Eric Lee

Back in 1996, I began writing a weekly blog (before there were such things as blogs) called BibiWATCH. That was how I met Robert Rosenberg.

Photo: Robert Rosenberg in Tel-Aviv.

Robert had created one of the first websites devoted to peace in the Middle East -- Ariga -- a year earlier, in 1995. He was a big fan of what I was doing to Netanyahu week after week, and the admiration was mutual.

In the third issue of BibiWATCH, I published this exchange:

Tres cool site -- your link will be added to Ariga -- and hope you can quote Ariga occasionally. -- Robert Rosenberg, Israel

Readers of BibiWATCH are encouraged to check out Robert's "Ariga" site; it's excellent.

Later, Robert would host BibiWATCH on the Ariga site -- for free.

We got together, sipped espresso in an outdoor cafe in his beloved Tel-Aviv, spent a weekend shmoozing at my kibbutz Ein Dor, and stayed in touch pretty regularly until I moved to London in 1998.

Robert pioneered the use of the new communications technology to further the most important cause of all -- peace. His untimely death from cancer at the age of 54 means that he will never see the realization of his dream of Jewish-Arab reconciliation.

Robert was a character. A former crime writer, he went on to write a number of crime novels based in Israel. By coincidence, I picked up one in New York in August -- one I hadn't yet read.

May his memory be blessed.

Posted by Eric Lee at 12:34 PM | Permalink

Following a special double episode of the hit BBC television series "Spooks" in which the bad guys turned out to be the Israeli Mossad (see my previous article) you'd think they would take a break. But instead, the episode aired last night on BBC3 (next week on BBC 1) in which the bad guys are initially fanatical Christian fundamentalists also turns out to have an Israeli angle.

The really bad guys in last night's episode manage to trick the Mossad into thinking that the show's hero, an MI5 agent, is some kind of anti-Semite, so the Mossad sends in a crack assassination team of around six men armed with easily-identifiable Israeli pistols. ("Ooo! Jerichos - they must be Israelis!" declares one of the crack MI5 team.)

Fortunately, the tall blonde heroine this season (who in the previous episode snarls out the phrase 'Yemenite Jew') uses her martial arts skills to disarm most of them, while unarmed hero Adam deals with the rest. The one surviving member of this "elite" unite of bumbling Jewish terrorists is called off following a phone call made by MI5 boss Harry to his Israeli counterpart, the cultural attache at the Israeli embassy. (Harry threatens to have all the Mossad agents in London deported if they don't stop shooting at MI5 officers right now. And no, I'm not making this up.)

You would think that the Mossad would be running out of trained (albeit rather inept) assassins, having lost an entire squad last week to MI5, but there seems to be a limitless supply of these types floating around London, ready to be picked off by MI5 each week. This is now three weeks in a row that Spooks is staying focussed on the Mossad theme.

The writer of some (all?) of the most recent episodes is a Lebanese-born author named Raymond Khoury. I wonder if he has a political agenda that we're not aware of.

Posted by Eric Lee at 08:23 AM | Permalink | Comments (10)

The BBC has just aired a special two-part episode of the hit television series "Spooks" in which the villains -- a team of terrorists -- turn out to be agents of the Israeli government.

In the episode, the Israelis (who are Mossad agents) pose as Al Qa'eda terrorists, and seize control of a Saudi Arabian building in London, taking hostages, several of whom they murder in cold blood. One of their confederates, a British agent whose Israeli wife was killed in a terrorist blast in Tel-Aviv years before, stabs to death a female, blonde MI5 officer who suspected that he was helping terrorists.

Israeli agent posing as Al Qa'eda terrorist tells MI5 agent Ros, "You're next" (to be shot).

In scenes in which the top MI5 boss, Harry, confronts his Mossad counterpart in London, it is made clear that this is no "rogue" outfit, but an official (albeit deniable) Mossad operation.

Now, I don't know if anyone else has a problem with this, but a couple of things come to mind.

First of all, Israel has never carried out an operation of this kind. Not in London, not anywhere.

It is unimaginable that an Israeli government would do such a thing.

Previous episodes of "Spooks" have focussed on Arab terrorists, so presumably someone decided that for balance, Israelis would also have to be shown as insane, sadistic murderers.

In a sense, it is not surprising that this sort of thing comes from the BBC, whose anti-Israel bias is well-documented.

This is all scary enough, considering the recent report of a Parliamentary committee which discussed the rise of anti-Semitism in Britain. This show will do little to help combat that.

Furthermore, one wonders how Muslims in Britain and abroad will see these episodes.

Clearly if Israelis can pretend to be Al Qa'eda terrorists and carry out an attack like this, maybe in real life they do similar things?

Maybe it really was the Mossad behind 9/11, or 7/7?

With this episode of "Spooks," the BBC has crossed a red line, and one hopes that the Jewish community and all those who want to combat anti-Semitism will raise hell over this.

Posted by Eric Lee at 11:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (25)