Israeli journalist Haggai Matar helped arrange for Ha’Ir to publish a profile (pdf in Hebrew) of me and Tikun Olam. Titled, Coming Soon to the Cells of Shabak, it is the first such profile ever printed in either English or Hebrew about my work. Naturally I’m delighted. Lital Grosman wrote the story after interviewing me for an unprecedented 90 minutes. Unlike most other such interviews, it was in depth, probing and she “got” what I do and why I do it.
Among the stories she referred to which I’ve reported are Anat Kamm, Mr. X., Immanuel Sonino, Ameer Makhoul, and Doron Zahavi (Captain George).
I’m working on an English translation and will publish that when it’s ready. In the meantime, only the Hebrew speakers among you can enjoy the contents.
The Polish court of appeals announced that the accused Mossad agent using the alias Uri Brodsky, will be tried in Germany for helping prepare an official passport for another agent, alias Michael Bodenheimer, who participated in the assassination plot against Hamas operative, Mahmoud al-Mabouh. He will be sent packing to Germany within the next ten days.
What is especially disturbing and ironic is that both Brodsky and Bodenheimer exploited German laws which allow family of Holocaust survivors to obtain German citizenship and travel documents on an expedited basis. They claimed that Bodenheimer’s family were Holocaust victims when nothing of the sort was true.
The ADL is very quick to castigate those who abuse the Holocaust for partisan political purposes. What about Israeli spy agencies who do so? Apparently, to the Mossad there is nothing sacred and there are no red lines or scruples that bar certain actions as long as the goal is, in its view, in Israel’s interest. That includes jeopardizing relations with several major western allies, the ejection of Mossad station chiefs from several of these countries, and placing in danger Israeli dual nationals whose identities were “appropriated” as part of the fraud leading up to the Dubai killing.
Now, the first chicken has come home to roost. Brodsky (not his real name) made the mistake of trying to visit Poland, where he was apprehended on a German arrest warrant. Despite his appeal of deportation and Israel’s insistence that its citizen should not be deported to Germany for prosecution, Poland has turned down his appeal and he will shortly be shipped back to Germany for a reckoning with justice.
I recently reported here that the Mossad stole the identity of an actual Israeli citizen with the genuine name Uri Brodetzki. The real Brodetzki appears, according to his parents to be student living in San Francisco. The family is none too happy with the Mossad placing their son’s life in jeopardy from any Hamas sympathizer who mistakes him for one of al-Mabouh’s killers. Gee, maybe the Mossad shoulda thought of that before they lifted their own nationals travel documents for their nefarious purposes.
Der Spiegel is reporting the unwelcome news that Germany may not be able to try Brodsky for espionage and may have to settle for a mild charge that would carry a fine as a sentence. Poland apprehended him only on a charge of forging fake travel documents for his trip there. And because Poland is extraditing him only on those charges, Germany may only try him for this offense, but not for the original, much graver one of abetting Bodenheimer’s participation in the Dubai killing.
One has to ask whether Israel’s lobbying of Poland not to extradite him resulted in Poland setting up this sweetheart deal which would essentially result in Brodsky facing no jail time and not being tried for his role in one of the most heinous and botched violations of national sovereignty by the Mossad in its history:
The Israeli government…will be delighted. An espionage trial in Germany of all places would put the embarrassing Mossad assassination back in the headlines. The targeted killings of Hamas functionaries is uncontroversial in Israel. Yet the government is eager to avoid further attention on the Mossad’s bumbling attack in Dubai.
The aftermath in Germany, however, might be just as embarrassing. Many will wonder how a suspect in a murder case can escape with just a fine.
Will “Brodsky” disappear from Germany, slip back into Israel and recede into the annals of failed spycraft? Or will he be the first bell tolling in the unraveling of this plot with embarrassing world-wide repercussions?
“The Israelis say the tree is on their side, and we say the tree is on our side,” a Lebanese Army spokesman said.
This is what it’s come down to: that Israel and Lebanon could go to war over a tree. Now don’t get me wrong. I love trees. But to start a shooting war and kill people over one?
There are increasing rumblings that war, or at least an attack against Iran is imminent. A group of dissident former CIA officers even claims Israel will attack this month. Rumblings from U.S. officials like CIA director Panetta are not exactly encouraging or promising. If Barack Obama thinks he can be cute in this and still walk away without starting a war, he may have another thing coming. If Israel and Lebanon can teeter at the brink of war over a tree imagine how small a match it would take to light the tinder keg that is the Iran-Israel conflict.
It is high time that Obama warns Israel in no uncertain terms that war with Iran is NOT on the table. Not now. No way, no how.
As I was trying to think of a title for this post that related to the school, which is the subject of the story, I thought of the Paul Simon song, Bridge Over Troubled Waters. Read on and you will see why.
A Facebook friend, Kamil Somaratne, recommended that I watch a 2008 PBS Global Voices documentary about the Israeli Bridge Over the Wadi school, which is a Jewish-Arab school dedicated to teaching tolerance and mutual co-existence. My first impression was intense skepticism. Aren’t most Jewish-Arab education projects dewy-eyed and hopelessly idealistic? Other than assuaging the consciences of the organizers, who do they help and what do they accomplish? And is what the world needs now another Kumbaya moment?
You can forget all that. This is a brutally honest, unblinking look at an absolutely crucial subject: educating Jewish and Arab young people to learn to live together. Yes, there is joy here at watching some of these children bond in touching and innocent ways. But there is no sentimentality. Every moment of sweetness is leavened by at least as many moments of acidic unvarnished truth. There are so many devastating moments in this documentary it’s hard to know where to begin.
Of course, there is the Jewish boy who invites an Arab boy to his home for a sleepover only to have the Jewish boy’s grandmother quiz the latter unmercifully about what his parents tell him about Palestinian terror attacks against Israel. There is another unblinking moment when the grandmother candidly reveals that she believes the Arab children of the school will exploit their education in order to learn better how to kill Jews.
All this is beyond horrible. But–and this is the mark of great documentary filmmaking–in the midst of this woman’s poison you realize that she too is caught in a trap of hatred from which she cannot free herself. While you don’t exactly sympathize with the grandmother, you at least have a sense from whence her fears derive as her family listens to the radio announcing the latest terror attack in Haifa, in which there were many innocent victims.
There is another segment about a visit to an amusement park by Jewish and Arab girls who clearly adore each other. The Israeli Palestinian father chaperones them and they appear to have a lovely day. In the evening the three sit around a campfire and you expect your Kumbaya moment. But this expectation is shattered by an innocent set of questions from the Jewish girl about the nature of love and relationships in Arab culture. To her increasing consternation, the father tells her that his daughter simply may not fall in love of her own volition with a boy of her own choosing, and that if she did he would kill her. And as he says it, the words come out in almost a friendly, embarrassed way. But nevertheless they come crashing down upon all three victims as they sit beside this charming roaring fire.
The observance of the respective holidays of the Jewish and Muslim students is fraught with tension. None more so than Yom Ha-Atzmaout and Land Day/Nakba. You watch as a Jewish teacher innocently tells the children about Arab villages which were “abandoned” by their inhabitants; only to be corrected by the Arab teacher who politely, but firmly takes command of the narrative and reminds her colleague that these villages were not “abandoned,” but “uprooted.”
Later you see tender young Jewish children in tears at the realization that their national holiday portends tragedy and suffering for their Arab classmates. When one Jewish girl in particular seems to break under the burden of this realization and says it is unfair to make her so sad, you want to reach out to embrace her for beginning to grasp this unfathomable contradiction. You know something is going to break in relations between the Jewish and Arab characters. And it does in the midst of a staff meeting in which two Jewish teachers take the Arab teacher to task for forcing such knowledge on a girl too young, innocent and tender to absorb it. The Arab teacher reacts angrily and blames her critics for refusing to understand her own personal and national pain.
Frankly, my sympathies were much more with the Israeli Palestinian teacher. But again the greatness of the documentary lies in the rightness of both sides. Even the side that is less right–in this case the Jewish teachers–elicits sympathy, especially when you watch this tender little girl almost break under the burden of the suffering with which she’s been saddled.
You watch with knowing sadness as an Israeli Palestinian mother takes her family on a car ride she hopes will end with a family reunion with close relatives in the West Bank. Of course, IDF road blocks and uncaring soldiers prohibit her family from traveling the few minutes it would ordinarily take to get to Tulkarem. Later, the mother unburdens herself at a parent’s meeting in front of Jewish and Arab parents. The tears flow and the other parents listen in unblinking silence. Their faces are a mask–not exactly an uncaring one. It’s more a mask of two peoples afraid to feel too deeply for the suffering of the other.
Finally, there is a chilling interchange among a group of very small Jewish boys (perhaps nine or ten years old) in which they speak candidly about the fact that when they grow up they will serve in the IDF and when they do they will have to kill Arabs. There is nothing savage in the statement, which makes it even more disturbing. The boys present this awareness matter of factly, drily, as if to say: “This is the way it is. What can we do?” There are other Jewish boys who protest and say they won’t be asked to kill Arabs. But you know that the boys who are the most cynical are also the most clear-eyed. And this breaks your heart.
This is an hour-long documentary. It’s hard to take that much time out of one’s day in this time of multi-tasking and pressure filled days. But I strongly urge you to make time for A Bridge Over the Wadi. It is time that will be richly rewarded by joy and wisdom and painful knowledge.
One of the most promising and bizarre developments in the Mahmoud al-Mabouh Mossad hit is that several weeks ago, one of the wanted Mossad agents, Uri Brodsky, made the serious mistake of attempting to travel from Germany to Poland. Poland arrested him and over his objection deported him to Germany for trial. So now we have the first Mossad culprit in custody. Only 30 or so to go.
The question is who is the real Uri Brodsky? Presumably they either know his real identity or have some idea what it is. I only wish Germany would be more forthcoming.
But what is little known is that, as with so many of the other agents, the identities of many real Israelis were stolen by their own intelligence agency; to this please add one Uri Brodetzki, a student whose parents say he is a student living in San Francisco. In a Maariv story, the parents claim their son’s identity was also stolen and they’re none to happy about it. In fact, they worry that since there is so much hostility to Israeli policy in a city like San Francisco, the Mossad could have endangered his life.
Since Brodezki is an Israeli living in the U.S. one assumes he travels back and forth frequently, which would give the Mossad numberous opportunities to retrieve and tamper with his passport as it did in all the other cases.
If anyone knows the real Brodetzki, I’d love to talk to him if he’d be willing.
After mounting an intense DoS attack against this blog and two others in Israel, my web host seems to have figured out a defense against the assault. But now, some members at the Rotter forum, among whose circle this assault may’ve originated, have resorted to homicidal ranting. One poster wrote the following (Hebrew):
I’m in favor of erasing Silverstein from this world at the hands of a Mossad hit squad.
Another member posted a picture of me in the thread. The only thing missing was a bull’s eye. I’m waiting for a Facebook group like the one they prepared for MK Haneen Zoabi calling for hanging her because she joined the Gaza flotilla.
I requested of a Rotter admin that they remove this comment. They have not responded nor have they removed it.
Also, in this thread a member boasts that the YouTube video showing protestors shouting the name of Doron Zahavi during a Sheikh Jarrah demonstration had been attacked and taken down. An Israeli peace activist confirmed the attack. But apparently it failed as the video is there for all the world to see. One thing these juvenile delinquents appear quite good at is cyber-vandalism.
I posted myself to the thread thanking them for their reception. The DoS attack brought my blog to the attention of thousands more Israelis, via stories in Ynet and Maariv, who’d never heard of it till then. A reporter from one of Israel’s major alternative papers spent an hour with me on the phone last night preparing a major profile of me and my blog. As far as I’m concerned they only hurt their own cause through this foolishness. And asking the Mossad to kill me doesn’t do any favors for the reputation of Israel’s overseas spooks either.
One of the common tropes of the Israeli far-right is an obsession with sexual identity and its use to humiliate their enemies. So, the Rotter members delight in claiming my photo is “feminine,” which only reveals their own sense of gender confusion. Frankly, I don’t know what’s more disturbed–their psyches or Israeli policy.
Can there be any doubt in any reasonable person’s mind that this incitement to murder is a symptom of the deep dysfunction within Israel nowadays in which peace activists and human rights NGOs are under physical, verbal and legal attack as never before?
Abe Foxman, one of American Jewry’s leading Islamophobes, announced the ADL opposed Park51, the new Muslim cultural center two blocks from Ground Zero. The project, also known as Cordoba House, has the strong support of Mayor Bloomberg and all the appropriate community planning boards and agencies. But “outside agitators” (cf. Republicans) have weighed in and turned the issue into a national political football. This is ugly. Truly ugly. It shows the worst face of America. The face of bigotry, fear and ignorance.
The N.Y. Times coverage of the ADL announcement was far too breathless for my taste and accorded the group far too much respect. But what really bent me out of shape was this comment from Foxman:
The issue was wrenching for the Anti-Defamation League, which in the past has spoken out against anti-Islamic sentiment. But its national director, Abraham H. Foxman, said in an interview on Friday that the organization came to the conclusion that the location was offensive to families of victims of Sept. 11, and he suggested that the center’s backers should look for a site “a mile away.”
“It’s the wrong place,” Mr. Foxman said. “Find another place.”
Asked why the opposition of the families was so pivotal in the decision, Mr. Foxman, a Holocaust survivor, said they were entitled to their emotions.
“Survivors of the Holocaust are entitled to feelings that are irrational,” he said. Referring to the loved ones of Sept. 11 victims, he said, “Their anguish entitles them to positions that others would categorize as irrational or bigoted.”
Let’s think about this for a second. Foxman attempts to make the serious argument that because someone has endured unspeakable horror this entitles them to be a racist. But does it? What possible reasoning can justify such nonsense? Is morality so relative that it is imperative only for those who have not survived a trauma like 9/11 or the Holocaust? And if survivors are permitted to be bigots, what level of suffering is required? And why can’t anyone who has suffered anything at all come along and claim Abe Foxman said it was OK to be a bigot because I suffered as much as people who survived 9/11?
The actual ADL statement against the Center noted that Muslims have the right to build at the site, but that it isn’t right because it would cause pain to families of survivors. What I’d like to know is where this stops. How much control do we wish to give to a group of survivors and the Republican Party over major decisions like this? Will our guilt at their suffering force us to accede to every wish no matter how irrational? Paul Krugman has called the ADL’s position “Shameful — and stupid.” Time’s Joe Klein said:
…The Anti-Defamation League has gone “from beacon of tolerance to slightly potty geyser of toxic foolishness.”
I couldn’t agree more.
Let us call this campaign for what it is: it is out-and-out Islamophobia. It is vile. It is racist. It should be impermissible. I don’t know what the victims of 9/11 would say about the cultural center project. But my idea of a perfect memorial is to show New York and the world that Islam can, should, and must co-exist in America with all our major religions. And what more fitting place for a tolerant Islam to take root than where a tragedy was wrought by the most hateful forces of radical Islam?
What are we afraid of? Why shouldn’t there be Muslims at (or near) Ground Zero? Do we really believe that every Muslim believes as does Osama bin Laden? If so, can there be any hope of ever living alongside Muslims in peace? There are those strident propagandists who answer “No” to this question. But most Americans know this is the wrong answer. Let’s not give in to hate or to Abe Foxman.
We should stay strong in support of this project. It deserves to be at Ground Zero. My concern is that Mayor Bloomberg’s support will crumble in the face of this onslaught of fear. This is what happened to in the case of the Khalil Gibran Academy and Debbie Almontaser, which he supported till he didn’t. Stay strong, Mr. Mayor. Don’t waver.
My Muslim blogging friend, Aziz Poonawalla has written a defense of the project.
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Israeli journalist Haggai Matar helped arrange for Ha’Ir to publish a profile (pdf in Hebrew) of me and Tikun Olam. Titled, Coming Soon to the Cells of Shabak, it is the first such profile ever printed in either English or Hebrew about my work. Naturally I’m delighted. Lital Grosman wrote the story after interviewing me for an unprecedented 90 minutes. Unlike most other such interviews, it was in depth, probing and she “got” what I do and why I do it.
