Cutting a deal.

 

Mohammed ben Salman is our new friend, so we had better get used to the idea.

That was my conclusion after reading Nahum Barnea’s column in

Yediot Aharonot’s weekend supplement.

Under the heading “With cunning you shall wage peace.” he was obviously reverse- paraphrasing a passage from Proverbs 24;6: “With cunning you shall wage war.”

Barnea quoted from an interview MBS gave to Fox News, the first of its kind to a non-Arab news outlet since 2019. “Every day we are drawing closer to an agreement that will benefit the Palestinians and will make Israel an important player in the Middle East.” Netanyahu couldn’t have wished for more!  In the deal currently being worked out there are three partners. The most confident of them is the Saudi Crown Prince. At present he is set to gain from both East and West. China, America’s greatest opponent, is wooing MBS and by doing so, increases the prince’s bargaining power.  Russia, America’s second opponent in this power struggle, is trimming 1.3 million barrels of crude oil out of the global market and boosting energy prices. A move that was coordinated with Ben Salman. The Saudis followed suit by doing the same, causing no little consternation in the White House.

Not so long ago, MBS was persona non grata in Washington. Now he is welcome almost everywhere. Partly because of his new image – a man with a vision. He has been carrying out drastic and far-reaching changes within Saudi Arabia, both by promoting large scale construction works and by relaxing some of the restrictive social mores.

So far no one has dared to oppose him, even high-ranking Muslim clericals.

Near East analysts are wondering how he will win over the Palestinians.   

After all, they won’t be satisfied with sympathetic platitudes and although they are always willing to accept ‘donations’, they won’t be bought off.

The Saudi foreign minister Prince Faisal bin Farhan’s 16-minute address to the UN General Assembly on Saturday surprised many observers. He warned that regional security in the Middle East hinged on a “just, comprehensive solution to the Palestinian issue” and appeared to criticise Israel without mentioning it by name. Nor did he mention the efforts being made to further the possibility of normalisation between Saudi Arabia and Israel.

Other reports claim that Riyadh has asked for Israeli concessions to the Palestinians that nevertheless, fall short of giving them an independent state.

Saudi Arabia's first ambassador to the Palestinian Authority, Nayef al-Sudairi, arrived in Ramallah on Tuesday morning, implying in a statement to reporters that the establishment of a Palestinian state with its capital in east Jerusalem would be a central pillar of any future deal with Israel.

I doubt if Israeli negotiators and their US counterparts are deterred by Saudi foreign minister and ambassador al-Sudairi’s seemingly emphatic statements,

Mohammed ben Salman is the man to watch.

At this juncture let’s consider what’s at stake.

According to Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics, there are 451,700 Jews living in West Bank settlements. Between 20,000 and 30,000 more live in illegal West Bank outposts. All settlements are located in Area C, the 60% of the West Bank controlled by Israel. Given that Israel has not annexed the West Bank, Jewish settlements in the territory are not considered by Israel to be under its jurisdiction. Emergency regulations renewed every five years extend Israeli criminal and some civil law to Israeli citizens in the West Bank.

Today, approximately one-third of settlers are Haredim, one-third are secular, and the remaining third are religious Zionists.

In allowing and encouraging the establishment of Jewish communities in the West Bank, the Israeli government’s initial priority was security. By placing Israeli civilians in certain areas to solidify Israel’s control, Israel sought to ensure that the territory’s political future would be consistent with the country’s perceived security needs. A civilian settler population could also act as the first line of defence against an invasion. Under this approach, Israel designated certain strategic regions of the West Bank for Jewish settlement while initially prohibiting the establishment of civilian communities in more heavily populated Palestinian areas.

Over time, messianic Religious Zionist ideology developed as a significant driver of the settlement movement, based on the notion of a religious imperative for Jews to settle the entire Land of Israel. Settlements established as part of this religious movement were often placed in regions with a large Palestinian population in order to secure Jewish dominance over the territory.

Driven by two distinct rationales, the settlement movement and the Israeli government sought to achieve the following political goals since post-1967 Jewish settlement in the West Bank began:

To delineate a future border between Israel and a Palestinian entity that reflects Israel’s priorities.

To disrupt the contiguity of Palestinian communities in the West Bank, especially along the central mountain range running north-south

To establish a significant Jewish population in parts of the West Bank so that if annexed, it would not impact the demographic character of the State of Israel.

Nonetheless, the size of the settler population does not come close to threatening the West Bank’s solid Palestinian majority.

Namely, 85.2% of West Bank residents are Palestinians.

Jews are the majority population (51.9%) within the environs of Jerusalem. In all other parts of the West Bank, Palestinians are the overwhelming majority. 96.7% of the population along the West Bank’s central mountain range that connects the major Palestinian cities is Palestinian.

The growth rate of the settler population has fallen to 2.24% from a high of 16% in 1991. Most of this growth is the result of natural growth, rather than migration, and almost half of it is from the Haredi cities of Modi’in Illit and Beitar Illit—both of which are consensus settlements that would be annexed to Israel under any two-state formulation. Settlements deep in the West Bank in areas slated for evacuation do not pose a demographic threat. Moreover, the West Bank Jewish population’s growth is expected to fall given current trends.

The Palestinian population density in the West Bank is six times higher than that of the Jewish population.

The layout of the West Bank’s Jewish population is also ineffective for the purposes of controlling the territory. Settlements are largely concentrated linearly, such as along the Green Line, along Route 60 through the central mountain ridge, and along Route 90 in the Jordan Valley and northern Dead Sea region.
The Palestinian population, by contrast, is more evenly distributed throughout the entire territory, with the exception of the sparsely populated Jordan Valley (where Palestinians, nevertheless, still outnumber Jews). 

Contrary to the widespread perception that the settlement movement succeeded in establishing facts on the ground that ensure Israel’s dominance over the territory, in fact, the opposite is true.

Settlements are incredibly dependent on Israel-proper. They are not self-sufficient and their residents are reliant on aid and services from within the Green Line.

Settlements are not a cohesive community, even within each of the six regional councils in the West Bank. 

 Long distances between settlements and their respective regional council administrative centres, as well as between the settlements themselves, limit interaction and hinder the establishment of Jewish cultural and economic centres within the West Bank. 

The need to circumvent Palestinian areas when traveling exacerbates this challenge.

The West Bank settlement system lacks a normal urban hierarchy, i.e., large urban centres surrounded by medium-sized and small communities.

The two largest settlements, Beitar Illit and Modi’in Illit, are Haredi communities that are largely irrelevant to the lives of non-Haredi settlers. 

The settlement system largely consists of small settlements that function as disconnected islands reliant on cities in Israel.

Israeli West Bank residents frequently need to travel to major cities within Israel for services that aren’t available in the settlements.

Employment opportunities within the settlements are incredibly limited. On average, 60% of the employed population in a settlement is employed in Israel.

The Israeli government provides significant financial aid to the local authorities and residents of the settlements. 

The number of settlers employed in local agriculture and industry in the West Bank is insignificant.

The precarity of the settlement enterprise is obscured by the government largesse that keeps it afloat. Should the government choose to end this support, local governments and residents would find themselves in a dire financial position. 

Most of the statistics and details I have quoted above were obtained from open-source information.

The rest from: - Shaul Arieli, Deceptive Appearances: Do the Jewish Settlements in the West Bank Negate the Feasibility of the Two-State Solution? (2020).

Margin note: Dr. Shaul Arieli is arguably the most knowledgeable authority on Israel’s borders. I can attest to the fact that he is also an excellent tour guide.

However, if as claimed MBS has asked for Israeli concessions to the Palestinians that fall short of giving them an independent state, would they agree to forget the Palestinian refugees.

I pause here in order to consider the theoretical possibility of dismantling the Jewish settlements in the West Bank in the unlikely event of a “comprehensive solution to the Palestinian issue.”

You probably recall the traumatic forcible removal of 8,600 Israeli settlers from   Gush Katif in August, 2005. Their communities were demolished as part of Israel's unilateral disengagement from the Gaza Strip.

The evacuation and relocation of close to half a million residents of the West Bank is inconceivable.

Time out for another margin note: -

In the aftermath of World War II, when it became apparent that millions of destitute refugees were not going to be attended to by existing organisations, the United Nations saw fit to establish an agency—the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR)—to coordinate assistance to them.  To date, the UNHCR has helped over 25 million people successfully restart their lives.

There is one group of refugees, however, for whom no durable solution has been found during the seventy-five years since their problems began: Palestinian Arabs who fled Israel in the period 1948-1949 as a result of its War of Independence. Originally numbering between 500,000 and 750,000 persons, today they number, (mainly their descendants), approximately 6 million persons.  Arguably, they constitute one of the world’s largest and most enduring refugee problems, and there is no feasible solution to their situation in sight.

The plight of the Palestinian refugees is, at first glance, fairly surprising. Whereas the rest of the world’s refugees are the concern of the UNHCR, the Palestinians are the sole group of refugees with a UN agency dedicated exclusively to their care: The United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), which operates independently of the Convention on refugees. The differences between the two agencies are striking: In addition to classifying Palestinian refugees by a distinct set of criteria, UNRWA, through an international aid package of several hundred millions of dollars a year, serves as the main provider of healthcare, education, relief, and social services for its client population—the sort of assistance the UNHCR usually devolves to refugees’ countries of asylum. Moreover, while the UNHCR actively seeks durable solutions to refugee problems, UNRWA has declined to entertain any permanent solution for the Palestinian refugees, insisting instead on a politically unrealistic “return” to pre-1967 Israel.

UNWRA Commissioner General Philippe Lazzarini speaking at UN Headquarters on Thursday, last week made an impassioned appeal for additional funding.   It appears that notwithstanding the generous funding UNRWA receives it is on the verge of bankruptcy. “I keep reminding Member States that we are the only Agency, with 30,000 staff, which operates on a negative cashflow.”  Lazzarini said.

This a good time to send in the bailiffs, dismantle UNWRA and everything it represents. Somehow, I doubt if this will happen.

 

Anyway, take care.

 

Beni,           27^th of September, 2023.

 In the halls of justice.

The Supreme  Court of Justice

I am including here excerpts from an article that appeared in the Washington Post on Tuesday. In it the authors, Liav Orgad and Ariel Procaccia put forward an intriguing question-

Can Israel turn a constitutional crisis into a constitutional moment?

But, first of all something about the authors-

Liav Orgad is co-director of the Rubinstein Centre for Constitutional Challenges at Reichman University in Herzliya, Israel.

Ariel Procaccia is Gordon McKay professor of computer science at Harvard University.

“The simmering conflict between the Israeli government and Supreme Court is coming to a head. In January, the court overruled the ministerial appointment of Aryeh Deri, a party leader with a checkered legal history, on the grounds that the appointment is “extremely unreasonable.” In response, the governing coalition amended a law to abolish the court’s (seldom exercised) prerogative to apply its reasonableness clause. The ball is now back in the Supreme Court, where an unprecedented 15-judge panel will soon decide on petitions to invalidate the law.

So far, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has refused to commit to obeying the court should it rule against him. This is “uncharted territory,” he said during a CNN interview, “and I hope we don’t get to that.”

We use the term “constitutional crisis” with a touch of irony, as Israel doesn’t have a formal constitution. The Israeli Declaration of Independence, mandated the creation of a constitution. This task was entrusted to a constituent assembly, which belatedly convened on Feb. 14, 1949. But it took all of two days for the assembly to shake off its historic duty. The constitutional debate ended with a compromise: A process of incremental accumulation of separate “basic laws” would form a constitution. Netanyahu’s coalition is taking advantage of this system: Its legislation is dressed up as basic laws in an attempt to shield it from judicial review. Prefacing laws with “basic” has become the grown-up version of prefacing commands with “Simon says.”

The silver lining is that a constitutional crisis can also be a constitutional moment. Public polls indicate that a majority of Israelis support drafting a constitution based on the principles of the Israeli Declaration of Independence. And that same document might hold the key to the creation of a new constitution, in that it originally called for the establishment of a constituent assembly. Such an assembly should be convened today.

The anti-judicial overhaul demonstrations are now the longest and largest protest movement in Israeli history.

It started when Netanyahu returned to power late last year – leading the most right-wing and religious coalition ever to govern the country.

And though judicial reform was barely, if ever, mentioned during Netanyahu’s election campaign, it quickly became the main issue when Justice Minister Yariv Levin announced the far-reaching plans he had mapped out days after being sworn in.

The original proposals included reshaping how Supreme Court justices are selected, taking away some of its powers to nullify government actions, significantly limiting the authority of government legal advisers, and even giving the Knesset the power in certain cases to overturn Supreme Court rulings with a simple majority.

Netanyahu’s coalition said the changes were necessary to rebalance the branches of government, claiming that the Supreme Court had become insular and elitist, and held too much power over the democratically elected legislators. Opponents saw the reforms as a power grab for the ultra-Orthodox and settler movements and as a way to help Netanyahu as he faces an ongoing corruption case – charges he has vehemently denied.

Although aspects of the reforms have been dropped or softened since their initial rollout, the demonstrations have grown and morphed into a wider protest movement against the government, whose far-right ministers like Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben Gvir have made controversial statements about Israeli society and about Palestinians that have raised concerns from international allies.

Other government ministers outdo the extremists every time they ascend the Knesset podium.

For example, Regional Cooperation Minister David (Dudi) Amsalem (Likud) criticised Israeli protesters abroad and Ashkenazi Israelis at home on Tuesday.

“You crossed every redline,” he said about the protesters during a Knesset plenum session. “You’re dragging the State of Israel into the abyss. You make all this mess and then tell us we’re not responsible. You destroy democracy, and we’re to blame?”

Amsalem also criticised Netanyahu’s comments to Elon Musk on Monday.

While explaining the judicial reform to Musk, Netanyahu said he thought the law to cancel the reasonableness clause was bad when it was proposed – an opinion he had not expressed before it was passed in the Knesset in July.

The law sought to “reject one imbalance by creating another imbalance,” Netanyahu said, adding that “it was a mistake.”

Margin note: Perhaps that was a gambit ahead of his meeting with President Biden in New York.

Back to our regional cooperation minister.

Amsalem said he disagreed and pledged that the coalition would continue to advance judicial reform.

This difference of opinion reflects what has been going on in the coalition over the last couple of weeks after a compromise outline was leaked to the media.

But while disagreeing with Netanyahu on this position, Amsalem defended the prime minister’s strong stance against Israelis protesting against him abroad.

Amsalem is one of a number of loud-mouthed government coalition members who malign members of the opposition, the anti- judicial reform protestors and anyone else who disagrees with them. 

At this juncture it’s opportune to mention the Biden-Netanyahu meeting in New York.

David Makovsky, a longtime Middle East watcher at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, noted in a post on X, formerly known as Twitter, that the meeting was occurring "265 days after Netanyahu took office, the longest such gap since 1964."

"The Saudi deal's enormous potential has left Biden & Netanyahu little choice but to meet despite differences," he said.

By way of providing a fitting and hopeful conclusion, I can do no better than quote something posted by the Institute for National Security Studies (INSS).

“Let the year begin with its blessings" takes on a sobering meaning this year, as a plea stemming from the deep existential anxiety for the future of Israel that affects so many of us. Indeed, this past year has given rise to the fiercest internal disputes and the deepest rifts that Israeli society has ever known, to the point that the fabric of our precious Israeli identity seems to be unravelling. In the process, countless red lines have been crossed in public discourse as well as in deeds, and the consequent damages in every realm of life are ominously piling up. And yet, this is also proving to be one of Israel’s finest hours: hundreds of thousands of old and young, secular and religious, in the centre and in the periphery, rally every week around one slogan “DEMOCRACY!” This is probably one of the largest and most significant civil militarisations ever recorded, anywhere, actively involving about 20% of the relevant adult population. The extent of their determination and perseverance (for 37 consecutive weeks as of now) guarantees that we shall find a way out of this horrendous crisis. We have thus learned the hard way that each generation must assume anew the responsibility for preserving liberal democracy, and for protecting the priceless norms of togetherness, caring, and belonging, that make Israel such a wonderful if complex “shtetl” to live in and to the “day after” we will have to restore what has been badly damaged: the fabric of the IDF as the people's army, the trust in our institutions, the vibrancy of the economy, and the cohesion of our society.  And then we will have to reckon with the fundamental problems that we have neglected and suppressed for too long, which have led to today's upheaval: the socio-economic gaps, the tensions between the ultra-Orthodox and the secular as well as between Jews and Arabs, the constitutional and political regime, and yes, also the bleeding conflict with the Palestinians. At the start of this new year, we shall not succumb to despair - on the contrary, this is an extraordinary opportunity to turn over a new leaf and draw the roadmap for a better Israel, which we shall be able to be proud of for at least the next 75 years. Let me say it loud and clear: if each of us will assume responsibility and do his/her share to preserve Israel as it was meant to be, a Jewish and democratic state in the spirit of the Declaration of Independence, here in Israel as well as in every Jewish community, WE SHALL PREVAIL!

 

Beni                      

21^st of September, 2023.

A soul-searching occasion.

 

For the past 50 years Yom Kippur has acquired an additional significance.

Alongside the solemn occasion of our Day of Atonement we commemorate the anniversary of the Yom Kippur War. This year and every year since 1973 it has become a soul-searching occasion. The memoirs of aging generals, new revelations from our own and foreign sources, shed more light on the battle narratives and all aspects of the war. The critics have spared none. Our intelligence community, the commanders in the field, as well as Golda Meir’s kitchen cabinet’s decisions and vacillations are all mercilessly scrutinised.  All this self-flagellation has had a cathartic effect on the IDF’s military intelligence, in fact on everyone.

The declassification of military and government archives is defined by law.

Consequently, new media reports last week, like the following one, weren’t surprising: -

“Ahead of the 50th anniversary of the Yom Kippur War, the Israel State Archives have been declassified revealing, hitherto undisclosed material. New documents from Golda Meir’s bureau, relating to the 1973 Yom Kippur War and its aftermath.

Voluminous materials have been disclosed over the last 50 years, including significant new documents discovered in journal entries made by Meir’s secretary Eli Mizrachi.

Some of the documents provide records of deliberations between Golda Meir and security chiefs in the days and hours before Syria and Egypt launched the coordinated war on October 6, 1973, as Israel was marking Yom Kippur.

Israel hadn’t expected the attack to materialise despite clear signs that the armies were preparing for an invasion, believing that following Egypt’s defeat six years earlier in the Six Day War, Cairo would only attack if it first gained the ability to paralyse Israel’s Air Force.

A day before the war began, Military Intelligence Directorate head Eli Zeira told Meir that the predominant assessment was that Israel’s “readiness stems mostly from our enemies’ fear of our deterrence,” adding: “I think they aren’t about to attack, we have no proof. Technically, they are able to act. I assume that if they are about to attack, we will get better indications.”

In another assessment hours later, Zeira and IDF chief of staff David Elazar repeated their stance that Syria and Egypt were most likely to be planning a limited aggression or even merely deploying forces defensively.

Elazar added: “I must say, we don’t have sufficient proof that they don’t intend to attack. We don’t have conclusive indications that they want to attack, but I can’t say based on knowledge that they aren’t preparing.”

I want to insert an excerpt from an article written four years ago by the late Shmuel Even, a research fellow at the Institute for National Security Studies (INSS). It presents a different version of then Chief of Staff, David Elazar’s contribution to the deliberations: -

“From an analysis of the events, it appears that the chief of staff, David Elazar, had a clear risk management approach. On October 5, 1973, a day before the war, he put the regular army on high alert and reinforced the front lines. He did this despite the assessment of the head of Military Intelligence that the likelihood of war was extremely low.  However, Lieutenant General Elazar’s decision was far from being sufficient to withstand the attack that broke out the following day at 1:50 pm, in part because both he and Defence Minister Moshe Dayan failed to properly assess the risk. Namely, that the regular army would be hard put to contain the offensive before the arrival of reserve forces. In addition, Defence Minister Dayan and Prime Minister Golda Meir rejected the chief of staff’s suggestion made the next morning to carry out a preemptive air strike against enemy forces, as they were concerned about the diplomatic risk involved, which made it even more difficult for the permanent army. The lessons learned from this sequence of events are that risk management is an essential part of the role of statesmen and military leaders, and the military and diplomatic risks on the strategic level should be managed jointly and should be subject to policy goals.”

The following morning at 7:30 a.m. — 6.5 hours before the combined Syrian and Egyptian offensive, Meir’s military secretary read to her an overnight telegram from Mossad chief Zvi Zamir, indicating that war was imminent.

Syria was massing tanks and missiles in the north. Egypt was conducting military manoeuvres near the Suez Canal. Russia had begun evacuating families from the region. Yet that afternoon General Eli Zeira, the head of Israeli military intelligence, announced at a staff meeting that a coordinated attack by Egypt and Syria was "low probability - even lower than low."

Just before midnight, London time, ‘The Angel’ (Ashraf Marwan) appeared at Mossad’s safe house.

A brief margin note: - “At an earlier time Marwan had approached the Mossad through a go-between offering his services. The Mossad determined that the documents he presented were genuine. Still, a rapidly formed working group of Mossad agents debated the risk in dealing with a walk-in, a volunteer who shows up bearing gifts.

They considered the possibility that he was a double agent spreading disinformation. It was decided, however, that this walk-in's credentials were worth the gamble.”

Back to Zvi Zamir at the London safe house- Marwan spoke to Zamir for less than an hour and then left.

Zamir phoned an aide at 3:40 a.m. on the morning of Yom Kippur. The Egyptians and Syrians, he said, will attack simultaneously on both fronts at sunset.

At an Israeli cabinet meeting that morning, Marwan’s warning failed to convince Meir’s cabinet ministers. The last time he had promised war would break out, reserve army forces were mobilised. The alert dragged on needlessly for months and cost the IDF $35 million.

I’ll pause here in order to add a few details concerning Ashraf Marwan ‘The Angel’ - In an article he wrote for the Jerusalem Post recently Yonah Jeremy Bob quoted remarks made by the current Mossad director David Barnea at a Mossad book launch event.

“The Angel’s” true identity, Ashraf Marwan, was revealed decades ago. Books have been written attempting to decode when he was helping the Mossad when Egypt, and when he had ostensibly played both sides, including his multiple warnings to Israel that Cairo was going to initiate a war – warnings which were dismissed by a good deal of the Israeli defence establishment.  However, Mossad Director David Barnea concluded unequivocally that Marwan was only working for the Mossad and that there were no dual loyalties. 

Marwan held top intelligence positions in Egypt both during Gamal Abdel Nasser and Anwar Sadat’s tenures as president, and was married to one of Nasser’s daughters, giving him unique access to the intentions of Egypt’s rulers. 

The Mossad book reveals new information from protocols of discussions Sadat had with Russian officials in Moscow in 1971.

In the protocols, Sadat’s intentions to try to regain all, and not just part, of the Sinai, by either diplomatic negotiations or by a war with Israel are detailed clearly.

The Mossad says that this is the first time that it has been revealed that Sadat was open to the idea of a more limited war for the purpose of helping move negotiations forward.

 Let’s return to the terrible uncertainty in the hours preceding the Yom Kippur War - Minister of Defence Moshe Dayan raged at the army chief of staff, "On the basis of messages from Zvika (Zvi Zamir) you don’t mobolise a whole army."

Just the same, Meir and her war cabinet ministers considered the option of leaking knowledge of the impending attack with the object of forestalling it.

Yigal Alon advocated leaking the knowledge of the attack plan to media outlets before a cabinet meeting scheduled for noon that day. However, Meir only backed leaking the information to foreign diplomats, and she ended up informing US ambassador Kenneth Keating after Dayan said: “We must tread carefully, so there’s no panicking.”

Meir asked Keating during their meeting to convey a message to Egypt: “We have no doubt that we will win, but we want to announce… that we aren’t planning an attack, but of course we are ready to repel their attack.”

When Keating asked if Israel would strike preemptively, Meir answered that it wouldn’t, “though it would have made it much easier for us.”

A day after the attack materialised — again surprising Israel since it happened earlier than expected — Dayan acknowledged to Meir and Alon that his assessments had been proven wrong.

“We had an assessment that was based on the previous war, and it was incorrect. We and others had wrong assessments about what would happen during the attempted crossing of the Suez Canal,” he said.

Only days later, after Washington was convinced, Israel hadn’t initiated the war, did the US provide weapons, with Meir saying: “There is a decision in principle by US president Richard Nixon on the supply of Phantom II F-4 interceptor fighter bombers. Now there’s just the issue of carrying this out. Kissinger is looking for a way to fly them in.”

 At this juncture it’s pertinent to evaluate a number of military intelligence topics. At that time (prior to 1973), the Mossad was mainly a spy agency for conducting special operations and gathering intelligence toward carrying out those operations.

However, it was not until after the Yom Kippur War that the Mossad gained a more significant and parallel recognition and access to IDF intelligence regarding the ‘bigger picture’ and long-term strategic questions of war and peace – especially regarding alerts to the likelihood of war.

Furthermore, in 1973 Unit 8200 was an almost unknown, largely disregarded team operating with primitive surplus American military equipment. A far cry from its current standing. Peter Roberts, the Director of Military Sciences at the  Royal United Services Institute, claims that, "Unit 8200 is probably the foremost technical intelligence agency in the world and stands on a par with the NSA  in everything except scale. They are highly focused on what they look at — certainly more focused than the NSA (the US National Security Agency) — and they conduct their operations with a degree of tenacity and passion that you don't experience anywhere else."

There’s a postscript regarding Ashraf Marwan’s life after the Yom Kippur War.

Following the Camp David Accords 1978 and earlier still, it’s unlikely that Marwan’s services were required by the Mossad. He could afford to rest on his laurels.

He was independently wealthy and appears to have spent most of his time with his family in their London home.

In a piece published in The Guardian on the 15^th of September 2015 the author queried – “Who killed the 20th century’s greatest spy?

When Ashraf Marwan fell to his death from the balcony of a London flat, he took his secrets with him. Was he working for Egypt or Israel? And did the revelation of his identity lead to his death?

This much is certain: Ashraf Marwan was alive when he tumbled from the fifth-floor balcony of his London flat. The Egyptian businessman landed, shortly after 1.30pm on the 27^th of June 2007, in a private rose garden. A woman screamed; someone called the police. The paramedics arrived too late. Marwan died from a ruptured aorta.

Whether he fell or was pushed has never been established conclusively.

A debate continues over whether Marwan was a well-connected and resourceful Israeli spy or a brilliantly manipulative Egyptian double agent.

Marwan's sister said he was in good spirits only hours before his death. But another unidentified friend said Marwan’s health had declined, he simply, lost his balance and fell.

There were also reports that he made many enemies through his activities involving armaments sales.

Nevertheless, Egyptian authorities arranged a grand funeral and Marwan was hailed as a hero.

Well, the Ashraf Marwan saga seems to have ended well for everyone, with one possible exception-

In 2019, the founder of an Egyptian publishing house, Khaled Lotfi, was sentenced to five years in prison for distributing a novel about Marwan on the grounds that the book revealed Egyptian military secrets.

 

Shana Tova

 

Beni, 

14^th of September, 2023

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