When the CIA Said 'It Won't Work'

In 1947, the UN would be voting on a plan of partition to solve the 'problem' of the Palestine Mandate.

What did the CIA think?

Here:

It is apparent that the partition of Palestine into separate Arab and Jewish states (and an international zone), with economic union between the two states, as recommended by the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) on 29 November 1947, cannot be implemented. The Arab reaction to the recommendation has been violent, and the Arab refusal to cooperate in any way with the five-nation United Nations Commission will prevent the formation of an Arab state and the organization of economic union. The Arabs will use force to oppose the establishment of a Jewish state and to this end are training troops in Palestine and other Arab suites.

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The Islamic Conquest of Judea

The Islamic conquest of Judea, how did it go?

Here is Andrew Bostom:

Relying upon the definitive study of this period, Moshe Gil's 1992 A History of Palestine 634-1099, and other corroborating scholarly sources, the following is a summary of the devastating and decidedly "non-liberating" consequences of these jihad campaigns, characterized by massacre, pillage, enslavement and deportation of the indigenous Palestinian Jewish, Christian and Samaritan populations.

The entire Gaza region up to Caesarea was sacked and devastated in the campaign of 634 C.E., which included the slaughter of 4000 Jewish, Christian and Samaritan peasants. Villages in the Negev were also pillaged, and towns such as Jerusalem, Gaza, Jaffa, Caesarea, Nablus, and Beth Shean were isolated. In his sermon on the Day of the Epiphany 636, Sophronius, Patriarch of Jerusalem, bewailed the destruction of the churches and monasteries, the sacked towns and villages, and the fields laid waste by the invaders. Thousands of people perished in 639, victims of the famine and plague wrought by this wanton destruction. The Muslim historian Baladhuri, maintained that 30,000 Samaritans and 20,000 Jews lived in Caesarea alone just prior to the Arab Muslim conquest; afterwards, all evidence of them disappears. Archaeological data confirm the lasting devastation wrought by these initial jihad conquests, particularly the widespread destruction of synagogues and churches from the Byzantine era, whose remnants are still being unearthed. The total number of towns was reduced from 58 to 17 in the red sand hills and swamps of the western coastal plain (namely, the Sharon). Massive soil erosion from the western slopes of the Judaean mountains also occurred due to agricultural uprooting during this period. Finally, the papyri of Nessana were completely discontinued after the year 700, reflecting how the Negev also experienced destruction of its agriculture, and the desertion of its villages.

When Caliph Umar ibn al-Khattab visited Jerusalem during 638, mainly to end some of the wanton destruction wrought by his jihadist forces, he immediately built an unostentatious mosque on the Temple Mount — hardly an act of "reinstating Jewishness and Judaism" to Jerusalem! Moreover, Umar's treaty of submission for the Christians included abiding their prohibition on Jewish settlement in Jerusalem. Three years later, in 641, Umar did allow very limited Jewish re-settlement of Jerusalem, but for politico-religious reasons, advantageous to the Muslim rulers: to spur economic activity and weaken Christian claims of exclusivity to the city. By the end of the 7th century, the triumphal Dome of the Rock was constructed on the Temple Mount under the Umayyad Caliph Abd al-Malik and his sons, giving Jerusalem a Muslim, not a Jewish "aura of sanctity," transforming it, "into a center of attraction to visitors from all over the Muslim world."

The jihad conquest of Palestine created an Islamic state under Sharia jurisdiction for the surviving Jews, Christians and Samaritans, with all its accompanying religious and socio-political discriminations. There was nothing "liberating" about the jihad waged against the vanquished "dhimmi," per Qur'an 9:29:

"Fight against those who do not believe in Allah or in the Last Day and who do not consider unlawful what Allah and His Messenger have made unlawful and who do not adopt the religion of truth [i.e., Islam] from those who were given the Scripture - fight until they give the jizyah1 willingly while they are humbled."

This verse, and its interpretation by seminal Muslim Qur'anic commentators and jurists, was the key rationale for Sharia-based restrictions on non-Muslims' religious practices, as well as their pauperizing taxation, disarmament and inequality in penal law.

Although interrupted, in part, for nearly two centuries by the Kingdom of Jerusalem (1099–1291 C.E.), the oppressive imposition of Islamic law in Palestine persisted for over a thousand years, in total, through the mid- to late 19th century under Ottoman rule.

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Jabotinsky on the Ethics and Morality of Zionism

 Zionism and Ethics

Ze’ev Jabotinsky, Di Tribune, Stockholm, May 10, 1916

There is an opinion that the Jewish people have no “moral right” to claim control of Eretz Israel. The claim that it is immoral is that since the Jewish population of Eretz Israel is only 100,000, while the Arab population is 600,000, this would mean the demanding that a minority rule over the majority. Jews have no right to risk and harm themselves by insisting on such unfair demands. The only right we have is “free repatriation and settlement activity”, but nothing more…

…If power is in the hands of a government hostile to the very idea of Jewish settlement, then such a government will be able to nullify any paragraph without any effort. And for this there will be no need to prohibit repatriation and settlement activity directly, which would simply contradict the terms of the paragraph. There are thousands of other means for this purpose. Thus, for example, without mentioning the Jews, one can establish laws on the right to own property, or on the acceptance of citizenship, or municipal and political laws for repatriates, and so on. In this way, it is possible to bring about a situation where settlement activity itself (one way or another) will run up against an iron barrier. In the end, with the help of all sorts of "proclamations" and "administrative procedures", one can do with this or that paragraph whatever one pleases.

Therefore, the paragraph concerning free repatriation does not give any guarantees. It follows that we must abandon the idea of guarantees and get used to another idea, the essence of which is that the fate of settlement in Eretz Israel depends on the good will of this or that government. Or we must go straight to the point and demand real and genuine guarantees. The most reliable guarantee is this: to grant us power in the form of a "charter" or in any other form.

This is precisely what the Basel Program demands. But the people who signed it twenty years ago suddenly came to their senses and decided that it was immoral. And now they are trying to find a way to accumulate capital and preserve their innocence at the same time. One of them wrote to me not long ago: “I would propose an agreement that would be both fair and even democratic: we should not demand a ‘charter’ for ourselves, but simply autonomy for Eretz Israel. The parliament should be elected by the entire population, both Jewish and Arab. The right to vote should be granted to everyone who can read and write, regardless of nationality or sex.

The masthead of Di Tribune 

Under this system we would get approximately the following figures: the Jewish population of Eretz Israel is only 100,000 people, but all adult men and women can read and write; thus, the Jewish population with the right to vote would be approximately 40,000 people. The number of Arabs reaches 600,000 people, but almost the entire female population does not meet the stated condition, that is, half of the population immediately drops out; and even among the male population, especially in the villages, the art of writing and reading is not very widespread. And if we continue and go along this path, then it will be possible to introduce a system of educational qualifications.

This system exists in England and Belgium. It is based on the fact that people with, say, a secondary education have the right to two votes, people with a higher education - to three votes. If such a system is introduced, then we Jews will have an absolute majority in the first parliament. The first parliament should be elected in 10 years, and during this time we will be able to properly strengthen our position in quantitative terms. How do you like this plan?"

I do not know how to answer such a question. This may indeed be a wise plan, but it has a weak point, namely, that at its core lies the idea that such an idealistically just matter as handing over Eretz Israel to the persecuted Jewish people so that they can establish their national home there, such a deeply ethical moral matter appears so immoral and unjust that it must be covered up with all sorts of fabrications.

It is also characteristic and noteworthy that only the Jews come with such claims to “ethics”...It seems that only the Jews are required to be super-ethical. Moreover, our moralists themselves do not at all want local Arabs to be in power in Eretz Israel. They want the country to be governed by some power that is sympathetic to the Jewish settlement and its activities. Some believe that such a power could be Turkey, others prefer England. But both sides think that it would be extremely "fair" if the English or the Turks were in power in Eretz Israel, although their numbers reach approximately thirty thousand. Such a situation, as you see, would be fair. But when the Jews demand the right to rule in Eretz Israel, there is no justice in this, since there are only one hundred thousand of them.

…No one demands that a "charter" be issued to those one hundred thousand Jews who have succeeded in getting into Eretz Israel, despite the barbed wire entanglements which the Turkish regime places before them. Eretz Israel must be handed over to the whole Jewish people. And this people numbers eleven or twelve million people, that is, in fact, twenty times more than the six hundred thousand Arabs who live in Eretz Israel today. In the course of four years the Jewish people can send over six hundred thousand new repatriates across the ocean. And if we take into account the entire stock of its “emigration”, that is, the entire mass that can be considered potential repatriates without fear of making a mistake, then we get a population equal to eight or even nine million people.

We demand Eretz Israel in the name of these masses, and not in the name of the "Yishuv" that exists today. And our aspiration is not to obtain a "charter" only for those who have settled already in the country, but for the entire Jewish people. This people, by virtue of its perfection, will manage the settlement in the holy land, will plant culture on it, will attract investors to it; the handful of current residents of Eretz Israel - both Jews and Arabs - are an insignificant minority in comparison with this people.

Sometimes the Jews make a funny impression, despite the fact that their faces express honesty and sentimentality. They love to sigh over the bitter fate of their opponents, and sometimes even their enemies. I know dozens of Jews who, even now, after all that has happened, feel sorry for the poor Poles because the Lord God put them in an awkward position and brought upon them such a misfortune as the Jewish question. Thank God, our relations with the Arabs are better than our relations with the Poles. And so we sigh over their fate much more often and with greater rapture. Unhappy people, we say they are, because Eretz Israel is, in fact, part of the Arab territory, because they have lived on this land for many, many years, and suddenly we have arrived and want to become masters there. I look at the moral side of the current situation with somewhat different eyes.

The tribes that speak Arabic inhabit Syria, the Arabian Peninsula, Yemen, Egypt, Tripoli, Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco and Mesopotamia. In a territory whose area (excluding the Arabian Peninsula) is as large as the area of all of Europe (excluding Russia), and is quite sufficient to feed a billion people, there lives only one national group - thirty-five million people. On the other hand, there is the Jewish people, a people persecuted, deprived of a homeland, who have no place of their own in the whole world. They strive for Eretz Israel because they have no other home and because everything that has brought glory to Eretz Israel in world history, all the splendor that was and is in it, all the superhuman functions that the country has performed, all this is the fruit of the spiritual development of the people of Israel. Compared with the entire vast territory inhabited by the Arab peoples, Eretz Israel constitutes only a hundredth part.

I do not know whether it is possible to speak of ethics in our time when such questions are discussed. But if it is possible, let me ask, what is ethics, in essence? Is it based on the fact that one should have much, another little? Is it based on the fact that the land, which is the basis of life, is concentrated in large quantities in the hands of one people, who are not even able to cultivate it, while another people, exiled and wandering like a dog in foreign lands, looks with great envy from behind a fence at the tempting desert? Where did this kind of ethics come from? And how can it be called ethics at all?

If they came with sword in hand to take Eretz Yisrael, we would be right before God and man, just as a beggar is right who takes from a rich man. The ethics concerning land relations between nations is, in essence, the same ethics accepted among the people of whom it is said in the Bible: from time to time there is a great harvest, and then he who has no land demands his share from he who has land in abundance. Instead of two million square kilometers, the Arabs will populate a territory of one million eight hundred thousand square kilometers. And thanks to this, a Jewish state will exist on earth, and one of the most pressing problems of history will come closer to its solution.

It is quite clear that the Arabs living in Eretz Israel have every right to demand that they not be expelled from there. That is a different matter. That is beyond any discussion and no one is going to expel them from there. There is plenty of space in Eretz Israel. The population density in Eretz Israel today is approximately twenty souls per square kilometer. In neighboring Lebanon, there are seventy souls per square kilometer; in Germany - one hundred and twenty; in Italy - one hundred and twenty-four; in Belgium - two hundred and fifty-seven; and in some densely populated areas of Egypt - three hundred and sixty-two. This is not the place to engage in puzzles and calculate how many people can live in one square kilometer in Eretz Israel in acceptable conditions.

But if we take Lebanon as an example, where the natural conditions are much worse than those in Eretz Israel, then, even then, if we calculate, we will find that in Eretz Israel there is room for at least another fifty inhabitants per square kilometer. It follows that we do not lay claim to the twenty occupied places, but to the fifty free ones, or to those deserted and abandoned places which, if only they fall into our hands, we can, with our labors, applying all our abilities, transform into an economically developed region and bring the population density in Eretz Israel closer to the level of civilized European countries. And in this way the question of the legitimate interests of the population of Eretz Israel now living will be resolved.

If there is a need to provide guarantees for the existence of their religion, language, property, personal rights, and the like, guarantees against possible tyranny or persecution on our part, then we are ready to provide them, regardless of whether the protection of their rights is handed over to a special international commission or to the consuls of the great powers. But no ethics can recognize either that they have a right of veto against Jewish settlement, or that a handful of half-savage people have the right to hold in their hands a territory that can feed millions, turn it into a desert, and close its gates.

I am not one of those people who believe that in the current situation it is naive and even unnecessary to express one's opinion in politics about the moral side of the issue. It is clear that the powers that be do not take the moral side into account, but the Jewish people cannot and should not give up their demands. We stand our ground and demand that the world hand over the land of our future into our hands, in the name of our entire history and in the name of all our suffering. In the name of that endless guilt that weighs down the conscience of the world. And it is strange to hear that there are people who do not understand this. But it is even stranger that the people who have doubts about the ethics of the "Basel program" are almost all Jews.

I myself had occasion during the war to talk about Zionism with political figures in England, France, Italy, Greece - and I have never heard such statements from anyone. People who are constantly in contact with government circles in England on questions of Zionism, and they have never encountered such excuses. The healthy political mind of a healthy people decides simply and clearly: it is impossible to imagine a settlement without real power. If the very fact of settlement is "ethical", then the power is ethical. If in relation to such countries as England, France, Italy, which in addition to colonies have enough of their own land, if it is ethical for them to settle colonies, then it is even more ethical in relation to a people deprived of any land at all. And only from the Jews are cries of protest heard. From this we can conclude that in this matter we are not talking about moral rights at all, but about fear of the idea itself.

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A 1921 Interview With Jabotinsky

Here is Sophie Irene Loeb's interview with Ze'ev Jabotinsky published in The Evening News on, November, 17, 1921. Jabotinsky was in America as a member of a Keren HaYesod delegation with other senior Zionist leaders.

Credit

Mrs. Loeb nee Simon was born in Rivne, Russia (now Ukraine) in 1876. Coming to the United States at the age of six, she later moved from McKeesport, Pennsylvania to New York. She was the president of the Board of Child Welfare of New York and in 1921 established the first child welfare building. In 1924, she became president of the Child Welfare Committee of America. In 1926, she succeeded in having the  Widows' Pension Law legislated by Congress.

She led campaigns that resulted in the New York State Widows' Pension Law, penny lunches in public schools, the motion picture law of New York, making building sanitary and fireproof and additional movements for public betterment. As the first woman called to be a mediator in a New York strike, she brought about the settlement of the strike in the taxicab industry in 1917.

In 1927, she was invited to work with the social service section of the League of Nations in Geneva to frame an international code for the care of dependent and afflicted children. She traveled to Palestine in 1925 and wrote “The New Jerusalem”. The profits from her "Palestine Awake” were dedicated to the United Palestine Appeal. She died in 1929.

Her interview was one of a series with leading Zionist officials at the time.

In preparing for the interview, she "looked up his history [and] wanted to stop work, run up to the woods and write the novel of the day. For the facts connected with the doings of this young man would stir the imagination of a Guy de Maupassant or provoke the pen of a Poe.

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Q. I heard it said that Zionism cannot be reconciled with the principle of self-determination, because Arabs and not Jews are today the majority in Palestine. What is your answer to this contention?

A. I t depends upon what you call self-determination. Some people think that this principle simply means taking a snapshot of the world as it is constituted and populated today, and then acting as though everything "were good and just. For instance, you take a statistical snapshot of Armenia and you state that the Armenians are a minority in their own country, because the Kurds and the Turks, have been successfully massacring them for hundreds of years; therefore self-determination for Armenia should mean the reestablishing a Turkish or Kurdish state, in which the Armenians would be left to the tender mercies of the majority. I think that this conception of self-determination is wrong.

Self-determination means a reconstruction, a readjustment of the world.  A homeless people can certainly claim no majority anywhere in the world in the present moment, just because it is a homeless people, and the world has got to be so reconstructed as to give every homeless people a territory where it could try and reconstitute Its majority. This is exactly what we demand for the Jews in Palestine.

Q. And what about the Arabs?

A. The question has two sides. First of all, the Arabs in Palestine itself. The number is just over 500,000. There is neither need nor intention to disturb or displace even one of them. The country, if properly developed, can feed 4,000,000 or even 6,000,000, and we undertake to cram these millions in without squeezing anybody out. I believe that when the Jews gain a majority in Palestine, the position of the Arabs there will be politically the same as the position of the Scotch in Great Britain. It will be absolute equality of rights and duties, and, in addition it will probably be what we term in Eastern Europe “cultural autonomy"—the right to run their own schools in their own language, to use that language for all official purposes, and of course to be absolute masters of all their religious institutions and holy places. Besides, we're going to make of them citizens of a rich country, whereas to-day they are citizens of a poor one. So much for the Arab in Palestine.

Now, the other side of the question is the national interest of the Arab race as a whole. Allow me to remind you of a few figures. All the Arabic-speaking populations of Asia and Africa total less than 40,000,000, but they occupy a territory almost as big as the whole of Europe, stretching from Morocco to the Persian Gulf.

Palestine is only 1-170th part of this immense territory. Its transformation into a Jewish national home will leave the Arab race as rich in national territory as it is to-d ay — indeed, one of the richest races of the world, as far as land  is concerned. They will be able to develop their national being In Morocco, Algeria, Tunis, Tripoli, Egypt, Sudan, Syria, Mesopotamia, the Hedjaz, the Yemine — I really think It is quite sufficient to satisfy the most ambitious nationalism. There is hardly any race In Europe, however victorious, which has not sacrificed a small fraction of its territory for the needs of the world's adjustment.

Q. Do you expect America to help you?

A. I expect American Jewry to shoulder, financially, the main burden of reconstruction. But if you ask me what we expect from America as a whole — indeed from Christian America — I must make a little preface. This is my first visit to this republic, but somehow l cannot think of myself as a complete stranger to American conceptions.

As a child, I was practically brought up (so was the whole of my generation in South Russia) on Fenimore Cooper, Bret Harte and the American tales of Capt. Mayne Reid and numberless other authors, perhaps forgotten by you, but not by me. My favorite author, after Dante, has always been Edgar Allan Poe; my favorite heroes, after Garibaldi, are Washington and Lincoln —and — you will forgive my impartiality — Grant and Lee. I won’t bore you with mentioning more names of statesmen and writers and others (up to your wonderful Griffith), with whom I and many of my fellow-Jews live in almost daily communion.

All this may account for the fact that whenever a great beau jeste or a bold call comes from America, be it Woodrow Wilton's fourteen points or Mr. Harding's disarmament scheme, I feel never surprised. To me it comes natural. It is just what I and my like expect from America as we know it. This is my reply to your question: What we expect from America.

Zionism is a great idea, akin to those ideas which inspired Washington and Lincoln: its prospects and vistas far back and far ahead as vast in the spiritual plane as your prairie is in the physical; a nation accustomed to great horizons cannot fall to grasp the value of our ideal. We expect America to understand our struggle, and when the time comes, to throw her mighty word in our favor.

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'White Privileged' Jews and Jabotinsky

I found that a 2008 thesis entitled 'Quasi-barbarians' and 'wandering Jews': The Balfour Declaration in light of world events presented by (and later incoporated in her book) Maryanne Agnes Rhett that she writes of Ze'ev Jabotinsky as becoming "the vehicle of [Max] Nordau‘s activist approach". He began

advocating the masculinization of Judaism and the militarization of the people via the creation of a Jewish legion. Jabotinsky recognized that in order to carry out the process of militarization, a new ideology to help reinforce muscular Judaism was necessary. For this model Jabotinsky turned to legend and lore of Biblical Israel and closely allied it with modern philosophical and ideological trends.

She then goes further postulating that Muscular Judaism is an Extension of Muscular Christianity:

Parallels that exist between what Max Nordau sought for the Jewish community and what European Christians were seeking are significant for our study. The policy of Anglicization‘ and the prevention of societal degeneration were driven by the same impulses that inspired the creation of the New Jew. While Anglicization was closely associated with an Anglican Christian viewpoint, it nevertheless shaped the identity construction of all Jews, Catholics, and other Christian denominations, especially those of the upper class. Among the Anglo-Jewish elite, identity construction manifested itself not only in sending their sons to the same schools as their Christian counterparts, but in establishing parallel Jewish organizations, like the Anglicized Boy Scouts, for immigrant Jewish boys and girls.

Just as muscular Christianity was a means for inculcating the Christian youth of Britain into a militarized physical identity; British Judaism underwent a revitalization of its own militaristic past with the development of paramilitary organizations like scouting groups. The Jewish Lads‘ Brigade, the most prominent example of these groups, was founded in Great Britain in 1895.

Later on, p. 153, she adds about 

Jabotinsky‘s campaign for a militarized Jewish body

and at p. 232 she suggests, based on "Historian Yakov M. Rabkin" who

argues that one reason De Hahn became disillusioned with political Zionism was because of its aggressive nature,‘ in particular the proto-fascism Vladimir Jabotinsky and his followers seemed to advocate. Rabkin contends that ―his [De Hahn‘s] acquaintance with Jabotinsky and other leaders of the future Israeli right wing, which was fascinated by the growing fascist movements of Europe, alerted De Haan to the threat that Zionism‘s violent side represented. (Footnote: Yacov M. Rabkin, A Threat from Within: A Century of Jewish Opposition to Zionism, Black Point, Nova Scotia: Fernwood Publishing, 2006, 130)

DeHa an arrived in Palestine in January 1919 and Jabotinsky left Palestine in July 1920. What other "future right-wing Israeli leaders" did he know? How well did he know Jabotinsky?

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Avishai Raviv and the Israel Media, 1997-98

The following article was submitted for publication to the Jerusalem Post in November 1997 but was not accepted. A second article on the subject "The Complicity and the Conspiracy" was published by the paper the following year. The two form one though outlook and we have decided to post the year-old article to complement the second.

THE "PROVOCATEUR" AND HIS COLLABORATORS

https://www.oocities.org/capitolhill/2527/op7.htm

by Yisrael Medad

The recently released Shamgar Commission’s secret section details the negligence of the electronic media as a contributory factor to Raviv’s "success".

The report blames specifically the television for being engaged, in part, in the creation of a virtual reality of a right-wing "incitement campaign".

"Eyal", the report states, referring to Avishai Raviv’s fictitious skeleton crew, "existed for all intents only in Raviv’s pronouncements and via the coverage provided him by the television".

The electronic media failed. The public were cheated of the truth.

The commission directly addressed one unique instance when TV’s Channel One broadcast a "swearing-in ceremony" in September 1995. In the fourth section of chapter four, on page 28, a clear charge of guilt is made when the commission’s members write:

"...all during that time, [Raviv] continued his connections with the media in order to portray Eyal as an existing group and achieved the collaboration of the television when it broadcast a swearing-in ceremony, that was actually a staged event, and anyone who was present should have been aware that it was nothing but a staged affair".

Media consumers, we now know, were, to a large degree, fed misinformation. Raviv sought coverage that would justify himself in his eyes and those of his General Security Services handlers.

The media were interested in the situation because it was good film footage. Each exploited each other. But someone of responsibility in the GSS, and ultimately, someone in the political overview echelon, let developments get out of hand.

Raviv was permitted by his handlers to move fringe actions, in themselves initiated by Raviv, to center stage by titillating reporters and cameramen with material they could not pass up.

Raviv was shown instructing teenagers in the art of urban guerrilla warfare;

Planning an armed break-in to the Orient House;

Patrolling, in a violent fashion, the alleyways of Hebron.

Praising Barukh Goldstein for murduring arabs worshipers in Hebron.

No one, though, thought to take a deeper look and focus their lenses on Raviv himself.

His initial taking the credit for the killing of an Arab in Halhul early in September 1995 was widely reported.

So, too, was the supposed links with the Hamas.

Recalled into service in 1993, he was ordered him to paint anti-peace process slogans on walls.

Raviv called for Rabin’s death while being paid by the government.

Somehow, the media accepted his actions as "normal" or as understandably representative of the Right.

The media cannot now avoid its own need to undergo a process of accounting. The media surrendered its professional duties to get a story which fitted a certain mold it felt comfortable with. That mold was retold by the Michael Karpin propaganda film produced for the "We Shall Not Forget" society which highlighted the incitement campaign while conveniently ignoring Raviv. And that mold, one can suspect, was fed by personal ideological persuasions of media persons.

Not one investigative reporter or program producer was intrigued enough to go after Raviv. Even after Israel’s Media Watch filed a criminal complaint against the Israel Broadcasting Authority for transmitting that "swearing-in ceremony", we as well as the subject were treated with disdain. What the late Law Faculty Dean of Tel Aviv University and the former President of the Supreme Court considered a staged event, was presumed an aberration.

We, media consumers, are owed an apology. Our right to know was harnessed to an out of focus approach by many media persons. The time has come to clear up matters if they are to fully regain our trust as commentators of the political scene.

Yisrael Medad is director of Israel’s Media Watch

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The Conspiracy and the Complicity

by  Yisrael Medad, Executive Director, Israel's Media Watch,

November 12, 1998

The decision of Israel’s Attorney-General, Elyakim Rubinstein, to press criminal charges dealing, in part, with an orchestrated "swearing-in" ceremony supervised by General Security Services (GSS) agent Avishai Raviv, was long overdue.  It was three years ago that Israel's Media Watch (IMW) first brought to public attention the probability that Raviv's performance was staged, perhaps in collusion with the TV’s Channel One film crew.  And today, IMW is still concerned over the role then played by the electronic media in the coverage of the Raviv/Eyal escapades.

Rubinstein's decision, courageous as it was in the face of opposition from within the State Prosecutor's Office and the criticism of left-wing politicians,  does not adequately deal with the issue of possible complicity that existed between the media and the political agenda of the previous government.

Ami Ayalon, current GSS director, admitted to the government last year that the Prime Minister’s bureau was notified a few days after the ceremony was broadcast that it was "a sham, a double deception also on behalf of the television".  Former A-G Michael Ben-Yair has also gone on record that the footage was a hoax.  Thus, the sharp criticism by such left-wing political figures as Amnon Rubinstein, Yossi Sarid, Ori Orr and Shimon Peres that Rubinstein is providing succor to those who would believe in a conspiracy theory in connection with Yitzhak Rabin’s assassination, should be judged as self-serving in the extreme.

Avishai Raviv was implanted into the nebulous area of right-wing fringe groups.  Ever since late 1987, when he was 21 years old, he has been a paid employee of the state of Israel.  But what exactly was he paid to do?  What was his mission? One cannot avoid the nasty suspicion concerning the GSS motives when one reflects more closely on just what the Raviv Affair is truly all about.

According to the Shamgar Commission Report, an intrinsic part of Raviv's job was the perpetration of violent and criminal deeds.  He engaged in assault, spouted racist invective, battered Arabs, damaged property, solicited minors to commit illegal acts and, ironically, lied to his handlers.  As part of his cover, he married and then, psychologically and physically, abused his spouse until she divorced him.  He was constantly excused for his behavior and, following stern talks, repeatedly rehired even after he assumed responsibility, as leader of the Eyal organization, for the murder of an Arab in Halhul in September 1995.

As the Shamgar Report makes clear, Raviv was engaged not only in violence but in provocation.  The report notes that "his handlers even chose to order him to write graffiti against the peace process". In any normal society, his employers would be chastised for moral corruption in serving a partisan political direction.  Despite the recent interviews of GSS officers, Raviv’s main task was the promotion of an image, the image of a wild, anti-democratic, felonious and outlaw ideology.   And, with GSS prodding, and the willing cooperation of central Israel media personnel, that image took hold.

The media, especially the electronic media, with its demand for "action", for pictures and scandal, alighted upon Raviv.  His ceremonies, his camps for arms training and his military-style exercise in preparation for the "conquest" of the Orient House broadcast on TV’s Channel One and Two, became a focus of attention.  Those scenes locked into the public’s consciousness.  As British media observer Patrick Birkinshaw has written, "TV represents the most immediate and effective mass persuader and conveyor of information in our culture".  And Raviv was a TV star.

Israel Broadcasting Authority’s Eitan Oren, a reporter for the weekly round-up program, "Yoman", had already been suspended for planning a staged item back in 1988.  His September 22, 1995 clip of Raviv’s gang was the highlight of media self-enticement.  As the Shamgar Report states: "[the clip] was a performance, for anybody who was present at the site must have been aware that it was a fake" (page 28).  Eitan’s professionalism, it would appear, failed him.  His personal agenda overrode ethical judgment for, it seemed, he was convinced that he was serving a higher principle: combating the right-wing.

Oren, his editor, Yisrael Segal, ITV director Yair Stern and IBA director-general Mordechai Kirschenbaum all sought to deny what everyone else perceived: Israel's state-supervised television channel was acting in complicity, willingly or otherwise, to convince the viewers that what they were seeing was truth, when it wasn't.

Whether or not with malice aforethought, the media took a true outsider with no real support or representative status and with the help of millions of TV screens, placed Raviv, now the epitome of the "extreme right", in everyone’s living rooms and in their minds and thoughts.  One cannot deny the atmosphere of antipathy and wrath directed against Rabin and his policies at the time.  But, for months, if not years, the outstanding and dominant example and role model of right-wing "incitement" was Avishai Raviv, media star and GSS agent provocateur, paid out of public funds.

The bandied about conspiracy theory should not be whether the GSS staged Rabin’s assassination.  Rather it is that the GSS may have crossed the lines of democratic norms.  The GSS is now perceived as having lent itself as a weapon of the Labor-Meretz coalition against a massive public protest campaign.  In this, the media was willingly compliant.

If there was actual complicity by the GSS and media elements to aid and abet Raviv’s illegal activities may be difficult to ascertain.  Raviv’s trial, if there is to be one, will be conducted behind closed doors.  But, as Raviv’s defenders are now aware, no locked door can for too long suppress the truth. 

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