Tikun Olam in 2016: Why I Do It…and You Should Too

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♦2016 Reporting Highlights♦

Outing Avi Arieli

I first exposed the identity of the chief of the Shabak Jewish terror unit, Avi Arieli, nearly seven years ago.  In Israel, officers of the Mossad and Shabak may not be publicly named.  But because one of Arieli’s settler targets named him to avenge his pursuit of nice Jewish boys (who happen to engage in acts of terror), I named him as well back then.

Since then, Arieli received a promotion.  He is now the Shabak’s U.S. liaison, working with U.S. police and intelligence services to identity and arrest suspects of interest to Israel.  At a recent conference sponsored by the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA), Arieli spoke publicly and was included in promotional materials about the event.  This permitted Haaretz columnist, Amir Oren, to “out” him in Haaretz–till the military censor cut the heart out of the story.  Oren mistakenly said that he was naming Arieli “for the first time.”  But he was named first here.

One of previous occupants of this position, Yoram Cohen, was also outed here after publishing a paper on terrorism through the Washington Institute for Near East Peace (WINEP).  Apparently, this job is a stepping-stone to bigger and better things in the security apparatus.  So look for Arieli’s name in the future to be in the running for the next Shabak chief.  You read it here first!

Misbah Abu Sbeih: Shabak informer turned avenger

To be an occupier, a state must recruit thousands of informers among the victims of Occupation.  The Shabak recruit intensively among vulnerable Palestinian populations like the sick and those needing work inside Israel.  It also recruits among Palestinian anti-Occupation leaders.  Misbah Abu Sbeih was such an informant.

But in his case, the traitor to his people developed a guilty conscience and became the dog that bit the hand that fed it.  Abu Sbeih took up arms, killing two Israelis in Jerusalem before he was executed by Israeli forces.  Nor is Abu Sbeih the first such Palestinian informer to turn against his handler.  The son of such a person, to avenge his father, unsuccessfully attempted to murder Shabak Agent “S.,” in Tel Aviv.

No one in Israel knew Abu Sbeih’s name until I reported it here.

Shandorfi Jewish terror cell

Seven kindly Jewish boys offered to help an old Palestinian grandma across the street…No, that’s the wrong fairy tale.  In this one, the seven Jewish boys are terrorists.  They wanted to kill grandma.  And there was an IDF soldier in this sainted crew.  Actually, they wanted to send a message to Shabak that though it might’ve caught a prior terror cell which murdered the Dawabsheh family, they would avenge their capture by wreaking mayhem on yet another Palestinian family.

They laid in wait in a Palestinian village, made sure a young family was asleep inside, then exploded a tear gas canister in the home.  Gas released in a small, confined space can easily kill a human being.  And has killed Palestinians in this way several times in outdoor protests.  So it’s a miracle the victims didn’t die.

The military censor protected the identities of these miscreants.  But I refused and named them so their ‘good works’ would be known to the world.  You learned it here first!

Adam Hasin: the Ugly Israeli

It’s illegal for Israelis to travel to many Arab countries including Iraq.  It’s even more illegal for them to fight outside Israel in foreign wars.  That didn’t stop Canadian-Israeli Gila Rosenberg, who did the same a few years back.  She never faced any legal repercussions for her violation of Israeli law.  That’s because she was a woman fighting for the good guys.  And she didn’t do anything terribly stupid while she was there.

Adam Hasin wasn’t so lucky.  An Israeli Kurd, he left Israel on the pretext of visiting his grandparents in northern Iraq.  When he arrived, he instead enlisted in the Kurdish cause to fight ISIS.  Along the way, he got himself into a world of trouble.  Somehow his real identity became known in Kurdistan.  A local resident threatened to kill him as an Israeli agent.  Hasin then had the bright idea to kill the man.  You can imagine how well that went down among the local Kurdish population.

Hasin was arrested, charged with murder and imprisoned.  Israel naturally didn’t want this story revealed to reduce the embarrassment of having an Israeli citizen fighting abroad and killing a foreign citizen in the process.  It also was hoping to negotiate quietly for his release.  But MK Ayoob Kara, the Donald Trump of Israel’s Kurdish community, revealed the entire story to the Jerusalem Post.  But the military censor once again struck a blow for the cause of secrecy and opacity by censoring the story.

I’m proud to say I published the story and Hasin’s name.  Again, the only place you’ll find it.

Holding the Israeli Elite to Account

Though the Israeli national security state and all its vestiges are the main subject of my reporting, the destructive impact of the system is writ small in the outrages perpetrated throughout the system.  The élite too, game the system to their own advantage: from the judge charged with rape to university professor accused of sexually abusing his students.

Though I didn’t know it at the time, merely reporting the name of Judge Shamai Becker, and the accusations against him or raping his daughter, would expose a much larger story: that Twitter was doing the bidding of Israel’s cybercrime czar in censoring tweets for Israeli users which mentioned Becker’s name.  That story was widely reported in media both in Israel and abroad, though in Israel they still couldn’t report Becker’s name.  To this day, no Israelis know of the crimes for which he was investigated.  Naturally, he was cleared of those charges; at least in part because the public remained oblivious of what he’d been accused of and could not raise a hue and cry about it.

Exposing the Black-Op Sites of the Security State

Unlike most other democratic countries, Israel maintains strict secrecy about the location of, and access to many of its black-ops sites where security prisoners are tortured or where security agents plot against Israel’s real and imagined enemies.  I exposed the location of the Shabak’s interrogation center in Jerusalem and its main headquarters outside Tel Aviv, the IDF intelligence agency (AMAN) prison where Capt. Doron Zahavi raped Hezbollah prisoner, Mustafa Dirani, and AMAN’s special operations base in Givatayim.  In this same post, I also noted previous secret sites I’d exposed including the only known joint spy base jointly operated by the NSA and Unit 8200 located in occupied East Jerusalem.

I also maintained a steady supply of important breaking stories over the past year to Mint Press News and the New Arab.

This is a record of reporting of which I’m proud.  It’s a record I hope you will recognize and support with a donation as we enter the Trump era; facing what promises to be one of the most dangerous and troubling of New Years.