THE conviction yesterday in Auckland of two Israeli Mossad spies for trying illegally to obtain New Zealand passports demonstrates yet again the ruthless duplicity of Israel toward countries to whom it regularly appeals for support and sympathy outside the Middle East. New Zealand Prime Minister Helen Clark rightly initiated strong diplomatic sanctions against Israel and demanded an explanation and an apology. First indications from Israel suggest this won’t happen. Officials in Sharon’s government suggest that New Zealand is unimportant but that reactions might have been more accommodating if the scandal had involved a more influential state.
The snub makes it all the more regrettable that the Auckland court chose to jail the Mossad agents for only six months when they could have faced a maximum of five years. The judge took into account the fact that while the two men denied working for the Israeli secret service, they did admit being part of a criminal conspiracy and promised to donate $32,700 to a local charity. Israel can well afford to have its spies buy their way to early freedom for that amount that is trifling compared with the hundreds of millions of dollars that flow from US Zionist supporters, to say nothing of the direct financial support the Israeli state receives from Washington. Indeed for years the Americans have been busy writing fat checks and passing on military technology and intelligence to Israel while successive Israeli governments have been content to authorize the theft of anything they have been refused and the murder of US citizens who get in their way.
Jonathan Pollard was a US naval senior analyst working in the top secret Field Operational Intelligence Office in Maryland who sucked dry all the highly classified information around him, some 360 cubic feet of paper and passed it to Mossad. Sentenced to prison for the rest of his life, there has since been an outrageous campaign by US Zionists for his release. The grounds for this demand are breathtaking: Pollard deserves to be freed because Israel and the US are such close allies. Nevertheless, this is one demand over which Washington has abandoned its normally supine position toward Israel. The resignation of CIA director George Tenet over the Iraqi WMD intelligence fiasco will have however pleased the Zionists, because Tenet was forthright in his protest that Pollard’s release should never even be considered. This begs the question that maybe “helpful” Mossad agents guided Tenet and the CIA to their totally false conclusions about Iraq’s WMD status and that Tenet and his agency were therefore “set up”.
Nor should Americans forget the attack upon unarmed the US National Security Agency electronic eavesdropping spy ship USS Liberty off the coast of Gaza during the 1967 Six-Day War in which 34 American servicemen were slain and 171 wounded. Despite the fact that the vessel flew the US flag, it was never radioed to confirm its identity before Mirage jets swept in to destroy it.
And yet still Washington trusts Israel, the author of so many of its woes. There is none so blind as will not see.
