מגזין הכיבוש Occupation Magazine

							RSS Feeds

Occupation magazine - Commentary

Home page back Print Send To friend

Red Rag column: False flag in Paris? Uprising of the knives - Israel police rape culture - Yossi Sarid, RIP

By: Gideon Spiro
12 December 2015 (English translation 28 December 2015)

False flag

After the massacre in Paris (Black Friday 13 November 2015), at the
inspiration or initiative of Daesh, the following item appeared in
Washington’s Blog : “The First Question to Ask After Any Terror Attack: Was It
a False Flag?” (http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2015/11/the-first-question-to-

ask-after-any-terror-attack-was-it-a-false-flag.html )

A short explanation for readers who may not have heard of the concept: false
flags are “covert operations that are designed to deceive in such a way that
the operations appear as though they are being carried out by entities,
groups, or nations other than those who actually planned and executed them.”
(Wikipedia) The blog lists over 40 cases of false flag operations by states
that admitted it years later, including Russia, the United States, the United
Kingdom, Germany, Japan and Israel, which famously created a terrorist
underground in the 1950s in Egypt, all the members of which were Jews with
Egyptian citizenship who had been trained by Israel. Members of the
underground planted bombs in US and British cultural institutions in Egypt.
The government of Israel assumed that those actions would be attributed to
Egyptian organizations, which would achieve Israel’s objective of harming
Egypt’s relations with those two countries. The goal was not realized because
the underground was uncovered by Egyptian intelligence, its members were put
on trial, two were sentenced to death by hanging and the others to long prison
terms. Eventually Israel admitted its responsibility for the underground.

I now do as the blog suggests and ask if there is a party that has or had an
interest in increasing the tensions between Daesh and France by means of the
mass slaughter that shocked the French and their government and increasing
France’s military involvement in the war against Daesh as well as the tensions
and hostility between French Muslims and Christians and Jews and thereby move
France towards that party’s positions on the issue of the struggle against
jihadist terrorism.

I know such a party, and its name is Israel.

In my inner eye I can already see some ingenuous or faux-naif Israeli leaping
up in anger and saying: “Again he accuses Israel, this time of murdering 130
people in France!” To which I reply: the sanctity of human life is not
Israel’s strongest point. On the contrary, Israel has acquired for itself a
reputation as a power of liquidation and murder, a retailer of individuals and
wholesaler of hundreds and thousands, and not since yesterday. It goes back to
the cradle of its creation with the Deir Yassin massacre, the expulsions from
Jaffa and Ramle and Lydda in the 1948 war, the Kfar Qasim massacre in 1956,
the air force bombing of Beirut in the First Lebanon War and the Sabra and
Shatila Massacre in that same war. The government of Israel continued to
provide weapons to the terrible military dictatorship in Argentina, even
though it knew about thousands of murdered, including hundreds of Jews who
were arrested and tortured and cruelly murdered, which proves the lie and the
fraud of the claim of the government of Israel and the Zionist movement to
represent the Jewish people. To that list of dishonour belong also the
barbaric bombings in the last Gaza War with its thousands of victims including
several hundred children. And that is only a partial list of mass killing. If
I were to add the list of what is called in the sanitized argot of the
Occupation “targeted preventions”, the list would get longer and longer. In
any case, the Israeli record proves that 130 killed is small change for
Israel.

Those who know the modus operandi of the Mossad, the Israel Security
Agency and the army can easily imagine a video in which a Mossad agent
succeeds in infiltrating Daesh, makes his way to the top as a committed
jihadist who knows how to quote the right verse at the right moment, speaks
idiomatic Arabic perfectly and makes insane suggestions for revenge attacks
against the unbelievers but always remembers who sent him and to whom he must
report. No one with an active imagination can rule out the possibility that
the Hebrew-speaker in the video aimed at Israelis was an emissary of the
Mossad who knew how to speak Hebrew with just the right accent and degree of
incorrectness so as to sound like an authentic Arab in Israeli ears. When a he
informed us that our fate is to be slaughtered, with a movement of a hand
holding a knife and cutting a throat, that movement served also as a
prearranged signal to his Mossad handlers that everything was under control.
In other words, the nation wants an improved version of Eli Cohen, without his
sad end. Cohen was the Israeli spy in Syria in the early 1960s who succeeded
in gaining the trust of the Syrians and rose high in the ranks of the army and
the regime. The height of his achievement was matched by the depth of his
fall. He was discovered, arrested, put on trial behind closed doors, convicted
and executed. End of the video.

As I said, this is just conjecture. The truth will be known to future
generations fifty or a hundred years from now when the archives are opened (if
Israel still exists), or if there is a courageous and decent person within the
Mossad, who like Mordechai Vanunu is revolted by what is going on in the
organization and leaves Israel with documents to back up his revelations. He
will be interviewed for a British newspaper known for its credibility (But not
before he has received political asylum. One of the lessons of the Vanunu
affair.) and tell about what is going on within the organization with all its
hatreds, rivalries and crimes, its gratuitous acts, the arrogance that
engendered reckless actions that cost human life, the false-flag operations
and so on. Until then we will have to glean shreds of information and piece
together a picture that at least approximates the truth.

The peacock

I am not an expert in body language, but from my layman’s perspective I have
discerned in Netanyahu the euphoria of a puffed-up peacock in his appearances
after the massacre in Paris. If we translate from Netanyahu to colloquial
Hebrew, previously he was the solitary knight fighting global jihad and now,
after Paris, he says, others have joined him in the struggle. “No,” replies a
voice of wisdom from Europe, “you are not part of the struggle against global
jihad, you are part of the problem. Don’t impose on us your war for the
perpetuation of the Occupation and the defence of the regime of apartheid you
and your predecessors have established in the Occupied Territories. You are
its covert ally; every house you demolish as collective punishment, every
Palestinian you imprison in administrative detention, every one of the
thousands of Palestinians that have run the gauntlet of torture in ISA
basements, all nourish the combative spirit of jihad so much that they saw fit
to make a video in Hebrew aimed at Israelis promising that they will also go
to you to carry out a big massacre. Your current policies are pouring oil on
the flames of jihad and pulling Israel toward the abyss. We tried to help, but
you slapped down every hand extended for peace.”

End of message from the European voice of wisdom.

Not only a peacock, also a dictator

Netanyahu has exploited well the atmosphere of hostility towards Islam that
that has crossed national borders since the attack in Paris. The international
media concentrated on the massacre in Paris and its implications, all of which
is a convenient background for what looks to me like the start of the
implementation of the third stage in the master plan of the hard Right to
eliminate the remaining traces of democracy within the Green Line as it
proceeds to convert Israel into a plutocratic tyranny. The first stage was
privatization. He rigorously privatized Israel. That stage did not get him in
trouble with the capitalist West, especially the US, which naturally approved
of it.

The second stage focussed on planting settlements all over the West Bank in
order to eliminate any possibility of a Palestinian state. That stage is
nearly complete despite international protests that have not exceeded the
bounds of diplomatic propriety and the opposition of a minority at home. As
stated before, the third stage, which began with the establishment of the
current government, is the stage of thug rule and stifling dissent. When
Netanyahu appointed Miri Regev as Minister of Culture he knew what he was
doing. Not many hours had passed before she found herself in conflict with the
mainstream of Israeli writers and artists. Her ideas about her role are taken
from the world of totalitarian values. It is no coincidence she spent most of
her adult life in the army, a system built on commands and orders – not
exactly a hothouse for democracy.

Her approach is to throw money at those who glorify and praise the State, the
leader and the ruling party. Those who want to take a critical approach can
sift through the garbage. In short – we do not have a Minister of Culture; we
got a Minister of Propaganda instead.

Silencing dissent

In my estimation, the two most significant actions are the decision of the
government to ban the northern branch of the Islamic Movement in Israel under
the leadership of Sheikh Raed Salah, and the invasion by the forces of the
Occupation of three radio stations in Hebron, stopping their broadcasts and
seizing their transmitters. The common denominator of these actions is the
heavy-handed silencing of dissent under cover of the word “incitement”. That
word is a devious one, because it facilitates manipulation, especially by
oppressive regimes that arbitrarily decide who is an inciter and take measures
of individual and collective punishment the main purpose of which is to
brutally gag dissent.

We have already learned that what starts in the Occupied Territories seeps
across the Green Line. First they silence Arabs, then leftists, then human-
rights organizations and so on until they end up closing the newspaper
Haaretz too for “incitement”. Which reminds me of the famous poem by
the German anti-Nazi pastor Martin Niemצller:

In Germany first the Nazis took the Communists,
I did not raise my voice, because I was not a Communist,
And then they took the Jews,
And I did not raise my voice, because I was not a Jew,
And then they took the trade unionists,
And I did not raise my voice, because I was not a trade unionist,
And then they took the Catholics,
And I did not raise my voice, because I was Protestant,
And then they took me,
But then no there was no one left to raise his voice for me. [1]

In 1996 the poem was put to music by the Irish musician Christie Moor in his
album Graffiti Tongue. (Hebrew Wikipedia)

Netanyahu goes from door to door to sell heads of state the story that the
Palestinian uprising of the knives is the result of incitement in the
Palestinian social media and the communications media under the control of the
Palestinian Authority. He demands that everyone condemn the incitement and
hold Palestinian Authority President Abu Mazen responsible. In Israel
Netanyahu has succeeded in planting the thesis of incitement in the brains of
“Arab-affairs experts”, as journalists who cover the conflict are called, most
of them covert agents for the ISA who daily repeat the Israeli government’s
line that incitement in the social media is what encourages the knife
attackers.

In Europe his success has been less impressive. There it is understood that
Netanyahu does not come with clean hands in his request for others to stop
incitement. He has a great deal of chutzpah to complain about Abu Mazen over
incitement in the Palestinian social media, for Netanyahu is a master of the
art of incitement. Before he makes demands of others he should clean his own
house, where racism and incitement already surpass tolerable levels. And
moreover Netanyahu is wrong on a more basic level: this is not a symmetrical
situation of two sides fighting each other. We have been in a situation of
occupier and occupied for nearly 50 years. The occupier brims over with
incitement against the occupied in order to justify at least in his own eyes
the perpetuation of the Occupation; and as for the occupied, they are not
inciting but struggling to free themselves from the occupier’s yoke. Netanyahu
evidently believes that Radio Hebron should welcome the Occupation troops by
playing Hava Nagila, but the duty of Radio Hebron is to support the people’s
struggle for liberation from the regime of apartheid that has been imposed on
them. It is but natural that the radio station see the young knife attackers
as heroes who have offered up their lives for the independence of Palestine.

If Radio Hebron is incitement, and publications of the Palestinian Authority
are incitement, and articles of the Left are incitement, against whom is all
that incitement? Against the occupier, of course. The peoples of the world
will be happy at the news from Jerusalem that Nelson Mandela was an inciter,
George Washington was an inciter and former Knesset Member Geula Cohen (mother
of current Likud MK Tzahi Hanegbi) the radio broadcaster for the Lehi
underground during the British occupation, was an inciter, and articles of the
Left are definitely incitement, so there is not alternative but to build
detention camps in the desolate Negev to house all those inciters, since the
existing prisons are filled to capacity with Palestinian guerrilla fighters.

It is a historical irony that the knife attackers are the realization of the
Lehi anthem:

Anonymous soldiers, we are here without uniforms
And fright and fear of death surround us
We have all joined for life
Only death will release us from our duty. [2]

Like all Israelis, I fear the knife attackers, but that fear does not paralyze
my capacity for critical thought about the policies of the government of
Israel. It must be said that Netanyahu, through his policies of perpetuating
the Occupation, is also serving as a manufacturer of knives and their
distributor to Palestinians. And it must also be said that the Swedish Foreign
Minister is right when she says that the policy of killing those who carry
knives constitutes extrajudicial execution.

In conclusion: the Netanyahu government is dangerous. It is on its way to the
fourth stage in its master plan: the thinning out of the Palestinian
population by means of expulsion (stick) and assistance in emigrating (carrot)
in order to ensure a stable long-term Jewish majority. Netanyahu’s promise to
Secretary of State Kerry that there will be no binational state will be fully
kept. If a rigorous movement of non-lethal confrontation with the government
to bring down Netanyahu and Bennett does not appear while it is still
possible, and the opposition continues to be anemic and meekly supply manpower
to the Occupation, it end badly. Israel will become a little Iran.

Ill repute

In recent months the Israeli media have been full of juicy stories about the
sex lives of Israeli police. It turns out that the professional advancement of
female police depends on their willingness to have sexual relations with their
supervisors. Six or seven deputy commissioners (equivalent to the rank of
general in the army) have been forced to leave the police following these
revelations. Nearly all the ranks of the Central Command of the Israel Police
have been involved in this corruption, which has outraged the public. A police
force in which rape culture prevails is a corrupt police force.

The Israel Police rape culture is a mirror in which the pathology of the whole
country is reflected. For nearly fifty years the State of Israel has been
raping the Palestinian people. This cruel and brutal rape has gone on 24 hours
a day for the past 48 years. The victims are women, children, babies and
senior citizens. No one has been punished because the rulers – the judges, the
army, the police, the ISA and the settlers – are all participants in the rape
of the Palestinian people. The settlements are a manifestation of rule by
Rahab the harlot in Occupied Territories. They are Israel’s houses of ill
repute. In some countries houses of ill repute are illegal; other countries
spend billions on building them. Israel belongs to the second group. It is
indeed symbolic that a Member of the Knesset who belongs to the Prime
Minister’s party gives his coalition its one-vote majority was before his
election to the Knesset an employee of a gambling club, responsible for
providing prostitutes to gamblers. [3] And it is also symbolic that the most
serious punishment the Knesset can impose on one of its members – 60 days’
suspension – was not imposed on the procurer of prostitutes, but on
Palestinian Knesset Member Haneen Zoabi, for her campaign against the houses
of ill repute.

Hannah and her seven sons

With coming of the Feast of Hannukah, Hannah and her seven sons are praised as
an example of sacrifice in sanctification of the Name of God, because Hannah
was willing to witness the murder of her seven sons rather than bow down to an
idol. [4] The Internet is full of of praise and glorification of the above-
mentioned Hannah, including children’s choirs that sing songs for the ascent
of her soul. The fact that in the 21st century entire sectors of the
population, which are also part of the government in Israel, are party to
this, is troubling. It must be said clearly and unapologetically: the episode
of Hannah and her seven sons was no sanctification of the Name of God but
sanctification of the culture of death. The kippa-wearing settlers perpetuate
that culture. They are willing to sacrifice all their children on the altar of
the idol-worship of tombs and soil. When the government of Israel holds up a
woman who lost her children for the perpetuation of the Occupation and who is
willing to appear as a reprover in the gate, [5] that is a sign of a sick
society.

When a Palestinian woman who has ten children, five of whom have been killed
fighting the Occupation army and three of whom are in prison, declares that
she is willing to sacrifice the last two left to her for the liberation of
Palestine, the responses in Israel are a mixture of hypocrisy and self-
righteousness. When that same phenomenon happens in Israel, it is seen as pure
idealism. One wants to vomit.

In memory of Yossi Sarid

I am mourning the death of Yossi Sarid. We knew each other for fifty years,
give or take; I do not remember exactly. Where we met – at a demonstration, at
a party at the home of friends or some other circumstances – does come to my
mind right now. In 1967-8 I was the US correspondent for the newspaper Al
Hamishmar and Yossi was there for his studies. We met one time in New York
for dinner. I have the impression that Yossi and Dorit were already married
and I was still single. When two young Israelis who are interested in politics
meet abroad, what do they talk about? Politics, of course. Those were the
first days of the Occupation and we hoped it would not last long. In the US
those were days of the Black struggle for equal rights under the leadership of
the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King and stormy demonstrations against US
involvement in the Vietnam War, when young men eligible for military
conscription burned their draft-cards to declare that they would not sacrifice
their lives on the altar of a war they did not believe in.

I will not linger over the various junctions at which our paths crossed. I
will settle for the last of them. It was in 1999, at the Meretz convention to
elect the chair of the movement and the list for the Knesset in the
approaching elections. I had decided to join Meretz in order to support Zehava
Gal-On who was running for first time on its list of candidates for Knesset.

Since I was now a member of Meretz I decided to run against Yossi Sarid for
the chairmanship of the movement on a non-Zionist platform that would reflect
the idea of a state of all its citizens. I anticipated that Yossi Sarid or one
of his supporters might appeal to the control committee to have my platform
disqualified on the grounds that it contradicted some planks in the Meretz
platform.

Yossi Sarid showed himself to be a true democrat. He approved my
participation. And as a well-mannered man, he even wished me luck.
The writer Eyal Megged attributed to Yossi Sarid a religious approach to the
issue of peace and called him the “Admor of peace”. [6] Nothing could be more
nonsensical. Admors inherit their positions from their fathers and there is no
appeal against their rulings.

Yossi Sarid struggled for his chosen path. Sometimes he succeeded and
sometimes he failed. He was no Admor but a public personality whose guiding
light was democracy. May his memory be blessed!

Translator’s notes
1. Poem translated from the Hebrew version that appears in the Hebrew
Wikipedia article on Martin Niemצller.

2. https://donabravanel.wordpress.com/2012/12/06/anonymous-soldiers-the-

anthem-of-the-lehi/

3. Oren Hazan. http://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.premium-1.660312

4. http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/judaica/ejud_0002_0008_0_08365.htm

l

5. Isaiah 29:21.

6. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honorifics_in_Judaism#Admo.22r

Translated from Hebrew for Occupation Magazine by George Malent

Links to the latest articles in this section

Playing with fire: Israel’s sweeping disregard for the wellbeing and security of East Jerusalem residents has led to four fatalities and dozens of injuries, and disrupted the lives of tens of thousands of residents

Why the metal detectors at Al-Aqsa are such a big deal

The Story Behind the Jerusalem Attack: How Trump and Netanyahu Pushed Palestinians to A Corner