Israeli propaganda would have you believe that Israel is a liberal western democracy. Though it’s true that Israel is a democracy – much to our detriment – this society is not western, and there is very little about life here that’s liberal.
Israeli citizens are required to carry identification and explain who they are and what they’re doing to police officers whenever asked. They can be summoned for questioning by police without reasonable suspicion of having committed a crime, and they can be arrested for refusing to be questioned. They are not allowed to have a lawyer present during questioning. Israelis can also be arrested and imprisoned without even knowing the charges against them, and without having any opportunity to face their accusers. When in trial, the accused in Israel do not have any right to a trial by a jury of their peers.
Did you know that Israel has a secret police apparatus? It’s called the Shabak (also known as Shin Bet, שירות הביטחון הכללי, General Security Service, GSS, Israel Security Agency, ISA, etc). I won’t pretend that the Shabak is anything like the secret police in Soviet Russia or the Mullahs’ Iran – they’re not habitually disappearing opponents of the regime – but they do use many tactics learned from studying totalitarian regimes and I don’t doubt that they’d rise to the occasion if opposition to our regime ever grew substantial.
The Shabak’s Jewish Department is its arm that is dedicated to preventing nationalist (ie, right wing) violence. The problem it faces is that there’s essentially no nationalist violence to prevent. You could say that this situation is a result of the Shabak’s ruthless effectiveness or that the Israeli right simply prefers to love Jews rather than hate Arabs. If it’s the former, the Shabak is a victim of its own success. If it’s the latter, one must wonder what kind of paranoia is fueling the elites’ hatred so much that they created the Jewish Department to sic on their benign enemies.
Though it’s highly potent, the Shabak is a bureaucracy like any other. It styles itself as a solution and needs to keep locating problems in order to keep the funding tap open. Consequently, the Shabak is involved in virtually all of the cases that it eventually brings to prosecution. The best known example is the assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin nearly 15 years ago. Yigal Amir, the murderer, was incited to commit the act by Shabak agent Avishai Raviv, whose code name was Champagne. That of course doesn’t absolve Amir of the murder – he committed it alone, pled guilty and went to prison for the rest of his life – but it also doesn’t mean that Raviv wasn’t somehow involved. Note: there are conspiracy theories about the murder and I don’t believe them; what I’ve just said is backed up by evidence and courtroom testimony given under oath and published in major newspapers.
The Shabak in the mid 1990s was totally out of control if one of its agents was egging on Yigal Amir to assassinate the Prime Minister instead of simply figuring out if anyone was going to commit a crime, then collecting evidence and making an arrest. But instead of reigning in the Shabak and the Jewish Department, someone decided to create many more potential assassins by locating people with nationalist views, trying to convince them to commit acts of violence, and then conjuring up Jewish Undergrounds if any plan was ever hatched.
Though I am not religiously observant, and I live in Tel Aviv and work in the internet industry, and I’m not involved in any politics, I have many friends who are religious, who live in Jerusalem or settlements in Samaria or Judea and who are active and even prominent in nationalist circles. Every single one of them has been approached by the Shabak in an effort to turn them into an agent or an informer. The Shabak is not the Stasi, but it’s hard to believe they don’t admire some of the Stasi’s successes.
When being approached by the Shabak, every target hears a unique story that’s crafted to his own situation and identity. An academic might receive an invitation to help struggling officers in their studies; someone whose pistol has been extra-judicially confiscated by the police might be offered another one (who knows how many crimes it’s been used to commit?); someone else who’s unemployed with a wife and children might be offered cash.
Any smart person who’s approached says nothing about anything and does it as publicly as possible, making sure that all his friends and family know that the Shabak has spoken to him. This neutralizes the Shabak’s ability to function in secret, playing games with its victims, promising them things and threatening them. It also restores that person’s credibility. In the open, there are some rules that the Shabak has to follow, but behind closed doors, they can do essentially anything they want. The prime reason for the Jewish Department’s success is that Jews love to talk.
One guy who couldn’t resist the urge to talk was Chaim Pearlman, who recorded 20 hours of conversations with the Shabak even though he almost certainly knew better than to say anything. In the conversations, he allegedly insisted over and over and over again that he was emphatically not interested in any acts of violence and that he preferred to do things like distribute flyers and organize demonstrations. Even assuming that these aren’t his true beliefs, it was completely foolish for him to have gotten involved with the Shabak in this way. If for no other reason, they’ll now wage a vendetta against him in the courts just because he wasted all their time.
And that’s not to say that he’s innocent of the crimes (stabbing a bunch of Arabs in 1998). But could any court ever convict him now, since the prosecution will never be able to show motive? Not to mention the long amount of time that’s passed? I doubt it. Moreover, J is not the only one of us who’s seen Pearlman. He’s a little guy – he looks rather timid and even weak. Could he really have walked up to an Arab in the middle of the street 12 years ago, when he was 17 or 18, and stabbed him? I very sincerely doubt it. He would have to have been so wildly crazy that he definitely would have gotten caught on the scene, running around while covered in blood.
As the struggle continues between the Jewish department and the Jews, I was totally shocked to see Haaretz reporting on some of the Shabak’s psychological warfare. Five years ago, at the time of the expulsion of the Jews from northern Samaria and the Gaza region, Moshe Feiglin wrote that no one – not a soldier, not a policeman, and not a protestor – should be allowed to bring any weapons into the zone of conflict, and that anyone who did so could be considered a provocateur and should be detained and turned out immediately. At the time, this reflected a very high degree of sophistication, as it canceled the Shabak’s opportunity to arm its agents, or to incite its targets to arm themselves: Feiglin can probably be credited with saving some lives. He also wrote that the protestors would not throw around “Nazi” epithets at the police or soldiers, and that anyone who did so was almost certainly a provocateur. When I was arrested in a large group as part of the struggle, one person started screaming that the soldiers were the Gestapo and that we needed to resist them like in the Warsaw Ghetto. I immediately pointed at him and yelled “Shabaknik!” Everyone else looked at him. He shut his mouth immediately and five minutes later he was transferred to a different holding cell.
Unfortunately, that wasn’t my final contact with the Shabak. As I wrote above, if you’re approached by the Shabak for any reason, you should decline to participate in what they’re doing, but let everyone know that you were approached. I understand that I am a novice at being accused, but that they are professionals at accusing, so I’m going to follow my advice right now.
I was recently contacted on the telephone by a man who identified himself as a police officer. He knew some things about me, but he didn’t know some other things (presumably the things he’d need a warrant to find out…); at first he indicated that I’d been the victim of a crime and then he insinuated that I had somehow participated in the crime. He demanded that I present myself at a police station within five hours to be interrogated. I’m a 100% law-abiding citizen, with the exception of my occasional ingestion of hashish via brownies that I cook in my own kitchen. I got off the telephone with that “police officer” and contacted an attorney, who called around to the police stations and learned that there is no police officer by that name and that I am not known to the police in Israel at all. Does this mean that I was contacted by a Shabak agent? It seems like it, though it’s hard to be sure. Certainly the real police have not phoned me or come knocking on my door since then… I hope I never find out the answer.
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I wonder if the Shabak’s “Jewish Department” actually concerns itself with any other Jews other than those connected to settlers. Maybe a more accurate name would be the “Settler Department”.
It seems to me that if if there was some low-level organization of pissed-off Jewish boys from Akko or Lod to stab Arabs and burn down mosques, this would totally fly under the Shabak’s radar.
I wonder if the Shabak’s “Jewish Department” actually concerns itself with any other Jews other than those connected to settlers. Maybe a more accurate name would be the “Settler Department”.
Whenever I hear the term “Jewish Department,” I always think of Yevsektsiya.
It seems to me that if if there was some low-level organization of pissed-off Jewish boys from Akko or Lod to stab Arabs and burn down mosques, this would totally fly under the Shabak’s radar.
They would miss it entirely, but… there’s never going to be an organization of Akko or Lod Jewish boys to do things like that. They’re not interested in changing the rules of the game – they just respond to hoodlum type behavior from their Muslim neighbors with some hoodlum type behavior of their own. The intellectual elite among them often do get sent to higher end yeshivot, marry well and end up in some of the more radical settlements, but then they involve themselves in matters of larger importance.
At any rate, if a little gang of Jews from Lod or Akko stabs some Arabs and burns a mosque, the state is adequately equipped to prosecute them and send them to prison for a very long time – because there’s no real ideological motive. If the state were to face the exact same crimes committed as part of a rational plan to intimidate a local population of Arabs out of an ideology of expelling them from the region or the country, it would quickly become apparent that the majority of Jews would support such a notion, and consequently the Shabak is tasked with making sure it never, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever happens.
By the way, although I support expelling the Muslim population from Israel, I also think it should be done in a way that’s organized and as civil as possible. I don’t think any people or property should be harmed in the process. I’d like to see the military, police and courts prepare for it as well as they prepared for Expulsion 2005.
Re: Expellment of Muslims
My belief is that before Israel can ever do this, some European country will have to do it first (no doubt as a result of scary demographic realities).
In the early 2000′s it was easy to believe that one day the Arabs would get crazy and violent enough that we could justifiably kick them out, but these days it seems all the crazies have been concentrated in Gaza.
My belief is that before Israel can ever do this, some European country will have to do it first (no doubt as a result of scary demographic realities).
In 2010 terms, sure. But there are a lot of things that could happen to overturn what we currently think is immutable.
In the early 2000′s it was easy to believe that one day the Arabs would get crazy and violent enough that we could justifiably kick them out, but these days it seems all the crazies have been concentrated in Gaza.
And yet, nobody believes that what we saw eight and nine years ago was the limit of what they’re capable of showing us.
Although the best option for everyone is an orderly transfer, your only option may be to just let Jewish anger boil into a pogrom.
That’s unthinkable. It could never happen.
I love sarcasm.
I hadn’t heard that Yigal Amir had been egged on by someone who turned out to be a Shin Bet agent. Interesting! And most disturbing.
Here in Canada, back in the 90s, the RCMP had an undercover agent infiltrate a neo-Nazi organization; this guy, Grant Bristow, then proceeded to infiltrate a right-wing political party, the Reform Party of Canada, with the intent of forging links between neo-Nazism and this new political party, which was seen by everyone else – the Liberals, the Conservatives, and the NDP (socialists), as well as the Quebec separatists (the Bloc Quebecois), as an unacceptable threat to the political status quo. So we had a police officer trying to increase the influence of neo-Nazism, in an effort to discredit a populist political party hated by the rest of the political establishment. Chilling, eh?
It gets worse; it has come to light that there have been quite a few undercover agents infiltrating neo-Nazism, and not too unsurprisingly, some of the most vocal voices on neo-Nazi internet forums have turned out to be such undercover agents. And guess what? Half the time, the left hand conveniently didn’t know what the right was doing, and vice versa, so it would seem that there were agents reporting on the alarming growth of neo-Nazism’s influence in Canada, esp. online, who were merely observing and reporting on each other. How convenient.
Modern government is the enemy of the people.
This reminds me of IHTG’s suggestion that I read Chesterton’s “The Man Who Was Thursday.” I will definitely pick it up on my next trip to America.
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