beniweek

Beni Kaye, a friend of ours who lives in Kibbutz Ein Harod writes a weekly newsletter which he sends to family and friends. I try to update this page with his weekly mailing.

Here is this week’s.

Who killed Cock Robin? I, said the Sparrow, with my bow and arrow, I killed Cock Robin. Begins the old nursery rhyme recounting a murder and an unabashed confession.  Our long and bitter experience with Arab terrorist groups has taught us that credit for a terrorist attack, even unsuccessful attempts is quickly claimed. Sometimes there’s more than a single claimant, both perpetrator and others hoping to benefit from the publicity.

Last Friday, or according to some accounts, Saturday morning, Brigadier General Mohammad Suleiman, aide to Syrian President Bashar al Assad, was shot dead by a sniper in his seaside villa at Tortuos. Some sources claim the assassin shot him from a yacht off the Syrian coast. The assassin hasn’t been identified and no organisation is claiming credit for the ‘hit’.

Until recently the Syrian news media made no mention of Suleiman’s murder. Finally on Wednesday the official Syrian news agency briefly grieved the general’s ‘untimely’ demise.

Six months ago a close associate of Mohammad Suleiman, Hezbollah master terrorist Imad Mughniyeh was assassinated in Damascus. Israeli officials have neither confirmed nor denied Israel’s involvement in the assassinations.

The London-based English language paper Asharq al-Awsat claims “There is no doubt that General Muhammad Suleiman was the closest person to Bashar al-Assad ,  his chief aide in the armed forces. He knew everything!”  

The London Times   emphasised the mysterious circumstances surrounding Suleiman’s  death, which has sparked intense speculation about internal feuding within the Syrian intelligence community.   

When Bashar Assad succeeded his father as president in 2000, General Suleiman ran his intelligence affairs, and is reported to have handled the transfer of weapons from Syria to Hezbollah in Lebanon.

The link with Hezbollah could be connected to Suleiman’s assassination. The Times quotes ‘a well-placed Syrian source’ which believes that General Suleiman’s murder could be retribution for the sacking of top intelligence officers following Imad Mughniyeh’s assassination. According to the source, the heads of several Syrian intelligence agencies were quietly replaced or had their powers stripped from them after the assassination. “The demoted intelligence chiefs may have met and decided on revenge”.Whether General Suleiman was killed by a clique of disaffected intelligence officials or not, there is no shortage of alternative theories for his death. Meir Javendanfar, a specialist in Iranian intelligence, said the general was the liaison officer between the Syrian regime and Hezbollah, and noted that his Iranian counterpart, General Ali al-Asgari, had defected to the United States last year, severing key links between the Lebanese organisation and its backers. “The assassination of Suleiman, Mughniyeh and the defection of General Ali al-Asgari sends a very strong message first and foremost to Hezbollah, and then to its allies in Iran and Syria that their activities and relations with Hezbollah in Lebanon are being watched,” he said. “It also says that the ranks of their intelligence organisations have most probably been infiltrated, and that a renewed conflict initiated by them would not be in their best interest, at least militarily.” Another theory was aired by Sheikh Abdullah al-Raghib al-Hamed, a Syrian opposition leader, who told the Israeli news website Ynet that the assassination had been ordered from the very top of the Syrian regime as part of a cover up to hide its own implication in the 2005 Beirut bomb attack that killed Rafik Hariri, a former Lebanese prime minister and an opponent of Syria. Syria was widely blamed for the murder, and outrage sparked by the explosion forced Syria to withdraw troops that had been stationed in Lebanon since 1976. The article in the Times  noted that “Syria is at a critical juncture as it pursues indirect peace talks with Israel and a closer relationship with the West, while attempting to maintain its long-standing regional alliances with Iran and the militant Shia Hezbollah of Lebanon”. The Debka file website which claims to have ‘exclusive information’ and isn’t the most reliable source of news, does nevertheless add an interesting facet to the mystery of Suleiman’s murder. “1. He was the president’s liaison man with the North Korean government. On his frequent trips to Pyongyang, Gen. Suleiman organised the consignment of components for the plutonium reactor in northern Syria, which Israeli forces demolished last September, and the security of the North Korean scientists and technicians who accompanied them.2. Muhammad Suleiman was also the president’s private channel of communication with Iranian military and intelligence chiefs; in this capacity, he most probably facilitated the Syrian-Iranian-North Korean connection. The Syrian reactor was designed to produce nuclear fuel for the Iranian programme and radioactive weapons for Syria.3. The late general also acted as the president’s contact man with Hezbollah’s leaders. He worked directly with Imad Mughniyeh, head of Hezbollah’s security apparatus, who was killed in Damascus last February.4. His key function was the management of Assad’s personal interaction with the Syrian chief of staff, generals and heads of military intelligence. There was no state secret from the powerful general. He was to have accompanied the Syrian president on his state visit to Tehran Saturday; instead he was laid to rest in his home village of Driekesh in the north”.

There’s no clear indication who shot Suleiman and maybe we will never know.

“Curiouser and curiouser” said Alice.

The other major event of the week only involved Israel in a humanitarian way.

BBC online reported that a group of 188 Palestinians which  were granted refuge in Israel following  deadly clashes between rival factions Hamas and Fatah were  returned to Gaza.

The men, members of a clan allied to Fatah, were allowed into Israel after fighting left nine dead on Saturday.

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, told Israel not to transfer them to the West Bank, as he had earlier requested.

Some 32 have already returned to Gaza, where Hamas says it has detained them.

The men are reported to be members of a Fatah-affiliated clan that Hamas blames for a recent bomb attack in Gaza.

Twenty-two of those who crossed the border were taken to hospitals in Israel for medical treatment.

The Gaza border crossing was opened after both Egypt and President Abbas asked for the men to be allowed in.

Later Abbas decided to let most of the group to be transferred to Jericho.

The dead Syrian general and the internal friction in Gaza appear to concern the Israeli public less than taking a late summer holiday abroad. The favourite destination – Turkey.

 

Have a good weekend.

 

Beni   8th August, 2008.

Here are previous weeks’

On December 6, 1987, an Israeli was stabbed to death while shopping in Gaza. The following day, four residents of the Jabalya refugee camp in Gaza were killed in a traffic accident involving an Israeli driver. Rumours that the four had been killed as a deliberate act of revenge began to spread among the Palestinians. Mass rioting broke out in Jabalya on the morning of December 9, in which a 17-year-old youth was killed by an Israeli soldier after he threw a Molotov cocktail at an army patrol. These incidents are often mentioned whenever we look for the causes of the first outbreak of large scale violence in the occupied territories – the   first Intifada. At that time the frustration felt by many Palestinians  in Gaza and the West Bank following twenty years of Israeli occupation with no equitable solution to the  ‘Conflict’ in sight was likened to a powder keg waiting for a spark to detonate it. The spark was provided by a baseless rumour.

Two days ago a bulldozer driven by Ghassan Abu-Tir,  a 22 year old Palestinian  from Umm Touba, a village in southeast Jerusalem ploughed through traffic in  Jerusalem injuring a dozen people. To everyone on the busy thoroughfare it was obvious that this was a copycat performance, a repetition of the terrorist rampage carried out by Hussam Duwiyat three weeks ago. .This time fortunately the driver was shot dead before he managed to do much damage.Only one eye witness said that Abu-Tir’s deliberate attack appeared to be a traffic accident. The differing opinion was voiced by the manager of the King David hotel’s restaurant, a Palestinian from Beit Sefafa in southeast Jerusalem.

At the time of Samir  Kuntar’s  triumphant return to Lebanon he was welcomed by all communities Sunni, Shia, Christian and Druze. There was no dissenting voice protesting the heroes welcome including the traditional rice and rose petals confetti at the reception given to this despicable murderer. The leaders who didn’t rush to embrace Kuntar were ‘vociferously silent’. Druze leader Walid Jumbalatt who has never been sparing with criticism, often verbally lambasting the Syrians and Hezbollah toed the line this time lauding the national hero.  Perhaps community solidarity dictated that Jumbalatt of all people should greet Samir Kuntar a son of the Lebanese Druze.

Earlier this year Jumbalatt stated very clearly in a television interview “I say this very quietly - there is no way to coexist with Hezbollah,”  ”I want a friendly divorce,” Jumbalatt said. “Let him (Hezbollah Secretary General Hassan Nasrallah) live the way he wants, but we want to live the way we want.”

Ironically the Israeli border police officer who shot and killed the rampaging Palestinian bulldozer driver in Jerusalem is a Druze.

Obviously the other side’s credibility is in question. Whenever we (Israel – the IDF, the settlers or someone) are at fault a formidable battery of protestors – the various ‘watch groups’ and the TV networks draw our attention to the wrongdoing. Concerned lawyers and others petition the courts seeking justice.

I hate all sweeping generalisations, however only too often our neighbours, be them Egyptians, Jordanians, Syrians, Lebanese, Palestinians and even the Arabs in the village down the road, have a hard time confronting the truth.

Communal solidarity, family honour and other ‘values’ take precedence over telling the story as it is – the truth!

Admittedly we have problems regarding greater Jerusalem with its expanded municipal borders. Efforts to create territorial contiguity between the city and some outlying settlements, neighbourhoods and satellite towns have created a large municipal area which has also incorporated a number of large Arab villages which were formerly considered part of the West Bank.

About 230,000 Arabs live in the greater Jerusalem area and since there are no physical boundaries separating the Arab neighbourhoods it is easy for any local terrorist to move from one part of the city to the other.

Ghassan Abu-Tir came from Umm Touba, a village in southeast Jerusalem near Sur Baher, home of Hussam Duwiyat, the terrorist who carried out the bulldozer rampage on July 2. Directly across from Umm Touba is the village of Jabal Mukkaber, where the terrorist who killed eight students at Yeshivat Mercaz Harav last March used to live. Umm Touba has several.

All three terrorists appear to have had no affiliations with any known organisation and probably acted spontaneously. Nevertheless, attempts made by Hamas to gain a foothold in the West Bank have yielded some results and its influence is felt especially among Palestinian youth. The IDF and the General Security Service relentlessly counter these attempts by cracking down on fledgling Hamas cells and intensifying surveillance and intelligence input throughout the West Bank.

When he appeared before the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defence Committee, General Security Service chief Yuval Diskin warned of the imminent likelihood of a terrorist attack in Jerusalem. Just three hours prior to  Ghassan Abu-Tir’s rampage Diskin warned that there were indications that Palestinians were planning to stage attacks mimicking earlier  incidents in Jerusalem, including the first bulldozer attack and the shooting of yeshiva students at Mercaz Harav earlier this year.

A few hours after the attack Barack  Obama  arrived in Jerusalem . After   a round of brief meetings with the president and the prime minister, a visit to the Holocaust Memorial Centre and a pre-dawn visit to the Western Wall to the following morning he flew to Berlin on the next leg of his campaign trip

We had another distinguished visitor this week Britain’s Prime Minister Gordon Brown. The Economist described his address to the Knesset as follows

 

“His trip to Israel was in its way more revealing. His heartfelt speech was followed by the Israeli national anthem, sung by the male members of the Knesset choir. The Speaker (herself a woman) apparently decided to weed out the women, for fear their singing might offend ultra-Orthodox Jewish members. Pandering to the ultra-Orthodox is a sure sign, in the contorted codes of Israeli politics, of the bloody succession struggle now in prospect, as Mr Olmert is forced out. Perhaps Mr Brown could take some comfort in the signs that at least one other prime minister is going through even harder times than him”.

Signs of the bloody succession are already evident.  Foreign Minister Tzippi Livni takes pains to distance herself from the prime minister as much as possible. When she attended the recent gathering of Mediterranean countries in Paris she flew on a separate flight and is careful to steer clear of Olmert whenever she can. She is also careful in phrasing her oblique critical comments, preferring allusions rather than blunt attacks. At the moment she is the leading contender but Shaul Mofaz is concentrating more on gaining support from the party’s field workers and delegates and shouldn’t be underestimated.

Some political analysts claim that Labour party leader Ehud Barak would prefer Mofaz to Livni. He is looking beyond the Kadima party primaries scheduled to take place in two months time to the general elections. They claim Barak would prefer to contend with a lack-lustre  Mofaz than the popular Tzippi Livni.

  

Have a good weekend.

  

Beni    25th July, 2008.