Doubt and Certainty
The Russian discotheque Dolphi, devastated by the Friday
night blast, stands on the shore of Manshieh, a
destroyed Palestinian neighborhood of Jaffa, not far
from my home. Teenage friends of my sons used to
frequent the place. It is an innocent crowd, brought to
the shores of Palestine by their parents after
disintegration of the Soviet Union. Kids speak Russian,
their contacts with Israeli boys and girls of the same
age are quite limited, as is their interest in local
affairs. Many of them are blond and blue-eyed, some
dress in the outmoded punk style, they drink more than
it is good for them. A Lost Generation, they call
themselves. Few of them are Jews by any reasonable
criteria, and Israeli radio informed that it would be
quite impossible to bury the victims in the hallowed
ground of the Jewish cemetery. Their fate is not an easy
one in the Jewish state: they are supposed to serve in
the army, but the army makes it difficult for them to
swear the oath of allegiance on the Gospel. If they
perish, they are buried beyond the fence, together with
suicides.
As Druse and Circassian minorities, one million strong
Russian community is not an obvious partner of the
Jewish supremacists. The Russians are subject to
discrimination. They have low paid jobs, which provide
no security of income. They pay huge interest (three
times higher than in the US) on loans they are given as
‘a settlement grant’ or ‘a mortgage help’. Many Russians
baptize their children, pretty Russian girls often marry
Palestinians. Actually, despite separation rules,
Russians marry Palestinians as often as they marry
Israelis. The blast is liable to enforce their tentative
ties with Israelis. That is why it is important to
stress that the circumstances of the explosion are still
surrounded by a cloud of mystery.
INFOPAL expressed doubts whether "any Islamic movement
is able to carry out such a strong attack, given that
most of the recent suicide bombings have failed to cause
significant harm or damage". On the other hand, Israeli
security services have know-how and facilities needed to
cause by one blast the major shift of alliance of the
Russian community. They proved their lack of scruples in
1949, when they bombed the Baghdad synagogue and sent
the Iraqi Jews running to Israel. In 1990-s they
instigated rumors of impending pogroms in Moscow and
sent the parents of Dolphi kids on the way to Tel Aviv.
Killing of non-Jewish children was already declared a
‘justifiable means’ by Madeleine Albright. She spoke
about Iraqi children, dying because of the US-imposed
blockade, but her Tel Aviv friends could make their own
conclusions.
Many years from now, Palestinians will unravel the
mystery of the botched suicide bomber wave 2001. They
will discover who and why targeted the Russian disco, or
the poorest Hassidic area of Jerusalem, or other
marginal sites, as if trying to enforce the elusive
Jewish unity. They will find out why the only
‘successful’ attack was made on predominantly non-Jewish
kids.
But it is not the only doubt. Susanne Scheidt from Italy
posited a legitimate query: "How come that last summer,
when there was no Palestinian uprising in sight, we read
about numerous cases in which Palestinians, as soon as
they showed up on the beach of Tel Aviv with a bathing
suit in their bag, were instantly spotted by Israeli
police and sent away from the beach?" Could a
Palestinian with a backpack get as far as the queue to
the discotheque, without a connivance of the security
services? Until now, there are doubts. Let as move to a
certainty.
Last year we witnessed a severe gang warfare for the
control of Russian night clubs. The warring parties used
to throw hand-grenades into the competing clubs, with
some human casualties. Russian discos of Tel Aviv are
fighting for the same market. Their methods are not too
gentle. It would not be impossible to suggest that the
fatal attack at the entrance of the Russian discotheque
was caused by the gang war, rather than by a Palestinian
bomber. A year ago there was a dreadful explosion in
Moscow underground station Pushkinskaya, that was
immediately ascribed to Chechen terrorists. Afterwards
it became known that the station was bombed by the
racketeers, as the vendors did not pay the protection
money.
Now, if it will be found out that the explosion was
actually caused by a rival gang from, say, a neighboring
Netania, would the IDF planes bomb Netania? Would the
army besiege Netania? Would Netania city council be
denounced as a terrorist organization? No, this way of
collective punishment is meted out only to Palestinians.
That is wrong. Gaza should be treated in the same way as
Netania, Mahmud and Anton should have the same rights as
Doron and Boris. Then, probably, there will be no reason
even for suspicions and doubts.
We should object both to the premature presumption of a
Palestinian involvement, and to the racist style of
collective punishment. Israelis are too fast in this
game. When a single Jewish terrorist shot a German
diplomat in Paris in 1938, the Nazi government replied
with the Kristallhacht, a massive pogrom that carried
away one hundred lives. When a single pro-Iraqi
terrorist shot an Israeli diplomat in London in 1982,
Israeli government unleashed the invasion of Lebanon and
killed forty thousand people. Maybe it was the thing to
do in the days of Genghis Khan, but not any more.
Next day after the bombing, Jewish mob tried to lynch
Palestinians and destroy the mosques in Jaffa. The
police blocked their advance. Israeli press made a lot
of profit out of this action. But I see no reason to
congratulate the police: they knew, as we all know, that
the work of the lynching mob will be done by the Israeli
army. Surely they will target Palestinians just because
they belong to the same ethnic group as the supposed
bomber.
Nobody demands ‘the Jews’ to pay for the dirty dealings
of Milken, Rich and Maxwell, or for Sharon massacres.
‘The Palestinians’ should not pay for excesses of
individuals. While there are still reasonable doubts as
to the identity of the bombers, one thing is certain:
collective ethnic-based punishment is a crime against
humanity.
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Doubt and Certainty Follow Up
June 29, 2001
With Sunday Times’ disclosure of the Israeli security
services’ involvement in the slaughter of the Russian
kids in Tel Aviv, the clever by half plot began to
unravel. From the first moment, there were reasonable
doubts that it was an act of Palestinian terror. The
crime had the bloody fingerprints of the Jewish
supremacist all over it. It was perpetrated on Sabbath
eve, when a ‘good Jew’ is not supposed to hang around a
discotheque. It washed the Palestinian blood off Jewish
hands with expendable Russian blood. It forced the hand
of Arafat to surrender to Israeli conditions of a
cease-fire. It created a miraculously ‘restrained’
General Sharon withholding his justifiable fury and
sparing malfeasants. It pushed a hence neutral Russian
community into the embrace of Arab-haters. The Qui Bono
principle of criminal detection led directly to the high
rooms of Israeli politics, who profited hugely from the
explosion.
An American activist voiced the initial suspicions
noting that ‘the bombing took place the day of
Husseini's funeral when the IDF had so "generously" left
East Jerusalem and when spirits were so high at the
demo. And then there was the convenient timing of this
horrendous crime; exactly what Israel needed to win over
public opinion’.
The Sunday Times now reports that the impossible feat of
delivering the bomber to the deep hinterland of Tel Aviv
was done by a Shabak (Israeli Internal Secret Police)
agent, al Nadi. Quoting a string of officials, an
Israeli journalist Uzi Mahanaimi drew a portrait of a
gullible Shabak agent who unwittingly became an
accomplice in the murder. He supposedly understood the
intentions of the bomber; but far too late. The Israeli
Army spokesman also stressed innocence of al Nadi who
did not know what he was doing.
This scoop by The Sunday Times reminded me of a plot by
the British thriller writer, Le Carre. When endangered
by a pending disclosure, secret services usually prefer
to leak their own doctored version of events. The
damning report of the English paper appears to be an
Israeli damage control procedure. Many Israel-based
foreign journalists recently received additional
detailed information from usually knowledgeable sources.
The sources claimed that the suspected bomber Said
Hotari worked for a branch of Jordanian security
services until his defection to Israel. He apparently
collaborated with Shabak, and that is why his Israeli
visa was duly extended. This fact of visa extension was
reported by Israeli newspapers before the court slapped
a full publicity ban on the case. Hotari was probably
unaware of his deadly load, as the explosion was caused
by remote control.
They also claim that there was an additional reason for
the peculiar choice of the site: the nearby David
Intercontinental Hotel had an unusual guest, the German
Foreign Minister Joshka Fischer. It is not a popular
hotel with high-ranking guests. Though it is a five star
operation, it is not located in the most fashionable
area of Tel Aviv. Purely by ‘chance’, Herr Fischer
became a star witness of the outrage. He was emotionally
swept away to the Israeli side and became an important
player in the following diplomatic game that resulted in
imposing the cease fire on Israeli terms.
Ruthless use of terrorism for political and tactical
purposes has always been a traditional tool of Israeli
secret service operatives. Provocation is not below
their dignity: in 1950s, in the infamous Lavon Affair,
some local Jews enlisted by Israel were apprehended in
Cairo while placing bombs in the American and British
consulates. They tried to present their bombing as ‘acts
of Islamic terror’ and cause hostility between Arabs and
Americans. Israeli agents did not hesitate to kill Jews
‘for the cause’.
Thus, on November 25, 1940, the Jewish Agency men sunk
SS Patria and killed 250 Jewish immigrants. They did it
in order to ensure sympathy to the plight of Jews who
were refused entry to British-run Palestine. The
perpetrators of the outrage admitted their crime in
Israeli media a few years ago. The explosive charge was
too powerful, they explained.
Joachim Martillo recently wrote of possible Zionist
connection with the bloody anti-Jewish riots in the
Polish town of Kielce after the WWII. The riots sent a
wave of Jewish immigrants to the shores of Palestine.
Israeli bombings of Baghdad synagogues are by now a well
known and declassified fact. They caused mass
immigration of Iraqi Jews to Israel.
In a more recent development, just over a year ago,
Moscow was shaken by dreadful explosions that caused
multiple casualties. Unknown terrorists exploded whole
residential apartment buildings in the Russian capital.
The explosions were blamed on Chechens, and brought
about the Second Chechnya war, the destruction of Grozny,
thousands of dead and wounded, but more importantly,
they served as a turning point in Russia’s relations
with Israel and the Muslim world. Russia’s media
enforced the image of Islamic terrorism and of Israel as
a guardian and ally of Russia.
‘We have a common enemy, Islamic terrorism’, was the
line reiterated by Israeli politicians visiting Moscow,
be it Sharansky, Lieberman or Peres. The comparisons of
Chechnya with Palestine became commonplace in the
Jewish-owned Russian press. The old Zionist dream of
creating confrontation between Russia and Dar al Islam
almost became true. Until now, the bombers have not been
found. Russia’s influential Nezavisimaya Gazette openly
expresses doubts of a Chechen connection to the
explosions.
Moreover, I am ready to risk anger of my readers and
claim that the Palestinians are miscast for the role of
terrorists. Surely some of them try to act the part the
Jews gave them and dabble in ‘terror’. Their ‘terror’ is
so timid, that a careful and objective observer would
just pooh-pooh an idea of the ‘Palestinian terrorists’.
Consider a suicide bomber, for instance, a quiet
sophomore at Bir Zeit University, Dia Tawil. He exploded
near a bus full of Israelis. He died while only a few
Israelis were lightly wounded. Many suicide bombers die
without killing a single Israeli, only a few manage to
wound and kill.
Even in their most successive and lethal wave of 1996,
all of them together could not beat a single Jewish
terrorist act, bombing of King David Hotel in 1947 with
its 92 victims. When Jews deal in terror, their enemies
die in droves. That is how they operated before the
state of Israel was established. And that is how the
Israeli state operates to this day. It is meaningless to
even compare the Palestinian ‘terror’ with the organized
terror of the state of Israel. They are not in the same
league. For Israel, the killing of a hundred refugees in
Kana, or bombing a school, or blasting a besieged Beirut
for two months, or assassinating a leader, or strafing
the USS Liberty, or shooting down a passenger airliner
is a normal occurrence. Yet the Jewish dominated media
machine manages to hang the terrorist label on the
Palestinians.
The Palestinians are inefficient killers because they
have the peaceful souls of peasants and martyrs. They do
not go out to kill, they go to die. They are similar to
the kamikaze, the Divine Wind of Japan. The Japanese
suicide flyers loaded their tiny planes with explosives,
prayed to God, wrote a poem comparing themselves with
falling petals of wild cherry, tied a white band over
their forehead and took off to ram the American aircraft
carriers in the blue waves of Pacific. More often than
not they caused no damage, but they scared the hell out
of McArthur. He could not understand this willingness to
sacrifice one’s life for a higher cause. Nor can
Israelis.
The unusually ‘productive’ explosion at Dolphi just did
not feel right from the start. We still do not know the
answer, but the doubts grow. Some supporters of the
Palestinian cause rushed to support the Israeli version
and condemned the discotheque explosion. They were
rewarded: the usually reluctant Jewish-owned American
press published their letters and articles. In my view,
in such dubious cases, when no known Palestinian
organization claimed the act in real time, it is not
wise to dish out blame hastily.