its location on the air base. Someone didn’t bother to think that Iran and Israel’s enemies would love to know such information. Now, the IDF generals are pissed as hell.

The U.S. has responded that it provided all the 1,000 pages of documentation to Israeli officials for review and that they approved publication. Sheera Frenkel reports this and Israel’s reply:

Israel continued to sharply disagree Thursday and to say the bidding proposal had revealed details that were to have been kept secret, including the location of the base, how the missiles are to be arrayed and even how thick the walls of the structures that would hold the missiles should be. One official had called the released details a blueprint for an attack.

“The Arrow 3 is not even formally operational. Why would we allow details of its composition to be published at this stage?” said an Israeli official close to the project. He declined to be identified because of the sensitivity of the project. He said Israel had expressed its shock at the publication of the base details to the United States through its own channels.

I have this terribly old-fashioned belief that the more secrets we know, the less likely those who harbor these secrets can use them to blow up the world. Or in this case, the Middle East. In that spirit, I’m happy to publish the map here.

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U.S. Built Replica of Iranian Underground Nuclear Facility, Destroyed It With New Bunker Buster

by Richard Silverstein on June 6, 2013 · 9 comments

in Mideast Peace, Politics & Society

gbu 57b bunker buster Alex Fishman, Yediot’s security correspondent, reports that the Pentagon spent millions of dollars to build an exact replica of an Iranian underground nuclear facility in the U.S. I presume we’re talking about the Fordo complex. It then armed a B-2 bomber with a new type of bunker buster bomb, which was used to great success in entirely destroying the facility. The goal of the field exercise was to prove to U.S. allies (read, “Israel”) that our military had sufficient weaponry and delivery capability to eliminate the Iranian nuclear threat if and when we decided that this was necessary. In other words, the mission was to remove any possibility that Bibi Netanyahu could argue that Israel had to do the job itself because the U.S. either couldn’t or wouldn’t.

Fishman describes in great detail the provisions for the test, indicating he had a very knowledgeable source. I’m guessing it was either Dan Shapiro or perhaps the U.S. military attaché. There is also a chance his sources were within the Israeli military: specifically those opposed to a unilateral Israeli strike. That might explain why, in his article he never mentions the test was meant to convince Israeli officials. He uses the oblique term, “friendly states” to describe Israel. This might indicate he was skirting the military censor.

Fishman reports the Pentagon test involved the most advanced version of bunker buster bomb, first developed in July 2012. It’s named the GBU 57B and is so heavy it can only be delivered by a B-2 bomber. The bomb succeeded in penetrating not only the dirt and rock protective barriers, but the concrete roof of the underground facility. What remained was an entirely obliterated complex.

Though the U.S. was loath to use one of the special new weapons because of its extremely high $3.5-million cost (the overall cost of developing the new weapon was $500-million). The military determined that it would be money well spent if it could persuade Israel to restrain itself from an attack. The size of the munition was six times greater than any other known bunker buster. It weighs 13 tons and has a speed of penetration two times greater than the speed of sound at a rate of accuracy of five meters.

American officials meeting with their Israeli counterparts have assured them that looming cuts in the defense budget will not effect this program, which is one of the president’s top priorities.

As with almost everything regarding Iran, Israel and the U.S., much is play-acting and posturing. This announcement too is part of the game. Obama understands the absolute mess an Israeli attack would cause. He can see how unstable the region is with Syria currently in shambles. The last thing he needs is yet another match lit under this tinderbox. So he tells his generals to prepare a grand field demonstration of American might that will persuade the IDF, and more importantly the war-party within the current government, that it doesn’t need to attack, since we can do the job quite nicely, thank you.

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Tel Aviv Youth Center Killings Were Anti-Gay Hate Crime

by Richard Silverstein on June 6, 2013 · 60 comments

in Mideast Peace

Nir Katz, one of the victims of the Bar Noar murders

It’s taken four years, thousands of hours of police work, and the most expensive investigation in the history of the Israeli police, but they finally appear to have cracked the case of the Tel Aviv gay community center killings in which a counselor and young member were killed by weapons fire that was sprayed throughout the room. Ten others were wounded that day with at least one paralyzed for life.

The unofficial Israeli police web forum has revealed further information (in case this is taken down due to a gag order here is a screenshot) on the attack, suspects, and the motive for it. At the time of the shooting, the center’s director was Shaul Ganon, 49, an 18-year activist in the gay community. According to the source posting to the web forum (which again is a police source and should be suspected of some anti-gay bias), Gannon was suspected of rape of a 15-year-old (minor). Brothers of the victim determined to get revenge. So they traveled from their home in Bnai Brak to the Center and attacked it with the intent to avenge the alleged crime.

UPDATE: Since I wrote the paragraph below, Walla reports that the suspects did have a Haredi upbringing, but that lately they’d abandoned it. They live in Pardes Katz, a largely Mizrahi “pocket” of Bnei Brak. Their family name sounds clearly Mizrahi as well. The hatred of homosexuality inherent in Jewish Orthodoxy rubbed off on them.

UPDATE I: This article implies that of the four suspects arrested, one is Ganon, two are the brothers of the victim, and the fourth is the gunman, hired by the brothers as the hit man. The latter reputedly has an organized crime background.

Shaul Ganon, who inadvertently set in motion the plot to attack Tel Aviv’s gay youth center.

Since the attackers didn’t harm Ganon, I have to suspect that the killers were motivated by a hate crime, since they attacked others who had nothing to do with Ganon or his crime. Given that the brothers are from Bnai Brak, a highly-Orthodox community, one may assume that the victim comes from such a background (though there are non-Haredi pockets in Bnai Brak where homophobia would be just as rampant). If so, this would only exacerbate the hatred the victim’s family would feel toward not only Ganon himself, but the entire gay culture, which they might feel victimized their brother.

The victim’s brothers are identified as Hagi (23) and Benjamin Felician (20).

According to an Israeli source active in the gay community, Ganon didn’t rape the boy, but rather had a consensual sexual relationship with him. The boy in turn “came out” to his family. And this is when the revenge plot developed. I should note that any sex act between a 46 year old man and a 15 year old might legally be construed as rape. But according to my source the relationship was consensual.

An Israeli commenter in the thread for this post notes that Ganon has been accused of similar unprofessional conduct with other young people. For that reason, he was dismissed from his post at the Center. So he appears to have a history of exploiting young gay men.

I want to make very clear that this information completely explodes the claim by the police that this was not a hate crime. It was indeed precisely that. But clearly claiming this merely involved revenge against an accused rapist (the police are falsely calling it “a personal vendetta”), it would allow the police to treat it as purely a sex crime and so limit the fall-out, if they could exclude homophobia as a motive.

Yonatan Boks, paralyzed in the Bar Noar shooting

To further rebut the police version: when the gunman couldn’t find Ganon at the Center (he wasn’t there that night), if he had gone home it would not have been a hate crime. But when he sprayed the entire hall indiscriminately with gunfire after he couldn’t find his intended victim, he killed for one reason and one reason alone: hatred of gays.

My source further notes that Ganon was one of those who inadvertently led to the notion of pinkwashing. He gave shelter to Palestinian gay youths who fled their families for fear of persecution or violence. In doing so, Gannon didn’t just offer shelter, he went further and heaped abuse on the homophobia of Palestinian culture and pointed to the superiority of Israeli attitudes on the subject.

This crime certainly will give the lie to that claim, since it proves there is a huge amount of gay hatred among the Israeli Orthodox community. You’ll recall there have been several acts of violence including a stabbing at a Jerusalem gay pride parade some years ago in which the attacker was Orthodox. Rabbis from the community have denounced the gay pride movement in vitriolic ways that would only exacerbate these sorts of reactions.

Ganon has also been arrested, though not, according to my source, for rape. But rather because he knew of the attack and attackers and did not divulge this to the authorities.

UPDATE: The Haredi news portal, HaTzofar, published two (Hebrew) articles justifying the Bar Noar murders. In the first, it judges Shaul Ganon a “Sodomite” rapist, as if the crime was proven. The second article is entitled, “This is Sodom.” Several Israelis have attempted to publish similarly vile comments here (which I’ve refused to publish). This is precisely the sort of environment out of which these murders were conceived.

UPDATE I: There is a claim by Israeli commenters in the thread here that attitudes toward homosexuality in the U.S. and Israel are comparable. That doesn’t accord with my own sense of the realities. Offering further support for my view, I note that the Pew Center released a new poll on global acceptance of homosexuality. The percentage of those accepting it in the U.S. is 60%. In Israel it is 40%.

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Israel SocialTV Video: Syrian Crisis and Iran’s Defunding of Hamas

by Richard Silverstein on June 6, 2013 · 1 comment

in Mideast Peace

This is my latest video for Israel SocialTV on the Syrian crisis. It specifically deals with Iran’s cut off of funds for Hamas and what it portends for Gaza and the Palestinians.

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Israeli Intelligence Services Budget Increased 26% Under Netanyahu

by Richard Silverstein on June 6, 2013 · 4 comments

in Mideast Peace

Israeli intelligence budget in billions of shekels (Haaretz)

Aluf Benn, writing in Haaretz (Hebrew here), reports an enormous increase in the budget of the Mossad and Shabak intelligence services during the Netanyahu regime. Funding increased 26% overall to a 2012 figure of $1.5-billion. If you think the intelligence budget is opaque here in the U.S., try figuring out how they spend money in Israel. My Israeli economics guru, Shir Hever, has often reminded me that the public budget is only a fraction of what these agencies really spend.

Like here, there is a black budget that is essentially off the books. Presumably the only officials who know what’s in this are senior U.S. intelligence officials themselves, the president and perhaps the Congressional oversight panel members. In Israel, there is even less accountability. As Benn points out, though the Treasury has offered numbers, it does not tell you anything about how it is spent or on what. That is left to your imagination. Further,the Mossad and Shabak are not funded as other government agencies are. In terms of oversight, hey are within the office of the prime minister. In budgetary terms, they are included under the defense ministry budget. At any rate, these arrangements give them extra “flexibility.” Figures can be fudged, projects can be massaged. All in the name of national security.

For example, a portion of the $400-million George Bush budgeted for covert ops against Iran is reported to have found its way to the Mossad for its cyberwarfare and assassination/sabotage campaign. None of that would ever show up in any publicly accessible data. We can reasonably assume that a great deal of that increase during the Bibi years has to do with ramping up intelligence operations against Iran. Not to mention, the campaign publicly announced by Yuval Diskin in 2007 to target on a broad scale Israeli Palestinian nationalist leaders (like Azmi Bishara and Ameer Makhoul) for prosecution. All this takes money. Lots of it.

Unlike here in the U.S., there is almost no oversight of the budget. Yes, there is an intelligence subcommittee of the Knesset which is nominally responsible. But no minister or MK would dare question the budget of the security services. They’d have their heads chopped off politically (or literally) if they did.

Ehud Olmert and Ariel Sharon apparently believed in economy, because their intelligence budgets were drastically less as you can see in the accompanying chart.