- This is how things work in Israel. I found a Hebrew publisher
for new book Save Israel. One of the stipulations of our agreement was
that he take care of all tax issues. I am too disorganized to handle taxes
and I prefer to stay out of trouble. He agreed and I had to meet his accountant
the next evening.
Now wouldn't you know it? His wife is a nurse at Ichilov Hospital,
where Rabin was murdered. And she asked that I bring some medical documents
along to satisfy sme morbid doubts she had been harboring.
It wasn't the clinically peculiar circumstances of Rabin's death that
bothered her; it was his bodyguard Yoram Rubin. She knew someone personally
and he had a story. This led to the following conversation. The last name
of the person will not be revealed, as requested:
"Rubin wasn't Rabin's personal bodyguard. He was a last minute
replacent."
"I know that," I answered. "I was told Rabin's personal
bodyguard was someone named Tzachi and he was sent away a week before the
assassination."
"No, it wasn't Tzachi. It was Adir ... He works for the Shabak
and lives on Kibbutz Miflasim. I can tell you that he was in shock after
the Rabin murder. He was supposed to guard him that night. But a week before,
he was sent abroad on a waste of time assignment. He knows Rubin did everything
wrong, like he was trying to get Rabin killed."
"Does he believe that's what happened?"
"He's never said so but he has to have suspicions, doesn't he?"
-
- ***
Amicam, a documentary producer, was intrigued by the water side of
the Owens murder story. Which leads us away briefly to a few people who
have been having intense conversations with me lately.
I always enjoy a phone call from Hadassa Har-El. She has a strong understanding
of how the world operates and explains so in her black American lilt, which
is really pleasing to listen to. A few weeks ago she told me that the Health
Ministry announced it was going to heavily fluoridate Israel's drinking
water and some people she was working with smelled a rat. I spoke with
three of her associates and they've done their homework.
Amicam had just completed his own research on the same subject and
observed, "There is no doubt that the Israeli corporation supplying
the chemical paid off people in the Health Ministry. But you're never going
to find out who. The seal is tight on these bribes."
In the early 90s, I wrote about twenty articles for the Gemini News
Service, a Third World-oriented organization, and I had the pleasure of
seeing my work reprinted in newspapers throughout Africa and Asia. Perhaps
my most widely published piece was called, Dream Water. It was an early
example of my acquiring real insider information.
Once again, here's how things work in Israel. I was writing for two
British water-related magazines and I visited the government hydrology
authority to gather facts. And who gave them to me but the assistant to
the authority head, Yaacov Tzemech. Now that name may not mean much to
you, and it shouldn't. But we served in the same regular army unit and
liked each other a lot. He told me his boss was the chief negotiator with
the Jordanians over the water issues included in the recent peace treaty.
Naturally, I asked if I could interview him. Yaacov said he'd try to arrange
a meeting but doubted the likelihood, since his identity was deliberately
not publicized.
Yet, the negotiator met me on condition of anonymity in the article,
and after a while, trusted me. While beginning the conversation in civil
servicese, he slowly switched to the truth. And when he did, he often choked
up. By the end, he was close to tears. He told me that he received instructions
to transfer 50 million cubic meters of water to Jordan every year and he
admitted he did so against his better judgement.
"We don't have the water," he told me. "We are making
up dream water. We're finding spare water in dams that won't be built and
spring water that can't be tapped. The government has completely accepted
the Jordanian position that we owe her the water because we divert water
from the Kinneret that would haved flowed to them by the the Jordan River.
It's a crazy argument. The Kinneret is our lake, not theirs.
"I hope I'm doing the right thing; that peace will be worth it
all. Because the Kinneret is going to shrink barring a miracle. We don't
have the 50 million cubic meters to spare. This treaty means the Kinneret
could turn into another Dead Sea in twenty or thirty years."
Which brings us to the prophetic Christian writer and broadcaster Jim
Searcy. He visited Israel recently and I took him to my favorite fishing
resort. Looking at the flowing river, Jim did some proselytizing, which
I always resent. The Kinneret, he insisted, is drying up because of a drought
the bible prophecized in end times. I could relate to that but I sure don't
want to switch religions to be saved from the upcoming deadly thirst. All
that aside, I still consider Jim a good buddy, but he's got his facts wrong
on this.
"Ever since the Jordanian/Israeli Peace Treaty," I explained,
"there is a drought reported each year. In the past five years I can
recall that one winter was a real disaster, one was pretty dry and the
others were better than average. And even in those years, droughts were
reported though everyone knew lots of rain fell. The explanation was always
that it fell in the wrong places. And every year the Kinneret falls by
about 50 million cubic meters, the same amount shifted to Jordan. The Kinneret
is shrinking because of corrupt diplomacy, not drought."
Jim refused to budge on the issue but Amicam saw eye to eye with me.
"I want to focus my documentary on the desalinization plant that Wayne
Owens and Peres set up in Ashkelon. I've just been doing research on water
issues and the whole water field here is criminally run. Ginosar may have
gotten Owens angry but my feeling is that water got him killed.
"What I noticed is that this desalinization plant will produce
50 million cubic meters of drinking water a year. That is exactly what
Israel forks over to Jordan. My first reaction is that besides skimming
from the budget, Peres and Owens were involved in a hugely expensive plan
to cover up the damage caused by the Jordanian peace treaty they organized.
The Ginosar scandal left Owens highly exposed in the water scam since he
was head of the board of the desalinization project, while Peres was merely
in charge of the NGO side of the enterprise. I don't know how they're going
to get away with calling this winter dry. It's been too rainy for that.
But the Kinneret won't rise much because of all the water they gave away.
This plant in Ashkelon was a patchup for a bad treaty and Owens was the
head patcher."
-
- ***
-
- When I was an eighteen year old university student
in Canada, I volunteered for a CIA-run desensitization experiment. It seemed
like an easy way to make $100. I was blindfolded and put into a dark, empty,
tiny, soundless room for a week. I later turned this experience into a
radio play which was broadcast over BBC Radio and utilized in a BBC TV
film.
Before entering the room, Professor Ketner, who ran the program, read
me 30 words three times, which I had to repeat. By the third try, I remembered
23. He said I was a champ. For the first day in isolation, I spent my time
trying to remember all 30 words. In time I recalled them all.
After a week, I was released from my confinement and the first thing
Dr. Ketner tested was the effect of isolation on memory. He asked me to
repeat the thirty words he recited a week before. As I recalled them one
by one, I could see the doctor was becoming emotional. When I hit number
30 he blurted out, "No one has ever done that before. No one has ever
come close. This defies all our results. Your memory becomes perfect in
isolation."
-
-
- Not wanting to spoil his opinion of me, I didn't
mention that I passed my first 24 hours in an obsessive hunt for all the
words. But I do have an ability to memorize words and that's how to become
a Scrabble champion.
Which brings me to a past life. In the 1980s I memorized about 25,000
words from the Scrabble dictionary and became a championship player. I
won the Israeli national tournament four times and the Jerusalem city club
championship five times. In 1987, I competed in what was then, the largest
American Scrabble championship ever, in Atlantic City. I came in the top
third, probably making me one of the top thirty players in the world at
the time. I turned this experience into an article which became an extended
feature in the April 1987 edition of the Atlantic Monthly. It is now archived
on the Atlantic site. Go look at my youthful writing.
Which brings me to a little pressure lately to write about the recent
death of a Jerusalem Post columnist and the curse of the Jerusalem Scrabble
Club. This club was founded in 1982 by Bill Blum and Sam Orbaum. Blum was
a psychologist, a therapist, and he had that typical professional personality
trait of showing empathy for everyone. That made him likable to most people.
Not long after the club was founded, Bill's father had a fatal heart attack
at the club. His last word was, ganglion. Barely a year later, Bill died
of a heart attack. He was 41.
Orbaum was 46 when he died last month. We didn't get along. I hate
losing and competitive Scrabble brought out the worst in me. But it brought
out much worse in many other players who cheated to win. The club was full
of them and I learned how to catch them. This was just practise for the
real thing a few years later.
Orbaum went on to write a rather dreary humor column in the Jerusalem
Post. His audience was limited to those English speakers living in Israel
who never caught on to the language or culture and thus, live in deep alienation.
I figure his total audience couldn't have topped 20,000 such lost souls.
The Jerusalem Post is filled with people existing in purgatorial Israel,
living with one foot in their former countries. The editor, one Caleb Ben
David publicly admits he doesn't speak Hebrew well or read Hebrew at all.
Another writer and I had a sad discourse. Rabbi Stewart Weiss' son Ariel
was killed in action in Nablus two weeks after an article appeared about
him in the Post, pinpointing his location to the enemy. I wrote that the
Post committed a grave wartime error by exposing a soldier to a heartless
enemy and that Weiss was targeted for death in a demoralization operation.
The next day, Islamic Jihad announced that they were responsible for Ari
Weiss' demise and they named him.
A few months later, I initiated a correspondence with Rabbi Weiss.
He felt my article was despicable because it made him complicit in his
son's death. I wrote back that my intention was to save Jewish lives and
this intention was honorable. I added that the family of the victims of
Arab atrocities were never complicit. The mother who puts her child on
a bus to school is not guilty of anything when the bus is attacked. Rabbi
Weiss could not accept that my contention was right and I became guilt-ridden
at the hurt I caused. That's what can happen when you report the truth
honestly and it's a painful side of my work.
The Orbaums, Weisses and Ben Davids join support groups for lost
Anglos, like ESRA and the AACI and this subgroup of Israel despises my
writing and me. I have never once been invited to lecture before chapters
of these groups and they mock my books. They have to; they have not caught
on to Israeli reality and I am shattering the reality they have created
for themselves.
Which leads me to my first journalistic expose. After the Atlantic
piece was published, the door was opened for my acceptance in other major
mainstream publications. New York Newsday published a series of editorials
by me, and I became the Israeli correspondent for numerous trade journals
like The Hollywood Reporter and Billboard.
But the article that I prize above all appeared in the March 14/94
edition of The National Review. Called, The Peres Gambit, I proved that
Shimon Peres and Yossi Beilin cut a deal with Arafat. If Arafat used his
influence to shift Israeli Arab votes in the 1992 elections to Labor or
its leftwing ally Ratz, he would be rewarded with a state. Arafat shifted
ten seats to Peres' parties and ousted the Likud from power. Peres and
Beilin gave terror a home in Israel just to gain power.
The article was noticed and both Maariv and Haaretz forced Beilin
to issue a denial that it was true and to smear my integrity by doing so.
Well, on Jan. 23, 2003, the Jerusalem Post finally proved me right. Uri
Dan wrote;
-
- "During February 1996, Peres rushed off to
the Erez Checkpoint to a meeting with Arafat. The
- protocol of that meeting, recorded by the Palestinians,
was found among the documents seized
- by Israel in Orient House after the massacre
perpetrated with Arafat's knowledge in the Sbarro
- pizzeria in Jerusalem.
-
- "According to that protocol, Peres asked
Arafat to stop the terror. But the gravest item in the
- Palestinian protocol testified to Arafat encouraging
Peres by telling him he was prepared to give
- a list of tens of thousands of Israeli Arabs
recruited by Arafat to vote for the Labor Party. Arafat
- said he had spent several million dollars on
this.
-
- "Knowing, as we now do, that Arafat, aided
by Shin Bet official Yossi Ginosar, transfered about
- $300 million to Switzerland, a few million dollars
were clearly just chicken feed when it came
- to helping a 'friend' get elected in Israel."
-
- It's nice to be proven right, eight years later.
Which is probably par for all my work.
-
- ***
-
- I have two very special lectures this week. On Monday,
the night before the election, I'm speaking about the Rabin assassination
in Tsfat. For details write nossonkohn@yahoo.com
-
- And on Thursday, Jan. 30, at 8:45, I will lecture on
Save Israel!, including in my presentation lots of juicy personal testimony,
like you just read, about political crime against Israel. The site is The
Israel Center on Keren HaYesod Street in Jerusalem, opposite the Sheraton
Moriah Hotel, up half a block.
- For information write rb@rb.org.il
-
- I've never been more excited. Starting the 2nd week in
March, I will be conducting a series of lectures in Australia. For the
latest dates write Ilanalevy@bigpond.com
-
- I get lots of nice comments about Save Israel! Here is
where I remind everyone that a copy is yours for $25 or 80 shekels by writing
me at chamish@netvision.net.il
-
- This wonderful lady, on first reading, found two controversial
items she felt were accurate. Of my claims about Sept. 11 and Flight 93,
she directed me to: http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/allnews/page.cfm?objectid=12192317&method=full&siteid=50143
-
- And she added:
-
- Barry,
-
- Thanks a million for your book. I have one comment for
now. I was reading your back cover came and across this statement: the
Vatican's plan to create a second Holocaust. Guess what, I heard a Rav's
sheir back in the spring of '01. He was speaking about the Mashiach and
the many things that he will do. The Rav said the Mashiach will go before
the Pope and demand that the Jews be set free from captivity. Now that
plays into what you have stated, the Vatican is planning a second Holocaust.
At the time it just made me wonder. But so our own Tehillim speak of being
brought back from captivity and being saved from death, see Tehillim 126
and 102.
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