I think they earned their award. The original story, now 11 months old, is perhaps worth re-reading.
Summary: anticipating ICC conclusions about the war in Gaza, Netanyahu (from whom Mossad takes commands) sent the agency to collect compromising material about the ICC prosecutor. The head of the agency threatened her, but she disclosed the contacts to other ICC officials and proceeded with the investigation.
According to accounts shared with ICC officials, he is alleged to have told her: “You should help us and let us take care of you. You don’t want to be getting into things that could compromise your security or that of your family.”
Let’s hope that they don’t have “accidents” any time soon
Israel only exists because the US and UK have used Mossad to do their dirty work, and they provide a black hole in the middle east for people to go when information is to be extracted
Don’t let the facts slow you down, eh.
Attributing the existence of a country to an agency the country built, is a bit on the fast side, I think. The agency was born 1 year after Israel and built from scratch.
Israel exists because millions of people didn’t have a place they could call their home country.
Sadly, what has become of that country is not cheerful. Its war in Gaza seems to intend making life impossible in the sector (making a population’s life impossible in their homeland has a definition: genocide) and prime minister Netanyahu is grabbing for more power, likely with thoughts about “staying a bit longer”.
Mossad (role: foreign intelligence) is an agency directly subordinated to the prime minister of Israel (unlike some others, e.g. Shin Bet (role: internal security and counterintelligence), which recently had its chief fired because he wouldn’t swear personal allegiance to Netanyahu). So, in the current political situation, there is credible suspicion that Netanyahu is creating a precedent and subordinating all intelligence agencies to his person - if not directly then indirectly.
Mossad’s cooperation with foreign agencies has been punctuated by episodes of non-cooperation.
I can point out several moments in history where the interests of Mossad contradicted, for example, the interests of the CIA. Threats were made, negotiations were held, some Mossad guys got caught and were imprisoned in the US.
However, during less tense periods, agencies have also been trading tips. Mossad has built a highly successful “business” of assassinating people. It logically follows that if agency A knows that person X is on Mossad’s “hit list”, and they find out where X lives, then A won’t need to send a killer, but tips off Mossad. Intelligence agencies may sometimes (not cheerfully) share part of their technical networks with each other, but human networks - almost never. It can get their own agents killed or imprisoned, if another agency is careless.
Israel exists because millions of people didn’t have a place they could call their home country.
That’s… Uh… No. Israel exists because European antisemites want somewhere to dump their Jews and answer “the Jewish question”, with two big pushes from early 20th century Russia and Nazi Germany. Before the Holocaust the position of most Jews around the world was “huh? What right do you have to dump me in buttfuck Palestine,” and even after the Holocaust it was far from a universal position. Let’s not pretend Israel was ever anything other than a settler colonialist project whose most ardent supporters were antisemites.
Let’s not pretend Israel was ever anything other than a settler colonialist project whose most ardent supporters were antisemites.
I’m a bit poorly informed about public and private discourse on the subject, in the late 1940-ties. Can you point me to any evidence which would substantiate that claim?
This goes a lot deeper than the 1940s.
It really begins with Herzl. Herzl himself said that antisemitism would help his cause, precisely because antisemitism would convince Jews that they had more of a chance of being successful outside of Europe than inside of Europe.
Hell, even Balfour (the Balfour declaration guy) was an antisemite, and thought that Zionism would
mitigate the age-long miseries created for Western civilization by the presence in its midst of a Body [the Jews] which it too long regarded as alien and even hostile, but which it was equally unable to expel or to absorb
He also thought that
We have to face the facts. Men are not born equal, the white and black races are not born with equal capacities: they are born with different capacities which education cannot and will not change.
With regards to disenfranchisement of black people in South Africa. This is the kind of people Zionists counted on for support.
You also have Zionist militias that would later become the IDF being sustained by Polish arms and training.
During the interwar period, as part of its policy of supporting a Jewish state in Palestine in order to facilitate mass Jewish emigration from its territory, the Second Polish Republic provided military training and weapons to Zionist dparamilitary groups, including Haganah.
Hell, even if we restrict ourselves to the 1940s you have the USSR under Stalin, a notorious antisemite, supporting Israel with diplomacy and Czechoslovakian weapons. The latter especially was crucial to their victory in the war against the Arab states.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balfour_Declaration and https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Zionism
A lot to cover, but it started earlier than the 40s. He’s partially correct, imo when the Zionist movement was growing (early 1900s) a large part of the colonist nations were quite content with having Jewish people leave their countries for Palestine without caring about what the results may be. Because they were absolutely antisemites. This emigration was supercharged in the 30s, because of obvious reasons. Then in 48 it was declared a state. Probably to try and wash their hands from their own behaviour in regards to Jewish people when it became public how fucked up the Nazis had treated them.
Jewish emigration had already started, and they were equally racist, so who gave a shit if Muslims lost their land.
Guess you could call it a co-op. Zionist wanted land, racists and antisemites wanted them out