Perhaps this article from The Jerusalem Post can shed a different light on the whole Tannenbaum-affair.

‘Tannenbaum affair one of worst ever’
By MATTHEW GUTMAN AND NINA GILBERT

The Knesset sub-committee on intelligence and secret services expressed concerns that information divulged by captured businessman Elhanan Tannenbaum may have reached Hizbullah, Syria and even Iran, reported Ynet Thursday morning.

Committee members grew suspicious of Tannenbaum’s health condition, and the fact that he showed no signs of torture, raising the possibility that his arrival in Lebanon was coordinated with Hizbullah.

No proof has been found for the allegations, and committee members say they would not have published their suspicions had not family members and friends launched their media attack, aimed at having him released from detention.

The Knesset Intelligence and Secret Services Subcommittee released a scathing statement Wednesday dubbing the Elhanan Tannenbaum affair “one of the gravest in Israel’s history,” following testimony that his abduction might have been contrived.

Kidnapped by Hizbullah and members of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard in October 2000, Tannenbaum, a colonel in the reserves and privy to some of Israel’s most sensitive weapons systems, was repatriated in a costly hostage swap on January 29.

It was the third statement the subcommittee – whose meeting times are even kept secret – ever released; it commented previously on the 1986 capture of Israeli spy Jonathan Pollard, and on the Mossad’s bungled attempt to assassinate Hamas leader Khaled Mashaal in 1997.

Tannenbaum had failed a polygraph test during interrogation, continued to be uncooperative and persisted in telling his investigators half-truths, Shin Bet head Avi Dichter told a stunned subcommittee Tuesday. This followed muffled accusations by Tannenbaum’s police and Shin Bet interrogators that their subject was “uncooperative” and their belief that Tannenbaum might even have fabricated the entire kidnapping, Channel 2 reported.

Following Tuesday’s revelation that Tannenbaum may be stonewalling interrogators, the subcommittee, apprised of the intelligence community’s exhaustive “Tannenbaum dossier,” demanded that his investigation be “exhausted” until “the truth is uncovered.”

Hizbullah leader Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah has adamantly maintained that Tannenbaum arrived in Beirut “willingly.”

Remanded Tuesday for another 10 days, Tannenbaum will remain under restricted conditions in the Neurim policy facility in Netanya. The firestorm was partially ignited Tuesday when Tannenbaum’s lawyers – much to the vexation of the subcommittee members – proclaimed that they see “no grounds for his indictment.”

The subcommittee differed. “The committee was upset with the image that Tannenbaum’s family and lawyer are portraying of the conditions of his interrogation,” one committee member told The Jerusalem Post, explaining the committee’s decision to publish the unusual announcement. Had the former hostage cooperated, the investigation would have been long since ended, former Shin Bet official Ehud Yatom told the Post.

The seven-man subcommittee also demanded that investigators be allotted “all of the conditions and the means necessary to exhaust the Tannenbaum investigation and to ascertain the truth in what is likely to be one of the gravest and worrisome affairs in Israel’s history.”

Much of the questioning focuses on what Tannenbaum, who had access to sensitive Israeli weapons technologies, confessed to his Hizbullah handlers, former Mossad chief Danny Yatom said.

Israel needs to know not only how Tannenbaum arrived in Beirut, but what Hizbullah, and therefore Syria and Iran, now know.

In the past three months some members of the subcommittee worked as diligently to scuttle the prisoner swap as Tannenbaum’s own family and lawyers labored to champion his return. Tannenbaum’s family has portrayed him as a hero who “served his country more than anyone imagines.”

Those who have access to his security files characterize him differently. Just two months ago, Yuval Steinitz, chairman of the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee and head of the Secret Services subcommittee, acidly condemned both the prisoner swap and Tannenbaum himself, whom he presented as a monster.

“Let’s suppose that an Israeli was arrested in Thailand because he raped and killed 20 young women, and he tortured them. This is the severity of [his] crime,” Steinitz said.
Responding to the subcommittee’s statement, Tannenbaum’s lawyer, Roi Belcher, said that he had “no idea” what its members meant, and chastised them for coming close to breaking the court-ordered ban on the details of the Tannenbaum investigation.

Ever loyal to his father, Ori Tannenbaum described Steinitz’s sniping at his father as “libelous,” and might consider pressing a suit against the Defense and Foreign Affairs Committee chairman, Channel 1 reported.

What is known is that a debt-ridden Tannenbaum fell in with the covert head of Hizbullah’s operations in Israel, who then lured him on a business deal first to Brussels and later to Dubai.

Once in Dubai, Tannenbaum was likely abducted by Iranian Revolutionary guards and interrogated. Until he left Israel for Brussels on October 3, 2000, Tannenbaum had worked as a consultant for a hi-tech Israeli arms firm that produces some of the Defense Ministry’s most sensitive technologies, a source in the company told The Jerusalem Post. He said that he saw Tannenbaum at the Holon-based company about twice a week.

The firm’s records were destroyed in a fire that gutted its basement in July 2001, and the company’s security officer, Shmuel Melekh, would only say the firm had “outsourced him for a number of contracts.”

Tannenbaum won a measure of success in the reserves, climbing from lieutenant to lieutenant-colonel in over 25 years, but struggled to find a foothold in civilian life.

In the late 1990s Tannenbaum forged ties with several elements of the Israeli and Palestinian underworld, Nasrallah’s chief Israel adviser Kais Obeid among them, and was reportedly warned of these connections in meetings with senior security officials.
Until Israel redeployed from its security strip in southern Lebanon in May 2000 Tannenbaum maintained trade links with Lebanon, largely selling pharmaceutical products.

Sources in the security establishment and in the government were also surprised to see a fleshy Tannenbaum descend from the air-force plane that brought him back from Germany following the January 29 exchange. His family, and sources in the Prime Minister’s Office portrayed Tannenbaum as in failing health, his life hanging by a thread.

Accusations that Israelis had been duped, that a proper debate had been undermined by the apparent deterioration of Tannenbaum’s health – though the primary German interlocutor with Hizbullah, chief of the Federal Intelligence Service (BND) August Henning – pronounced him months before in “fair condition” infuriated many.

Away from the army, he suffered a series of business failures. He fell further into debt due to a reported gambling addiction. His family life suffered following extramarital affairs and calamitous trysts, at least one of which resulted in him fathering a son – who is now 11 – out of wedlock.

Tannenbaum’s lover, who last saw him five days before he left for Brussels, described him as a man who “loved money more than anything or anyone. He liked to drive fancy cars, and eat in pricey restaurants. He was constantly working on schemes to swindle money. God knows what he was capable of doing.”

All depends on Labor’s ability to recover to what it once was, though the odds of that happening seem to be rather low at the moment, and also on what happens inside Likud, i.e. will Netanyahu once again take over the party or will Sharon remain the leader, or perhaps someone else.

And of course the next question is whether or not Shinui would be able to form a coalition, if it would become the largest party. There are many difficulties there as well, as Shinui and religious parties don’t go along too well…

PS: Skythe, check your mail.

Yep, a problem that indeed should be addressed and in a sense is addressed by Shinui. Let’s just wait and see what comes out of thay….

I used to read the JPost online, but now you need a log-in so I can’t use it no more.

Sure you can, all you have to do is register. There’s no spam or so involved, so it’s risk free ;). I’d really advise you to do it, reading just Ha’aretz will give you a too narrow picture (seriously, especially some of the op-eds are quite, well, radical. Ze’ev Schiff’s though are very good and give a good insight into the situation).

The Jerusalem Report also has some good commentary (I especially like Ehud Ya’ari, but that’s kind of an Israeli thing I guess. Or maybe it’s just me…)

BTW, Carthago was already destroyed long time ago, Jonathan 🙂 150 BC somewhere 🙂

Oh really? Must look for some other external enemy then :D. Seriously though, the quote is mainly symbolic, but I guess you understand the message.

Geforce, your anecdote illustrates quite well that the European perception of Israel is quite detached from what’s actually going on. In spite of what most (Western) media report, life in Israel simply goes on. Sure, people are more careful, bags are searched, each terror alert creates a traffic jam etc. However, people still want to live and go out and enjoy themselves (some perhaps even more so because of the situation, as you never know when your last hour has come). In fact, I find life in Israel to be much more intense than life in The Netherlands.

As for Israel being such a rich country in war: Israelis hardly know a life without war or terror around the corner, yet that hasn’t stoped Israel from developing itself from the dirt-poor, mostly agricultural country it was in 1948 to the high-tech nation it is today, with all the problems it entails. Israel developed itself from almost Third World standards to nearly First World standards in 50 years, even though it was in an almost constant state of war and had to fund an ever-growing and military. True, it had some outside assistance, I’ll give you that . But then, almost each counrty on this planet had after WWII, yet harldy any developed itself the way Israel did.

Starjet, can you name me some of the domestic problems Israel is working on?

I can: high unemployment (10%), educational problems, environmental problems to name a few. Just read Ha’aretz and the Jerusalem Post for a few weeks (including the op-eds) and you’ll get the idea.

edit after Arthur’s post:
Actually, the current Likud government (at least finance minister Netanyahu) blames the economic problems largely on all previous Israeli (socialist) governments, form Ben Gurion on :rolleyes:. In any case, the current Intifadah at least for some part is to blame for the current economic problems (falling tourism, Israel being increasingly isolated), though previous governments have all added their fair share (except for Rabin’s I guess, as at least he pulled money out of the territories to improve education and all the previously notoriously bad Israeli roads, as well as health care). The situation is slowly improving though, and I guess that in a few years Israel’s economy will be fully recovered and modernized.

While politically speaking Israel and the US are closer, economically speaking Israel is closer to the EU than to the US. In fact, the EU is Israel largest trading partner, and Israel has signed numerous very important agreements with the EU, mainly in the economic field. However, Israel is also working closely with the EU on the Galileo project, so the cooperation between the EU and Israel has more bedy to it than entirely economic cooperation. Currently, Israeli ministers have also raised the idea of Israel becoming an EU member. I don’t see that happening too soon though.

Euhhh… i sincerely doubt it. In the short term some of our beloved bureaucratic institutions will dissappear, but considering the level of organisation our society has, we’ll soon discover that a lot of this bureaucracy was created with a reason. Also, the mythical privatisation of former state-owned agencies/businesses/offices certainly did not diminish bureaucracy: just look at the railways, communications, and social insurances (especially the latter – being currently unemployed myself…).

We can do away with a lot of rules, most of them are not enforced anyway (you know what I’m talking about). Second, not all examples you give are fair. The Dutch health-care system as you know is a hybrid system: partly government-prescribed insurances (ziekenfonds), partly private, with all kinds of rules only to determine who should apply for what. That alone is worth abandoning: either eject the government part, or the private part (I know where my preference is ;)).

I know it’s really fashionable these days to blame current economical problems on a ‘too large and inefficient bureaucracy’, and i guess for a part it is the Pim-legacy. But it has become a rather hollow phrase if you ask me: ‘bureaucracy’ has IMHO more become an easy-target scapegoat (goes down well with the voters too!) than a seriously defined problem which should be tackled. Of course, seriously defining and tackling bureaucracy will bring up it’s own bureaucracy-fighting bureaucracy itself…

Well, you do know that doctors for instance in this country have to fill in an insane number of forms for each patient they see (and I literally mean see). All this to control the cost of healthcare, yet in the end it costs more: doctors have less time to see and examine their patients, the forms have to be checked etc etc ect. Imagine cutting that down, how much more time doctors will be able to spend with patients, to study, whatever. That would surely save money. And I haven’t even mentioned all those bureaucrats, who are no longer needed, what a lot of money it would save.

Let me state clearly that I don’t believe that all bureaucracy should go away. What I am arguing is that currently there is too much.

And don’t forget that the Netherlands are more and more becoming a state where governmental responsibilities are pursued to the last straw: just look at the whole carnival surrounding the fireworks in both Enschede and Volendam.

With that I have to agree. Unfortunately, people still long for scapegoats when something goes wrong.

Oh, and one last question: what’s wrong with Arend-Jan Boekesteijn? I’ve followed one of his classes, and he is a great lecturer, with clear ideas, who knows how to tell his story.

Right Arthur, but less intrusive government does not necessary mean less beautiful, poor looking cities. It’s just the way it is organized, and the way people take care of their own property.

I do have a feeling though that with the current government a lot of all the bureaucracywill go away. At least I hope so.