Gas Realpolitik, Agent Provocateurs and the Israel-Gaza Protests

Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose

“Mandela Hall,” Hamilton Hall, 1985.

I recently got an email from a mentor of mine which I thought I’d share. As you know, I love emails.

Dear Charles

I saw your tweet about the LASD and their infiltration of the UCLA Gaza protests.

So, I think you would be interested in something I heard on the Dutch Radio news program "Met het oog op morgen" from Thursday.  It airs at 11 PM Dutch time which is 2 PM Pacific.   

The Dutch radio news program had a whole segment on the Gaza student protests in the US. This section featured Dutch documentary film maker Sjoerd Oostrik who teaches at UCLA.  They spoke live at about 2:15 PM Pacific. Oostrik made the following observations after following the demonstrations closely.

First.  The camp of Gaza  protesters was peaceful.  Second. The violence came from the outside and went on for two days.  Oostrik claims that outside agitators  -  he called them “white supremacists, radical Zionists and hooligans” -continually attacked the peaceful demonstrators while the police did nothing.  Third.  The amount of violence employed by the police against the demonstrators was all out of proportion to any threat posed.  He was shocked by the use of rubber bullets. 

His observation about the attacks on the demonstrators by outside agitators is the most interesting part. I have no reason to doubt what he says is true.   I saw a tweet by a Jewish activist who bragged about using a bull horn at 4:30 AM to wake the demonstrators up.    The same guy is not going to film his co-religionists attacking the demonstrators. 

We don’t often talk about how penetrated American law enforcement is by Israeli interests, especially the Israeli Defense Forces. We saw just that the other day when Aaron Cohen, an Israeli Special Operations vet, said he was engaged in a “quiet infiltration” campaign against the students alongside the Los Angeles Sheriffs Department. Last year the FBI opened criminal investigations into the extremely violent Los Angeles County deputy encounters.

Thankfully Mayor Bass stepped in to help quell the violence after imploring the LAPD to get involved.

Bass’s own relationship with the LAPD is rather tense. She had no LAPD security at her home when an intruder broke in. The intruder is 29-year-old Ephraim Hunter, or “Fruitful Hunter.” Mr. Hunter seemingly had a lot of drug problems and there’s always the question of how suggestible he was. Who sent him to cause trouble for the mayor?

Okhrana group photograph in St. Petersburg, Russian Empire in 1905

There’s always the question of agent provocateurs and that goes back to the 1980s and even to the czarist secret police before that. You’re not really allowed to talk about how many of the agent provocateurs were Jews, including some of my favorites like Dmitrii Bogrov who assassinated Russian Prime Minister Pyotr Stolypin or the assassin (and Socialist Party organizer) Yevno Azef.

Is the ADL a continuation of the Okhrana? It’s funny you should ask. Consider the following:

As Pulitzer Prize-winning author Glenn Frankel noted in Foreign Policy magazine in 2010, ​“The Anti-Defamation League participated in a blatant propaganda campaign against Nelson Mandela and the ANC in the mid 1980s and employed an alleged ​‘fact-finder’ named Roy Bullock to spy on the anti-apartheid campaign in the United States — a service he was simultaneously performing for the South African government. The ADL defended the white regime’s purported constitutional reforms while denouncing the ANC as ​‘totalitarian anti-humane, anti-democratic, anti-Israel, and anti-American.’”

Nor are you allowed to notice that there’s lots of money spent on trying to discredit these students and to threaten them with reduced career prospects.

For what it’s worth I’ve more or less come to see this whole conflict as a bit of one step-two step with Qatar and Netanyahu, who are much more in league than people know. We’ve talked about the relationship of Thiel to Netanyahu but we haven’t as yet talked about Thiel’s relationship to Qatar. Thiel’s lover — before his alleged suicide — lived in a building owned by the Qataris.

I’ve been a supporter of Qatar in the past but it’s clear that the approach of being a Middle Eastern Switzerland isn’t going to work anymore. Eventually everyone has to pick a side and that’s just how this goes. Secretary Blinken seems to be suggesting as much. Over the years Qatar has tried to play a key role in our system. They’ve done deals with the Huntsmans, of course, and they’re all over Utah (oddly). You can see Blinken’s chat with Romney over the weekend as a tell here that Blinken knows how dangerous the Qatari-Mormon nexus is. The implosion of Attorney General Sean Reyes of Utah is similarly useful.

It’s also no secret that Qatar would prefer the gas field in the Eastern Mediterranean near Gaza not be developed. Chaos in the Middle East makes a stable player like Qatar look all the more reliable. How much leverage they’ll have here remains to be seen. My suspicion is that the Turks and the Azerbaijanis will build a corridor from Istanbul to Baku and onto the Caspian Sea. It’s doubtful the high prices for gas can be maintained. Natural gas prices are down nearly 40% year to date. How low can they go? Nobody knows.

I met recently with a friend who is doing deals with Japan over Alaskan natural gas. This can’t be good for Qatar.

There’s a lot of gas in Turan

My guess is that the Qataris do the sensible thing and cut Hamas loose in exchange for American support. But in exchange for what I couldn’t say. Perhaps a lack of investment in the gas field off the Gaza coast? Will America honor that deal? Hard to say.

My old mentor continues:

Thanks for the piece on the Hill and Valley conference.  Glad to hear that Pik Botha's boy seems to have his head on straight.  And that Lindsey Graham gets it right every decade or two.  

The more I study the Botha family, the more impressed I become. The more I study Senator Graham, the more I become convinced of the power of an unfriendly FBI chat.

Could both Botha and Graham be useful to Uncle Sam?