The
political wing of organized crime
by Amir Oren, Ha'aretz (Israel), December
17, 2002
"The how-to guide to making an MK [Member of Knesset, Israel's Parliament]
: Take all your relatives, friends, acquaintances and employees, have them
sign on as members of the Likud, use all your clout at the local branch
to be elected to the central committee, and proceed to wheel and deal. It
pays off. To gain election to the central committee from the largest local
branch of the party (in Tel Aviv) all it takes is about 50 registered members,
and if you've covered their expenses, the NIS 3,200 you spent on their membership
dues will soon be recompensed by Knesset hopefuls ... In Labor, but mainly
in Likud [the two major Israeli political parties] , the primaries are tainted
by criminal behavior - they might better be known as 'crimaries.' Criminologists
find parallels between terror groups and criminal organizations, which pose
a similar level of danger to the foundations of the state ... Organized
crime has spawned a political wing, and is penetrating the government echelons.
It is literally taking the law into its own hands. Its influence will be
felt in legislation, votes (for the Judicial Selection Committee, the president
- the vital partner in the pardoning process - and the State Comptroller)
and the immunity granted from surveillance of home, office, car and telephones
registered in the name of an MK, unless a judge issues a permit ... No longer
a party [Likud] that has criminals in it, but criminals who have a party.
When three high-ranking officials of the Public Security Ministry - the
minister, his deputy and his assistant - were all subject to the mercies
of the central committee in the struggle over their places on the list,
very few organs of power remained outside the control of crime, although
perhaps in its sights - television (the "Broadcasting Committee" of politics),
the polling companies, and the Shin Bet - whose higher echelons also were
also clouded over early in the last decade by their over-closeness to Aryeh
Deri, who was then under police surveillance - which deals only with
political subversion. When the police investigations division threatens
the power of sources of criminal subversion, the latter enlist their political
partners to disrupt the investigators and the law."
Likud
sees lead wilt as inquiry mounts into alleged vote buying,
Jewish Telegraphic Agency, December 17, 2002
"Pundits say a police investigation into allegations of corruption
in the selection of its Knesset candidates could cost Likud enough seats
to lose the election. While the Labor Party is facing its own investigation,
analysts say the scope of the Likud scandal could be enough to swing the
Jan. 28 election to Labor. According to the Likud’s own internal polls,
the scandal — which broke last week with allegations that aspiring Knesset
members had been asked to pay for political support — already has cost Likud
two or three seats. Party insiders say the trend seems to be continuing
... A secretary for one candidate told Israeli television that her boss
had asked her to hint to Central Committee members that she would be willing
to have sex with them in return for their votes ... Two members of the Central
Committee were detained Monday and place under house arrest Tuesday. The
arrests, carried out by the Israeli police force’s fraud division. Some
of the money for this heavy-duty canvassing was believed to come from underworld
figures, some of whom recently joined Likud. Enigmatic reports surfaced
in the press about 'criminal families' having funded campaigns of Cabinet
ministers and Knesset members, and of 'current or past criminals'
who had hosted senior ministers at their homes for lunch or dinner ... Chemi
Shalev, an analyst for the Ma’ariv daily, wrote that 'there always
was and always will be corruption in politics, but in a place where representatives
of the underworld are elected directly to the legislature, it’s only a matter
of time before the pagan idol takes over the temple from within' ... The
Likud is seriously considering hiring American spin doctor Arthur Finkelstein,
master of the negative campaign, who ran Benjamin Netanyahu’s 1996
and 1999 prime ministerial bids. Labor is sure to keep the Likud bribery
and corruption allegations on the public agenda for as long as possible."
Notorious
brothers brush aside scandal and crimes in race for power, Questions of
character matter little as Israeli political parties jostle for position
in the elections,
Sydney Morning Herald (Australia), December
14 2002
"The next Israeli parliament is shaping up as a rogues gallery, the
last refuge for scoundrels clinging to public power. That is the picture
that emerged when the political factions submitted their candidates for
next month's elections. The ability of some figures to survive scandal and
intrigue in the name of 'democracy' is perhaps best illustrated by the Yatom
brothers. Ehud Yatom, a self-confessed murderer of Palestinians
in custody, was barred from becoming parliament's sergeant-at-arms but there
is no legal impediment to him becoming an MP for the ruling Likud party.
His older brother, Danny, a former head of the Israeli spy agency
Mossad who made headlines when he organised a bungled assassination attempt
in Jordan, is set to become a Labour Party MP. Of the two, Ehud, 54, is
remembered for his role as a member of Shin Bet, Israel's secret police,
in what became known as the Bus 300 affair, involving four Palestinians
who hijacked a passenger bus in 1984. After he retired from the agency in
1996 he admitted in an interview that he killed two of the surviving Palestinian
terrorists, who had been taken into custody. 'I smashed their skulls, on
orders of [the then Shin-Bet chief] Avarham Shalom, and I'm proud
of everything I've done,' the newspaper Yediot Ahronot quoted him
as saying. He later denied having made the statement but few doubted that
he had been quoted correctly ... Danny Yatom has also been prone
to scandal. He resigned as head of Mossad in 1997, after he ordered the
assassination of the Hamas leader Khaled Mashaal in the Jordanian capital,
Amman. Mr Mashaal survived the attempt to kill him with a lethal injection
in a busy street. Two of the Israeli agents involved in the operation were
caught by Jordanian security forces, and Israel only secured their release
by agreeing to release Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, the then spiritual leader and
founder of Hamas, from an Israeli prison. But Danny Yatom survived
the embarrassing affair and later became security adviser to the then Israeli
prime minister, Ehud Barak, who lost power to Mr Sharon last
year. This week he secured the safe 12th spot on the Labour Party ticket,
which, according to recent opinion polls, will guarantee him a place in
the next parliament ... If, as the opinion polls suggest, Israel is moving
to the right, other controversial names will soon surface. One of them is
Baruch Marzel, who has the No 2 spot on Michael Klenier's
right-wing Herut list. A discipline of the late Rabbi Meir Kahane,
who formed the now outlawed anti-Arab Kach movement, he is now confined
to Jerusalem under a court order. The Kach organisation was banned after
the 1994 massacre of 29 Muslims in the divided West Bank town of Hebron
by a Jewish settler, Baruch Goldstein. After the massacre Mr Marzel,
a resident of the Jewish enclave in Hebron, was placed under administrative
detention for nearly three years."
Setting New Standards,
by David Horovitz, Jerusalem Report, January
13, 2003
"Week by week, we are forced to redefine our assumptions about the
scale of avarice and criminality in the governance of this country [Israel].
In Scandal One, already receding fast, we saw new standards set for greed
outweighing concern for the national interest: Yossi Ginossar, a
former senior Shin Bet agent, was allegedly raking in payments as a coordinator
of Yasser Arafat’s foreign bank accounts even as Arafat was inciting his
people to murderous martyrdom ... Now along comes Scandal Two, the Likud’s
internal elections -- and new revelations arrive daily about the extent
to which the elected representatives of the governing party, and those about
to be elected, pander to and are intimidated by criminals. Ex-cons, and
recent ex-cons at that, allegedly have leading politicians in their pockets.
A family suspected of skating along the edges of the laws on gambling, and
consequently much investigated by police, can turn a favorite child into
a Knesset member by pulling a few strings -- and the fact that the young
woman in question, Inbal Gavrieli (No. 29 on the Likud’s slate), has no
record of public service, no remote qualification for running the country,
nor even longstanding party membership for that matter, merely made the
endeavor more of a challenge. Likud Central Committee member Musa Alperon,
former face of one of the most notorious debt-collection families in Israel,
with a conviction and jail term for a counterfeiting conspiracy behind him,
is now publicly lamenting that he didn’t run for a seat himself, instead
of just making his pet preferences known ... Amid all the Likud fuss, alleged
ballot-box irregularities in Labor's nationwide primaries are largely being
overlooked. All but overlooked, as well, is the Likud’s legitimization of
Moshe Feiglin (41st place) convicted of sedition in 1997, and the
adulation for Ehud Yatom, another former Shin Bet agent, swept into
24th place on the Likud slate -- the man who in 1984 bludgeoned to death
two Palestinians captured after attempting to hijack an Egged bus, lied
about it, and later invoked the unthinkable defense, for us as a people,
that he had only been following orders. Overlooked too, as it it has been
for months, is the kind of institutionalized scandal that currently afflicts
the [Arab] residents of Kafr Aqab ... But while, in practice, Kafr Aqab
has been severed from Jerusalem, the fiction that it is part of our capital
is scrupulously maintained by City Hall, which continues to collect city
taxes from its residents. This despite the fact that, given the stringent
controls that apply at the checkpoint, the city, even if it wanted to, is
manifestly incapable of providing proper refuse-collection, road maintenance
or other services. So committed is City Hall to obtaining its taxes from
the theoretically Jerusalem neighborhood of Kafr Aqab that it routinely
places liens on accounts at Israeli banks held by locals who don’t, or can’t,
pay up. A homeowner there last week showed me his 10,000 shekel city tax
demand, including fines and interest payments, and a letter confirming that
he may not access his bank account."
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