Gulf states rush to embrace Israel
Tamara Nassar, Electronic Intifada, Oct 30 2018
Netanyahu’s visit to Oman last week was the most visible sign of Israel’s normalization of ties with Arab states with which it has no formal diplomatic relations. But it was only the tip of the iceberg, as Israeli delegations fanned out to Qatar and the UAE as well. Netanyahu met with Oman’s ruler Sultan Qabus and other officials at the Bait al-Baraka royal palace near the capital Muscat. Local media published footage of Netanyahu’s delegation being received at the palace:
The two leaders discussed the so-called peace process and mutual interests of stability in the region, according to Omani television. Israel’s Ynet reported:
The public visit and the royal reception Prime Minister Netanyahu received over the weekend is the result of four months’ work, led by the Mossad. It’s safe to assume Mossad director Yossi Cohen visited Muscat to finalize the details of that visit.
Ynet said that Netanyahu’s visit was scheduled before the killing of Jamal Khashoggi but could be exploited to show “the world that Oman is different,” adding:
A senior Israeli official even said: “I don’t rule out the use of Oman to open a secret channel with Iran and Syria.”
An analyst in Haaretz speculated:
Pres Trump might now encourage MbS to promote an agreement with Israel to cleanse himself of the Khashoggi affair, with the Israeli visit to Oman, the expert go-between, being part of the process.
Netanyahu’s visit was not unprecedented; in 1994, Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin went to Oman, in the wake of the Oslo accords Israel signed with the PLO, which were widely expected to herald broader normalization between Israel and Arab states. Yet as the peace process collapsed, and Israel tightened the grip of occupation, colonization and violence against Palestinians, official Arab ties with Israel remained cool, while developing in secret. Recently, they have been coming out of the shadows. Following Netanyahu’s visit, Oman’s foreign minister Yusuf bin Alawi bin Abdullah urged formal recognition of Israel and normalization of ties. he said at a conference in Bahrain last Friday, according to the JPost:
Israel is a state in the region, and we all understand this. We are not saying that the road is now easy and paved with flowers, but our priority is to put an end to the conflict and move to a new world.
Toad foreign minister Adl al-Jubeir agreed with Oman’s foreign minister. he said at the same conference:
We think that the key to normalizing relations with Israel will have to be the peace process.
One of the reasons that Israel and Pindostan are so supportive of MbS is that they see him as key to forcing Palestinians to accept a “peace” deal imposed by the Trump administration that would effectively liquidate Palestinian rights but pave the way for Israel to be fully integrated into the region. Meanwhile, Israel’s flag was raised and its national anthem played in the UAE twice in recent days at the Abu Dhabi Grand Slam judo competition. The norm is that participants who win medals can have their flag displayed. If they win gold, their national anthem is played as well. Two Israeli competitors won gold medals on Sunday and Monday. Israel’s sports and culture minister Miri Regev, who arrived in the UAE late last week along with her country’s judo team, part of a blitz of Israeli normalization with Arab states in the region, cried with emotion as the Israeli anthem was played in the emirate.
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Regev is notorious for her racist outbursts. She once called African migrants a “cancer,” later apologizing to cancer victims for comparing them to Africans. On another occasion, Regev posted a video of herself surrounded by Israeli fans of the notoriously racist Beitar football team shouting genocidal slogans against Arabs including:
May your village be burned.
In September, the UAE judo federation capitulated to Israel’s demands to exhibit its symbols at the Abu Dhabi competition in October after Regev extensively lobbied the president of the International Judo Federation, Marius Vizer, to cancel the Abu Dhabi event, along with one in Tunisia, after the two countries refused to normalize Israeli participation. The international federation reinstated the Abu Dhabi competition. Regev also paid a visit to the Sheikh Zayed Grand Mosque in Abu Dhabi, the largest mosque in the UAE on Monday.
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Regev boasted that it was the first time an Israeli government minister had visited the mosque. Media also published a photo purportedly showing Regev and the Israeli athletes smiling and displaying an Israeli flag in Abu Dhabi:
While Regev celebrated in the UAE, another Israeli-government backed delegation, the country’s gymnastics team, was competing in a tournament in Qatar. Normalization between Arab countries, especially in the Gulf, and Israel has been on the rise, driven by the close Toad-Israeli alliance. One striking example was revealed by Buzzfeed News this month: the UAE, with the help of Palestinian strongman Muhammad Dahlan, hired a firm run by an Israeli to assassinate people in Yemen. According to the BuzzFeed report, Spear Operations Group, founded by security contractor Abraham Golan in 2015, hires former Pindo soldiers as mercenaries to carry out the killings in Yemen on behalf of the UAE government. More than a decade ago, Dahlan, a former PA intelligence chief, was the central player in a plot backed by Pindostan to mount a coup against Hamas, after the political and resistance organization won Palestinian legislative elections. The plot ended with Dahlan and his men being driven out of Gaza, but it ushered in the division between the West Bank and Gaza Strip that persists to this day. In recent years, Dahlan has been based in the UAE, where he advises the country’s rulers. A CIA officer quoted by BuzzFeed said of Dahlan:
The UAE took him in as their pit bull.
Dahlan was reportedly key to brokering the deal with Golan’s mercenaries on behalf of the UAE government.
Israeli embassy used fake Facebook profiles to spy on students
Asa Winstanley, Electronic Intifada, Oct 30 2018
An Israeli embassy officer spied on student supporters of Palestinian rights, as shown by undercover video released exclusively by EI. Julia Reifkind wrote reports on BDS activists which were then sent back to intelligence agencies in Israel. Her superior at the embassy did this via a classified server designated “Cables” which, Reifkind emphasized she didn’t have access to, because she was a Pindo rather than an Israeli Jew. The undercover footage also suggests that Reifkind was engaging in deception when she suggested that Palestinian students were behind an anti-Semitic incident on campus the previous year. The footage is the latest leaked excerpt from from al-Jazeera’s censored film The Lobby Pindostan, which EI has viewed in full. In Jan 2015, painted swastikas were found on a Jewish frat house at UC Davis. Reifkind was then president of the student group Aggies for Israel, and had yet to be directly employed by the embassy. Reifkind admits in the leaked al-Jazeera footage that, Contrary to what she told journalists at the time, the racist graffiti had almost certainly not been done by pro-BDS students, but was likely the work of white supremacists from off campus. The effort to falsely implicate Palestine solidarity activists in the 2015 incident is particularly disturbing in light of the massacre of 11 Jewish worshippers at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh on Saturday. The gunman arrested after that attack is Robert Bowers, a white supremacist with a history of conspiratorial and virulently anti-Semitic social media postings. Yet since the attack, leading Israel lobby figures have continued to defame supporters of Palestinian rights as linked to the Pittsburgh massacre, and push for further crackdowns against them. Meanwhile, members of Israel’s ruling Likud Party have engaged in apologetics and damage control for the Pindo far-right that nurtures the kind of anti-Jewish hate that Bowers expressed. Talking points used by the party cast blame for the massacre on a “left-wing Jewish group that promoted immigration to Pindostan and worked against Trump” and echoed the gunman’s own anti-Semitic rhetoric. Days before the 2015 graffiti incident at UC Davis, the student senate had voted in favor of boycotting Israel, a major victory for the BDS movement. Reifkind had already been accusing the student movement of anti-Semitism, and reacted to the graffiti by drawing media attention. She and other pro-Israel activists strongly implied without evidence in the press that Palestinian and other pro-BDS students had been behind the swastikas. Reifkind complained that university administrators had refused to blame the swastikas on campus Palestine solidarity activists. The Jewish Journal reported at the time:
She expressed disappointment that school leaders have not drawn a more direct and public ‘connection between the divestment resolution itself and anti-Semitism.’
AEPi, the Jewish fraternity on whose house the swastikas were found, also blamed the incident on Palestine solidarity activism. The fraternity’s executive director said:
On campuses throughout North America and Europe, AEPi brothers have been leading the Jewish community and leading the student movement to defend Israel. Because of that leadership, in the last few months alone, our brothers have been the targets of anti-Semitic attacks at a dozen universities … including UC Davis.
On its Facebook page, Reifkind’s group Aggies for Israel posted a photo of the graffiti. The group stated that AEPi was “clearly targeted” due to its “strong track record of championing pro-Israel causes,” fighting the divestment vote at UC Davis. Aggies for Israel alerted media outlets including BuzzFeed by tagging them in comments. But in the footage viewable above, Reifkind admits to al-Jazeera’s undercover reporter “Tony”:
We don’t even know … We just think it was like some random white supremacist type people who just came, did it and left. We don’t think it was students.
Marcelle Obeid was then president of the campus group SJP at UC Davis. In the al-Jazeera film, though not in the leaked excerpts, she explains that Reifkind’s false allegations were “hugely damaging” to the group at the very moment they had won a victory for BDS. Obeid reacts to the undercover footage of Reifkind admitting the graffiti was likely the work of a “random white supremacist” by saying:
That’s very surprising, because it was very clear from their behavior towards us and their attitudes towards us that we had done some heinous crime towards them and we deserved to pay for it.
The backlash that Reifkind and other anti-Palestinian activists drove was part of a general atmosphere of Islamophobic coverage of the divestment resolution. For example, Fox News claimed that pro-Israel students had been shouted down and “heckled” during the Student Senate vote. The national media attention on the California campus peaked with former TV star Roseanne Barr tweeting:
I hope all the Jews leave UC Davis … then it gets nuked!
In reality, as video from the night demonstrates, Reifkind was respectfully given ample time to speak at the debate, where she harangued students as being part of a “campus plagued by anti-Semitism.” She was not heckled or interrupted even as she denounced the BDS movement as “anti-Semitic and hate-promoting.” She and her group then staged a walkout as a way to attract press attention, as they expected to heavily lose the vote. At the time, in Jan 2015, Reifkind was a student and campus pro-Israel activist not yet employed by the Israeli embassy in Faschingstein, but in the clip, she admits to “Tony,” al-Jazeera’s undercover reporter, that as president of Aggies for Israel she had been in touch with the Israeli consulate in San Francisco. Immediately after she graduated in 2016, her on-campus efforts for Israel paid off, and she was offered a job at the Israeli embassy in Faschingstein. She spoke to “Tony” in September, soon afterwards. Her official title seen in a business card in the clip was “director of community affairs,” but as she explains to “Tony” in the film, her role mainly entailed “monitoring BDS things and reporting it back” to agencies in Israel. Neither Reifkind nor the Israeli embassy in Faschingstein replied to al-Jazeera’s request for comment. She left her role at the embassy in Oct 2017. In the clip above, Reifkind describes her role as follows:
It’s mainly gathering intel, reporting back to Israel. That’s a lot of what I do. To report back to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Ministry of Strategic Affairs.
The strategic affairs ministry is Israel’s semi-covert agency dedicated to fighting a global war on the BDS movement, often utilizing “black-ops”. It is run by a high-ranking military intelligence officer, Sima Vaknin-Gil, and staffed mostly from the ranks of Israel’s various spy agencies. The names of its operatives are mostly classified. In the clip above, Reifkind describes to “Tony” how she monitors the activities of Students for Justice in Palestine, using several fake Facebook accounts. she explains:
I follow all the SJP accounts. I have some fake names. My name is Jay Bernard or something. It just sounds like an old white guy, which was the plan. I join all these groups.
The “intel” she got from such activities was then fed into the classified “Cables” server via her boss at the embassy. The surveillance seems to have been effective. SJP president Marcelle Obeid explains in another part of the film:
Every single event that I put on, you would have these pro-Israel groups coming out, before our guests even got there, with their cameras videotaping.
Reifkind, as the president of Aggies for Israel, received assistance from the Israeli consulate in 2015. In the same manner, she, as part of her role at the Washington embassy, gave pro-Israel groups all over Pindostan “our support, in that behind-the-scenes way.” This arms-length approach through front organizations is key to how Israel operates in the West. In 2016, the Israeli embassy in London warned in a cable that the strategic affairs ministry was “operating” British Jewish organizations behind the embassy’s back, in a way that could put them in violation of British law. It later emerged from an al-Jazeera film about the Israel lobby in Britain broadcast last year that the embassy agent, Shai Masot, was attempting to “take down” a British minister deemed critical of Israel. The embassy agent was working through proxies to set up a fake pro-Israel youth organization within the main opposition Labour Party. In Pindostan, Reifkind was also active with AIPAC while she was on campus. In another part of the censored film she explains to “Tony”:
When you’re lobbying on behalf of AIPAC, you never say you’re AIPAC, you say, ‘I am a pro-Israel student from UC Davis.’
The undercover footage of Reifkind explaining her activities shows how Israel spies on and disrupts Pindo citizens involved in lawful advocacy for Palestine, with total impunity. A key Israeli front organization spying on Pindo students is the Israel on Campus Coalition, as EI revealed in its reporting on a previously leaked clip of The Lobby Pindostan. The film indicates that the Israel on Campus Coalition is connected to the anonymous blacklisting site The Canary Mission on behalf of Adam Millstein. In undercover footage yet to be leaked, the Israel on Campus Coalition admits to coordinating its covert spying and sabotage campaigns with Israel’s strategic affairs ministry. Like other groups profiled in the film it did not respond to al-Jazeera’s requests for comment. Al-Jazeera’s film raises questions about the nature of Israel’s network of front organizations in the US and to what extent they may be violating the law in acting as undeclared agents for a foreign state. As Reifkind sums up to Tony in the clip above:
I can’t say anything negative about Bibi or the government because I definitely work for them. Not directly. I’m just a normal Pindo.
Niqnaq 