Advancing to… 1949?

So now, Washington’s “leadership” of the Palestinian-Israeli diplomacy looks poised to rush forward to… 1949, and the proximity talks that Ralph Bunche convened in Rhodes that year.
Haaretz’s reporters tell us there,

    the American administration is hoping the sides will declare the beginning of indirect talks [on Sunday] morning, ahead of the arrival of U.S. Vice President Joe Biden on Monday.

These “proximity talks” have been touted by U.S. officials as some kind of big deal, even though they are a major step back from what Obama was promising when he came into office 14 months ago.
The P.A. leadership has until now merely been asking that, if the Netanyahu government wants to talk, it should first comply with its own commitments under the 2002 Road Map. But they’ve gotten no support from Washington for that position, and Washington has been putting big pressure on Abu Mazen, including through Egypt, Jordan, etc., with the aim of getting him back into talks– any talks, never mind about what!
The problem is not whether the two “sides” talk to each other; or how close they are when they take; or what shape table or configuration of hotel they might employ. The problem is getting Israel to end its illegal occupation of Palestinian land.
When Saddam Hussein occupied Kuwait in 1990, was Pres. G.H. W. Bush concerned about getting Iraqi and Kuwaiti leaders into a room together– or in rooms in the same hotel together– to “negotiate” a resolution? Of course he wasn’t… Although, just possibly, there might have been a negotiated outcome to have been had. But he never gave anyone a serious chance to explore that avenue. Five and a half months after Saddam’s forces moved into Kuwait, the international alliance that Bush brought together acted swiftly to evict them.
In the OPTs, the occupation has now gone on for nearly 43 years.
Israel has no more claim to the West Bank, Gaza, and Golan than Iraq had to Kuwait. Claims of “holy places” and such don’t confer sovereign rights. Everywhere in the world, people have places they consider somehow sacred in other countries… and they go to visit them on pilgrimages. That’s how it is.
International law concerns itself with quite different matters; and in the matter of the Israeli-occupied lands the Security Council has clearly stated the inacceptability of Israel’s acquisition of those territories by force.
… In Palestine meanwhile, Abu Mazen’s apparent decision to take part in the upcoming “proximity talks” farce has come in for a lot of criticism, including from one rather unexpected source: Muhammad Dahlan.
Maan News reported today that,

    If the American policy is to “waste time pretending we are in negotiations” as Israel continues to build settlements and claim Palestinian heritage sites, Dahlan said, there is no point to go ahead with the talks.
    “We have been sick of the occupation for years, and sick of negotiations since 2000,” he said, referring to the start of the Second Intifada following civil unrest around a failure of the Oslo Accords.

Oh dear. It looks as if the project to rebuild Fateh’s organizational integrity that was pursued with such fanfare last summer didn’t do quite as well as hoped.

Prolonged conflict and pro-natalism

Last month, uber-Zionist commentator Martin Kramer openly argued (Youtube here) the “political aim” of Israel’s sanctions on Gaza is

    to break Gaza’s runaway population growth… That may begin to crack the culture of martyrdom, which demands a constant supply of superfluous young men.

He also claimed there that there is “some evidence” that this anti-natalist campaign was succeeding.
(What on earth evidence is he talking about? When I was in Gaza last November, the UN folks there told me that in the first ten months of 2009, 43,000 babies had been born to Gaza’s population of 1.5 million. Kramer is just plain wrong, as well as deeply immoral… What a pathetic “analyst” he is, eh?)
There has been considerable discussion (e.g. from Abunimah, Cole, Silverstein) as to whether what Kramer said constituted genocidal incitement, support for the racist “eugenics” concept, or just plain old racism. Regardless of which it was, it was disgusting and racist.
Kramer was also accusing “the west” of “providing pro-natal subsidies for Palestinians with refugee status”. What??
Now, it’s true that UNRWA– like the UNHCR, which provides relief services to refugees everywhere else around the world– does not cut off the food support it gives to women, if they become pregnant. Both agencies also provide special nutritional support, as needed, to nursing mothers; and once children are weaned both agencies put them onto the rolls to receive the appropriate amount of nutritional support– and public-health and educational services, as required, as well.
Why would that shock anyone?
Do we want the UN’s refugee agencies not to do that?
Or is it only UNRWA that Kramer wants to stop providing such services? Someone should ask him if it is Palestinian refugees against whom, uniquely, he wants to discriminate… or whether refugees from Congo, Cambodia, Nepal, Somalia, Afghanistan, and everywhere else from which there are refugee flows should also be subjected to his “eugenicist” plan.
This issue does raise, of course, a couple of related subjects that Martin Kramer might prefer not to talk about. One is that in every situation of prolonged inter-group conflict, the communities that are party to that conflict tend to adopt extremely pro-natal policies. This has certainly been the case in Rwanda, over many decades. There, as in Israel/Palestine, leaders of both the competing communities judge that the conflict will eventually be resolved either through fighting or through the ballot-box. Either way, numbers are an asset…
A second thing Kramer might prefer not to talk about is the fact that Jewish Israelis– and in particular the religio-nationalists who form the heart of the settler movement in the West Bank– are certainly huge beneficiaries of a whole series of extremely pro-natalist governmental policies and subsidies (which are underwritten by the US government’s economic aid to Israel, at a rate considerably higher than the rate the US government dribbles out aid to UNRWA.)
Shall we talk about large families among ultra-orthodox Jews, in Israel and around the world?

Here’s a piece in the February 18 New York Times about the recent death of Mrs. Yitta Schwartz of Kiryas Joel, NY, who when she died last month at age 93,

    left behind 15 children, more than 200 grandchildren and so many great- and great-great-grandchildren that, by her family’s count, she could claim perhaps 2,000 living descendants.

Did the NYT reporter, Joseph Berger, take Mrs. Schwartz to task for the effect her fecundity might have on Mother Earth? No, he described it instead as “a thumb in the eye of the Nazis.”
To be fair to Mrs. Schwartz and the particular Hasidic group she was a member of, the Satmar, I should note that (1) She was born in Hungary and during WW-II was sent, along with her husband and her then-six children to Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, where they lost one child, and (2) the Satmars are mostly anti-Zionists, which is why Mrs. Schwartz and most of her 2,000 descendants now live in New York state, rather than the occupied West Bank.
However, there are now numerous other communities of Hasidic Jews who follow social/marital injunctions from their rebbes that are every bit as pro-natalist as the Satmars’, but that are Zionist, or that anyway take advantage of the many wonderful subsidies and incentives that the Israeli government provides in order to have them go and settle in the West Bank.
I also note the significance of that throwaway line from the NYT reporter, to the effect that Mrs. Schwartz’s fecundity was “a thumb in the eye of the Nazis.” On this reasoning, why would having a large family, for Palestinians, not equally be seen– especially in the context of the still-continuing conflict– as “a thumb in the eye of the Zionist expropriators”?
… Either way, I certainly think that for Mother Earth’s sake, all excessive procreation, whoever engages in it, needs to be brought sensitively, sustainably, and rapidly to an end. I submit, though, that this is highly unlikely to be achieved in situations of prolonged inter-group conflict, so long as the conflicts themselves are not resolved (for the reasons given above.)
So to me, this adds yet another reason– let’s call it an environmental reason– why this conflict between Israelis and Palestinians needs to be speedily ended.
But so long as it isn’t ended please let’s not beat up disproportionately on the Palestinians for pursuing something like the same kind of pro-natalist instincts that the Israeli government is certainly very aggressively promoting, on the Jewish-Israeli side.

Home-library discoveries

The home library that Bill the spouse and I have built up over a total of 90 years of adulthood, between the two of us, now sprawls over seven rooms in our Charlottesville home and one in our DC apartment. (Oh, and he also has may yards of bookshelves in his professorial office, too.) So okay, it’s not completely surprising that often individual items get mislaid…
This morning I was reorganizing some of the space in my home office, to make room for the new project I’m working on. It’s always a good task to do. For me, it helps me focus on whatever I’m about to launch into while also reminding me of many of the resources I’ve gathered for past projects, that can often very helpfully be repurposed today.
Three great discoveries this morning:

    1. Two good, clean, printouts of a lengthy series of articles I wrote about Jerusalem in 1995. Yay! I’ve been thinking for a while I should look for those on a ‘floppy disk’ (remember those?) and then find a way to read the floppy disk and re-use the articles in some way. Now all I need to do is scan one of these printouts into a PDF. I even recently bought a new program called ReadIris that’s pretty good at converting PDF’s into regular word-processing programs…. So now I’m just about set with repackaging/ re-using that now almost “vintage” piece of 1995 reporting.
    2. A copy of Elizabeth Monroe’s great 1982 study Britain’s Moment in the Middle East 1917-41. I was looking for that book with some urgency just the other day, and couldn’t find it. This morning, as I restacked some books from my study onto a shelf in our guestroom, there it was!
    3. Archibald Baxter’s We Will not Cease, which is a most amazing testimony by a young New Zealander who underwent horrendous privations when he tried to uphold his religious principles as a conscientious objector during WW-I. New Zealand made no provision at all for conscientious objection during that war. When Baxter refused to put on the uniform they shipped him in a troop-ship in his underwear to France and at one point in the lengthy narrative even tied him to a cross for two or three nights, in a military base in northern France, during a snowstorm… I actually wanted to quote a few excerpts from the book when I wrote here recently about the enlistment in the N.Z. Rifles in 1914 of my great-uncle Cyril Marlow… But I couldn’t find it at the time. Now I have. Yay!

So, just more reminders that doing a good office reorganization from time to time is a really good idea…

Israel Ballet bombs (artistically) in DC

The Israel Ballet, which reportedly receives around $1 million annually in funding from the Israeli government, gave a performance Saturday in suburban Washington DC that was panned by influential WaPo dance critic Sarah Kaufman.
She wrote,

    One could hear the dancers rejoicing from the stage Saturday after the curtain fell on the Israel Ballet… [A]s the audience filed out of Montgomery College’s Takoma Park/Silver Spring Performing Arts Center, the dancers’ commotion seemed tinged with relief that the three-hour-plus event was over.
    If so, they were not alone.

About the performance itself, she wrote,

    The performers danced with a firm correctness but no joy. Standing behind their partners, awaiting a cue for a lift or a turn, a few of the men looked bored. Throughout the evening, the men and women alike lacked a sense of presentation, which was odd given the intimate dimensions of the 500-seat theater. They shouldn’t have had a problem with projecting in that small space, yet they came across as unfocused and distant.

It is quite possible that the dancers’ ‘distraction’ came from the sheer weight of distinctly political expectations that have been laid upon their current US tour. It’s the company’s first US tour in 25 years, and it’s been aggressively marketed, e.g. here, by the Israeli Foreign Ministry as part of its “Rebrand Israel” campaign.
I’ve seen no reports that the performance at Montgomery College was greeted with any protests. But protesters were out in force during earlier appearances in Brooklyn, NY, and Burlington, Vermont. In Brooklyn, the always inventive protesters organized by Adalah-NY had a small troupe of women dancers in blue-and-white tutus, and people handing out mock ‘programs’ to ballet-goers as they went in. (Scroll down here.)
I guess the intention of the hosts at Montgomery College was to try to make sure the ballet company felt warmly welcomed at the college… by making the numerous lengthy speeches that, according to ballet critic Kaufman, took up a full hour before the first pointe shoe hit the stage. The speechifying seemed to rile a good portion of the ballet-lovers who had turned up– including, apparently, Kaufman herself.
She wrote,

    The evening’s languor wasn’t entirely the company’s fault. The dancers took the stage nearly an hour after the appointed start time, once the capacity crowd endured politician introductions, speechifying by campus officials and heaped-on praise for endless donors to the college. It made one wonder if the ballet wasn’t in some way a play for the pockets of culture-loving Jews. The least they could have done, one man near me grumbled, was to have a plate of hamentashen in the lobby.
    The greater lack of sugar was on the program…

Ouch. It really seems the lengthy ‘welcoming’ backfired, doesn’t it.

Iran “calling” Israel’s nuclear-related blackmail?

Speculation is reportedly rife among Washington insiders over why, a couple of weeks ago, the Iranian authorities moved nearly all their stockpile of low-enriched uranium from its previous, deep-underground bunker to a very vulnerable-looking above-ground facility.
But here’s one possible explanation for the move that immediately occurred to me, and which was not among those listed in that article from Washington by the NYT’s David Sanger.
In moving the uranium to its new, very vulnerable position, perhaps the Iranian authorities are not so much “inviting” an Israeli attack, which is one of the possible explanations Sanger mentions (with the cynical goal that the attack might then strengthen the mullahs’ own political position inside Iran)… as calling out the political blackmail the Israelis and their supporters have been using worldwide, around the argument that “if the world’s governments don’t support much tighter sanctions on Iran, then it might be impossible to hold Israel back from attacking Iran’s nuclear stockpile.”
It seems entirely possible to me that, by trundling their stockpile up into its new position– which they did under the ever-present and watchful eyes of the IAEA inspectors who, lest we forget, have been monitoring Iran’s nuclear-tech programs from the get-go, unlike Israel’s– the Iranians may in effect be saying: “Okay, here it is. Go ahead, Israel!”
But with the aim, not as Sanger posits of quite cynically hoping that that attack take place, but of demonstrating to the world that when push comes to shove Israel does not actually dare do it.
Enlisting the aid of the relevant authorities is nearly always the best way to deal with blackmailers, in any realm of human activity. Iran undertook its move to greater physical “vulnerability” under the full protection of international legitimacy.
So does Israel dare attack now?
I very much doubt it.
And now, it can no longer so easily hide its decision not to attack behind “logistical” excuses such as “Well, it’s a very tricky thing to do, but we’re working very hard to find a way…” while its spokesmen and apologists worldwide also continuing saying, “but when we decide the time is right– which will be soon!– you’ll have to hold us back very hard and give us many additional benefits etc, plus step up those sanctions on Iran quite considerably, in order to prevent us from going ahead… ”
If this is indeed the thinking behind the Iranian move, then it looks very smart. It’s an excellent way to deflate all the rhetoric that’s been going around, internationally, to the effect that “If the Security Council members don’t adopt even more draconian sanctions against Iran, then no-one can predict what the Israelis might decide to do!”
… Your move, Israel.

Martin Indyk’s ‘conversion’

Back in the late 1980s, when I was working in Washington as a writer/researcher on the Middle East, with several years of experience as a Beirut-based correspondent for The Christian Science Monitor and other serious MSM outlets, and two books (on the PLO and Lebanon) already to my name, there was another researcher in town, about my age, who was much better plugged-in to the corridors of power and to sources of seemingly endless funding than I was. His name was Martin Indyk. He hadn’t actually done any major writing or research projects by then. But oh, he had been deputy research director at AIPAC! (Working for the infamous Steve Rosen.) And he parlayed that into getting funding from some big California-based money people to set up his own, always staunchly pro-Israeli “think tank”, the so-called Washington Institute for Near East Policy…
Like me, Indyk had been born in England. He arrived in Washington via a childhood and education in Australia. I came via my seven years of on-the-ground-experience in Lebanon and other Arab countries. Then in 1993, on the eve of Bill Clinton’s inauguration as president, Indyk received extraordinarily rapid naturalization as a U.S. citizen and immediately went to work in Clinton’s White House as his senior adviser on Middle East policy.
You see, when it comes to the pro-Israeli crowd, having other nationalities or dual or triple nationalities is an easy-come-easy-go business inside the U.S. political elite. Australian to American? No problem– provided you’re well-connected with the pro-Israeli in-crowd, like Indyk. American to Israeli? Again, a matter of moments if you happen to be long-time “American” scholar turned suddenly Israeli diplomatic rep, Michael Oren.
At the time, when I wrote something about the rapidity of Indyk’s acquisition of U.S. citizenship, he picked up the phone and started screaming at me, accusing me of being an “anti-Semite.” “Oh,” I asked him, “I assume we are talking on the record here?”
He slammed down the phone. What a baby he was. I don’t think we’ve spoken since then.
So… Indyk went on to have a long and notable career working in the Clinton administration, first as the top “Middle East expert” in the Clinton White House and then as Clinton’s ambassador to Israel. He later wrote about those years in his stunningly mis-titled book Innocent Abroad: An Intimate History of American Peace Diplomacy in the Middle East. (The title is inaccurate in many ways… “Innocent”?? “Peace” diplomacy?? But it is also stunningly inappropriate. I mean, would anyone really want an “innocent” to be advising the president on an area as important as the Middle East?)
While working for the Clinton administration, Indyk bore a huge degree of responsibility for many outstandingly bad policies, including:

    1. The administration’s complete failure to follow up on the diplomatic opening the Norwegians handed them on a plate with the Oslo Accords; and Washington’s complete failure, in particular, to hold both parties to the accord accountable for working in good faith to meet the deadline specified in it of May 1999 for completion of a final peace agreement.
    With Indyk’s advice constantly ringing in his ears– and all his own insecurities as a young president who had weaseled his way out of military service in the 1970s– Clinton stayed trapped in a posture of complete subservience to Israel’s older, much more experienced, and battle-hardened Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. He never put an ounce of pressure on him. Rabin took his time implementing Oslo… and made numerous fatal concessions to the settlers along the way. But Clinton (and Indyk’s) adoration and provision of huge financial and diplomatic benefits to Israel continued unabated.
    Only in his very last months in office– ways after the 1999 deadline had come and gone– did Clinton even start to stir himself to mention the idea of a final peace agreement. It was ways too late. The Second Intifada broke out… Oh, and Clinton then sided completely with the even more dreadful (but also “battle hardened”) Ehud Barak as they came out of the failed Camp David talks in 2000 and jointly blamed Yasser Arafat for its failure…
    Thanks for all the “advice” you gave along the way there, Martin Indyk!!
    2. In early 1993, the U.S. was still dealing with the aftermath of the it first war in the Persian/Arabian Gulf, the 1991 “liberation” of Kuwait. People in the US policy elite were debating what the correct U.S. “posture” in the Gulf area should be. Indyk’s signal contribution to that was to successfully persuade the president that the posture should be one of “dual containment”– containment, that is, directed against both Iraq and Iran. In both cases, that meant ratcheting up the sanctions that had long been in place against those countries. In the case of Iraq, the sanctions maintained throughout the entire Clinton presidency were so draconian that they resulted in the otherwise preventable deaths of around 500,000 of Iraq’s most vulnerable citizens, and the destruction of most of the country’s previously well-developed social and economic infrastructure… Not so “innocent” there, either, Martin Indyk…

Well, I could write about many more of the nefarious episodes in this man’s past… But now, I have to take a deep breath and recognize that he has recently, uh, been undergoing something of an interesting conversion in his attitudes and behaviors.
Here he is now, on the board of the generally excellent “New Israel Fund”, and defending it quite robustly (here, for an Australian audience) from the slings and arrows being sent its way by Gerald Steinberg and other representatives of Israel’s new hard right.
I welcome Martin Indyk to the ranks of reason and good values that he seems to edging toward, at this point. I don’t, however, think anyone should give him a free pass for his past record. The Clinton years, and the role he played in them, still need to be quite honestly examined.

The ultimate in chutzpah??

Israeli citizens living quite illegally in the settlement of “Ateret” in the occupied West Bank are now protesting the Palestinian Authority’s pursuit of a project to build the first-ever Palestinian “new town” just a few miles north of Ramallah.
Some of those settlers now have the chutzpah to complain that the new Palestinian town will “be a burden on the environment” of the West Bank… that it will contribute to traffic congestion… that its effluents might flow into West Bank valleys… and even that it “will only benefit Palestinian elites.”
The new town, to be named Rawabi, will have around 5,000 housing units, for a total population of around 25,000 people.
This is the first planned new town development the West Bank’s 2.6 million Palestinians have been allowed to build in 43 years of living under Israel’s foreign military occupation. During those years, their numbers have just about doubled.
And in those 43 years, successive Israeli governments have worked hard to implant more than 500,000 settlers, quite illegally, into the West Bank (including East Jerusalem.)
Are we supposed to be touched by the concern these settlers show for the interests of the West Bank’s environment and of those Palestinians who not members of the elite???
Nah. I am not touched. Let them all go home.

Leveretts on Israeli-Iranian ‘proxy war’

Shortly after I published this post earlier today about the Spy Wars underway between the Israeli team and the pro-Iranian team, I saw this post that Flynt Leverett and Hillary Mann Leverett put up onto their bog.
They are just back in the US after a research visit that took them to Lebanon, Syria, and Iran.
In Damascus, they met Khaled Meshaal. But they have thus far written about the meetng only that,

    It was notable that, in our meeting with him, Mishal did not say a word about the murder of a prominent HAMAS figure, Mahmoud al-Mabhouh, in Dubai last month.

Oh well, I hope they’ll be writing a lot more, soon, from all of their destinations on the trip.

Excellent BDS victory in Brussels!

Lengthy efforts by those trying to get targeted sanctions imposed against products made in Israel’s illegal settlements have won a great victory in the European High Court. It ruled today that setlement products cannot benefit from the free trade agreement the EU has with Israel.
Hurrah!
The case in question involved water-carbonating machines and syrup made by Soda-Club, which is based in the nasty, sprawling settlement of Maale Adumim. The German company Brita objected to paying import duty on these items. The Hamburg Finance Court had earlier ruled that Brita should indeed pay such duties. Brita appealed to the High Court– and the BDS forces won!
The court’s decision also noted that “the Israeli authorities are obliged to provide sufficient information to enable the real origin of products to be determined.” That is also important, given the misleading labeling many settlement-based manufacturers have engaged in.
Locating businesses inside the settlements has been important to Israel’s powerful pro-settlement forces because (1) they enable the settlers to work close to home, (2) they generate some tax revenues to help administer the settlements– in addition to the vast subsidies from central government, that is, and (3) they help “normalize” the whole idea and reality of settlements within the socio-economic life of Israel and its trading partners.
But now the EU, which is Israel’s largest trading partner, is saying a resounding NO! to that normalization.
(I should note that though I called this a victory for the ‘sanctions’ part of the BDS movement, strictly speaking it is not a sanction/punishment to make the settlers pay normal import duties on products exported to Europe. In truth, it is the withholding of a benefit/reward. But why on earth should Israel– or its settlers– get rewarded for anything??)

Spy Wars heat up!

The long-simmering Spy Wars between Israel on the one hand, and Iran and its allies in the Jebhat al-Mumana’a (Blocking Front) on the other, have been heating up a lot over the past couple of weeks.
Does all this accelerating string of revelations and counter-revelations indicate that the two sides are doing some deck-clearing preparatory to a military encounter that perhaps both of them now see as increasingly inevitable, or is there another explanation for what’s been happening?
Today, the security forces in heavily Hizbullah-influenced Lebanon announced that two weeks ago they arrested the latest in a long string of Lebanese citizens who have now been formally accused of (or in many cases, convicted for) involvement in the once-extensive spy network that Israel’s Mossad used to run in Lebanon.
This announcement comes hot on the heels of the revelation publicized out of Israel yesterday that a young man called Mosab Hassan Yousef, the son of a prominent Hamas leader in the West Bank who embraced Christianity a decade ago (the son, not the dad) had in fact also worked as an agent for the Shin Bet during the Second Intifada.
And all this comes, of course, as the authorities in Dubai continue to dribble out additional, extremely incriminating and well-documented details about the Mossad’s involvement in last month’s killing of Hamas operative Mahmoud al-Mabhouh in Dubai.
And then, there was Tuesday’s announcement from Tehran that the Iranian authorities had captured Abdel-Malek al-Rigi, the accused head of Jundallah, an armed opposition group that’s been active active near Iran’s border with Afghanistan. The Iranian authorities did this by forcing down into one of their southern airports a plane on which Rigi was flying to Kyrgyzstan from Dubai, just a day after Rigi allegedly met with his CIA handlers in the emirate.
Dubai and Lebanon are both significant ‘entrepot’ locations whose enthusiastic embrace of free-market capitalism made them both of them, for many years, into places where agents, spymasters, and arms salesmen loyal to a dizzying range of paymasters and ideologies would interact– often engaging in unlikely-seeming collaborations with each other, but also, very frequently rubbing up against each other, or rubbing each other out, while all keeping close eyes on each other…
Beirut, certainly, played that role for many years (Kim Philby, etc), though it became far less ‘cosmopolitan’ and free-wheeling as the civil war set in in earnest in the late 1970s. But still, Israel and Syria each retained strong networks of spies and operatives in the country for many years thereafter. Last year, the Lebanese security forces succeeded in uncovering and rolling up much of Israel’s remaining spy network inside the country, which has probably significantly crimped Israel’s long-vaunted ability to dominate in the region’s long-summering spy wars.
So let’s turn to Dubai. As I blogged here recently, one of the most notable things about the fallout from Mossad’s assassination of Mabhouh there last month has been not– as some have claimed– the capability that the Dubai authorities showed in their investigation, but rather the intentionality and commitment they have shown thus far in their pursuit of it.
And then, we heard about the Iranian regime’s success in identifying and capturing Rigi on Tuesday.
Where did they get that information from, I wonder?
There have been some reports that they got some help from Pakistan in getting him. But most likely they did most of the footwork themselves– including by using the broad network of their own operatives and contacts that they have doubtless maintained inside Dubai for many years now.
Dubai may seem to many westerners like it’s only a kind of playground for their tastes– whether for shopping, beaches, tennis tournaments, ‘democracy’ seminars aimed at Iranian dissidents, military/naval bases, or whatever… But it has an even longer history as a entrepot with Iran; and throughout many years of various western sanctions efforts against Iran, dhows and larger ships would regularly ply between Dubai and ports in southern Iran, carrying large volumes of traffic both ways.
Don’t forget that– though the federation of which Dubai is part, the United Arab Emirates, has many close military relationships with Washington– still, the UAE leadership has been notably unenthusiastic about the prospects of a US or US-Israeli military attack against Iran.
And regarding Hamas, its head, Khaled Meshaal, was in the UAE capital, Abu Dhabi, holding an apparently friendly meeting with UAE president Sheikh Khalifa bin-Zayed al-Nahyan, just a few days before Mabhouh’s ill-fated visit to Dubai…
I think that fact provides some helpful background to the question as to why the Dubai authorities have been so dogged and committed in their investigation of Mabhouh’s Israeli killers. It is also quite possible that the UAE security authorities are undertaking even wider measures against Mossad’s continued and longterm activities within the federation than anything anyone there has thus far announced.
I guess my big question is whether this intensifying “war of the spies” that Israel and its allies have been conducting against Iran and its allies are a way for the intel agencies in these two countries to try to prepare the regional battlefield for a future war.
And just lest I be misunderstood, I certainly do not see this war being started by Iran. Iran has been doing very well in the region over recent years, thanks to the numerous massive mis-steps taken there by both Israel and its close friend the United States. It has every interest in just continuing to see the two western allies bumble along in the self-destructive way they’ve been going over the past decade or more… But Tehran’s decisionmakers are doubtless well aware that there are serious forces inside Israel trying to push the U.S. into an attack against their country. And, realists that they are, they no doubt want to prepare for every eventuality.