OPERA AMONG THE SHOPPERS OF TEL AVIV

The shoppers are singing a much-loved chorus piece from Verdi’s Il Trovatore.

Filmed, July 2010 in the Friday morning food market atTel Aviv’s Dizengoff shopping center.

 

VLADIMIR PUTIN SINGS "BLUEBERRY HILL"

Last week, Vladimir Putin, the Russian Prime Minister (and probably soon to be president again) last week sang “Blueberry Hill,” the popular 1940s American hit. When he rode bareback on wild stallions across the Russian heartland, that was for votes. This time it’s for charity, with the likes of Goldie Hawn, Kurt Russell, Kevin Costner and other Hollywood celebrities in the audience.

Stalin also wrote poetry.

 

“WE ARE FAMILY” (OF DICTATORS)

This video was made by the Iranian opposition movement and is very popular among Iranian bloggers.

 

IDF SOLDIERS ROCK THE (HEBRON) CASBA

This was filmed in the summer of 2010 on a Hebron side street early in the morning. I was in Hebron twice recently and, like other West Bank towns, the city is in many ways prospering. The streets and markets are for the most part full and crammed with goods and people.

Nevertheless, on past record, the UN and certain West European governments may well condemn this dance as a war crime.

 

US SOLDIERS DANCE TO LADY GAGA IN AFGHANISTAN

This was filmed in the summer of 2010.

Other dispatches in this video series can be seen here:

* Video dispatch 1: The Lady In Number 6

* Video dispatch 2: Iran: Zuckerberg created Facebook on behalf of the Mossad

* Video dispatch 3: Vladimir Putin sings “Blueberry Hill” (& opera in the mall)

* Video dispatch 4: While some choose boycotts, others choose “Life”

* Video dispatch 5: A Jewish tune with a universal appeal

* Video dispatch 6: Carrying out acts of terror is nothing new for the Assad family

* Video dispatch 7: A brave woman stands up to the Imam (& Cheering Bin Laden in London)

* Video dispatch 8: Syrians burn Iranian and Russian Flags (not Israeli and U.S. ones)

* Video Dispatch 9: “The one state solution for a better Middle East...”

* Video dispatch 10: British TV discovers the next revolutionary wave of Israeli technology

* Video dispatch 11: “Freedom, Freedom!” How some foreign media are reporting the truth about Syria

* Video dispatch 12: All I want for Christmas is...

* Video dispatch 13: “Amazing Israeli innovations Obama will see (& Tchaikovsky Flashwaltz!)

* Video dispatch 14: Jon Stewart under fire in Egypt (& Kid President meets Real President)

* Video dispatch 15: A rare 1945 BBC recording: Survivors in Belsen sing Hatikvah (& “No Place on Earth”)

* Video dispatch 16: Joshua Prager: “In search for the man who broke my neck”

* Video dispatch 17: Pushback against the “dictator Erdogan” - Videos from the “Turkish summer”

* Video dispatch 18: Syrian refugees: “May God bless Israel”

* Video dispatch 19: An uplifting video (& ‘Kenya calls in Israeli special forces to help end mall siege’)

* Video dispatch 20: No Woman, No Drive: First stirrings of Saudi democracy?

* Video dispatch 21: Al-Jazeera: Why can’t Arab armies be more humane like Israel’s?

* Video dispatch 22: Jerusalem. Tel Aviv. Beirut. Happy.

* Video dispatch 23: A nice moment in the afternoon

* Video dispatch 24: How The Simpsons were behind the Arab Spring

* Video dispatch 25: Iranians and Israelis enjoy World Cup love-in (& U.S. Soccer Guide)

* Video dispatch 26: Intensifying conflict as more rockets aimed at Tel Aviv

* Video dispatch 27: Debating the media coverage of the current Hamas-Israel conflict

* Video dispatch 28: CNN asks Hamas: “Do you really believe Jews slaughter Christians?” (& other items)

* Video dispatch 29: “Fighting terror by day, supermodels by night” (& Sign of the times)

* Video dispatch 30: How to play chess when you’re an ISIS prisoner (& Escape from Boko Haram)

* Video dispatch 31: Incitement to kill

* Video Dispatch 32: Bibi to BBC: “Are we living on the same planet?” (& other videos)

“GIVEN 30 SECONDS TO RECOMMEND A SINGLE BOOK...

Heda Margolius-Kovaly, the woman who survived Hitler and Stalin
By Tom Gross
The National Post (Canada)
and The Jerusalem Post (Israel)
December 14, 2010

Anglo-Australian writer Clive James, reviewing the memoir of Heda Margolius-Kovaly several years ago, wrote: “Given 30 seconds to recommend a single book that might start a serious student on the hard road to understanding the political tragedies of the 20th century, I would choose this one.”

I met Heda, who was born Heda Bloch into a prosperous Czech-Jewish family and who died last week in Prague aged 91, several times over the years. And despite all she had suffered, she remained a vivacious and incredibly resilient woman, charming, thoughtful, and with a sense of fun.

After surviving Auschwitz and a “death march” to Bergen-Belsen, Heda arrived back in Czechoslovakia in 1945 at the home of a friend who had promised to be “an anchor” for the Jews deported from her circle. He greeted her with the words: “For God’s sake, what brings you here?”

“SO YOU’VE COME BACK? OH NO. THAT’S ALL WE’VE NEEDED”

She then ventured into the countryside to visit her family’s former home (her parents were gassed upon arrival in Auschwitz), where the Czech farmer who had been allocated her confiscated property slammed the door on her with the words: “So you’ve come back? Oh no. That’s all we’ve needed.”

Heda’s first husband, Rudolf Margolius, was a survivor of Auschwitz and Dachau. Disgusted by Fascism he joined the Communist party and rose to become deputy minister of foreign trade. But he was then murdered as part of the notorious anti-Semitic Slansky show trial which the Czechoslovak Communist party staged in 1952 at Stalin’s instigation, in order to hang the leading Communist Jews.

Her husband was accused of being a “Zionist agent” and of “aiding and abetting capitalist Jews trying to undermine Czechoslovak socialism”. Of course, this was all completely without foundation.

IN A FINAL INDIGNITY, HIS ASHES WERE THROWN UNDER THE WHEELS TO CREATE TRACTION

Having been prevented from seeing her husband for 11 months after his arrest, and after he and the other Jews gave false confessions extracted by torture, Heda later learned that he had been hanged and his body cremated and given to security officials for disposal. In a final indignity, a few miles out of Prague, the officials’ limousine began to skid on the icy road and Rudolf Margolius’s ashes were thrown under the wheels to create traction.

Rudolf Margolius in 1950 before his arrest

Heda’s persecution by the communist authorities continued for years after her husband was killed on the grounds that she was “the widow of the Zionist capitalist Jew”.

She and her four-year-old son, Ivan, were hounded by the secret police and shunned by former friends. She moved into an unheated shack in the mountains, where she struggled to support herself and her young child.

“Three forces carved the landscape of my life,” she wrote in the opening lines of her memoir. “Two of them crushed half the world. The third was very small and weak and, actually, invisible. It was a shy little bird hidden in my rib cage an inch or two above my stomach.”

“The first force was Adolf Hitler; the second, Iosif Vissarionovich Stalin,” she wrote. “The little bird, the third force, kept me alive to tell the story.”

Alfred Kazin, reviewing her memoir in The New York Times, wrote: “This is an extraordinary memoir, so heartbreaking that I have reread it for months, unable to rise to the business of ‘reviewing’ less a book than a life repeatedly outraged by the worst totalitarians in Europe. Yet it is written with so much quiet respect for the minutiae of justice and truth that one does not know where and how to specify Heda Kovaly’s splendidness as a human being.”

AN OUTSTANDING TRANSLATOR

She eventually managed to flee Czechoslovakia in 1968, making her way to America where she was granted asylum and worked as a librarian at Harvard Law School. She returned to live in Prague after the fall of communism.

Her memoir was first published in 1973 as “The Victors and the Vanquished,” and later rewritten by the author and re-translated in the U.S. under the title “Under a Cruel Star: A Life in Prague, 1941-1968,” and in Britain under the title “Prague Farewell.”

Peter Brod, the former director of the the Czech language BBC service, says that she was also a truly outstanding translator into Czech of English literature, particularly of Raymond Chandler, William Golding, Muriel Spark, Saul Bellow and Philip Roth.

Her son Ivan, who lives in London, said that “she absolutely didn’t want any funeral or ceremony of any kind”.

 

* For another remarkable story of another Czech Jewish Holocaust survivor, please see The Lady In Number 6.

See also: Honouring the dead, one stone at a time

DAGAN STEPS DOWN AFTER SOME MAJOR SUCCESSES

[Notes below by Tom Gross]

Meir Dagan is to step down as director of Israel’s Mossad external intelligence agency at the end of this month.

After eight years and three months on the job, he will be the second-longest-serving Mossad chief after Isser Harel, who served for 11 years, from 1952 to 1963. (For more on Harel, please see further down this page.)

During Dagan’s tenure the Mossad was involved in a number of important successes, in particular the discovery and destruction of Syria’s nuclear weapons program in 2007. (That program, like the Burmese regime’s attempts to gain nuclear weapons, was aided by North Korea.)

But Dagan’s main focus has been on Iran, and were it not for actions taken in the last eight years, a well-informed source tells me, Iran might well already have a nuclear bomb.

“Dagan is one of the greatest Mossad directors ever,” a former senior Mossad official said recently. “His achievements are considerable.”

 

HIS AIM: “NEVER AGAIN”

Dagan, now 65, was appointed head of the Mossad in 2002 by his friend and former military commander Ariel Sharon, and under Sharon’s instructions, Dagan restored a sense of daring to the organization after a number of “quieter years”.

On his first day on the job, Dagan mounted an old black-and-white photo on a wall in his office at the Mossad’s headquarters north of Tel Aviv. The picture is of an elderly bearded Jew, draped in a prayer shawl and kneeling down in front of two Nazi soldiers, one with a large baton in his hand, the other carrying a rifle.

“Look at this picture,” Dagan often says to those visiting him in his highly secure office. “This man, kneeling down before the Nazis, was my grandfather just before he was murdered. I look at this picture every day and promise that the Holocaust will never happen again.”

 

A NUMBER OF MYSTERIOUS ACCIDENTS?

There have been a number of apparent accidents that have slowed down Iran’s pursuit of nuclear weapons during Dagan’s term (as well as before it).

Some have alleged that these weren’t accidents and attributed them to the Mossad.

These include, but are not limited to:

* The disappearance of an Iranian nuclear scientist;
* The crash of two planes carrying cargo relating to the Iranian nuclear project;
* Two laboratories that burst into flames;
* The mysterious accident in July 2007 at the Al-Safir missile factory jointly operated by Iran and Syria;
* Equipment sent to Iran for its nuclear program that arrived broken;
* Warehouses in Europe where equipment for Iran’s nuclear program was stored before being shipped that went up in flames

 

OPERATION SABOTAGE?

There have also been a number of events that cannot have been accidents, such as the infection earlier this year of computers at an Iranian nuclear plant with the Stuxnet virus that continues to wreak havoc – the virus was inserted by human hand using a USB stick; or the assassinations of Iranian nuclear scientists on the streets of Tehran; or the shooting dead by a sniper positioned on a boat offshore, of the head of Syria’s covert nuclear program, at his vacation home in the Syrian port city of Tartus.

Sometimes, these operations do not end well. Ali Ashtari, a high-tech Iranian electronics vendor, was hung by the Iranian regime in 2008 after he “confessed” to bugging the equipment of senior Revolutionary Guard figures with viruses and GPS units provided to him by Israel.

 

TARGETED AIRSTRIKES -- OR REGIME CHANGE TEHRAN?

Of course, sabotage has long been a staple of modern (and ancient) warfare by the U.S. and many other countries, and other states are also likely to have been involved in sabotage operations against Iran’s nuclear program.

History has proven time and again that such acts of sabotage have done more to slow weapons programs of this kind than any sanctions or endless rounds of negotiations have, or are likely to do, in cases where democracies are trying to persuade dictatorships to do something.

Yet sabotage, while effective, is not on its own the answer. It can delay the Iranian program but it cannot stop it. And eventually the regime in Iran will likely manage to build nuclear weapons, just as the regime in North Korea managed to. There are only two ways to stop this: bomb Iranian nuclear plants (as difficult as this might be with Iran’s nuclear facilities scattered and buried deep underground) or change the government in Tehran, so that a less belligerent and more democratic government is in place, which would be a much better option. (Just to be clear, the above opinions are mine, and not attributed to Dagan -- Tom Gross.)

 

INTELLIGENCE GATHERING, AND BUILDING BRIDGES WITH “HOSTILE” STATES

Although there have been assassinations (in Lebanon, Damascus, Dubai and elsewhere) that various European and Arab newspapers have attributed to the Mossad during Dagan’s term of office, the Mossad’s primary objective, even when it undertakes special operations, is to gather intelligence. It then presents assessments to enable Israel’s leaders to make better decisions.

Another aim is to establish good working relations with the intelligence agencies of friendly countries, and to establish political and other links with countries Israel is not formally at peace with.

So, for example, as has been previously reported on this website and elsewhere, Meir Dagan has held secret talks with Saudi officials to discuss the Iranian nuclear program and Saudi officials have reportedly let it be known to the Mossad that the kingdom would turn a blind eye to Israeli jets flying over its airspace during any future raid on Iranian nuclear sites.

(Reliable sources tell me that every Arab country with the exception of Iraq under Saddam Hussein and Libya has had some diplomatic channels to Israel.)

As for allies, Israel now has an unprecedentedly high level of cooperation with American, British and other intelligence agencies.

There have been some failures in Dagan’s term too, but as Dagan pointed out recently, only the Mossad’s mistakes tend to become known to the public, not its successes.

 

A NEW DIRECTOR, WITH AMPLE COMMAND EXPERIENCE AND FOUR DEGREES

Tamir Pardo has been appointed to succeed Meir Dagan as Director of the Mossad, effective January 1, 2011, for a five-year term. (Incidentally, from a numerological point of view, we should all look forward to writing that date: 1.1.11.)

Pardo, 57, has served in various senior Mossad positions for over 25 years, most recently as Deputy Director, and has reportedly taken part in dozens of secret operations.

He joined the Mossad in 1980 and apart from a couple of short breaks, has been with the organization since then. From 1988 on, he occupied command roles in various departments, including the one responsible for infiltrating targets to plant listening devices and cameras. In 1998 he was appointed head of operations, a post he held for four years. He was deputy head of the Mossad from 2002-6, and again from 2007-9.

He has degrees in mathematics, physics, political science and history.

Pardo is considered to be close to the Israeli prime minister and his family. When he served in the Israeli army service, Pardo was communications officer for Benjamin Netanyahu’s elder brother Yoni, who was killed in the Entebbe hostage-rescue raid.

Coincidentally, the decision to appoint Pardo was made final on the same morning, two weeks ago, that two Iranian nuclear scientists were attacked (one was killed and the other was injured) in separate incidents by passing motorcyclists in Tehran. (It is not known who carried out those attacks and there are a number of possible culprits, both Iranian and foreign.)

In appointing Pardo, Benjamin Netanyahu consulted Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak, Intelligence and Atomic Energy Minister Dan Meridor and former Mossad heads Shabtai Shavit, Efraim Halevi and Nahum Admoni, among others.

 

A MODEST MOSSAD WEBSITE TO PRESENT A MORE HUMAN FACE

As I reported on the day it was launched in 2008, the Mossad has posted a modest website in Hebrew, English, Russian, Arabic and Persian in order to present a more public and “human” face and to counter some of the extraordinary lies told about it (“the Mossad was responsible for the 9/11 attacks, the London transport bombs, the Asian tsunami, global warming, yesterday’s suicide bomb in Stockholm, and so on”).

It reveals a small amount of information as well as photos of its past directors.

(Until a few years ago, the names of Mossad directors were kept secret.)

Among the latest fabrications told about the Mossad is the one mentioned below.

 

EGYPT: “MOSSAD MAY BE BEHIND RED SEA SHARK ATTACKS”

The Egyptian authorities have alleged that the mysterious shark attacks which have left several European tourists dead or injured in recent days, may be a “Mossad plot” to harm Egyptian tourism.

Last Sunday, the body of a 70-year-old German woman washed up on the shore at Egypt’s Sharm el-Sheikh resort on the Red Sea after an attack. Officials said the shark had bitten a chunk out of her right thigh and also eaten her right elbow.

Egypt had just lifted a ban on swimming which was imposed in parts of the area after three Russians and a Ukrainian were injured in shark attacks the week before. The resort draws some 4 million tourists every year.

“What is being said about the Mossad throwing the deadly shark into the sea to damage tourism in Egypt is certainly not out of the question, but we need time to confirm this,” the Governor of Egypt’s South Sinai province, Mohamed Abdel Fadil Shousha, was quoted as saying by the state news website egynews.net.

Others said sharks had been drawn to shallow waters after cattle being shipped in for last month’s Islamic feast of the sacrifice (Eid al-Adha) had died and were thrown overboard.

As mentioned in past dispatches on this website, Egyptians often blame neighboring Israel for many of their own problems.