Niv Sultan stars in the TV series ‘Tehran’, about a Mossad hacker smuggled into Iran to help blow up a secret nuclear site
MOSSAD, TV AND THE MOVIES
[Note by Tom Gross]
There have been a number of articles in the US and UK this weekend praising the new Israeli TV series “Tehran” about a female Mossad hacker smuggled into Iran to help blow up a secret nuclear site. (I attach two of those articles, from the British papers the Financial Times and the Daily Telegraph, below.)
The show was a hit when shown in Israel in June and July, and also in Iran and the Arab world in July and August after it was bootlegged and illegally streamed across much of the Middle East.
The show was bought by Apple TV and the first episodes were released in the US and Europe this weekend.
One of the writers of “Tehran” was also one of the creators of “Fauda,” another Israeli show later picked by Netflix, which has become a hit throughout the Middle East and even (as I noted in a 2018 dispatch) praised on Hamas’ website in Gaza for its realistic depiction of Hamas.
LEARNING FARSI
The dialogue in “Tehran” (which I watched on Israeli TV in June) is in Hebrew, Farsi and English. Israeli and Iranian actors worked together on the series. The Iranian actors were, of course, exiles based in the US and UK (two also acted in “Homeland”).
Contrary to some press reports in the West this weekend, the lead Israeli actor in “Tehran,” Niv Sultan, is not of Iranian-Jewish descent – in fact she is an Israeli of Moroccan-Jewish descent and knew some Arabic from home. But she learned Farsi especially for the program.
Some members of the Israeli cast, such as Liraz Charchi, who plays one of her Mossad handlers, was already fluent in Farsi, but Sultan did not know the language, which she learned in four months.
One of those quoted in the Financial Times piece (below) is Sima Shine, a former head of intelligence gathering on Iran for the Mossad (2003-2007) and later in charge of the Iranian file for Israel’s Ministry of Strategic Affairs from 2009-2016. Sima is a long-time subscriber to this email list.
She says that it’s good that the program “Tehran” depicts the Iranian security apparatus in an intelligent and largely accurate way.
‘FAUDA’ ANNOUNCES 4TH SEASON
“Fauda” announced on its official Instagram page last week that it would be back for 4th season.
https://www.instagram.com/p/CFHmATeFIZC/?utm_source=ig_embed
“Fauda” focuses on an undercover Israeli commando unit whose members embed themselves among Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, gathering intelligence and preventing terror attacks.
Netflix bought the show in 2016, a year after it was first shown in Israel. Two of the show’s creators (journalist Avi Issacharoff, and actor Lior Raz, who plays Doron) served in the army unit depicted in the series.
‘FAUDA’ STAR TELLS UAE FANS ‘WE CAN’T WAIT TO VISIT YOUR BEAUTIFUL COUNTRY’
“Fauda” star and Israeli singer-songwriter Idan Amedi, 32, has shared a video on twitter for his fans in the United Arab Emirates. (The UAE this month officially made peace with Israel.)
“If I can speak for all Israelis, we all think peace is a good thing. It’s the right thing and we can’t wait to visit your beautiful country. Hopefully you will come to Israel as well,” he said in English before he blessed those watching from the UAE in Arabic.
Amedi’s music has been played on the radio in the UAE this month.
‘SHTISEL’ SEASON 3 CLIP RELEASED
The trailer for Season 3 of “Shitsel,” the popular Israeli drama about a complicated ultra-Orthodox family in Jerusalem, has been released.
Among this stars of the show is Shira Haas, who also stars in Unorthodox.
The show originally aired in Israel in 2013 and ran for two seasons. The new season picks up four years after the end of the second season. “Shitsel” later became an international hit on Netflix. Season 3 will be shown in Israel at the end of 2020 and on Netflix in 2021.
‘SAPIENS’ GRAPHIC NOVEL COMING OUT
“Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind,” by Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari, is also mentioned in the Financial Times article on “Tehran” below.
Not mentioned by the Financial Times is that a graphic novel version will be available next month. “Sapiens: A Graphic History” will be narrated by a caricature of Harari. It’s the first of four planned volumes covering the material in the bestselling book, which has sold 16 million copies in 60 languages worldwide.
The nonfiction book charts the course of the development of humans from the prehistoric era to modernity. It was originally published in Hebrew as a textbook for Harari’s students at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
https://www.ynharari.com/book/graphicnovelsapiens/
SOPHIA LOREN RETURNS TO MOVIES AGED 86 TO PLAY HOLOCAUST SURVIVOR
On a separate note, also regarding a forthcoming Netflix production, Italian superstar Sophia Loren is to act once again after an 11-year screen absence. She will play a Holocaust survivor who befriends an orphan in a Netflix film “The Life Ahead,” directed by her son Edoardo Ponti
The Hollywood magazine “Deadline” reported last week that the film will premiere in Rome in October, and be available on Netflix from November.
Loren won her first Oscar in 1961 for “Two Women,” before receiving a second, honorary, Oscar in 1991 for “a career rich with memorable performances that has added permanent luster to our art form”.
Among past dispatches concerning TV and film, and the Mossad:
* (About Fauda) What if ‘The Wire’ were set in Ramallah? (& Jewish-Arab celebrity wedding in Israel) (October 11, 2018)
* “The Inevitable Lies of Unorthodox” (May 3, 2020) which touches on the Israeli show ‘Shtisel’, which humanizes ultra-orthodox Jews in a way that many critics say the German-made Netflix hit ‘Unorthodox’ fails to do so.
* Another Netflix hit “The Red Sea Diving Resort,” about the daring Mossad-led rescue of thousands of Ethiopian Jews in the 1980s, is written about in this dispatch:
Coming soon to Hollywood: The Mossad’s very own holiday village (April 23, 2018)
* Israel Harel, “The man who made the Mossad” (February 19, 2003)
ARTICLES
MOSSAD AND THE MOVIES — HOW ISRAELI SPIES TOOK OVER OUR SCREENS
Mossad and the movies — how Israeli spies took over our screens
Hit drama ‘Tehran’ is the latest in a series of thrillers that trade in the mystique of Israel’s secret service
By Mehul Srivastava in Jaffa
Financial Times
September 26, 2020
When a series of unexplained explosions rocked Tehran in July, the Israeli actress Niv Sultan posted a video of herself watching the news, with a coy expression on her face.
For fans of Israeli spy dramas, the video made total sense — Ms Sultan is the star of Tehran, a TV show about a Mossad hacker smuggled into Iran to help blow up a secret nuclear site.
The show, bootlegged and illegally streamed this summer across much of the Middle East, including Iran, is the latest in what has become Israel’s most resilient cultural export: espionage thrillers that trade on the mystique of the Jewish State’s secret services, both feared and admired in the region. This weekend it will be launched in the US on Apple TV.
In recent months, the latest season of Fauda (Chaos), has consistently been among the top-watched shows in Lebanon, Jordan and the United Arab Emirates on Netflix, with Arab audiences intrigued by the exploits of a shadowy Israeli unit that operates covertly in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.
The Red Sea Diving Resort, a film about the Mossad’s daring evacuation of Ethiopian Jews out of a 1984 civil war, also has a loyal audience.
“We all know to laugh, how to fall in love, but we don’t all know how the spy world looks like,” said Avi Issacharoff, the journalist who co-wrote Fauda, Israeli television’s first breakout international hit. “This is not just a cliché, that this is a world in the darkness, and so suddenly to find and learn about the world of espionage through a realistic lens — people are attracted to that.”
Even Sacha Baron Cohen, the actor famous for playing satirical characters such as in the film Borat, abandoned comedy to play Eli Cohen, a famed Israeli double-agent embedded in the Syrian government before the 1967 Six-Day War and hanged in a public square in Damascus after he was discovered.
“Unfortunately, these are the headlines we are in too often, because of the situation here,” said Arik Kneller, the agent who sold the Israeli show Prisoners of War, which was remade as the hit US series Homeland. “It appears that this is our claim to fame abroad, whereas in Israel, people are telling more personal, and less political stories, especially in cinema.”
Israel has a serious literary and cinematic history — including the books of Amos Oz and Yuval Noah Harari as well as films such as the Oscar-nominated Waltz With Bashir — but the exploits of its spies and assassins have become a profitable niche.
Just as India is best known for Bollywood, and China for its kung fu and Han-era historical dramas, Israel’s violent birth and its constant battles with its neighbours have made espionage its cultural watermark.
Part of the commercial success can be tied directly to the reputation of the Mossad, Israel’s foreign spy agency, said Avner Avraham, who retired after 28 years with the service and set up a cinema consultancy and speakers bureau called The Spy Legends Agency.
“In the spy world, the agencies are both always secret and always on the top of people’s imagination,” said Mr Avraham, who advised actor Ben Kingsley for his role as Adolf Eichmann, the Nazi war criminal who was abducted by the Mossad in Argentina in 1960 and brought to trial in Jerusalem.
It also helps that it is official Israeli policy for spymasters to brag of their exploits, adding to the perception in the Middle East that the Mossad is everywhere, listening to everything.
Embarrassing failures are far outweighed by the successes, including, most recently, the spiriting out of an abandoned Tehran warehouse of the entire nuclear archives of the Islamic Republic, proudly displayed on TV by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in April 2018.
The realism helps too, said Sima Shine, who kept an eye on Iran for most of her career at Mossad and the National Security Council, and watched Tehran closely when it aired in Israel.
“It’s good that they give a lot of credit to the security apparatus [in Iran], and they don’t show them as stupid — instead they show them as operating quite well,” she said. “We see the demonstrations by students, and the counter demonstrations, and the hidden parties of young people — we know that all these things are happening in Iran.”
The Iranians were equally fascinated by the drama and perturbed by inaccuracies, said Holly Dagres, an Iranian-American non-resident fellow at the Atlantic Council, the Washington-based think-tank.
“This is the first time a wide Israeli audience got a glimpse of their enemy, Iran, beyond the news cycle. This is also the first time Iranians got to see what Israelis, to an extent, think of them,” she said.
The timing helped too. “The unusual explosions must’ve added more interest in the series for both audiences as it unintentionally served as publicity for Tehran because the plot is about Israel taking out nuclear facilities.”
For Israeli directors and film-makers, the hope is that other art will eventually come to the international stage. One show, Shtisel, about the ultraorthodox community, is already on Netflix, and others, such as Yellow Peppers, about an autistic child, was remade as The A Word for British television.
“The obvious stuff has gone through,” said Mr Kneller, who hopes that female Israeli television writers will soon come to dominate the cultural output, pointing to Thursday’s Emmy nomination for Fifty, a series by Yael Hedaya, about an Israeli screenwriter turning 50. “Maybe now the less obvious stuff will shine also.”
TEHRAN REVIEW: A TENSION-BUILDING, HEART-STOPPING GENDER-SWAPPED BOURNE IDENTITY
Tehran, Apple TV+ review: a tension-building, heart-stopping gender-swapped Bourne Identity
Review
By Ed Power
Daily Telegraph (London)
September 25, 2020
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/tv/2020/09/25/tehran-apple-tv-reviewa-tension-building-heart-stopping-gender/
Apple’s megabucks foray into original television has veered from the sub-prime (Jennifer Aniston comeback vehicle The Morning Show) to the ridiculous (Game of Thrones wannabe See). But the tech giant has struck the motherlode with Tehran (Apple TV+), an irresistibly tense conspiracy thriller from Moshe Zonder, one of the brightest talents in the new wave of Israeli drama.
Zonder already has a cult following thanks to Fauda, a suspenseful caper set against the Israeli-Gaza conflict that has become a huge hit for Netflix. With the eight-part Tehran he now turns his gimlet gaze towards the hegemonic rivalry between Iran and Israel.
It’s claustrophobic stuff in which the titular mega-city comes alive as a noir-ish purgatory brimming with midnight rendezvous, brutal agents of the state and calculated flurries of violence. And it features a star-making turn by Niv Sultan as Tamar Rabinyan, a Tehran-born hacker and Mossad agent on the run from both Iranian and Israel intelligence.
Some of the appeal is undoubtedly down to novelty. The grit, the noise, the heat of Iran floods the screen: it truly feels as if Zonder is taking you somewhere you’ve never been (although not actually to Tehran – the series was filmed in Athens).
There is an instructive early scene in which Rabinyan is travelling in a cab towards a hush-hush meeting when the driver idly points towards a public hanging. The corpse dangles from a crane in the middle of a bustling interchange. The usual rules, Zonder is telling us, do not apply here.
He is also a master of pacing and Tehran unfolds like a coiled spring left suddenly loose. Having entered the country disguised as a flight attendant, Rabinyan’s mission involves assuming the identity of a local electrical company employee and then breaking into a corporate mainframe. Her goal is to neutralise the regime’s air defences in preparation for a bombing raid on its nuclear facilities, all at the behest of the Israeli Defence Forces’s Unit 8200 – a real life cyber-intelligence crack squad – of course.
However, the situation turns horrifically violent when a figure from her alter-ego’s past intervenes. She’s already drawn the suspicion of Faraz Kamali, the buttoned-down head of investigation of the Revolutionary Guard. Shaun Toub is terrifying in the role and captures the contradictions of a man who can speak with huge kindness to his wife one moment and lash out at a woman weeping in his interrogation room the next.
Also with a close eye on Tamar is her Mossad handler in Tehran (Navid Negahban, aka baddie Abu Nazir from Homeland). He’s got her spooked with his capacity for off-the-cuff killing and leads Tamar to realise she must go it alone and face up to her past life in the city.
Strip away the subtitles and the beautiful yet subtlety alien Middle East vistas and what’s left is essentially a gender-swapped Bourne Identity. But Zonder orchestras the tension masterfully, crafting a thriller as stylish as it is heart-stopping.
* You can also find other items that are not in these dispatches if you “like” this page on Facebook www.facebook.com/TomGrossMedia
Tom Gross writes: In a world first, and in one of many signs of the increasingly warm relations Israel is now enjoying with various Arab countries, major TV networks in the UAE, Bahrain and Israel last night decided to host a joint live main evening news broadcast covering the historic signing ceremony.
Above and below: Many newspapers in the Arab world have welcomed Benjamin Netanyahu’s and Donald Trump’s peace moves.
Above: Leaders from Israel, Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates and the US wave to a crowd of 1000 dignitaries (including, for example, former British prime minister Tony Blair) gathered on the South Lawn of the White House yesterday to witness the historic signing ceremony of the Abraham Accords in Arabic, Hebrew and English.
NETANYAHU AND TRUMP NOMINATED FOR NOBEL PEACE PRIZE BY EUROPEAN POLITICIANS
[Note by Tom Gross]
Because many newspapers in the US and Europe have today ignored or downplayed yesterday’s historic treaty signing at the White House between Israel, the UAE and Bahrain, I attach a few photos above to draw attention to it for those who may have missed it.
Those same media also downplayed the recent historic peace deal between Serbia and Kosovo brokered by the Trump administration.
One doesn’t have to like the personality, or agree with other policies of Donald Trump, to applaud the historic deals his administration has carefully helped craft during the past four years. Had any such deals been brokered under the presidency of Barack Obama, we can safely assume that those same critical media would be trumpeting them rather than pouring scorn on them.
Today an Italian politician nominated Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for this year’s Nobel peace prize. Last week, a Norwegian politician nominated Donald Trump for the Nobel prize.
Some media traditionally hostile to Trump and Netanyahu have praised them for these peace moves but other commentators can’t bring themselves to properly report these historic peace moves.
NY TIMES, WRONG ON THE MIDDLE EAST AGAIN AND AGAIN
Above, a skeptical 2017 New York Times tweet about Jared Kushner, who was one of the main architects of the Abraham Accords. At least five more Arab countries are now reportedly in advanced stages of negotiating peace deals with Israel, brokered with Kushner’s assistance.
Here, by contrast to the New York Times, is a short clip from one of my interviews with a European TV network in early April 2017, a few weeks into the Trump presidency. In this interview, as elsewhere, I argued that by breaking with the old formulas of politicians like John Kerry which were so obviously flawed, the Trump team may succeed in the Mideast where previous administrations had failed.
Most media, academic and diplomatic ‘experts’ were pouring scorn on the Trump administration’s approach, and that of Netanyahu. To quote the star Pulitzer prize winning New York Times columnist Tom Friedman, he had claimed that Benjamin Netanyahu led “the most diplomatically inept … government in Israel’s history.”
NO “ADULATORY PROFILES”
The Wall Street Journal notes today:
“How would official Washington respond if a Democratic President brokered a peace deal between Israel and two Arab states? The papers would be stacked with play-by-plays of how the historic breakthrough was achieved and adulatory profiles of the people in the room. The hosannas to the President’s strategic vision would flow from think tanks and academia, if not also from Oslo’s City Hall.”
Tom Gross adds:
If you want to link to, or use parts of this (or other) dispatches, please do. But I would kindly request that you try and give me credit for my hard work and research. An increasing number of journalists and others are lifting my original writings without crediting me.
* You can also find other items that are not in these dispatches if you “like” this page on Facebook www.facebook.com/TomGrossMedia
Israeli and Emirati officials greet each other in Abu Dhabi last week
* Saudi Gazette: Palestinian politicians have sabotaged negotiations and rejected all peace initiatives for six decades in order to keep the aid funds flowing to their private bank accounts.
* Bahraini activist: “There is growing awareness among many in the Arab world that the Jewish people are not foreign colonialists in the Land of Israel, they are part of this land, and part of our region… it’s a fact, and we can do many things together for prosperity, security and peace for the region.”
* The National newspaper (Abu Dhabi): “The UAE-Israel accord is a win for every Muslim… Since 9/11, Muslims across the world have been on the defensive. I saw the suspicion of Muslims in the eyes of American officials. It always boiled down to: show us peace in Islam. Now, with the visionary accord between the UAE and Israel, a new horizon is opening to reinstate Muslim dignity by showing peace between peoples. We can now say: ‘A new way of co-existence is achievable. We are not pawns for the mullahs of Iran or the Muslim Brotherhood. Look at the UAE.’”
* Arab researcher speaking on Russia Today TV: Iran - not Israel - is responsible for the deaths of millions of Arabs in Syria, Yemen, Iraq and elsewhere.
PEACE DEAL TO BE OFFICIALLY SIGNED NEXT WEEK IN WASHINGTON
[Notes by Tom Gross]
Below, I attach further Arab and Muslim media reaction in the wake of the UAE-Israel peace deal.
The signing ceremony of the Abraham Accord will take place on September 15 in Washington, the White House announced yesterday. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will represent Israel, the Emirati Foreign Affairs Minister and the crown prince’s brother, Abdullah bin Zayed, will represent the UAE.
SIR RONALD HARWOOD
I try and pay tribute when long-standing subscribers to this Mideast dispatch email list pass away.
The screenwriter and playwright Ronnie Harwood, a subscriber to this list for the last 15 years, died yesterday aged 85.
He is perhaps best known internationally for winning an Oscar for writing the screenplay for Roman Polanski’s 2003 film The Pianist, which is generally regarded as one the best feature films ever made about the Holocaust. He was also awarded a knighthood for his service to theatre and cinema.
He was born Ronald Horwitz to a family of South African Jews and emigrated to London as young man.
He was also involved in human rights causes, and served as president of PEN International. From time to time, he wrote me interesting emails about these dispatches, and on one occasion he wrote to me that “your bulletins delight me”.
When my father John Gross died in 2011 he also sent an email saying he “loved his [my father’s] company and was always astonished by his knowledge, recall and gift for being able to bring to life books, plays, people. The tributes to him [my father] have been glorious. I can’t remember anyone being so affectionately treated in the columns of our newspapers.”
At the end of this dispatch, I attach the obituary of Ronnie Harwood published today in The Times of London.
***
ARTICLES
SAUDI GAZETTE: PALESTINIAN POLITICIANS HAVE SABOTAGED NEGOTIATIONS AND REJECTED ALL PEACE INITIATIVES FOR 6 DECADES IN ORDER TO KEEP THE AID FUNDS FLOWING TO THEIR PRIVATE ACCOUNTS
When will the Palestinian man wake up?!
By Hani Al-Dahiri
Saudi Gazette
September 6, 2020
https://saudigazette.com.sa/article/597569/Opinion/Voices/When-will-the-Palestinian-man-wake-up!
It is regrettable to see the plight of Palestinian brothers whose politicians have traded their cause for more than 60 years. These politicians saw to that the issue remained alive and did not reach any settlement. They sabotaged negotiations and rejected all peace initiatives, whether those presented by the Israeli side or those by other international parties.
The Palestinian politicians did this at the expense of their cause and their people so as to gain from the situation, which has remained as is till date. The intransigent attitude that they pursued for decades was the only guarantee for their survival with donations pouring in and aid funds boosting their treasuries and accounts in the European banks from all sides, especially from the countries of the Arab and Islamic worlds.
Today, things have changed, and the peoples who used to sympathize with the Palestinian cause are fully aware of this game by people with vested interests. The Palestinian issue means the death of the issue in the minds of millions of people, because it is the inevitable result of six decades of lying, trickery and collection of money in the name of a crisis whose owners do not want it to be resolved.
A few days ago, the courageous Emirati step to normalize relations with Israel came and that delivered an explicit message to the Palestinian political leaders: “The time has come to confront between yourselves and those who are deceived by you... the time for playing and jumping the ropes as well as trafficking with the concerns of the Palestinian people is over.”
As for serving the interest of the Arab people in Gaza and the West Bank, it requires the intervention of rational Arabs to negotiate with the Israeli side and work to establish comprehensive peace in the region away from gangs who eye only political gain.
It is evident that it has become certain that other Arab countries will catch up with the United Arab Emirates, and this means that the last berry leaves will fall from the private parts of the thieves of the cause who have gone beyond history, and the curses of the Palestinians, who have traded in their pain since 1948, will follow them forever.
There is an eternal saying attributed to the 16th US President Abraham Lincoln, and I find it completely applicable to most of the Palestinian leaders who manipulated their people and their cause. Lincoln said: “You can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time.”
The truth is that there is nothing in the entire Palestinian issue that enables it to continue and remain dependent on the current situation, because it is an issue that has reached old age and after old age the only thing remaining is death. And hence, either it is to be resolved today or it would die as the Andalusian issue died as wise men realize that there is no difference between the two issues at all.
As a human being, as a Muslim and as an Arab, I am saddened by the situation of the Palestinian man who was traded in by his political leaders. I wish him well, and hope that he would wake up from his coma and adopt what is good that serves his interest and his future.
However, his case in the property dispute with his opponents is not sacred to me, especially since the normalization of relations of some Arab countries with Israel will allow me and other Muslims to visit Al-Aqsa Mosque and pray therein, which is the only thing that concerns us in this case.
As for other matters, the people of Palestine are more deserving of it, because in terms of logic, it is a first-degree “real estate dispute” and no one should be ashamed of acknowledging this fact.
THE UAE-ISRAEL ACCORD IS A WIN FOR EVERY MUSLIM
The UAE-Israel accord is a win for every Muslim
Those exhausted by the anger and division that have been haunting the Islamic world can hold their heads higher now
By Ed Husain
The National newspaper (Abu Dhabi)
September 4, 2020
https://www.thenational.ae/opinion/comment/the-uae-israel-accord-is-a-win-for-every-muslim-1.1072408
For almost twenty years, Muslims across the world have been on the defensive. Muslim identity has been largely under attack. The terrorist incidents of September 11, 2001 on New York and Washington DC cast – in many a popular imagination – every Muslim as suspect in some way. In almost every continent, a dark cloud hung over us. The security checks at airports are only a manifestation of that deep distrust.
Osama bin Laden and a range of extremist organisations hijacked the Palestinian cause: they created nothing but more loss, terrorism and humiliation for the noble Palestinian people. Now, with the visionary accord between the UAE and Israel, three new horizons open: reinstating Muslim dignity, reviving a two-state solution opportunity and creating regional economic prosperity.
I am a British Muslim. In my teens, I helped raise money in London for Hamas. My peers and I believed suicide bombers were martyrs heading for paradise. We were wrong.
The Greek philosopher, Heraclitus, 2,500 years ago taught that there is only one constant in life: change. Life flows ever onwards. After 9/11, I recognised the blunder of my beliefs. I changed. In my twenties, I lived in Damascus next to a Palestinian refugee camp in Syria. In my thirties, I lived in New York and Washington where I advised the US government. I saw the suspicion of Muslims in the eyes of American officials. It always boiled down to something unspoken: show us peace in Islam; stop talking about it.
And that is exactly what the Abraham Accord is doing: showing peace between peoples, not only preaching it. The accord represents an important opportunity to further reject “Islamophobic” accusations of terrorism and anti-Semitism. We can say: “We believe in one God. Peace is possible. A new way of co-existence is achievable. We are not pawns for the mullahs of Iran or the Muslim Brotherhood. Look at the UAE.”
More than 70 countries have applauded the agreement with Israel and today, the UAE enjoys unprecedented support on both sides of the US political divide. The Pope’s visit to the Emirates in 2019 won the hearts of 2 billion Christians to the prospect of a pluralist, peaceful Middle East.
Islam-haters cannot say all Muslims cannot make peace with Jews. The natural choice for ordinary Muslims – 1.8bn people round the world – is: modernise, moderate and move with the times. The Quran calls upon Muslims to be rational. It confirms repeatedly that Jews and Christians are the children of Abraham. We are all followers of Jacob, Moses and Jesus. The Prophet Mohammed was a merchant, a member of the elite tribe of Quraysh. He engaged, dialogued, signed treaties and behaved rationally. Muslims are not victims, but victors.
Every time I visit Jerusalem, walking along the Roman cobblestone pavements, it pains me that Jerusalemites cannot visit Gaza. And Gazans cannot visit the West Bank. Terrorism causes this division. It pains me equally that the unemployment rate is 45 per cent in Gaza and 41 per cent for women in the West Bank; that Hamas have turned Gaza into a prison, killing any dissenters or peacemakers; that schools I visit in the West Bank do not even have Israel, their neighbour, on the map. This shows a leadership that is afraid of change and the future.
Hamas leaders cannot continue to visit Tehran and praise terrorists and murderers of Arabs, and then expect to be taken seriously as a state builder by the United Nations. The old tactics of terrorism, boycotting and resistance have not worked. A free, dignified state for the Palestinian people, beside a secure Israel, is now again on the table. The Palestinians have a sincere, transparent ally in the UAE.
We must never forget that the Romans expelled Jews from Jerusalem. After five hundred years of banishment it was the Caliph Omar, in the year 637, who invited Jews back to the holy city. Unlike others, Muslims have a long and honourable history of honouring Judaism. The great rabbi Maimonides was a physician to Muslim rulers.
In our time, Sheikh Abdullah bin Zayed, the UAE Minister of Foreign Affairs and International Co-operation, has built a diplomatic corps that is sharp, serious, respected for achieving results and, above all, discrete. To have Emirati diplomacy at the service of the Palestinian people’s dream for statehood – now with direct, trusted and open access to American and Israeli political leaders – is a gift. The Saudi Arabian, Bahraini, Egyptian, Moroccan, Jordanian and other Arab and Muslim nations want to see this issue settled so that the Middle East can fulfil its true potential as a global hub of innovation, capital, finance, technology, health and tourism.
Can the Middle East dream again? No, rather, can it be its true self again? From algorithms to ophthalmology to medicine to naming the stars, much came from the early Muslims. Sometime in the 13th century, that desire to dream and understand the cosmos was lost. Philosophy was abandoned and – with it neglected – science and innovation became marginalised.
Among the greatest defenders of reason, if not the only champions of the time, were the Arab Muslims of Al Andalusia – descendants of the Umayyads from Makkah. There, it was Ibn Rushd in the 12th century who shone the light of reason.
That spirit shone again last month when the Emirates “Hope Probe” Mars mission launched. Just imagine the power of that Arab spirit of knowledge, inquiry and ambition coupled with Israeli advances in medical technology, software developments, agriculture and environment, navigation and road safety.
Youth aged 15-24 consist of 32 per cent of the Arab population. That’s 22 countries with a population of 300 million, of which 100m is under the age of 25, crying out for economic opportunities, houses, marriage, families, health care, cars, dignity and stability. This is evident to anyone taking a walk downtown and talking to the youth in Cairo, Amman, Tunis or Beirut.
As the world emerges from Covid-19, the old models of operation will be defunct. Why take a 20-hour flight to Silicon Valley when similarly bright tech minds are three hours away in Tel Aviv? Why seek investors in New York amid jet lag when similarly wealthy financiers are sat in Riyadh? How is it possible that youth in Egypt and Jordan are starved of investment capital and resources when Israel next door needs new markets? For how much longer will the Middle East tolerate a torn-apart Syria? Damascus – land of St Paul, home of the Umayyads and city of Nizar Qabbani – deserves to return to its Arabic regional allies.
Lebanon, pivot of private bankers, again next to Israel, was deprived of basic talent to manage its port and lost innocent lives in last month’s explosion. For how much longer? I could go on, but year after year, the UAE has been the prime destination of choice for youth across the region. The reason for that status is its entrepreneurial trading spirit.
The winds of change are blowing across the world again and, as the cradle of faiths and civilisations, what happens in the Middle East influences us all. “Do I not destroy my enemies when I make them my friends?” asked the beloved US president Abraham Lincoln. The Israeli-UAE accord opens new paths for all who seek a better future for their grandchildren: Muslims who seek to live in the modern world, a Palestinian-Israeli two-state solution and a more prosperous region for the youth of the Middle East.
BAHRAINI ACTIVIST SAYS JEWS ARE PART OF THE MIDDLE EAST
Bahraini social media activist talks UAE deal, says Jews part of Middle East
Beyond praising the recent deal, Alshareef highlighted an important shift in perception among Arabs in the Middle East.
The Jerusalem Post
September 7, 2020
Loay Alshareef, a social media activist and linguist from Bahrain, was interviewed by i24NEWS on Sunday, in which he discussed the recent Israel-UAE normalization deal, Israel and the Jewish people’s role in the Middle East and the future of Arab-Israel ties.
Beyond praising the recent deal, Alshareef highlighted an important shift in perception among Middle East Arabs, particularly in the Gulf states, regarding perceptions toward Israel specifically and Jews in general. The activist noted that views among the populace of the UAE in regard to the agreement are rooted in stabilizing the Middle East, while adding that “now the awareness is becoming more clear to many people that the Jewish people are not foreign colonialists in the Land of Israel: They are part of this land, and they are part of our region.
He added that “the Jewish people belong here, they have nowhere else to go... so it’s really becoming very obvious that the existence of the Jewish people in the Land of Israel is not only historical, but it’s a fact – and we can do many things together for prosperity, security and peace for the region.”
When asked about the Bahraini position and the UAE, Alshareef said that the latter has taken a principled position of encouraging a stable Middle East, in addition to noting that those who don’t want a stable region are the ones opposed to an Arab-Israeli rapprochement.
In a clear reference to Iran, Alshareef said that “Israel is not a threat to its neighbors, but what is a threat to its neighbor is a country that writes in its constitution to export revolution, to exports its sect and to believe in what they believe in.” He also noted that Judaism itself is not a proselytizing religion, something that not so many people know in the Arab world.
Alshareef also criticized Qatar’s Al Jazeera news network for criticizing the UAE-Israel deal, suggesting that it is supporting anti-Israel sentiment and antisemitism in the region. Attributing his personal change in perception toward Jews to his having lived with a Jewish family in France, Alshareef said that the importance of breaking down barriers and communicating in each other’s languages can help build peace.
ARAB RESEARCHER: IRAN - NOT ISRAEL - IS RESPONSIBLE FOR THE DEATHS OF 4 MILLION ARABS
Amjad Taha speaking on RT (Russia Today) TV, August 27, 2020:
“Israel did not plant a bomb next to the Kaaba, nor did it target Mecca with missiles. Israel did not create militias that kill Lebanese, Iraqis, and Yemenis. The Palestinians were the ones who described… Qasem Soleimani – who killed Syrians, Iraqis, and others – as the ‘Martyr of Jerusalem.’
“Iran, which has killed more than four million Arabs, is today the one that has made an alliance with the militias in Gaza. Let us be honest and say that even viruses evolve, but the peddlers of the [Palestinian] cause do not. They have nothing to offer except for curses and recklessness.”
For further reaction to the UAE deal please see my conversations with former Israeli Deputy National Security Advisor Eran Lerman and Palestinian academic Mostafa Elostaz.
***
OBITUARY: SIR RONALD HARWOOD
Sir Ronald Harwood
Obituary
Civilised yet mischievous Oscar-winning screenwriter and playwright known for The Dresser and his passion for smoking and cricket
The Times (of London)
Wednesday September 9, 2020
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/register/sir-ronald-harwood-obituary-526fl6rwh
In 1959 Ronald Harwood was an out-of-work actor, recently married and so impecunious that he was about to take a job as a labourer, helping to build the Hammersmith flyover. Then fate smiled upon him. His father-in-law, though reportedly less than happy that a daughter descended from Russian nobility was now the wife of a Jewish immigrant from South Africa, gave the 25-year-old a typewriter for Christmas. That gift launched the career that would win Harwood acclaim as a dramatist, an Oscar for his screenplay for The Pianist, and a knighthood.
Harwood’s best-known stage play remains The Dresser, based on the five years he spent in Sir Donald Wolfit’s theatre company. However, he saw more than 20 others staged, several dealing with the subjects that preoccupied him: Nazism and its aftermath, the choices open to those living under oppressive regimes, and the demands of morality more generally. An important task of drama, he said, was to confront audiences with a key question: how would I behave in dangerously testing circumstances?
That question was close to his heart since his father had fled Lithuania for South Africa as a young man when pogroms threatened his village: a place Ronald was to visit years later, seeing there a mass grave containing 1,800 victims of the Nazis.
He himself was born Ronald Horwitz in Cape Town in 1934, and, like his younger cousin and near-neighbour Antony Sher, wanted to become an actor from childhood, an interest he persued at Sea Point Boys’ High School in Cape Town. After the death in 1950 of his commercial-traveller father, Isaac Horwitz, his Polish-born mother, Isobel, told him: “Anybody can be a good actor in South Africa, so you’d better go to England, to find out if you are really any good.”
Aged 17 and changing his surname to Harwood, he won a place at Rada and, when his mother could no longer afford to support him there, earned money cleaning tables and doing other odd jobs. By his admission, he “wasn’t very good, a show-off, not an actor”.
In 1953, however, the intervention of a mutual friend brought him a successful interview with Wolfit. Initially Harwood was that great actor’s dresser – “I loved the job, was very good at it, and didn’t feel demeaned at all” – and then his business manager. After Wolfit’s death in 1968 Harwood discovered that he had left him his papers in his will, hoping that he would undertake his biography. Accordingly, he published Sir Donald Wolfit CBE: His Life and Work in the Unfashionable Theatre to general acclaim in 1971.
A year with the 59 Theatre Company at the Lyric, Hammersmith, followed his departure from Wolfit’s company in 1959, the year in which he married Natasha Riehle, whom he had met when she was a stage manager in Chesterfield. “She was divinely beautiful,” he said. “All the boys were after her, but I played a very cool waiting game.” One reason for their mutual attraction, he thought, was that both came from immigrant backgrounds – “there’s the same kind of insecurity”.
Actually, it was a socially improbable marriage, since she was the great-great-great-great-granddaughter of Catherine the Great and he was on the dole, but it was a long and happy one. “I owe everything to her, she gave me stability,” Harwood said, claiming that they had had only one quarrel before her death in 2013, “about a plate of spaghetti”.
A chance meeting in 1959 with Harold Pinter, whom he knew as a fellow actor, had left Harwood thinking that, despite the recent failure of The Birthday Party, “if he could do it I could do it”. Yet it was that gift of a typewriter that started him writing. Deeply affected by the massacre of 69 black South Africans at Sharpeville in 1960, he tapped out his first novel, All the Same Shadows, seeing it published the next year. When he finished it, he found he could barely breathe: “I knew at that moment I was on to something in myself. It was an epiphany.”
Also in 1960, his play about a lonely bachelor, The Barber of Stamford Hill, was transmitted on television. Private Potter, starring Tom Courtenay as a soldier accused of cowardice during the Cyprus emergency, soon followed, as did other television plays and several novels, including The Girl in Melanie Klein. His first stage play, March Hares, was produced in Liverpool in 1964.
Though he went on to write or collaborate on successful film scripts, among them One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich in 1970, the theatre was his principal outlet. As he said, he couldn’t ditch the snobbish belief that film was an inferior art form: “It’s what I grew up with. Novels were important. Plays were important. Films were . . . populist.” He also felt that the theatre, unlike the cinema, “was a marvellous arena for ideas and language, with proper arguments and emotions”.
In 1977 his adaptation of Evelyn Waugh’s Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold transferred from Manchester to the West End. A year later, A Family brought Paul Scofield to the Haymarket Theatre. Yet it was The Dresser in 1980, with Courtenay as the camp factotum of a “Sir” played by Freddie Jones, that gave Harwood his first big success. Next year the play moved successfully to Broadway and in 1983 became a film, with both Courtenay and Albert Finney, who played “Sir” to his Norman, nominated for Oscars. It continues to be regularly revived, with Ian McKellen and Anthony Hopkins playing the leads on television in 2015 and, in 2016, Reece Shearsmith and Ken Stott starring in the West End.
Harwood’s Deliberate Death of Polish Priest, based on the trial of the security police for the murder of the title-character, was staged at the Almeida Theatre in 1985, and Another Time, a semi-autobiographic piece with Finney and Janet Suzman as warring parents, at Wyndham’s in 1989. Some of the plays that followed were non-political – Poison Pen, about the mysterious death of the composer Peter Warlock, in 1993, and Quartet, a portrait of retired opera singers, in 1999 – but increasingly Harwood’s stage work involved the issues raised by antisemitism, Nazism and the Holocaust.
Taking Sides, about the relationship of the conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler with the Hitler regime, had a long afterlife on both stage and screen after Pinter first directed it at Chichester in 1995. The Handyman, in which an elderly odd-job man of Ukrainian origin is accused of involvement in a wartime massacre of Jews, followed in 1996. Mahler’s Conversion, about the Jewish composer’s opportunist conversion to Catholicism in a bigoted Vienna, proved a failure in the West End in 2001. However, there were good reviews in 2008 for An English Tragedy, about John Amery, the fanatic fascist hanged for treason in 1945.
All these plays displayed not only Harwood’s dramatic energy, fairness and determination to enter the minds of deeply flawed people but the pessimism that, he said, he had never lost after learning about the death camps as an 11-year-old. “Civilisation is no defence against barbarism” he said. “Germany was the most cultured nation in Europe and look what happened.”
Despite the success of his screen adaptations, it wasn’t until Roman Polanski’s film The Pianist, about a Jewish musician’s precarious survival in Nazi-occupied Warsaw, that Harwood’s work achieved international renown. His screenplay won him an Oscar, though it did not lessen his scepticism about Hollywood, where, he said writers were “terribly treated” and “people read books only to see if they will make movies”. Ignored by the celebrities and clutching his statuette, he and Natasha fled Vanity Fair’s post-awards party, to sup chicken soup in bed at their hotel.
Harwood was a civilised man, with a love of music often reflected in his plays, but also modest, self-effacing, companionable and fun. In later years he took mischievous relish in being seen as politically incorrect, which perhaps explained why he was said to be Margaret Thatcher’s favourite playwright. Though a heart attack and radical surgery in 2013 forced him to give up cigarettes, he publicly battled the government’s prohibitions. As he told The Times in 2009, cricket and smoking were his passions: “My first cigarette in the morning with my coffee is my best. I look down and I’m shocked: 20 have gone already. How lovely!” In 2010 he inveighed against the cult of Brecht, calling him one of the most boring playwrights ever: “I only have to think of Mother Courage and, if I can’t sleep at night, I’m off.” And in 2016 the object of his exasperation was the fashion for casting women in male roles. This was not to happen in his plays until copyright lapsed 75 years after his death – “and then,” he added, “they can do what they f***ing well like”.
After the triumph of The Pianist offers of film work poured in, almost all of which he declined. A remake of Oliver Twist for Polanski in 2005 was no great success. Nor was Australia for Baz Luhrmann in 2008. However, the film of his Quartet in 2012 was well received and The Diving Bell and the Butterfly in 2007 won him a Bafta award and an Oscar nomination for his extraordinary skill in finding a screen form for the predicament of Jean-Dominique Bauby, the paralysed stroke victim who learnt to communicate by blinking. Harwood was, he said, particularly attracted to situations displaying, as here, “triumph over adversity”.
He is survived by his three children: Antony, a literary agent, Alexandra, a composer for film and TV, and Deborah, a potter and artist.
Harwood was active in literary and human rights causes, including chairing the Royal Society of Literature and holding the presidency of PEN International. Although he had won the regard of the Establishment he never felt part of it. “I don’t think of myself that way,” he said. “I always think of myself as slightly outside. You can’t be more outside than a Jewish immigrant from South Africa, can you?”
(Sir Ronald Harwood CBE, playwright and screenwriter, was born on November 9, 1934 and died of undisclosed causes on September 8, 2020, aged 85)
* You can also find other items that are not in these dispatches if you “like” this page on Facebook www.facebook.com/TomGrossMedia
IRAN PUTS MUSICIAN ON TRIAL FOR WORKING WITH A WOMAN
[Note by Tom Gross]
I attach a number of articles below, all published in today’s newspapers.
Among them:
* The Washington Post reports: Mehdi Rajabian, a composer and musician, received an urgent message last month from Iran’s domestic security agency: Turn yourself in as quickly as possible. …Tomorrow (Saturday), Rajabian is set to stand trial for the “crime” of working with female artists. His trial comes amid a broader push by Iran to silence voices calling for an end to the repression of women Iran.
IRAN PRO-DEMOCRACY PROTESTORS BEATEN WITH CABLE WIRES, SEXUALLY ABUSED, FORCED TO DRINK CHEMICAL SUBSTANCES, GIVEN REPEATED POWERFUL ELECTRIC SHOCKS
* Arab News: A new report by Amnesty International has revealed the gruesome reality of torture in Iranian jails, but survivors of the country’s prison system have told Arab News that this is not a new phenomenon (and wonder why Amnesty has not highlighted this more previously) and say that the authorities have been abusing inmates for decades.
After anti-regime protests swept Iran in November 2019 (TG: I covered this in depth last November and December on this Mideast list and criticized papers like the New York Times for not doing so sufficiently at the time), the resulting crackdown saw “more than 7,000 men, women and children as young as 10 years old” arrested “within a matter of days,” Amnesty said this week. Those detained, the report said, were subject to an array of torture techniques.
They were beaten with cable wires and other weapons, sexually abused, subject to mock executions, waterboarded, forced to drink chemical substances and given repeated powerful electric shocks, Amnesty said.
Iranian dissidents singled out the EU and Britain for their failure to condemn Tehran. (The US administration has been relatively tough on Tehran.)
LEBANESE ARMY FIND CACHE OF EXPLOSIVE MATERIAL NEAR BEIRUT PORT
* The Wall Street Journal: The Lebanese army yesterday found a cache of explosive material near Beirut Port, where a large stockpile of ammonium nitrate caused last month’s deadly blast. An engineering team discovered the chemical during a search of a warehouse that was requested by the customs agency at the port, an army official said. (The explosives may well belong to or be connected to the Iranian-controlled Hezbollah militia.)
* Haaretz: Israel-UAE deal brings 25 years of covert cooperation out of the shadows. As one diplomat put it, “These foundations were built bottom up, patiently and quietly, over many years, to prepare people’s hearts in advance, unlike what happened in Jordan and Egypt.”
FORMER ISRAELI DEPUTY NATIONAL SECURITY ADVISOR ERAN LERMAN
Tom Gross adds:
Here is another in my series of informal zoom talks “Conversations with friends,” recorded two days ago.
Former Israeli Deputy National Security Advisor Eran Lerman (Modiin)
Eran Lerman was Israel’s Deputy National Security Advisor in the governments of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu from 2009-15. He previously served more than 20 years in military intelligence. We discuss present issues concerning the Gulf states (including the UAE-Israel peace deal), why many Arab countries prefer Israel keep control of the Jordan Valley, how the Palestinians refused the offer of a Palestinian state by Netanyahu during Barack Obama’s second presidential term, when Saudi Arabia might officially make peace with Israel, and the emerging strategic importance of the eastern Mediterranean.
(Discussion by zoom on September 2, 2020.)
ARTICLES
IRAN’S TORTURE VICTIMS WELCOME THE FACT AMNESTY INTERNATIONAL REPORT ON ‘SHOCKING’ PRISON ABUSE
Iran’s torture victims welcome Amnesty report on ‘shocking’ prison abuse
By Christopher Hamill-Stewart
Arab News
September 4, 2020
Homa Jaberi, told Arab News that she welcomes Amnesty’s report, but that it only scratches the surface of the abuse that is rife in Iran’s prison system.
https://www.arabnews.com/node/1729131/middle-east
LONDON: A new report by Amnesty International has revealed the gruesome reality of torture in Iranian jails, but survivors of the country’s prison system have told Arab News that this is not a new phenomenon – the authorities have been abusing inmates for decades.
After anti-regime protests swept Iran in November 2019, the resulting crackdown saw “more than 7,000 men, women and children as young as 10 years old” arrested “within a matter of days,” Amnesty said. Those detained, the report said, were subject to an array of torture techniques.
They were beaten with various weapons, sexually abused, subject to mock executions, waterboarded, forced to drink chemical substances and given repeated powerful electric shocks. The findings amount to “a catalogue of shocking human rights violations,” Amnesty said.
Kobra Jokar, who fled Iran in the 1980s, told Arab News that she has come to expect this behavior from the regime.
She was detained for sympathizing with the Mujahedin-e Khalq (MEK), an Iranian political group that played a pivotal role in the 1979 revolution, but that was later outlawed.
“I found what Amnesty International has written eerily similar to the kind of torture I experienced,” she said.
Jokar, who was pregnant at the time, was violently abducted by Tehran’s security forces in the middle of the night.
Held in the notorious Evin prison, she said officers brutally and repeatedly flogged her and her husband with cable wires.
Her husband was later executed alongside 75 other prisoners. “The guard said, ‘We executed him so that he’d never see his child’,” Jokar explained.
Another MEK supporter, Homa Jaberi, told Arab News that she welcomes Amnesty’s report, but that it only scratches the surface of the abuse that is rife in Iran’s prison system.
A torture survivor herself, Jaberi said she was arrested at the age of 18 after attending a pro-MEK rally in Tehran. She languished in jail for nearly six years, two of those in solitary confinement.
For most of that time, she was held in a tiny cell alongside nearly 30 other female prisoners. Rape and violence were commonplace.
“A cellmate of mine was a physician. The guards raped her repeatedly,” Jaberi said. “Torturers beat us viciously … They kept us standing for three full days without allowing us to sit down.”
Amnesty’s report highlighted the prevalence of “mental health issues (and) self-harm among prisoners.”
This is a situation that Jaberi can attest to only too well. When one of her cellmates cut her own wrists, “prison guards did nothing to save her and waited until she bled to death.”
Iran’s judiciary, which Jaberi describes as “a mockery of justice,” was singled out in Amnesty’s report for the pivotal role it plays in meting out harsh punishments to defendants who receive little or no due process.
“By bringing national security charges against hundreds of people solely for exercising their rights to freedom of expression, association and peaceful assembly, while judges doled out guilty verdicts on the basis of torture-tainted ‘confessions,’ (the judiciary are) complicit in the campaign of repression,” said Diana Eltahawy, Amnesty’s deputy regional director for the Middle East and North Africa.
Amnesty called on UN human rights bodies to conduct a UN-led enquiry into the human rights situation in Iranian prisons, and urged “accountability” for those responsible for violations.
Jokar said Iran’s leadership “must be held accountable and punished for crimes against humanity.”
She urged the international community, and in particular the EU, to “break their silence” on Tehran’s atrocities.
IRANIAN MUSICIAN MEHDI RAJABIAN TO STAND TRIAL FOR COLLABORATING WITH FEMALE ARTISTS
Iranian musician Mehdi Rajabian to stand trial for collaborating with female artists
By Rick Noack
Washington Post
September 4, 2020
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2020/09/03/iranian-musician-mehdi-rajabian-stand-trial-collaborating-with-female-artists/
Mehdi Rajabian, a composer and musician, received an urgent message last month from Iran’s domestic security agency: Turn yourself in as quickly as possible.
He was soon in handcuffs.
On Saturday, Rajabian is set to stand trial for working with female artists, according to activists who are monitoring his case. One of the performers in question – dancer Helia Bandeh, who performed to his music in a video published online – is based in the Netherlands, beyond the reach of Iran’s justice system.
Even after serving previous prison terms over charges related to his work, Rajabian has approached the upcoming trial with defiance. “I strongly believe in the philosophy and message of music, artistic independence and an uncensored world,” Rajabian said in a text messages from the Iranian city of Sari, after posting bail.
His trial comes amid a broader push by Iran’s ultraconservatives to silence voices calling for an end to rules limiting the behavior and expression of women in the country ahead of next year’s presidential election.
Iran has been hit harder by the novel coronavirus pandemic than most Middle Eastern nations, which has fueled political discontent and worsened the country’s economic crisis. As the death toll continued to rise, conservative hard-liners have in recent months cracked down on progressive critics and announced the arrests of women who refused to cover their hair.
The “hardest of the hard-liners are using this milieu, more so than the prospect of greater international tension, to prepare the ground to capture the presidency in 2021,” Behnam Ben Taleblu, a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, said in an email.
Under Iran’s vaguely defined laws regulating public performances, dancing and singing – especially by women – can be considered illegal.
Rajabian’s defense of artistic freedoms and women’s rights has come at a high price. He was jailed in 2013 and 2016, both times for violating laws banning artists from producing music without being granted permission, among other charges.
“To go after Mehdi and the whole artistic community in Iran like this, it just showed that Iran has been taking several steps backward,” said Srirak Plipat, the executive director of Freemuse, a nongovernmental organization that advocates artistic freedom and has been in frequent contact with Rajabian.
Iranian authorities have been on high alert in recent months, analysts said.
After protests erupted in November over plans to cut fuel subsidies, authorities used torture “to punish, intimidate and humiliate detainees,” according to a report by Amnesty International.
Why Iranians are rallying online to stop the execution of three protesters
“Instead of investigating allegations of enforced disappearance, torture and other ill-treatment and other crimes against detainees, Iranian prosecutors became complicit in the campaign of repression,” Diana Eltahawy, a regional director for Amnesty International, said in a statement.
Iran’s justice system has been under additional scrutiny in recent months, amid a new wave of arrests.
After coronavirus restrictions drove a growing number of people online earlier this year to post photos of themselves violating the country’s rules on women’s clothing, authorities threatened a harsh response.
By early June, human rights activists said more than 250 women had been arrested for not covering their hair, according to the Los Angeles Times.
“The Iranian state has over the last few months engaged in deepening repression,” said Ali Fathollah-Nejad, an Iran researcher with the University of Tübingen.
He and others analysts said Iranian officials have shown growing concern that discontent exacerbated by the coronavirus crisis may result in new protests.
But relying on crackdowns to preempt new protests carries political risks, as well. In July, Iranian social media was flooded with dissent over plans to execute three young men who were arrested during the November protests last year. Authorities stayed the executions.
Rajabian said he does not know how many years in prison he could face. While his case has triggered criticism from abroad, Iran’s state-run and semiofficial media outlets have refrained from covering his story.
“Even ordinary people are afraid to talk to me,” Rajabian wrote.
Iranian authorities did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the charges.
The artist has faced state scrutiny in Iran since he was first arrested in 2013, along with his brother, Hossein, a filmmaker, with whom he operated a joint record label.
Rajabian said he was held in solitary confinement for several months.
He and his brother were sentenced to prison in 2015 on charges that included the production of music outside of state sanction – the duo did not have a government license.
Rajabian was released early from prison after going on a hunger strike, in which he says he lost 33 pounds and 40 percent of vision in one eye.
He is not afraid of going to prison again, he said in a text message. The repression he has faced, he said, has been “a prison in itself.”
LEBANESE ARMY FINDS CACHE OF EXPLOSIVE MATERIAL NEAR BEIRUT PORT
Lebanese Army Finds Cache Of Explosive Material Near Beirut Port
A larger stockpile of ammonium nitrate caused last month’s deadly blast
By Raja Abdulrahim
Wall Street Journal
Sept. 4, 2020
https://www.wsj.com/articles/lebanese-army-finds-cache-of-explosive-material-near-beirut-port-11599161077
BEIRUT – The Lebanese army found more than four tons of ammonium nitrate near Beirut’s port, where a larger cache of the same highly explosive material caused last month’s deadly explosion that ripped through much of the capital’s central districts.
An engineering team discovered the chemical during a search of a warehouse that was requested by the customs agency at the port, an army official said Thursday. The army in a statement said it dealt with the ammonium nitrate but did not specify how.
It wasn’t immediately clear if the chemical was from the same stockpile – which authorities said was about 2,750 tons – that blew up. But it served as a grim reminder of the security lapses that led to the Aug. 4 blast that killed at least 190 people, injured more than 6,000 and left thousands of homes in ruins.
The Lebanese government and ruling elite have come under scathing domestic and international criticism for allowing the highly combustible material to be kept so close to the city center for nearly seven years after it was unloaded from a leaking ship.
Foreign leaders have called for an international investigation into the explosion, but so far the Lebanese government has resisted such demands and is carrying out its own probe.
Former and current customs officials have been called in for questioning, but it was unclear if Thursday’s discovery was related to the investigation or part of the port authority’s attempts to prove its competence.
The latest discovery of explosive chemicals comes days after the judicial investigator in the case issued arrest warrants for Beirut port’s harbor master and the general director of land and maritime transport, according to state media.
Judge Fadi Sawan also interrogated and had arrested a port intelligence official and numerous security officers.
But Lebanese worry that lower-ranking officials will be scapegoated for the explosion while the political elite escape accountability for a catastrophe they say arose from government corruption and ineptitude.
The chemical that blew up was seized in Beirut’s port in 2013 when the ship it was on was found to be unseaworthy and its owner subsequently failed to pay shipping agency fees. It ended up in the port’s warehouse as Lebanese officials, lawyers, judges and a Russian shipper fought over what to do with the toxic cargo.
The blast and the bureaucratic failures that led to it have made jittery and still-wounded residents anxious that other poorly stored chemicals around the country could lead to another explosion. But they have little trust in the government to handle it and instead have been calling on TV stations to investigate unidentified stacks near their homes and neighborhoods.
The country’s prime minister and his cabinet resigned under pressure from protesters who demanded justice for those killed in the blast. But this week’s appointment of the country’s ambassador to Germany as the new prime minister has dismayed many Lebanese and convinced them that the explosion won’t lead to real political change.
BAHRAIN TO ALLOW FLIGHTS BETWEEN ISRAEL AND UAE TO CROSS ITS AIRSPACE
Bahrain to Allow Flights Between Israel and UAE to Cross Its Airspace
Reuters
September 4, 2020
Flights between Israel and the United Arab Emirates will be able to fly over Bahrain after the kingdom on Thursday said all services to and from the UAE can cross its airspace.
U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo held closed-door meetings Wednesday with Bahrain’s royal family and top officials in the United Arab Emirates amid the Trump administration’s push for Arab nations to recognize Israel.
Bahrain, a small island nation just off the coast of Saudi Arabia in the Persian Gulf, has a historic Jewish community. The kingdom has slowly encouraged ties to Israel, with two U.S.-based rabbis in 2017 saying King Hamad himself promoted the idea of ending the boycott of Israel by Arab nations. That boycott had been in place to offer Palestinians support in their efforts to form an independent state.
On Wednesday, Saudi Arabia has agreed to let flights between Israel and the United Arab Emirates through the kingdom’s airspace, Saudi state media and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced.
In Manama, Pompeo tweeted that he met with King Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifa and his son, Crown Prince Salman bin Hamad Al Khalifa, on Wednesday morning. “We discussed the importance of building regional peace and stability, including the importance of Gulf unity and countering Iran’s malign influence in the region,” Pompeo wrote.
Also on Wednesday, Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah al-Sissi spoke with Netanyahu over the phone, stressing Cairo’s support for “any effort towards regional peace that would maintain the Palestinian people’s legitimate rights.
In a statement after the meeting, the state-run Bahrain News Agency said King Hamad “stressed the importance of intensifying efforts to end the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.” The king said that includes a two-state solution for an independent Palestinian state with east Jerusalem as its capital – a longtime Arab stance.
On Monday, El Al flight LY971 from Tel Aviv to Abu Dhabi, carrying an Israeli delegation on its way to hold meetings to finalize the normalization agreement with the United Arab Emirates, made the first publicly acknowledged entry of an Israeli plane into Saudi airspace.
EL AL TO FLY FIRST CARGO FLIGHT TO DUBAI BY AN ISRAELI CARRIER
El Al to fly first cargo flight to Dubai by an Israeli carrier
Reuters
September 3, 2020
TEL AVIV - El Al Israel Airlines said on Thursday it would operate the first cargo flight to Dubai by an Israeli carrier on Sept. 16.
The first flight, using a Boeing 747 jet, will travel to Belgium and from there to Dubai, carrying agricultural and high tech products. It will later become a weekly flight, leaving Israel every Wednesday and returning to Israel on Fridays.
El Al, Israel’s flag carrier, said the new route will be an “import and export” link to Dubai and further east.
An Israeli delegation visited Abu Dhabi on a historic trip earlier this week to finalize a pact to open up relations between Israel and the United Arab Emirates (UAE).
El Al flew the delegation and received permission from Saudi Arabia, which does not have diplomatic relations with Israel, to cross over its territory en route to the UAE’s capital of Abu Dhabi.
On Wednesday, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Israeli airliners will be allowed to fly directly to the UAE, shortly after Saudi Arabia opened its airspace to all flights to and from the UAE.
Israeli officials have played up the economic benefits of the accord, which once formalized would include agreements on tourism, technology, energy, healthcare and security, among other areas.
ISRAEL-UAE DEAL BRINGS 25 YEARS OF COVERT COOPERATION OUT OF THE SHADOWS
Israel-UAE Deal Brings 25 Years of Covert Cooperation Out of the Shadows
As one diplomat puts it, ‘These foundations were built bottom up, patiently and quietly, over many years, to prepare people’s hearts in advance, unlike what happened in Jordan and Egypt’
By Noa Landau
Haaretz
September 4, 2020
https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.premium-israel-uae-deal-brings-25-years-of-covert-cooperation-out-of-the-shadows-1.9127412
ABU DHABI – The normalization agreement between Israel and the United Arab Emirates came as a complete surprise to many Israelis and is often described as the relevant leaders’ personal achievement.
But as in any diplomatic process, though leaders make the decisions and reap the rewards, many people and processes over years have paved the way to the gala ceremony that will take place at the White House. In the UAE’s case, 25 years of quiet diplomatic efforts helped prepare the ground for the current agreement.
And unlike in the cases of Jordan and Egypt, where largely defense officials manage the relationship while civilian ties are neglected, Israel’s Foreign Ministry slowly and quietly built productive civilian ties with the UAE alongside the security relationship.
Now that bilateral relations have become open, people involved in this effort can speak more freely about the process. One of them is Eliav Benjamin, head of the ministry’s coordination bureau, who is responsible for ties with Arab and Muslim states that don’t have official relations with Israel.
“It all began after Oslo, when Shimon Peres came and told us, ‘Start opening the door to the Arab world,” Benjamin said, referring to the 1993 agreement with the Palestinians and the then-foreign minister. “That’s when the contacts started. We opened a dialogue with them in Washington, New York and Abu Dhabi, with senior officials’ blessing. Slowly and quietly. A dedicated team was built and we were on the phone with them.
“At first, most of the activity was economic, with the goal of it spreading to the diplomatic sphere as well. In 2002, there was a breakthrough when they wanted to establish a diamond exchange in Dubai and saw the Ramat Gan exchange as a model. We held many talks with them about this, and dozens of Israeli traders started working there.
“Today, more than 40 are registered. Every year there’s a big jewelry fair, and you can see quite a few religious Israelis there. That was one of the first anchors. We also invested in helping with agricultural development and water.
“Even after the Mabhouh affair, the end of the crisis became an opportunity,” Benjamin said, referring to Israel’s 2010 assassination of a senior Hamas operative in Dubai. “In 2017, we opened our delegation to the UN’s renewable energy agency in Abu Dhabi. The agreement was that we’d be there under the agency’s auspices, but it included a sign and a flag in front. Everything. This was an important breakthrough.”
RENEWABLE ENERGY AND DIPLOMACY
Dan Shaham Ben-Hayun currently heads Israel’s delegation to the renewable energy agency and serves as its special envoy for applied research. Until now, he rarely spoke to the press, given the sensitivities in building the relationship. His delegation was Israel’s first official foothold in the Persian Gulf.
“Israel supported setting up the agency in the UAE, and when it opened, we received the option of opening an affiliated delegation there,” he said. “It’s a delegation to an international organization based in Abu Dhabi, and I think we acted wisely when we scrupulously adhered over the years to the mandate we were given. We dealt mainly with being able to display Israeli technologies for renewable energy and green construction in the country.
“But our second role, as diplomats, was understanding the country – its culture and priorities, what they talked about and how they talked. In any relationship, it’s important to understand the other side, what’s important to him .... It’s not just what I want, but also what the other side wants.”
The ability to be there openly as Israeli diplomats “contributed to a direct, unmediated familiarity with the social and economic system and decision-making in the country, as observers and people being observed,” Shaham Ben-Hayun said. “When you’re a guest, you respect and accept the conditions set for being a guest and a diplomat.
“Both sides’ ability to understand and respect each other contributed to building mutual trust for the next step. When you’re serious and professional as a diplomat, you send them the message that it’s okay to continue. They saw that they had a serious ally. There was a carefully cultivated Israeli image, and our presence allowed us and them to get acquainted.
“Additionally, our deep understanding of what’s important to them helped build a framework of relations that will enable the embassy-to-be to be more focused. For example, we understand how important areas like food security and desert agriculture are to them. These fields are also now bases for the normalization agreements on the way. This is important to us, and I think it’s also important to them. They’re deeply committed to this.”
500 ISRAELI COMPANIES
Benjamin said the current agreement “is an outgrowth of these efforts and also of a fortuitous combination of circumstances. They wanted further dialogue with us of their own initiative. Their research institutes, for instance, included us in strategic dialogues.
“From economics, it progressed to diplomatic contacts and good, direct personal connects between senior officials and key people. Even secret reciprocal visits. Or a medical consultation. An intimate acquaintance. Thus the announcement three weeks ago wasn’t born in a vacuum.”
Some aspects of the developing relationship were public. Israeli sports teams took part in competitions in the UAE, Israeli ministers visited, and Israel was invited to participate in the 2020 Dubai expo, though it was later postponed by the coronavirus.
The Foreign Ministry also helped some 500 Israeli companies enter the UAE market. Many were defense technology companies, like spyware developer NSO.
Over the past 18 months, the ministry has also worked openly to prepare Emirati public opinion.
“The Foreign Ministry’s digital public diplomacy team opened a Twitter account for the Gulf and worked on it a lot to move public opinion in both countries,” Benjamin said. “The leadership understood that after many years of laying suitable groundwork, public opinion there was ready for this. People there were just waiting for the dam to open.
“Obviously, the U.S. administration also played a role. Throughout the years, we had very good ties with American ambassadors in the UAE and with their ambassador to the United States.
The expo invitation “was another key element in the infrastructure we built,” he said. “We negotiated for two years over that invitation.”
Asked whether the UAE’s desire to buy American F-35 fighters, the upcoming U.S. election and the possibility of another Israeli election played an equally important role, Benjamin replied, “You could say this normalization agreement came together after all the stars aligned.
“True, there’s also their desire for the F-35; that isn’t new. And granted, there was the question of applying sovereignty, yes or no,” he said, referring to Israel’s plan to annex parts of the West Bank. “And there are leaders who want to show an achievement. That’s all true.
“But there was also an accumulation of long-term processes that worked. The economic story, for instance, played a super-important role. The coronavirus also suddenly created a suitable catalyst for open civilian cooperation.
“These foundations were built bottom up, patiently and quietly, over many years, to prepare people’s hearts in advance, unlike what happened in Jordan and Egypt. We were already talking about swapping art exhibits, for instance. You don’t see things like that with Jordan and Egypt.
Benjamin notes the “civilian diplomatic ties with them for years, including public contacts,” and the “economic and business ties and the brand equity of the relationship for both sides.” All this “helped lay the groundwork for the agreement. Very wealthy, well-connected businesspeople there went to the leadership and said, ‘Come on, let’s move forward.’ We saw this more and more, including through the expo; they help us connect to companies there.
“We believe in bottom-up processes and building infrastructure,” Benjamin concluded. “And that’s how the ground became ready.”
* You can also find other items that are not in these dispatches if you “like” this page on Facebook www.facebook.com/TomGrossMedia
Another in my series of informal zoom talks “Conversations with friends”
Former Israeli Deputy National Security Advisor Eran Lerman (Modiin)
Eran Lerman was Israel’s Deputy National Security Advisor in the governments of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu from 2009-15. He previously served more than 20 years in military intelligence. We discuss present issues concerning the Gulf states (including the UAE-Israel peace deal), why most Arab countries prefer Israel keep control of the Jordan Valley, how the Palestinians refused the offer of a Palestinian state by Netanyahu during Barack Obama’s second presidential term, when Saudi Arabia might officially make peace with Israel, and the emerging strategic importance of the eastern Mediterranean.
(Discussion by zoom on September 2, 2020.)
Other conversations in this series:
Tom Gross
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T4Pg-IDYJYE
As part of a series of informal conservations with friends, Paul Lewis asks Tom Gross about his own life experiences and views: growing up surrounded by cultural and literary luminaries in London and New York; Sunday brunches with Elvis Presley’s songwriter; crossing Checkpoint Charlie into East Berlin with his grandmother during communism; helping the Roma when almost no one else would; Tom’s close relationship with his godmother Sonia Orwell (the model for the heroine Julia of her husband’s masterpiece ‘1984’); being in Manhattan on 9/11; the Mideast; the importance and legacy of the Holocaust; and other matters.
(Discussion by zoom on June 28, 2020.)
World aclaimed pianist Evgeny Kissin (Prague)
Described by The Economist magazine as “the world’s most acclaimed classical pianist” Evgeny Kissin talks about being a child prodigy; his favorite concert halls and musicians; learning new repertoires and visiting Kafka’s grave during coronavirus lockdown; about Stalin’s murder of Yiddish writers, his own love for Yiddish, his support for Israel, and his political views about Russia and the West.
(Discussion by zoom, while under coronavirus lockdown in Prague, on May 24, 2020.)
* You can see shorter extracts from the conversation with Evgeny Kissin here: Conversations with friends: Evgeny Kissin on music, the Yiddish language, Israel and the Soviet Union
Mostafa Elostaz (Paris / Jerusalem)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WduAASj4C4k
Tom Gross speaks to Palestinian academic and peace activist Mostafa Elostaz about his life and views. Mostafa grew up in Kuwait to parents who moved there from Gaza, and were originally from Majdal Asqalan (Arabic) / Ashkelon (Hebrew). Mostafa taught many years at Al Quds university in east Jerusalem, and now teaches at Tel Aviv University. Should the Palestinians welcome the UAE-Israel peace deal? Should they take up Trump and Netanyahu’s offers to negotiate?
In case you want to skip to the political parts, these start at 15 minutes into this interview, where we begin our discussion about the Israel-UAE deal, the Trump plan, and how the Palestinians should best react to Israeli peace offers, and offer to negotiate.
(Discussion by zoom on August 19, 2020.)
Zoe Johnson (Oxfordshire)
Zoe Johnson is the second woman ever to be appointed Senior Treasury Counsel by the attorney general to prosecute the UK’s most serious cases including Islamic terrorism, organized crime, abuse of public office, and honor killings. And she has done all this with the added difficulty of being confined to a wheelchair for almost her whole life.
(Discussion by zoom on August 12, 2020.)
Jonathan Freedland
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y_3phYh8WMU
Award-winning Guardian columnist Jonathan Freedland in conversation with Tom Gross about the state of the world; the Trump presidency (and whether some of his policies might be good); Britain’s coronavirus failures; early Zionism; whether Britain can still learn from the American constitution and system of government; and as a teenager how Jonathan was a mentor to Sasha Baron Cohen before he became Ali G and Borat.
* There is also a separate shorter conversation: Should statues of antisemites come down?
Jonathan Freedland & Tom Gross discuss left-wing antisemitism, and English antisemitism
Jonathan Freedland: Most British people aren’t aware that “one of Britain’s gifts to the world, which originated in England, is the blood libel” -- which led to countless Jewish deaths over many centuries of European history.
Tom Gross: Should the large statue outside the British Parliament of Richard the Lionheart (who was responsible for murder of tens of thousands of Jews) and the bust of Karl Marx (who wrote about Jewish vermin) come down?
(Answer: no they should remain. But schoolchildren should be taught at least a bit about historic English antisemitism, in addition to the wrongs, as well as rights, of the British Empire.)
(Conversation by zoom while under coronavirus lockdown on June 18, 2020)
The last Nazi-hunter Efraim Zuroff (Jerusalem)
Efraim Zuroff speaks about why he became a Nazi hunter, his pursuit of war criminals all over the world over many decades, and his efforts to make countries such as Lithuania, Latvia and Croatia admit to their own nation’s very substantial collaboration with the Nazi genocide. As the last survivors die out where does Holocaust education and memory go from here?
Why did it take Steven Spielberg’s 1993 film Schindler’s List to make Holocaust education finally become incorporated into the British education system some years later? Why did western countries and the Vatican and Red Cross help Nazi criminals escape at the end of the war? Why were so many doctors Nazis?
We also discuss the trial of Bruno Dey (charged for his part in the murder of 5,230 people at Stutthof death camp) which is continuing now in Hamburg – it is 75 years late but the German judge insisted it continue despite the coronavirus restrictions.
(Discussion by zoom, while under coronavirus lockdown in Jerusalem, on June 8, 2020.)
Oscar-nominated filmmaker Hossein Amini (London)
Born in Tehran to a distinguished Iranian family (his grandfather was prime minister under the shah) Oscar-nominated screenwriter and film director Hossein Amini speaks with his friend Tom Gross about Iran before and after the Islamic revolution, his career as a filmmaker, his work with Martin Scorsese and Harvey Weinstein, his favorite films, and says that ‘it’s no accident that the MeToo movement started in tolerant Hollywood’. We also discuss racism in Britain.
(Discussion by zoom, while under coronavirus lockdown in London, on May 30, 2020.)
David Pryce-Jones (London, Wales, Florence)
Writer David Pryce-Jones discusses his childhood escape from the Nazis, his friendships with Isaac Bashevis Singer, Arthur Koestler, Stalin’s daughter Svetlana, John Gross and others; and Israel, Italy, and the New York Times.
(Discussion by zoom, while under coronavirus lockdown in Wales, on May 21, 2020.)
John O’Sullivan (Budapest)
Born to modest parents near Liverpool (his father was a ship steward, his mother a shop girl) John O’Sullivan rose to become one of Margaret Thatcher’s most trusted aides and advisors in 10 Downing Street. In this zoom conversation, he discusses Thatcher’s personality and how she developed her views, and other leading figures he met. (On one occasion John had breakfast with Thatcher in London, then flew to Washington and had dinner with President Reagan that same evening.) He and Tom Gross also discuss Donald Trump’s presidency; the future of journalism; and his lifelong love for musical theatre.
(Discussion by zoom, while under coronavirus lockdown in Budapest, on May 29, 2020.)
Amanda Foreman
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lFHkJcf0qO0
Historian and writer Amanda Foreman talks with Tom Gross about her life and career; her father Carl Foreman (who wrote the films Bridge on the River Kwai, High Noon, and Guns of Navarone, but who was then driven out of town by Senator McCarthy’s witchhunts); Amanda’s own encounter with John Wayne; her books; her TV series on the ascent of women; her nonprofit that helps deprived American kids to read; and about curating an exhibition last year on Queen Victoria for the current English queen in Buckingham Palace. Amanda also discusses why statues and icons are such popular targets in History wars.
(Discussion by zoom to New York on July 14, 2020.)
Rt Hon Lord (David) Young of Graffham
Lord David Young talks about his life, his ten years in Downing Street working closely with Margaret Thatcher, his five years in Downing Street with David Cameron, and about Boris Johnson, Donald Trump, and modern multicultural Britain.
(Discussion by zoom in Graffham, Sussex, in England, while under coronavirus lockdown, on May 20, 2020.)
Bahra Saleh (Kirkuk, Iraq)
Tom Gross talks with Bahra Saleh about her life and about Kurdistan.
(Discussion by zoom in Kirkuk, Iraq, while under coronavirus lockdown, on May 20, 2020.)
Shmuel Bar (Herzliya)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j_ekSPVLMAg
Shmuel Bar, who worked for Israel’s government for 30 years in various analytical and operational capacities, and who is a world-class expert in a variety of fields, discusses the state of America, Europe, the Mideast and the world, and what dangers may lay ahead.
(Discussion by zoom, on July 2, 2020.)
Orit Yasu (Shoham, near Tel Aviv)
Born to recently arrived Ethiopian-Israeli parents, Orit Yasu talks with Tom Gross about growing up in Kiryat Malachi, the rescue of Ethiopian Jews by the Mossad, her participation in the 1999 Columbine High School shooting memorial while on a school trip to Colorado, on how NYC is too crowded, her trip to see her parents village Ethiopia, and why many Ethiopian-Israelis vote Likud.
(Discussion by zoom, while under coronavirus lockdown, on May 31, 2020.)
Charlotte Cunningham (Yorkshire / London / Luxembourg)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kva8JQ1Jgsw
Charlotte, who has established a successful arts organization in England that helps people with mental and physical disabilities, has managed to forge her own path distinct from her illustrious family background -- her grandmother was the ruling monarch of Luxembourg after whom Charlotte is named; and on the other side of her family, her grandfather was US secretary of state under a Republican, Eisenhower, and then US treasury secretary under two Democrats, Kennedy and Johnson.
(Discussion by zoom, while under coronavirus lockdown in London, on June 19, 2020.)
Nidra Poller (Paris)
Writer Nidra Poller discusses hanging out with James Baldwin and other African-American writers and musicians in 1970s Paris, the origins of the name Nidra, how her Japanese partner introduced her to Israel, and the position of women in the modern world.
(Discussion by zoom, while under coronavirus lockdown in Paris, on May 19, 2020.)
Susan Loewenthal Lourenco (Berlin)
Educator Susan Lourenco talks about being the child of refugees from Berlin, her life in four different countries and how she reconciled herself with modern Germany.
(Discussion by zoom, while under coronavirus lockdown in Berlin, on May 12, 2020.)
* You can also find other items that are not in these dispatches if you “like” this page on Facebook www.facebook.com/TomGrossMedia