AxisMundi Jerusalem

Frayed cloak, rusty dagger?

Seems someone on the Mossad’s hit-list just won a reprieve.

A botched assassination exercise by Israel’s overseas intelligence service on Monday has thrown a rare spotlight on its secret tactics, as well as raising questions about professionalism.

According to witnesses, a black-clad man in his 20′s attached a magnetic replica bomb to the door of a car parked in Tel Aviv’s tony port district, and tried to slip away. He was spotted by two diners at a nearby restaurant who, thinking him a terrorist or mob contract-killer, alerted police.

Confronted by the cops, the suspect revealed that he was on a Mossad drill. The story surfaced on Tuesday evening, after government censors dropped a gag order.

Was it a training exercise for a novice spy? Probably not. The Mossad is known to dispatch its cadets onto the streets of Israel, and beyond, to learn basic surveillance and infiltration skills. But assassination missions are reserved for select squads of veteran operatives.

(Besides, if the first rule for espionage trainees is “don’t get caught”, the second is: “If caught, don’t admit you’re a spy.”)

That suggests that the Mossad chose Tel Aviv port for a “model run” — Israeli spooks’ term for a rehearsed operation in a safe area that closely resembles the real target’s environment. In such drills, eluding detection and making a getaway are key. Less important is the weapon of choice. Israelis are familiar with the effectiveness of booby-trapped cars thanks to the assassination in 2008 of Hezbollah mastermind Imad Moughniyeh in Syria, and of two brothers from Islamic Jihad in Lebanon in 2006. Arabs blamed both bombings on the Mossad, which, under long-time director Meir Dagan, is widely understood to be taking the fight to Israel’s foes abroad.

2006 Lebanon War Still a Point of Contention in Israel, Lebanon

Today, July 12, marks another controversial anniversary: it is the third anniversary of the start of the Second Lebanon war, as it is known by Israelis, or the July War, as it’s called by the Lebanese.

(See our factbox on the war here).

Three years on, Israelis are still divided as to whether their government made the right decision in undertaking the 34 day conflict in 2006.

Columnist Eitan Haber, of Yedioth Ahronoth, sums it up this way: “Everyone is right in the war that followed the Second Lebanon War. Those who believe it was an untimely and unsuccessful war that led to the erosion of our deterrent power, especially vis-à-vis Hezbollah, are right. Those who argue that the war led to absolute calm in the rocket-battered north, pushed Hezbollah’s men away from the border, and prompted the deployment of an international force in south Lebanon are also right.” (Read his whole article here).

As the Israeli public sorts out its feelings about the war, IDF officials also spoke up today at a conference marking the war’s third anniversary. Dan Halutz, the former IDF chief who resigned in the wake of criticisms of his actions in the war, defended the choice to launch a campaign: “I believed that if we crave life in this Mideast arena, we have to sometimes just ‘go crazy’. “

He also said that he had been against citing Hezbollah’s abduction of two Israeli soldiers as the impetus for the attack, as he considered it to have been a long term strategic need for Israel to curb Hezbollah’s capabilities.

Giora Eiland, former head of the Israeli National Security Council argued that Israel’s attack was mistake. It should have only launched a two- or three-day attack against Hezbollah in 2006, he said, and then accepted an internationally-backed truce: “That kind of action would have restored  Israel’s deterrence … The achievement might have been limited, but so would the price.”

The music stops for ‘Waltz’

In one of the biggest surprises on Oscar night, the animated Israeli documentary Waltz with Bashir did not walk away as many expected with the famed statuette in the Foreign Film category, which instead went to Japanese film Departures.

Even the star of Departures acknowledged he was expecting Waltz with Bashir to win the Academy Award.

The hype in Israel surrounding the movie- which won a Golden Globe earlier in the year – had provided a spark of optimism in the country where politics, regional relations and the economy have been weighing heavily on the public mood.

Some are already suggesting the failure of Waltz on Hollywood’s biggest night was some form of censure for the recent Israeli offensive in Gaza.

An editorial cartoon in the Israeli press made the connection - showing Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert presenting director Ari Folman with a consolation prize and saying “We made you a statuette out of Cast Lead”. Operation Cast Lead was the Israeli code name for the Gaza offensive launched late last year with the stated aim of countering militant rocket fire from inside Gaza. It provoked much international criticism of Israel, notably over hundreds of civilians killed and wounded.

Echoing the glum mood elicited by Waltz’s failure – another cartoon in Israel’s leading Yedioth Ahronoth newspaper has a man reacting to the headline “Disappointment at the Oscars” saying “There’s another failure of the Lebanon War” – a reference as much to the broadly unpopular and inconclusive 2006 battle with Hezbollah in southern Lebanon as to the 1980s invasion of Lebanon that is the subject of Ari Folman’s astonishing animated flashback.

from Global News Journal:

Twittering from the front-lines

Who remembers the Google Wars website that was doing the viral rounds a few years back – a mildly amusing, non-scientific snapshot of the search-driven, internet world we live in?

It lives on at www.googlebattle.com where you can enter two search terms, say ‘Lennon vs. McCartney’ or ‘Left vs. Right’, and let the internet pick a winner by the number of search hits each word gets.

As we reported here – the virtual world has become a real battleground in the ongoing Gaza conflict – with all sides deploying significant resources.

For Israel – where hasbara or PR has often been frowned upon as unnecessary pandering to international opinion that never turns in Israel’s favour anyway – the second Lebanon war underlined the need for a coherent media and PR strategy coordinated at the centre of government.

The post-mortem of the month-long war with Hezbollah in 2006 - known as the Winograd Commission - recommended a centralised approach to hasbara to avoid spokesmen from different ministries, the army or the police telling different or conflicting stories to a voracious local and international media.

Notwithstanding the fact that the head of the new National Information Directorate did not make it to a scheduled interview with our reporter on the story above  – as my colleague Dan Williams reported here the strategy certainly seems to be working for domestic consumption.

Sources inside the Israeli government have said they are generally happy with the way the strategy has worked internationally as well despite growing international calls for a ceasefire and increasingly angry protests around the world.