Tag: MEMO

Buyer beware: Israeli spy tools may be spying right back

Last month I wrote about Israel’s high-tech industry and how integrated it is with with state intelligence and military agencies. Top figures in the same agencies that systematically spy on and persecute Palestinian civilians often later go on to work in the private sector.

One reader of that article alerted me to another such “revolving door” figure. Matan Caspy, the co-founder and head of operations at the firm which sells the Wifi spy boxes I wrote about listed on his LinkedIn page that he was for eight years a “special operation agent and team leader” with the Shin Bet, Israel’s secret police.

Four years after he left he would found the firm, Rayzone. Is the idea that he and his friends and colleagues at the Shin Bet do not still stay in touch and share information the least bit credible? Of course not.

Caspy boasting about his links to Israeli spooks might not seem the brightest thing to do for a former spy. But apparently, high-tech investors and buyers seems to love the idea that their spy gear is made by an ex-Israeli spy. (Since I wrote that last article on Rayzone, his LinkedIn has been deleted. But I made copies, so you can still read it here.)

But revelations in the Wall Street Journal last month suggest an intriguing possibility: what if the Rayzone “InterApp Interception System” (designed to spy on Wifi connections within range of a small box) also clandestinely spies on the foreign state agencies it is marketed to?

The new revelations show there is a precedent.

Read the rest over at MEMO.

Israel’s fanatical settlers can get away with murder – literally

Just before Christmas, a shocking video was broadcast on Israeli television. It showed a large group of Israeli settlers at a wedding celebration dancing and singing. The clip was quickly dubbed the ” wedding of hate” because of the violent nature of the event.

In the clip, the wedding guests wave guns, knives and what is apparently a Molotov cocktail. One of them then stabs a photo of a Palestinian baby. It was a very specific photo.

According to the reports, it depicted Ali Dawabsha, an 18-month-old child burned to death by Israeli fanatics. His home in Duma, near Nablus was attacked in a July fire-bombing. Both Ali’s parents died in agony after suffering severe burns in the attack.

 Continue reading over at MEMO.

Playing both sides in Syria

For several years now in this column I have argued that the strategic aim of both Israel and the US in the Syria conflict has been to to actively prolong the war. If you believe their rhetoric about wanting to encourage “stability” in the region, this would seem unlikely. But scratch beneath the talk about human rights and democracy and it’s not hard to see the reality of imperial self-interest lying beneath.

Over the course of 2015, I have also used this column to show how a most unlikely alliance has played out in the south-western reaches of Syria: one between Israel and al-Qaeda’s officially-recognised franchise there – Jabhat al-Nusra.

Israel has been providing logistical support to al-Qaeda in Syria by treating their wounded fighters in its hospitals and sending them back to fight against the Syrian regime. UN reports have suggested that it may also be arming them.

It is well known that the US has been training and arming rebel groups in Syria. Although the US media routinely claims these are “moderate” rebels (in contrast with the extremists of the so-called Islamic State) the reality is that the US and its allies in the Gulf dictatorships have been giving arms and training to rebels who either “defect” to al-Qaeda soon after being trained or, under the rubric of the “Free Syrian Army” openly fight in alliance with al-Qaeda.

Read the rest over at MEMO.

Israel wants the civil war in Syria to continue

From before Christmas:

This weekend Israeli occupation forces bombed out an entire apartment building in Syria, in order to target a leader of the Lebanese resistance forces: Samir Quntar, who died in the attack.

It showed once again Israel doing what it does best: killing Arab civilians. There is a long history of Israeli “assassinations” indiscriminately targeting whole civilian areas, ostensibly in order to kill a political, military or activist enemy. The other aim of such Israeli terror attacks is to send a direct message to Palestinian and other Arab civilians: give in, accept Israeli occupation and stop supporting resistance (in any form, whether armed or unarmed).

In 1972 Israeli agents used a car bomb to murder Ghassan Kanafani in Beirut. He was an important Palestinian writer and an activist with the Marxist group the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. At same car bomb killed his young niece Lamis during the attack.

When they can catch them, Israeli strikes against resistance leaders in Gaza systematically blow up the homes and cars of those leaders, targeting their families at the same time. During the last Israeli war against the civilian population of Gaza in 2014 (during which Israel murdered 551 Palestinian children), Israel was unable to get to Muhammad Deif, the military mastermind behind Hamas’ armed wing, so instead they blew up his home, murdering his family.

Read the rest over at MEMO.

The hypocrisy that underlies Cameron’s Muslim Brotherhood ‘review’

So after much prevarication, a summary of Cameron’s “intelligence-led” review into the activities of the Muslim Brotherhood has finally been released, sneaked out just before the Christmas break where it will gain little attention from press or MPs.

What a farce this document is – or at least the 12-page summary of the full (secret) review, which is all that has been released. As I predicted from the start, this was a political stitch-up, concocted to keep tyrants in the Gulf and Egypt happy, and to keep arms deals with the bloody kings and princes of Saudi Arabia and the UAE flowing.

In a written statement to MPs Thursday, Cameron said that the review supports “the conclusion that membership of, association with, or influence by the Muslim Brotherhood should be considered as a possible indicator of extremism” and that “parts of the Muslim Brotherhood have a highly ambiguous relationship with violent extremism.”

Read the rest over at MEMO.

The UN’s ambiguous role in Palestine

The United Nations is supposed to be the guardian of peace and justice in the world. Founded in 1945 “to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war, which twice in our lifetime has brought untold sorrow to mankind,” the UN was sadly flawed from its inception.

But those familiar with the struggle for Palestinian human rights will know about the many ways the authority of the UN is cited to back the right to Palestinian self determination and to the return of Palestinian refugees. UN General Assembly and even Security Council resolutions are cited tirelessly in reference to the illegality of the Israeli occupation of the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and Syria’s Golan Heights.

And well they might be: citing the authority of international law is a useful and persuasive tool in campaigning for human rights.

The UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) provides essential services to Palestinian refugees both in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip, as well as in regional Palestinian refugee camps. And there is also the International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People, on 29 November each year.

Continue reading over at MEMO.

The arrogance of Israeli spy firms

Israel has long been a global hub of terrorism. It is part of a global terrorist network run by the US empire. Israel’s spy agencies, such as the Mossad, are a notorious gang of killers, kidnappers and thugs.

Israel’s weapons industry has been a great asset to the cause of US imperialism over the years, arming various dictators and counter-revolutionary forces around the world at times when it was inconvenient for the hegemon to do so directly. The Iran-Contra scandal is a case in point.

Another example was Israeli aid for various other reactionary dictatorships in Latin America in the 1980s. The author of a book about the history of the AK-47 automatic rifle tells the story about how Osama bin Laden’s own Kalashnikov was provided by Israel via the CIA: it had originally bean seized in Lebanon after PLO fighters were made to evacuate Beirut in 1982.

Continue reading over at MEMO.

The Mossad accelerates its strategy against BDS

One year ago I wrote about the Mossad’s strategyto combat the boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement. In part, I based my argument on the analysis of former Mossad director Shabatai Shavit, who had written an important, and under-noticed, opinion piece about it in Haaretz, Israel’s liberal daily newspaper.

In that piece Shavit had argued, in a most sinister fashion, that “in this age of asymmetrical warfare” Israeli spy agencies are not yet “using all our force, and this has a detrimental effect on our deterrent power.” To me, this seemed tantamount to a declaration of war on the BDS movement. I maintain that in the long term, as Israel becomes more and more desperate in its (mostly failed) attempts to combat BDS, the more likely it is to carry out some sort of violent attack on BDS activists.

It’s already very difficult for Israel to combat BDS. It’s something akin to trying to against fight a shifting sand dune. BDS is a diffuse and broad movement, which, although it has popular and influential figures supporting it, has no central leadership or cadres that Israel could remove through its various nefarious means. More fundamentally, it’s pretty hard to force people to buy Israel products, or make them participate in Israeli propaganda initiatives against their will or interest. Furthermore, although some people can be bought-off, intimidated, or otherwise coerced into silence, it’s pretty much impossible to stop everyone talking about an idea or a strategy.

Nonetheless, that doesn’t stop Israel trying.

Continue reading over at MEMO.

Netanyahu’s Hitler remarks part of a disturbing trend

Last week Israel’s prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu made a speech to the World Zionist Congress with an extraordinary claim.

“Hitler didn’t want to exterminate the Jews at the time” he said. He only wanted to expel them. It was, he claimed, none other Amin al-Husseini, the Mufti of Jerusalem in the 1920s and ’30s who convinced the Nazi leader to embark on the extermination programme which ultimately led to 6 million dead.

“Haj Amin al-Husseini went to Hitler and said, ‘If you expel them, they’ll all come here [to Palestine].’ ‘So what should I do with them?’ he asked. ‘Burn them!’,” Netanyahu claimed, quoting an imaginary conversation between the Palestinian leader and Hitler.

And it really was imaginary: there is no record that any such conversation ever took place, and Netanyahu’s speech has been widely criticised as ahistorical.

It seems astounding that, in an attempt to vilify the Palestinians by association with an old leader (albeit one appointed by the British occupation forces of the time), an Israeli leader would stoop even to exonerating Hitler.

Read the rest over at MEMO.

Egypt’s coup regime has devastated its own people in Sinai

A new report by Human Rights Watch has cast light on the scale of the Egyptian dictatorship’s crimes against its own people in the Sinai region.

The report on forced evictions in the Egyptian town of Rafah says that “at least 3,255″ homes, businesses and other local buildings have been demolished by the military since it came back to full power in the coup of July 2013. Innocent people have been forced to move out of their own homes, often at extremely short notice and with little or no compensation in return.

The report opens with a moving quotation from one of the local people who has suffered at the hands of the military in this way, reflecting on what she lost: “I myself used to make food and tea for the soldiers and they came and sat in the shade of our olive tree when the sun beat down on them… My mother told me: ‘The tree is your responsibility. I fed you from it and raised you on it. Even in times of war, we lived from its oil when nobody could find food.’ Now there’s nothing I can do but hold the tree and kiss it and say, ‘Forgive me, mom, what can I do.'”

The town of Rafah sits near the border with Palestine, close to the Gaza city of the same name. Historically, these two places were one city, but as the saying goes, these people did not cross the border, the border crossed them.

Continue reading at MEMO.

Israel is a threat to the entire region

The Zionist project represented by Israel is a fundamental threat to the entire Middle East. Despite the attempts by Arab dictators to demonise Palestinians and downplay the threat from Israel, many remain unconvinced.

In 2013, Saudi Prince al-Waleed bin Talal told former Israeli prison guard Jeffrey Goldberg in an interview that “the threat is from Persia, not from Israel”. The increasingly open nature of the Israeli alliance with the Gulf dictatorships is helpful in the sense that it clarifies things that many have long suspected.

But the way Israel has behaved historically throughout the middle east will not soon be forgotten by those who have been its victims. Israel occupied south Lebanon for decades and was only driven out in 2000 by a successful armed resistance campaign (although some small border territories remain illegally occupied by Israel).

Despite the way the Palestinian struggle has become the most iconic one against Israeli occupation and apartheid, there is no denying the reality of the threat that Israel poses to everyone in the region.

Continue reading over at MEMO.

Israel’s dystopian dictatorship

Israel takes great pride in its propaganda claim to be the “only democracy in the Middle East”. This is something it bangs on about at sanctimonious length in every international forum it has access to.

As well as being totally false for Palestinians (more of which below) it is entirely hypocritical. In reality, Israel has long had an important role in supporting, propping up and being in tacit or open alliance with the region’s worst dictatorships and human rights abusers.

The undemocratic regimes in Jordan, Egypt and Saudi Arabia for example. But it also includes the Iran-Contra episode of the 1980s in which Israel was recruited by the US to sell weapons to Iran; the profits were used to aid the terror war of the right-wing Contra army against the revolutionary government of Nicaragua (the US President at the time needed to get around Congress, which had imposed some limits on aid to the Contras after the record of their war crimes became impossible to ignore).

The Hashemite monarchy in Jordan has, despite some conflicts, too often served as a buffer between Palestinian anger and resistance, and Israel. The Black September war of the early 1970s being only one example. More recently, the Jordanian regime has played a key role in training anti-democratic, pro-imperialist forces in the region, such as when it trained and armed the Palestinian Contras led by the former Gaza warlord Mohammed Dahlan, whose failed 2007 coup attempt in the Gaza Strip (backed by Israel and the US) was nipped in the bud by forces loyal to the elected Palestinian Authority government of the time (led by Hamas).

Read the rest over at MEMO.