An Israeli Spy

To hear Israeli intelligence chief Meir Amit tell it, the 1967 clash that established his country as the most fearsome military force in the Middle East wasn't a Six Day War after all.

On June 5, 1967, Israel's air force destroyed Egypt's air force on the ground in a series of morning bombing raids that represented as much an intelligence victory as a military one. It was the culmination of years of careful work penetrating the Egyptian armed forces. The results were decisive and swift.

"Don't call it the Six-day War, call it the three-hour war," Mr. Amit, the Mossad's chief from 1963-1968, told a conference held to mark the 1967 war's 25th anniversary in Washington. "And I must take pride in the intelligence."

In one spectacular operation in 1966, Mr. Amit engineered the defection of an Iraqi fighter pilot who landed his MIG-21 at an Israeli air base. The plane -- among the most modern of the U.S.S.R's fighters -- was immediately shared with the Central Intelligence Agency, helping to cement the bonds between the two nations' intelligence agencies.

The Iraqi pilot was inspired to defect by someone he took to be his American girlfriend but who was actually a Mossad agent.

Mr. Amit "pioneered the use of female agents, the 'honey trap,'" says Dan Raviv, author of "Every Spy a Prince," a history of Israeli espionage.

A patron called to reserve the book a couple of days ago.

He sometimes meditated on the gestalt of intelligence, which could be "boring" because it took years to build up a useful picture of the enemy, yet had moments "far beyond" the most gripping John Le Carre novel. And to Mr. Amit, success could breed failure. He believed the 1967 victory, for example, spawned a dangerous complacency.

"After the war we succumbed to the disease of arrogance, of 'We know better, we are the best, far above the others,'" he once said.

A great insight.

Shai Tsur, Mr. Amit's grandson, says his grandfather believed "the failure of the 1973 war, especially on the part of military intelligence, was a direct product of this 'konseptziya,'" the idea that Israel was so strong that its neighbors would never attack.

In recent years, Mr. Amit warned of the dangers posed by a nuclear-armed Iran and served as chairman of Israel's Center for Special Studies in Tel Aviv, which maintains a giant sandstone monument in the form of a maze as a cenotaph for the nation's fallen intelligence agents.

In a statement Tuesday, Israel's president, Shimon Peres, said, "Generations of Israelis, entire generations of children owe Meir Amit a debt of gratitude for his immense contribution -- a large part of which remains secret."

Some secrets can never be revealed, certainly in Israel.

Obama Chides Israel, Arabs

See how Obama's speech compares with some of his predecessors' addresses on the relationship between the U.S. and the Muslim world.

Parsing the Prez's speech: How many times did he use certain words?
In a wide-ranging speech in Cairo, President Barack Obama said the U.S. is committed to working in partnership with countries in Middle East.

On Cairo's Streets, Support

"I didn't expect him to go this far" in confronting the region's core problems, said Tarek Ali, 44, a driver for a government agency. "He really seems to want to move forward."

Maybe only a couple of streets are represented, but so far, so good.

Although Obama was blunt about the United States' "unbreakable bonds" with Israel, that statement was quickly followed with others about Palestinian "suffering" since Israel's founding in 1948 and the need to curb Jewish settlements in the occupied West Bank and establish a Palestinian state.

Surely the right wing will react to that assessment.

Ahmed Yousef, a spokesman for the Islamist Hamas movement, told al-Jazeera television in Gaza that the speech was reminiscent of Martin Luther King Jr. in its vision -- but that it would not make Hamas inclined to recognize Israel.

"What he said about Islam was great. What he said about Palestinian suffering and a Palestinian state is great," Yousef said. But "we have a lot of reservations."

Reservations? Such as?

"Egyptian people are very quick to forgive," said Mosad Ashour, a producer at a local television studio. "People insult us and even the next day, it is over."

Egyptian Tycoon Sentenced to Death for Murder

A Cairo courtroom erupted Thursday after Hisham Talaat Moustafa was sentenced to death in the murder of the Lebanese singer Suzanne Tamim. Egyptians assume that a man with his wealth and connections is above the law’s reach. More Photos >

May 22, 2009
Egyptian Tycoon Sentenced to Death for Murder
By MICHAEL SLACKMAN

CAIRO — A wealthy and politically connected Egyptian businessman was sentenced to death on Thursday for hiring a hit man to kill a Lebanese pop singer in a case that has captivated the Middle East for nearly a year with its storyline of revenge, power and money.

The businessman, Hisham Talaat Moustafa, was a multimillionaire who seemed to have it all. He headed a real estate conglomerate, was a member of the upper house of Parliament and had close ties to the family of President Hosni Mubarak. He was part of the most elite strata of Egyptian society, a high roller of the type that Egyptians have long assumed to operate beyond the reach of the law.

Then Suzanne Tamim was found dead in July, slashed and stabbed in her apartment in Dubai, in the United Arab Emirates. She was 30, a pop diva and, it was charged, had fled from a failed relationship with Mr. Moustafa.

When rumors first spread of Mr. Moustafa’s links to the killing, Egypt’s leadership appeared to react instinctively, closing ranks to protect one of its own. But Egyptians have been growing increasingly frustrated with two scales of justice, one for the poor and one for the rich, political commentators here said. And there was pressure from Dubai, which was unwilling to let a murderer walk, no matter how rich and connected.

In the hours after the sentence was announced, it seemed as though Mr. Moustafa was all people could talk about in Cairo. People were astounded, and pleased, at the rare fall from grace.

“There is a fundamental element missing in the political system here, and this is the element of trust, the ability of the people to trust that their regime is just,” said Osama Ghazali Harb, an editor and researcher at the Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies in Cairo. “This verdict can bring citizens to have some trust in the judiciary, and it can have a positive outcome for the regime because people don’t trust it in general.”

Mr. Moustafa’s fate was sealed with a quick reading of the verdict. A little after 9 a.m. Judge Muhammadi Qunsuwa entered a run-down, litter-strewn courtroom in the center of Cairo. He said that the case would be referred to the nation’s highest religious official. It was instantly understood that that meant the death penalty.

Mr. Moustafa showed no emotion.

He stood in a prisoner’s cage, a black box of bars and metal mesh about seven feet tall. He wore a white prison jumpsuit and turned his back to the crush of journalists and family and friends who had crowded the room. The man who prosecutors say he hired, Mohsen al-Sukari, was in the cage next to him, reading the Koran.

He received a death sentence, too.

Mr. Moustafa was hustled out of the courtroom as the crowd surged toward the prisoner’s cage. Friends and family members cried out in shock, while his wife collapsed. A young man fainted and was carried out on an officer’s shoulder.

Mr. Sukari turned pale, crossed his arms over his chest and mumbled to himself before being taken away.

Under Egyptian law, the country’s chief religious official, Grand Mufti Ali Gomaa, must review all death sentences. His decision will be handed down next month, but experts here said there was no reason to expect that he would overrule the judge.

Mr. Moustafa’s lawyers also said they would appeal the verdict and sentence, which under Egyptian law are delivered simultaneously.

The case of Mr. Moustafa and Ms. Tamim grabbed public attention because of the spectacular characters, and the locales involved: Dubai, the fast-moving emirate in the Persian Gulf with influence far beyond its size; and Egypt, the floundering, crisis-prone state where power and money often buy immunity from the law.

Egyptian officials were keen to point to the verdict on Thursday as proof that there is rule of law in Egypt, and that even someone as influential as Mr. Moustafa could be forced to pay the ultimate penalty for his crime.

Ms. Tamim was murdered in Dubai, but Egypt does not allow its citizens to be extradited, so the trial took place here. In the beginning, it appeared that Mr. Moustafa would benefit from his social and political standing. Courts ordered that the case not be covered in the press, and Mr. Moustafa retained his parliamentary immunity.

But that changed, a result, some say, of pressure from the United Arab Emirates and a need to calm local hostility toward Egypt’s elite. There was outrage earlier this year when a court initially acquitted another important businessman in connection with the deaths of about 1,000 people when a ferry he owned sank.

Mr. Moustafa was arrested in September and charged with paying $2 million to Mr. Sukari, a former police officer who had worked in security at a hotel Mr. Moustafa owned.

Mr. Moustafa, who was 49 at the time of his arrest, had an estimated net worth of $800 million in 2007. He was one of Egypt’s largest real estate developers and a member of Mr. Mubarak’s governing National Democratic Party.

Ms. Tamim became famous after winning the regional equivalent of “American Idol,” called Studio Al Fann. Her career took off but her personal life was plagued by failed relationships, and when she moved to Cairo she was entangled in a bitter divorce from her second husband.

She met Mr. Moustafa after her move. He offered to help revive her career and then, according to news media reports, they became romantically involved.

But she evidently tired of him and eventually moved to Dubai and married a kickboxing champion.

Prosecutors charged that Mr. Moustafa was enraged and hired Mr. Sukari, who was arrested in Egypt shortly after the killing at the request of the authorities in the Emirates.

When the case first came to public attention in Egypt, the authorities tried to keep the details secret, a move widely interpreted as a signal that someone connected was involved.

But in the end, commentators here said Egypt’s leaders decided that the political costs of protecting Mr. Moustafa were too steep, so they decided in this instance to allow the law to be applied without interference.

“The general guiding rule is the interest of the regime,” said Belal Fadl, a columnist with the independent newspaper Al Masry al Yom. “At this particular moment, the regime’s interest is to prove to people here and to the outside world that it is not a corrupt system.”

Mr. Moustafa saw it differently. In a letter written from his jail cell before his trial, he insisted that he was innocent and that he was the victim of jealousy because of his success.

“I keep asking myself every moment in my cell: Why is this happening to me?” he wrote. “Why am I facing all this distortion and destruction and lies that nobody faced before? Why is this happening to me, while everyone knows who I am and how I am disciplined, serious and committed to my faith and my duties towards God?”

Mona el-Naggar contributed reporting.

Analysis: US, Israel could coax Hamas to moderate

Wishful thinking, or strategic vision?

Postwar Gaza could become a test of President Barack Obama's inauguration speech offer to hard-liners to "extend a hand if you are willing to unclench your fist." The extended hand would be open borders and international reconstruction money for Hamas-ruled Gaza. The unclenched fist would be the Islamic militants holding their fire against Israel and giving their moderate Fatah rivals a foothold in the coastal strip.

Wishful thinking? Perhaps not: Hamas needs help. Nonetheless, to expect that 1,300 deaths will have no effect other than changing the political thinking of Hamas seems absurd.

After an Israeli offensive that killed nearly 1,300 Palestinians and left much of Gaza in ruins, the new U.S. administration and a soon-to-be new Israeli government have a chance to forge a fresh strategy toward Hamas. The war appears to have shaken up Mideast politics and the international community could leverage Gaza's postwar reality to boost moderates in the region, taking advantage of the fact that Hamas desperately needs help following the Israeli onslaught.

On the other hand, moderates could be marginalized, and radicals, defiant, could focus their energies on causing trouble.

Hamas, which has been holding victory rallies in Gaza despite suffering enormous losses from Israel's assault, is not about to suddenly recognize the Jewish state or join the peace talks between Israel and the moderate Palestinian leadership in the West Bank. But the war proved Hamas is not a monolith. Divisions emerged between the group's Syria-based leadership, which opposed a cease-fire, and those inside Gaza who felt the bloodletting had to stop.

Focusing on a common enemy, Israel, could help Hamas factions to even a tenuous truce.

Hamas was deeply disappointed the original truce did not bring a deal to reopen the borders of Gaza, which Israel and Egypt have blockaded since Hamas seized power. The closure destroyed almost all private enterprise in the territory of 1.4 million people, exacerbating misery in a place where 80 percent of the people need U.N. food handouts to survive.

It is a ward of the UN. And worse: Gazans found themselves without cement to build new apartments or make gravestones for the dead. Ninety percent of the territory's 3,600 factories shut down because of a lack of spare parts and raw materials. And Israel's military offensive inflicted an estimated $2 billion in damage.

No work, no gravestones, and then more damage and devastation. Out of this some expect reform to emerge?

Current international proposals for a durable Gaza truce envision allowing Fatah back into Gaza to help monitor a reopened crossing into Egypt, an outcome that could be a first step toward moderates regaining a foothold in Gaza.

Why would Hamas accept Fatah? They are enemies.

Hamas leaders have been defiant since a tentative cease-fire took hold Sunday, But Hamas spokesman Fawzi Barhoum made a point of not rejecting Obama's inaugural overture. Israel remains Hamas' enemy, he said. "That does not mean we cannot open a new page with the whole world, including the new elected American administration if they support the Palestinian people's just rights."

Israel remains the enemy.

Clinton, Familiar With Pitfalls of Mideast Politics, May Face Early Test in Gaza

May? The crisis is awaiting, and will not be solved before she gets into office in two and a half weeks.

Rina Castelnuovo for The New York Times - Hillary Rodham Clinton at the Western Wall in Jerusalem in 2005. After awkward episodes as first lady, she proved to be Israel’s friend as senator.

Mrs. Clinton brings several strengths, according to current and former aides and Middle East experts, including her knowledge of the region and experience in navigating it, as well as lingering good will among Arabs and Israelis won by her husband, Bill Clinton, for his efforts to broker a peace deal in the waning days of his presidency. But Mrs. Clinton will have to reassure the Palestinians that she, too, can be a broker, working with Egypt and other Arab neighbors, and putting pressure on the Israeli government, when needed. “She’s going to have to demonstrate her independence from Israel,” said Aaron David Miller, a public policy analyst at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. “Our interests are inevitably going to diverge from their interests. We cannot be an ‘amen corner’ for them.”

That might be her toughest task, pressuring Israel. Brokering negotiations will be very tough, but the US is the only party that can do so. She brings good will from being a Clinton, and from being Obama's Secretary of State. But to push Israel? There will be a lot of pushback from Israel, the Israeli lobby, Israel's US supporters in both government and lobbies.

In a speech to an Israeli lobbying group shortly after she lost the Democratic nomination to Barack Obama, Mrs. Clinton said the next president should shun direct negotiations with Hamas because it was a terrorist group, equipped by Iran and bent on destroying Israel. Earlier, Mrs. Clinton declared that the United States could “obliterate” Iran if it attacked Israel with nuclear weapons — a far more strident tone than that of her potential new boss, President-elect Obama.

In the middle of the campaign season things are said that are not the things that are said by Secretaries of State.

Most experts believe that Mrs. Clinton’s support of Israel is heartfelt, even if it is also smart politics in New York.

Obviously.

But when she was first lady, Mrs. Clinton made waves on two occasions for seeming to tilt toward Palestinian interests. In 1998, she told a gathering of Israeli and Arab teenagers that creating a state of Palestine was “very important for the broader goal of peace in the Middle East.” The White House disavowed her comments, saying they did not reflect the administration’s policy. Today, the two-state solution is a central part of the American blueprint for a peace deal.

How times change. Her comments were a bit ahead of the time when they became acceptable; today that is accepted policy.

More trouble loomed in November 1999, when Mrs. Clinton, by then a Senate hopeful, visited the West Bank town of Ramallah. At a ceremony with Palestinian health officials, the first lady did not react when Suha Arafat accused Israeli forces of using “toxic gases” against Palestinians, causing cancer in women and children. At the end of the ceremony, Mrs. Clinton gave Mrs. Arafat a polite kiss — a gesture that angered Jewish groups and earned the first lady critical newspaper editorials in New York.

She overcame that storm, and is now considered a strong friend of Israel. And in an ironic twist, that statement might now work in her favor.

In one way, Mrs. Clinton’s baggage may carry a silver lining. Some Palestinians point out that she was ahead of the curve, as an American public figure, in calling for a Palestinian state.

She is a very complex person, in many different ways.

Her marriage to former President Clinton also gives her a valuable calling card. Though his efforts to forge a peace deal fell apart, Middle East experts say that people on both sides credit him for trying longer and harder than other presidents. “People don’t just perceive her as a senator from New York who was very close to Israel,” said Ziad J. Asali, the president of the American Task Force on Palestine, an Arab-American advocacy group that favors a Palestinian state. “They perceive her as a Clinton.”

And Clinton has respect in the Middle East. There is no doubt that that played a significant role in her selection as Obama's Secretary of State.

The challenge for Mrs. Clinton, experts said, will be reaffirming her support for Israel while establishing strong relations with Egypt, an undertaking many believe will be critical to brokering a durable cease-fire in Gaza. “She has to quickly restore the relationship with Egypt,” said Mr. Miller, a former State Department veteran of numerous Middle East peace negotiations. “In doing so, she’s going to have to bear the brunt of being accused of indirect negotiations with Hamas.”

I do really wonder if Egypt's importance is not overestimated, at times. And the word restore jumps out at me; why restore?

Given the pace and fluidity of events in the Middle East, some experts say that the Gaza crisis may end up as a footnote in Mrs. Clinton’s diplomatic tenure, even if it now looms as a huge early test. “She may have to deal with a rough episode coming in, but it doesn’t have to define her,” said David Makovsky, a senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. “You need a smart person who understands the complexity of the situation, and she is that.”

It will be interesting, at the least.

Why Israel Feels Threatened

The author, Benny Morris, a professor of Middle Eastern history at Ben-Gurion University, is the author, most recently, of “1948: A History of the First Arab-Israeli War.”

MANY Israelis feel that the walls — and history — are closing in on their 60-year-old state, much as they felt in early June 1967, just before Israel launched the Six-Day War and destroyed the Egyptian, Jordanian and Syrian armies in Sinai, the West Bank and the Golan Heights.

Now, this next paragraph, third sentence is quite interesting.

Israelis, or rather, Israeli Jews, are beginning to feel much the way their parents did in those apocalyptic days. Israel is a much more powerful and prosperous state today. In 1967 there were only some 2 million Jews in the country — today there are about 5.5 million — and the military did not have nuclear weapons. But the bulk of the population looks to the future with deep foreboding.

I've highlighted it for emphasis. The military did not have nuclear weapons in 1967, he says, leaving the implication that they do now.

His analysis is quite dire: the Arab and wider Islamic worlds, despite Israeli hopes since 1948 and notwithstanding the peace treaties signed by Egypt and Jordan in 1979 and 1994, have never truly accepted the legitimacy of Israel’s creation and continue to oppose its existence.

Little argument can be made about that.

public opinion in the West (and in democracies, governments can’t be far behind) is gradually reducing its support for Israel as the West looks askance at the Jewish state’s treatment of its Palestinian neighbors and wards. The Holocaust is increasingly becoming a faint and ineffectual memory and the Arab states are increasingly powerful and assertive.

Ditto.

A combination of dire threats face Israel: Iran to the east, pursuing a nuclear policy, denying the Holocaust and of any domestic homosexuality, has Israel’s political and military leaders on tenterhooks; Hezbollah to the north, which would join in a war between Iran and Israel, now has an arsenal of 30,000 to 40,000 Russian-made rockets, supplied by Syria and Iran — twice the number it possessed in 2006. Some of the rockets can reach Tel Aviv and Dimona, where Israel’s nuclear production facility is located; Hamas in Gaza has a large arsenal of rockets — home-made Qassams and Russian-made, Iranian-financed Katyushas and Grads smuggled, with the Egyptians largely turning a blind eye, through tunnels from Sinai; and an internal threat: the country's Arab minority.

What is common to these specific threats is their unconventionality. Between 1948 and 1982 Israel coped relatively well with the threat from conventional Arab armies. Indeed, it repeatedly trounced them. But Iran’s nuclear threat, the rise of organizations like Hamas and Hezbollah that operate from across international borders and from the midst of dense civilian populations, and Israeli Arabs’ growing disaffection with the state and their identification with its enemies, offer a completely different set of challenges. And they are challenges that Israel’s leaders and public, bound by Western democratic and liberal norms of behavior, appear to find particularly difficult to counter.

Very dire.

Israel fears Hamas might blow up Rafah

Speak of intractable problems: Israel has been fighting all of its 60 years to survive as a nation. Still groups such as Hamas vow its destruction. Even with its sometime heavy hand, Israel must defend itself.

The Egyptian Foreign Ministry warned that any move to do so [breach the border] would hurt the Palestinian cause and undermine efforts to end the Israeli embargo on Gaza. The ministry statement criticized the timing of the Hamas threats, saying they coincided with "the concocted problems inside Egypt," an apparent reference to this week's deadly riots over rising food prices.