Jews weaponizing Jews

...for guns and nukes and power.

I’ve been researching Israel’s nuclear program for my novel and was reading Michael Karpin’s A Bomb in the Basement and Seymour Hersh’s The Samson Option when I came across a few bits that give me an unexpected window into why Israel has been so intertwined with the political and military machinery of Europe and the United States. Pretty much from the very beginning Israel fashioned itself into a helpful agent of imperialism, offering various services in exchange for what it needed: weapons, military gear, nuclear tech, foreign political support. In all these trades, Israel developed true camaraderie with the US-European security apparatus. It became integrated into it on multiple levels — personal, political, business…

In the 1950s, as Israel was forging ahead with the development of the nuclear bomb, one of the key assets it had to trade was intelligence. Back then there were many Jewish communities spread around the Middle East and North Africa, living in countries and territories that were fighting for independence from European colonial powers. Jews had been living in these societies for generations, sometimes thousands of years. Israel turned them into human assets, turning fellow Jews into spies and collaborators.

I give you Exhibit A, France:

It was clear to many Frenchmen that France could not depend on its NATO allies to protect purely French interests. This was especially true in Algeria, where the bloody revolution and French repression were turning the casbahs and deserts into a killing field.

In January 1955, the French government fell again and a new socialist government headed by Guy Mollet assumed power. Mollet took a much harder line on the war in Algeria and those Arab leaders, such as Nasser, who supported the revolutionaries. Israel, which had been intensively waging guerrilla war against Egypt, was now widely seen as one of France’s most dependable allies. Mollet agreed later in the year to begin secretly selling high-performance French bombers to Israel; the sales, arranged by Shimon Peres, were from one defense ministry to another, with no diplomatic niceties and no involvement of the French or Israeli foreign ministries. Arms continued to flow from France to Israel for the next twelve years. In return, Israel agreed to begin sharing intelligence on the Middle East, the United States, and Europe with the French. The Israeli intelligence networks in North Africa were particularly good, former Israeli officials recalled, because the Jews there tended to live and work as merchants and businessmen in the Arab quarters. Of special significance were the more than 100,000 Jews in Algeria, many of them trapped by the violence and irrationality of both sides. Those Jews were encouraged by the Israeli government to provide intelligence on the leadership of the National Liberation Front and in other ways to cooperate with the French.

The story is complicated somewhat by the way that France also weaponized the Jewish community after it colonized the Algeria in the 19th century, separating it from the Muslim majority by giving everyone French citizenship. But returning to the 1950s, Israel tapped Jews in Algeria as part of a relationship it made with the France — a relationship that included not just weapons and fighter jets and tanks and ammunition but collaboration on the development of a nuclear weapon…a relationship that ultimately produced the bomb for both France and Israel. These mutually beneficial trades went deeper, helping establish friendships and relationships between Israel and French politicians and security state operators. That friendship is still going strong today.

Then there is Exhibit B, the United States and the CIA:

In the late 1970s, the United States limited Israel’s access to a state-of-the-art CIA spy satellite. As a response Israel stopped sharing intelligence on Iran and Afghanistan with the CIA, cutting off valuable information at a time when the CIA needed it most. Fact is while the CIA had great technical capabilities that Israel did not yet possess, Israel had much better on-the-ground intelligence. Why? For the same reason outlined above. Because both Iran and Afghanistan had Jewish communities…and they could relay real embedded information about what was going on in their countries. As Hersh wrote: