How To Repair The Israel America Relationship: Declassify Netanyahu's Involvement With 9/11

A new prime minister presents new opportunities for a closer relationship between America and Israel

Yair Lapid, a friend to America and Israel

Sometimes you need to talk to your friends about how they haven’t been good friends to you. And at least some our Israeli friends have failed us by continuing to send Benjamin Netanyahu back again as a candidate for high office. His reemergence yet again, despite real corruption cases against him, is disturbing, to say the least.

It’s time now for Yair Lapid — once foreign minister of Israel — to do us a solid once again and declassify the relevant material around Prime Minister Netanyahu and his party which imperils America’s national security, particularly his advance knowledge of 9/11.

Were Prime Minister Lapid to do that, he would make it all but impossible for the Jewish diaspora and American Jews in particular to continue financially supporting him lest they suffer blowback in the United States. To be sure BDS is morally wrong — collective punishment is never appropriate — but boycotts against specific financial supporters of disastrous and dangerous policies are altogether necessary when public safety is concerned.

There are big questions here. As Israeli voters return to the polls for the fifth time in three years the world is watching and taking Israel’s measure. Is it a democratic, rule of law state? Or a gangster clique-backed by China and transnational organized crime?

Big things tend to happen around Israeli elections, especially during the Trump years. For example, Jeffrey Epstein found himself around arrested and then killed right after his friend and mentor, Ehud Barak, entered the second Israeli elections.

There is no more murkier example of why our relationship is poorly understood than the Israeli intelligence services’ unexplained role in 9/11—which has never been discussed. Early propaganda featured febrile characters accusing “The Jews” of being “behind” 9/11. Rather than illuminating what took place on 9/11, this propaganda may have served to shut down all discussion about what the Middle East’s intelligence superpower actually knew about the attack.

If you dare google “Dancing Israelis,” you’ll find that what you’ve been told about the September 11th terrorist attacks isn’t exactly a full picture of what took place that day.

You can watch a very interesting clip where a TV interviewer chats with some of those “dancing Israelis.” Take a gander at this short clip, especially toward the end.

What you may not know is that Yair Lapid — the current prime minister of Israel — is the interviewer. That’s Lapid right there at the end of that clip, listening to one of the Israelis say, chillingly, that “[their] purpose was to document the event.” TV, film, and other journalists are routinely a part of covert ops — and often act as a cover for kinetic operations.

What you might not have caught is that Lapid essentially broke Israeli law and custom by showing the five Israelis on screen. He even outs the two Mossad officers — Sivan and Paul Kurzberg — sitting in the audience. Israeli intelligence would never have allowed either man to be interviewed and, as far as I can tell, neither have been.

Mossad agents Sivan and Paul Kurzberg were pointed out by Yair Lapid on the show.

Here’s a June 21 2002 ABC News article which fell down the memory hole: “Were Israelis Detained on September 11 Spies?”

For the FBI, deciphering the truth from the five Israelis proved to be difficult. One of them, Paul Kurzberg, refused to take a lie-detector test for 10 weeks — then failed it, according to his lawyer. Another of his lawyers told us Kurzberg had been reluctant to take the test because he had once worked for Israeli intelligence in another country.

Which country was that? We don’t find out. In fact there’s an interesting lack of curiosity about the Kurzberg family altogether despite Paul — and three other Israelis — having sued the Justice Department over his treatment in 2004. What chutzpah!

“The infamous arrest of these young Israelis on 9/11 has been used by anti-Semites worldwide as ‘proof’ of Israel’s involvement in the World Trade Center attack,” said Nitsana Darshan-Leitner, the Israeli lawyer representing the four Israeli plaintiffs.

“Our clients are seeking compensation for the harm they suffered in the Metropolitan Detention Center by prison officials,” she said. “In addition, the lawsuit will serve as an important public forum to debunk the lie that Israel or Mossad was behind the 9/11 attacks.” (Uriel Heilman, “Israelis arrested after Sept. 11 sue Ashcroft,” Jewish Telegraphic Agency, September 22, 2004.)

(Interestingly both Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell were thrown in the Metropolitan Detention Center as well.)

While Mossad may not have been behind the 9/11 attacks they were certainly behind Ms. Darshan-Leitner.

According to a 2007 US embassy cable released by WikiLeaks, Darshan-Leitner explained to a US embassy official that Shurat HaDin received evidence from and had taken direction “on which cases to pursue” from Mossad, Israel's national intelligence agency.

Darshan-Leitner modeled her organization on the Southern Poverty Law Center, which itself had received monies from Jeffrey Epstein and Bernie Madoff and his coworkers, among others, before being taken over by US intelligence.

(In future pieces we will explore the idea that Manning/Snowden/Wikileaks were a response to Israeli intelligence ops.)

A friend of mine writes:

My mind was almost totally closed on Wikileaks/Snowden until it was suggested that they could have been throwing a flag on the *Israeli tech stack.* Not individual operatives, which wouldn’t have excused blaming surveillance of U.S. citizens on the US Gov’t. Not even foreign intel services, who are supposed to surveil us. But the weaseling of Israeli tech contractors into the design of the stack — that was a huge revelation, and one that would justify the statement that “Hey, the U.S. GOV’T will be spying on you” — because the implication isn’t that the U.S. can surveil people on its soil, but that Israel would be using the USIC as *its own personal front.* And *that* would be worth a long stay in Moscow to expose.

This also makes Israel directly (however partly) to blame for Trump’s election. No Wikileaks, no crummy FBI story coverage… but no Israeli compromise, no Wikileaks in 2016.

Indeed there is also the question of qui bono from these sorts of events.

The maverick journalist Whitney Webb lays out how Netanyahu’s Likud government benefited from that relationship:

I quote from her at length:

If the “Dancing Israelis”, and more broadly the Mossad and the Israeli government, had foreknowledge of September 11, why would they remain silent and not attempt to warn the American government or public of the coming attacks? In the case of the “Dancing Israelis,” why would Israelis celebrate such an attack?

One of the detained “Dancing Israelis,” Omer Marmari, told police the following about why he viewed the September 11 attacks in a positive light:

Israel now has hope that the world will now understand us. Americans are naïve and America is easy to get inside. There are not a lot of checks in America. And now America will be tougher about who gets into their country.”

While Marmari’s statement may suggest one reason some of the “Dancing Israelis” were so “visibly happy” in their photographs, there are also other statements made by top Israeli politicians that suggest why the Israeli government and its intelligence agency declined to act on apparent foreknowledge of the attack.

When asked, on the day of the 9/11 attacks, how the attacks would affect American-Israeli relations, Benjamin Netanyahu — the current Israeli prime minister — told the New York Times that “It’s very good,” before quickly adding “Well, not very good, but it will generate immediate sympathy.” He then predicted, much as Marmari had, that the attacks would “strengthen the bond between our two peoples, because we’ve experienced terror over so many decades, but the United States has now experienced a massive hemorrhaging of terror.”

Netanyahu, in a candid conversation recorded in 2001, also echoed Marmari’s claim that Americans are naïve. In that recording, Netanyahu said:

I know what America is. America is something that can easily be moved. Moved to the right direction. … They won’t get in our way. They won’t get in our way… 80 percent of the Americans support us. It’s absurd.”

In addition, also on the day of the September 11 attacks, Netanyahu — who at the time was not in political office — held a press conference in which he claimed that he had predicted the attacks on the World Trade Center by “militant Islam” in his 1995 book, Fighting Terrorism: How Democracies Can Defeat Domestic and International Terrorism. In that book, Netanyahu had posited that Iranian-linked “militants” would set off a nuclear bomb in the basement of the World Trade Center.

During his press conference on the day of the attacks, Netanyahu also asserted that the 9/11 attacks would be a turning point for America and compared them to the 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor. Netanyahu’s statement echoes the infamous line from the “Rebuilding America’s Defenses” document authored by the neoconservative think tank, the Project for a New American Century (PNAC). That line reads. “Further, the process of transformation [towards a neo-Reaganite foreign policy and hyper-militarism], even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event — like a new Pearl Harbor.”

Then again, years later in 2008, the Israeli newspaper Maariv reported that Netanyahu had stated that the September 11 attacks had greatly benefited Israel. He was quoted as saying: “We are benefiting from one thing, and that is the attack on the Twin Towers and Pentagon, and the American struggle in Iraq.”

Indeed, it goes without saying that the aftermath of 9/11 — which involved the U.S. leading a destructive effort throughout the Middle East — has indeed benefited Israel. Many of the U.S.’s post-9/11 “nation-building” efforts have notably mirrored the policy paper “A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm,” which was authored by American neoconservatives — PNAC members among them — for Netanyahu’s first term as prime minister.

That document calls for the creation of a “New Middle East” by, among other things, “weakening, containing, and even rolling back Syria” and “removing Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq — an important Israeli strategic objective in its own right.” As is known now, both of those main objectives have since come to pass, each with strong Israeli involvement.

Netanyahu’s return to power wouldn’t be possible were it not for the blackmail networks that he and his supporters have long maintained and which they threaten to deploy at all times. This isn’t merely the work of a nation-state but of a global espionage network.

These networks extend to the highest reaches of global, and especially American public life, including Silicon Valley, Hollywood, the media, and of course, politics. Seeking to break the blackmail networks should be Lapid’s main foreign policy consideration.

We’ll be watching to see what he does and helping him along as necessary to see to it that justice be done.