November
30, 2023
From
beatings to arbitrary arrests, Germany’s crackdown on all those who dare defy
the country’s support for Israel’s genocide in Gaza targets everyone from
Palestinian refugees to anti-Zionist Jews.
Western
governments are cranking up repression of pro-Palestine activists in response
to the outpouring of solidarity with Palestine by millions around the globe. In
Europe, Germany has set a grim bar in brutalizing protestors and violating
their civil liberties. The Real News reports from Berlin’s largely Arab and
Muslim Sonnenallee neighborhood.
Transcript
(Narrator):
As Israel continues to subject besieged Gaza to a brutal bombing campaign,
variously described as war crimes, ethnic cleansing and genocide Western
governments have lined up in support of Israel whilst attempting to dampen
solidarity with Palestine. No country, though, seems to have aligned itself as
unequivocally with Israel than Germany.
On
the streets of Berlin, a city famous for its ‘anything goes’ attitude. This
unwavering support of Israel has translated into harsh and unprecedented police
repression. Sonnenallee, a street in the predominantly Arab and Turkish
neighborhood of Neukölln is known by the Arab community as Share’ al-Arab or
Arab street.
Zaid,
Activist: Sonnenallee is the street with all the Arab shops and Arab people and
migrants in general, they are very
I
mean, this is also Hermannplatz.
(Narrator):
Zaid Abdulnasser is the coordinator of the Germany chapter of Samidoun an
international solidarity network for Palestinian prisoners.
He’s
also a Palestinian refugee and resident in Germany since 2015.
Zaid,
Activist: I would say in every demonstration and every event that happened for
Palestine in Berlin ever since the seventh of October, in every event, there
was an incident, at least one where the police attacked the demonstration and
hit people and assaulted them and arrested at least a couple of people.
Some
of the harshest repressions took place, last week happened here, and they
closed that street and they blockaded it with tens of police vans, and, and
police officers, like hundreds of police officers, were roaming the street
here, and they built some sort of desk to process the people.
(Narrator):
One of the people processed at these desks was sociologist and activist
Mattanja, who says she was walking home when she was arrested.
Mattanja,
activist: They just drove me two blocks and dropped me off over there in this
street on Hermannplatz, where they created a pop-up police station.
They
really put down tables and everything because they were arresting so many
people that day. And there was a line with people, maybe like 100 people,
women, men, ten year old kids after me, a ten year old boy got arrested, worked
to the floor, sat on his neck. He was standing behind me in line over there.
(Narrator):
In a video that quickly went viral, Mattanja is seen being arrested by police.
“I am arrested because I said ‘free, free Palestine’”
Mattanja,
activist: On that day there were like two protests scheduled here in Neukölln
that were banned immediately. Those protests were on two different squares here
in the neighborhood. I was just there on the sideline like watching other
people getting kettled and arrested. And then actually I was on my way home to
where I live and passing over Sonnenallee there were like a lot of people and
some people said: “Free, free Palestine.” I chanted “Free, free Palestine”
twice while walking home on a street where there was no demonstration planned.
And I sat down at a table and 2 seconds later, five police cops ran at me and
said: “You’re arrested.”
(Narrator):
Of course, the police are acting on orders from higher up.
Olaf
Scholz, German Chancellor: It is very important to say this today here in
Israel during these difficult times: Germany’s history and responsibility it
had for the Holocaust requires us to help maintain the security and existence
of Israel.
(Narrator):
Activists claim that police repression, criminalization, and institutional
silencing of Palestine solidarity goes way back to before October the 7th. With
the recent events representing only an intensification.
Nevertheless
the drive by many in Germany to express solidarity to mourn, to protest against
occupation and genocide seems not only to persist but to grow.
Crowd
chanting: “Free, free Palestine!”
“Stop
the genocide!”
“Cease
fire now!”
(Narrator):
Iris Hefets is an activist in Germany’s ‘Jewish Voice for Peace’. On October
14th, she was arrested and detained for holding a sign in public reading:
‘As
a Jew and Israeli stop the genocide in Gaza.’
Civilian:
Iris Hefets from the ‘Jewish Voice’ detained the Berlin police detained Iris
Hefets on Hermannplatz.
Iris
Hefets, Activist: Yeah, if someone is here offended by the fact that I’m
criticizing Israel it can be considered to be anti-Semitic. This is the
perversion of Germany, of anti-Semitism. And we see now, of course, that it’s a
big problem, because if everything is anti-Semitism, then nothing is
anti-Semitism.
Anna,
Protester: Of course anti-Semitism exists, but Palestinians and Arabs still
have the right to go on the street, show their support for the people mourn
also and this has been completely, since one month, forbidden in the name of
anti-Semitism, which is actually racism against Arabs and Muslims within
Germany who is a huge part of the population also.
Lorin,
Protester: By silencing a democratic protest you’re just gonna divide more
people. They actually get to the opposite result that they say they want to
achieve.
Samantha,
Protester: Supporting this idea that to oppose the state of Israel is to oppose
Jews this causes anti-Semitism this is an extremely dangerous mystification.
People have the right to protest and suppressing the right to protest is only
going to actually increase anti-Semitism.
(Narrator):
As well as arresting people for expressing an opinion, since the 7th of
October, videos have surfaced showing German police attacking protesters,
stamping out candles at candle-lit vigils, ripping away Palestinian flags and
simply stopping and searching people who are even suspected of being part of a
demonstration.
Mohamed
Al Hassan, is the manager of a law firm representing many of the protesters who
have been arrested at the demonstrations since October 7th.
Mohamed
Al Hassan, manager of Advocardo: At the moment we have women, young women,
girls, basically girls who are beaten up very badly up into hospital. So they
have black eyes. They have broken bones, broken ribs. So people people were
completely beaten up and we have to say that some people were even beaten up
after they were taken into the police cars. So they were handcuffed already.
And they totally got beaten up. And we are filing cases against the police as
well.
Samantha,
Protester: The police… I never feel safe when the police are nearby, and I
don’t think they are here to protect us, they are here to enforce the German
State’s perception of Palestine as an anti-Semitic cause and it’s outrageous
and dangerous.
Crowd
chanting: “Eyes open, eyes open!”
“Our
children are being lost!”
Zaid,
Activist: But what happens when you apply this amount of repression and
pressure against Palestinians and Arabs and even internationals who support
Palestine, where you ban them, from gathering legally and voicing their worries
and voicing their feelings and voicing their political position.
What
this resulted in is that the street at some point refused this repression, so
like even in a sense of if I were the state and I was concerned about my inner
security, it is very dangerous to alienate hundreds of thousands of people in
this very brash and very repressive way and if anything, it does show that,
fascism never left Germany. Fascism is still alive and well in Germany.
Iris
Hefets, Activist: If Germany says that in order to do a ‘never again’, they are
supporting genocide, that is really a perversion of the Jewish history, of the
history of all humans. The Holocaust is not only Jewish history.
Therefore,
I am here to say, of course not in my name. Of course, I condemn deeply what
Germany is doing.
Mattanja,
activist: I think it’s very important for people all around the world to become
aware of how German propaganda the media outlets have no shame in twisting the
most like basic basic observations.
(Narrator):
One of Germany’s largest media corporations, and one of the largest media
publishers in Europe, Axel Springer, outlines its core “values” on its website.
The first value mentions “democracy and a united Europe” while the second “the
right of the existence of the State of Israel.”
Their
flagship tabloid Bild is the highest-circulation newspaper in Europe with over
12 million daily readers.
Zaid,
Activist: The German media specifically played a major role in everything that
happened in the past two years.
(Narrator):
BILD has not only targeted the Samidoun network but Zaid personally.
Zaid,
Activist: A couple of weeks ago ‘Samidoun: Palestinian prisoners solidarity
network’ was banned by Olaf Scholz. And suddenly Samidoun is this devil in
Germany and my picture was put on The Bild as “Chef der Juden-Hass” like “the
leader of Jew-hatred.” This is an invitation to harm. This is an invitation to
attack me, like, physically hurt me. And for what?
What
do we do in Germany? We go to the streets, we organize public events where we
speak about Palestine and the prisoners. It is very normal political work.
(Narrator):
Nevertheless, the German government continues to clamp down on Palestine
solidarity, with some politicians now even openly calling for deportation on
grounds of anti-Semitism. For Zaid these threats have become a reality, as he
struggles to retain his refugee status, and fights possible deportation.
Despite all of this, he remains committed.
Zaid,
Activist: So regarding the future, I do feel, a sense of extreme optimism, what
we’re seeing on the street where people are refusing the repression by the
state.
They
see that this German police is not too different than the police they see on
TV, in occupied Palestine that is hitting and repressing people.
They
have put themselves there. They have expressed this extreme hatred towards
Palestinians and towards Palestine and towards Arabs and towards anything that
does not support the occupation.
You
can do a thousand seminars about it, but it will never be as clear as when the
person is being punched in the face by the police because they’re saying “Free
Palestine from the river to the sea.”
How Israel Sabotaged U.S. Nuclear Diplomacy with Iran
November
30, 2023
Critical
Review of Ilan Evyatar, Yonah Jeremy Bob and Jonathan Davis, Target Tehran: How
Israel Is Using Sabotage, Cyberwarfare, Assassination – and Secret Diplomacy –
to Stop a Nuclear Iran and Create a New Middle East. New York: Simon &
Schuster, 2023.
Munich
(Special to Informed Comment; Feature) –
The book starts with a heist that represented “an astonishing covert
achievement that decisively altered both the balance of forces in the Middle
East and U.S. policy.”[1] At least, this is what Yonah Jeremy Bob and Ilan
Evyatar, both journalists at The Jerusalem Post, claim in “Target Tehran”,
their recently published book on Israel’s shadow war with Iran. As in so many
other passages of “Target Tehran”, the authors show here a weakness for
hyperbolic statements.
The
“astonishing covert achievement” they refer to is Mossad’s operation to steal
documents related to Iran’s nuclear program from a warehouse in Tehran in
January 2018. It was certainly astonishing that Israel managed to access some
of Iran’s most sensitive information. However, there was nothing truly
surprising in the documents obtained during the heist. And yet, they were
presented as such by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in his
well-rehearsed (fifteen times, according to the authors) televised speech in
April 2018.
Netanyahu
accused Iran of having lied and continuing to lie about its nuclear program
after the conclusion in July 2015 of the Iran nuclear deal, formally known as
the JCPOA. On the first point, everyone involved in the negotiation of the
JCPOA knew perfectly well that Iran had been carrying out a covert nuclear
program. This is why a nuclear agreement was needed in the first place. On the
second point, Netanyahu did not present any convincing argument to contradict
the IAEA’s assessments that Iran was complying with the JCPOA at that time.
As
for the fact that the document heist “decisively altered both the balance of
forces in the Middle East and U.S. policy,” this is even more of an
over-statement. The normalization process between Israel and the UAE and
Bahrain, which culminated in the Abraham Accords in September 2020 and had the
external support of Saudi Arabia, had been in the making for years, as the
authors themselves explain. And yes, Netanyahu’s speech might have affected
U.S. President Donald Trump’s decision to abandon the JCPOA in May 2018, but
the Israeli prime minister was pushing at an open door as Trump had been
referring to the JCPOA already on the campaign trail as “the worst deal ever.”
Far
more interesting than the details of how Israel convinced a U.S. President that
needed little convincing to abandon the JCPOA are Israeli long-running efforts
to first prevent the nuclear agreement and second, to complicate a return to it
after Joseph Biden succeeded Trump. The main narrative thread in “Target
Tehran” is Israel’s ingenuity in countering Iran through targeted
assassinations, cyberwarfare, and diplomacy with the Arab world. But a more
critical approach to the book allows us to read it as the story of how Israel
consistently undermined U.S. diplomatic efforts to reduce tensions with Iran.
While
negotiations on the nuclear file were ongoing between 2013 and 2015, Israel
continued to carry out sabotage efforts against the Iranian nuclear program,
former Mossad director Tamir Pardo told the authors. This covert action was
simply the secret side of Netanyahu’s very open campaign against the JCPOA,
which brought him to criticize Obama’s Iran policy in an address to a
Republican-dominated Congress in March 2015.
There
are more recent examples of similar dynamics. In May 2022, The Wall Street
Journal reported that Iran had accessed internal IAEA documents and used them
to thwart the international agency’s fact-finding efforts. Again, the documents
were from the period prior to the signing of the JCPOA, but Israel’s intentions
were clear. The Israeli government leaked this information to the WSJ, first
obtained in the 2018 heist, during an intense phase of diplomatic efforts to
revive the JCPOA.
In
“Target Tehran”, we get to know the backstory of this leak. Naftali Bennett,
who was Israel’s prime minister at the time, told the authors that “he picked
that particular moment to release the intelligence about Iran’s hack of the
IAEA because he thought it could push the U.S. away from the nuclear
negotiations.”[2] With friends like these, who needs enemies?
One
of the biggest weaknesses of “Target Tehran” is that, while it extensively
describes how Iran has been fighting back against Israel in the context of the
shadow war between both countries, it never really seeks to understand Iranian
behavior. For instance, if we are puzzled by Iranian Supreme Leader Ali
Khamenei’s fatwa against the production of nuclear weapons, we only need to
read the explanation that Harold Rhode, a former American intelligence analyst,
gave to the authors in an interview.
Rhode,
most probably without an ounce of self-reflection on how he essentializes a
whole culture, told the authors that the Persian culture has “perfected the art
of deception” and that the Iranians “attach little meaning to words.” The
targeted assassination in May 2022 of Hassan Sayyad Khodaei, a colonel in the
Revolutionary Guard who had reportedly planned attacks against Israeli targets,
is impersonally described by the authors as “a strike at the head of the
octopus.”
Compare
this with the bizarre description of former Mossad director Meir Dagan, who was
“a prickly pear, tough on the outside like the thorny shell of the fruit and
soft on the inside like its sweet flesh.”[3] Any claim to a minimum of
objectivity is left behind when Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman and
Egyptian President Abdel Fattah Al-Sisi are introduced to us as “socially
liberal autocrats,”[4] a concept you will not find in any political science
textbook for good reason. More accurate is the description of John Bolton as an
“ultra-hard-liner” and the former national security adviser seems to be content
with it if we are to judge from his positive review of “Target Tehran” for the
WSJ.
Bolton
is just one of the key figures Bob and Evyatar had the opportunity to interview
in the course of their journalistic careers and research for the book,
alongside many others such as former prime minister Ehud Olmert and a
succession of former Mossad directors. The authors’ access to these
high-profile figures, however, seems to have come at the cost of avoiding
uncomfortable but imperative questions. For example, how is it possible that,
despite Israel’s undeniable success in killing key Iranian nuclear scientists
and disrupting Iran’s nuclear program through cyber weapons and sabotage,
Tehran is currently further than ever in its uranium enrichment path?
Under
Netanyahu, but also during his brief period out of power, Iran has been the
focus of Israel’s covert action. In April 2023, Netanyahu said Iran was
“responsible for 95% of the security threats” against Israel. It is true that
Tehran supports Hamas both rhetorically and materially. Nevertheless, to
present Hamas as an Iranian puppet, as a WSJ report tried to do in the
aftermath of Hamas terrorist attack against Israel on October 7, which killed
1,200 people, can only be the result of willful ignorance. Although one cannot
flatly deny that Iran had some knowledge of Hamas’ plans, both Israeli and U.S.
officials have expressed they have no proof that Iran was directly involved in
the terrorist attack.
Palestinian
armed groups have long had their own agendas, which are mainly the product of
the specific situation in Israel/Palestine, and the PLO was fighting Israel
long before Khomeini took power in Tehran. The main challenges to Israel’s
security have long derived from its occupation of the West Bank and enforced
isolation of the Gaza Strip after Hamas militarily took over the territory in
2007. The more than 15,000 Gazans that have been killed in the course of
Israel’s offensive against the Gaza Strip after October 7 will not bring Israel
any closer to safety and, considering the risk of regional escalation, the
opposite appears more likely. For all its military superiority over the
Palestinians and Washington’s support for the country, it is difficult to see
how Israel can enjoy real peace as long as it remains an occupying power.
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